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[MIKA27]

Way Out of Place Aquatic Beasts

Nature is anything but predictable. She constantly surprises us with new discoveries, strange anomalies, and baffling enigmas. We strive to understand her, but just when we think we have her figured out, we are presented with yet another mystery.

One such mystery can be found in the many cases of animals that turn up in places they have no business being in. It is not always completely clear how these animals have become so unexpectedly dislocated from their natural habitats, but one thing that is certain is that these cases are almost always perplexing.

Among the many reports of out of place land animals, one can find others that describe aquatic creatures, some quite large and dangerous, showing up in the strangest of places. The prospect of coming across a creature totally unexpected in the depths of a lake or river holds a certain peculiar fascination. In such locales we think we can fish and have an idea of what we’ll catch, that we can swim and be totally safe. We seem to have a sort of false sense of familiarity with such places, so when something totally new rises up from the water, we are truly reminded of how unpredictable nature can be.

Let us take a look at some of these head scratching cases of aquatic beasts that, for whatever reason, have wound up in some of the most bizarre places.

To most people, sharks are shadowy creatures that lurk within the depths of the ocean. These often frightening denizens of the deep are what we might expect to find along coasts, out at sea, or perhaps in our nightmares, but certainly not at a golf course. Right?

Welcome to the Carbrook Golf Club, in Brisbane, Australia, a place that gives the term “water hazard” a whole new dimension. The course boasts beautiful scenery, a full 18 holes of golf, and a lake full of sharks. The small lake, which is located in the center of the golf course, harbors at least six full grown bull sharks measuring from 8 to 10 feet long, whose dark shapes and fins slicing the surface of the water have become a common sight.

The sharks are believed to have become stranded in the small lake during flooding in 1996, when the Logan and Albert rivers broke their banks and spilled onto the course. Since then, the sharks have not only survived in their new habitat, but are thriving and are even said to be breeding, giving the lake its new name “Shark Lake.” Many golfers sit by the side of the lake watching the beasts swim through the water just feet away, and golfers often pause during games in hopes of catching a glimpse of the sharks before continuing on to the next tee.

Bull sharks are large sharks that prefer shallow water and are known to be generally aggressive. A great many shark attacks have been attributed to this species. They are perhaps most well known for their unique and somewhat disconcerting ability to survive in fresh water. In fact, bull sharks can thrive in freshwater habitats, and have been known to venture hundreds of miles up rivers. Bull sharks are often found in many rivers throughout the world, and have been seen as far up the Mississippi as Illinois. They are even known to pop up in lakes, such as Lake Nicaragua, a large freshwater lake in Nicaragua that is known to have a breeding population of bull sharks.

However, Carbrook Golf Club is thought to be the world’s first shark infested golf course, and as such has attracted considerable publicity with its unusual guests. The sharks have become popular for corporate events, and some people have wedding ceremonies at the lakeside, where fins can sometimes be seen cruising through the water in the background as the couples exchange vows. There is also a tournament held at the course called the “Shark Lake Challenge.”

The sharks might be frightening, but so far people have had mostly a positive attitude towards them. Some even go as far as to throw pieces of meat to the sharks, even though the lake is well stocked with fish. Whether people want the sharks there or not, when visiting Carbrook Golf Club, it may be a good idea not to dive in for a lost ball.

While the presence of bull sharks in lakes or rivers may be alarming, at least they are known to frequent fresh water. What of even larger sharks with no such propensity?

Although rarer, there have been a fair number of accounts of great white sharks lurking in fresh water. Perhaps the most infamous and deadly account is the Matawan Creek incident of July 15, 1916.

The incident occurred at the height of a series of gruesome shark attacks along the New Jersey shoreline from July 1 to July 12, 1916. In total, 5 people were viciously attacked by what is believed by many to have been possibly a great white shark. What is curious about this case is that during this string of horrifying attacks, three separate attacks also happened in a small freshwater creek 15 miles from the ocean.

Matawan Creek lies in New Jersey and is a partial tidal inlet of Raritan Bay. On July 15, 1916, 12-year-old Lester Stillwell was killed while swimming in the creek. During the grisly attack, 24-year old Watson “Stanley” Fisher jumped in in an attempt to rescue the boy, whereupon the shark turned its attention on the would be rescuer and killed him as well before disappearing into the bloodied murk. Later that same day, a shark ferociously attacked and severely injured 14-year-old Joseph Dunn in the very same creek.

Matawan Creek

The attacks in a calm freshwater creek so far from the ocean stunned people and created widespread panic. The attacks are so notorious that they are believed to be one of the inspirations for the novel and subsequent film “Jaws.” While the true culprit of these attacks remains unknown, some believe it to have been the work of a great white shark. That a large great white was captured in Raritan Bay two days after the attacks suddenly ceased seems to somewhat support this theory.

There is the chance that these attacks may have indeed been carried out by the more freshwater inclined bull sharks, but still other accounts in freshwater clearly describe a great white.

A fisherman at Tuggerah Lake, a small freshwater lagoon about 90km north of Sydney which is connected to the ocean by a small tidal channel, claimed to have captured a large great white shark in his net. The man described the shark as being bigger than his 18 foot long boat, and claimed it was around 21 feet in length.

The startled fisherman said he cut the net in a panic and watched the shark sink back into the depths of the lake. Tuggerah Lake had never had any reports of sharks in its waters before, and the find was said to be so incredibly odd that some experts have doubted the veracity of the story.

Another great white shark measuring 16 feet and weighing 3500 pounds was haunting marshlands and shallow, brackish water bordering on freshwater deep within St. Helena Sound in South Carolina in 2013. The tagged shark made its way much further inland than any previously observed great white and experts said it was highly unusual behavior for this species.

Great whites are not known to inhabit such habitats, nor are they known to have any tolerance for or ability to adapt to freshwater, yet there various other reports and sightings of great whites spooking people in freshwater lakes, rivers, and estuaries. There have even been sporadic and unconfirmed sightings of the beasts in America’s own Great Lakes.

If there were great whites in the Great Lakes, they would certainly not be the only toothy out of place resident there. The Great Lakes have produced quite a few accounts of pirahnas in their waters as well. The deadly piranha, popularized in Hollywood for swarming upon animals to strip them to the bone in seconds, are world renowned for their razor-sharp teeth and vicious bites. They are also native to the Amazon River Basin in South America, which makes the Great Lakes pretty far from home.

