STUFF: News, Technology, the cool and the plain weird

[MIKA27]

This Is The Amazing Self-Driving Car We All Need Right Now

The promise of the self-driving car is taking too long to materialise — but it may be around the corner. As soon as 2020, says Nissan.

This video shows the XchangE self-driving concept car now on display at the Geneva Auto Show 2014. Imagine being able to take a road trip like this, chilling and relaxing, with no risks.

Here’s another video of the car shown at the Geneva Auto Show 2014.

[MIKA27]

The Most Expensive Deleted Scenes in Film History

It seems that in Hollywood it doesn’t matter whether the scene is ultra-expensive to film since it can still be easily deleted from the movies. Even though this act may seem bizarre to the layman apparently it makes a lot of sense for film makers. It is very common for really expensive scenes to end up being deleted from the editing room in order to speed up the pace of the movie.

Little Shop of Horrors

Reportedly the original ending of the movie “Little Shop of Horrors” was changed to help make it more upbeat. Reportedly the 20 minute sequence that ended up in the waste bin cost its producers around $5 million more than the one that was actually shown to the audience. However the original deleted ending briefly made an appearance in a special edition DVD of the movie before the producers removed it from view.

World War Z

“World War Z” director Marc Foster has claimed in his statement that it is highly unlikely the audiences would ever watch the multimillion dollar original ending of his movie. Reportedly the producers chose to re shoot the climax at great cost leaving the initial third act with unfinished visual cost.

The Superman Returns

Reportedly in Bryan Singer’s 2006 sci-fi flick “The Superman Returns”, the alternative opening scene cost a staggering amount of $10 million extra than the original. It therefore featured Superman returning to the remains of his home planet in a unique crystal shaped spaceship.

The Brothers Grimm

In an another flick titled “The Brothers Grimm” the director Terry Gilliam admitted that he deleted the most expensive scene of the movie at the suggestion of his old friend Terry Jones. The deleted scene apparently showed CGI trees coming to life and attacking the main leads of the movie.

Watchmen

“Watchmen” is a 2009 American superhero film originally comic book series. Several scenes were removed from the final version of “Watchmen”. This reportedly went against the wishes of the film’s director since he wanted only a handful of scenes to be left out from the final edited version.

The director Zack Snyder reportedly wanted the animated movie to say as close as possible to the source of the original material. However the company didn’t comply with his wishes since the movie’s running time was going beyond three hours. The projected length of the movie was deemed unacceptable as a result of which several expensive scenes ended up being deleted from the film.

[MIKA27]

In a Crystal Decanter: Single Malt Macallan Scotch sold for $628,000

Scotch on the rocks on your mind? Well, you could end up paying half a million of dollars for the same. In a recent auction held in Hong Kong, wine lovers had to pay $628, 000 for a bottle of whisky. This in turn turned out to be the most expensive single malt whisky which was ever sold at an auction. Interestingly, the previous record for the most expensive bottle of whisky was with a 64-year bottle of Macallan which went for $460, 000.

The bottle is a 28-inch design and holds up to 6 litres of single malt scotch. The exclusivity of the bottle can be realized from the fact that only four such pieces have been made till date. It took 17 talented craftsmen at Lalique putting in 50 hours to make the exclusive bottle. The whisky has been blended from seven different casks over a period of two years.

The auction which was held by Sotheby’s had estimated the revenues to be in range of $258, 000 to $516, 000. Sotheby’s seems to be donating to charity off late now as the proceeds from the auction went to various charities in Hong Kong.

[MIKA27]

NVIDIA's Unveils Battery Saving Beauties With New 800M Series

PC gaming on a laptop usually involves you lugging around a giant desktop replacement and eventually straining everything you care about on your body. NVIDIA wants you to play AAA games on a thin and light laptop with a battery that lasts more than 40 minutes. Meet the new GeForce 800M series.

Overnight NVIDIA unveiled six new dedicated graphics cards meant for laptops in the 800M series: the high-end GTX880M, moving down the range to the GTX870M, GTX860M and landing at the entry-level GTX850M. These are the ones meant for gaming.

The family of four has the new Kepler-based 880M and the 870M filling out the top half and the Maxwell repping 860M and 850M on the bottom.

The lower end gets the bigger boost in power over last year’s 700M models, with the switch to Maxwell offering 60 and 50 per cent improvement on the 860M and 850M respectively. The 870M and 880M improvements are a little more modest at 30 and 15 per cent. But that’s enough to run games like Call of Duty: Ghosts and Metro: Last Light at 1080p on Ultra.

The 800M series is all about battery optimisation when you play your games. The average gaming laptop right now isn’t smart enough to realise that it can kill itself within 40 minutes of play-time. That’s mostly because gaming was originally done on desktops where power wasn’t a problem. NVIDIA wants to build smarter chips to make your play sessions longer without needing a charger.

