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

[MIKA27]

Google’s Microcramera Contact Lens Is Coming to an Eyeball Near You

Forget those glasses. The tech giant has filed a patent application for a lens with a built-in micro-camera which could be controlled by blinking and would process data to help blind people "see" and link to smartphones

After Google Glass, the next “moon shot” Google product might very well be a contact lens with a built-in micro-camera.

The tech giant has filed a patent application on a smart lens with sensors that could detect light, pattern of colors, objects and faces.

Those wearing the contacts would command the device through a sophisticated system of unique blinking patterns, as explained by the blog Patent Bold.

Google’s latest breakthrough could help blind people see certain moving objects around them, according to Patent Bolt.

“For example, a blind person wearing Google’s contact lens with a built-in camera may be walking on a sidewalk and approaching an intersection. The analysis component of the contact lens can process the raw image data of the camera to determine … that there is a car approaching the intersection.”

The lens would also have wireless capabilities to be hooked up to smartphones.

In January, Google revealed a prototypes of contact lenses that will make it easier for diabetes patients to monitor their blood sugar levels and stay healthy.

[MIKA27]

Paul Walker’s Surprising Replacement in Fast & Furious 7

Though film production was halted after Paul Walker died in a car accident in November, the latest installment of the successful franchise will continue with the help of his family, Caleb and Cody Walker

Filming on Fast & Furious 7 will continue with Paul Walker’s brothers filling in for the late actor.

A statement published on the official Fast & Furious Facebook page revealed that Caleb and Cody Walker have helped the production complete the action scenes that were not shot before Paul Walker died in a car accident in November. Walker, 40, completed most of his filming before his death.

“We came together and all felt the only choice was to continue,” the statement reads. “We believe our fans want that, and we believe Paul would want that too. Paul had already shot his dramatic scenes and most of his action for FAST & FURIOUS 7, and it’s among the strongest work of his career.”

Universal Pictures suspended production on Fast & Furious 7 in December following Walker’s death. According to The Hollywood Reporter, his character will retire in the upcoming film, not be killed off.

[MIKA27]

Boston Marks Anniversary of Marathon Bombings

Survivors, first responders and dignitaries congregated Tuesday to remember the victims of the Boston Marathon bombings last year

One year after four people were killed and hundreds more injured in the Boston Marathon bombings, the city marked the grim anniversary Tuesday with a day of tributes amid preparations for a record number of entrants to this year’s race.

The day began with a group of dignitaries, including the family of the youngest victim, walking with an honor guard to the site of the April 15, 2013, bombings. Bagpipes played as wreaths were placed at the site of the tragedy and no public comments were made.

Around 3,000 survivors, first responders and dignitaries were in attendance at a ceremony at the Hynes convention center Tuesday marking the one year anniversary of the bombings.

“I know that no memorial, no words, no acts can fully provide the solace that your hearts and soul still yearn to acquire,” Vice President Joe Biden said in remarks during the event. “I hope it eases your grief a little bit.” Biden praised the courage of survivors and the families of the dead. “America will never, ever, ever stand down,” he said. “We are Boston. We are America. We respond, we endure, we overcome, and we own the finish line.”

After speeches by Biden, Massachusetts Gov. Deval Patrick and others, survivors walked to the finish line to observe a moment of silence, USA Today reports. Church bells throughout Boston sounded at 2:49 p.m., a year to the minute from the moment the bombs exploded.

President Obama released a statement asking for remembrance of those injured and the four innocents killed, each of whom he called by name. “We also know that the most vivid images from that day were not of smoke and chaos, but of compassion, kindness and strength,” the president said. “A man in a cowboy hat helping a wounded stranger out of harm’s way; runners embracing loved ones, and each other; an EMT carrying a spectator to safety. Today, we recognize the incredible courage and leadership of so many Bostonians in the wake of unspeakable tragedy.” Obama and a small gathering of aides will join Bostonians for a moment of silence at 2:49 p.m. in the Oval Office.

Officials expect a crowd of roughly a million people to cheer on 36,000 runners in this year’s race on Monday, April 21, a 33 percent increase from the cap on entrants in previous years. The field in this year’s Boston Marathon will be larger than any in the race’s 118-year history but one: the 1996 centennial Boston Marathon, at which more than 38,000 started the race. Security will be tight this year, with 3,500 police on duty for the race, double the size of last year’s deployment.

[MIKA27]

No Salary, No Benefits, No Sleep: This Is The World’s Toughest Job

Only the strong survive

A company placed this classified ad looking to fill a Director of Operations position.

The job had a mandatory 135+ hours a week of work and required the job holder to be on call at all times, day or night. Qualified candidates should have a knowledge of psychology, medicine, personal finance, culinary arts and basic technology skills. The job also had physical requirements: the ability to stand for hours, lift up to 75 pounds, be constantly moving and operate on little to no sleep.

While the U.S nation’s jobless claims may have dropped to the lowest levels since 2007, 24 people responded to the job posting at Rehtom, Inc., even though the position offered no medical or dental benefits, no pension and no paid holidays, but did offer “infinite opportunities for personal growth and rewards.”

The 24 applicants were interviewed via webcam. That’s when they got the surprise of their life. The video is worth watching all the way to the end.

[MIKA27]

What’s Next For That Actor From Game of Thrones?

If you haven't watched Sunday night's episode of Game of Thrones, you probably don't want to read this spoiler-filled update

Note: Spoilers ahead.

Many fans who saw Sunday night’s episode of Game of Thrones, where the series’ resident psychopath King Joffrey was poisoned and killed at his own wedding, are still reeling. But the actor who plays Joffrey is already moving on.

For the past three years, Irish actor Jack Gleeson has masterfully embodied evil as the spoiled brat who becomes the ruler of the Seven Kingdoms. Yet after his character’s ghastly death, the 21-year-old actor says he plans to retire completely from acting.

Speaking to Entertainment Weekly in the wake of the pivotal episode, Gleeson explained, “I’ve been acting since age eight. I just stopped enjoying it as much as I used to. And now there’s the prospect of doing it for a living, whereas up until now it was always something I did for recreation with my friends, or in the summer for some fun. I enjoyed it. When you make a living from something, it changes your relationship with it. It’s not like I hate it, it’s just not what I want to do.”

Gleeson, who comes across as gracious and humble in interviews, started his on-screen acting career with roles in Batman Begins and A Shine of Rainbows. But it was his turn as Joffrey in Thrones that really put him on the map. In a show filled with amoral or despicable characters, Gleeson’s character stood apart as the worst of the pack, a sadistic and cowardly fiend with unmitigated power to boot.

In fact, George R. R. Martin, the author of the GoT books from which the HBO series is based on, even admitted to EW that he feared Gleeson’s experience playing such a hated character could have put him off of acting. “He created someone that everyone hates, and everyone loves to hate, and that’s a considerable feat of acting,” said Martin. “I feel a little guilty that he’s quitting acting now. I hope that playing Joffrey didn’t make him want to retire from the profession because he does have quite a gift for it.”

Yet Gleeson has been quite open in the past about his feelings on celebrity culture in general and his own unpleasant experience with fame, which go deeper than any one toxic role. In a long and wide-ranging talk given at the Oxford Union last year, Gleeson said that fame not only “embarrasses” him, but he also feels that being a celebrity is an exercise in “dehumanization.” Despite admitting that he once dreamed of being a famous actor, Gleeson said the reality was far different: “I detested the superficial elevation and commodification of it all, juxtaposed with the grotesque self-involvement it would sometimes draw out of me. Being a faceless member of a mob, I soon realized, is far more comforting than teetering on a brittle pedestal one inch off the ground.”

Now, with the sudden and brutal death of Joffrey, it looks like Gleeson can work on returning to that faceless mob. He’s currently a student at Trinity College in Dublin, though he’s said he no longer is drawn to academia. He said he’s not yet sure what type of career he’d like to embark on.

But is there any hope for Thrones fans, who might have hated Joffrey, but have come to appreciate Gleeson’s obvious talent? Maybe. Gleeson did discuss a potential return to the screen with EW, jokingly saying, “When I’m destitute in 10 years time, I’ll accept any script!”

[Fuzz]

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

A CO_² fire extinguisher would do the same job, or you could cobble together the parts from some old paintball gear.

[MIKA27]

Teen Falls In Coma After Friend Squeezes His Testicles

A 17-year-old male is now in coma after suffering a heart attack when a friend jokingly squeezed his testicles. Dr Irwin Goldstein — urologist and San Diego Sexual Medicine’s director — says it’s very possible to have a heart attack because the trauma can release a huge amount of adrenalin.

Yes, the testicles are exquisitely sensitive to touch and there is a huge release of adrenalin when there is excessive force applied to these organs.

Testicular pain is referred to the lower abdomen, mesenteric plexus, and causes men to stop abruptly what they are doing, lie on the ground, close their eyes and bend their knees.

A heart attack could certainly result from severe testicular pain from squeezing.

According to the Irish Mirror, a source close of the family says that it wasn’t a savage attack, just a joke, and that it wasn’t malicious:

A school teacher and one of the youths performed CPR at the scene before the emergency services came which could have saved the teen’s life.

[MIKA27]

Scientists Reveal New Moon Forming On The Edge Of Saturn's Rings

For the first time in history, scientists are witnessing the formation of a new moon in our solar system. NASA’s Cassini spacecraft has detected a new moon forming in the edge of Saturn’s rings. Astronomers around the world are amazed about this incredible find, which they have named Peggy.*

It’s really exciting to see this happening in real time. Carl Murray — lead author of the paper describing Peggy — says that “we have not seen anything like this before. We may be looking at the act of birth, where this object is just leaving the rings and heading off to be a moon in its own right.” According to Cassini Project Scientist Linda Spilker at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, “witnessing the possible birth of a tiny moon is an exciting, unexpected event.”

The images were originally taken on April 15, 2013. They show a small icy object forming at the edge of Saturn’s A ring, which is its outermost large ring. The objects’ gravity disturbing the edge, creating a bright arc 750 miles (1,200 kilometers) long and 6 miles (10 kilometers) wide.

According to NASA, “the object is not expected to grow any larger, and may even be falling apart.” However, the formation process and the outward movement gives us clues about the formation of other Saturn’s moon, as well as the formation of planets around our home star. The movement shows how Earth may have formed deeper into the solar system, then move slowly away from the Sun.

Based on these facts, and other indicators, researchers recently proposed that the icy moons formed from ring particles and then moved outward, away from the planet, merging with other moons on the way.

