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

[MIKA27]

Not only is that table expensive, but you're gonna go through a huge load of charcoal or briquettes for the amount of food you'd be cooking. Plus, there doesn't seem to be an easy way to extinguish the leftover charcoal for future use.

Here ya go... For those who prefer small BBQ's over larger

BioLite's BaseCamp Stove Grills Your Food And Charges Your Gadgets

We’re already well-acquainted with BioLite’s ingenious brand of biofuel-burning (and gadget-charging) camp stoves. The startup’s newest offering though, takes the original CampStove and turns it into a grillmaster’s group-friendly dream.

Launching today on Kickstarter, BaseCamp functions on the same basic principal as the original; using nothing but firewood, you get to charge your devices, power a small light, and grill up dinner over an elevated cooking fire. It really is a pretty smart — not to mention sustainable — alternative to the more common versions that run off propane.

But how do you get from wood to tablet juice? According to the stove’s Kickstarter page:

The BaseCamp converts heat from the fire into usable electricity via a thermoelectric generator housed within the orange power pack.

This powers a fan that blows air back into the burn chamber for improved combustion. The surplus electricity is then sent to a USB port, allowing you to charge your devices.

The stove puts out 5 Watts of power via a standard USB port. But if you’re not ready for a charge while you’re cooking, BioLite has also added a battery to the stove’s powerpack. So whether or not you’re charging, if the fire’s burning, you’re collecting energy to use at your convenience.

The stove itself has some pretty neat origins. Its original iteration, the wood-burning HomeStove, also doubled as a gadget charger — but for developing countries.

The HomeStoves proved so popular, though, that BioLite decided to design a consumer version intended for camping. And while Kickstarter campaigns can be a gamble, BioLite has proven they can deliver — plus, they have already surpassed their goal.

If you want to get in on the ground floor early, you can head over to BaseCamp’s Kickstarter page to preorder one of your own Fuzz.

[MIKA27]

US Military Is Spending Millions To Build Robots With Morals

Imagine a future where autonomous robots make life or death decisions based not just on data, but a preprogrammed moral code. This is not the plot of a dystopian novel. It’s the directive of a new Pentagon program that will scare your socks off.

Over the next five years, the Office of Naval Research is awarding $US7.5 million in grant money for university researchers to build a robot that knows right from wrong. This sense of moral consequence could make autonomous systems operate more efficiently and, well, autonomously. And some people even think that machines could make better decisions than humans, since they could strictly follow the rules of engagement to the letter and calculate the outcome of multiple different scenarios.

It sort of makes sense when you think of it like that. “With drones, missile defines, autonomous vehicles, etc, the military is rapidly creating systems that will need to make moral decisions,” AI researcher Steven Omohundro told Defense One. “Human lives and property rest on the outcomes of these decisions and so it is critical that they be made carefully and with full knowledge of the capabilities and limitations of the systems involved. The military has always had to define ‘the rules of war’ and this technology is likely to increase the stakes for that.”

On the contrary, programming robots with a certain moral code assumes we can all agree on that certain moral code. Without digging too far into your college philosophy syllabus, it’s easy to understand how this could be a pretty contentious task. And while computer processing power could come in handy, say, when better handling triage at a field hospital, it gets super tricky when you’re pointing missiles at people.

“I do not think that they will end up with a moral or ethical robot,” said Noel Sharkey, another AI expert, in response to the news. “For that we need to have moral agency. For that we need to understand others and know what it means to suffer. The robot may be installed with some rules of ethics but it won’t really care. It will follow a human designer’s idea of ethics.”

The debate goes on and on. It’s worth having though, especially since we’re depending more and more on machines. And research suggests that we already hold robots morally accountable for their actions. Why not program some morals into them? Maybe because maybe then they’d decide that the right thing to do is take control of the world away from weak humans. You’ve read Asimov. You know how this story ends.

[NJP]

Melbourne Non-smoking CBD is the last straw. I put up with the pseudo intellectual, self righteous tarts, riding high the Eco friendly snot powered one left winged unicorn because I smoke a cigar and walk past them in a cloud of bliss.

[MIKA27]

Melbourne Non-smoking CBD is the last straw. I put up with the pseudo intellectual, self righteous tarts, riding high the Eco friendly snot powered one left winged unicorn because I smoke a cigar and walk past them in a cloud of bliss.

Couldn't have said it better myself.

[MIKA27]

Here's A 5-Minute Look At The New 'Flash' TV Show

Video: There’s something excellent about superhero origin shows on TV. They aren’t like films: the creators, actors and directors can all take their time with their characters and the exposition to create something that doesn’t have to fly through the humble beginnings in order to get to something explodey. Flash is the TV show based on the superhero of the same name, and the CW in the US put out this five minute teaser for it. Check it out!

