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

[MIKA27]

Feces Up Your Nose? It’s a Good Thing!

If you wake up and find feces in your nose, you could blame your friend who you seem to remember saying, “Hold my beer and watch this!” Or you could thank the doctor who treated you with a new way of fighting a drug-resistant super stomach bug.

The superbug is the bacterium clostridium difficile, which causes stomach cramps, chronic diarrhea and possible life-threatening colon inflammation. Even worse, it’s resistant to drugs normally used to treat similar problems. C. difficile is commonly picked up in – ironically – hospitals and can quickly develop in the guts of patients who are already being over-treated by other antibiotics.

An alternative natural remedy called a fecal transplant was developed in 1958 but seldom used for obvious reasons. It involves mixing feces taken from like donors, preferably family members, and inserting them into the small intestine by enema. Doctors originally used fresh stools but found that frozen feces worked equally well and could be stored much longer.

More recently, unadulterated donor feces were mixed with saline solution and given to the patient via a feeding tube from the nose to the stomach, a procedure that is easier and much less expensive. This procedure and other new developments were presented at a recent conference of Australasian anesthetists and surgeons by University of Sydney associate professor Ian Seppelt, an intensive care doctor and anesthetist.

Seppelt says the fecal transplant is 95% successful and works because healthy humans have about 100 times more bacteria cells in their gut than their own cells. He is part of a team that is studying the gut bacteria of intensive care patients across Australia. More information is still needed, says Seppelt.

We are trying to get the balance right, but we are pretty much ignorant of what we are doing to the normal bacteria in the gut.

Another natural remedy that stinks, but not as much as the disease it cures.

[MIKA27]

Firing Missiles at Mars – What Could Possibly Go Wrong?

It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out that a group trying to raise money to shoot missiles at Mars is from the U.S. No matter what the reason, is blasting holes in another planet a good idea? And what IS their reason anyway?

Explore Mars, a non-profit group in Beverly, Massachusetts, is appealing for funds for a project it calls Exolance, whose purpose would be to probe deeper into the surface of Mars than any previous missions by firing missiles into the planet’s crust. The missiles would contain instruments design to withstand the impact so they can radio subterranean data back to Earth – data that Exolance hopes will include evidence of life on Mars.

Curiosity’s drill can only dig about an inch. NASA’s upcoming InSight lander mission will dig down five meters but isn’t looking for life, while the European Space Agency’s ExoMars rover will probe two meters for life but only in one spot.

Exolance uses archery metaphors to explain its plan. The Arrows are small, lightweight penetrating probes originally designed for the military (bunker-busting weapons technology) that will pierce the surface to a depth of five or more meters. The life-detection equipment will send data to a surface transmitter which relays it to an orbiter that sends it to Earth. Multiple Arrows will be shot by a Quiver dispenser as it descends to the surface, so that they are spread across a wide surface area.

Explore Mars will test Exolance in the Mojave Desert in 2014 to prove the instruments can withstand the impact. Then it needs to convince NASA, SpaceX or another private company to take the probes to Mars as part of another mission.

NASA sent two penetrating probes to Mars in 1999 but the shock of impact knocked out the instruments. It has fired probes into sand and ice for a possible mission to Jupiter’s moon Europa.

Missiles, bunker-busting, arrows, penetration … not exactly terminology that says peaceful space exploration. What could possibly go wrong?

[MIKA27]

Japanese Space Agency Takes the Lead on Solar Power

The Sun produces more power than we are ever likely to learn how to consume, and it will continue to do so for another five billion years, but getting that energy into our power grid is tricky. The Sun is about 93 million miles away from Earth, and the scraps of highly diffused waves that make their way to us are further diluted by the atmosphere. By the time they reach the surface, we’re dealing with a fraction of the power we could be absorbing if we could just reduce the distance between solar power collectors and the Sun.

So the logical solution is to put our solar power collectors outside of Earth’s atmosphere—and we’ve been using solar panels to power spacecraft since 1958, so it’s not as if we don’t know how to harness solar energy in space. The trouble is getting it back to Earth. And after decades of flawed attempts, the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) may be very close to figuring out how. JAXA’s own explanation for the Space Solar Power Systems (SSPS) initiative explains the degree to which our natural world is already solar powered, and efforts the agency is making to replace fossil fuels with this clean and renewable energy source:

http://youtu.be/D56vRfv71OA

There have been various attempts to solve the space-to-Earth energy transfer problem, ranging from lasers (too hard to aim) to space elevators (too expensive). The most recent, and fully realized, version of the JAXA proposal was outlined by Susumu Sasaki in a recent issue of the IEEE Spectrum. It calls for an island of microwave receivers aligned with a satellite 22,000 miles away—beaming the intense but (probably) harmless microwaves from the satellite to Earth. The proof-of-concept version of the SSPS will launch in 2020 and provide 200 kilowatts of power; the hope is that by 2040, the SSPS will beam 1 gigawatt of power back to Earth.