One piranha was caught at a popular swimming hole called Sandy Bottom, in Dollar Bay, Michigan, which lies along the shores of Lake Superior. The man who caught the piranha wasn’t quite sure what he had reeled in at first, and brought it to a bait shop where it was identified as a red-bellied piranha. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the unusual catch stirred up quite a bit of panic among swimmers in the area, with many people refusing to go into the water.

Experts asserted that this was an isolated incident and an individual fish, whereas piranha attacks usually are carried out by schools of them. Nevertheless, people weren’t rushing back to the beach.

Red bellied piranha

In another case, fisherman Bill Locket was jigging for perch in a place called “warmwater bay” at the Monroe Power Plant at Monroe, Mich when he hooked into an exotic fish with a mouth full of sharp teeth. The fish, which measured 15 inches and weighed 1.79 pounds, was later identified as a red bellied piranha.

Another fisherman, a mister Toby Davison, was fishing for bluegill when he pulled a huge 18-inch, 4.5 pound piranha out of Lake St. Clair, which is part of the Great Lakes system and connects Lake Huron with Lake Eerie.

Piranha have turned up in all of the Great Lakes, and are thought to be the result of aquarium owners dumping exotic pets when they get too big to care for properly. It is not thought that the tropical piranha would be able to survive the cold weather of winters in the Great Lakes region, but they could possibly survive near the warm water discharge from power plants.

Either people keep releasing them or they are somehow surviving by huddling near the warm water of power plants, because whether the piranha can survive the cold or not, the somewhat sobering fact remains that they are sporadically reported in the region year after year.

If it seems odd for piranha to be caught in the Great lakes, there is also the peculiar case of a red bellied piranha caught in England. The 1lb, 4 oz fish was pulled in by angler Derek Plum, 46, at a small pond in Radnor Park in Folkestone, Kent. It was an extraordinary find, as reports of such tropical fish, so far from home in the wild in Britain are practically unheard of.

When fishing in England, as bizarre a catch as it may seem, piranha are still not the strangest thing that has been caught in British waterways. That distinction would probably have to go to the 196 pound swordfish caught by fisherman Brian Hynd in a Scottish river where no swordfish should ever have been found.

Hynd was out for a day of fishing with his nephew on the River Forth when he made the amazing catch far up river, 20 miles from sea. Swordfish are typically found in tropical and temperate waters. They are not known to venture as far north as Scotland and are never seen in rivers, which made the surprise catch quite a mind-boggling experience. Nothing of the sort had ever been seen in the River Forth before.

The River Forth

Yet the story gets even stranger. The swordfish, nowhere near its natural habitat, was not even caught on a hook and line. Hynd is a lobster fisherman. He had not really expected to catch any lobster in the river, as it was freshwater and lobster aren’t found that far inland, yet nevertheless he had set the pots out as sort of an experiment after hearing wild rumors of lobster being caught fairly far upriver.

Hynd was out collecting the lobster pots, which were totally empty as expected, when he found the swordfish thrashing about in the water, tangled in the lines of one of the pots. He described catching such a large swordfish so far up river as the shock of his life. Experts were also very surprised at the find.

Hynd with his unusual catch

There are a variety of reasons for why aquatic out of place animals might end up in such odd places. Sometimes it is due to climate change, which disperses populations outside of their historic ranges. Other times it is released or escaped pets, or animals introduced by humans in other ways, either intentionally or not. Maybe it is the result of a shortage of resources in their usual habitat which causes them to venture out in search of food, or a disaster of some sort uprooting an animal and whisking it away far from its home. Maybe the animal is just plain lost.

Whatever the reasons may be, one thing is for certain. When you are at your favorite swimming or fishing hole, or even enjoying a game of golf, and you come across a creature you never expected to see there in this place you thought you knew so well, it is easy to gain an appreciation for just how weird and unpredictable nature can be.

[MIKA27]

Shrimp Packs a Punch and Inspires Stronger Materials

Aquariums displaying the colorful peacock mantis shrimp are warned to place it in a tank with reinforced glass because the little crustacean can pack a big punch using its fist-like front club. Researchers finally decided to see what’s behind this unusual strength and the result is some tough new material for airplanes, cars, body armor and even football helmets.

As described in a report in the journal Acta Biomaterialia, researchers at University of California, Riverside, University of Southern California and Purdue University studied the club which the 6-inch mantis shrimp or stomatopod can swing at the speed of a 22-caliber bullet with a force of more than 1,000 times its own weight. The club also creates cavitation that boils the water and generates a secondary shockwave.

The researchers used carbon fiber-epoxy composites to recreate the spiralized arrangement of the mineralized fiber layers of the shrimp’s shell. The spiral or helicoidal structure provides shock absorption as well as strength.

Tough material and the shrimp version that inspired it

To test the material, they used a drop weight impact test, common in the aircraft industry, that created 100 joules of energy on impact. The results were compared to materials made with unidirectional or parallel layers and materials with alternating cross layers. The mantis shrimp’s spiral design was better than both at resisting external damage by 15 to 20 percent.

In the news release, David Kisailus of UC Riverside’s Bourns College of Engineering confirms what we already know:

"Biology has an incredible diversity of species, which can provide us new design cues and synthetic routes to the next generation of advanced materials for light-weight automobiles, aircraft and other structural applications.

Not to mention for breaking open clam shells.

[MIKA27]

Pulp Hero Flash Gordon May Be Headed Back to the Big Screen

Eighty years after his creation and following multiple television and film adaptations, 20th Century Fox has reportedly scooped up the rights to bring Flash Gordon back to the big screen. Considering the pop culture property land-grab that is Hollywood tentpole filmmaking, it was inevitable that eventually the pulp comic hero would be in the running again, but Gordon’s been done before. A lot. So the inevitable question is: Will this one do it right?

So far all that’s known about the new project is that veteran producer John Davis will be handling the film, according to The Hollywood Reporter, and up-and-coming Star Trek 3 scribes J.D. Payne and Patrick McKay have signed on to do the script. Not a bad pedigree, but not a lot to go on either.

But even though little is known about the new adaptation, a lot is known about past incarnations of Flash. The first came just two years after his creation by cartoonist Alex Raymond in 1934 and had the high-flying football star headlining a serial starring a bottle-blond Buster Crabbe. That was followed by a live-action television series in the 1950s and several animated adaptations in the ’70s, ’80s, and ’90s. There was even a notorious 1974 porn parody called Flesh Gordon—which was popular enough to merit an edited R-rated re-release and is a remarkably faithful homage to the old Crabbe serials.