Also, check out the teaser trailer for the Flash and Green Arrow working together to play William Tell.

http://youtu.be/rnXsnR-2AvU

[MIKA27]

Video Shows Life In Machu Picchu In Beautiful 4K Detail

Video: You can probably walk every inch of the Earth and not find a place that’s as mysteriously majestic as Machu Picchu. The city in the sky not only takes your breath away, it forever changes the meaning of being breathless. This video by Devin Super Tramp reminds you how beautiful it is out there and reveals life in Machu Picchu in glorious 4K. Enjoy.

[MIKA27]

This Cold War Test Bed Irradiated Satellites Before The Soviets Could

How do you ensure that fancy new military satellite is tough enough to withstand an orbital EMP attack by the Soviets? By shooting it with your own nuclear bomb using this massive, movable test chamber, obviously.

During the Cold War, players on both sides of the Iron Curtain worked just as hard devising ways to bring each other’s satellites down as they did to get their own orbiters up. One of the most radical methods proposed involved nuking space itself to create an artificial Van Allen Belt and EMP wave, frying the circuitry of all satellites that passed through it. And for nearly two decades between 1962 and 1980, American researchers at the Yucca Flats test range sought to shield our satellites from such blasts, culminating in the Project Tinderbox — a giant, 45-tonne vacuum chamber on tank treads — in June 1980.

This huge, $US10.3 million test chamber, mounted atop tractor treads and connected to a long length of winched steel cable, was large enough to hold an actual Defence Satellite Communication System satellite, the DSCS III, suspended inside a vacuum chamber designed to simulate the space environment. It sat atop a 300m deep vertical shaft drilled into the ground at the Nevada Test Site. At the other end of the shaft sat a low-yield — less than 20kt — nuclear device dubbed the Huron King shot.

The idea was to detonate the bomb underground (nuclear arms treaties had already outlawed above ground tests), forcing the radiation to flow up the shaft and irradiate the satellite within the chamber for a fraction of a second, then yank the 45-tonne test bed out of the way before the explosion caused the shaft to collapse in upon itself (sealing off the radiation leak) while subsiding as much as 60m below the rest of the valley floor.

Upon inspection, the DSCS III booted and operated without a hitch, indicating that the satellite’s new-fangled anti-radiation shielding had worked as intended. While the data that researchers collected from the test was quite valuable and helped spur on further radiation hardening developments to protect America’s most vital satellites, the test chamber itself was only employed once, for Project Tinderbox. For the last 34 years, it has sat where it came to originally came to rest, slowly rusting in the hot Nevada sun. You can see it for yourself during the test range’s occasional public tours.

[MIKA27]

Hunting for Treasures in a Massive Aircraft Boneyard

The world’s largest civilian aircraft boneyard sits in the shadow of the Catalina Mountains, about 30 miles outside of Tucson. It’s a hot, dusty place where military personnel carriers drove past our car and signs at the entrance warn against entering or taking pictures.

We, of course, were here to do both.

My friend Noah Landis has been an airplane aficionado as long as I’ve known him, and he dragged me here to grab some souvenirs to decorate his 8,000-square-foot apparel factory in Los Angeles.

It isn’t easy getting into an airplane boneyard like Pinal Airpark, and they don’t let just anyone wander among the 150 or so aircraft, sprawled over 1,200 acres of Arizona desert near the town of Marana. Before long, Brandi Whitley of Logistic Air arrived to guide us through the place. She gave us the ground rules—no wandering off unchaperoned, and don’t photograph anything that isn’t owned by Logistic Air—and then led us inside.

Most of the airplanes were Airbus and Boeing models you’ve almost certainly flown in: Airbus A300-series planes, Boeing 737s and 767s. There was the occasional McDonnell Douglas MD-80, and business jets like Learjets and Citations.

Many of them had been there since the early 1990s and looked as if they might still fly. On others, the windows, like the propellers, engines and other vital parts, were covered with thin aluminum to protect them from dust, dirt and animals.

Noah Landis looks around as he climbs into the first class section of one of the decommissioned 747s at Pinal Airpark.

Landis was in heaven. He’s been single-mindedly building his company, Kent Denim, for the past decade. With the brand finally ready to take off, this trip to Pinal Airpark was something akin to smashing a bottle of champagne across the bow of a ship. He was here to get something cool to decorate his factory.

“I would love to suspend a wing or a full engine from the roof,” he said.

Our visit was supposed to be impossible. When Landis surfed online message boards to investigate visiting a boneyard, the response was as discouraging as it was deafening. “Pfft. Good luck” sums it up. Eventually, though, Landis found Logistic Air and an invitation to check out a 747-100 from Aer Lingus, another from All Nippon Airways and a 747-SR from the late, great Trans World Airways.

