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

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Samurai Dazzles With Soccer Tricks

For this year’s World Cup, Japanese noodle company Nissin thought it would be a good idea to send Red Bull athlete Kotaro Tokuda to Brazil. To do soccer tricks. In samurai gear.

Tokuda is a freestyle football champ and apparently pulled off these moves without the help of CGI or wire trickery.

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This Is The Cockpit Of The Supersonic Car That Will Reach 1600KPH

This awesomeness — captured by photographer Stefan Marjoram — is the cockpit of the Bloodhound Supersonic Car, designed to set a new world land speed record of — at least! — 1,000 miles per hour (1,609.34 km/h) in South Africa. Its pilot, Andy Green, explains how the instruments work in this video tour.

As well as the rather essential speedometer, the car’s future driver Andy Green says one of Bloodhound’s most critical cockpit displays relays the wheel load data, telling him if the car’s stable and still attached to the ground. “It’s fundamental we keep the wheels on the ground. If we do that we can’t have a crash,” he said, already reassuring himself that everything’s going to be OK.

The other stats hitting Bloodhound’s screens give Andy braking data, hydraulic pressures, fuel information and various temperatures. No mention of if there’s a 3.5mm jack for hooking up his phone to the radio, but there must be. It’s pretty much a standard feature these days.

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Extremely Rare Image Of Two B-2 Bombers Refueling At The Same Time

Image of the day: An extraordinary photo of two B-2 Spirit refueling simultaneously from two KC-135 Stratotankers. And if that’s not cool enough for you, here are two more cool photos of the world’s most advanced stealth bomber (that we know of.) One solo, one flying with two F-22 Raptor fighters over Guam.

Top image was taken during Operation Iraqi Freedom, March 21, 2003.

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How WWI Bombs Shattered Bedrock And Changed The Geology Of France

Every once in a while, we’re reminded of World War I’s awful legacy: Trenches that run like gashes through the French countryside, craters in farmland, the iron harvest. These scars are even deeper than we might imagine. Bombs actually shattered bedrock and created the bizarre, dimpled landscape of modern day Verdun.

World War I has gone down in history as our first modern war, when we became brutally efficient at killing people. As bombs rained down on the Western Front, thousands of craters opened up on the battlefields. Meteorites had created the occasional crater before, but large-scale bombing was a new phenomenon on earth, which two geographers have called “bombturbation.”

A post by David Bressan on his History of Geology blog pointed me toward the geographer’s 2006 paper where they first discuss bombturbation. “The artillery fire changed how and which type of soil can form — so much that the authors suggest that the modern use of bombs and explosives is a significant erosion factor that it deserves a own term,” writes Bressan.

The geographers Joseph P. Hupy and Randall J. Schaetzl had visited Verdun in France, home to one of the World War I’s deadliest and most infamous battles. They marked off two plots of land, a quarter hectacre each, and measured depth and soil disturbance of every crater in those plots.

Artillery shells could blast craters up to 30 feet wide and many feet deep. Land mines were even more powerful, creating holes up to 160 feet deep. These explosives blasted through bedrock. Though curiously, artillery shells did more damage to the ground in WWI than WWII in the same area. That’s because early artillery shells were designed to explode on impact, but more advanced detonators during WWII allowed shells to explode in the air.

Because of Verdun’s high water table, some of these craters later filled up with water like small ponds. In dry craters, rotting matter and microbes have accumulated on the exposed limestone bedrock, making it more prone to weathering and erosion. The soil in these craters is thicker than in undisturbed areas.

Aerial images of Verdun in A and B. Craters in Vietnam in C and D.

Verdun is an early example of bombturbation, but weapons have only gotten more powerful since then. Vietnam has suffered the worst of it. The U.S. dropped some 14 million tons of bombs on the country during 8 years of war. As destruction of enemy habitat became an explicit part of American strategy, “aerial bombardment inflicted damage to the Vietnamese landscape at a scale never before accomplished,” write Hupy and Schaetzl. We may not pause to think about the geological legacy of bombs in the thick of war, we have to live with it long after.

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Insane Slackliner Crosses 660-Metre Gorge Without Safety, Then Jumps

25-year-old slackliner Spencer Seabrooke went to the North Gully of Stawamus Chief Mountain in Squamish, British Columbia, to do three things: Walk across on a slack line without safety harness (he did it on the third try), swing on a rope from the other side, and freak the hell out of all of us watching.

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This Is The New Larger iPhone 6, Claims Aussie Leaker

You are looking at the new iPhone 6 — at least according to Australia’s Sonny Dickson whose Apple leaks have always been accurate. If this is true, his photo potentially confirms the rumours that claimed that Apple would start producing 4.7-inch and 5.5-inch iPhone 6 models starting in May.

The 5.5-inch model may look ridiculous — as every other large phone in the market — but Dickson has been a reliable source of Apple iPhone rumours for a while now. Of course, he can be wrong this time — but these images fit with all the other gossip and the new iPhone 6 cases already being sold in the Chinese market.

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How Two Women Made Your Watch Glow In The Dark

On 21 December 1898, Marie and Pierre Curie discovered the radioactive element radium (in the form of radium chloride), extracting it from uraninite. They first removed the uranium from the uraninite sample and then found that the remaining matter was still radioactive, so investigated further. Along with the barium in the remaining substance, they also detected spectral lines that were crimson carmine, which no one had yet documented or, apparently, observed. These spectral lines were being given off by radium chloride, which they managed to separate from the barium. Five days later, they presented their findings to the French Academy of Sciences.

Five years after that, they won a Nobel Prize in physics for their discovery, making Marie Curie the first woman to win a Nobel Prize. She went on to win a second Nobel Prize in 1911; this time in chemistry, with the help of André-Louis Debierne. The two successfully managed to isolate radium through electrolysis of radium chloride. This second Nobel Prize made her the first person to ever win two.