In test scenarios, NVIDIA was able to run Borderlands 2 at 30fps in 1080p on an Intel Core i7 machine with a GTX860M on-board, all powered by a 70-watt hour battery for a total of two hours and 11 minutes.

All of this extra battery life cleverness is managed through NVIDIA’s clever little software suite known as GeForce Experience. It allows you to set up a Battery Boost profile for your games so that you don’t have to go and change settings to optimise life in every single game.

The new NVIDIA graphics cards are also smarter about when they should be in use. Smart switching is automatically configured on every laptop running at GTX800M series card, meaning that your laptop will happily trundle along using integrated graphics when doing stuff like web-browsing and word processing, but will fire up your graphics card when it figures out you’re gaming. Rather than just power the graphics card 100 per cent of the time, the laptop will dynamically manage it, giving you 2x the battery life according to NVIDIA.

As far as speed is concerned, NVIDIA hails the GTX850M as 30 per cent more powerful than the top-end GTX580M from two years ago. We’ll have to see how that comes off when we benchmark it ourselves, but it’s a good claim to be sure.

There are two other graphics processors in the line-up meant for non-gaming laptops. The GeForce 840M and the GeForce 830M are meant for bringing the majority of AAA titles to laptops that weren’t originally meant to play games. Think an Ultrabook that can actually play games and you’re there.

Using the new GeForce processors, NVIDIA was able to get Skyrim running at a consistent 30FPS on 1080p with medium settings. That was on a laptop packing an Intel Core i5-4210U processor with the GeForce 840M.

The new GeForce chips aren’t meant for hardcore portable gamers, but they’ll get you over the line in a pinch.

Here are the new laptops coming this year with the new GTX800M series:

GTX880M

• MSI GT70 Dominator

• Alienware 17

• Asus G750

GTX870M

• Razer Blade

GTX860M

• Lenovo Y50

• Gigabyte P34

These are just the launch models that NVIDIA is able to tell us about at the announcement of the GT800M. NVIDIA promises that we’ll have six times the amount of thin and light gaming laptops in the next 12 months than we did in 2011. Happy days!

[MIKA27]

This Drone Footage Of An Erupting Volcano Is Absolutely Nuts

Put your face close to your screen and hit play. This short video, uploaded by YouTuber Shaun O’Callaghan, was shot from a DJI Phantom quadcopter as Yasur volcano on Tanna Island in Vanuatu erupted.

The view is absolutely stunning, but the remarkable thing about this footage is that the copter survived the heat, smoke, debris, and even flaming flying balls of lava! Absolutely incredible.

[MIKA27]

NASA Must Fast-Forward The Manned Use Of SpaceX's Dragon Spacecraft

This new cool SpaceX photo popped in my Twitter feed right after reading how Putin is annexing Crimea to Russia in the same way Hitler annexed the Sudetenland to Germany back in 1938. I don’t know what will happen next but this is yet one more reason why NASA should fast forward the manned use of SpaceX’s Dragon spacecraft.

It’s stupid that the United States depends on a fascist country governed by a power-hungry, ***-hating authoritarian ex-KGB officer with an ego only matched by the size of the off-shore accounts and corrupted business dealings of his gangster cronies.

And it’s even stupider when you look at the bill: Russia is basically extorting the US into paying an inflated price — $63 million per astronaut! Compare it to the price of one seat in Dragon: Only $20 million per seat. And Dragon can take seven astronauts on board. I feel like they are laughing the rest of us for being just such putzes.

I know that Dragon needs to be safe, that it probably needs a bit more testing before launching humans to space, but the U.S have done much — much — more in much less time (HELLO MERCURY! HELLO GEMINI! HELLO APOLLO!)

NASA and SpaceX must work together and accelerate the process to get Dragon ready to ferry astronauts in and out the International Space Station while they keep developing Orion for interplanetary travel. Congress, NASA, SpaceX, the President, all of the above, should act now.

[MIKA27]

This Is How They Load Nuclear Cruise Missiles On A B-52 Stratofortress

When I first saw this photo I immediately thought “what the hell is thing?” Well, it’s a nuclear armed AGM-86B cruise missile. Three of them, in fact, being loaded on a B-52 Stratofortress.

It’s hard to tell because you are looking at the butt of this 1.3-tonne nuclear shark, which is 6.3 metres long and has a wingspan of 3.7 metres.

The image was just taken at the Minot Air Force Base in North Dakota during “a large-scale inspection for all base operations”. You will be happy to know that “for the Nuclear Surety Inspection portion, the 91st Missile Wing and the 5th Bomb Wing received a rating of satisfactory. The 91st MW completed the Nuclear Operations Readiness Inspection with an excellent rating.”

