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

[MIKA27]

Monster Machines: This 130km/h Badger Fits In The Belly Of An Osprey

US ground forces are about to get an awesome new whip from Boeing’s Phantom Works: a petite combat support vehicle combining power, speed and all-terrain traction to deliver soldiers to just about anywhere on Earth — without all the hiking.

The Phantom Badger, as it is called, is a 240hp combat support vehicle that resembles a Humvee shrunk down to Mini Cooper dimensions. Measuring just 150cm wide, the Phantom Badger is the first combat support vehicle narrow enough to fit aboard the new V-22 Osprey. They’re tiny enough to pack a pair into a C-130′s maw, sling under a Chinook, and stuff nearly a dozen into the cargo hold of a C-17 (before being air dropped alongside paratroopers).

They’re like golf carts, except with a top speed of 130km/h, rugged adjustable-height suspension, all-wheel drive and all-wheel steering which delivers a minuscule 7m turning radius. And machine guns. Each Badger include a .50-calibre machine gun or a 40mm automatic grenade launcher bolted to the roll cage. Plus, the additional pair of rear-facing seats can be removed to make room for supplies or additional hardware.

After more than 8000km of durability testing over treacherous terrain, the US Navy has just certified the platform combat ready. “This certification validates Phantom Badger’s versatile design while offering the warfighter increased battlefield access and deployment options,” John Chicoli, who leads Boeing’s internally transportable vehicle program, said in a statement. There’s no word yet on when these chibi combat vehicles will make their battlefield debut.

[MIKA27]

Astronauts Can Power Their Bodies And Spacecraft With Pee

Astronauts have been able to drink their own (treated and filtered) urine for years, but scientists have managed to squeeze one more benefit out of an inevitable byproduct thanks to a new technique. Now, astronauts can use their urine to keep both their bodies and their spaceships running smoothly.

Currently, about half of an extended space mission’s total waste can be chalked up to bodily functions, and sending water refills out into space from Earth is wildly expensive. Obviously, finding ways to recycle human waste is key. Now, instead of the massive, clunky distillers previously in use, NASA uses a treatment process called forward osmosis, as seen in the video below.

Still, turning urine into water is no new feat. What’s particularly innovative about this method, though, is that it’s also able to convert the urea extracted from the urine into ammonia by using a bioreactor. This ammonia could then be converted into energy by combining it with fuel cells.

Astronauts aren’t the only ones with the potential to benefit though. According to NASA’s team at the Ames Research Center in Mountain View, California, “the results showed that the UBE system could be used in any wastewater treatment systems containing urea and/or ammonia.” Sure, the idea of living off our own waste might make people a little squeamish, but hey — it worked for Kevin Costner.

[MIKA27]

Handheld Jet Thrusters Make Any Sport Instantly Extreme

If you’re wondering how this snowboarder is moving so fast on flat ground, the answer is simple. He’s holding powerful jet thrusters in his hands. Yes, jet thrusters. This is awesome.

Now that rechargeable battery technologies have developed past the point of being abysmal, they have allowed a company called Dreamscience to create this set of handheld electric jet thrusters that make everything from snowboarding to rollerblading infinitely more awesome.

Because they’re not quite ready for primetime just yet, Dreamscience isn’t exactly forthcoming with technical details on its creation. But it credits recent advances in lithium polymer battery technology as making it possible to actually power four 8kW motors that in turn spin fan blades at speeds of up to 30,000 rpm. And all without creating so much eat as to scorch whoever’s using it.

In trial runs on snow, the Dreamscience thruster has propelled a snowboarder to speeds of up to 80km/h in seconds. And that’s on a completely flat run, no inclines to help it along.

The company is nowhere near ready to start selling this to the public, but it’s hoping to first get it out the door for around $10,000. Certainly expensive, given how many lift tickets that could buy. But eventually they’re hoping to get the price down to around $5000, which is comparable to what a Segway will cost you, but so much more fun.

[MIKA27]

Archaeologists Unearth Rare Egyptian Sarcophagus And Gold Seal In Israel

Archaeologists have unearthed a rare tomb in Israel with an Egyptian ceramic sarcophagus. Inside, the body of a man who died about 3300 years ago along with a gold scarab with the name of Seti I, the father of Ramses II — the pharaoh that enslaved Moses and the Jews according to the Bible myth. But the buried man was not Egyptian.

The man is a Canaanite, a polytheistic tribe who lived in what’s now modern Israel. The Canaanites were important during this period because their territory was at the intersection of the Egyptian, Hittite and Assyrian Empires.

The tomb — which was first found by natural gas pipeline workers in Jezreel Valley, south of the Lower Galilee region, 15km southwest of Nazareth — doesn’t correspond to the usual Canaanite burial rituals, according to Dr Ron Be’eri, of the Israeli Archeological Authority.

Canaanites… were not accustomed to burying themselves in coffins of this sort. The Canaanite style of burial is different. Completeness of the body is a basic thing in Egyptian burial, and that’s because [they believed] the soul of the dead… is meant to leave the body after death.

But the man was indeed a Canaanite, probably a high ranking official during the time of Seti I, a pharaoh who reconquered Canaan up to the south of the Sea of Galilee.

[MIKA27]

Large Hadron Collider Finds New Particle Unlike Any Other Form Of Matter

Not content with perhaps the biggest scientific discovery of the decade, scientists at the Large Hadron Collide continue to search for new particles — and now they have found one that seems to be an entirely new form of matter.