It’s still not enough to provide all of Japan’s power needs, much less the world’s—but it would be a legitimate power plant, and would mean larger and more powerful satellites could soon follow.

[MIKA27]

Syrian Refugees in Turkey Begin to Wear Out Their Welcome

Turkey was home to less than 200,000 Syrian refugees at the start of 2013. Now up to 700,000, the patience of many Turkish citizens is running thin. With no sign of the conflict in Syria abating, that number is expected to more than double this year

“We had work, we had a big home, four rooms, two floors,” Farid says, his wife, Ghada, and children sitting beside him. “Ghada used to make carpets. We lived side by side with a few other families. It was crowded, but not like this.”

“This” is what passes for Farid’s new family home: a small room in a dank, filthy basement in Eminonu, an Istanbul neighborhood, packed with two carpets, a single light bulb, four wafer thin mattresses and a shelf. Nine other Syrian families live in the same building, crammed into two floors. Farid, 27, a farm laborer, arrived here last summer, he says, his Aleppo neighborhood engulfed by fighting between anti-regime rebels and government forces, his old house devastated beyond repair.

Work in Istanbul hasn’t been easy to find. Occasionally, the odd construction job comes along, paying 20-30 lira ($10-15) per day. Ghada and the kids spend their days panhandling in the nearby tourist district. “We can afford food,” says Farid, “but not medicine, not diapers.”

For Turkey, the trickle of refugees that began in late April 2011, soon after the start of violence in Syria, has turned into a flood. At the start of 2013, the country was home to 171,000 officially registered Syrians. Today, that number has climbed to 736,000, according to Turkey’s Disaster and Emergency Management Presidency. By the end of the year the government expects to receive another 750,000 refugees.

Turkey’s border camps and container cities, accommodating about 220,000 Syrians, have been praised as some of the world’s best. The bulk of the refugees, however, live outside the camps, most of them in large cities, many of them in abject poverty.

Officially, they number about 500,000. Some estimates put the figure at close to a million. A recent report by the International Crisis Group (ICG), a think tank, underscored their plight: 86 percent of Syrian children living outside the camps have no access to education. Many of them, much like their parents, are forced to work illegally with no social security and often for less pay than Turks, or to beg.

Amidst reports of rising crime and sectarian tensions in border areas, as well as competition for jobs, the refugees have started to wear out their welcome. In a January poll, 55 percent of Turks said their country should close its doors to fleeing Syrians. Of these, 30 percent insisted that it should send back those already here. Thus far, the mainstream political parties have not taken the bait, declining to indulge in any populist, anti-immigrant rhetoric.

Though reports of open hostility are relatively few and far between, the potential for unrest is growing. Last May, after a car bomb attack in a Turkish town killed more than 50 people, angry locals clashed with Syrian refugees, sending hundreds fleeing.A man in Gaziantep, a large city near the border, recently told ICG analysts his neighbors were “sleeping with guns under their pillows” out of fear that Syrians would break into their houses. On Wednesday in Ankara, the country’s capital, a number of people were injured when locals set fire to a building inhabited by refugees after a street brawl.

Turkey never expected the war in nearby Syria to play out as it has. Three years ago, as peaceful protests gave way to an armed rebellion and as the first of the fleeing Syrians arrived, officials in Ankara predicted that Bashar Assad’s days were numbered. Today, with the war having claimed 150,000 lives, Assad still in power, and with no end to the fighting in sight, the government of Recep Tayyip Erdogan is facing a bitter reality: the refugees might be here to stay.

Ankara, says Kemal Kirisci, director of the Turkey Project at the Brookings Institution and the author of an upcoming paper on the refugee crisis, never had a long-term strategy for integrating the Syrians. To this day, he says, “these challenges are being addressed on an incremental basis.” Without a comprehensive plan to provide them with adequate shelter, food, education and work, he warns, Syrians living outside the camps risk turning into a permanent underclass.