[MIKA27]

All-New HTC One Specs Leak Out

It’s unclear whether the all-new HTC One will score phone of the year like the last one did, but we do know it’s about to win the award for “worst kept secret in history”. The specs of the new device have reportedly leaked, and it looks like we’re going to be enjoying a super-fast, 5-inch beast.

According to GSMArena, the all-new HTC One (please don’t really be called that), will be packing a 5-inch, 1080p screen, a 2.3GHz clock speed thanks to the new Snapdragon 801 processor, a 2600mAh battery and a four-megapixel camera with Ultrapixel technology.

HTC BoomSound is back thanks to the two front-facing speakers but the front-facing camera will reportedly be 5-megapixels (likely sans-Ultrapixel), which might be hard for people to understand, especially those who haven’t had Ultrapixel explained to them.

Basically, HTC wants to rely on larger pixels on the image sensor to capture more light and detail rather than just focus on the size of the sensor itself. Larger pixels on the sensor, better low-light performance. That means that the rear-facing camera — the important one — is only four-megapixels rather than the 10+ offered by competitors like the Galaxy S4, S5 and LG G2.

It’s also going to reportedly pack a new software feature called Motion Launch which will let you answer a call by just holding the phone straight to your ear when it rings. Weird.

We’ll figure out what’s real and what’s fake at the launch in a few weeks.

[MIKA27]

Inside the Nearly Impossible Task of Finding an Airplane in the Ocean

Two-thirds of the planet is covered with water, which makes finding something lost at sea an imposing task.

Four days after Malayasia Airlines Flight 370 disappeared enroute to Bejing, search and rescue vessels scouring the region have found no trace of the airliner or the 239 people aboard. Although authorities have yet to speculate on what happened aboard the Boeing 777-200, what ever it was that brought down the plane is widely believed to have occurred quickly, catastrophically and at high altitude. That would scatter debris over a huge area.

You’d think that would make finding debris easy, but that has not been the case. Malaysia Airlines says nine aircraft and 24 ships are searching for Flight 370; the flotilla includes the USS Kidd and USS Pinckney, two destroyers that were conducting exercises in the area. The U.S. Navy also deployed a Lockheed P-3C Orion, a maritime surveillance plane originally developed for anti-submarine work. This search force, drawn from nine countries, has expanded its focus to a vast swath of the South China and Andaman seas, the Straits of Malacca and the Gulf of Thailand–an area larger than Texas and California combined.

Despite the size of the search operation and the technology at its disposal, the task of searching for an aircraft in the water still comes down to sailors and airmen looking at the sea, for hours at a time.

“Finding pieces and parts from the air is very difficult to do,” said retired Coast Guard Lt. Commander Larry Kidd. Although a portion of the search effort is focusing on land masses in the area, that doesn’t make the task any easier. There are some remote areas in that part of the world, and “they could lose an airplane or pieces of an airplane and never find it,” Kidd said.

Large-scale pelagic search-and-rescue operations are managed from what’s called a Rescue Coordination Center. Officials there coordinate the efforts of the various nations and agencies involved, ensuring efforts are not duplicated and the area in question is thoroughly and efficiently searched. Because Flight 370 was from a Malaysian carrier, departed from Malaysia, and presumably went down relatively close to home, that country’s Department of Civil Aviation is running the show. Malaysian authorities have considerable experience with search and rescue operations, and the country’s expertise is well regarded by others in the field.

The biggest challenge, aside from the size of the search area, is not knowing where Capt. Zaharie Ahmad Shaw and First Officer Fariq Ab Hamid ran into trouble, where the plane went down, or why. Knowing where to begin the search is, of course, a key data point, said Petty Officer 3rd Class Katelyn Shearer of the United States Coast Guard. Although she would not speak specifically about the search for Flight 370, she outlined what typically happens in such a search and rescue operation.

When the call comes in–either a distress call from an aircraft or a ship, or an alert from another agency–authorities direct any available ships, helicopters and aircraft toward the vessel’s last known position. The number of vessels deployed will depend upon the situation–an aircraft carrier wouldn’t respond to a sailboat sinking a mile offshore, for example, but would be dispatched if it were the vessel closest to a distressed ship on the high sea.

If the vessel in distress cannot be promptly located, search and rescue craft begin a search pattern. The Coast Guard has five general patterns, and which one is deployed depends upon the accuracy of any information about where the distress call was made and whether, and where, datum–possible debris sightings–are reported. The pattern used is determined by the current, wind and other factors and also the type of vessels involved in the search. Using a specific pattern ensures the search is conducted efficiently and accurately.