Radium was soon all the rage- bottled radium water was used as a health tonic, such as the popular Radithor brand “Certified Radioactive Water”; facial creams that included the element were used to “rejuvenate the skin”; the Radium Institute in New York City was giving out radium injections to those who had the money to pay for it; certain brands of toothpaste started including it; high-end spas began adding uranium ore to the water of their pools in an effort to capitalise and the radioactive craze created by the discovery of radium. Radium was even used as a treatment for those who had cancer after it was observed that exposing tumours to radium salts would shrink them.

Beyond medicinal uses, shortly after radium was discovered, it was found that if you mixed radium salts with zinc sulfide and a glue agent, the result would be a pale glowing paint thanks to the radium causing the zinc atoms to emit photons. This wasn’t particularly useful in the daylight, owing to the light emitted being very dim; but at night, the glow was readily apparent close-up.

This brings us to watches. A problem in the trenches of WWI had developed where soldiers crawling and wading around in the mud weren’t able to see their watch dials at night, and their pocket watches themselves simply weren’t suitable for this environment. To solve this, watchmakers started making men’s watches with straps, specifically designed to be worn, rather than placed in a pocket. (Previous to this, wrist watches were primarily only worn by women, with men outside of the military favouring pocket watches. After WWI, this all changed.)

The watch makers also began painting the watch dials with this special radium paint. The dimness of the glow was beneficial for the soldiers over a normal light as they could tell the time without giving away their position.

Enter U.S. Radium Corporation, who the U.S. military had given a contract to produce wrist watches with glowing hands for soldiers. Beyond the soldiers, these new watches soon became all the rage among the general public as well.

With the boom, many young women (4,000 in total employed by U.S. Radium alone from 1917-1926) were hired by various factories to paint the watch dials with this special radium-laced paint, with U.S. Radium’s version being named “Undark.”

It was good paying work for the day for young women who on account of their small hands were seen as perfectly suited to do the work. The girls earned 1.5 cents per dial painted (about 17 cents today). Not only that, as radium had been widely touted for its health benefits, getting to work with the stuff was seen by some as a perk, even though more and more scientists at this point had begun backtracking on this point. For the general public though, the dangers of radium weren’t yet as widely known.

Despite the fact that U.S. Radium chemists had been writing up reports on the risks of excessive exposure to radium, the girls were told the paint was completely safe, and even encouraged to use their lips and tongues to keep their brushes as fine tipped as possible for precisely painted dials.

Having been assured it was completely harmless, among other uses the girls also commonly painted their fingernails and even teeth with it, so that at night they would glow. Of course, what the girls seemingly didn’t notice was that the upper management and scientists at U.S. Radium were not so gung-ho about exposing themselves to radium. In fact, they used lead screens, masks, and other such protective barriers whenever working with it. They also were careful to avoid touching it themselves, always using tongs.

As you might imagine, not only U.S. Radium’s girls, but workers at other dial painting factories quickly started to develop odd medical issues that their doctors couldn’t explain. Frances Splettstocher, who had worked at a Waterbury, Connecticut dial painting factory, in 1925 developed anemia and began having jaw and tooth pain, along with arthritic symptoms. When her dentist attempted to remove one of the aching teeth, part of Splettstocher’s jaw ended up breaking away at the same time. Soon, her gums and cheek rotted away, ultimately resulting in a hole in her cheek. Her health continued to deteriorate and she was dead within a month of having her tooth pulled. Over in the Orange, New Jersey factory, four other girls had recently died and many more were ill with strikingly similar symptoms.

This all brings us to Grace Fryer, who in 1922 had her teeth inexplicably start to loosen and then later begin to fall out. After X-raying Grace, her doctor discovered her jawbone was riddled with tiny holes. Other doctors examined her in an attempt to find the underlying cause of these strange symptoms, which they began seeing more and more of in various young women in the town. They eventually realised all the women were either currently working at, or had once worked at a watch dial painting factory. It was then suggested to Grace that perhaps the health problems she was experiencing were related to her former employment in some way.

Grace then sought out the help of a specialist. That’s when Dr. Frederick Flynn from Columbia University came on the scene. After thoroughly examining Grace, he and a colleague of his, both claiming to be medical experts, declared there was absolutely nothing wrong with her. The problem was that Flynn was not a licensed physician, though was a toxicologist, who it turned out secretly worked for U.S. Radium. His colleague? He was one of the vice-presidents at U.S. Radium, unbeknownst to Grace.

U.S. Radium couldn’t keep the lid on their terrible secret much longer. That didn’t stop them from trying. They paid off doctors and dentists to claim the girls were suffering from the sexually transmitted disease syphilis (and generally having this listed as the cause of death when the girls died), with the hope that it would not only throw the media off the scent, but also sully the girls’ reputations. If the doctors who examined some of the girls were unwilling to make false claims, they simply paid them not to talk to the media.

A few years earlier, Cecil Drinker, a Harvard physiologist, was hired by U.S. Radium to come and write up a report on the conditions at the factory. Unfortunately, Drinker couldn’t be so easily paid off. His report after examining the girls and the factory was dire. Among other things, he had noted that,

Dust samples collected in the workroom from various locations and from chairs not used by the workers were all luminous in the dark room. Their hair, faces, hands, arms, necks, the dresses, the underclothes, even the corsets of the dial painters were luminous. One of the girls showed luminous spots on her legs and thighs. The back of another was luminous almost to the waist….

Besides also accurately painting a picture of the state of the girls’ health, he suggested a series of things that could be done to fix the underlying problem of the overexposure to radium.

Not only were all his suggestion ignored, but U.S. Radium took his report and re-wrote it, though still listing him as the author. In the new report filed with the New Jersey Department of Labour, it claimed that “every girl is in perfect condition.”

This brings us back to a few years later in 1925, when Drinker discovered that his report had been re-written. Needless to say, he wasn’t pleased. He then submitted his original report for publication. U.S. Radium threatened to sue him. He ignored them.

As the media exposure continued to grow, Grace Fryer decided to take legal action against U.S. Radium. Of course, suing a major defence contractor like U.S. Radium wasn’t easy. They had boatloads of money and connections with just about every level of government. Lawyers wanted no part in such a lawsuit. In fact, it took Grace a full two years to find a lawyer willing to take her case, all the while her health continued to decline.