But, standing out from all of those incarnations, it was arguably sci-fi mogul Dino De Laurentiis’s 1980 movie that got the tone right. Telling a successful Flash story requires a certain degree of tongue-in-cheek commitment to camp and the producer’s now-cult-classic feature film version came complete with a Flash played by one-time Playgirl centerfold Sam J. Jones and backed by a soundtrack by operatic rock legends Queen. It wasn’t a huge commercial success, but it nailed the saturated, high-flying classic-pulp feel of the Raymond comic strips.

It’s impossible to tell if this latest reboot will emulate that campy formula, especially in the era big hero tentpole films, but fingers crossed that Flash’s latest foray into the spotlight will be able to give the pulp hero the high-shine approach his character and concept demand.

[MIKA27]

Meet the Pro-Russian Separatists of Eastern Ukraine

Ukraine has alleged that Russian forces are operating in the east of the country. But one man, whose bearded face appears in photographs seen around the world, tells TIME that he and his comrades do not work for the Russian government.

Spend a few days riding around the separatist badlands of eastern Ukraine, and you’d have a good chance of running into Alexander Mozhaev, the fighter suspected of being a Russian government operative. He’s hard to miss, and not just because photographs of him – or claiming to be of him – have been made available by the Ukrainian government in recent days. His beard, which juts out of his face like a spade, has made him something of a mascot for the local separatists.

Perhaps aptly, Mozhaev’s nickname among them is Babay, the Russian word for bogeyman, which is exactly what the Ukrainian government has tried to make him. Over the past week, authorities in Kiev have released photographs that purport to prove that Mozhaev is an agent of the Russian military intelligence service known as GRU, and they have shared that information with senior western diplomats and some reporters. This claim has been at the center of their narrative that Russian special forces, controlled by the Kremlin, have taken over towns in the Donbass, the industrial heartland of eastern Ukraine.

But Mozhaev, a mild-mannered fighter with a chest like a barrel, says he only wishes that were true, and so do many of the people in the separatist-controlled towns that dot this region. If Russian forces had indeed taken over eastern Ukraine, as they did in Crimea last month, the streets of the separatist stronghold of Slavyansk would probably not be nearly as lawless as they have become in recent days. On the ground, the conflict in this town of 120,000 feels far more erratic and dangerous than the Russian occupation of Crimea, where a sense of order largely prevailed, in part because of the presence of disciplined and professional Russian troops. The ranks of the so-called “green men” who are running Slavyansk, in contrast to those troops, appear to be made up mostly of war veterans, itinerant pro-Russian nationalists and ethnic Cossacks from across the former Soviet Union. Fitting neatly into all these categories is Mozhaev, a Russian citizen, whose fellow fighters are now armed not only with assault rifles and rocket propelled grenades, but also tanks and armored vehicles that they have seized from the Ukrainian army.

Mozhaev and his comrades took control of Slavyansk about a week ago. But over the last few days there has been no evident sign that they are receiving material support from Russia. Their foot soldiers have been so short on fuel that they have asked journalists to bring them gasoline in exchange for granting interviews, saying they don’t have enough fuel to go on patrols.

Their leader, Vyacheslav Ponomaryov, a soap manufacturer who took the title of “people’s mayor” after seizing power, has pleaded for assistance from Russian President Vladimir Putin, but has apparently been ignored. “We need guns, you understand? We’re running out of everything but spirit,” he told TIME. His militia force, he admits, is made up partly of volunteers who have come from Russia, Belarus, Kazakhstan and other parts of the former Soviet Union. But Kiev’s cries of a separatist insurgency fueled with money, weapons and troops from the Russian government look out of sync with the reality in Slavyansk.

No one embodies that disconnect quite like Mozhaev. In trying to link him to Russia’s GRU special forces, the government in Kiev has offered two blurry photos as evidence. One of them, allegedly taken during the Russian invasion of Georgia in 2008, shows a bearded man wearing the GRU insignia – a black bat with its wings spanning the globe – on the shoulder of his uniform. The second photo, taken this year in eastern Ukraine, shows Mozhaev dressed in camouflage among his fellow separatists. Kiev says the two photos are of the same man. Mozhaev finds that slightly flattering but altogether false.

When TIME tracked him down on Monday night, Mozhaev and his men had just finished taking over the local headquarters of the Security Service of Ukraine, or SBU, in the town of Kramatorsk, a short drive from their base of operations in Slavyansk. Having met no resistance at the SBU that evening, he and his men were riding around Kramatorsk in a dark green van, which looked like a windowless, Soviet version of an old VW Camper. The vehicle, whose fender had been stenciled with the words “People’s Militia of the Donbass,” disgorged at least ten heavily armed passengers in mismatching camouflage uniforms.

This was the rapid reaction force of the local separatist militia. Mozhaev is a member of that force. TIME showed him the picture supposedly placing him in Georgia during the 2008 war. With a smile, he said: “I’ve never even been to Georgia, not even for a holiday.” His men then gathered around to laugh at the photos of Mozhaev and the man in Georgia, slapping Mozhaev on the back as he learned that he was not only famous, but a famous Russian special forces agent. “That guy looks more like Osama bin Laden than our Babay,” one of the gunmen remarked.

In reality, Mozhaev, 36, fits the description of many of the separatist fighters in the area around Slavyansk, a zone of about 100 km in diameter that all branches of the Ukrainian state, from the police to the tax authorities, have effectively abandoned to the separatists. According to his passport, which he showed to TIME, Mozhaev hails from the town of Belorechensk in the southern Russian region of Krasnodar, the traditional stomping ground of the Cossacks, the warrior clan into which he was born.

Though he would have liked to have served in the Russian special forces, he says his service was in the regular Russian army, and it ended in the mid-1990s, when he attained the rank of staff sergeant. His reasons for coming to Ukraine in March had a bit to do with Russian nationalism, but more to do with adventurism, and even more to do with his apparently being a fugitive from Russian law. Earlier this year, Mozhaev said, just as a revolution was forcing Ukraine’s old regime from power, he was charged in Krasnodar with a violent crime – which he described as “threatening to kill someone with a knife.” When he failed to come up with the bribe money for the corrupt officials who he says fabricated the charges, Mozhaev was put on a national wanted list in Russia and went on the run, according to his account, which could not be verified.