A series of experiments at the LHC have confirmed that a new particle called Z(4430) — catchy! — actually exists, and it’s the best evidence to date of a new form of matter called a tetraquark. Quarks are the subatomic particles that, combined, form all matter. In pairs they form mesons; in triplets, protons and neutrons. Tetraquarks are a hypothesised combination of four of the little things — and Z(4430) was, if it existed, thought to be an example. Thing was, nobody knew for sure — until now — that it existed or not.

Its sighting at the LHC changes things. Researchers from CERN have found as many as 4000 of the particles, which means that those who think tetraquarks do exist are pretty excited. There remains some work to be done to understand once and for all if Z(4430) is with 100 per cent certainty a tetraquark, and even then exactly what that means for us. But in the meantime, it’s nice to know that the LHC isn’t resting on its laurels.

[MIKA27]

US Military Wants To Turn Its Drones Into Flying Wi-Fi Hotspots

Not to be outdone by Facebook’s vision of a drone internet, the military is whipping up unmanned aerial Wi-Fi hotspots of its own. Unused drones from the war in Iraq are getting a second life as part of DARPA’s Mobile Hotspots program.

In remote areas where communication is critical, having your very own Wi-Fi drone circling overhead makes a big difference. The RA-7 Shadow drones DARPA has been retrofitting are much smaller than the deadlier and more infamous Predator drones. In fact, at just 3m long and 84kg, you have to be careful not to overload them with heavy internet equipment. War is Boring explains the details:

The trick, of course, is to fit the wireless equipment on the drone. DARPA researchers say they have developed small antennas operating on the millimetre wave band — that’s extremely high frequency — as well as special amplifiers that can boost the signal while generating just half as much noise as regular amplifiers.

The pod with all this equipment comes out to about 9kg, and the drone itself can fly for nine hours at a time. Now it’s up to DARPA to put it all together and make sure a Wi-Fi equipped drone actually works for troops on the ground. In the future, even drone armies could be Wi-Fi equipped.

[MIKA27]

Monster Machines: This Special Ops Missile Prioritises Precision

Despite their generally overwhelming combat prowess, many large US naval vessels remain vulnerable to small, fast-moving speedboats. But with the latest iteration of Raytheon’s multi-role precision missile, that won’t be a problem for much longer.

The AGM-176 Griffin is a precision munition developed by Raytheon since 2008, designed as mission agnostic, low-collateral-damage weapon for use in the sorts of “irregular warfare operations” that our troops faced in Afghanistan.

These lightweight modular munitions use components from existing weapons platforms such as the FGM-148 Javelin and the AIM-9X Sidewinder. They measure just under 15cm in diameter, 109cm in length, weigh a third of what the Hellfires that UAVs normally carry do, and pack a relatively small 6kg blast-frag warhead. But their real value lies within their flexibility.

The Griffin can be employed as either a short range surface-to-surface/air-to-surface rocket powered missile, or as an air-dropped unpowered, guided bomb. When powered by their solid fuel rocket motor, Griffins can strike from more than 19km away. These munitions seek their targets using either a semi-active laser designator or by GPS. Plus, they can be preprogrammed for air burst, impact, or timed detonation.

Originally developed for the Special Ops MC-130W gunship, the Griffin has since been integrated into a number of vehicles from the Reaper and Predator UAVs to unadulterated C-130 transports (which is far easier and cheaper than sending in a dedicated gunship) to manned attack helicopters like the Kiowa Warrior. So long as the vehicle can mount a 10-tube “Gunslinger” launcher, it can employ the Griffin.

The Navy’s latest iteration, the Mark 60 (Block III), recently proved its mettle in a series of live-fire demonstrations late last March. Launched from Cyclone-class patrol ships (part of the Fifth Fleet). Utilising the semi-active laser seeker and a new Multi-Effects Warhead System, these precision missiles successfully intercepted and destroyed a number of static and mobile targets mimicking swarms of fast attack ships. The US Navy has since declared the new Mark 60′s fit for field deployment and plans to integrate them into its new fleet of littoral combat ships.

[MIKA27]

Scientists: Ancient Papyrus That Says Jesus Was Married Is Authentic

Three teams of scientists at Harvard University, Columbia University, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have concluded that the ancient coptic papyrus that talks about Jesus’ wife is authentic and not a forgery. The Vatican claimed the latter when it was discovered.

The papyrus is called the Gospel of Jesus’ Wife because it contains phrases attributed to Jesus talking about his wife. Here’s the complete translation of the text above:

Carbon dating dates the text to eighth-century Egypt, which is 400 years later than what Karen L. King — Professor of Divinity at Harvard University — thought it was going to be. But that date is still considered ancient times — not a modern forgery as the Vatican said.

On the paper presenting this discovery, King says that this papyrus is not proof that Jesus was married:

The fragment does not provide evidence that the historical Jesus was married but concerns an early Christian debate over whether women who are wives and mothers can be disciples of Jesus.

No matter her caveat, however, it’s probably going to make Christians scream in a thousand tongues. Which is probably the most interesting aspect of all this, as she said to the Boston Globe:

I’m basically hoping that we can move past the issue of forgery to questions about the significance of this fragment for the history of Christianity, for thinking about questions like, ‘Why does Jesus being married, or not, even matter? Why is it that people had such an incredible reaction to this?’

Indeed. What’s the problem with Jesus being married or not?