Pulling a wing or engine was not really feasible, even if there was an engine lying on the ground like an enormous boulder. Whitley carried a ladder to the belly of one 747. I looked at the ladder, looked at the door and was momentarily confused, because there was no way a ladder that short would reach a door that high. Then Whitley planted the ladder behind the forward landing gear, clambered up, and removed a small square panel from the fuselage.

In contrast to our amazement, crawling around aircraft is old hat to Whitley. A longtime employee of Logistic Air, she got the gig after three years as an Air Force avionics technician based in Okinawa.

We squirmed through it into a utility area beneath the cabin, then climbed another ladder into the cabin. The interior was dim in the complete absence of cabin lights, and still, almost silent. My footsteps hardly seemed to carry as I walked through the muffled, musty cabin. Landis later remarked that it was like The Langoliers.

I watched as he moved through the plane quickly and efficiently, moving from the galley to the cockpit, eying things like a round upper deck light fixture ($500), and turning up hidden spaces like the cockpit bunk beds. Seats (~$300) are, of course, among the most popular items yanked from old planes; Whitley said one client took several of them to help his son build a flight simulator, and many have found their way into man caves.

J.R. Dodson, CEO of Dodson International Parts, confirms a trend toward decorative uses for airplane parts, but the bread and butter of salvage operations like his always will be industrial and aviation uses. The company is the largest supplier of parts for all classes of aircraft; it maintains an inventory of roughly five million parts.

An engine, removed from its 747.

More often than not, Dodson’s customers are airlines, but he notes that his company sees business from theme restaurants such as Wingnuts, private airplane collectors, and people who want to build a coffee table out of a turbine wheel. There’s also a cottage industry in building airplane mockups, for use in film and advertising. When Dodson salvages parts, specialty warehouses such as wheel shops are often eager to replenish their inventory.

There’s a reliable supply of parts for most customers. Of the 300,000 or so aircraft in service in the United States, Dodson estimates hundreds are decommissioned each year. So-called limited life parts–parts that regulations say must be taken out of service after a given number of hours or takeoffs–are always in demand. In vehicles as complicated as airplanes, some parts can be transferred readily, but many others, such as passenger cabin oxygen masks, must be recertified before they can be sold.

Demand for parts varies and can change quickly, which means that companies such as Dodson purchase retired aircraft on spec, hoping to meet uncertain future demand. Changing technology or regulatory standards put a shelf life on several parts. While parts from engines are often the first thing to sell, the outdated engines of the older 747s we toured were headed straight for scrap metal.

And despite having built up a sophisticated internal system for tracking the age and composition of the commercial fleet, Dodson says the type and number of parts he stocks is in some ways based on instinct and feeling. Because his company salvages at the aircraft scale, it’s hard to truly strike gold. If parts are hard to find for a certain plane, so are customers to buy them. He likens it to being in the automotive business.

“You can stock parts for a Monte Carlo, knowing that there’s a customer for those parts,” he said. “But that customer might not walk through your door for six months.”

A place like Pinal Airpark is where people go when they need parts for, say, a McDonnell Douglas DC-9. Right in the middle of the boneyard sits Marana Aerospace Solutions. It covers 400 acres, making it, by area, the largest aircraft maintenance, repair and overhaul (MRO) outfit in the world.

Some of the aircraft have been slathered in a fresh coat of white paint, awaiting the livery of new owners. Marana Aerospace doesn’t perform engine overhauls, but it can perform the range of standard aircraft maintenance letter checks. Marana can turn around a light A check—including fluid checks—in as little as a day, and is one of the few facilities that offers heavy D checks. It can take 25-40 days to perform a D check, including thorough inspection, repair, and replacement, and this level of check is usually reserved for when an airplane is headed to a new owner.

The flight attendant’s seat in a decommissioned 747.

Stephen Maceyko, the vice president of sales, says Marana Aerospace offers three categories of service: flightline (another word for storage), maintenance and end-of-life. End-of-life is where parts harvesting comes in. A small airline or operator might, for example, keep a decommissioned 767 to cannibalize parts for its other planes. Or a company like Dodson might buy it, fly it to Pinal Airpark—which has an airport code (MZJ) and a 6,850-foot runway—and slowly break it down for parts.