Finally, in 1927, attorney Raymond Berry and the Consumers’ League of New Jersey on behalf of Grace and four other Radium Girls- Katherine Schaub, Edna Hussman, Quinta McDonald and Albina Larice- filed a suit against U.S. Radium seeking $US250,000 in damages (about $US3.4 million today).

U.S. Radium wasn’t giving up without a fight. At every turn they sought to delay the trial as much as possible with the hope that all the women in the case would die before an outcome could be reached, even at one point in the trial temporarily getting a fourteen month delay instituted before public outcry resulted in that delay being shortened to just a couple months. Despite public outrage over the delays and the plight of the women involved, the trial still crawled along at a painful pace.

Marie Curie herself chimed in on the issue, but had little comfort to give stating, “I would be only too happy to give any aid that I could, [but] there is absolutely no means of destroying the substance once it enters the human body.”

By the time the girls finally got a chance to appear in court in January of 1928, none of them were even able to raise their arms to take the oath, and two were bedridden. Grace could not sit up without the help of a back brace, and could no longer walk. After their testimonies, the case was once again postponed for a few months for no good reason.

Despite that one medical expert testified that all the girls in the case would be dead in a year from radium poisoning, in the next hearing in April, U.S. Radium convinced the judge to postpone the trial once again, owing to the fact that some of U.S. Radium’s expert witnesses were currently on vacation and would be for many months.

This move was called by journalist Walter Lippmann, “one of the most damnable travesties of justice that has ever come to our attention. It is an outrage that the company should attempt to keep these women from suing… There is no possible excuse for such a delay. The women are dying. If ever a case called for prompt adjudication, it is the case of five crippled women who are fighting for a few miserable dollars to ease their last days on Earth.”

In the end, the five girls whose medical bills were piling up as their bodies rapidly deteriorated, seeing the trial would likely not conclude before some of their deaths (indeed, all five were dead by the mid-1930s), decided to try settling out of court. U.S. Radium agreed, though managed to get a U.S. Radium stockholder, District Court Judge William Clark, assigned to be the mediator.

The girls ultimately agreed not to hold U.S. Radium liable for their health problems and in return received $US10,000 each (about $US135,000 each today). Further, U.S. Radium agreed to pay all their medical and legal expenses, as well as $US600 each annually for as long as the girls lived.

So what was the company’s official position on this in the aftermath? They stated they had not settled because they weren’t in the right, but rather that the public was biased against them and they wouldn’t have been able to receive a fair trial. Further, U.S. Radium’s president, Clarence Lee, stated:

We unfortunately gave work to a great many people who were physically unfit to procure employment in other lines of industry. Cripples and persons similarly incapacitated were engaged. What was then considered an act of kindness on our part has since been turned against us. Classy.

Bonus Facts:

• So why did radium cause the bones of the afflicted women to develop a patchwork of holes, and ultimately rot away? It was later determined that radium will concentrate in bones and teeth, with the body treating it as a calcium substitute. Unlike calcium, which strengthens the bones, radium kills off the bone tissues, compounding the issue. It was estimated that the girls who worked at the factories had been exposed annually to thousands of times the maximum recommended exposure to radium.
• The primary reason cockroaches and many types of insects are so resistant to ionizing radiation is that their cells don’t divide that much between molting cycles. Cells are most susceptible to damage by ionizing radiation when they are dividing. Given that a typical cockroach only molts about once a week and its cells only divide around a 48 hour period during that week, about 3/4 of the cockroaches exposed would not be particularly susceptible to damage by ionizing radiation, at least, relative to those whose cells were currently dividing. That said, contrary to popular belief cockroaches would not survive an extreme nuclear fallout, though there are some things that would.
• Marie Curie’s notes from the 1890s are still considered too dangerous to handle without protection, due to the high levels of radioactivity. They are even stored in lead-lined boxes. Neither she nor her husband, of course, knew anything about that and handled radioactive items all the time in their research. She eventually paid the price for this, dying from aplastic anemia in 1934, resulting from long-term ionizing radiation exposure. Her husband was killed after being run over by a horse drawn carriage just a few years after Marie and Pierre had won their Nobel Prize together. Pierre Curie had been walking across the street during a very heavy downpour when he was hit by the carriage, resulting in his skull being fractured under the carriage’s wheel.
• Despite denials of any fault by U.S. Radium, after the lawsuit, they and other factories that dealt with radium-laced paint quickly changed the working conditions of the dial painting girls. The previously recommended “lip pointing” to keep a fine tip on the brushes was now strictly forbidden. Further, the girls were provided with various means of protection to minimize exposure to the paint. After these simple changes were instituted, the health issues among dial painters quickly disappeared, though it’s probable that at least some still got cancer later in life as a result of working with the radium paint. But, at the least, the problem was no longer systemic among most of the workers. The fact that the changes were so easily instituted and were a resounding success, along with the fact that the scientists and upper management at U.S. Radium had previously taken steps to protect themselves but not the simple ones for the girls, further outraged the general public.
• Even though the Radium Girls settled out of court and quickly died off, their lawsuit and the media storm it produced had a significant impact on the labour rights movement, including establishing a precedent for workers to be able to sue corporations for labour abuses; improving industrial safety standards to protect workers more; and later partially being used as a means to get a Congressional bill passed allowing for workers to be compensated for occupationally acquired diseases. In a report from the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission concerning workers developing the atomic bomb, it was also noted that “If it hadn’t been for those dial painters thousands of workers might well have been, and might still be, in great danger.”
• The last surviving woman to have worked as a dial painter in the era in which the girls were told the radium-laden paint was completely safe only recently died. Mae Keane lived to 107, though did twice have cancer in her lifetime and lost all her teeth within a decade of working as a dial painter. She also suffered from gum problems the rest of her long life. She worked for Waterbury Clock Co. (now called Timex) at the age of 18 in 1924. Lucky for her, she hated the work, was slow at it, and further hated the gritty texture of the paint, so avoided sticking the brush in her mouth to point the tip. After just a summer there, at the “encouragement” of her boss (who it turns out accidentally saved her life), she found different employment. Keane died at the age of 107 on March 1, 2014.
• A couple of Marie Curies’ children have also been involved in the winning of a Nobel Prize. Her daughter, Irène Joliot-Curie, won a Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1935 with her husband. She also had another daughter who was the director of UNICEF when it won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1965.