It won’t be for lack of trying. Officials here point out that the government has extended healthcare access to all Syrians in Turkey, that work has begun on a facilitated employment system, and that a plan to put more Syrian children in school is in the pipeline. But they draw the line at citizenship. “Naturalization is not in our agenda,” says one. Foreign aid, he adds, “has been below all expectations.” Of the $3.5 billion that Turkey claims to have spent on helping the refugees, less than $200 million came from outside donors.

Inside Farid’s ramshackle Istanbul house, an older relative holds a child in one arm, an empty pack of pills in the other. The boy is visibly sick, his nose running, one of his eyes dimmed by fever, the other swollen shut. A fetid stench fills the air, so thick it seems to slow down the flies haloing above Farid and his family. One of the kids has diarrhea, says Ghada. She tucks her youngest son under her robe to breastfeed him.

[MIKA27]

Metallica to headline Glastonbury on Saturday night slot

US metal veterans Metallica have been announced as the Saturday night headliners on the Pyramid Stage at Glastonbury.

They will join the previously announced headliners Arcade Fire and Kasabian at the event in Somerset on 27-29.

It marks Metallica's debut appearance at Worthy farm and it is the first time a heavy metal band have headlined the event.

Tickets for this year sold out in just one hour and 27 minutes in October.

Glastonbury Festival founder Michael Eavis told BBC 6 Music's Matt Everitt: "[Metallica] wanted to play for a long, long time and they're one of the most amazing rock bands in the world, everywhere I go people say 'When are Metallica going to play?' I said, 'They will be here one day' and this is their time now.

"We've done it before (with Rage Against the Machine in 1994). People think that we're prone to have Radiohead and Coldplay and Oasis but when we had Jay Z a few years ago, people said he wasn't a Glastonbury act but we have all kinds of music."

"I feel ecstatic," Metallica's Lars Ulrich told Radio 1's Zane Lowe. "We've been waiting for this phone call for years."

The drummer said the band wouldn't choose their set-list until the last minute - but they'd bear in mind that the Glastonbury audience might not be hardcore fans.

"It'll be your friendly neighbourhood Metallica. If nothing else, we'll enjoy it," he added.

The news of Metallica's booking echoes that of the announcement in 2008 that Jay Z was to become the first rapper to fill the coveted Pyramid Stage headline slot.

His involvement was initially met with some scepticism, with Oasis guitarist Noel Gallagher saying: "I don't know about it. But I'm not having hip-hop at Glastonbury. It's wrong."

The rapper won over critics with his exuberant performance, cheekily taking to the stage with a guitar and singing along to Oasis' song Wonderwall.

Other artists playing this summer include Dolly Parton, De La Soul, Manic Street Preachers and Ed Sheeran.

Hundreds of other acts will play across more than 100 stages at the festival in Somerset.

Metallica were formed in 1981 by singer James Hetfield and drummer Lars Ulrich. The current line-up includes longtime guitarist Kirk Hammett and bassist Robert Trujillo.

The band's eponymous fifth album, known as the Black Album, contained the hit singles Enter Sandman and Nothing Else Matters.

Metallica are also headlining the Sonisphere festival in Knebworth Park between 4-6 July.

[MIKA27]

'Look Up' A Powerful Message That We All Need To Hear

Whether we're swiping through Facebook's newsfeed, snapping away on Instagram, editing hashtags on Twitter or adding things to our boards on Pinterest, every moment we spend using "social" media, has the ability to make us more detached, more isolated and more distant from the things and people we love.

A world of self-image, self-promotion, self-image where we all share our best bit, but leave out the emotion.

Gary Turk's powerful and thought-provoking video monologue, is dedicated to how he sees social media harming contemporary society. How the smallest moments, the ones that really matter, are passing us by. And how we've become slaves, to something we've all mastered.

Watch it, share it and remember, it's good to look up once in a while.

If you don't, you might just forget when the world looks like at all.....

[MIKA27]

UPSTATE LAKE CAMP | NEW YORK

Our latest weekend retreat dream is this stunning rustic waterfront cabin in Upstate Lake Camp - New York. It was designed by rustic dwellings experts, Pearson Design Group, a company that specialises in projects from large multi-structure ranch and family camps to intimate, highly detailed retreats such as this. Not much more info on the project, but it sure looks like the perfect getaway from hectic New York city life... the photos are enough to drool over.

[MIKA27]

LA MARZOCCO MISTRAL ESPRESSO MACHINE

Looking more like a piece of Cylon technology than anything made by human hands, the La Marzocco Mistral Espresso Machine would feel right at home in your geeky office space or quirky coffee shop.