[MIKA27]

Mark Webber's Le Mans Porsche 919 Hybrid Sounds Amazing

Porsche is back in Le Mans competition this year, and it has a brand new car to compete with. The 919 Hybrid combines a highly turbocharged two-litre four-cylinder with energy recovery and a battery-based electric electric motor driving the racer’s front wheels under acceleration. The entire super-compact, super-light prototype chassis should be a proper competitor for Audi’s barnstorming turbodiesel R18 e-Tron, and no matter how it performs, it sounds amazing.

This video, Jalopnik tells us, comes from a performance test at Circuit Paul Ricard near Marseille. The 919 uses a supercompact V4 — that’s right, a V and not an inline four — that’s extremely turbocharged, running the car’s rear wheels in tandem with a front-mounted electric motor to output a lazy 500 horsepower. All kinds of whiz-bang energy recovery and regeneration systems are in use, of course, with the primary one being a turbine sitting in the exhaust system — very high-tech.

This is the car that Mark Webber will be driving throughout the 2104-15 Le Mans season; the Aussie, formerly of Formula 1 and Formula Ford, previously tested the car in Portugal in December last year. Webber is one of six drivers who’ll be sitting in the 919 Hybrid over the series’ race meetings.

Full details on the car — like most LMP1 cars, which are shrouded in secrecy until they hit the track for the first time — are sketchy. We don’t even know how competitive the 919 Hybrid will be. What we do know is that it sounds utterly crazy. Have a listen.

[MIKA27]

Photographer Captures Awesome Halo Projected Behind His Jet Fighter

Professional photographer Blair Bunting takes some really awesome photos. He’s also an aviation freak. So much that he has flown in a F-16 twice – and he’s the honorary commander of the USAF 425th FS (Singaporean Air Force). He captured the incredible shot above in his latest flight with the Thunderbirds. Here are some of his photos:

Some of his beautiful commercial work. I’m in love this Ford in Gulf livery.

Blair Bunting is a commercial photographer and aviation fan based in Phoenix, Arizona. You can follow him on Facebook, Twitter and his blog.

[MIKA27]

The Unflinching War Photography Of Chris Hondros

Almost exactly three years after Getty Images photojournalist Chris Hondros was killed by a rocket-propelled grenade in Libya in April 2011, there’s a new book of his writings and photography. War is horrible.Warning: Some of these images are graphic.

Spanning more than a decade of work, Testament is a striking book, which documents Hondros’ incredible eye for the ways the way conflict affects people. The photos are at times disturbing, showing the sadness and misery of the world’s constant warfare. It’s hard to look at, but it’s the truth — a truth that Hondros gave his life to tell. Here are 10 beautiful images, complete with the original Getty Images captions Hondros filed.

April 16, 2003: A US Marine pulls down a picture of Saddam Hussein at a school April 16, 2003 in Al-Kut, Iraq. A combination team of Marines, Army and Special Forces went to schools and other facilities in Al-Kut looking for weapons caches and unexploded bombs in preparation for removing and neutralising them.

Samar Hassan screams after her parents were killed by US Soldiers with the 25th Infantry Division in a shooting January 18, 2005 in Tal Afar, Iraq. The troops fired on the Hassan family car when it unwittingly approached them during a dusk patrol in the tense northern Iraqi town. Parents Hussein and Camila Hassan were killed instantly, and a son Racan, 11, was seriously wounded in the abdomen. Racan, who lost the use of his legs, was treated later in the US.

US Army soldiers in the 1/501st of the 25th Infantry Division shield their eyes from the powerful rotor wash of a Chinook cargo helicopter as they are picked up from a mission 15 October 2009 in Paktika Province, Afghanistan.

Army Specialist Allan Beck, injured in a vehicle accident, has his neck stablised in the emergency room at Balad Air Force Theatre Hospital (BAFT) 18 March 2006 in Balad, Iraq.

An American medic in the 82nd Airborne Combat Aviation Brigade gives CPR to a grievously wounded unidentified Afghan National Army soldier (ANA) in a Medivac helicopter 1 November 2009 in Kandahar province, Afghanistan.

In the orange fog of an Iraqi sandstorm, medic Sgt Matthew Kunkle (L) and Private Aaron Livas, US troops of the 2nd Battalion, 30th Infantry Regiment of the 10th Mountain Division carry a wounded Iraqi man who started running from their platoon during a routine morning patrol and was shot 16 May 2008 in Baghdad, Iraq.

A child Liberian militia soldier loyal to the government walks away from firing while another taunts them on 30 July 2003 in Monrovia, Liberia.

Kurdish boys play with a soccer ball after school at sunset 10 January 2003 in Mardin, Turkey.

A Marine Arabic translator, of the Force Recon attachment to the 24th Marine Expeditionary Unit, prepares to interrogate an Iraqi prisoner 12 April 2003 in central Iraq, north of Nasiriyah. The prisoner and two others were picked up fleeing from the Marines and trying to discard military uniforms and IDs. Force Recon is the Marines equivalent of Special Forces, Marines tasked with recon and other sensitive missions in small groups.

An anti-Taliban commander looks over the area where Al Qaeda fighters are hiding and engaging his troops 10 December 2001 in the Tora Bora area of Afghanistan. Anti-Taliban soldiers bombed and fought al Qaeda fighters in an attempt to oust the estimated 2000 soldiers loyal to Osama bin Laden that are holed up in caves in the rugged countryside.

Top image: Getty Images photographer Chris Hondros walks through the streets on 3 August 2003, in Monrovia, Liberia.

[MIKA27]

Your Decaying Corpse Becomes A Factory Of Toxic Chemicals After You Die

What happens after we die? Spiritually, who knows. Physically? Your body becomes a festering production line, spewing out more than 400 nasty compounds that would be toxic to your body if you weren’t already dead, as Scientific American explains in this unsettlingly cheery animation.