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NASA's New Smell-O-scope Experiment Sniffs Saturn's Moon Titan

Good news, everyone! NASA has came up with an interplanetary smell-o-scope experiment, processing data from the Cassini spacecraft and reproducing the smell of another world right here on Earth: Saturn’s moon Titan. (Spoiler: It smells like farts mixed with gasoline.)

A team led by Joshua Sebree — assistant professor at the University of Northern Iowa in Cedar Falls and former postdoctoral fellow at NASA Goddard — has “created a new recipe that captures key flavours of the brownish-orange atmosphere around Saturn’s largest moon”, enabling us “to classify previously unidentified material discovered by NASA’s Cassini spacecraft in the moon’s smoggy haze.”

How does it smell?

Before this new experiment, scientists couldn’t really make it work. They originally tried mixing nitrogen and methane, the two most common gases in Titan, but that just smells like terrestrial farts: “These experiments never produced a mixture with a spectral signature to match to the one seen by Cassini; neither have similar experiments conducted by other groups.”

Then they start other combinations, adding benzene and other chemicals they thought could correspond to what they were seeing in Cassini’s spectrograms. When they finished the experiment, they analysed the result with an spectrograph and saw that they almost hit a home run. Sebree says that “this is the closest anyone has come, to our knowledge, to recreating with lab experiments this particular feature seen in the Cassini data.”

So how does it smell? According to Melissa Trainer — one of the planetary scientist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland — “it has a strong aromatic character.”

You can interpret as “it stinks!” but she’s actually talking about the fact that it smells of a subfamily of hydrocarbons known as aromatics. Benzene is part of this family, and it has a “sweet, aromatic, gasoline-like odour.” So, in other words, yes, I imagine Titan reeks a gas station full of people farting as they fill their tanks.

All good news indeed. Now,”if a dog craps anywhere in the universe, you can bet [we] won’t be out of the loop.”

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Audemars Piguet's New Watch Museum Looks Like Frozen Clockwork

In way, the 149-year-old Swiss watchmaker Audemars Piguet already has its own museum: The town of Le Brassus, where it’s located, is full of historic watchmaking workshops. But the iconic company is building its own dedicated museum anyway, and unsurprisingly it looks just like the intricate movements inside its super-expensive timepieces.

Bjarke Ingels Group, the Dano-American architecture firm that seems to sweep every major design competition these days, just won — yep — another competition to build Piguet a museum in Le Brassus next to the company’s headquarters. BIG’s plans for a museum of haute horlogerie, or fine watchmaking, include an interlocking set of circular galleries that are partially embedded in the landscape, forming a succession of exhibitions spaces that culminate in a central pavilion.

And the entire interior space is clad in a single sheet of steel covered in brass, carefully sliced to create a glittering ceiling. Just like the gears inside Piguet’s watches, it’s designed to have a sense of precision and movement, frozen in space.

The comparison is echoed by Ingels, who says that “watchmaking, like architecture, is the art and science of invigorating inanimate matter with intelligence and performance. It is the art of imbuing metals and minerals with energy, movement, intelligence and measure — to bring it to life in the form of telling time.”

Funnily enough, his plan for the museum looks a bit like another of BIG’s recent competition wins — the Museum of the Human Body, in Montpellier, France. The human body and the fine watch: Not so dissimilar, it turns out.

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The Entrance To Hell Is In The Centre Of Asia, And It's Terrifying

You are looking at the city of Mirny, located right in the heart of Asia, in the Republic of Yakutia, an estate associated to the Russian Federation. That terrifying hole is an open quarry 525m deep and 1.2km in diameter right next to the city itself. It looks like the gates of hell to me.

Here they harvest 25 per cent of all the diamonds in the world. The open quarry was opened in 1955, and it became the centre of the diamond production in Russia. The open air operations ended in 2009 and, since then, diamonds are harvested underground by these infernal machines operated by demons.

Seeing that enormous hole right next to the city defies belief. Apparently, the Soviet Union city planners really didn’t give a damn about the population.

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A Floating Disc Boat Gives Fishermen 360-Degree Access To Their Prey

If you took a bass boat and stripped it to its bare essentials — just the most important things a fisherman needed — you’d probably end up with the Ultraskiff 360. It does away with the traditional boat design in favour of a circular floating platform that gives fisherman better access to the water in any direction.

It’s easier to manoeuvre, can operate in very shallow waters, and makes it easy to fight a fish even if they’re criss-crossing underneath the boat. But as compact as it is, the Ultraskiff 360 still features livewells, coolers and ample storage for the mountain of gear most fishermen rely on, including a removable 360-degree pivoting seat.

Anyone who’s ever shopped for a bass boat before will certainly appreciate that the Ultraskiff 360 starts at around $US1000 for the base version. And you don’t need to factor in the cost of a trailer or paying to use a boat launch, since the craft can simply be turned on its side and rolled to wherever you need it. Try that with a 6m Tracker.

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The Planet's Biggest Water Supply Might Be Hidden 640km Below The US

When most of us imagine what the mantle of the Earth is like, we see burning hot rock and magma (and maybe satan hanging out for good measure). But scientists have discovered evidence that all that rock may be hiding huge amounts of water — three times the volume of all our oceans combined.

The scientists behind the study, which was published online today in the journal Science, think they have figured out the answer to a question that has long plagued Earth science: Just how much water is there on Earth in total? “I think we are finally seeing evidence for a whole-Earth water cycle, which may help explain the vast amount of liquid water on the surface of our habitable planet,” said study co-author and Northwestern geophysicist Steve Jacobsen to PhysOrg. “Scientists have been looking for this missing deep water for decades.”