In slight of its intimidating appearance and commercial build-quality, this machine is easy to use once it's all set up, letting you brew great espresso and steam milk like a pro.

It features automatic setting, a double boiler, an articulating steam wand, high capacity, a hot water dispenser, a cup warmer, and much more. It's so easy you may never head to another Starbucks again.

[MIKA27]

IGRILL MINI REMOTE MEAT THERMOMETER

For the man who obsessively loves to grill, the search for the next great gadget can be an exhaustive one, especially once you’ve already stockpiled the necessary prongs, tongs, and assorted thingamajigs that you swear you’ll remember what they’re used for one of these days.

But we’ve found a new one for ya: the iGrill Mini, a remote meat thermometer for your iOS device. With the power of Bluetooth, this little gadget will let you know exactly when your food is ready for consumption. iDevices promises a 150′ range and 150 hours of battery life, letting you swing away on your backyard hammock while your burger reaches its searing peak. There’s a temperature LED indicator, magnetic mounting with two viewing angle positions, and you can choose from dozens of preset temperature alarms or create your own. [Purchase]

[MIKA27]

The Hacker Who Worked on a Navy Nuclear Aircraft Carrier

Nicholas Knight and his hacker crew, Digi7al, were a lot like other hacking crews. According to a Federal indictment filed this week, they broke into computers, took information, posted it, and boasted about their exploits.

But there is a key difference: Nicholas Knight was employed by the Navy on the nuclear aircraft carrier USS Harry S. Truman. He called himself a "nuclear black hat," black hat being a common term for a broad array of malicious hackers.

Knight was working as sysadmin supporting the ship's nuclear reactor. But the indictment alleges, he was also hacking Los Alamos National Laboratory, AT&T, the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, the Department of Homeland Security, the Toronto Police Service, and the Navy itself.

The Navy discharged Knight after he was caught trying to worm his way into a Navy database while aboard a Navy vessel.

The exploit that drew the focused attention of the authorities was the capture of at least part of a database that held the information of 200,000 Navy servicepeople who were being transferred. They employed a common hacking technique called a SQL injection, in which attackers probe a database to understand and (ultimately) exploit it.

They posted the information—with social security numbers redacted—and crowed about it on Twitter. The Navy service underpinned by the database was shut down and never reopened, causing logistical hassles for individuals and the armed service itself.

The indictment doesn't disclose much information about the attack on the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, but this is the agency that serves as, roughly, Google Earth for the military. As they describe their mission: "NGA is there to Know the Earth… Show the Way… Understand the World."

It's also unclear precisely what Digi7al obtained from Homeland Security's Transportation Worker Identification program, although the indictment implies they got into a database that contained the "biometric and other sensitive personal information" of DHS workers at maritime facilities.

Perhaps the scariest haul from their exploits were the 2,500 usernames and passwords of Toronto police affiliates, along with the personal information of 500 police informants. Yikes.

At the time of this writing, the website for the USS Harry S. Truman was down.

[MIKA27]

An Ever-Curious Spirit, Unbeaten After 111 Years

So what is it like to be pronounced the oldest man on earth?

Alexander Imich, 111 ¼ years old, sat in a chair in his Upper West Side apartment overlooking the Hudson and made a face. Stick-thin with vein-roped hands, bristly whiskers and an enviable shock of hair, he formed a gaunt smile, eyes dancing.

“Not like it’s the Nobel Prize,” he wheezed, pausing for a startled moment when his hearing aid popped out.

Yes, Mr. Imich, a scholar of the occult who was born in Poland on Feb. 4, 1903, is the world’s oldest validated male supercentenarian (those over 110), according to the Gerontology Research Group of Torrance, Calif.

He attained the distinction when the previous record-holder, Arturo Licata of Italy, died on April 24 at 111 years and 357 days. (Sixty-six women officially outdate him; the eldest, Misao Okawa of Japan, is 116, the Gerontology group reports.)

“I didn’t have time yet to think about it,” Mr. Imich said in a halting interview last week as friends came by with a chocolate cake for a belated birthday celebration, delayed by a hospitalization for a fall at home on the very day he turned 111. “I never thought I’d be that old.”

Mr. Imich was 10 months old when the Wright brothers invented the first manned airplane that sustained controlled and machined-powered flights. Teddy Roosevelt, having assumed the White House upon the assassination of William McKinley, had yet to run for the presidency on his own.