By coincidence, he says, he was forced to flee arrest on March 7, in the middle of Russia’s invasion of Crimea. He chose Crimea as his destination. As TIME reported last month, thousands of state-sponsored Russian Cossacks were then streaming into Crimea to aid the Russian troops with that invasion. For most of March, Mozhaev says, he was there along with some of the men from his Cossack battalion, the Wolves’ Hundred, helping in the siege of a Ukrainian military base near the city of Bakhchysarai and guarding a local TV tower. In late March, after Russia annexed the Crimean Peninsula, “we were sitting around down there and wondering what to do next,” he says. “So we decided to go conquer some more historically Russian lands.” Eventually he wound up in Slavyansk, where Ponomaryov was glad to welcome him into his separatist militia.

As of Monday, Ponomaryov said his forces number around 2,500. That number is impossible to verify. Many of his armed supporters wear civilian clothes and do not appear to be part of any military or organized paramilitary group. Well-armed fighters such as Mozhaev make up a small minority of Ponomaryov’s force, perhaps a few hundred men at most, with a fair share of Cossacks among them. Known as “green men” for the camouflage uniforms they wear, these militia members are not as well drilled and equipped as the Russian troops who occupied Crimea last month. If there is a Russian military presence currently in Slavyansk, it has remained or is now out of public view.

From the beginning, the head of Ponomaryov’s militia force has been a wiry man who goes by the nickname Romashka, which means Daisy in Russian. Romashka claims to have served in a branch of the Russian military in Chechnya, attaining the rank of captain. Some years ago, he says, he married a Ukrainian woman, took Ukrainian citizenship and moved to eastern Ukraine.

These days, Romashka drives around Slavyansk in a police cruiser, having removed the license plates and affixed a separatist flag to the hood. When asked about his ties to the Russian security services, Romashka smiles and says, “Well, let’s leave that between the lines.” But the statements coming out of Kiev about a Russian military operation in eastern Ukraine have left him a bit perplexed. “My buddies watch TV and then call me to say we have some kind of military conflict going on, with tanks, shooting, the works, like in Chechnya,” he says in an interview at the separatist headquarters in the center of Slavyansk. “In reality, it’s not like that. They’ve made up a war.”

In recent days, Kiev has intensified its efforts to prove that Russian special forces are operating in eastern Ukraine. Its evidence, according to the New York Times, is built around a series of photographs, including the one of Mozhaev, which the Ukrainian authorities have passed on to the U.S. State Department and the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe. It is not clear to what extent those pictures have influenced Western decision-making on the crisis in Ukraine, but Jen Psaki, a spokeswoman for the State Department, has said that the U.S. and its allies “don’t have a shadow of a doubt about the connection” between what she called “the Russians” and the armed militants in eastern Ukraine. But if that connection exists, it is not as explicit as it was in Crimea.

For his part, Mozhaev hopes that help is indeed on its way from Moscow. “Russians don’t leave Russians in the lurch,” he says. “So before the American menace comes to my homeland, I came here to stop it, and to get back some Russian land in the process.” The criminal charges against him, however, will keep him from returning to his homeland any time soon. In May or June, his wife back in Krasnodar is due to give birth to his first son – “a full-blooded Cossack,” he says. But he’s resigned himself to missing that family occasion. “When we take Kiev, I’ll go back, and then we’ll celebrate.”

[MIKA27]

BICYCLE 1800 VINTAGE SERIES PLAYING CARDS

It’s tough to have that smoky, old time vibe going on for your poker night when the felt on the table is factory fresh, the seal on the whiskey bottle is barely broken, and the cards have nary a dent in them. You’re on your own for the first two, but these Bicycle 1800 Vintage Series Playing Cards will do the trick nicely for conveying that lived-in look at your next Texas Hold ‘Em tourney.

Make no mistake, these genuine Bicycle cards are brand new, but their distressed look makes it seem like they were used by guys with names like Stanley, Theodore, and Mortimer, maybe with Eleanor coming in to offer the boys a little postgame whoopee. They’re made in the USA, and they probably make cheesy card tricks look much cooler too. [Purchase]

[MIKA27]

VICTORINOX SWISS ARMY INOX WATCH

Perhaps the worst part of working at a cinder block factory – other than the fact that you have to tell people you work at a cinder block factory – is the occasional bone-crushing cinder block falling on your person. Besides the pain, think of what they do to wristwatches. Dear heavens!

The designers at Victorinox Swiss Army have clearly thought of that, as they’re unveiling the INOX, a watch that’s destined for the arms of cinder block factory employees everywhere. Made from a solid stainless steel block, this timepiece gets the added protectuion of a removable nylon and silicone bumper. Each INOX is rigorously tested, including making sure it can withstand a 10-meter drop onto concrete, as well as the weight of a 25-ton truck rolling over it. For whatever reason, there’s been a shortage of cinder block test participants, but we’re sure it’ll do just fine there. [Purchase]

[MIKA27]

LYTRO ILLUM CAMERA

As prevalent as smartphone cameras and easy-to-use photo filters might be right now, there is still an unmistakable art to taking a professional-looking photograph. The Lytro Illum is looking to make that art form a lot simpler.

Lytro debuted its first model three years ago, wowing the tech world with a camera that could snap a picture, then let users refocus the image later. The new Illum still does that neat little trick, but it also ups the ante, as its aimed at more of the pro shooter market with features like an 8x optical zoom, 30-250mm equivalent focal lens with a constant f/2.0 aperture and 1:3 macro, and 4-inch glass touchscreen with a backlit LCD. The Illum’s software also lets you change the depth of field and create 3-D images. Lyto is taking pre-orders now at $1,499, with shipments expected to go out in August.

http://youtu.be/A9djBssNgzE

[MIKA27]

Will nuclear-powered spaceships take us to the stars?

In the 1950s, rocket scientists dreamed of atomic-powered spaceships. Now these far-fetched designs might help a new generation explore the cosmos.

Project Orion has to be the most audacious, dangerous and downright absurd space programme ever funded by the US taxpayer. This 1950s design involved exploding nuclear bombs behind a spacecraft the size of the Empire State Building to propel it through space. The Orion’s engine would generate enormous amounts of energy – and with it lethal doses of radiation.