The study is the first direct evidence of an idea that’s been bouncing around for years: That deep inside the Earth’s mantle — the layer below the crust and above the outer molten core — is hidden massive amounts of water in the rock. Specifically, the water is trapped inside a type of rock called ringwoodite, since it’s under tremendous pressure, and it plays a critical role in turning all that rock into magma. More on that later.

But first things first: How did Jacobsen and his co-author, University of New Mexico seismologist Brandon Schmandt — two scientists who live up here on the crust — figure out what’s going on 640km inside the Earth? In essence, they echo sounded it. Using a network of 2000 seismometers placed across the entire US, they were able to “listen” to the speed of the waves made by earthquakes as they moved through the varying depths of the Earth’s crust. Because water and rock react differently to those waves, they could figure out when the waves were hitting a watery patch versus a solid rock patch.

They didn’t stop there: They also simulated the pressure of being 640km below the Earth’s surface in a lab, so they could test how rock and water would react. And they found that ringwoodite (seen below) is a little bit like a sponge at those high pressures: it soaks up water at the molecular level so that as much as one per cent of its structure is water. In fact, all that water is the key to turning rock into magma.

So, would we ever be able to extract these resources? Almost certainly not — you can just imagine what would come of trying to tamper with the Earth’s mantle. Just discovering them is an amazing thing. And as PhysOrg explains, it’s not exactly as though these are literal oceans:

This fourth form is water trapped inside the molecular structure of the minerals in the mantle rock. The weight of 250 miles (402km) of solid rock creates such high pressure, along with temperatures above 2000 degrees Fahrenheit (1093C), that a water molecule splits to form a hydroxyl radical (OH), which can be bound into a mineral’s crystal structure.

It’s still an incredible discovery though. And it comes on the heels of a March study about a rare diamond (Pictured above) that confirmed the existence of water trapped deep below the Earth’s crust. Now, thanks to the team behind this new paper, we know that a whole lot of it is sitting right below our feet.

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These Japanese Ultra-Luxury Trains Are Penthouses On Rails

The golden age of railways is steaming back into the modern era — in Japan at least. Since the island nation privatised its extensive rail network in the late 1980s, there has been an explosion of high-end designer trains all culminating in these gorgeous, luxurious rail cars from former Ferrari designer Ken Okuyama.

Dubbed the “cruise train” by JR East, the Japanese train company developing them, these $US50 million rail cars spare their riders no luxury. Just look at those interiors, they’re like rolling Park Avenue apartments replete with full length glass windows and ceilings, full baths and split-level sleeping accommodations.

The new trains are already in production and are expected to enter service in the Spring of 2017. There’s no word yet on pricing yet, although, given that each hyper-exclusive outing will only carry 34 passengers in total, you can be that tickets will be astronomically priced and almost entirely out of the reach of normal folks.

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NASA's Real-Life Enterprise May Take Us To Other Star Systems One Day

Dr Harold “Sonny” White is still working on a warp drive at NASA’s Johnson Space Center. His work is still in the experimental stage, but that doesn’t mean he can’t imagine what the real-life Enterprise ship would look like according to his maths.

You’re looking at it right now.

This is the starship that may take us where no human has gone before. And it has me screaming like a little Klingon girl.

Concept 3D artist Mark Rademaker told io9 that “he worked with White to create the updated model, which includes a sleek ship nestled at the center of two enormous rings, which create the warp bubble.”

The updated model is the one you can see above, a variation of the original concept which, according to Dr White, was rendered by Rademaker based on an idea by Matthew Jeffries, the guy who came with “the familiar Star Trek look”. This is the original warp drive spaceship concept:

Dr White — whose daily life is working in future propulsion solutions for interplanetary travel in the near future, like ion and plasma thrusters — developed new theoretical work that solved the problems of the Alcubierre Drive concept, a theory that allowed faster-than-light travel based on Einstein’s field equations in general relativity, developed by theoretical physicist Miguel Alcubierre.

A spaceship equipped with a warp drive would allow faster-than-light travel by bending the space around it, making distances shorter. At the local level, however, the spaceship wouldn’t be moving faster than light. Therefore, warp drive travel doesn’t violate the first Einstein commandment: Thou shall not travel faster than light.

Here’s more views of the IXS Enterprise during its construction phase, the concept that Dr White developed with Rademaker:

The spacecraft reminds me a bit to the spaceship in Chris Nolan’s Interstellar, a film that — in theory — will portrait realistic faster-than-light travel. This is partial view of the ship in the movie, which also has a ring of some sort around it.

Not a fantasy, but real science

But Interstellar is just science fiction. Dr White’s work at the Advanced Propulsion Theme Lead for the NASA Engineering Directorate is science. And while his department only gets peanuts compared to NASA’s budget (not to talk about the Pentagon’s) I find his words comforting:

Perhaps a Star Trek experience within our lifetime is not such a remote possibility.

See, Dr White and his colleagues aren’t making a movie or coming up with 3D renders for the sake of it. They just don’t just believe a real life warp drive is theoretically possible; they have already started the work to create one:

Working at NASA Eagleworks — a skunkworks operation deep at NASA’s Johnson Space Center — Dr White’s team is trying to find proof of those loopholes. They have “initiated an interferometer test bed that will try to generate and detect a microscopic instance of a little warp bubble” using an instrument called the White-Juday Warp Field Interferometer.

It may sound like a small thing now, but the implications of the research huge. In his own words:

Although this is just a tiny instance of the phenomena, it will be existence proof for the idea of perturbing space time-a “Chicago pile” moment, as it were. Recall that December of 1942 saw the first demonstration of a controlled nuclear reaction that generated a whopping half watt. This existence proof was followed by the activation of a ~ four megawatt reactor in November of 1943. Existence proof for the practical application of a scientific idea can be a tipping point for technology development.

The roadmap to the warp drive

According to Dr White, this is a roadmap that they need to follow to achieve that final objective of rapid interstellar travel. He explains this roadmap in the video above.