Mr. Imich remembers the first automobile in his hometown, fighting the Bolsheviks in the Polish-Soviet War, escaping the Holocaust and surviving a Soviet gulag. He then immigrated to the United States, finding time to master the computer and publish a book on the paranormal at 92.

He grew up in a well-to-do family of secular Jews in Czestochowa in southern Poland, known for its famous painting of the Black Madonna. His father, who owned a decorating business, installed an airstrip for early aviators.

“At the time, flying was a demonstration,” he recalled. “It attracted people for the show.” He called “the aeroplane” the greatest invention of his lifetime.

He sought to become a captain in the Polish Navy, but as a Jew was told to forget it. “I decided to become a zoologist and traveled to exotic countries in Africa,” Mr. Imich recalled. But blocked from advancement, he switched to chemistry, earning a doctorate at Jagiellonian University in Krakow.

In the early 1930s, Mr. Imich grew fascinated with a Polish medium who was known as Matylda S., a doctor’s widow gaining renown for séances that reportedly called up the dead. He participated in numerous inexplicable encounters that he detailed in a German scholarly journal in 1932 and recounted in an anthology he edited, “Incredible Tales of the Paranormal,” published by Bramble Books in 1995.

He keeps a box of forks and spoons twisted in macropsychokinesis experiments. “I watched ordinary people doing that,” he said, although he himself was unable to duplicate it.

He married a childhood sweetheart who a few years later left him for another man, whereupon he married her friend, Wela. When the Nazis overran Poland in 1939, they fled east to Soviet-occupied Bialystok. Refusing to accept Soviet nationality, they were shipped to a labor camp.

With Russia reeling under German attack, they were freed and moved to Samarkand, a city in Central Asia, in what is now Uzbekistan, and then back to Poland. There they found that many family members had died in the Holocaust.

In 1951 they immigrated to Waterbury, Conn. Wela Imich, a painter and psychotherapist, opened a practice in Manhattan. After she died in 1986, Mr. Imich moved into her suite in a prewar apartment hotel at 305 West End Avenue. Eight years later it was turned into the Esplanade, a luxury senior residence, and he was grandfathered in. His savings vanished in dubious investments, and The New York Times Neediest Cases campaign came to his aid in 2007.

So what are his secrets of longevity?

He and his wife never had children. That might have helped, he guessed. (His closest relative is an 84-year-old nephew.)

Did his many hardships prolong his life? “It’s hard to say.” He credited “good genes” and athletics. “I was a gymnast,” he said. “Good runner, a good springer. Good javelin, and I was a good swimmer.”

He used to smoke but gave it up long ago.

Alcohol? Never, he said.

He always ate sparingly, inspired by Eastern mystics who disdain food. “There are some people in India who do not eat,” he said admiringly. Now, his home-care aides said, he fancies matzo balls, gefilte fish, chicken noodle soup, Ritz crackers, scrambled eggs, chocolate and ice cream. At the words “ice cream,” Mr. Imich perked up. “Jah!” he interjected.

The couple who came to visit, Michael Mannion and Trish Corbett, founders of the Mindshift Institute, dedicated to spreading new scientific knowledge of the nature of the universe, met Mr. Imich in the 1990s at the IM School of Healing Arts on 26th Street in Manhattan, where, though he was already in his 90s, he prepaid for three years.

They lay his survival to his ever-curious mind. Mr. Mannion said Mr. Imich wondered recently, “How long can this go on?” But he was cheerful, noting, “The compensation for dying is that I will learn all the things I was not able to learn here on Earth.”

[MIKA27]

ARIEL ATOM 3.5R LIMITED EDITION

For those of you not familiar with the Ariel Atom, just think of it like a go-kart on steroids for adults. It’s a vehicle that never stops being improved upon, and this year the brand is rolling out the Ariel Atom 3.5R.

This limited edition version of the beloved sports car is more than just striking good looks, it’s an absolute beast on the asphalt. The 2-seater has been equipped with a supercharged Honda Type R 2.0-liter motor that pumps out 350 horsepower and 243 lb-ft of torque. Delivering that power through a Sadev six-speed sequential gear box, the 3.5R can reach 62 miles per hour in just 2.5 seconds from a complete standstill. The 1,212-pound animal has also seen a slew of suspension updates which include a set of fully adjustable Ohlins TTX dampers and springs, along with 290mm vented disc brakes complete with four-pot calipers, and Kumho tires to help hug the road. Have your check book ready though, as this thing is hitting the market at roughly $135,000 USD starting next month.