According to Murray:

The theory holds that Saturn long ago had a much more massive ring system capable of giving birth to larger moons. As the moons formed near the edge, they depleted the rings and evolved, so the ones that formed earliest are the largest and the farthest out.

According to NASA, “Cassini’s orbit will move closer to the outer edge of the A ring in late 2016 and provide an opportunity to study Peggy in more detail and perhaps even image it.”

[MIKA27]

6 Things You Didn't Know You Could Do With Your iPhone

1. Charge your iPhone twice as fast by putting into 'Airplane' mode

As incredible as the iPhone is, it's battery life does suffer. Recharge those batteries twice as fast by plugging in your phone and switching it to "Airplane" mode instead. - just swipe up from the bottom of the screen to access. Another handy tip, if you want to preserve battery life whilst away from a charger, turn data off in settings.

2. Ask Siri To Read Your Emails Out Loud

Tell Siri, “Read my email,” and she’ll oblige. You’ll hear the sender’s name, the date/time of the message, and the subject line. You can also instruct her to “read my latest email” or ask, “Do I have email from [person]?”

Give Siri the command "Read my email" and hey presto she'll tell you the sender name, time of message and subject line. If you want to get specific just ask "Read my latest email" to find out which is top of the pile.

3. Find out which plane is flying overhead

It's a feature that is more a novely than anything, but if you find yourself in a flight path or see a plane whizzing overhead, just ask "What flights are above me". Siri will then present you with a list of flights scheduled for that day including the flight no. altitude and impressively enough even its angle.

4. Take better photos with the volume button

You can take some great shots with your iPhone, but holding it steady and pressing the shoot button can lead to more than a few blurry images. Make things less shaky by using the volume up button to take the photo. It's easier to access and you'll dramatically reduce all those blurry shots.

5. Delete your text by shaking it

If you're having second thoughts about sending that text message, don't spend an age tapping the delete button - just shake your phone gentle from side to side to delete the message in its entirety.

6. Use it as a spirit level to hang pictures correctly

Hang a picture perfectly every time, with the iPhone built in spirit level. To access, open your Compass app and swipe left - simple.

[MIKA27]

LAND ROVER DISCOVERY VISION

While it’s not supposed to be unveiled until the upcoming New York Auto Show, we’ve learned over the years that the internet waits for no auto maker when it comes to debuts – and that includes Land Rover. Say hello to the Land Rover Discovery Vision concept.

Aesthetically speaking, the four-door SUV looks like a newer version of Land Rover’s current offerings, but there’s more than meets the eye with this project. Discovery is slated to be an entire range of vehicles that will introduce unprecedented technologies to the automotive scene. Stuff like Remote Control Drive (a feature that lets drivers control the car remotely at low speeds), Transparent Bonnet (HUD system that gives you a view of the ground below using built-in grill cameras), laser headlights, laser terrain scanning, and a whole lot more. The brand looks to launch the vehicles in 2015. Watch the video below.

[MIKA27]

PEUGEOT 2008 DKR RALLY CAR

Peugeot has been MIA from the Dakar Rally for well over two decades, but the brand looks to break that dry spell for 2015. Teaming up with both Red Bull Motorsports and Total, Peugeot has unveiled their 2008 DKR.

As the name would imply, the menacing vehicle is based on the 2008. Of course a standard 2008 wouldn’t get the job done at Dakar, which is why the French auto maker added meaty 37-inch off-road Michelin tires, a much taller stance, a large rear wing, and so much more more to the mix. As you can see, the two doors from the back have also been removed. At this point in time, we don’t know what kind of powerplant this rally car will be equipped with, but we imagine Peugeot won’t let us down. Regardless, the aesthetics of this black buggy alone are enough to give the competition nightmares. Expect the vehicle to compete in January 2015.

[MIKA27]

South Korea ferry rescue under way

A major rescue operation is under way after a ferry carrying 476 people capsized off South Korea.

The ferry, carrying mainly school students, was travelling from Incheon to the southern resort island of Jeju, officials said.

More than 50 ships and helicopters were at the scene to rescue passengers.

One person has died and almost 150 have been rescued so far. Reports say remaining passengers have been told to jump into the sea to await rescue.

Images from the scene showed the ferry listing at a severe angle and then largely submerged.

So far, a total of 147 people have been rescued, South Korean officials said.

A total of 34 naval, coastguard and civilian ships were involved in rescue efforts, as well as 18 helicopters, they said.

South Korean President Park Geun-hye had ordered coast guard commandos to be mobilised to search the ship so that no-one was left behind, Yonhap news agency reported.

Dozens of passengers have been rescued but the fate of many others remains unknown

More than 30 ships are involved in the rescue

It is not yet clear what caused the incident, but Yonhap news agency reported that the ship had run aground.

"The ship is taking in water and sinking," a coastguard spokesman told AFP news agency by phone. One body had been recovered from the ship, the coastguard said.

One passenger told the YTN news channel: "We heard a big thumping sound and the boat stopped.

"The boat is tilting and we have to hold on to something to stay seated," the passenger said.

News agencies said the ferry had sent out a distress signal about 20km (12 miles) off the island of Byungpoong at about 09:00 local time (00:00 GMT).

It was bound for Jeju, a popular tourist destination, carrying mainly students from a school near the capital, Seoul.

Angry parents have gathered at the school to demand answers, reports the BBC's Lucy Williamson in Seoul.

They are questioning why the ship was allowed to leave amid reports of bad weather, our correspondent says.

Earlier reports put the number of passengers on the ferry at about 350. The vessel is reported to have a capacity of up to 900 people.

[MIKA27]

Hungary’s Cold War battle with polio

Trapped by conflict and scarred by a failed revolution, Hungary fought one of its greatest battles against the crippling disease, as Penny Bailey discovered.

Kisvarda, Hungary, 1954. The summer night was warm, the road outside deserted. No one drove any more unless they were secret police or favoured by the Party. Inside, Iren and Janos Vargha sat watching their two-year-old son’s eyelids as he slept through his fever. The only visible sign of the attack, they were told, would be if Gyorgy’s eyeballs started moving rapidly.

Polio was unpredictable. Often no more harmful than any other childhood infection, it could on occasion ‘turn’ with swift, inexplicable savagery, destroying a child’s nerve cells and leaving him paralysed for life. If it damaged the nerves controlling his lungs they could freeze up and Gyorgy would either die or spend the rest of his life inside an iron lung that breathed for him.

The hours crept by without him showing any symptoms of paralytic polio, but the next morning, as Iren stood him on the table to get him dressed, his legs buckled. She stood him up again – again his legs wouldn’t support him. This moment is his earliest childhood memory. “I could stand easily before,” he says. “Now I could still bend my legs but I couldn’t straighten them. For me it was astonishing and interesting that my legs were doing that strange thing. But my mother was afraid.”

Gyorgy was rushed 100km (60 miles) to the hospital in Debrecen. Then began the frantic search for gamma globulin. The antibody-rich solution was the only medicine then known to have some ability to disarm the poliovirus in the bloodstream, preventing it from invading the nerves. But gamma globulin was scarce. Iren and Janos rode from town to town and village to village on their motorbike, pharmacist after pharmacist regretfully shaking their heads.

Later that evening, as they sat at home thinking of their son fighting his lonely battle in a strange bed far away, there was a knock at the window. Behind the curtain they saw two avos – secret police agents – waiting at the door, a large black Pobeda parked in the empty road behind them. In 1950s communist Hungary, when a black car stopped outside your house in the middle of the night, there was only one explanation: the avos had come to take you away.

But when Janos and Iren opened the door, fear gave way to relief, then bafflement. The men explained they had driven three-and-a-half hours from Budapest because they had heard the Varghas’ son had polio. They were very sorry and had brought the boy some gamma globulin.

Sixty years on, Gyorgy’s daughter, historian Dr Dora Vargha, tells me her father’s story over coffee in Bambi Presszo on the Buda side of the Danube. Her own little boy is three years old, a little older than Gyorgy was when he first caught polio. Her son was born just as she was starting to write up her research, the first ever history of polio in Cold War Hungary. “It put everything in a different place. I could suddenly feel the stakes – the fear. I took him for his first polio vaccination just after I finished my research. That was a strong moment for me.”

Sadly, the avos delivery arrived a little too late for the young Gyorgy, who needed six operations on his legs and rehabilitative therapy.

In communist Hungary, both the cafe and the baths were favourite haunts of intellectuals and dissidents, who exchanged ideas in the haze drifting over ashtrays or rising from sulphurous, shadowy thermal waters. The tradition began at the end of the 19th century, when Budapest’s new middle class constructed elegant bridges, the continent’s first subway, the world’s first-ever telephone exchange, and Andrassy Avenue – a vast, leafy boulevard to rival the Champs-Elysees in Paris. Writers, artists, inventors and philosophers gathered in the city’s cafes and baths to talk about the exciting, radical future.

Half a century later, the stucco had been blasted from Budapest’s once-elegant frontages, the glass from its windows, and its bridges had been blown up by the retreating Nazis. The world was divided between the two postwar superpowers: the democratic US and the communist USSR, who, under the threat of an apocalyptic nuclear war, were locked in ideological combat – the Cold War. Each side sought to prove that its was the right way to build a bright new world by demonstrating technological and economic superiority and happier, healthier citizens.

In Europe, the divide was physical as well as ideological. The continent was cut in half by a vast, impregnable military barrier, passing along Hungary’s western border. No one could cross the Iron Curtain in either direction without permission from the highest levels of government, and activity behind it was invisible to the other side. The Soviets had installed a communist government in Hungary, and in place of the coffeehouse intellectual there was a new hero: the proletariat worker.

Polio, or poliomyelitis, is caused by a virus and mainly affects children under 5 years of age

The vision for the country – shared by many of its homegrown communists – was of a centrally managed, classless state whose resources were shared equally among everyone. By 1950, all its mines, factories and banks had been nationalised and the large country estates divided among the peasants. “You couldn’t own your own store or business any more. But most people kept their home, if it was a reasonable size,” says Dora. “Large houses were divided into apartments to house more families. You still see the effect of that in Budapest: one flat will have the kitchen, and the next-door flat will have the big bathroom.”