Sure, at the hands of a skilled mortician, your dead body can look strikingly lifelike at your funeral. But it turns out, when your body stops working to remove toxins and fight off bacteria and vermin, it generates a lot of chemicals you might recognise from hazardous material labels. Freon, benzene, carbon tetrachloride, oh my! At the end, though, everything turns to dust, providing nutrients that plants can extract from the soil. Aww, it’s the circle of life!

[MIKA27]

What Are These Giant Concrete Rings Built By The Nazis?

These huge concrete rings were built by the Germans during World War II on the coast of the Barents Sea. For decades, the Soviet military limited access to them after the war was over, fuelling speculation about their purpose. Conspiracy theorists and local folk claimed they were test grounds for Nazi wonderweapons and antigravity devices.

These rings, some said, served as launching pads for Nazi UFOs — flying saucers that used antigravity devices that were later captured by the United States and the Soviet Union. Of course, these aircraft were never used again except to spook the conspiranoics and break their cameras. No images of these fabled wunderwaffe exist and — given the fact that Nazis documented all their technology experiments with photos and movies (didn’t you see Raiders of the Lost Ark?) — it is logical to assume that these UFOs have the power of destroying any cameras around them.

Other people claim that one of these awesome devices was The Bell, a metallic bell-shaped object that was being developed by the Nazis in Poland. The machine was so powerful that the project ended with the killing and mass burial of about 60 scientists working on it (because, apparently, it makes sense to kill 60 scientists capable of building these machines instead of putting them to work in, say, a bloody nuclear bomb.)

Die Glocke – as it was codenamed by the Nazis — was a hard metal object about 4m to 5m tall and 3m in diameter. Described by a Polish journalist and self-proclaimed military historian based on the alleged testimony of that SS general, the Bell held two counter-rotating 2.5cm thick lead cylinders inside.

The cylinders contained a liquid metal called Xerum 525. It looked like mercury but glowed purple while the machine was powered up using high amounts of electricity. Once activated, nobody really actually explains what it did, except killing people and animals around it, disintegrating them. Some even say it was designed to look into the past, bending gravity and time — but not into the future.

Of course, the only thing that actually bend reality are the neurons of all these conspiranoics. These are not launching pads for UFOs. The concrete rings are located near the village of Liinakhamari — in the region of Murmansk Oblast, Russia, next to Finland — and were used as fortifications for artillery pieces.

Soviet marines invaded the area and took over these positions on 12 October 1944. The harbour became a base for the Red Fleet and a base for submarines was built nearby — which explains the prohibited nature of the site for decades, until the base was dismantled.

Sorry, no UFOs to see here, folks. Just old concrete bases for rotating artillery pieces.

[MIKA27]

How Huge Subterranean Grids Could Protect Cities From Earthquakes

French engineers have been experimenting with a technique that could redirect seismic energy away from structures such as cities, dams and nuclear power plants, sparing them from damage. It involves digging large, cylindrical boreholes into the ground, forming a defensive geometry of lace-like arrays that, researchers hope, could deflect seismic waves and thus make whole landscapes “invisible” to earthquakes.

In fact, these arrays were inspired by the same type of “cloaking” effects already used elsewhere to show “how light can be manipulated to make objects invisible,” as David Biello reports in Scientific American. These are referred to as “metamaterials”, and, thus, appropriately, the empty boreholes are described as “seismic metamaterials” in a new paper published in Physical Review Letters.

As Biello describes it, however, these boreholes would need to be “precisely tuned,” almost like musical instruments — he specifically writes that a “precisely tuned array of boreholes around a city or a nuclear power plant” would be required. This would be so that the voids could “resonate at the frequencies characteristic of quakes,” “shielding” the protected area from harm. Physics World calls this transformation seismology.

Interestingly, the deflected seismic energy wouldn’t just disappear: another city, town, or empty landscape that would not previously have been affected could now very well experience the brunt of the destruction.

There are some other implications here, then, including the potential need to designate — or even design — a kind of seismological sacrifice zone where these quakes could be directed.

Like seismic weapons, these drilled grids of empty space on the edge of the city would thus be used to send earthquakes toward other locations. Think of them as magnifying lenses in the ground for redirecting seismic destruction.

While the research is all very practical at the moment and still in its earliest stages, it’s not hard to imagine a future urban landscape — perhaps Los Angeles in the year 2094 — perforated with a new infrastructure of huge resonating voids, a kind of tectonic sitar beneath the streets that can deflect catastrophic earthquakes toward distant locations.

Perhaps led out into the desert along a long necklace of deep-earth grids, earthquakes pulse outward into a national seismic sacrifice zone in the desert, an empty expanse of land where artworks have been installed to shiver with every lurch in the soil and people come to experience the near-constant jolts and tides.

In fact, who knows: maybe you could even pair this with fracking — which is, after all, notorious for setting off earthquake swarms, as in Oklahoma — and you could effectively instrumentalize seismic activity, capturing, deflecting, and strategically reusing the effects of earthquakes on demand.

[MIKA27]

2015 CHEVROLET CORVETTE Z06 CONVERTIBLE

It’s been decades since Chevy has outfitted the Z06 with a drop top, but this year marks the end of that dry spell with the introduction of the 2015 Chevrolet Corvette Z06 Convertible.