[MIKA27]

Terrifying Slow Motion Video of a Missile That Never Misses its Target

No matter how fast you're driving, no matter the weather conditions, if someone fires a Brimstone missile from a MQ-9 Reaper drone and you're the target, you're dead. This slow-motion test compilation shows its terrifying precision and the destruction that follows. Just look at that shockwave moving.

You can fire this thing against any target moving at 70mph from a maximum of 12 kilometres away and forget about it—it's implacable. In fact, you can target the driver with a missile without a warhead and kill that person alone, leaving the rest of passengers (mostly) untouched.

[Fuzz]

How Superman Would Look if He Was an Average Dude Trying to Fly

If Supes had a cape that bloody long, he'd never survive. I think the movie "The Incredibles" has all taught us the cons of wearing a cape, let alone one that long!

Firing Missiles at Mars – What Could Possibly Go Wrong?

Might upset this little fella....

[MIKA27]

The Division Is A Game Worth Buying A Next-Gen Console For

http://youtu.be/O_j9uKBmUEk

Last year at E3 we saw games that aimed to show off the next-gen hardware of both the PlayStation 4 and the Xbox One. The only game that really has me sold so far, however, is The Division: an open-world RPG set in post-apocalyptic New York City. Check out this gameplay.

The Division is set in a world where an infection has been transmit through the population via the currency, turning cities into wastelands and citizens into mercenaries. You are a sleeper agent who awakes in the apocalypse with one objective: survive.

The game centres around co-op gameplay to scrounge for supplies and secure territory. Groups of other players are trying to do the same thing, and there’s always the risk of you running across them and getting into a giant firefight. Awesome.

With beautiful graphics and a UI to die for, The Division is a game worth getting a next-gen console for. Thankfully, it’s not an exclusive title, so both PS4 and Xbox One players can enjoy it come-2014.

Here’s the story trailer.

[MIKA27]

Victorian Labor MP Shines Laser At Opposition, Gets In Trouble From The Teacher

Briefly: This is the state of politics in Victoria right now. Adem Somyurek, the shadow minister for technology and manufacturing, got in trouble from the Victorian Parliament’s upper house president yesterday for shining a laser on the forehead of a Liberal MP across the chamber.

According to the Herald Sun, President of the Victorian Parliamentary Legislative Council, Bruce Atkinson, actually had to stop proceedings in the middle of question time to find out why Liberal MP Bernie Finn had a red dot hovering around on his face.

When he was caught out, Somyurek apparently dropped the laser quickly onto his chair (and hopefully pretended nothing happened). Afterwards, Liberal government health minister David Davis gave his professional opinion: “It’s not the laser itself, it’s the use to which it was put. I think it is certainly unacceptable.”

Bruce Atkinson’s statement during question time yesterday has shades of an angry school teacher telling off his students:

“It is extraordinary and a matter of concern to have that sort of device aimed at a member and it wasn’t just once, it was on his forehead a couple of times.

“You’re actually very lucky in this circumstance that I don’t send you out of the house because I regard it as that serious.”

Since Somyurek is the minister for technology, it’s entirely appropriate that he was using a pen that can shoot lasers, but he shouldn’t have been shining it at other people — that’s a recipe for an expensive trip to the optometrist.

MIKA: Bet you don't see that sort of stuff in Congress...

[MIKA27]

US Military Drones Are Going To Start Running On Linux

Raytheon is making a bold move: It’s dumping the proprietary operating system Solaris in favour of Linux for the control systems of its US military drones.

According to a May 2 Avionics Intelligence report, Raytheon entered into a $US15.8 million contract with the US Navy earlier this month to upgrade their control systems to Linux. The first vehicle to be upgraded will be the Northrop Grumman MQ-8C Fire Scout helicopter, pictured above.

The switch is supposed to make for a more intuitive control system and should make future software upgrades more straightforward — saving money in the long term. Still, it’s a an impressive amount of trust to place in an open source OS project, and a move that will likely irk Oracle, the developers of Solaris.

In fact, in October 2013, Oracle published a white paper arguing that open source software is unacceptably risky for military applications. Clearly, the US Military and Raytheon disagree.

[Habana Mike]

'Look Up' A Powerful Message That We All Need To Hear

Whether we're swiping through Facebook's newsfeed, snapping away on Instagram, editing hashtags on Twitter or adding things to our boards on Pinterest, every moment we spend using "social" media, has the ability to make us more detached, more isolated and more distant from the things and people we love.