Parts are pulled as needed and promptly shipped to customers, so there isn’t a lot of loose inventory lying around. Just how long an airplane stays at the park varies. Although it isn’t uncommon to see an airplane remain there for years, a small crew of about four can pick a plane clean in two or three months. The airframe is then broken down and rolled into what resemble giant hay bales and sold for scrap

Landis is, of course, an outlier in this world. He wasn’t looking for a gently used 767 or a Pratt & Whitney PW4000 turbojet. The most outlandish thing he considered was a nose cowl ($1,600), and he did give a long look to a yoke in the cockpit ($300.)

Ultimately, though, he chose two business-class seats at $350 a pop and a dozen sections of coach seats, which you can have for $285 for a row of three. He also nabbed ten galley carts ($250 apiece) to use on the factory floor. Rounding out the purchase were some magazine racks ($30 each), overhead storage compartments ($75 per), and one aerospace oddity—a $300 ottoman from the All Nippon plane’s first class cabin.

Of all these items, Landis is happiest to have located classic TWA coach seats. “TWA is an iconic brand in aviation and design—very few people have those pieces,” he said. But half the fun was how he acquired them. Our visit was the “furthest thing from shopping in a store. It was a treasure hunt,” he said. He describes the site as a “forest of 747s, like a dreamscape. Pictures don’t do it justice.”

Controls in the cockpit of a decommissioned 747 at Pinal Airpark in Marana, Ariz.

Noah Landis crawls out from inside the nose of a decommissioned 747 at Pinal Airpark.

An item with low resale potential aboard a torn-down 747

Noah Landis scavenges for parts in one of the more gutted decommissioned 747s at Pinal Airpark.

[MIKA27]

How 3-D Printed Guns Evolved Into Serious Weapons in Just One Year

A burgeoning subculture of 3-D printed gun enthusiasts dreams of the day when a lethal firearm can be downloaded or copied by anyone, anywhere, as easily as a pirated episode of Game of Thrones. But the 27-year-old Japanese man arrested last week for allegedly owning illegal 3-D printed firearms did more than simply download and print other enthusiasts’ designs. He appears to have created some of his own.

Among the half-dozen plastic guns seized from Yoshitomo Imura’s home in Kawasaki was a revolver designed to fire six .38-caliber bullets–five more than the Liberator printed pistol that inspired Imura’s experiments. He called it the ZigZag, after its ratcheted barrel modeled on the German Mauser Zig-Zag. In a video he posted online six months ago, Imura assembles the handgun from plastic 3-D printed pieces, a few metal pins, screws and rubber bands, then test fires it with blanks.

“Freedom of armaments to all people!!” he writes in the video’s description. “A gun makes power equal!!”

It’s been a full year since I watched the radical libertarian group Defense Distributed test fire the Liberator, the first fully printable gun, for the first time. Imura is one of a growing number of digital gunsmiths who saw the potential of that controversial breakthrough and have strived to improve upon the Liberator’s clunky, single-shot design. Motivated by a mix of libertarianism, gun rights advocacy and open-source experimentation, their innovations include rifles, derringers, multi-round handguns and the components needed to assemble semi-automatic weapons. Dozens of other designs are waiting to be tested.

The result of all this tinkering may be the first advancements that significantly move 3-D printed firearms from the realm of science fiction to practical weapons.

“With the Liberator we were trying to communicate a kind of singularity, to create a moment,” says Cody Wilson, who founded Defense Distributed and hand-fired the first 3-D printed gun in May, 2013. “The broad recognition of this idea seemed to flip a switch in peoples’ minds…We knew that people would make this their own.”

Even as the DIY community has refined and remixed 3-D printed guns, it’s left legislators and regulators in the dust. Congressional efforts last year to place restrictions on printed, plastic weapons within the renewed Undetectable Firearms Act fell flat. That said, the legality of 3-D printing a gun in the United States remains unclear, which explains why most of the gun designers contacted by WIRED declined to comment or wished to do so anonymously.

Despite that legal ambiguity, it took only weeks for digital gunsmiths to improve upon the first fully 3-D printed gun. Defense Distributed printed the first Liberator in May, 2013, using a second-hand refrigerator-sized Stratasys 3-D printer it bought for $8,000. Later that month, a gun enthusiast in Wisconsin riffed on the Liberator to produce a working firearm for far less, using a $1,725 Lulzbot printer with less than $25 in plastic. It fired eight .38-caliber bullets without damage.

Two months later came the first fully 3-D printed rifle, built by a Canadian gunsmith identified only as Matthew. The gun, which he calls the Grizzly, fires .22-caliber bullets. In the video below, it fires three shots. Another clip, since pulled from YouTube, shows him hand-firing it 14 times. Wilson calls the Grizzly the “best, first improvement on the Liberator.”