If his work is successful, he says that we would be able to create an engine that will get us to Alpha Centauri “in two weeks as measured by clocks here on Earth.” The time will be the same in the spaceship and on Earth, he claims, and there will not be “tidal forces inside the bubble, no undue issues, and the proper acceleration is zero. When you turn the field on, everybody doesn’t go slamming against the bulkhead, which would be a very short and sad trip.”

Every time I read that paragraph I smile — and these renders just make my smile so wide it looks stupid.

OK, Dr White, you got our attention. Make it so.

[MIKA27]

A Bizarre WWII-Era Supermaterial Made Of Ice Is Making A Comeback

Steel was in short supply during the height of World War II, and there was nothing to be done but invent a replacement. One proposal was called Pykrete, a mixture of ice and sawdust that melted incredibly slowly. The idea faded away once the war ended — but now, a group of Dutch architects and engineers are reviving it. In a big, big way.

First, a little backstory. Pykrete was created by a British inventor named Geoffrey Pyke. As io9 explained a few years ago, Pyke was convinced that he had a better option to replace steel: A special mixture of about 14 per cent sawdust and water. When frozen, this special fluid would form an amazingly strong hybrid material that didn’t melt and was resistant to shattering.

An artist’s rendering of a pykrete-built ship.

In fact, the British government even considered using it to build an aircraft carrier. But when the war ended, Pyke’s novelty faded away, though it wasn’t entirely forgotten (maybe you saw this MythBusters episode about the stuff).

Enter the Eindhoven University of Technology, where students and professors are resurrecting pykrete for use in architecture. Last year, a team build the world’s largest ice dome with the stuff (check out an incredible making-of video below).

Using an inflatable dome, they were able to spray enough of the mixture onto its surface to create a free-standing dome with a 30m span.

Now, the team says they’re ready to take it to the next level. This time, they’re building a 1:4 model of Barcelona’s famed Sagrada Familia out of pykrete. “We could have just decided to build another, even larger, dome,” said professor Arno Pronk. “But in building terms the Sagrada Familia is a much bigger challenge. And of course it’s very recognisable.”

This winter, a team of 50 will get started on the project by creating a inflatable mould of the museum in northern Finland. Then, they will cover it with snow and blow the water and sawdust mixture over it — which will freeze and form the mysterious pykrete, which is three times as strong as normal ice.

The project will really get started this September, when temperatures drop in Juuka, one of the coldest places in Europe. Pronk is worried, though: Juuka had one of the warmest winters on record last year, which could seriously endanger the project if this winter is a repeat. Here’s hoping for deep freeze.

[MIKA27]

The F/A-18 Hornet Is Still One Of The Most Badass Fighters Ever Built

This dramatic shot is enough to prove that the F/A-18 Hornet fighter/attack jet, which entered operational service more than 30 years ago, is still one of the most badass fighters ever built. Here, an F/A-18F Super Hornet aircraft attached to the Strike Fighter Squadron of (VFA) 102 sits on the aircraft carrier USS George Washington (CVN 73) in the Pacific Ocean on 2 June 2014.

[MIKA27]

How Atari Plans to Bring Itself Back From the Dead

For techies of a certain age, few brands inspire as much nostalgia as Atari. They remember the heyday in the 1970s and 80s, when its two-dimensional arcade game Pong was the epitome of fun and the Atari 2600 videogame console was the epitome of cool. But for many young gamers today, their closest brush with Atari is in the retro T-shirt section of their local Urban Outfitters.

Fred Chesnais wants to change that. As Atari’s new CEO and majority shareholder, Chesnais is leading what he hopes will be a turnaround of the 42-year-old brand, which emerged from bankruptcy proceedings last year. For Chesnais, who also served as Atari’s CEO between 2004 and 2007, it’s a second chance to make Atari relevant to a new generation.

His first step: let other people be Atari. Rather than immediately trying to reclaim Atari’s place as a top gaming company–a goal that has eluded many other CEOs with many different comeback strategies over the years–he’s planning on licensing that almighty brand to other studios who are already adept at building games for today’s audience. “Corporations die,” he says. “Brands like Atari don’t.”

It’s a plan that Chesnais says will allow his lean team of 10 employees to take on less risk and experiment with new products and mediums until they find a hit. If successful–and Chesnais knows as well as anyone that he may not be–he hopes that the dark days of Atari will have been nothing more than “a bad scene in what is a very good movie overall.” Here’s how he hopes to do it.

Games Are Dead. Long Live Games.

Games, of course, will still be part of Atari’s future. But this time, Atari is targeting the mobile and online gaming markets, not consoles. In other words, says Chesnais, “no boxes.”

The Atari team will create both new versions of older titles, as well as completely new games based on trends that have emerged in the gaming industry. For instance, after witnessing the rise of the survival video game genre, Atari is developing a new version of one of its classic titles, Asteroids, an arcade shooting game that was first released in 1979. In the new mobile game, players have to figure out how to survive on an asteroid after their spaceship crashes into it. “It’s social, so the more friends you have the better, and you can play anywhere because it’s on mobile,” says Chesnais, who revived another failed gaming brand called MicroProse in 2007 (1). “It’s just much more relevant.”

Since Chesnais returned to Atari, the company has released four new games, including Haunted House and Roller Coaster Tycoon, and it has a slew of additional games set to be released this fall.

Social Gambling

Online gambling for real money may be illegal in the United States today, but in Europe and elsewhere, the market is growing exponentially. One research firm, Juniper Research, recently estimated that by 2018, 164 million people will be playing mobile gambling games, from slot machine games to poker. “We want to be there,” Chesnais says.

To do that, Atari is partnering with two gaming startups already working in the gambling game space. FlowPlay, the company behind the game Vegas World, will work with the company to build Atari Casino, a social casino game in which players can play for virtual money, while another startup called Pariplay will build a game of the same name where players bet with real money.

Entering the mobile gambling market, Chesnais says, will let Atari reach audiences who might never otherwise have played one of its games.

Lights, Camera, Action

Perhaps the biggest departure for Atari is the launch of Atari TV, which will create original video content for YouTube and elsewhere. According to Chesnais: “We’re not just competing against gaming companies anymore. At the end of the day, it’s a competition for the user’s time.” For younger audiences, YouTube dominates that time.