A world of self-image, self-promotion, self-image where we all share our best bit, but leave out the emotion.

Gary Turk's powerful and thought-provoking video monologue, is dedicated to how he sees social media harming contemporary society. How the smallest moments, the ones that really matter, are passing us by. And how we've become slaves, to something we've all mastered.

Watch it, share it and remember, it's good to look up once in a while.

If you don't, you might just forget when the world looks like at all.....

Reminds me of one time I was driving through San Francisco during rush hour. Went by a bus stop with about 20 people lined up.

Every one of them heads down on their 'smart' phones!

[MIKA27]

Reminds me of one time I was driving through San Francisco during rush hour. Went by a bus stop with about 20 people lined up.

Every one of them heads down on their 'smart' phones!

We actually have signs up near tram stops and stations in Melbourne CBD at Flinder Street warning people to look up. Been a few people stepping out in front of trams. It's pretty bad that people are that engrossed in their mobiles.

[MIKA27]

China's Maglev Train Prototype Could Reach Speeds Of 2900km/h

A research team in China just successfully tested a blisteringly fast transportation concept: super-maglev, a high speed train that could theoretically hit speeds of up to 2900km/h. That’s three times the speed of a passenger jet.

The concept, put forth by the Applied Superconductivity Laboratory of Southwest Jiaotong University, uses the same technique proposed for Elon Musk’s Hyperloop: run the train inside a vacuum tube, removing air resistance and enabling super high speeds uninhibited by wind resistance. Research shows that, for vehicles travelling faster than 400km/h, up to 83 per cent of the energy used goes towards fighting aerodynamic resistance.

But with a (highly theoretical) top speed of 2900km/h, super-maglev would blow the doors off Musk’s 480km/h trains. That’s because the train inside the Evacuated Tube Transport loop only encounters one tenth of the air resistance of the outside environment.

Dr Deng Zigang, who led the project, envisions applications beyond land-based transportation. He proposes similar vacuum tube technology could be used to launch vehicles into outer space, or enable super high speeds for military weapons.

Of course, this is all pie-in-the-sky imagination talk right now — Dr Zigang’s test vehicle, running inside a 6m diameter vacuum loop, tops out at a very pedestrian 48km/h. But as research continues at the university’s high-temperature superconducting maglev ring, Dr Zigang and his team hope to push that top speed way, way higher.

It sounds like, theoretically at least, the race is on.

[MIKA27]

Great White Shark Chews And Nearly Sinks Inflatable Boat

Video: Looking at this video of a great white shark biting and nearly sinking an inflatable boat, it seems that looking for them in this type of vessels is not a smart idea. Fortunately, the South African film crew on board wasn’t hurt, but the boat was seriously damaged and was sinking as it limped back to port.

[MIKA27]

NYC Will Turn 7000 Old Payphones Into A Huge, Free Wi-Fi Network

In 2013, Mayor Bloomberg asked designers to reimagine the city’s decrepit pay phones as internet-flinging, ad-spitting future machines. The winners were simply design concepts, never truly destined for reality. Now, the city is moving forward with the plan to retrofit its pay phones, after all.

Now, the city’s Department of Information Technology and Telecommunications has put out a brand-new request for proposals. This time, it’s not for pie-in-the-sky designs — it’s for real budgets and designs to create a “citywide Wi-Fi network and state-of-the-art information hubs.”

There are roughly 11,000 pay phones scattered across the city, and this plan would retrofit up to 10,000 of them with new hardware that would broadcast free Wi-Fi, financed by ad revenue, within 85 feet of the station. Here’s how de Blasio describes the project in a statement:

For years, the question was, ‘What to do with payphones?’ and now we have an answer. By using a historic part of New York’s street fabric, we can significantly enhance public availability of increasingly-vital broadband access, invite new and innovative digital services, and increase revenue to the city — all at absolutely no cost to taxpayers.

The idea, says one city spokesperson to the New York Times, is to “level the playing field” for New Yorkers who can’t afford broadband. It’s doubtless also to figure out a way to make street-level advertising more lucrative, guaranteeing at least $US17.5 million in annual ad revenue for the city.

But there’s also a more vital purpose, as the DoITT explains. “While public payphone usage has decreased in recent years, the phones served a critical role during power outages following Hurricane Sandy, as public payphones receive electricity via the phone line and not external power sources,” the office explains. These new stations would provide the city with Wi-Fi and access to 911, even if another superstorm takes out our electricity.