It made the Varghas’ strange encounter with the avos in 1954 all the more baffling. As the district veterinarian for the farms and villages surrounding Kisvarda, Janos was indisputably a member of the former middle class, the hated bourgeoisie. Why had two avos driven nearly four hours in the middle of the night to help a child they had never met? Years later, the family found out. “It turned out my grandfather was the vet for the parents of one of the pharmacists he had asked about the gamma globulin,” explains Dora. “And the pharmacist had a brother-in-law who was an avo in Budapest at the time. The communist ideal was that everything should be shared equally, but in reality, access to scarce resources depended on who you knew.”

Prams

After the War, countries everywhere were short of the labour they needed to build a prosperous modern society – whether their economies were capitalist or communist. Hungary was in a dilemma: without rapid industrialisation there wouldn’t be a proletariat on which to build the communist state. But those of its citizens who had survived the War and were fit enough to work – even if they couldn’t be proven to be bourgeois or dissident – had fought (albeit reluctantly) on the side of Nazi Germany and were by definition ideological enemies.

While the UK encouraged mass immigration from its former colonies to swell its workforce, the Hungarian state directed its utopian gaze towards its children. Given the right education, enough food and free healthcare, untainted Hungarian children would grow up to be productive, ideologically pure miners and steel workers. “Wherever you looked, you would see images of the healthy, muscular body of the hard-working citizen. You couldn’t get away from it. Statues, posters, newspapers and magazines all depicted the same ideal,” says Dora.

To make that shining vision a reality, the government introduced a range of measures to encourage women to have children. It didn’t matter if they weren’t married. Propaganda reassured them: “To give birth is a duty for wives, and glory for maidens.” A special tax was levied against anyone over 20 who was still childless. From 1952, abortion was made a crime, accompanied by public show trials (guilt a foregone conclusion) of women charged with having abortions and the doctors charged with performing them.

To allow mothers to parade their babies proudly through Hungary’s streets and squares, the national bus-manufacturing company Ikarus started producing prams in 1954 – the year Gyorgy caught polio. One of Dora’s favourite images among the photographs and film footage she unearthed in her research – and one that is redolent of the era in which it was taken – is of a collection of pristine, bus-shaped Ikarus prams (with women cooing into them) in front of a row of proud, parental buses.

Jonas Salk discovered and developed the first successful inactivated polio vaccine in the mid-1950s

Enter polio. A disease that specifically targeted and disabled children, the first epidemic struck in 1952, the second – the one that paralysed Gyorgy – in 1954. That same year, Hungary watched closely as trials of the world’s first vaccine against polio began on more than a million children throughout the USA. The trials were deemed a success and the injectable Salk vaccine, named after Jonas Salk – a Jewish scientist from New York, who developed it using an inactivated virus – was quickly introduced nationwide in the USA.

In April 1955, the US Cutter Laboratories (one of the companies licensed to produce the vaccine) released a batch containing poliovirus that had not been fully inactivated. As a result, almost 200 vaccinated Americans went down with paralytic polio. A Hungarian newspaper was swift to declare that “due to such negligence many thousands of children became the guinea pigs of the savage protectors of free enterprise”. The American Medical Association, meanwhile, blamed the ‘Red Menace’ of socialised medicine in the form of mass trials for the notorious ‘Cutter incident’.

Yet in June the following year, after a series of international success stories had confirmed the safety and efficacy of the Salk vaccine, Hungary decided to start producing it domestically. It went even further and sent two virologists and the director of the Human Vaccine Production and Research Institute (a nationalised vaccine production company) to Denmark, a centre of polio research in Europe at the time. That they were allowed to travel across the Iron Curtain was remarkable, all the more so considering that scientists, like vets and doctors, had been kingpins of the conservative prewar society. America was less liberal with its own scientists, rejecting 600 passport applications on political grounds before 1958.

However, doctors and scientists were in short supply. Many had fled when the Nazis occupied Hungary in 1944. Others had returned from Russian prisoner-of-war camps ‘unable to work’ (as a result of deprivation or torture) or been deported to the Siberian gulags because of their ‘bourgeois’ affiliations. The desperate need gave scientists more freedom than academics in the more politicised humanities and social sciences, says Dora. “The Party turned more of a blind eye to their political and ideological views, and after a while many physicians and scientists actually regained the social status they had before the war. There wasn’t a clean break from the prewar society – just a new set of inequalities.”

Four months after its scathing condemnation of America, the Hungarian government was forced to make a rare admission of negligence itself. The construction of new hospitals was one of the objectives set out in the first Five-Year Plan, of 1950, an economic blueprint for rapid industrialisation. But on 19 October 1956, Health Minister Jozsef Roman told the leaders of the health institutes that none had been built. Existing hospitals were overcrowded, and to cope with the strain other buildings – not originally intended for healthcare – had been converted into makeshift infirmaries (the ORFI was first established in a former hotel). Román also admitted that public health and epidemiology had been neglected.

Salk’s polio vaccine breakthrough made headlines worldwide (March of Dimes/Wikimedia Commons)

The lack of investment in healthcare was a stunning omission, particularly since free healthcare was a key tenet that communist leaders used to distinguish their system from the capitalism of the West – supported by the belief that a healthy body led to a healthy mind that would choose the most rational ideology (theirs). The government also took the rare step of allowing public discussion of those concerns in the media. “For a brief moment in time newspaper reports spoke the same language as those in the ministerial archives,” says Dora.

Her grandparents saw the reality. Gyorgy’s hospital in Debrecen was unable to cope with the ever-increasing influx of children with polio. Janos’s medical contacts had advised him that the ORFI had a large polio ward and offered the most advanced treatment and surgeries for polio-induced paralysis, so the Varghas transferred their son 250 km away to Budapest.

Only three at the time, Gyorgy now has just fragments of memory of the period he spent in Debrecen, enduring agonising daily lumbar punctures (a “spinal tap” whereby a needle is inserted into the lower part of the spine. Even in the early 1950s it was seen as an outdated, and painful, treatment for polio). “I remember lying on my belly on an operating table, crying in pain,” he says. “And lying on my back in my bed, which was in the far corner of a ward with perhaps 12 other children. When the nurse came towards my bed I started crying before she even reached me.”

Tanks

On 23 October 1956, tens of thousands of students, workers, writers and intelligentsia marched together to Parliament calling for greater independence for Hungary from the Eastern Bloc and “the rights of free men for all its citizens”. The government labeled the revolt “chauvinistic, nationalistic, and anti-Semitic”, and Moscow sent in its Red Army to help quell the “counter-revolutionaries”. Street battles with tanks, machine guns and Molotov cocktails ensued, making new craters in Budapest’s patched-up façades, as rebels set the avos’ black Pobedas ablaze.

Five-year old Gyorgy witnessed the uproar from the ORFI. Sat upright on a raised physiotherapy bed he could see out of the window to the navy-blue waters of the Danube in the distance. He had a clear view when a tank directly outside raised its gun at a machine-gunner on the roof of the neighbouring building – to the electrified Gyorgy it looked as if it was pointing directly at the hospital. Eventually, his parents came to take him home to Kisvarda; the ORFI couldn’t look after him any more as food and medical supplies had run dry due to the revolution.

With all international communications down and airports closed, Budapesters relied on Radio Free Europe (RFE), a CIA-funded broadcasting network, to let relatives abroad know they were all right as the violence raged on. RFE broadcasts from the West offered tactical advice to the “freedom fighters” and urged them to hold on, assuring them that help was on its way.

In the last days of October 1956 RFE served another purpose. Another polio epidemic erupted in the midst of the revolution, but the iron lung at the hospital in Debrecen, where Gyorgy had first stayed, was broken. A replacement was needed urgently to save a child’s life. The hospital contacted local radio stations, which broadcast an appeal. It was picked up by RFE and made its way to Munich, where the West German Red Cross managed to track down an iron lung.

Paralysed child strapped in a walking frame wearing splints to prevent forward dropping of the knee

In the evening of 29 October, a German plane carrying the lung crossed the Iron Curtain and made its way towards Debrecen airport. But the fighting had spread to Debrecen, the airport was in darkness and with all the phone lines down it was impossible to reach anyone who worked there. The nearest alternative was Miskolc airport, over 100 km away. The radio station in Miskolc broadcast an urgent appeal – and its citizens responded. People living near the airport illuminated the area with lights, while local amateur radio transmitters contacted the plane and helped guide it safely to the ground.

On 1 November, in Budapest, revolutionary leader Imre Nagy announced that Hungary was withdrawing from the Warsaw Pact (the Eastern Bloc equivalent of NATO) and appealed through the UN for the US, the UK and other powerful countries in the West to recognise Hungary as a neutral state, no longer aligned with the USSR. He also set out plans to transform the country into a multi-party democracy.

Across the river on Rozsadomb (Rose Hill), one of the leafy hills overlooking all the turmoil from the Buda side, five buildings had been seized by the rebels. Once the luxury villas of the prewar bourgeois elite, they had been nationalised by the communists, then turned into a kindergarten for the children of the Party elite. On 4 November – three days after his bid for Hungary’s independence – Nagy paused in the midst of trying to implement those radical changes and gave orders for orthopaedist Dr Laszlo Lukacs to set up a specialised polio hospital in the annexed buildings.

This was to be the only one of his orders that was fulfilled. A few hours later, a Soviet radio station announced the formation of a new Hungarian government headed by a new Moscow-installed leader, Janos Kadar, who declared his dedication to eliminating imperialist, Western, “counter-revolutionary” elements from Hungary. Nagy was deposed and given sanctuary in the Yugoslav embassy (he was later arrested when he left the embassy and was tried and executed in secret).

No military support for the rebels arrived and by then, despite the promises broadcast by RFE, it was clear that it wasn’t going to. That same day, the USSR stepped up its intervention and the Russian Commander-in-Chief gave the order to attack.

Gyorgy, back home in Kisvarda near the Soviet border, awoke to find the ground was trembling and rumbling. His father carried him to the edge of the road, where crowds silently assembled, watching the Soviet army march from the USSR towards Budapest. Hour after hour, the seemingly endless procession of tanks, big guns, cars and soldiers filed past – terrifying to most onlookers but enthralling to a little boy

Laundry

The Soviet military finished routing the rebels by 11 November. A day later, despite the hostility of a political elite who wanted their kindergarten back, Lukacs upheld Nagy’s orders and opened the Heine Medin Post Treatment Hospital in the appropriated villas on Rozsadomb.