Plans suggested the spacecraft could take off from Earth and travel to Mars and back in just three months. The quickest flight using conventional rockets and the right planetary alignment is 18 months.

There were obvious challenges – from irradiating the crew and the launch site, to the disruption caused by the electromagnetic pulse, plus the dangers of a catastrophic nuclear accident taking out a sizable portion of the US. But the plan was, nevertheless, given serious consideration. Project Orion was conceived when atmospheric nuclear tests were commonplace and the power of the atom promised us all a bright new tomorrow. Or oblivion. Life was simpler then.

In the early 1960s, common sense prevailed and the project was abandoned, but the idea of nuclear-powered spaceships has never gone away. In fact there are several in the cold depths of space right now.

Nasa's Nerva project also investigated the use of nuclear engines in space

The Voyager space probes, currently heading beyond the bounds of the Solar System, and the Cassini spacecraft in orbit around Saturn are fitted with nuclear power plants. These Radioisotope Thermoelectric Generators (RTGs) rely on the natural decay of plutonium to generate heat, which is then converted into electricity.

With no moving parts, RTGs are not nuclear reactors and can only generate a few hundred watts of power (the equivalent of a bright lightbulb). But as ambitions for missions deeper into our solar system grow, much larger spaceships propelled by more powerful nuclear generators are back on the agenda.

“Orion was a visionary project,” says Kelvin Long, physicist, engineer and head of the Initiative for Interstellar Studies. “People who are excited about this stuff don’t live in the present, we live in the future.”

Long’s immediate future involves helping to design a starship – a robotic craft that could travel at high speed beyond our Solar System to other nearby stars. A starship travelling at thousands of kilometres per second could reach Mars in weeks, the outer solar system in months and other star systems in years. Long is not alone. There are several other programmes underway, including the 100 Year Starship project backed by the US military research agency, Darpa.

To achieve this goal, the ships will need much more powerful propulsion systems than conventional chemical rockets or solar-powered probes. “It’s all about generating enormous amounts of energy,” says Long. “You can get much more efficient power generation from nuclear systems, such as fission or fusion.”

In the 1970s, the Daedalus project combined a nuclear fusion engine with helium fuel cells

Fission involves splitting atomic nuclei in a controlled chain reaction to produce energy. Conventional nuclear power stations and the generating plants on nuclear submarines and ships use the technique to make electricity. It is a well established, but not incident-free, science. In the fusion process, on the other hand, the nuclei of atoms are forced together to release energy. It is what powers the Sun, and the hydrogen bomb.

“Fusion produces much more energy, in terms of bang for your buck, compared to fission-based systems,” says Long, explaining why his group’s starship designers favour fusion propulsion. “We know it’s a very efficient process. If you can do it you can produce a power generation system which will move you outside the Solar System and you don’t have to come back for more rocket fuel.”

Power challenge

However, as anyone who has followed the field knows, despite the multi-billion-dollar global effort that has gone into fusion research over the past half century, no one has yet built a fusion reactor that produces more energy then you put in. There is an in-joke among fusion engineers (and their journalist followers) that a viable fusion power plant is always 30 years away.

Undeterred, various concepts for fusion engines have been proposed. One, funded by Nasa, involves a contained atomic reaction that generates a focused beam of charged particles to push the starship along. Apart from the enormous thrust such a system could generate – well in excess of conventional rockets – as you travel around the cosmos you could tap into a ready supply of suitable fuel, such as helium 3.

“There’s helium 3 in the gas giants like Jupiter, absolutely loads of it,” says Long. “You could mine it with huge balloons that you drop into the atmosphere, separate out the helium, load it into your starship and away you go.” It seems that no problem is too big for those who live in the future.

In the film 2001: A Space Odyssey, the Discovery's design kept the nuclear engines far away from living quarters

Most 21st-Century starship designs owe a great deal to the Daedalus interstellar craft, conceived by members of the British Interplanetary Society in the 1970s. Assembled in orbit, like the International Space Station (ISS), and a similar size to Orion, the concept starship was powered by a fusion engine surrounded by bulbous tanks of helium fuel.

But even assuming all this is doable, there remains one particularly sticky problem. It’s the same issue that faced the designers of Project Orion back in the 1950s. You can build and power-up your fusion engine in space to avoid nuclear fallout, but how do you protect your astronauts from dying of radiation sickness?

The Orion solution was to put thick metal or liquid shielding between crew and nuclear material. The latest concepts suggest a better idea might be to build long thin ships, where the engine is several hundred metres away from the habitation modules. Not unlike the spaceship in 2001: A Space Odyssey.

If a viable fusion reactor can be developed, Long reckons we could we see a nuclear-powered ship heading out of our immediate cosmic neighbourhood to the stars and planets beyond within the next century. “We would like to see humanity moving outwards and following the pioneers and dreams of the past,” he says. “We feel we’re working towards a future that’s good for humanity.”

Project Orion may have been ill-conceived, foolhardy and environmentally irresponsible, but nuclear power could yet be a tool to take humans to the stars.

[MIKA27]

Lou Ferrigno to voice Hulk in Avengers: Age Of Ultron

Long-time Hulk actor/voice artist Lou Ferrigno has confirmed that he'll be back to voice the green giant again in Joss Whedon's Avengers: Age Of Ultron.

Don't worry, though, Hulk won't be attempting to rival Tony Stark in the blabbermouth stakes – Ferrigno is onboard to provide Hulk's signature ground-shaking roars.

Ferrigno previously played Hulk on screen in two TV shows called The Incredible Hulk (one in the '70s, the other in the '90s), plus numerous standalone movies including The Death Of The Incredible Hulk.

He also voiced everybody's favourite trouser-buster in Ed Norton rebootThe Incredible Hulkas well as Avengers Assemble (though that "puny god" line was actually spoken by Mark Ruffalo).

Avengers: Age Of Ultron opens in the UK on 24 April 2015.

[MIKA27]

TWISTED ALPINE EDITION LAND ROVER DEFENDER

Just when you thought the beloved Land Rover Defender couldn’t get any better, the English design team at Twisted Performance got their hands on one. Say hello to the Land Rover Defender Alpine Edition.