Until now, the parts needed to operate a convertible top added way too much unnecessary weight to the mix. Chevy has solved this with a lightweight aluminum frame that makes the drop-top version of the C7 Z06 weigh nearly the same as the hard-top version. Of course you still get everything you love from the Z06, including the LT4 6.2-liter supercharged V8 powerplant putting down 625 horsepower through the seven-speed manual or 8-speed paddle shift transmission. The convertible can be opened or closed in just 30 seconds right from the key fob. No price tag has been revealed yet, but don’t expect this thing to come cheap.

[MIKA27]

SECRET HEMLOFT TREEHOUSE CABIN IN CANADA

What started off as a secret treehouse project by Joel Allen has become the inspiration for treehouse cabins all around the globe.

A Canadian software developer turned carpenter, Allen dedicated countless hours to building this tiny Hemloft treehouse dwelling in the woods of Whistler. The residence is shaped like an egg, and has plenty of room to spend a few nights under the stars, enjoying everything the great outdoors has to offer. While it’s still considered a secret in some regards (not many people know exactly where this thing is at), Allen says that it’s just a short 5-minute walk from the main road. This makes it the ultimate get away spot.

[MIKA27]

Canadian Dentist Plans to Clone John Lennon, From a Tooth

People collect some weird things. I collect books, and tobacco pipes and old bottles. I know a guy who collects guitars, and my late Mother collected bells. I’d think, usually, the things people collect say something about who they are, after all, that’s why they collect those things, because those items speak to them on a personal level and they wish to surround themselves with that feeling.

So when you hear of a dentist who collects teeth, the initial wave of creep that washes over you could be mitigated by an understanding that teeth are what dentists do. Teeth are how they earn a living and in some cases, perhaps, teeth are their entire lives.

Collecting celebrity teeth seems to add to that undefinable creep factor, but even so, there is a dentist in Red Deer, Alberta (Canada) who has, over the last few years, undertaken to collect teeth of various celebrities. Dr. Michael Zuk DDS recently purchased a tooth believed to have once been housed in the mouth of musical genius John Lennon. He apparently paid $30,000 for the chomper, which may seem strange enough, but you just wait until you hear why he bought it.

The tooth, which by all information seems to be genuine, was apparently given to Lennon’s housekeeper, by Lennon himself, in the 1960’s. The woman’s family put the tooth up for sale for the housekeeper’s 90th birthday, and it seems Zuk was the lucky buyer.

Dr. Zuk made headlines in 2012, when he purchased a dental crown previously belonging to the late Elvis Presley, but this time he’s getting press for a different reason.

Zuk plans to clone John Lennon.

Yes, you read that correctly. He openly plans to mine the tooth for DNA with the ultimate goal of genetically cloning the original pop icon, and raising him as his own son.

This story was showcased on Britain’s Channel 4 series Dead Famous DNA, the existence of which seems to mean that there’s more than just this one guy trying to collect DNA from dead celebrities. On the show, which aired April 9, Zuk explained his plans, stating that he would raise the cloned music legend as his own son, getting him guitar lessons and steering him away from drugs and alcohol.

Zuk has denied all efforts by outside parties to test the DNA in the tooth to confirm whether or not it truly belonged to Lennon, though he seems to be convinced that it did.

Apparently the moral implications of such an endeavour are no obstacle for Zuk, he’s stated outright that he believes he can own John Lennon. And when asked about the legal ramifications of cloning a person, Zuk responded:

“Depends where you do these things. If it can’t be done in one country you can do these things in another.”

According to current law in Canada, such a procedure would be explicitly illegal. As would it be in Australia, Denmark, the EU, India, Romania, Serbia and the US, as well as within the United Nations. However, he’s not wrong. There are plenty of places one could take their genetic building material and have the unscrupulous parties in those countries make their clone in no time.

Human cloning, which actually refers to two different ideas – therapeutic cloning and reproductive cloning, the latter being relevant here – is a theoretical possibility at present, but as far as we know it hasn’t actually been performed using human DNA…yet.

So what happens if he’s successful? Would the resulting person actually be John Lennon?

No, certainly not. As much as Zuk, or Lennon’s fans even, might like to believe they could truly resurrect the lost Beatle, the truth of the matter is far less certain.

What makes a person who they are? Speaking in terms of genetics, we are the sum of our genotype as expressed by our phenotype. In more common terms, that means that our genetic material makes up our physical being, but it’s affected in a fundamental way by our environment and experiences. It is the combination of our genes and our life’s experiences that make us who we are, and it seems almost silly to have to say, but John Lennon’s clone would not have the benefit of John Lennon’s childhood, his relationships, chance encounters, culture and even his illnesses, therefore the resulting person would not be John Lennon.

If you need even more to convince you, think about this…what happens to us when we die?

John Lennon was shot in the back four times by Mark David Chapman on December 8, 1980, as Lennon and Yoko Ono returned to their home after a night out. He died on the front steps of his home in New York at 11:00pm (approximately). The living being that was John Lennon ceased to be on those steps, in the arms of his love. His immortal soul, if you believe in that kind of thing, left his mortal coil in the darkness that night. And where did it go? We really have no idea, but we do know that, if it existed, it was no longer trapped within him.

So, if the man were resurrected by artificial means, how could that soul, that part of him that apparently has passed on to another realm, be forcibly reintegrated with another physical form?

There’s more to consider though.

Zuk, by virtue of the comments he’s made, seems to be intent to gain ownership over the legend that was John Lennon – and perhaps even other dead celebrities. We mustn’t miss that loaded word though…ownership.