“Search patterns are valuable because they allow crew members to complete a thorough and a methodical search of the area,” Shearer said. Depending on what’s available, search patterns will be done via air and sea, with the coordinating authority assigning tasks to individual vessels to ensure coverage. Each vessel has a specific advantage–and drawback. An airplane can survey a much larger area than a ship, and do so in much less time, but it is not as useful for locating or investigating small debris.

One of the biggest issues in searching for anything at sea is dealing with current and drift. Computer models and meteorological data help here. The Coast Guard, for example, uses computer models to “determine the most appropriate search pattern based on currents, wind and other external factors,” said Shearer. The Cost Guard software can also predict in which direction the vessel may have drifted, but as time passes, predicting drift becomes increasingly difficult.

Members of the Chinese emergency response team salvage a floating object at the possible crash site of missing Malaysia Airlines flight.

In the case of Flight 370, rescue planes would have started with a track line search, tracing the flight path of the plane from the point of departure in Kuala Lampur all the way to Beijing, said Kidd. Then, search assets would begin adjusting for lateral drift, performing what’s called a parallel track search. Kidd said airplanes would likely fly in five-mile-wide patterns, with ships searching one mile at a time. If something was spotted, a radio beacon typically is dropped into the water and new search grids developed based on that location.

Even with all the technology in the world, search and rescue operations come down to men and women scanning the sea with binoculars. This is an exceedingly daunting task when you consider the search area covers as many as 500,000 square miles. And this explains how it is possible not to have found any debris yet. Searching open water is slow, tedious work, made more so by the time required to get anywhere.

With something like a missing commercial airliner, help from other, less traditional sources, comes into play. The U.S Government reviewed imagery taken by its spy satellites in the region for possible evidence of an explosion, to no avail, according to Reuters. DigitalGlobe, a commercial satellite imagery firm, has taken numerous pictures of the search area with its five satellites, posting the pictures on its website in an attempt to crowdsource the search.

The odds of finding survivors dwindles over time, but U.S. Navy and other vessels involved with the search are equipped with medical facilities should survivors be located, and hospitals are on alert.

Kidd says that if the plane had hit the water in one piece, there would most likely would be a lot of debris in a concentrated area. However, if it broke up at altitude, pieces could be scattered far and wide, making it hard to identify any single item from the air. This, combined with the challenge of seeing debris of any kind in the water, can make finding things difficult. Early in the search it was widely reported that an airplane door had been spotted, but authorities didn’t conclusively identify what it was and it hasn’t been spotted again. What was thought to be debris in another area turned out to be a coral reef.

And so the search goes on, for as long as it takes. It took two years before authorities found the black box data recorder and the airframe for Air France Flight 447, which went down over the Atlantic in 2009. But at some point, the search will scale back. When and how that happens will be up to officials at the Rescue Coordination Center.

[MIKA27]

Armed Cossacks Flock to Crimea to Help Russian Annexation Bid

Armed groups of Cossacks from across the area are flocking to the disputed region to help Moscow rest it from Ukraine in hopes they'll be rewarded by being integrated into Russia's primary security apparatus after the takeover's complete

On Monday morning, about 150 Cossack officers got together in Crimea, the breakaway region of Ukraine, and lined up in formation on the central square of the regional capital of Simferopol. Bundled up against the winds that blew in that day from the Black Sea, they made for a sorry sight, disheveled and grumpy, like a reunion of elderly veterans kitted out in old, mismatching camouflage gear. But their commander, Vladimir Cherkashin, stood before them in a leather jacket and military cap to say that their fortunes were about to change.

Next week, a referendum on Crimea’s independence from Ukraine will open the door for Russia to annex the entire Crimean Peninsula, and for the local Cossack paramilitary groups, that marks the opportunity of a lifetime. It would mean a chance to be integrated into the Russian security forces – just like their Cossack brothers to the east have been under Russian President Vladimir Putin. “That means state recognition, it means training for our cadets,” Cherkashin explained to his Cossack commanders, who are known as atamans. “It’s status. You understand? It’s all about finances!” At this, the group of men looked around at each other and grumbled in approval. Then, at Cherkashin’s command, they shouted the celebratory Cossack salute – “Lyubo!”

For the past two weeks, the Cossacks – a caste of warriors who have guarded the borders of the Russian empire for centuries – have played a key role in the Russian occupation of Crimea. They have manned checkpoints on its highways, guarded the headquarters of its separatist government, patrolled the streets with their ceremonial whips in hand and are now helping build and defend fortifications on the de facto Crimean border with Ukraine. Through it all, they have had ample help from Russia’s professional and state-sponsored Cossack forces, who have come by the thousands to defend what they see as historically Russian lands.