The first big project for Atari TV is a daily video blog called TheRealPele.com that trails Pele, the soccer phenom, throughout the upcoming World Cup in Brazil. But this, Chesnais says, is just the entry point into what he sees as a booming online video market. “We have to be there,” he says. “We cannot ignore another revolution.”

[MIKA27]

The 120-Foot-Long Jellyfish That’s Loving Global Warming

In the Sherlock Holmes story “The Adventure of the Lion’s Mane,” our hero is strolling along a beach when he comes across a man in his death throes, staggering and screaming before shouting his last words: “The lion’s mane!” His name is Fitzroy McPherson, and all over his back are thin red lines—which Sherlock notices because he’s a detective and all—as though the man “had been terribly flogged by a thin wire scourge.”

McPherson’s colleague, a mercurial fellow named Ian Murdoch, becomes a person of interest. He had, after all, once thrown McPherson’s dog through a plate glass window. But that suspicion falls to pieces when the dog-hurler himself staggers into Sherlock’s home in comparable agony, all marked up with the same red lines.

And then the answer hits the great detective. With a police inspector and a guy named Stackhurst he hurries to the beach and finds the culprit: “Cyanea!” he cries. “Cyanea! Behold the Lion’s Mane!” It’s a great jellyfish among the rocks. Shouts Sherlock: “It has done mischief enough. Its day is over! Help me, Stackhurst! Let us end the murderer forever.” And with that they push a boulder into the water, crushing the critter.

That’s a whole lot of animal cruelty in a single short story, and the severity of a sting from a lion’s mane jellyfish, known scientifically as Cyanea capillata, is highly exaggerated here. But this critter is actually far more remarkable than its fanciful villainization. What Sherlock failed to mention is that this is the world’s largest jellyfish, with a bell that reaches a staggering 8 feet wide and tentacles that grow to 120 feet long, far longer than a blue whale. And this monster is really, really loving the whole global warming thing, conquering more and more of Earth’s oceans in massive blooms. So please, if you will, welcome our new giant gelatinous overlords.

It’s those seemingly endless tentacles, hundreds and hundreds of them, that make this incredible growth possible, according to Lisa-Ann Gershwin, a marine biologist with Australia’s Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation. “They’ve got all of these fishing lures out there at the same time,” she said. “Every single tentacle is out there to catch something. They can find so much food simply by multitasking, really.”

Lion’s manes will take just about anything, from the tiniest zooplankton—little critters and fish larvae and such that drift in the open ocean—to smaller jelly species and even their own kind. Their mighty weapons are stinging cells known as nematocysts, which on contact fire poisonous barbs into the prey (think Scorpion from Mortal Kombat, only nematocysts didn’t used to get me in trouble for spending so much money in arcades).

Though nowhere near as powerful of the notoriously deadly box jellyfish, the sting of the lion’s mane is more than enough to incapacitate small critters—and dish out searing pain to humans. (Gershwin herself once had a lion’s mane sting her foot, which “went all red and puffy” and felt like it was being stabbed with “thousands of needles.”) Thoroughly ensnared by the tentacle’s innumerable spines and none too healthy on account of the poison, the prey is reeled in. The lion’s mane can do this a single tentacle at a time, contracting the muscles in each until the prey reaches its curtain-like “oral arms,” folds of tissue in its bell.

From here the prey passes into the jelly’s mouth, which is really just a hole in its body that also functions as its anus, and finally moves into the stomach. “And then they have a circulatory system of canals where the nutrients from the stomach are just dispersed out to the rest of the body through this network,” said Gershwin. “It’s really, really simple, but it works really well. I mean, they’ve been doing exactly that for 600 million years, and it works so well they haven’t needed to change it.”

That’s quite an evolutionary sweet spot. Such a sweet spot, in fact, that the lion’s mane never bothered to evolve true eyes. Instead, these jellies have extremely rudimentary eyespots and can do nothing more than detect light and dark—no shapes and certainly no colors (interestingly, box jellyfish have eyes more like our own, complete with lenses and such, presumably so they can observe the terror they strike in humans). And a brain? Not really necessary, as it turns out. They do have nerve bundles that essentially automate all of their processes, but these are nothing like a brain as we would recognize it.

“A brain is kinda overrated, really,” said Gershwin. “We find it kind of entertaining, and a little bit important, but they do all the stuff they need to do without a brain. But so do venus fly traps. Lots of things can actually do kind of sophisticated behaviors without a brain.”

Reproduction for the lion’s mane, though, is quite sophisticated. Males release sperm threads into the water, and females hoover them up with their mouth-anus thing, a totally unscientific term that I just made up. Her eggs are fertilized internally, and when they hatch, the larvae roam around a bit inside her, then drift off to settle on the seafloor.

But these larvae don’t turn right into what we would identify as jellies, in what is known as the medusa stage, named after the mythical lady with snakes for hair. Instead, they become little white tubes with frilly ends called polyps, which wait until conditions are just right to actually clone themselves hundreds of times over, releasing baby jellies into the water column. Though scientists have yet to do genetic testing on this, Gershwin suspects that huge blooms of lion’s mane jellies could in fact all be clones from a single tiny polyp. It’s a bit like Attack of the Clones, only interesting.

Sting Operation

And boy have they been blooming. Populations of jellyfish like the lion’s mane seem to be exploding in the world’s oceans—because, bluntly put, we’ve goofed. Global warming, overfishing, pollution, basically anything terrible we’ve done to the seas have been an absolute boon to jellyfish, according to Gershwin. Data on jellyfish populations is scarce, so nothing is yet definitive, but as Gershwin puts it, “we now find ourselves in the unexpected position of knowing that we have serious problems with stings to tourists and cloggings of power plants and salmon kills and whatnot, but really having little idea about the speed and trajectory in terms of long-term view.”