How, in this day and age, can a person even contemplate ownership of another person? Didn’t we do away with this sort of mentality at some point over the last 200 years? It could be said that we didn’t, what with the booming slave labour and sex slave trade in certain parts of the world. But would not the “clone” have the right to liberty? Would it not be sovereign unto itself? What line of reasoning would deny such a living being the same basic human rights as any other person?

The very idea that Dr. Zuk presents is offensive, but, if he’s truly motivated to achieve the cloning of a rock and roll legend, what is there to stop him? It’s clear that he would not succeed in bringing back John Lennon, as he was, but what life would the doppelgänger have, living in such a shadow?

[MIKA27]

CHUGPLUG

Chugplug is a portable battery pack for MacBook Air and 13in MacBook Pro, giving the power to move. Chugplug charges and powers 45W and 65W MacBooks using your existing Apple AC power cable and MagSafe power adapter, giving you up to 4 hours of additional run time without being tethered to an outlet.

[MIKA27]

PIT BARREL COOKER

Get perfectly cooked meat in less time with the Pit Barrel Cooker. Built around a 30 gallon steel drum, this "vertical cooker" combines the qualities of a smoker and a slow cooker, resulting in flavorful, tender meat without the need to constantly check on the temperature or smoke levels. Included in the kit are the drum, eight stainless steel hooks and two steel hanging rods for hanging cuts of meat, a charcoal basket, a grill grate, a wooden hook remover, a stand, and two packs of delicious rubs.

[MIKA27]

SMOKESTACK FIREPIT

Most firepits are short, gather 'round affairs — so if you're looking for something a bit more striking and directional, the Smokestack Firepit should do the trick.

Designed by Frederik Roijé who based the shape on industrial chimneys, this unique outdoor burner stands 6.5 feet tall, and is made in Holland with Corten steel that's meant to oxidize with the elements over time, giving it an inviting copper color that will blend in great with naturally-colored seating and decorative elements.

[MIKA27]

Forget The Freezer, This Device Frosts A Beer Glass In Just 10 Seconds

When you want a frosty cold one, you usually don’t have the time to wait for your pint glass to actually get frosty sitting in a fridge. So you probably settle for a less satisfying can or bottle — a compromise you’ll never have to make again with this countertop glass frosting contraption.

The device connects to a CO2 tank or cylinder you’ll have to provide yourself, and using an oversized spout it fills a glass with a frosty blast that will have it chilled in about 10 seconds. A triumvirate of AA batteries powers a set of blue LEDs that add to the freezing effect (but not the process) and the whole unit clamps to the edge of a bar or table to prevent it from blasting off — maybe.

The only downside is that in addition to the cost of topping off a CO2 tank ($20 plus $5 a refill) the unit itself will set you back a hefty $400. This means that all of a sudden drinking from a can that was floating in a cooler minutes ago doesn’t seem like such a hardship.

[MIKA27]

US Police Testing 'Live Google Earth' To Watch Crime As It Happens

Last year, police in the US began quietly testing a system that allowed them to do something incredible: watch every car and person in real time as they ebbed and flowed around the city. Every assault, every purse snatched, every car speeding away was on record — all thanks to a company that monitors cities from the air.

The Center for Investigative Reporting takes a look at a number of emerging surveillance technologies in a new video, but one in particular stands out: a wide-area surveillance system invented by Ross McNutt, a retired Air Force veteran who owns a company called Persistent Surveillance Systems.

McNutt describes his product as “a live version of Google Earth, only with TiVo capabilities,” which is intriguing but vague. More specifically, PSS outfits planes with an array of super high-resolution cameras that allow a pilot to record a 65 square kilometre patch of Earth constantly — for up to six hours.

It’s sort of similar to what your average satellite can do — except, in this case, you can rewind the video, zoom in, and follow specific people and cars as they move around the grid. It’s not specific enough to ID people by face, but, when used in unison with stoplight cameras and other on-the-ground video sources, it can identify suspects as they leave the scene of a crime.

The PSS system has been tested in cities including Baltimore and Dayton, and, last year, police officers in Compton used it to track crimes, including a necklace snatching. In one case, they could track a criminal as he approached a woman, grabbed her jewellery, and then ran to a getaway car. They eventually drove out of frame, which meant they weren’t caught — but, as the Compton police explain in this video, the system told them that this particular car was involved, at the very least.

Plenty of critics argue the technology is an ominous invasion of privacy: video surveillance free of any traditional technological barriers, tracking everyone and everything that moves in a city. But according to police and its creators, it’s not as invasive as other systems, because it can’t see into homes or identify faces. It “allows us to provide more security with less loss of privacy than any of the other options that are out there,” says one officer. That’s definitely one way to look at it.

[MIKA27]

Glow-In-The-Dark Roads Finally Exist Outside Of Hot Wheels

The concept of glow-in-the-dark roads is an incredibly simple piece of safety infrastructure that feels like it should have been implemented years ago. Finally, it has been — on the roads of the Netherlands.

Back in 2012, Dutch design firms Studio Roosegaarde and Hejmans Infrastructure proposed the idea of roads painted with lines which would charge in the day then glow at night to make users aware of their position on the asphalt. If you were like us, you probably read the news and thought “yeah, but it will be years before that becomes reality.”

In fact, it’s only taken two years for the initiative to go from concept to concrete fact. Now, a 500m stretch of the N329 highway in Oss features the lines — which are made by adding photo-luminescent powder into the road paint — that glow all night. And they deliver on their promise. According to a local news report, “it looks like you are driving through a fairytale.” Which is, hopefully, a good thing.