The communist elite had chosen well: it was a perfect place for children. The new hospital was surrounded by small parks and woods, and from the top of the hill the children could look down over the treetops towards the gleaming curve of the Danube and the fairytale domes and spires of the Parliament building far below. As well as being the only hospital in the country dedicated to the long-term effects of polio, the Heine Medin also became a home for children with polio whose parents couldn’t afford to care for them. “They could live together and grow up there together,” says Dora.

Party members who had lost their lovely kindergarten may have been compensated in one respect: the secluded location meant that polio-stricken bodies – the antithesis of the ideal, healthy proletarian body – were largely out of sight.

Mixing strains of killed polio virus to prepare the final vaccine in 1956

The next challenge for the Heine Medin was to equip itself – no mean task, considering the revolution had brought the country to a halt, the infrastructure was still down and supplies were scarce. Help came from the West, with the International Committee of the Red Cross coordinating donations of hospital beds, bed linen, surgical equipment and medicine from all over Europe (the high-quality blankets from Sweden were known as the “Swedish blankets” for years afterwards). Meanwhile, the new hospital’s only van had been hit in the street fights and sported a large hole in its side and base. Children and babies paralysed by polio were carried up the hill to the Heine Medin with the clean laundry, in laundry baskets tied to the inside of the van.

It was perhaps inevitable that children paralysed by polio sometimes had to undergo painful rehabilitative surgery that failed or was even injurious. For one of the patients Dora interviewed, polio made her legs uneven in length. To help her walk more easily, Lukacs sawed off a part of her unaffected leg near the knee joint – one of the most common surgeries at the hospital – so that instead of one bad and one good leg, she ended up with two short legs. Because ether in large doses was considered dangerous for children, some weren’t given full anaesthesia for the operation. “I still remember the pain and the sound of him tinkering away at my bones,” she told Dora. “Even though they said I wouldn’t feel anything, I can tell you I felt every single thing.”

Down the hill in the ORFI, Gyorgy’s first operation – an attempt to manipulate his muscles, when he was four – had also turned out to be painful and superfluous. He was at least given ether, but found it extremely unpleasant. “Everything went dark after they put the mask on, then a red-orange colour passed in front of my eyes. Then I fell asleep and when I woke up I vomited.” He also recalls the discomfort of being in a cast that enclosed his leg and his lower body for about six weeks after each operation. “I mostly lay in bed looking at the ceiling. It was very boring.” When it was hot the children sometimes begged the nurses to remove their casts at night to give them some relief from the unbearable itching. Sometimes the nurses did – risking the wrath of the head of the hospital, who occasionally made surprise visits to the wards in the middle of the night.

Once the cast came off for good, the real pain began: physiotherapy to re-tone the muscles that had been in plaster. It was a critical part of the rehabilitation process and could be more efficient than surgery, but Gyorgy remembers the agony of having the therapist stretch and move his legs again.

The pain of physiotherapy, and the degree of cooperation required from the child, meant many of the children had an unusual amount of autonomy over what surgeries they had. Doctors and therapists took pains to forge strong relationships with them and gain their trust, so that they would buy into their treatment. When Gyorgy was eight years old, the chief doctor and medical students came to his bed on their ward rounds and told him he needed another operation. He began to scream and shout at them. Sharing a hospital room with adult men had added some choice swear words to his vocabulary and he put them to good use now. “I sent the whole company to hell,” he recalls. The medics beat a hasty retreat, but the matter wasn’t over. Gyorgy’s favourite physical therapist came talk to him. After she had managed to calm him down, she gently persuaded him to agree to give the surgeon a chance to explain why he should have the surgery before he made up his mind.

Vaccination campaign in Hungary where children received the oral polio vaccine

Outside, the country was licking its post-revolution wounds. While help from the West had come for Hungary’s polio-stricken children, its revolutionaries realised that no help was coming their way. With the tacit agreement of the West, Hungary remained part of the Eastern Bloc. In the two years after the revolution, the new government led by Kadar meted out harsh punishment to the rebels: trainloads were deported to the Siberian gulags, while those remaining faced mass arrests, imprisonments and executions.

Once Soviet power was restored – and Kadar’s own position stablilised – things slowly changed for the better. Briefly, the revolution had unmasked the reality of the “People’s State” for the rest of the world to see. And the sommunist governments in both the USSR and Hungary had also learned an important lesson: if communism was to succeed in Hungary, there had to be a bit more give in the system.

Gradually people’s lives became easier, albeit at a price. “The new government positioned itself as the paternalistic provider for and protector of its citizens,” says Dora. “But it wanted acknowledgement for that. In return for free healthcare education and mass-dining canteens it expected happiness, loyalty and gratefulness from its people.”

Before it could adopt that new role, however, the state had to rebuild homes, workplaces, roads and power lines that had been damaged in the revolution – and treat citizens who had been harmed in the street fighting or by the polio epidemic. The challenge was compounded by the fact that in the immediate aftermath of the revolution, even basic necessities like soap were difficult to get hold of – and many of the 200,000 rebels who had fled the country were much-needed doctors and other professionals.

In desperation the state turned for aid to those it had driven away. It announced that all packages arriving containing food, clothing and medicine – many of which were sent by dissidents who had fled Hungary – would be duty-free. It also offered amnesty to those who hadn’t been affiliated with the revolt. Around 50,000 Hungarians were lured back home in the early summer of 1957 (some of whom were imprisoned or executed despite that promise), but most of them never returned. However, as it turned out, the most disastrous immediate consequence of the revolution was the interruption to the production of Salk vaccine.

Beer

It was the summer of 1957. A heatwave enveloped Budapest, the temperature rising to a scorching 45C. While Budapesters sought relief along the banks of the Danube and in the city’s outdoor spas and pools, the government took pains to ensure that beer production (by the nationalised breweries in Budapest’s Kobanya district) would be sufficient to quench its citizens’ thirst throughout the long, hot summer.

Then, on 27 June, a warning appeared on the back pages of newspapers: polio had appeared in the city. In the following weeks its darkening shadow spread across the country, claiming more victims than it had in any of its previous visitations. As anxious parents followed its progress in newspaper and radio reports, mass organised vacations in the mountains or by Lake Balaton were banned and – in the relentless, claustrophobic heat – children were forbidden to go to the baths and spas.

Today, over half a century later, a similar heatwave has just broken in Budapest. “It was over 38 degrees in the city yesterday,” says Dora. “As I was walking around I was thinking, ‘Oh my god what could it have been like in 1957?’ It was only the year after the revolution so there wasn’t time to rebuild everything and lots of people didn’t have running water in their homes. And then if you can’t go to the public pools, it’s just deadly, the streets get so hot. I took my son to this fountain where the water’s coming from the ground and the kids were running around enjoying the water and that was a lifesaver.”

The new Kadar-led government was in a quandary. Inadequate healthcare and the lack of doctors (and the criticisms of those who had stayed behind) had been one of the grievances driving the revolution six months ago – and it simply couldn’t risk another uprising. It needed to flex its muscles against polio – and be seen to win. But Hungary hadn’t yet begun to produce the Salk vaccine.

Hungary turned to its enemies in the West as it hadn’t yet begun to produce the Salk vaccine

Once again, it turned to its enemies in the West and ordered a shipment of Salk vaccine from Denmark. The shipment (originally produced in Canada) was delivered by a West German pilot who had volunteered for the job on his day off and was heralded as a hero in the Hungarian press. For once there was no suggestion that he might be an imperialist spy

Shortly afterwards, the government had to reach through the Iron Curtain again because the shipment brought by the West German pilot wasn’t enough for the entire population. It purchased a batch from the American pharmaceutical company Parke-Davis – and accepted a donation from the World Health Organization (WHO) of 40,000 doses – despite the fact that Hungary, along with other Eastern Bloc countries, had withdrawn its membership in 1949.

Perhaps most remarkably, it accepted further donations of vaccine from the national Actio Catholica organisation. In the 1950s, the relationship between the Hungarian state and the Catholic Church was extremely fraught. The head of the Hungarian Church, Cardinal Jozsef Mindszenty, who staunchly opposed communism, had been tried, tortured and given a life sentence in a 1949 show trial. The revolutionaries had managed to free him, and he was now living in sanctuary in the US embassy.

The temporary but necessary graciousness towards its enemies seemed to pay off. When the next year passed without an epidemic – held up as proof that the campaign had succeeded – the Hungarian government had cause to congratulate itself. Or so it thought.

Ice cream

Gyorgy, now aged eight, had his second operation in 1959. The surgeon divided a flexor muscle of his right leg, and reattached it to allow him to straighten it. He remembers a group of doctors gathering round his bed when the cast came off. “They said, ‘Extend your leg’. I tried but it didn’t work and they were disappointed. Then the Chief Medical Officer had an idea – she told me to bend my leg instead. I tried to, and it straightened! I was thrilled. For a short time I had to think of bending to extend my leg, then my brain got used to it.”

Outside, the city was sweltering in another heatwave. A newspaper article from the period warns people that all buses going into the hills were completely packed, reassuring them that if they went to cool off in the open-air baths instead, there would be enough beer and ice cream for everyone.

People queued up to receive the oral polio vaccine developed in 1957 by Albert Sabin

Then, on 21 July, the impossible happened: a health minister’s report on the back page of Nepszava, the trade unions’ newspaper, mentioned a growing number of polio cases in Budapest. Ten days later, a newspaper article warned parents to avoid crowds and swimming pools. Polio was back – with a vengeance. As the epidemic unfolded it again reached every corner of the country, the dreaded paralytic form claiming 1,830 new victims – just slightly fewer than it had in 1957. But this time everyone had supposedly been vaccinated. How could this have happened?

The mystery and fear were compounded by silence from the government. This time there were no weekly reports from the Health Ministry detailing the number of cases and what cities and counties were affected, as there had been in 1957. In 1959 there were only two reports throughout the long, hot weeks of the epidemic, and these discussed the success of the vaccination programme before going on to blame parents for not taking their children to be vaccinated when they had the chance.

The internal papers of the Health Ministry, however, told a different story. There was hardly any mention of parental negligence. Instead the reports dwelt on practical, organisational issues that could have compromised the vaccination programme. One was the lack of a clear registration system. Another was the difficulty in diagnosing polio when 95 per cent of cases were abortive (non-paralytic). When polio was diagnosed, doctors and hospitals often failed to report it. And even if they did, information about when and how many doses of vaccine the child received (if any) wasn’t covered by the form.