The Grizzly, like the Liberator, requires removing the barrel to load a new round after each shot. But less than a month after Matthew unveiled the Grizzly, another gunsmith who calls himself “Free-D” or “Franco” test-fired a five-shot derringer revolver he calls the Reprringer. It shoots low-power .22-caliber rounds. Though the tiny revolver isn’t entirely 3-D printed–it uses 8mm metal tube inserts in each barrel and several screws–its metal components seem to allow for a far more compact design, making the the Reprringer the smallest working 3-D printed gun publicly tested.

The blueprint for that miniature six-shooter, along with dozens of other firearms, gun parts and even explosives like grenades and mortar rounds, are hosted online by FOSSCAD, the Free Open Source Software & Computer Aided Design. The group spun out of Cody Wilson’s online gun printing community known as Defcad.

Most of FOSSCAD’s designs haven’t been publicly tested, and its loose-knit members are reluctant to reveal their identities. But one anonymous member summed up the group’s motivations: “First, I like guns,” he wrote via instant message. “And second, I think you should be able to 3-D print virtually anything you want.”

Aside from the Reprringer, the anonymous FOSSCAD member noted another new, proven design that may be far more practical–and have far more serious implications–than fully-printed guns: a key part of a semi-automatic weapon called the lower receiver. That part, which comprises most of the body of a gun, is the most regulated element of a firearm. Print a lower receiver, and you can buy the rest of a gun’s components off the shelf without an ID or waiting period.

FOSSCAD members have printed and test fired AR-15 lower receivers, including one designed to be the lightest available, another that includes a printed stock and grip, one designed for a Czechoslovakian semi-automatic pistol called the Skorpion, and another designed for the SKS, a semi-automatic rifle that fires the same ammunition as an AK-47. The last two of those designs are test fired in the video below.

Those partially printed semi-automatic weapons are powerful, military-grade firearms, and because their lower receivers were printed, they are largely unregulated. The FOSSCAD member who spoke to WIRED says it’s only a matter of time until fully-printed guns are equally durable and deadly.

“Before the Liberator, if you would have asked someone if plastic guns were possible, they would have laughed at you,” he says. “They aren’t practical, but that doesn’t mean they couldn’t be. Hence the desire to improve.”

[MIKA27]

Audi’s New R8 Supercar Has Frickin’ Lasers for Headlights

Audi is obsessed with lighting. It was the first automaker to bring LED headlamps to the masses, then it incorporated GPS, pedestrian detection and selective dimming in its A8 sedan, essentially creating smart headlights that turn before you do.

Now the company has topped even that by introducing a car with laser headlamps. Yes, lasers.

The high-tech high-beams will be offered on the Audi R8 LMX, a limited-edition run of the bonkers R8 supercar. Audi says the laser spot lamp in the car’s high beam lamps provide significantly more light, and shines it much further ahead of the car–two things you’ll find useful when barreling through the night at felonious velocity in a 570-horsepower sports car.

Each headlight features a laser module that generates a cone of light that reaches twice as far as Audi’s LED headlight. Each module sports four laser diodes just 300 micrometers in diameter. They fire a blue laser beam with a wavelength of 450 nanometers into a phosphor converter, generating white light with a color temperature of 5,500 Kelvin–the perfect white light for nighttime illumination. The laser spot, as Audi calls it, supplements the standard LED high beam at speeds over 38 mph. A camera detects pedestrians and cars ahead and adjusts the beam so you don’t blind them.

As with so much cool stuff, the technology derives from auto racing. Audi first used laser illumination in the R18 e-tron Quattro, which raced at the 24 Hours of Le Man and elsewhere. A 24-hour race, by definition, includes running at speed through the night, making effective illumination a key component of going fast.

So far the tech is available only in the R8 LMX, which launches in Germany this summer with a base price of €210,000. No word if or when the tech might trickle down to cars the rest of us can afford.

The laser spot high beam illuminates significantly farther than the standard high and low beam LED lights in the R8 LMX, making it perfect for late-night sprints on the Autobahn.

[MIKA27]

Kim Jong Un Takes on the Capitalists in New Video Game

With additional assistance from the North Korean leader's best friend, Dennis Rodman

Other video games let you experience life as a cat, but now you can pretend to be a dictator.

Atlanta-based Moneyhorse Games created a side-scrolling video game that will be available soon for PCs and mobile devices. It features North Korea’s Kim Jong Un gallivanting through forests on unicorn and dashing through the streets of Pyongyang, battling U.S. paratroopers and eventually setting fire to an American flag.

Oh, and of course, Kim Jong Un’s noted bestie Dennis Rodman will be involved.

As the Guardian points out, this game — simply titled “Glorious Leader!” — could trivialize the very serious accusations against the dictator’s regime and the many perceived problems within the secluded nation. Moneyhorse Games CEO Jeff Miller told theGuardian that the company hopes to “carefully walk the line of satire without being an apologist for the regime.”