As humans, it’s clear we need to tackle the direness that is global warming, but the lion’s mane and its jelly comrades would really prefer that we didn’t. Not only do jellies grow faster in warmer waters, temperature is a pivotal factor in their reproduction. In some species, polyps will only develop as days grow longer in summer, but others instead wait until the water climbs to a certain temperature. Thus ever-hotter oceans in these times of global warming could make for more blooms.

In addition, global warming is monkeying with oxygen concentration in our seas, which is also great news for jellies. “Colder water holds more dissolved oxygen than warmer water,” said Gershwin. “So even a really slight warming—a degree, a half a degree, a quarter of a degree—we may not feel it, but it changes the amount of oxygen that the water can hold.”

And jellyfish are really good at living in oxygen-deprived water. Pretty much everything else in the sea? Not so much. “High-rate breathers,” such as beefy fish that need lots of oxygen to power their muscles, die off when jellyfish lazily cruise around, not the slightest bit fazed.

Then there’s the inflow of our sewage and fertilizers, nutrients that microscopic plants called phytoplankton go ga-ga for. Their populations explode, and are then eaten by their animal counterparts, zooplankton, which are in turn eaten by jellies. But when blooming phytoplankton die and decompose, the bacteria that feed on them suck still more oxygen out of the water.

Add all of this to the fact that we’re overfishing the hell out of our oceans—eliminating not just jellyfish predators but also their competition—and we have a gelatinous, stingy mess on our hands. “It’s probably really tempting to think about jellyfish as these evil beings, we should extinct them because they’re bad,” said Gershwin. “But what they’re doing, whether it’s stinging us or eating all of the fish eggs and larvae or clogging up power plants or whatever, they’re just responding to what we’re doing.”

So we just may have unwittingly assembled an ever-growing army of jellies, led by the outsized lion’s manes, for all-out assault. And this time there won’t be a boulder-wielding Sherlock Holmes to come to the rescue. Which is just as well if his associates insist on throwing dogs through windows.

[MIKA27]

The Criminal Lamborghini Gangs Of Japan

Every capital city has it's fair share of gang culture, but in Japan the familiar biker gangs are giving way to new movement of Lamborghini driving criminals, each operating outside of the law on their own terms.

One of those colourful characters is called Morohoshi-san, who openly admits to both being a delinquent and being arrested numerous times. He candidly recalls how his general apathy towards authority during his childhood, has continued to grow and define him into adulthood.

Not only is he known for mixing with more than a few unsavory individuals, he's one of the leaders of a new sub-culture within the criminal underworld - Lamborghini Gangs.

A club for the elite, the wealthy and those who travel through life with reckless abandon and whose sole aim is to live by their own rules.

[MIKA27]

BEATS POWERBEATS2 WIRELESS EARBUDS

While the media is still covering every angle of Apple’s $3 billion acquisition of Beats, the brand built by hip hop superstar Dr. Dre continues doing what they do best – building headphones that millions of people will want to buy. Introducing the Beats Powerbeats 2 Wireless Earbuds.

Serving as the company’s first pair of wireless earbuds (they have already released wireless headphones), we imagine these will be a huge hit with avid gym goers and athletes everywhere. Each pair is completely wireless, and also completely sweat proof. A full charge will give you 6 hours of Bluetooth connectivity, while a quick 15 minute charge will give you enough juice for a 60 minute session. These lightweight earbuds were inspired by LeBron James, and have been packed with the power of dual-driver acoustics. These are the perfect companion to help you get back into shape this summer season. [Purchase]

[MIKA27]

THE BRUCE LEE OF BARTENDING

Learn anything about Bruce Lee’s training or Jeet Kune Do in general, and you’ll hear a lot about flow. Everything is smooth and relaxed and that makes it more powerful. While this bartender in an iconic yellow jumpsuit probably won’t be sending you across the room with a one-inch punch, he will dazzle you with his insane moves behind the bar while he seems at ease. Take a peek at the world’s greatest flair bartender.

[MIKA27]

JEEP WRANGLER NIGHTHAWK | BY STARWOOD MOTORS

Starwood Motors are known for building some of the hottest, meanest, most talked about Jeeps on the road. I have featured their awesome Full Metal Jacket Jeep before, but the supercharged Wrangler "Nighthawk” has to be their most impressive release to date.

Powered by an almighty 3.6 liter V6 engine, the "Nighthawk” is not only a powerful machine but also stunning, I love the matte magnesium metallic paint job and the elegant leather interior on this badass. Starwood also added a ton of extras and hi-tech equipment to make it even more impressive.

[MIKA27]

ULTRALIGHT COLLAPSIBLE BACKPACKING STOVE

When backpacking, packing light is essential, this Collapsible Camp Stove is the perfect cooking solution for when you venture out into the wild. The lightweight cooker is made from stainless steel and can be assembled in a matter of seconds to burn either wood or alcohol, the clever firebox doubles as a windscreen. After use simply dismantle it and nest it together to take up virtually zero space in your backpack.

[MIKA27]

MAISON MARTIN MARGIELA REPLICA JAZZ CLUB COLOGNE

Normally if you come home smelling like a jazz club, your significant other is going to wonder what you were up to. But with a couple sprays from Maison Martin Margiela Replica Jazz Club Cologne, you can smell like that before you even leave the house. This intriguing fragrance brings together notes of musk, vanilla, tonka bean, vetiver, and tobacco leaves in a masculine mix that evokes all the mystique and ambiance of a hidden club. As an added bonus, the bottle looks great, inspired by classic apothecary jars with bold letting, a cotton label, and a rope-wrapped pump.

[MIKA27]

The Steamboy Is A Steam Box For Your Pocket

A Steam machine in your pocket? You’ve got be kidding us. And yet, that’s exactly what we might get with the Steamboy.

Announced and teased at E3, the handheld device isn’t affiliated with Valve. Instead, it’s an independent project backed by the SteamBoy Machine team, a third-party group.

The specs are modest: a quad-core CPU, 4GB RAM, a 32GB built-in memory card and a 5-inch, 16:9 touchscreen. But coupled with Steam’s streaming functionality, the SteamBoy should be capable of running most PC games at acceptable frame rates.

If and when it actually comes out.