There were also complaints from doctors that the needles supplied by the Health Ministry were leaking; many started using their own needles (working against the communist ideal of a centrally organised, standardised method). Moreover, doctors were suspicious of the injection method the government had chosen to adopt. Most countries injected 0.5 ml of vaccine into the muscle, but the Danish method of injecting a lower dose (0.3 ml) into the skin instead seemed to be equally effective. The saving was very appealing to the cash-strapped Hungarian government – which parents now blamed for lowering the dose.

Bottles containing the polio vaccine developed by Albert Sabin

Why had the Salk vaccine seemed to work in 1958 but not 1959? One suggestion is that another intestinal virus, the Coxsackie B virus, had been circulating in 1958 and may have interfered with the poliovirus in the gut, where it replicates, preventing an epidemic. Chris Maher, senior adviser on polio operations and research at the WHO, offers another: “The injectable, inactivated [salk] vaccine gives really good individual protection, by boosting immunity in the bloodstream, but it doesn’t stop the live poliovirus from infecting the gut”. The virus replicates in the gut for a few weeks, without doing that particular host any harm, and is eventually shed back into the sewage system where it can circulate until it finds someone else to infect.

This, he says, is why samples taken from Israel’s sewage system in June 2013 were found to contain live poliovirus. “Israel has a highly immunised population, their basic coverage is 90 per cent, but they use the inactivated vaccine. So when poliovirus of Pakistan tribal origin was brought over, no one got hurt. But people are obviously getting infected and shedding the virus – because we’re continuing to find virus. So there is the risk that they could end up with clinical cases of polio.” More worryingly, people from Israel, although protected themselves, could carry the virus to places where vaccination rates are lower, like southern or eastern Europe, and unknowingly infect many more people.

Sugar

Back in 1959, salvation for the harassed Hungarian government and frightened parents arrived – and this time it came from the ‘right’ side of the Iron Curtain: the USSR. Albert Sabin, a Polish-American Jewish researcher, had developed a new vaccine in the USA. But he couldn’t test it there because a large proportion of children there had already been immunised with the Salk vaccine. So he had turned to the East and, in a much-lauded Cold War scientific collaboration, trials had begun in 1957 on millions of children in the USSR and Czechoslovakia.

This vaccine used a weakened (attenuated) rather than a killed poliovirus, and could be delivered orally on a sugar lump – a method that, in contrast to the Salk vaccine, didn’t require any medical expertise or specialised training. Importantly, the vaccine went straight to the gut where the virus replicates, so it would induce the immune system to stop the virus there so it wouldn’t be shed to circulate in the population; the harmless, attenuated virus would be shed in its place, immunising anyone it infected who hadn’t been vaccinated. Although the new vaccine provided less personal protection than the Salk vaccine (it didn’t boost the immune system in the bloodstream so well), it seemed to be a better tool for protecting large communities.

The Sabin vaccine did not come without risks. The weakened but live virus might mutate in the gut and become more virulent, leading to vaccine-derived strains of polio. “If you’ve got high vaccine coverage in a population, vaccine-derived strains aren’t an issue – they need a large, susceptible population,” says Maher. This, he says, gives the virus time to mutate and develop circulating characteristics, by hopping from one susceptible gut to the next. And once the mutated virus does begin to circulate as a vaccine-derived strain, it has the same characteristics as wild-type (naturally occurring) poliovirus, including the power to cause paralysis. “The most active vaccine-derived strain circulating [in December 2013] is in Pakistan, in the same region as the wild-type virus, where there’s a very susceptible, unvaccinated tribal population,” he says.

Fifty years ago, this concern was exacerbated by Cold War suspicion. Doctors and scientists on both sides of the Iron Curtain distrusted the Sabin vaccine for the same reason: because it hadn’t been tested in the USA. Americans doubted the reliability of Russia’s results (some even believed they may have been deliberately misrepresented, as part of wider attack on the West’s children). And some Russians were suspicious of a vaccine that the Americans had developed but not tested on their own children. Despite these concerns, Hungary took the plunge. It began its own trials of the Sabin vaccine on 3–4 November 1959, and a month later became the first country in the world to begin a nationwide vaccination campaign with it. By 1969, polio had been practically eradicated in Hungary, ten years before the USA achieved the same result.

Polio vaccine dropped on to sugar lump for child patient

“The oral vaccine – the attenuated live vaccine – can knock it out of circulation completely because it creates immunity in the gut and stops the virus spreading. That’s why the first countries to use it could eradicate polio early on,” says Maher. “Once polio had been knocked out of some fairly large areas for good, that prompted health organisations to start thinking about global eradication. The oral vaccine has since been demonstrated to eradicate polio in just about every setting.”

In fact, he says the best possible vaccine schedule is a combination of the two. “In Syria [in 2013] the routine vaccination is a combination of the injectable inactivated vaccine and the oral attenuated one. A marriage of the two protects the individual and the community – it gives you a better bang for your buck.” However, the eradication campaign responding to an outbreak of polio caused by the civil war there (which has led to a drop in vaccination rates) is using the oral vaccine alone. “You use the oral vaccine to respond to an outbreak, because it’s easy to administer, it stops people shedding the virus back into the environment, and it helps protect the wider community.”

Yet even given the well-documented success of the Sabin vaccine, polio remains endemic in small pockets of Pakistan, Afghanistan and Nigeria, where vaccinators are prevented from gaining access to unvaccinated children.

“Worldwide, people aren’t refusing the vaccine at a household or community level because they think it might harm them. That’s not a significant issue now,” says Maher. “The main obstacle is armed conflict; the group in control will decide not to allow us in.” Often, he says, it’s not that they don’t trust the vaccine or that they think it’s a Western plot to poison their children. They’re more wary of the idea that vaccinators, as they move from house to house, might be as gathering intelligence, passing information around, or marking houses. “In an era of target-marking and air attacks, it’s not an entirely illogical position for these guys to have,” says Maher, “but it certainly makes life complicated for us.”

Snow

Winter came. Snow settled on the Heine Medin’s elegant buildings up on the hill. Down below, in the ORFI, there was no lift, and as nurses couldn’t carry the bigger children up and down the stairs, those living in the upstairs wards could no longer leave them. The nurses brought snow in from outside to show them.

Gyorgy underwent two further operations on his left leg there, and by 1961, aged ten, he could finally stand again. Once he could walk, his parents paid for him to learn to swim in the outdoor pool of Lukacs Thermal Baths opposite, where, overlooked by slim, mullioned windows in the ochre façades, he played ball with his friends from the hospital in the shallow end, or watched the vigorous games of water polo being played at the other end.

By 1963, polio was becoming a distant memory in Hungary thanks to the Sabin vaccine. As a result, the victorious state turned its attention to more pressing matters. It stopped trying to get hold of iron lungs, respirators and other medical equipment from international organisations. And because of the lack of new patients, after just six years as a dedicated polio hospital designed to support patients for life, the Heine Medin hospital on Rózsadomb was transformed into a general hospital.

“Once you’ve got protection covered – and no one’s going to get ill again – treatment becomes a non-issue and so lots of questions can be left unexplored,” says Dora. “But in Hungary there were still thousands of existing patients, and now there was no organised, dedicated care for them. Everybody was dispersed and had to fend for themselves without any trained physicians or physical therapists or nurses, or access to specialist equipment.”

In 2014, only three countries – Afghanistan, Nigeria and Pakistan – remain polio-endemic

The problem persists today. Many childhood survivors from the Heine Medin and ORFI hospitals, who Dora interviewed for her research, are now dealing with post-polio syndrome: increased weakness and pain in the muscles, starting 20–30 years after the original infection, probably caused by the decades of extra stress placed on the remaining nerve cells. Or they continue to need specialist medical equipment such as respirators or movement aids, which have to be prescribed by doctors with little or no knowledge of polio. “They’re only taught the virology part of it in medical school and nobody’s doing the treatment any more, so it’s very difficult to find doctors who actually know how to help them,” says Dora. “Some of the patients call themselves dinosaurs because they’re the last of their kind. They’re the only repositories of knowledge of their disease, and it will die with them.”

If their families didn’t have the resources to care for them, or they were orphans or wards of the state, the children no longer had a permanent home to grow up in. They were moved around the country, from place to place, housed temporarily in palace ruins and other abandoned buildings from a former era – sometimes even in mental asylums. The important thing was to keep them invisible: their disabled bodies spoke too eloquently of the state’s earlier failure to protect them.

Gyorgy was one of the lucky ones. He moved back home, and went regularly for physio to the hospital in Debrecen where he was first treated as a two-year-old. It is now linked to the university at which he is now Professor of Microbiology. He still loves swimming. He recalls how, once he had learned to swim all those years ago in Lukács Baths, he loved to dive in, through the steam rising from the water into the chilly November air, hiding the other swimmers from sight, and down to where he could finally stretch out his legs and kick.

[MIKA27]

ITRACK DOCK

The new iTrack Dock by Focusrite is aimed at musicians, making it easy to capture studio-quality recordings on an iPad. It offers a high-quality, 24-bit/96kHz recording interface that integrates directly with your Lightning equipped iPad, plus two Focusrite Mic preamps, two line inputs and an instrument DI, independent stereo monitor and headphone outputs, and a USB port for class-compliant MIDI instruments and controllers. Oh, and it even charges and powers the iPad at the same time

[MIKA27]

X-Men: Days Of Future Past Looks Epic In This Final Trailer

The entertainment industry seems to lurch from one superhero movie to another these days. Not that we mind, given how awesome X-Men: Days of Future Past looks anyway. The final trailer for the film came out today before its theatrical release in May, and it’s nerd porn.

The new and final trailer gives us the best look yet at Wolverine’s mission to go back in time to stop the war with the Sentinels.

We see everyone from Xavier and Magneto in their present and past forms, as well as Peter Dinklage in his role as Bolivar Trask.

[MIKA27]

Samsung Galaxy S5's Fingerprint Scanner Can Be Duped By Lifted Prints

This isn’t a good look: Samsung’s Galaxy S5 fingerprint scanner has been out in the wild for less than a week, and already someone has been able to bypass it using one of the simplest exploits ever to come through the biometric industry.

German boffins have already figured out that you can trick the fingerprint sensor with a rudimentary copy of a print swiped over the reader.

By using a wood glue finger dummy template (which had previously worked on an iPhone 5s), boffins were able to lift a print and use it to unlock the phone.

Worryingly, that also means that your PayPal account — the one that can be unlocked and verified with your fingerprint — is also at risk thanks to the simplicity of the scanner.