[MIKA27]

Brazilian anti-World Cup protests hit Sao Paulo

Demonstrators in Sao Paulo burned tyres and blocked roads, and police responded with tear gas

Riot police in Brazil have fired tear gas and stun grenades to disperse thousands of people in the city of Sao Paulo who were protesting against the cost of hosting the football World Cup.

Some demonstrators hurled stones while other burned tyres and blocked roads.

They say they are angry that billions of dollars are being spent on next month's football tournament, rather than social projects and housing.

Protests are taking place in many other cities, including Rio de Janeiro.

Aerial images showed hundreds of people marching in rush-hour traffic on a main thoroughfare in the Brazilian city, which will host the final match of the World Cup on 13 July.

Police, teachers and civil servants, among others, have also been on strike across Brazil.

The BBC's Gary Duffy in Sao Paulo says that the scale of the protests will be watched closely by the government as an indication of the security challenges they may face during the tournament, which kicks off on 12 June.

He adds that, with both the World Cup and a presidential election this year, many groups have spotted an opportunity to exert maximum pressure on the government.

The demonstrations began earlier in the day in Sao Paulo, with one of the biggest protests in the city's Itaquera district near the Arena Corinthians stadium, which will host the tournament's opening match.

Protesters there demanded housing, and not stadiums, be built in accordance with Fifa standards, in reference to world football's governing body.

'No panic'

"Our goal is symbolic," said Guilherme Boulos, the head of Homeless Workers Movement.

"We don't want to destroy or damage the stadium. What we want is more rights for workers to have access to housing and to show the effects the Cup has brought to the poor."

One protest in Sao Paulo was held near the stadium which will host the tournament's opening match

The government has tried to downplay the scale of Thursday's unrest, arguing it was not related to the World Cup.

"From what I've seen, these are specific claims by workers. I've seen nothing that is related to the (World) Cup," Brazilian Sports Minister Aldo Rebelo said.

"There's no reason to panic ahead of receiving three million Brazilian tourists and 600,000 foreign tourists (for the tournament)."

Army deployed

The planned protests coincide with a range of strikes, including one by the police force in the north-eastern state of Pernambuco.

The army has been deployed there to provide additional support after some robberies and looting, as the strike enters its third day.

Recife, the state capital, is due to host five matches during the World Cup.

Recent protests in Brazil have been much smaller than those which took place in June last year in various cities.

More than a million people took to the street then over poor public services, corruption and the high cost of hosting the World Cup.

The wave of protests prompted Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff to propose a referendum on political reform.

She also pledged to invest 50 billion reais ($25bn, £16bn) in public transport, one of the protesters' main grievances.

[MIKA27]

Three friends return $40,000 found stuffed in couch

Three friends in New York found $40,000 (£24,000) in a second-hand couch they had bought, then tracked down the owner and returned the cash.

Reese Werkhoven, Cally Guasti and Lara Russo bought the furniture from a charity shop for $20 and found the cash in several envelopes.

The woman said her daughter had sold it while she was in hospital for a surgery, unaware what was inside.

When they returned the money, the woman rewarded the three roommates with $1,000.

The three, who live in the northern part of New York state, told the local CBS broadcaster the elderly woman, who wanted to remain anonymous, told them she had stashed the money in the couch over a number of years.

"This was her life savings and she actually said something really beautiful like 'this is my husband looking down on me and this was supposed to happen,'" Ms Guasti said.

[MIKA27]

See Spot – See Spot Shrink – Jupiter Watchers Wonder Why

The most famous planetary blemish and the largest storm in the solar system is at its smallest size since first described as a “permanent spot” by Giovanni Domenico Cassini in the 1600s. Why is it happening and should we be worried?

The giant anticyclonic storm known as the Great Red Spot was first definitively observed with a telescope by Samuel Heinrich Schwabe in 1831. It has since been closely watched by astronomers using Earth telescopes, Voyagers 1 and 2 and the Hubble Telescope, which provided the latest pictures of the spot’s shrinkage.

Using the early photos, descriptions and drawings from Schwabe and others, the oval-shaped Great Red Spot was estimated to be 25,475 miles (41,000 km) in length in the late 1800s. It was first observed to be getting smaller starting in the 1930s. The Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 flybys in 1979 measured it at 14,500 miles across. The most recent photographs taken by the Hubble telescope put its current size at 10,250 miles (16,496 kilometers) and its shape is now almost circular instead of oval. A comparison of historical measurements shows that the spot’s shrinkage is accelerating, with the rate of reduction now at 580 miles (933 km) a year.