There are two different versions of the Twisted Alpine available, including the Alpine 90 and 110. Both variations have been outfitted with everything you need to tackle the great outdoors, all while toting your family, friends, and gear with you. Upgrades include the Twisted P10+ performance kit, gas B6 dampers, halogen crystal headlight conversion, and a whole lot more. Of course each one is also finished off in that beautiful white paint job paired with a set of powder coated gloss black 20-inch Eltex alloy wheels wrapped in Cooper ties.

[MIKA27]

iOS 7.1 Developers' Source Code Hints At Siri For Apple TV

Apple’s virtual helper might soon appear in additional types of hardware from the tech giant, with snippets of code found within the iOS 7.1 SDK suggesting that a version of Siri for Apple TV may be in the works.

The discovery hinges around the device identifier “3″ that’s been found inside the Assistant call code in iOS 7.1 and 7.1.1. That particular UIDeviceFamily reference number refers to Apple TV throughout Apple’s software, a fact that men who analyse stuff agree means Siri will soon start offering to search for TV content on our behalf. Fingers very firmly crossed.

[MIKA27]

People Don't Notice The Homeless, Even When They're Family Members

To most people living in cities around the world, the homeless have essentially become invisible. They blend into the streets, they’re background noise, they’re just a part of the fabric of a city, like buildings and street lights. To prove how invisible the homeless are to normal decent folks, NYC Rescue Mission did a social experiment where they dressed people’s family members as homeless to see how they would react.

Everybody just walked by without saying a word to their family, some never even gave a glance to their relatives.

The clip gets a bit heavy handed, but if you can ignore that, the NYC Rescue Mission wants to do something to help out the homeless.

http://youtu.be/u6jSKLtmYdM

[MIKA27]

Italy Wants To Turn Its Old Bridges Into Inverted Skyscrapers

Southern Italy is dotted with hulking aqueducts that went out of service years ago. In an attempt to find a new use for the structures in lieu of tearing it down, the government held a competition. One of the winning designs will blow your mind.

This proposal to repurpose an abandoned concrete viaduct in Calabria could be described as a series of connected, inverted skyscrapers. Dreamt up by the always impressive team at Oxo Architecture, the plan not only rethinks the bridge structure but also the very idea of neighborhoods. The structure’s location high up and near the ocean makes for incredible views — so why not build a new kind of community to enjoy the splendor.

“The idea is to turn it into something like a city within the bridge,” said Oxo’s Manal Rachdi told FastCo Exist. “I call it an inverted high-rise. In a high rise you come from downstairs and go up. In this, you have your car waiting for you upstairs, and you go maybe 150 feet down to get to your apartment.”

With ideas that seem straight out of a Jetsons episode, the “vertical village” includes houses with lawns, offices, schools, and a pedestrian walkway on top. And, because the Italian government asked for something sustainable, the design includes its own rainwater collection tank, water treatment plant, and geothermal power plant.

It’s also just plain pretty to look at.

The major problem with the design, however, is the fact that Italy doesn’t have the money to pay for it. The location of the bridge also puts it right in the middle of Mafia territory, a detail that’s proved problematic for infrastructure projects in the past.

[MIKA27]

The Typhoon Looks Like A Cool Futuristic Fighter With Its New Top Tanks

This picture — taken by aeroplane photographer Luigi Sani — shows a weird smooth hump on the central fuselage of an Eurofighter Typhoon. It’s one of its two new top Conformal Fuel Tanks, designed to further extend its range. They are now being tested by BAE Systems in wind tunnels.

The Typhoon can already carry traditional CFTs under its wings.

A Typhoon model with the top CFTs in a wind tunnel.

An Israeli F-16 with similar tanks.

[MIKA27]

Arecibo Observatory Confirms Existence of Mysterious Intergalactic Radio Bursts

In November 2007, a team of astronomers led by West Virginia researcher Duncan Lorimer uncovered a really cool, and really strange, intergalactic radio signal that they attributed to a supernova. Flash forward a few years later, and we found evidence of similar radio bursts from Parkes Observatory in New South Wales.

Swinburne University discusses the original Lorimer and Parkes bursts, and what they may mean, here:

Now the Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico has confirmed the signals, removing any possibility that this is a fluke.

Are we being contacted by extraterrestrial worlds? If we are, they’re doing a terrible job of it—the bursts are short, fast, and not particularly complex. They’re exactly the sort of thing you’d expect to see from a series of cosmic explosions 10 billion years or so ago, but they don’t correspond well with what we’d ordinarily expect to find from supernovae. Which doesn’t necessarily mean that they’re not supernovae, since our understanding of supernovae isn’t exactly comprehensive.

But more likely we’re discovering a new kind of star. Some researchers have credibly speculated that what we might be picking up are the emanations of blitzars and magnetars, stars whose existence has been theorized but never observed, or the death throes of a dissolving black hole. It’s all highly speculative at this point, but what we do know for certain is that the radio signals are very real, very loud, and (probably) very old and very far off.

[MIKA27]

WORLD RECORD BASE JUMP AT BURJ KHALIFA, DUBAI

According to French skydivers Fred Fugen and Vince Reffet, there is no fear in base jumping – they do it just for fun. “If you are scared, there is no fun.” The 2 must have had one hell of a time when they set the world record by jumping of the Vurj Khalifa building.

After taking practice jumps at the nearby Lauterbeunnen Mountain (and even a few jumps from a helicopter), Fugen and Reffet decided it was time to tackle Dubai’s tallest building. The Burj Khalifa structure towers 2,700 feet tall, and helped the two adrenaline junkies earn themselves a spot in the Guinness Book of World Records for the tallest BASE jump of all time.

[MIKA27]

CAN-AM OUTLANDER 6×6 ATV

The odds of you running into Bigfoot in the woods, engaging him in hand-to-hand combat, and emerging victorious may be slim, but if that were to happen, how would you lug home your trophy? You’re gonna need something like the Can-Am Outlander 6×6 ATV.

The Rotax V-Twin 1000 engine delivers on-demand six wheel drive, while the ability to tow 1,653 pounds of Sasquatch is vital. Or, if he’s a little lighter than we all believed he was, the 800-pound cargo capacity will do. Factor in a CVT transmission with an extra low gear, an SST G2 frame, an anti-theft system, and pre wiring for a rear winch, and you can see why the Outlander has to be on the short list of Bigfoot-hunting vehicles. Check out the video below. [Purchase]

[MIKA27]

THE SLIDE CORK WALLET BY STITCH & LOCKE

In the old days, baseball players would use burnt corks to create eye black to help shield them from the sun. Today, old corks are being transformed into wallets. That, my friend, is cork progress.