Perhaps it’s best to stick to a complex password if you want to keep your phone really safe. [Heise.de]

[MIKA27]

A $15 USB Adaptor That Fixes An Annoying iMac Design Flaw

No product has even been made better when functionality follows form, and Apple’s decision to only include USB ports on the back of its iMacs has been frustrating desktop computer users for years. An ugly USB extension cable makes life with an iMac considerably more enjoyable. Now, thanks to Bluelounge’s new Jimi, it doesn’t even have to be ugly.

The J-shaped Jimi extender makes one of the USB ports on the back of a latest-gen iMac easily accessible from the front as it just peeks out from under the computer. At $US15 (officially available tomorrow) it’s a simple solution to an annoying problem, and should help prevent the back of your lovely machine from getting all scratched up as you try to blindly plug in a cable or a flash drive.

[MIKA27]

New Wireless Power Setup Charges 40 Smartphones From Across The Room

Wouldn’t it be wonderful if you never had to plug in your phone? Well, a team of Korean scientists say that they’re one step closer to making that fantasy a reality with new wireless power transfer technology that works from over 4.5m away. And it works pretty damn well too.

This new system isn’t entirely new. It improves upon the basic idea for so-called Coupled Magnetic Resonance System (CMRS) developed by MIT scientists back in 2007. A team from the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology, however, just announced a new option that both simplifies and improves the earlier design, extending the reach of the wireless power transfer from a little over 1.5m to over 4.5m. It does so with two 3m long boxes made of up compact ferrite core rods with coils of wire in the middle. One of the boxes generates a magnetic field, while the other induces the voltage. They call the set up a Dipole Coil Resonant System (DCRS).

In plain English, anything between the two boxes can tap into the system’s power. It effectively generates wireless electricity. The researchers are ambitious about the implications of such technology: “Although the long-range wireless power transfer is still in an early stage of commercialisation and quite costly to implement, we believe that this is the right direction for electric power to be supplied in the future,” said KAIST engineering professor Chun T. Rim. “Just like we see Wi-Fi zones everywhere today, we will eventually have many Wi-Power zones at such places as restaurants and streets that provide electric power wirelessly to electronic devices. We will use all the devices anywhere without tangled wires attached and anytime without worrying about charging their batteries.”

For the time being though, the setup is sophisticated and a bit unwieldy. Not destined for your local Starbucks any time soon.

Rim and his team aren’t the only ones with such a dream. All kinds of systems are in development around the world with plans to wirelessly power everything from TVs to city buses. Some geniuses have even developed a way to turn Wi-Fi signals into useable electricity. This new DCRS technology certainly is promising, though. In a video, the team showed how they can power an LED TV and three fans wirelessly. They also say they can charge up to 40 smartphones from the other side of the room.

But did notice how there aren’t any humans in the charge zone? It makes you wonder: How much cancer does this thing cause? It’s a question worth answering before tech like this comes anywhere near you or me.

[MIKA27]

Satellite Photo Shows Giant, Monster-Like Biological Shape At Loch Ness

Is that the Loch Ness monster in this satellite photo used by Apple Maps? Or at least something that looks like a giant biological form underwater?

Could it really be an underwater creature, a long-forgotten aquatic dinosaur who can magically live for thousands of years?

According to Loch Ness “experts” Peter Thain and Andy Dixon, this can’t be anything else but the monster:

When Andy got in touch at the beginning of the year, we finally managed to locate a device that had the image on it and asked some boating experts to look at it. They confirmed that while it looks like a boat wake, it cannot be a boat as there is no hull or superstructure visible. This is confirmed by the fact that there are clear images of other boats in the pictures.

You can check it out here (you need Apple Maps on OS X.)

[MIKA27]

Teenager Survives Five-Hour Flight In Aeroplane's Wheel Well

A 16-year-old boy managed to stow away in the wheel well of a flight headed from California to Hawaii on Sunday. He then survived the five-hour trip despite freezing temperatures, low pressures and little oxygen.

Hawaiian Airlines Flight 45 set off from Santa Clara, California, on Sunday morning, before flying 5.5 hours to Maui in Hawaii. Analysis of security footage shows that the boy hopped a fence to hide away in the Boeing 767. When the flight landed, he jumped down from the wheel well and wandered around the airport’s grounds, reports the AP.

FBI officials have described that during the flight, which reached altitudes of 11,500m, the boy was subjected to “frigid temperatures” and “a lack of oxygen”. Speaking to the Associated Press, FBI spokesman Tom Simon explained:

“Kid’s lucky to be alive. He was unconscious for the lion’s share of the flight. Doesn’t even remember the flight… It’s amazing he survived that.”

Following interviews by the FBI, it appears the teenager ran away from his family following an argument. He’s undergone medical inspection and found to be unharmed. The FBI has explained that he won’t be charged, but has been referred to child protective services.

[MIKA27]

Man Explains Why He Prefers $50 3D-Printed Hand To $42,000 Prosthesis

Everybody’s excited about the possibilities of 3D printing, but, for some people, the technology stands to improve their lives on a daily if not hourly basis. Jose Delgado Jr, a 53-year-old man born without most of his left hand, is one of them. Thanks to 3D-printing, Jose got a new hand.

Well, to be perfectly clear, Jose already had a hand: a $42,000 myoelectric prosthesis that tapped into muscle signals on his left arm to open and close. While insurance covered part of the cost, Jose paid for about half of his prosthesis out-of-pocket. No wonder he was eager to see what the world of 3D-printed prostheses could offer.

Jose got in touch with Jeremy Simon from 3D Universe, who outfitted him with a mechanical hand called the CyborgBeast. It only costs $50 in materials to produce (plus whatever it costs to use a high-end 3D printer for a few hours if you don’t have one at home). How does the $50 hand stack up against the $42,000 prosthesis? Jose prefers it! He says it offers more day-to-day functionality, and, if a part ever breaks, he can just print another one.

[MIKA27]

Holy Cow, Another Crazy Meteor Caught On Russian Dashcam

Last night, yet another eye-searing blue meteor screamed across the dark Russian sky. Lucky for us, Russia is the land of dashcams, meaning that yet again, we get a driver’s seat view of the phenomenon. How do you say “wow” in Russian?

The meteor blasted over Murmansk, a city in the very northwest part of Russia. Check out this video, and a different view here, from a YouTube account called, oddly enough, “Meteorite and Murmansk.” I guess it’s a whole thing.

Russians install dashcams in their cars for a variety of reasons, most of them corruption or extortion related. Thankfully, they also happen to catch awesome astronomical phenomena in the process. Bless you and your crazy dashcams, Russia.

[MIKA27]

Advanced Concrete Could Last More Than A Century Without Maintenance

A new water-repellant concrete impregnated with tiny superstrong fibres promises to leave roads and bridges free of major cracks for up to 120 years.

University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee civil engineers have developed a concrete mix that is durable and superhydrophobic. They call it Superhydrophobic Engineered Cementitious Composite (SECC). Preventing normally porous concrete from absorbing water means that liquid can’t get inside, freeze, and cause it to crack. The concrete’s unusual characteristics, including being significantly more ductile than traditional concrete, means that cracks that do form do not propagate and cause failure.

“Our architecture allows the material to withstand four times the compression with 200 times the ductility of traditional concrete,” said associate professor Konstantin Sobolev, whose lab created SECC.

A report available on the Government Finance Officers Association lists the useful life of typical concrete roadways as 30 years and concrete bridges and culverts as 40-45 years. The UWM team says their improved material will hold up with little or no maintenance for well over a century.

To impart the characteristics in the material they wanted to see, they doped their mix with superhydrophobic additives based on siloxane, a compound that forms the backbone of silicones, mixed with superfine powders. Together, these form a microscopic spiky surface nearly impermeable to water. They also added unwoven polyvinyl alcohol fibres, each the width of a human hair, which are strong enough to let the concrete bend without breaking.

“The use of polyvinyl alcohol fibres in engineered cementitious composite proves to be a very effective method to not only improve the ductility of concrete, but to drastically improve its durability,” the researchers wrote in a June 2013 report on SECC. “Conventional reinforced concrete is a relatively brittle material which, when loaded, typically causes large cracks. These large cracks allow water to penetrate through the concrete, reaching the reinforcing steel and, in turn, cause the steel to corrode, ultimately leading the failure of the reinforced concrete.”

Last August, the team laid a 4-by-15-foot slab of their improved material as a patch to a university parking structure. They embedded sensors in their concrete to monitor moisture, stress and load. They are still analysing whether the SECC they installed in the structure shows the performance improvement they saw in the lab.

They say the material, which would cost more than typical concrete, would pay for itself with diminished maintenance costs if it performs as they expect. It would also help with the sorry state of civil infrastructure across the country.

“America’s infrastructure is in urgent need of restoration/repair, especially in parts of the country exposed to freezing,” they wrote in 2013. “Freezing and thawing cycles in northern regions lead to loss of performance, demanding urgent repairs and attention or bridge failures… An engineered high-performance and durable material is required for these elements of infrastructure in order to increase the service life of roadways and to minimize the need for repair.”

[MIKA27]

How Native Americans Were Crucial To Defeat The Nazis And Japan In WWII

This is Chester Nez, the last of the original Navajo 29, being honoured at an April 4 ceremony. If it weren’t for him and the other 28 Native Americans who created the secret code language used in the Pacific theatre during World War II, America would have probably never won the war against Japan.

Their work was so important that it remained secret for decades and it’s only recently — in 1968 — that they have started to receive some of the recognition they deserve.

According to Major Howard Connor — 5th Marine Division signal officer during the battle of Iwo Jima — “were it not for the Navajos, the Marines would never have taken Iwo Jima.”

Connor had six Navajo code talkers working around the clock during the first two days of the battle. Those six sent and received over 800 messages, all without error.

Before the development of this code, Japanese intelligence broke every single encryption created by the US military, something that costed thousands of lives and millions of dollars in material losses. The Navajo code, however, was never broken. Not by the Japanese, not by anyone. Nez — who fought at Guadalcanal, Bougainville, Guam, Peleliu and Angaur — tells the story here:

We first 29 Code Talkers designed a doubly-encrypted secret language using Navajo and English. It became the only unbroken spoken code in modern warfare. Not even other Navajos could crack our code. Finally the Marines could plan strategic maneuvers without the enemy knowing every move.

The code was a complete success and soon was implemented across the entire Pacific theatre of operations:

The code was so successful that the Corps recruited 400 more Navajo men to join as Code Talkers. During the war, Nez and the other Code Talkers’ primary mission was to receive and send encrypted messages. Even if they were being shot at, their focus was on sending the message, not firing back at the enemy.