“Cossacks have no borders,” says Nikolai Pervakov, the first deputy commander of Russia’s Kuban Cossack legion, who is leading their mission to Crimea from his usual base of operations in the southern Russian city of Krasnodar. Appearing on the square alongside Cherkashin on Monday, he told TIME that a few thousand of his men have come to Crimea from Russia, all with the express approval of the Kremlin. After inspecting the bedraggled ranks of his Crimean comrades, Pervakov gave a short speech on their fraternal ties. “We are a united people, people of the same faith, traditions, customs. Our lives are linked,” he told them. “So we need to be like a clenched and monolithic fist. Only then will we have victory.”

The links that bind Cossacks around the world can be mystifying for outsiders and hard to pin down. They are largely Slavic but come from many other ethnic groups as well, and they speak various languages. Some are born Cossacks while others are initiated into their martial traditions. Their zealous devotion to the Orthodox Christian religion tends to unite them, although different Cossack groups follow different denominations of that faith. Through history, they have rebelled against the Russian empire and marched alongside its armies to fight common enemies, including the Turks, the British and the Khans of Central Asia. Conflicts and upheavals have scattered them for centuries around the world, and there are vibrant communities of Cossacks as far afield as New Jersey, where their ancestors wound up after the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 tried to purge them from the Soviet Union. But what unites the Cossacks in Crimea with their allies in Russia today is a common belief that Moscow should command the Slavic world, most crucially including eastern and southern Ukraine.

For the Cossacks of Crimea, that victory could mark a total transformation. Ever since the collapse of the Soviet Union, Ukraine’s succession of leaders, regardless of whether they leaned toward Russia or the West, have treated the local Crimean Cossacks with great suspicion. Their commanders in Crimea have spread militant notions of Slavic unity among their young cadets. All of that has attracted scrutiny from Ukraine’s security services in recent years. Under the rule of President Viktor Yanukovych, a Russia-leaning leader who was deposed in a revolution last month, Crimea’s leading Cossacks were investigated for training paramilitary groups and speaking out in support of separatism, both of which are illegal in Ukraine. Some of them have had their Cossack training camps raided by police in search of weapons. Others have been deported to Russia on charges of inciting ethnic hatred.

All of that stands in stark contrast to the lives of their fellow Cossacks in Russia. In 2005, Putin signed a law called “On the state service of the Russian Cossacks,” which gave them the status of a state-backed militia, complete with government paychecks. Under that law, Putin, in his role as commander-in-chief, is the only one who can assign someone the rank of Cossack General. Other officer ranks in the Cossack hierarchy, which is distinct from the rest of the Russian military’s pecking order, must be approved by the Kremlin Council on Cossack Affairs. That law also granted more than 600,000 officially registered Cossacks in Russia the rights to fulfill various functions usually controlled by the state. This includes the right to defend border regions, guard national forests, organize military training for young cadets, fight terrorism, protect local government buildings and administrative sites and provide the vague service of “defending social order.”

It seemed to be in the latter capacity that they patrolled the streets of Sochi during last month’s Winter Olympic Games, even greeting arrivals in the airport terminal dressed in their signature lambskin hats and knee-high leather boots. Vladimir Davydov, a local Cossack officer and a member of the Sochi city council, saw the Games as a historic chance to demonstrate the usefulness of Cossacks to the Kremlin. “Our entire history we have served the sovereign, the motherland,” he told TIME a few weeks before the Games began. “Now that role is restored.” If the Kremlin calls on them, he said, the Cossacks can field a force of 50,000 armed irregulars in the region surrounding Sochi. “The Olympics will be our chance to prove our worth.”

Throughout the Games, they seemed to do that with flying colors, though not without one appalling show of force. On Feb. 19, a few days before the closing ceremony of the Games, a group of activists from the protest group ***** Riot tried to film an anti-Putin music video in Sochi. But just as the young women pulled on their colorful balaclavas and started dancing around, a group of uniformed Cossacks ran up to them, sprayed them in the face with pepper spray, hit them with whips, yanked them by the hair and dragged them away kicking and screaming. Under current Ukrainian law, that kind of attack would have gotten the Cossacks arrested for battery. In Russia, even during the Olympics, it was part of their paid service to the state.

The allure of becoming a formally recognized militia force seems to have made Crimea’s Cossacks even more gung-ho about the Russian annexation of their peninsula. “Our priority right now is to make sure the referendum goes as planned,” Cherkashin told me on March 9, just after he held a meeting with the new de facto leader of Crimea, the separatist Prime Minister Sergei Aksyonov. Watching Russian state TV in a waiting area outside Aksyonov’s office that afternoon, Cherkashin said Cossack volunteers from across Russia and the former Soviet Union have been offering to come help Crimea break away from Ukraine. “These two Cossacks in Armenia called me on Skype the other day,” he says. “They held two Kalashnikovs in front of the camera and said they’re ready to ride.”