The SLIDE Wallet by Stich & Locke is made from eco-friendly materials, including a durable cork exterior and an interior pocket. The wallet holds 8 cards and plenty of cash, but the super slim design is the big appeal here, with a very stealthy profile allowing it to be a front pocket accessory as well as the back. SLIDE’s corner notch lets you easily slip out lesser used cards whenever you want them, and we imagine in a real pinch, you could also use this wallet to keep your wine fresh. [Purchase]

[MIKA27]

Cold War Spy-Satellite Images Unveil Lost Cities

A study of Cold War spy-satellite photos has tripled the number of known archaeological sites across the Middle East, revealing thousands of ancient cities, roads, canals, and other ruins.

In recent decades archaeologists have often used declassified satellite images to spot archaeological sites in Iraq, Turkey, and Syria.

But the new Corona Atlas of the Middle East, unveiled Thursday at the Society for American Archaeology's annual meeting, moves spy-satellite science to a new level. Surveying land from Egypt to Iran—and encompassing the Fertile Crescent, the renowned cradle of civilization and location of some of humanity's earliest cities—the atlas reveals numerous sites that had been lost to history.

"Some of these sites are gigantic, and they were completely unknown," says atlas-team archaeologist Jesse Casana of the University of Arkansas, who presented the results. "We can see all kinds of things—ancient roads and canals. The images provide a very comprehensive picture."

The team had started with a list of roughly 4,500 known archaeological sites across the Middle East, says Casana. The spy-satellite images revealed another 10,000 that had previously been unknown.

The largest sites, in Syria and Turkey, are most likely Bronze Age cities, he says, and include ruined walls and citadels. Two of them cover more than 123 acres (50 hectares).

Signs of ancient habitation are visible in this satellite image of Tell Hamoukar in eastern Syria.

But, says Casana, "it's not just new places to excavate. We have a real way with all these sites to look across the whole Middle East and see how it was connected."

The new Middle East atlas reflects both the opportunities and challenges facing archaeologists, who must handle ever larger amounts of data from excavation sites and entire regions, says information-science scholar Eric Kansa of the Alexandria Archive Institute in San Francisco, who spoke at the meeting. "This is big data," Kansa says. "We have the opportunity to really blow up the scale of our efforts in archaeology."

Cold Warrior

The end of the Cold War led to the public release of Corona spy-satellite images by U.S. defense officials almost two decades ago. The spy satellite made images from 1960 to 1972, and the atlas samples only some of the 188,000 images taken from 1967 to 1972 by the last generation of the satellites. The images of the Earth's surface, intended to expose Soviet missile bases and military camps, had a resolution of two meters (6.6 feet).

A missile launch site near Chelyabinsk in the USSR is outlined in this 1969 image.

Current imaging satellites, such as the privately owned DigitalGlobe based in Longmont, Colorado, return better resolution images, but "they can't go back in time," says Casana.

The Corona images, he explains, were made before cities such as Mosul in Iraq and Amman in Jordan overran the many archaeological sites near them. Dams have also flooded river valleys, covering many other archaeological sites. As cities grew, the industrial farming and irrigation that supported them grew too, obscuring roads and sites clearly visible in the spy-satellite images.

"Even with much better resolution, we can't see a site that someone has covered up with a building," Casana says.

Information Warfare

"This project is just incredible," says Syro-Palestinian archaeologist David Schloen of the University of Chicago. "It's amazing what their atlas can do."

The mapping team, for example, set up their site to allow you to look at the 1960s images of a given location side by side with views of it today.

The 1960s image at left captures an area of southern Iraq's marshes, many of which have since been drained. The photo at right is of the same location in the early 2000s.

Corona satellites photographed the Earth in swaths 120 miles (193 kilometers) long by 10 miles (16 kilometers) wide. Film strips were delivered from space inside parachute-equipped buckets, and the film's stretched and distorted views of the Earth required special optics to sort out. The existence of the photographs was officially kept secret until 1992.

Much of the atlas team's work has involved tying landmarks in the Corona images, purchased from the U.S. Geological Survey, to mapped landmarks in modern-day images. The landmarks also helped computers remove distortions in the original spy-satellite images.

"We don't want to stop here," Casana says. Many of the Corona images cover other areas of great interest to archaeologists, including Africa and China.

"Corona is amazing," he says. "We really have coverage from almost everywhere."

[MIKA27]

E.T. Found In New Mexico Landfill

One of the most infamous urban legends in video games has turned out to be true.

Digging in Alamogordo, New Mexico today, excavators discovered cartridges for the critically-panned Atari game E.T., buried in a landfill way back in 1983 after Atari couldn’t figure out what else to do with their unsold copies. For decades, legend had it that Atari put millions of E.T. cartridges in the ground, though some sceptics have wondered whether such an extraordinary event actually happened. (Of course, news outlets like the New York Times reported on the dump back in 1983.)

Last year, Alamogordo officials finally approved an excavation of the infamous landfill, and plans kicked into motion two weeks ago, with Microsoft partnering up with a documentary team to dig into the dirt and film the results.

Today, it’s official. They have found E.T.’s home — though it’s unclear whether there are really millions or even thousands of copies down there. The AP reports they have found “hundreds” so far.

MIKA: Ahhh, what memories. Good old ATARI 2600

[MIKA27]

America's Tactical Nukes Are Worth Twice Their Weight In Gold

The GBU-57A-B is by far America’s biggest bunker buster, but it’s not actually its most powerful one. That acclaim goes to the deep diving, hard hitting, supersonic B-61 tactical nuclear bomb. And the US is about to spend more than $US11 billion to ensure it stays on the front lines through the middle of the next decade.

Originally developed in 1960 at Los Alamos National Labs as a tactical nuclear device — that is, a bunker-busting casing wrapped around a small nuclear warhead — for penetrating heavily fortified installations and vaporizing everything inside. They were used throughout the Cold War as NATO’s front line deterrents against potential Soviet expansion, and have since become a cornerstone of the US Enduring Stockpile arsenal of nuclear weapons.