What’s causing the Great Red Spot to lose greatness? Dr. Amy Simon of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, has a theory.

In our new observations it is apparent that very small eddies are feeding into the storm. We hypothesized that these may be responsible for the sudden change by altering the internal dynamics and energy of the Great Red Spot.

Simon and Hubble astronomers will continue to watch the shrinking Great Red Spot.

[MIKA27]

Taiwanese Animators Hilariously Recreate Alex Baldwin's Arrest

That's precisely what happened to 30 Rock's leading man Alex Baldwin who found himself getting arrested on account of riding his bicycle the wrong way up a New York street.

Once the cops asked him for ID (which he didn't have) he allegedly erupted into a tirade of insults and F-bombs. That landed him a second charge of disorderly conduct.

He's due to appear in court on July 24, meanwhile numerous murders, rapists and sex offenders are obviously free to roam the streets undeterred.

In the meantime, Taiwanese animators have "recreated" the events as they apparently unfolded - it's truly hilarious to watch.

[MIKA27]

600 Days Around the World With A GoPro On A Stick

This clip is sure to give you travel envy.

We all have "that friend" who posts 10 different selfies in the bathroom mirror or on the couch right?

Well, they're the opposite to adventurer Alex Chacón , who has a vastly different approach to taking selfies.

He took his using a 360° degree video, set against a backdrop of 36 countries in 600 days. He covered most of the ground on his motorcycle traveling some 200,000KM in total. That's a serious trip in anyones book.

His journey saw him whizzing across 75+ individual borders visiting some of the most remote and exotics places on earth.

After watching his journey, you'll likely get the travel bug too, the question is could you top his selfies?

[MIKA27]

A Giant Ball Of Fire Fell From The Sky In North Queensland

Yesterday evening, residents of Townsville in north Queensland looking out their windows would have seen a massive fireball in the evening sky. A meteor, or possibly a chunk of an old satellite, falling to Earth made for an impressive twilight light show.

ABC News has the story; Townsville residents said the meteor had a bright blue and orange tail as it fell towards the planet, hitting the ground some distance away and causing a bright, noiseless explosion.

“It was pretty big and this thing hit like a bomb — it was huge,” said Townsville homeowner Terry Robinson. “I don’t know how big it was, but in the sky it looked like half a dozen jumbo jets falling out of the sky at the same time.”

The meteor’s blue flame would have been caused by the metals in its makeup; copper and lead are two elements that burn blue. It could have been a small asteroid or part of an old satellite or piece of space junk that fell out of orbit.

Despite looking like it was close, it’s probable that the meteor eventually made landfall a long distance away. Astronomer Owen Bennedick told ABC that while most of the meteorite would have been burned up in its entry through Earth’s atmosphere, any part that fell would have been distant to Townsville watchers: “Only the heavier objects make it to ground, the rest of it burns up in the atmosphere.

“My experience is that most people think it’s landed just over the next door hill, but the pieces have actually landed hundreds of kilometres away. They look like they’re very close but that’s not necessarily the case.”

[MIKA27]

WOOD SLEEVES | BY GROOVEMADE

Groovemade, makers of the popular iPhone Skatebacks, have presented some sleek Wood Sleeves for iPad Air, iPad Mini, and MacBook Air. Handcrafted from wood veneer, the sleeves feature an interior wool lining and a leather and brass pull strap to remove your device. Organic textures protect your precious device from bumps and scratches on the go. Available in a choice of maple or walnut wood.

[MIKA27]

STRIETMAN ES3 ESPRESSO MACHINE

Most modern espresso machines are rather complex affairs, with built-in frothers, pumps, and sometimes even grinders, letting you brew a cup with the press of a button.

The Strietman ES3 Espresso Machine is not most espresso machines.

Handmade in the Netherlands, this carefully built machine uses the time-tested lever technique to press hot water through the coffee with a piston, providing you with a perfect cup every time. Features include an open boiler that holds up to 350cc of water, three included filter basket and a double spout for brewing two cups at a time, and a handsome wooden wall-mount frame.

[MIKA27]

How To Make A Truly Grilled Grilled Cheese Sandwich

Grilled cheese sandwiches are usually a simple slapping combination of bread and cheese but the result is never as delicious as you imagine. Alton Brown has another way to make a grilled cheese sandwich that is truly grilled and looks absolutely fantastic. Watch him walk you through the process. He’s pretty much reinventing the wheel here.

[MIKA27]

A Massive Dose Of Measles Virus Wiped Out This Woman's Cancer

Stacy Erholtz didn’t have many options to treat her blood cancer left when she agreed to being injected with the equivalent of 10 million doses of measles vaccine. Hours later, she was vomiting and feverish. Months later, her cancer was gone. This landmark result — if replicated in larger clinical trials — could open the door to new therapy that uses viruses to target cancer cells.