But Cherkashin, who is also a member of the Crimean parliament, has had to decline most of these offers. Flooding the peninsula with various Cossack vigilantes would not be good for “keeping order,” he says, and besides, they have enough support from Pervakov and the Kuban Cossack legion as it is. After the morning line-up on the square in Simferopol, the highest ranking commanders walked over to a nearby church – The Cathedral of Holy Mary Magdalene, Equal to the Apostles – for a private powwow. It began with a blessing from a local priest of the Russian Orthodox Church, Vitali Liskevich, who prayed for the Lord to defend the righteous mission of the Cossacks in Crimea. After that, Pervakov, the Cossack envoy from Russia, walked into the hall with a sheaf of papers, and this reporter was asked to leave the room

[MIKA27]

Arnold Schwarzenegger Will Ride in a Tank and Destroy Things for Charity

The action hero and former California governor is selling a chance for fans to ride shotgun with him in an M47 tank while he runs a whole bunch of stuff over, an idea he says he got from Reddit. Proceeds from the raffle will go to charity

After crushing a “steak and egger” sandwich and frying an ostrich egg on his tank with the Epic Meal Time gang last week, Arnold Schwarzenegger is now going to crush things with his tank.

You can enter to win a chance to ride shotgun with him in his M47 Patton tank and — with cigars in hand — run over everything from bubble wrap to a piano to a copy of Million Dollar Baby. The shenanigans benefit After-School All-Stars, which plans after-school activities for disadvantaged children.

According to the description of the video on Schwarzenegger’s YouTube channel, “This idea came from Reddit, so I want to give credit where credit is due. Specifically, it came from “ipeeinyourshower” who has better taste in video ideas for charity than usernames.”

In a January promotion for After-School All-Stars, the former California Governor posed as a trainer at his old stomping grounds Gold’s Gym. The video went viral, racking up 17.1 million views to date.

[MIKA27]

Italy: 'Urban' wolves get alarmingly close to humans

Italians are worried that wild wolves are becoming too comfortable making forays into towns and villages across the country, it seems.

The latest proof that the animals are getting dangerously close to humans came when a driver ran over a wolf near the northern city of Turin, Torino Today reports. In October, residents of a town in Italy's coastal region of Liguria said they saw a wolf roaming the streets in broad daylight, showing no signs that it was afraid of humans.

It is estimated that between 600 and 800 wolves live in the Italian peninsula. Although they are protected by EU law, farmers have started killing the animals, complaining that that they are increasingly hunting their livestock, according to another Italian website, The Local.

In January, farmers in Tuscany protested against what they saw as the inaction of local authorities by dumping the dead bodies of wolves in villages and towns across the central Italian region.

[MIKA27]

MODULAR URBAN PACK | BY EMBER EQUIPMENT

Ember Equipment is a new brand from California, their first offering is this bad-ass backpack.

The minimalist Ember backpack is a sleek urban-travel pack, built with rugged materials and designed to scale from minimal to maximal effortlessly. The 20-liter urban pack is modular, giving the user the opportunity to build their own pack by choosing from a variety of Ember gear options, including several magnetic pouches, a removable airport-security-ready laptop sleeve, and three styles of external utility straps/handles

[MIKA27]

APOLLO 70 AIRSTREAM BAR

When you’re really looking to impress at your next corporate event, do so with the Apollo 70 Airstream Bar – an airstream trailer that has been completely transformed into a mobile bar.

We’ve always had an affinity for Airstream trailers, but renovating your Land Yacht, and transforming it into a party trailer? Now that’s something that never crossed on our minds. Thankfully this beauty isn’t owned by some lucky dude who just gets to sit back and enjoy it while we all drool. In fact, team at Apollo 70 rent the Airstream out to anyone (anyone willing to pay of course) for events. The bar on wheels comes complete with a fully stocked bar, televisions, and a courteous staff to ensure all of your guest’s are properly taken care of. Not only does this bar offer up locally sourced craft beers and cocktails, but can also transform into a full-fledged food truck, serving everything from the finest Belgium chocolates to gourmet street food.

[MIKA27]

Titanfall Tips From Microsoft

Sure, the first half of this Titanfall tips video from Microsoft is mostly just hype. But in the second half they have included a few simple but worthwhile pointers.

Some of the ideas are similar to the tips we’ve already shared , but three of them are small new ideas worth keeping in mind. To paraphrase the best pointers:

1) Use the AI soldiers to your advantage. The AI soldiers aren’t just there for an easy little XP boost — you can use them to your advantage in a couple of ways. For starters, enemy grunts tend to belie the location of enemy pilots, so follow the grunts to find the pilots. Secondly, crafty players can usually crouch and mimic the AI patterns of friendly grunts (do a lot of kneeling) and fool enemy pilots who skip over grunts while looking for more dangerous prey. I’ve done that latter move quite a bit, and it works pretty well.