“That could be pretty stressful,” Nez said. “But we did it.”

The Nazis tried to thwart the plan

The Navajos weren’t the only Native Americans that were instrumental to win the war. The Comanches worked hard in Europe too, even after Adolf Hitler sent a team of anthropologists to try to learn Native American languages in preparation of their use in World War II. Hitler knew that, during World War I, the Americans and British forces successfully used Cherokee and Choctaw code talkers against the Germans.

Fortunately, Hitler’s minions never got the complexity of their language and — even while the Allies were nervous about the findings of the Nazi anthropology team — fourteen Comanche code talkers successfully worked their code magic during the Invasion of Normandy and until the end of the war.

Comanches of the 4th Signal Company compiled a vocabulary of over 100 code terms using words or phrases in their own language. Using a substitution method similar to the Navajo, the Comanche code word for tank was “turtle”, bomber was “pregnant aeroplane”, machine gun was “sewing machine” and Adolf Hitler became “crazy white man”.

In North of Africa, 27 Meskwaki did the same work against Germans and Italians. Amazingly enough, that’s 16 per cent of the population of the total Meskwaki population in Iowa.

That data point is quite surprising. The entire story of the code talkers is even more incredible considering that these tribes were systematically exterminated, removed from their land, and humiliated by the United States government and its military a mere decades before this all happened. They lived in reserves (and still do) and they suffered the same discrimination as African-Americans (and still do.)

Late recognition

To add insult to injury, the code talkers got no public recognition until 1968. In 1982, President Reagan gave the Navajos a “Certificate of Recognition.” It wasn’t until Clinton, in 2000, that a law was passed to award the Congressional Gold Medal to the Navajo 29, while the rest of the code talkers got the silver medal. Four surviving members of the Navajo 29 got the medal from President George W. Bush in 2001. Nez is the last one.

It wasn’t until 2008 that all the tribes who participated in coding operations during the two big wars were awarded the Congressional Gold Medal. Each tribe got a gold medal — which the white men will keep safe at the Smithsonian Institution, because apparently the Native Americans can’t keep them safe for some reason I fail to comprehend — and each code talker got a silver medal duplicate.

[MIKA27]

Synanon's Sober Utopia: How A Drug Rehab Program Became A Violent Cult

In 1970, George Lucas needed dozens of actors with shaved heads for his sci-fi dystopian movie THX 1138. He had trouble filling the roles at first, since so few actresses wanted to cut their locks, but Lucas eventually found the extras he needed in a strange utopian community where everyone worshipped sobriety and expressed solidarity by shaving their heads. It was called Synanon, and over the course of three decades it would become one of the weirdest and most vindictive cults of the 20th century.

“Today is the first day of the rest of your life…”

Charles E. Dederich spent the better part of two decades wandering the country as a barely functional drunk. A sales exec from Ohio, Dederich moved to Southern California after his first divorce, and in 1956 gave Alcoholics Anonymous a good faith effort at the insistence of his second wife. She chose to leave him anyway, but the program really resonated with Dederich, who quickly became a sober evangelist for everything AA stood for. Dederich was only dismayed by one fact: AA didn’t accept other kinds of substance abusers to their meetings.

Narcotics Anonymous was founded in Los Angeles in 1953, but by the late 1950s (when Dederich was sobering up) the organisation was still very disorganized, and NA groups rarely met. So in 1958 Dederich decided to form his own group that, unlike AA, embraced all kinds of addicts. He first called his group the Tender Loving Care club, but soon after renamed it Synanon.

Dederich is credited with a lot of positive innovations early on in his career as a drug rehab guru. He focused on a marginalized group that most institutions wanted nothing to do with. He was said to have coined the phrase “Today is the first day of the rest of your life.” He was stern with the people around him, but he believed this tough love was necessary to achieve and maintain sobriety.

But Dederich made it quite clear early on that treating addicts was merely a byproduct of his larger mission. He wanted to create an experimental society that would transform the world. Over the years, the organisation grew — it built businesses and started schools — and its goal was no less than a utopian revolution. Synanon was a new way of living, as important to its members as any of the world’s major religions.

“This is the kind of revolution that moved the world from Judaism to Catholicism to Protestantism to Synanism,” Dederich would insist. “This is a total revolution game.”

But as one might anticipate given that kind of rhetoric, a dark side emerged. Not with one single act, but with many small changes that would enable the organisation to evolve into something much more dangerous. What was once a small drug rehab facility in sunny Santa Monica would become a violent, abusive and well-funded cult with satellites throughout California and beyond.

The Game Begins

“He was the first person I have ever met that was able to somehow able to cut through the nonsense,” one early Synanite said in a film referring to Charles Dederich. “He struck a chord.”

That chord was one of supposed honestly, with Dederich’s brash and booming voice dominating whatever room he entered. And that booming voice made him a worthy opponent in a brutal form of therapy created by the man himself. It was called The Game.

The Game was most important method of treatment at Synanon. When it came to getting addicts clean, the program rejected any form of pharmaceuticals or tapering of drugs. Everyone went cold turkey, and junkies were left on a couch to writhe and vomit for a few days while they went through withdrawal.

The Game was the medicine administered later, a kind of group therapy invented by Dederich where people sat in a circle to express (and often shout) their frustrations at each other. The confrontational approach was a way to hash out everything that bothered you about others in your group. It was supposed to help you learn about yourself as well. While playing the Game, your frustrations didn’t even need to be true. Lying was just one of many strategies in The Game, which could last anywhere from one to 48 hours.

As Rod Janzen notes in his book about Synanon (a book, it should be noted, that’s bizarrely sympathetic to the cult and its methods), Dederich’s writings suggested that the Game start with a question like “The most boring person in this circle is ____?” or “What really pissed you off most this week?”

On its face, many found The Game to be positive and a constructive (if admittedly unconventional) way to deal with issues within the group. But it would lay the groundwork for the abuse that was to come.

Meeting the Neighbours

Many of Synanon’s neighbours in Santa Monica weren’t terribly excited to have a drug rehab facility in their neighbourhood. The Synanon members faced harassment early on, some of it unjustified and rooted in racism and fear of addicts, some of it seemingly more deserved. In 1961, Dederich spent just under a month in jail for zoning violations and operating a hospital without a licence. In this case, he was guilty on both counts.

Those events and persecutions only served to make the Synanites more cohesive as a group, and elevated Dederich to martyr status, suffering unjust incarceration for his beliefs. It also didn’t lead anywhere; at this point, the group was firmly committed to non-violence. But it wouldn’t be until much later that Synanon would take its revenge. Soon, that would change.

That Hollywood Scene

In the early 1960s, the Synanon house became quite the fashionable hang-out for Hollywood’s more cerebral celebrities. Guest speakers in 1963 alone included Twilight Zone creator Rod Serling, legendary sci-fi author Ray Bradbury, and the original host of the Tonight Show, Steve Allen. Other visitors included Leonard Nimoy, Jane Fonda, Charlton Heston, and Milton Berle, among dozens of other curious stars. Synanon had some pretty cool parties, thanks to the fact that so many jazz musicians were around trying to kick their habit.

But it wasn’t just the Hollywood elite and L.A. musicians lining up to get a peek at the exciting things happening in Santa Monica. Others who couldn’t resist poking their heads in for a look at the program included counterculture drug aficionado Tim Leary, futurist Buckminster Fuller, and labour activist Cesar Chavez.

Politicians also came knocking. Senator Thomas Dodd from Connecticut claimed in 1962 that, “There is indeed a miracle on the beach at Santa Monica.” Jerry Brown Jr., the current governor of California, even visited Synanon while with his father in the mid-60s. Synanon was widely held up as a tremendously successful program by countless politicians well into the early 1970s. No wonder, given the kinds of numbers Synanon was reporting.

Dederich’s organisation insisted recovery rates were anywhere form 80 to 100 per cent, though those figures were never confirmed by outside sources for obvious reasons. It simply wasn’t true. Some observers claim that fewer than 70 people in Synanon’s entire existence — of the thousands who sought treatment — could reasonably have been claimed as rehabilitated, though it’s probably somewhere in between these extremes.

It’s especially tough to judge rehabilitation rates when a program’s founder eventually comes to claim there’s no such thing as rehabilitation, and that staying within the organisation is the only true path.

Growth Curve

Starting in 1965, Synanon started buying up land in Marin County, California. It would eventually have three sites in the county, comprising just over 3,300 acres in total, making it the largest private property owner in the county.

That year it also reached a high-watermark of public awareness: It got the Hollywood movie treatment. The film starred Edmund O’Brien as Dederich, and was even filmed on location in Santa Monica with the full cooperation of the Synanon organisation.

In 1967, Synanon also purchased a palatial new building in Santa Monica called Club Casa del Mar. First built as a hotel in 1926 and then used by the US Army during World War II, the building sat on a gorgeous spot on the beach. Now a hotel again, you’d never know its bizarre history if you walked inside.

At the same time, Dederich himself abandoned Santa Monica, moving north to his Tomales Bay site. By the mid-1970s, his organisation had acquired over 2,000 acres in Tulare County.

One reason for the Synanon’s rapid expansion? The organisation was fast attracting non-addicts into the fold. Aside from the bevy of celebrities that would make appearances, locals who had never been considered addicts (squares, as Synanon called them) also wanted in. They were reluctantly allowed, and by 1967 Synanon broadened its mission to include “research into the causes of alienation and delinquency.”

Synanon’s ranks were swelling. After starting in 1958 with just 40 junkies in a rundown building, it now boasted 823 members and some incredibly expensive digs to boot.

Circling the Wagons

By 1968, a new type of Synanon membership was established: the Lifestyler. Members of this group were allowed to have jobs outside of Synanon and live outside of the Synanon community, provided they gave most of their income to the organisation. This new kind of member allowed Synanon to fill its coffers with outside money that it had otherwise been reluctant to receive. After all, the organisation was leaving a lot of cash on the table by declining government-funded grants. Why? Those grants stipulated that there be some kind of independent examination and verification of success rates through drug tests and the like. These were flatly rejected.

This experiment with Lifestylers wouldn’t last long, however, as this type of member was often accused of not being committed enough to the cause. Most Lifestylers washed out of the program, though some joined the ranks fully, leaving their homes behind as a show of true commitment.