Fully charged with sunlight, the lines glow for eight hours, though as yet there’s no evidence to suggest how well they cope with wear and tear. Indeed, there’s no word on just how widely the lines will be rolled out, either — there are plans to expand, but it’s not clear when or where.

The future of the roads looks even safer too: There are plans to make the paint smart, so that it can allow communication with vehicles, and create road markings that can turn on and off to signal bad weather or upcoming hazards. For now, glowing roads will have to be enough to keep Dutch drivers a little safer.

[MIKA27]

30 Years After Chernobyl’s Meltdown, Gripping Photos Expose the Human Fallout

Part of the mystery and terror of the Chernobyl disaster is the invisibility of the threat. The explosion at the Vladimir Ilyich Lenin nuclear power plant released more radiation than the bomb dropped on Hiroshima, and one might never know they were being poisoned until months, even years later. Veteran photographer Gerd Ludwig’s spent 20 years photographing the area, chronicling the ongoing consequences of the radioactive release.

“You don’t see it, you don’t feel it, you don’t smell it, you don’t taste it, but it’s there,” he says. “It’s around you, and that makes many people oblivious to the danger.”

Ludwig has photographed the benighted reactor and the 18-mile exclusion zone surrounding it nine times in the last two decades. The photo book he’s crowdfunding, The Long Shadow of Chernobyl, gathers the deeply affecting images he took and shows why the disaster, which occurred on April 26, 1986, remains relevant.

“I want to give a voice to those people that suffered this tragedy and still are suffering,” Ludwig says.

On April 26, 1986, operators in this control room of reactor #4 at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant committed a fatal series of errors during a safety test, triggering a reactor meltdown that resulted in the world's largest nuclear accident to date.

The book, which started life on the iPad, is divided into four categories: the compromised reactor; the abandoned town of Pripyat about a mile away; the contaminated villages farther out; and the medical and emotional impact of the disaster in places like Belarus and Ukraine. The photos recount the still-unfolding narrative of the meltdown but remain fixed on the people involved: A man and child hospitalized with cancer, a 93-year-old woman who defied an evacuation order to live out her life at home, the tourists who venture among the ruins.

Beyond the looming threat of radiation, visits present a host of practical and bureaucratic hurdles and usually are limited to a few days at most. Accessing the reactor intensifies the risk, and the hassle, and Ludwig reckons he’s gone deeper into the belly of the beast than any other Western photographer.

He first entered in 1993 on assignment for National Geographic. During another visit in 2005, he took advantage of the administrative confusion caused by the Orange Revolution to extend his stay to nearly two weeks. By the time he visited in 2011 and 2013, he was using Kickstarter and arts grants to help cover his expenses.

“They charged an incredible amount of money for access and transportation, simply because they can,” he says. “There’s no other way of getting entry than through the administration.”

When Soviet authorities finally ordered the evacuation, the residents' hasty departure often meant leaving behind their most personal belongings. The Soviet Union did not admit to the world that an accident had occurred until two days after the explosion.

Ludwig’s photos show the chaos the explosion created. Many were sharply limited by exposure to radiation. For example, a ghostly image of a ravaged room, its clock frozen at 1:23, had to be taken within six seconds, and only after pleading with his guides. In many cases, his camera gear was irradiated and needed to be washed or discarded before leaving the area.

“It’s post-apocalyptic, you have this incredible adrenaline surge because you know you’re entering an area that few have ever seen,” Ludwig says. “You’re stumbling along more than you go, along metal walkways that were built in there for easier and faster access, but all is full of radioactive debris and wires, and you have the people with you that push you on. It’s a frantic atmosphere and you’re trying to stay focused and photograph, but they tell you ‘Ok, this was enough to take a picture.’”

A radiation sign along the road near Pripyat warns of the menace. The tranquility of the sight on an evening of heavy snowfall belies the lingering danger looming in the peaceful winter landscape.

Pripyat, at one point home to 50,000 people, is a ghost town. All around are signs of a hasty evacuation in which people left their entire lives behind. Further out, in the evacuated villages surrounding the plant, Ludwig found people who have defied the contamination and dire warnings of the risk. Several hundred have stayed, refusing to sever strong generational ties to their land.

“Soon the authorities turned a blind eye because they realized it was mostly the elderly who wanted to live out their lives on their contaminated soil rather than dying of a broken heart in an anonymous city suburb where they had been evacuated to,” Ludwig says.

The cloud of radioactive particles that drifted northwest from the reactor reportedly reached as far as the UK (Swedish authorities were the first beyond Russia to notice a radiation spike). Southern Belarus bore the brunt of the fallout, and the book highlights some of those now suffering from thyroid cancer, one of the few diseases definitively linked to cesium radiation. It’s a reminder of another level of vagueness in this disaster — it’s nearly impossible to pin down its precise consequences.

“We can never trace back one disease to one single cause,” Ludwig says. “Even the numbers of people who will eventually die of cancer related diseases caused by Chernobyl are disputed–the UN initially put the number at 4,000, then 6,000, then 8,000. Now they’re at 9,000. Greenpeace and other reputable environmental agencies have put the numbers at 100,000 and more. Where the number really is, we will never know, because the 800,000 people that were brought in from all over the Soviet Union are dispersed back all over the former Soviet Republics. There is no record of who was there, who got sick and how. We will never know.”

Kharytina Desha, 92, is one of the few elderly people who have returned to their village homes inside the Exclusion Zone. Although surrounded by devastation and isolation, she prefers to die on her own soil.