2) Rodeo smart. Rodeoing an enemy titan is super fun, but you want to stay mindful of where the titan’s pilot has gotten to. If he or she ejects to come out and fight you, immediately jump off and get ready to fight back. Even better, start a rodeo with a titan ready to drop and then, when the enemy pilot ejects, call in titanfall immediately to crush his titan. Boom. I now really, really want to pull that trick off in a game.

3) Hang off walls. This one’s one me for not reading the instruction manual, but I didn’t realise that you could pause mid-wall-run by hitting LT and hang on the wall, aiming and firing. In general, mastering the wall-run is going to be the thing that separates the better Titanfall players from the lesser players, and the ability to hang and fire offers even more versatility to an already versatile system.

And there you have ‘em: three more small tips.

[Fuzz]

MODULAR URBAN PACK | BY EMBER EQUIPMENT

Ahh, multiple easy to reach compartments on a backpack... a pickpocket's dream come true!

[MIKA27]

Ahh, multiple easy to reach compartments on a backpack... a pickpocket's dream come true!

Well the... business should be good for you!

[MIKA27]

Monster Machines: How The Granddaddy Of US Recon Planes Is Helping Search For Flight 370

The mysterious disappearance of Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 off the coast of Vietnam has prompted a massive multinational maritime search for hints of the plane’s fate. Among the growing armada of surface and aerial search vessels is the US Navy’s venerable P-3C Orion, a long-range surveillance platform still just as effective today as it was in the early Cold War.

Lockheed developed the four-engine turbo-prop P-3 Orion for the US Navy as an anti-submarine and maritime surveillance aircraft, introducing it 1962. The basic fuselage design was lifted from the Lockheed L-188 Electra commercial airliner, but the militarised version bears little further resemblance to its civilian precursor. The Orion, for example, sported a long Magnetic Anomaly Detector (aka a “MAD boom”) — used to spot submerged submarines — under its tail. It also employs a Raytheon synthetic aperture search radar system, Advanced Imaging Multispectral Sensor, sonobuoy receivers and acoustic processors for detecting passing subs, and a host of other long-range sensor suites. There is so much surveillance gear packed aboard this plane, it requires a crew of 11 airmen to operate.

The planes have also housed the latest and greatest in surveillance systems throughout their 50-plus year service careers. In fact, the P-3 Orion is among a very select few aircraft, including the KC-135 Stratotanker and B-52 Stratofortress, to serve more than half a century.

While the US fleet of 734 Orions will eventually be phased out in favour of the more modern P-8A Poseidon, these remain widely used aircraft and serve in more than a dozen nations worldwide. They are also routinely put to use in humanitarian missions, such as the search for the missing Malaysia Airlines plane.

The US Navy deployed a P-3C Orion aircraft from Kadena Air Base in Okinawa, Japan, to the search area last Sunday, where it joined the 7th Fleet’s USS Kidd and USS Pinckney, both Arleigh Burke-class guided missile destroyers, in the search effort. The 35m long P-3C is equipped with a quartet of 4600 shp Allison T56-A-14 turboprop engines which provide a cruising speed of 600km/h with a range of 2380 nautical miles. This will allow the P-3C to cover nearly 4000 square kilometre every hour according to Cmdr William Marks, the spokesman for the US 7th Fleet. What’s more, the Orion can remain airborne for up to 16 hours at time, giving crews more time to search for the missing airliner.

[MIKA27]

This Guy’s Building a Tsunami-Proof Pod in His Silicon Valley Backyard

Chris Robinson has never built a boat or even sailed, and he admits that a tidal wave is unlikely to hit Silicon Valley. But in his Palo Alto backyard, Robinson has spent the past two years building a defense against one: a 22-foot-long, 10-foot-wide, 8.5-foot-high tsunami-proof capsule made of plywood and epoxy.

After watching coverage of the Fukushima disaster and a flood-devastated Japan, Robinson started working on an escape route. “No one is going to wear a jet pack on their back as they work in their office,” Robinson says, so he imagined a more buoyant solution—drawing inspiration from oil-derrick escape pods and a Canadian artist who constructs wooden spheres that hang in trees and double as hotel rooms.

The former Facebook and PayPal art director used Adobe Illustrator to sketch his tsunamiball plan (he asked some engineers for help calculating whether it would float). “Very early in the project it became about building this interesting object,” Robinson says.

“I’m not a survivalist. I don’t even have life jackets.” He does, however, have an emotional connection to Fukushima—he met his wife there in 1991, when he lived in Japan. “Half the places we went on dates are gone,” he says. Robinson plans to finish the outer shell by May, then ocean-test the vessel if he can find a crane and truck big enough to haul it over to the Pacific. And if the sphere doesn’t sink, he’ll use Airbnb to rent the tsunamiball for tidal wave-safe overnights in Palo Alto.