This RFP invites anyone to submit a proposal for the project — they’re due on June 30, so you’d better get cracking if you’ve got a plan

[MIKA27]

China's Batty Proposal For An Under-Sea Train To The United States

A lone report in China’s state-run Beijing Times claims the nation is already in discussions to build an 12,870+ kilometre railroad connecting China, Russia, Canada and the US — including a 201.2km undersea tunnel spanning the Bering Strait. Forget taking this with a grain of salt, you’re gonna need the whole shaker.

Yes, according to Wang Mengshu, a railway expert at the Chinese Academy of Engineering and the only person cited in the report, China has already discussed the plan with Russia, and Russia’s on board. Never mind that the proposed undersea route would be more than five times longer than the current longest underwater tunnel, the one under the English Channel.

This alleged project comes hot on the heels of an earlier assertion that a Chinese research team has developed a prototype of a Hyperloop-style train that could someday hit speeds of 2896.8km/h. Thankfully, the daydream underwater tunnel train would stick to a much more sensible 220 MPH — taking around two days to make the full 12,870km trip from northeast China, through Siberia, under the Pacific Ocean, across Alaska, down through Canada, and into the Continental U.S.

As The Guardian puts it, the bonkers proposal leaves plenty of room for scepticism:

No other Chinese railway experts have come out in support of the proposed project. Whether the government has consulted Russia, the US or Canada is also unclear. The Bering Strait tunnel alone would require an unprecedented feat of engineering — it would be the world’s longest undersea tunnel — four times the length of the Channel Tunnel.

The Guardian was unable to reach Wang for comment

[MIKA27]

US Approves First Prosthesis Controlled By Muscle Electrical Signals

Dean Kamen’s DEKA Arm is an electronic prosthetic that mimics natural arm and hand movement with an amazing level of finesse. It’s controlled by electrical signals from the wearer’s muscles. This week, the DEKA Arm became the first muscle-controlled prosthetic approved by the FDA for sale to the general public.

The user controls the DEKA arm by contracting different muscles in the arm or foot. Electromyogram sensors pick up the electrical signal from the wearer’s muscles and translate them into any of 10 different complex, multi-joint powered movements. The entire assembly is the same size and weight as a natural limb, and the battery-powered prosthesis offers six different hand grips.

Watch the DEKA Arm in action, performing the type of household tasks that require delicate manoeuvres and varying levels of grip:

[MIKA27]

The Audacia Lays 30m Of Pipe On The Ocean Floor Every Minute

Undersea energy pipelines constitute a vital physical link between deep water wells and onshore refineries, but it’s not like we can just lay these lines like oversized bendy straws. That task of constructing and sinking these tubes instead falls to vessels like Allseas’ newest addition to its pipelaying fleet, the Audacia.

Over short distances, sure, use an ROV. But when running a pipe across, say, the English Channel, submersible robots won’t cut it. Instead, these enormous undertakings fall to ships like the 225m long, 32m wide Audacia, which has been in service since 2007. The vessel can carry up to 270 crew members and over 12,000 tonnes of pipe ranging from 5cm to 150cm in outside diameter.

As the pipe sections are hoisted from the bowels of the ship, they travel down a firing line comprised of seven welding stations, followed by a non-destructive testing station, and then by three coating stations before being shoved overboard through the vessel’s prominent bow spur, where it sinks to the seafloor. At maximum capacity, the Audacia can set down nearly 30m of steel tube every minute.

To ensure that the pipes reach their underwater destination undamaged, the Audacia combines an advanced full dynamic positioning system (which guides the ship along a precise route using GPS signals) with a powerful pipe tensioner, which regulates how quickly the pipe is let out.

“We also took care of all the automation, navigation and communication equipment, and the frequency-regulated systems for the thrusters and the pipelaying system,” Cor van Miltenburg, BU Director of IM Tech (the company that installed the ship’s DP system), said in a press statement. “These ensure that the pipeline remains stable during the entire process, from the welding path to the sea bottom. What is unique to the Audacia is that the pipeline is set into the sea over the bow using the stinger. In this way, it was able to keep its original stern with its fast propulsion. The Audacia can thus head off to a new pipeline laying location anywhere in the world.”

And it looks like the Audacia is getting herself a big sister soon pretty soon. Allseas is in the midst of constructing an even bigger pipelaying vessel, the $US1.7 billion Pieter Schelte. At 380m long and 124m wide, this vessel will likely become the largest pipelayer ever constructed when it’s delivered in 2020.