By 1968, the group was becoming even more isolationist, with Dederich declaring that it would no longer graduate any of their members. This meant that no addict who kicked their addiction would be allowed to “graduate” to a life outside of Synanon. What little pretense the group had about helping addicts rejoin the outside world had been dropped. Synanon was now the only place to be, a narrowly focused utopian experiment that was ready to swallow you whole.

After the massive expansion into all parts of California, not to mention satellite offices in places as far out as Detroit, the business side of the organisation was growing tremendously. In 1968, Synanon was bringing in roughly $US1.2 million from its various businesses, including gas stations and a manufacturer of branded promotional items. By 1976 it was grossing $US8.7 million, with estimated assets of over $US30 million.

Raising Kids

Children inside the Synanon cult were raised communally. This was a common practice romanticized by utopian communities of the 19th and 20th century (including in Upton Sinclair’s failed Helicon Home Colony), though Synanon took it a step further than most.

Parents had highly restricted access to their children after they reached the age of about 6-9 months. By the end of the 1960s, adult members might only see their kids once a week, even if they wanted to see them more often. The policies dictating how often a given member could see their children became more and more restrictive throughout the 1960s, and by 1972 Dederich had proposed that the children from every California branch be moved to a single site in Marin County. This was quite obviously a way for Dederich to better control his followers. But for many people, it was the final straw. According to Janzen, between 200 and 300 people left the organisation after this new policy was proposed.

“Dederich and others displayed a good-riddance attitude,” Janzen writes in The Rise and Fall of Synanon. “Those who left lacked commitment to Synanon’s new utopian vision, they said.” The choice was clear: Your family, or that of Synanon.

LSD and Do As I Say

Synanon was a completely drug-free environment, save for aspirin, caffeine and nicotine. But there was another drug that Dederich didn’t consider harmful. In fact, he credited this drug with expanding his mind and allowing him to create the Synanon program in the first place. That drug was LSD.

Early on, Dederich’s experience with LSD at UCLA, under the supervision of doctors, was written about with the kind of mythical terminology that you’d expect of a charismatic leader. In 1961, one admirer profiling the group explained that Dederich was not affected by the LSD as some commoners might be:

Chuck was an atypical patient in that he experienced no regression, no sensory enhancement or hallucinations. During the active period of LSD intoxication, his normal traits appeared merely in a sort of caricature. One phrase that came into his mind impressed him: “It doesn’t matter, but, at the same time it matters exquisitely.” He would go to his room and give way to tears for an hour or more every day. Even with the seeming grief, there was euphoria.

He was seemingly stronger than powerful hallucinogens. And yet he would credit them with inspiring him to start Synanon. Sometimes his philosophy was do as I say, not as I do. Other times, it was explicitly, do exactly as I do.

In 1970, Dederich decided that he should quit smoking for health reasons. Once a safe-haven for nicotine, with centres filled with smoke, Synanon banned smoking for everybody. This top-down control over the lives of Synanites was common, and would ultimately contribute to its violent transition. Dederich would act on impulse, rationalize his behaviour, and then claim that had been the plan all along.

A pivotal moment occurred in 1973 when a woman was speaking disrespectfully of Dederich’s wife Betty during a session of the Game. This, of course, was part of the Game, but for whatever reason, this time Dederich took it very personally.

Dederich grabbed a can of soda and poured it on the woman. At first, he apologized, but he almost immediately recanted his apology and rationalized his behaviour as justified. “I gave the woman a lesson in manners,” he explained.

Finding Religion

In 1974, Synanon moved to become recognised as a religion. The organisation was running up against troubles with the IRS and had realised, much like other self-help cults of the 20th century, that being recognised as a religion could help it maintain tax-exempt status.

After abandoning drug treatment as its sole mission in the 1960s, Synanon could no longer claim to be simply a non-profit organisation. And its substantial for-profit businesses weren’t helping its case. Becoming a full-fledged religion was the best way to protect its massive holdings from the tax man.

It didn’t work, though. The IRS never officially officially recognised Synanon as a religion, though it would be at least another decade before it finally stripped the company of its tax-exempt status.

Death and Embracing Violence

At same time it was claiming its religious rights, Synanon stepped up its use of violence within its ranks. Suspected “spies” were severely beaten. Teenagers sent to Synanon to help cure juvenile delinquency were regularly physically abused for insubordination. Everyone in the group started shaving their heads. Things were gradually, but steadily, getting worse inside the sober cult of Synanon.

Dederich was also becoming less interested in having any children around, telling many members that if they wanted to have kids they probably shouldn’t be a part of Synanon. “I understand it’s more like crapping a football than anything else,” Dederich would say about childbirth in 1976.

By January of 1977, Dederich’s distaste for children turned into an official policy. Men were pressured to get vasectomies, and women were shamed into getting abortions. These policies instigated another wave of defections, though Dederich’s increasingly inward focus caused him not to care. As Rod Janzen notes in his book about Synanon, one member told Dederich, “I’ll give you my life, Chuck, but not my balls.” Notably, Dederich didn’t get a vasectomy himself. Those that stayed, completely beaten and indoctrinated, didn’t seem to care that Dederich had become a tyrant who couldn’t even pretend that he held himself to the same standard as other Synanites.

Chuck Dederich’s wife Betty died of lung cancer on April 19, 1977. After that, all bets were off. Betty, a strong woman in her own right, seemed to dial back some of Chuck’s weirder megalomaniacal tendencies. After her death, nothing could temper his darker desires to control people.

By October of that year, only a few months after the death of his wife, Dederich’s policies became even more extreme and controlling. He declared that married Synanites should split up and find new partners. He started by breaking up his own daughter’s marriage. About 600 couples were divorced by the following year.

At the same time that Synanon was becoming increasingly militant and strange, it was enjoying substantial support from American businesses as a charitable organisation. As Richard Ofshe notes in his 1980 paper The Social Development of the Synanon Cult, there were 20,000 businesses and organisations giving to or interacting with Synanon by the late 1970s, “including one out of five corporations in the Fortune 500 who were listed either as donating or as doing business with the organisation.”

By the late 1970s, Synanon was going from bad to worse in some terrifying ways. The group’s reported purchase of over $US200,000 in firearms in 1978 raised plenty of eyebrows. If you were on the fence about Synanon’s classification as a cult before, you certainly had fewer doubts now.

In 1978, ex-Synanite Phil Ritter would try to extract his young daughter from the organisation and nearly paid with his life. Ritter’s wife was still in the organisation, and had moved with their child to Synanon’s Detroit facility. Ritter sought legal action against the cult and in response, the church sent two men to beat him senseless in his own driveway. He wound up in a coma for a week.

Bad Press

During the 1970s Synanon attracted a fair amount of attention from the media, though unlike the positive press it was getting in the 1960s for its drug rehab “successes,” the coverage was overwhelmingly negative.

Major news networks had started slowly reporting on the organisation, but much of the legwork that went into exposing Synanon as a violent cult was done by a tiny newspaper with a circulation of only about 1,700. The Point Reyes Light in Marin County was dogged in its pursuit of the Synanon story, which involved child abuse, wrongful imprisonment, assault and misappropriation of funds. Despite being constantly threatened for libel action, the paper didn’t back down. The Light even won a Pulitzer Prize in 1979 for its reporting on the organisation, something virtually unheard of for a paper of that size.

Members of Synanon didn’t take kindly to the criticism. The group lashed out at anyone who dared question their organisation; after an expose by NBC in 1978, members sent hundreds of ominous letters to NBC executives, threatening physical harm.

Syanon also spent the 1970s suing anybody who wrote a critical article or aired a negative TV segment about it. In 1972 it sued Hearst Corporation over a San Francisco Examiner article that described the cult as the “racket of the century.” When it was finally revealed to the broader public just what a financial and emotional scam Synanon had become, this was no longer considered hyperbole.

The Rattlesnake

The most famous incidence of the organisation’s violence — and the one that Americans old enough to remember may recall — was a planned attack by Synanon on a Los Angeles lawyer. It’s remembered largely due to the bizarre choice of weapon: a rattlesnake.

Attorney Paul Morantz had successfully represented a young woman who had been held against her will by the cult. Morantz came home on October 10, 1978 to his house in the Pacific Palisades and opened his mailbox, only to be immediately bitten by a rattlesnake. The people who had placed the snake there had removed its rattle so as to keep it quiet. Morantz rushed outside yelling to his neighbours for help.

Thankfully they were able to call an ambulance in time, saving his life after quick and extensive treatment with anti-venom. Two men — 20-year-old Lance Kenton and 28-year-old Joseph Musico — were charged with attempted murder, along with Dederich for conspiring to commit it.

Dederich’s obsession with recording audio came back to haunt him, as the police produced tapes of him talking about violence and specifically mentioning Morantz’s address in the Pacific Palisades. All three plead no contest and Dederich entered into a plea deal that included probation, though he didn’t see jail time. The other part of the plea: Dederich would have to step down as head of Synanon.

It should be noted that I filed a Freedom of Information Act request with the FBI for Dederich’s file but was told that he had none.

The Dwindling Game

Synanon’s reach was relatively limited, and yet everyone that came in contact with the organisation left with battle scars. The cult hobbled along throughout the 1980s, badly damaged from their wars in both the press and the courtroom. Who wanted to be associated with the rattlesnake cult?

Synanon was formally stripped of its tax-exempt status in 1991 and completely disbanded shortly after that. Charles E. Dederich died in Visalia, California in 1997.

Relative to other cults of the second half of the 20th century, Synanon wasn’t the worst. But if you stuck around with Synanon in the 1970s, you would have felt right at home in some of the most notorious cults of the 1970s and 80s.

Synanon started with what looked like the best of intentions. And the organisation still has defenders today. But no matter what the initial goals of this strange community and its heavy-handed leader, there’s no denying what it had become: a dangerous cult ultimately tossed on the scrap heap of failed utopias.

Whether dangerous or benign, the utopian impulse is almost always about control. We strive for perfection with small actions, working toward some greater change in our lives; our own slice of heaven. We blind ourselves to the dark undercurrents of our carefully controlled little worlds.

That’s what happened at Synanon. Members ignored the greater sins for the smaller ones. As members became more and more invested in the utopian project’s minutiae, it became harder and harder to escape. Ultimately, Synanon collapsed under its own utopian hubris — a tyrant’s ant farm masquerading as a grand experiment with the good life. And for some of the bruised and battered left in Synanon’s wake, its undoing came none too soon.