There have been a total of nine variants of the B-61, capable of delivering yields in the 0.3 to 340 kiloton range depending on settings and configurations. That’s a couple of magnitudes larger than the paltry 15 kiloton warhead we dropped on Hiroshima. The newest version, the B-61 Mk 11, has been in service since 1997. It measures just under 3.7m long and 33cm in diameter, and weighs in the neighbourhood of 317.5kg (roughly what previous iterations have). Its W80 nuclear warhead weighs another 131.5kg. However, unlike early B-61 models that relied on unstable plastic bonded explosives to implode the core, the Mk 11 employs insensitive high explosives which will not detonate if exposed to fire, shock, or impact.

With its streamlined casing, the B-61 can be mounted under the wing of a number of US aircraft — primarily the B-2 Spirit but also the F/A-18 Hornet, A-6 Intruder, F-15E Strike Eagle, basically all NATO dual role fighters. Its shape allows it to withstand extended supersonic flights and can be released at Mach 2 as low as 15.2m above the deck. The B-61 can be programmed for air burst, laydown detonation (floating to the ground using a carbon fibre parachute then exploding), and timed detonation.

It’s also far more accurate than older air dropped nuclear bombs, which reduces the necessary size of the warhead. Wherein previous tactical nukes would require a 400 kiloton equivalent head to compensate for their wide, 110-170 meter targeting radius, the B-61 will strike within just 30m (same as a JDAM) of its intended target, eliminating the need for a huge warhead to blow through that additional 100-plus metres of dirt.

Critics have voiced a number of concerns with the continued deployment of these tactical nukes. They worry that the nukes will spread radioactive fallout beyond their intended target (there’s really not much left but a smouldering crater after this thing goes boom), placing civilian lives and health in jeopardy for years to come. Plus, the political and diplomatic fallout from launching another nuke would be catastrophic for the US, what with the multiple international treaties doing so would violate.

Still, these weapons offer an unparalleled degree of deterrence, which is why the USAF is angling for $US11.6 billion to refurbish the existing stockpile of B-61 Mk11′s (estimates range from 200 to 400 units in all) into new Mk12s. These refurbished warheads would be variable yield with a user selectable detonation between 0.3, 5, 10, and 50 kilotons and could remain in service through 2025. A separate $US178 million retrofit to the Mk11′s tailfins begun in 2012 will allow the F-35 Lightning II to carry them as well as add a modest stand-off capability.

However, US Congress has stringently opposed the warhead renovations, and insists that the Pentagon look into alternatives — like maybe not using nuclear bunker busters in the heart of Europe.

[MIKA27]

Oh God, This Giant Fused Hornet's Nest Looks Like It Swallowed A Human

When you let bugs run wild inside a shed for years, you never know what you’re gonna get. Like this hornet’s nest that fused together with a wooden statue to look like a sand creature swallowing a trapped human head. It’s haunting.

The nest is currently abandoned, so I guess the hornets moved on to build their home somewhere else. Or this is all just a trap trojan horse to sting us silly humans.

[MIKA27]

Drones Could Help Reduce Poaching In Kenya By 96 Per Cent

Drones will soon fill the skies above Kenya’s 52 national parks and reserves, after a successful pilot program showed that they’re effective at stopping poachers. Very effective: In the pilot program, drones reduced poaching by a remarkable 96 per cent.

Of course, the drones have some help. “Use of drones has shown that we can prevent poaching and arrest many poachers on their tracks,” Paul Udoto, spokesman for the Kenya Wildlife Service (KWS), told The Guardian. “The pilot project has been a success and we are working with many partners including the Kenya police, the National Intelligence Service, and a lot of international partners such as Interpol, Ugandan and Tanzanian governments.” The drones themselves use radio frequencies to monitor the movement of the wildlife and spot poachers before they strike.

Using drones to monitor wildlife is nothing new, but this is one of the first statistics showing the efficacy of such a program. While poachers have killed 435 elephants and about 400 rhinos in Kenya since 2012, only 51 elephants and 18 rhinos have been lost this year. We’ll soon see if the program will actually scale.

[MIKA27]

Apple Filed A Patent For An Interactive Hologram

Patent and Trademark Office just published another patent from Apple that revolves around an interactive 3D display system, or a hologram. Apple filed for the patent in Oct. 2012, and according to Apple Insider, it combines a number of “known display techniques” to create this version of a hologram.

The idea is that you would be able to interact with projected images that are just hanging out mid-air. You could control and manipulate the images with swipes and other gestures. Imagine pinching and zooming a hologram.

Apple’s method of projecting this hologram includes a display system, an optical system, and a sensor assembly. It involves infrared lasers and a non-linear crystal. Which is all to say that digital interactive images will be created.

Keep in mind this is just a patent filing. Apple files lots of patents all the time, even if the inventions described never come to reality. Still, it’s interesting to take a look at them to get an idea of the stuff Apple dreams up.

[MIKA27]

Abu Dhabi's New Park Will Hide A 30-Acre Oasis Below The Desert

The United Arab Emirates has been overrun with a surge of costly and extravagant developments over the past decade including the Palm Islands and Burj Khalifa in Dubai. Now, a 125,000 square metre park in Abu Dhabi will join them — but this isn’t your average mega-development.

The beautiful design is credited to Thomas Heatherwick, an imaginative and innovative architect who has a rich history of implementing the natural surroundings of the site’s locations into his projects. Here, he uses the distinctive texture of a dry and cracked desert as the façade for the canopied design that shades the park.

Proposed for completion in 2017, Al Fayah Park will boast a seemingly endless network of canopies that double as walkable terraces. Additionally, they will house a vibrant microcosm of life underneath complete with cafés, community gardens, a public library, recreational spaces, as well as public pools and saunas. “These elevated pieces [will also] create a perforated canopy of partial shade under which a lush garden can grow, protected from the hot desert sun,” Heatherwick notes.

However, despite the surplus of growth and wealth that has been flowing into the UAE, there is still a shortage and dependence on water that strangles these projects and makes them both costly and inefficient. Therefore, finding a way to create a sustainable model for the park was a challenge for Heatherwick.

Consequently, he elected to abandon the traditional park design that relies too heavily on irrigation to water its countless blankets of grass. Instead, Heatherwick opted for a natural solution that will limit the evaporation of the park’s water by reducing the intensity of the sun.

The park’s design is not only beautiful, it is highly functional as it blends the natural landscape into a self-sustaining simulacrum of itself. “Instead of denying the presence of the desert that the city is built on, we set ourselves the task of making a park out of the desert itself”, thus, protecting the integrity of the desert’s most natural resource — its beauty.