Ludwig was in Chernobyl in 2011 and his first Kickstarter campaign was well underway when the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster occurred. He says it prompted an increase in funding to his campaign as the scope, and the relevance, of his work gained new urgency.

“All of a sudden the people realized that an accident like Chernobyl can happen anywhere and anytime,” he says.

Photographer Gerd Ludwig is suited up with protective clothing for a 15-minute entry into the highly contaminated Reactor #4 – the maximum he and the shift workers are allowed to spend inside for a single day.

The The Long Shadow of Chernobyl is an effort to make more people aware of the potential risk of nuclear energy. Ludwig’s home country of Germany banned nuclear power in response to Fukushima, but many other nations remain committed to it. The benefits are easy to enumerate, but the potential consequences more difficult to specify. Chernobyl offers a long-term case study of what can happen when things go wrong. Ludwig sees his work as an effort to foster an informed discussion of the issue.

“We all want energy, we depend on energy,” he says. “But we have to ask ourselves ‘If a nuclear plant would go up in the vicinity of my home, how would I feel about it? That is the ultimate question people have to ask themselves.”

[MIKA27]

The KKK Tries to Make A Comeback

As a former Klan leader is charged with killing three in Kansas, the frayed white supremacy group is trying to attract new members. The Southern Poverty Law Center estimates the number of hate groups in the U.S. has risen from 602 in 2000 to 939 in 2013

Frazier Glenn Cross, 73, of Aurora, Missouri, is led to a police car after his arrest following shooting incidents which killed three people at two Jewish centers on Sunday in Overland Park, south of Kansas City, Kansas in a still image from video April 13, 2014.

The Ku Klux Klan was once a major force in America, with a membership of nearly 4 million that regularly included mayors, chiefs of police and other grandees of segregated regions, especially in the South and Midwest. It’s been decades since the Klan held that sort of mainstream sway, but Sunday’s deadly rampage at two Jewish community facilities in Overland Park, Kan. serves as a reminder that the nation’s best known white supremacy organization has not completely disappeared.

Frazier Glenn Cross, who was charged with murder Tuesday for the shooting death of three people in the Kansas City suburb, is a prominent white supremacist whose long resume in the movement included founding the Carolina Knights of the KKK. Those sorts of regional groups are the basis of the current Klan, which exists only as a decentralized collection of dozens of regional organizations devoted to white nationalism. The total membership is between 5,000 to 8,000, a fraction of its peak, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center, which tracks hate groups.

“The Klan has become marginalized, even among more mainstream racist groups,” says Paul Ortiz, a professor of history at the University of Florida. “The organization itself is a hodgepodge. It’s no longer a mass movement. There’s no nationally recognized leader, and even the language is much more splintered.”

Even Klan leaders recognize the changed landscape. “I like to think I’m in charge,” says Thomas Robb, the national director for the Knights of the KKK, which was founded by the politician David Duke. “You know how that goes, though.”

As the Klan has become more diffuse, many of the splinter chapters are working hard to bolster their ranks. On April 18, the KKKK, an Arkansas-based branch, plans to launch an online radio station featuring a 24-7 stream of Klan news, updates of classic radio segments and children’s programs. The Maryland-based Confederate White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan recently held a rally on the battlefield at Gettysburg to capitalize on the attention generated by 150th anniversary of Abraham Lincoln’s famous address.

In North Carolina, the Loyal White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan—the group that was reconstituted from the now-defunct Carolina Knights of the KKK founded by Cross—has spent the last few months distributing fliers with messages like “The KKK Wants You!” in parts of Florida, Louisiana, Ohio, Texas and Virginia.

The aim of all of these efforts is to enlist new devotees to the cause of what they call “white genocide,” a catch-all term for the belief that white Christians are being cast to the margins of American society.

Robert Jones, the imperial klaliff of the Loyal White Knights, says the organization has tripled in size since President Obama’s election, though he would not divulge membership totals. That growth is consistent with the uptick in hate groups around the nation, which the SPLC estimates has risen from 602 in 2000 to 939 in 2013. Heidi Beirich, who leads SPLC’s Intelligence Project, says the higher numbers can be traced directly to the 2000 U.S. Census showing that the country would become a majority minority nation by 2043. “They started freaking out,” she says of white supremacy organizations.

Jones says he kept in touch with Cross and described him as a “good Christian man who spoke out for what he believes in.” He says they last last spoke a couple months ago. “I think he’s just fed up with the way the world’s going. I can see why he is the way he is to an extent. A lot of white people are getting fed up with what people are doing.”

Other Klan leaders were quick to distance their groups from Cross. “He had no credibility in the white nationalist movement,” says Robb. “There are people who use the name Klan, put on a Klan robe, put some crazy thing on YouTube and say they’re going to exterminate all non-whites. That becomes a statement from the Klan. It’s not. It’s some loser that lives in a little world of Hatesville.”

Robb has led an effort to soften the Klan’s image, changing the name of the organization’s top position from “imperial wizard” to “national director” and requiring members to wear business suits instead of the trademark white robes at Klan functions and public rallies. The Montana-based United Klans of America recently tried a similar tack when it met with the NAACP, likely the first between the two organizations.

The Klan’s messaging may have changed, but experts say the substance remains the same.

“For the most part, they still have nasty websites. They still preach hate about immigrants. They still preach hate about black folks. It’s basically a bunch of squabbling, infighting factions who don’t like each other,” says the SPLC’s Beirich. “Some groups do try to position themselves to say they’re just fighting for white rights, that they’re not racist. But that’s absurd. It’s just racism dressed up in a new language.”