[MIKA27]

The Dancing Stripper Robots Of The Future Are Now Here

Far from creating an army of cyborgs that can carry out menial tasks at the touch of button, German robotics developer Tobit Software have opted few a better use for their robots.

Turning them into gyrating and slightly awkward strippers.

Who needs a real doll, when you can have your very own Short Circuit masquerading around to your hearts content. Each robot is programmed and controlled by an app in your SmartPhone, so you can spend more time having a drink at the bar, as opposed to fumbling around trying to find the on switch.

The only downside? You’ll need to have a far about of cash in the bank, each one of these robots dancers will set you back an eye-watering $39,500.

Now THAT’S a expensive night out.

MIKA: Only in Sydney....

[MIKA27]

Can You Make Big Money Hunting Asteroids?

Stuck in a dead-end job? Looking for a field with infinite potential? Are you able to spend long hours looking up? Then you could be qualified for an exciting new career hunting asteroids!

OK, don’t quit your day job just yet. On March 17, 2014, NASA launches the first phase of its NASA and Planetary Resources Asteroid Data Hunter challenge. NASA has teamed up with the asteroid mining company Planetary Resources to create a contest to help them locate asteroids, harness their resources and potentially stop them before they do something serious like collide with our planet.

The NASA Tournament Lab is running the competition and describes it this way:

In this challenge, we are tasking competitors with developing a significantly improved algorithm to identify asteroids in images from ground-based telescopes. The winning solution will increase the detection sensitivity, minimize the number of false positives, ignore imperfections in the data, and run effectively on all computers.

The competition is broken down into a series of contests running from March 17 through August 2014. It offers a total of $35,000 in prizes, with each individual contest offering cash for first and second place and some offering an additional reliability bonus based on past performance of the contestant. It’s all explained in greater detail on the contest web site, where you‘ll also find instructions for registration and entering.

Sure, it sounds like a cheap way for NASA to get around budget cuts, but Prizes and Challenges Program executive Jenn Gustetic describes the mission in more noble terms:

By opening up the search for asteroids, we are harnessing the potential of innovators and makers and citizen scientists everywhere to help solve this global challenge.

With a chance to save humanity and better odds than winning the lottery, what are you waiting for?

[MIKA27]

TACTICAL BACON

When the zombie apocalypse begins, and the world as we know it ceases to exist, there is going to be a ton of stuff we miss. Above all, the thing we will miss the most is bacon. Thankfully CMMG has already thought this one out, and implemented an ingeinous solution with their Tactical Bacon.

Will the infection spread to animals? Who knows. All we know is that we aren’t looking to take any chances. Tactical bacon comes packaged in a convenient 9-ounce can, is fully cooked and prepared, and boasts an impressive 10-year shelf life. Start stockpiling now. If the apocalypse never happens (and it will), at least you can enjoy the sweet taste of bacon on your next camping or hiking trip.

[MIKA27]

SLATEPRO PERSONAL TECHDESK

The Slate Mobile Airdesk was one of our favorite solutions for people who work from home, and now the same design team is back with a new device – the SlatePro.

As Airdesk was to “couch workers,” SlatePro is to people looking for a complete home office setup. The brand has described it as a personal TechDesk, designed specifically for professionals who work from their home. Although it would also be great in a traditional office environment as well. The desk is crafted from premium bamboo that has been mated to a set of handmade steel legs. The surface has been outfitted with an acrylic sheet for protection, perforations to run wires through and ensure your laptop stays cool, multiple docks for mobile devices, heavy duty mousepad, and a recessed cup holder among other things. Check out the video below. [Kickstarter]

[MIKA27]

JAMES BOND 007 SUITE AT SEVEN HOTEL, PARIS

Looking for the perfect place to score a little Octopussy? Maybe you’d just like a weekend alone in a Quantum of Solace? (Yes, we wrote that. No, we don’t know what it means.) The Seven Hotel in Paris is offering guests a chance to live like Bond, James Bond, with its 007-themed hotel suite.

Designed by Agence Bastie, the suite’s dramatic décor seems like it was plucked right out of the films, with its golden toilets, Turkish bath, mirrored ceiling, golden gun-lamp, 62” inch TV with archive of Bond films, and appropriately themed mini-bar, electronic safe and bathrobes. There’s even a 007 suit you can wear as you comb the lobby for gun-toting blonde bombshells. $620 gets you in the door, and it’s BYOG (gadget).

[Fuzz]

The Dancing Stripper Robots Of The Future Are Now Here

MIKA: Only in Sydney....

Ok... getting past the stripper robot bit, why on Earth would you stick a security camera on as the head?