Viral therapy is an old idea with some success in mice, but this is the first clearly documented result of it working in humans. “It’s a game changer,” one of the researchers told the Washington Post.

A key problem with cancer therapies has always been distinguishing healthy cells from cancerous ones, and viruses are exquisitely good at recognising specific cells to attack. Erholtz’s cancer, called myeloma, allows the buildup of malignant blood plasma cells in her bone marrow. Measles viruses happen to have the ability get into bone marrow.

Her doctors at the Mayo clinic injected her with a genetically engineered version of the weakened virus used in measles vaccines. The dose needed to be huge, so that her immune system would not kill the viruses before they could kill the cancerous cells. That exposes a weakness of this specific therapy: it probably could not work in patients with immunity to measles already. Erholtz and the one other patient in this trial did not, but most of us in the U.S. are vaccinated for measles at a young age. Symptoms from the measles infection itself disappeared after a few weeks for the two patients.

The other myeloma patient also did not achieve complete remission like Erholtz, possibly because her tumors formed in the muscle rather than the bone. And of course, the result would need to be confirmed in larger trials to prove it wasn’t a one-time fluke. Such a clinical trial is expected to start in September.

The other myeloma patient also did not achieve complete remission like Erholtz, possibly because her tumors formed in the muscle rather than the bone. And of course, the result would need to be confirmed in larger trials to prove it wasn’t a one-time fluke. Such a clinical trial is expected to start in September.

Other researchers in the field have deployed different viruses to treat different cancers, such as a variant of the common cold virus for pancreatic cancer. It will be years before viral therapies for cancer become routine — if the results even hold up in clinical trials — but this suggests we could eventually deploy viruses for the good of our health, too.

[Habana Mike]

How To Make A Truly Grilled Grilled Cheese Sandwich

Grilled cheese sandwiches are usually a simple slapping combination of bread and cheese but the result is never as delicious as you imagine. Alton Brown has another way to make a grilled cheese sandwich that is truly grilled and looks absolutely fantastic. Watch him walk you through the process. He’s pretty much reinventing the wheel here.

Blows away the old Wonder bread and American cheese version by at least 2.3 kilometers!

[Pedro2486]

How To Make A Truly Grilled Grilled Cheese Sandwich

Grilled cheese sandwiches are usually a simple slapping combination of bread and cheese but the result is never as delicious as you imagine. Alton Brown has another way to make a grilled cheese sandwich that is truly grilled and looks absolutely fantastic. Watch him walk you through the process. He’s pretty much reinventing the wheel here.

I have, at great risk to my waistline, decided to attempt to create this sandwich. Maybe using jarlsberg instead of gruyere. I will report back with my findings, I may be some time

[MIKA27]

The First Full-Length Interstellar Trailer Is Spectacular

I’ve been excited about Christopher Nolan’s new epic, Interstellar, for some time. But the arrival of a brand new trailer, revealing an emotional Matthew McConaughey preparing to save us Earthlings from imminent starvation, is still thrilling. It’s like the Great Depression meets 2001: A Space Odyssey — in a good way.

[MIKA27]

These Bones Might Be The Biggest Creature That Ever Walked The Earth

http://youtu.be/A845vlSim0U

Paleontologists have just unearthed the fossilised bones of a gigantic dinosaur that’s never been seen before. They believe it’s an entirely new species — and based on the size of its bones, it’s way bigger than what we thought was the biggest dinosaur ever. Meet the new number one among earthly creatures.

Based on the size of the thigh bone found at the dig site in Argentina, paleontologists estimate this dinosaur was 39.6m long and 19.8m tall, and weighed in at a whopping 77 tons. That’s seven tons heavier than what we used to think was the biggest dinosaur, Argentinosaurus. In other words, this jumbo-dino weighed as much as 14 African elephants, and with its neck held high the herbivore was seven stories tall. That’s positively massive.

The bones were first discovered in the desert near La Flecha, roughly 140 miles from Trelew, Patagonia, by a local farmer. Paleontologists from the Museum of Palaeontology Egidio Feruglio, led by Dr Jose Luis Carballido and Dr Diego Pol, have since uncovered some 150 bones belonging to seven individual skeletons.

“Given the size of these bones, which surpass any of the previously known giant animals, the new dinosaur is the largest animal known that walked on Earth,” the researchers told BBC News.

The next step is naming this newly-discovered juggernaut in a way that pays tribute to the place where it was discovered, the people who discovered it, and its towering size and ground-shaking heft. Or, they could just ignore all of that and call it Godzilla. I vote for the latter.