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

[MIKA27]

The man who carried out one of the world's earliest hijackings

Sixty years ago, a passenger plane was hijacked and forced to land on a deserted beach in Myanmar, also known as Burma. For many years the incident involving Karen rebels was hushed up - but now a film about it is being made.

In the comfort of his armchair, Saw Kyaw Aye clenches his hand into a fist, raises it to his face and mimes pulling a grenade pin out with his teeth.

Sixty years may have passed, but this is clearly a story the 87-year-old has been telling - or acting out - ever since.

He closes his eyes for a second. He's back in the moment. It's 1954 and he has just forced his way into the cockpit of a passenger plane.

This is the critical moment in an audacious plot to steal a Dakota DC-3 and use it to smuggle weapons. At that point he looks up and tells me he shouted at the British pilot - one Capt A E Hare: "I'm going to die for my Karen nation - what cause are you going to die for?"

Realising the danger, Capt Hare capitulated. He took the map the rebels had drawn and agreed to fly them to a rendezvous point near Myanmar's west coast.

At the time, the Karen controlled land both east and west of the then capital Rangoon, and the plan was to use the plane to link the two.

For the next three hours Saw peered desperately at the ground below looking for the large piece of white paper that would show a prepared runway. But something had gone wrong.

Maybe none of his fellow rebels had actually believed the plan would work. Hijacking in the 1950s was almost unheard of and two of the most senior Karen commanders had rejected the scheme outright. One of them had even called him a fool.

Fool or not, Saw was now in control of the plane with nowhere to go and with fuel running out. In desperation the pilot attempted to bring the plane down on a deserted beach. Twice the landing was aborted - before at the third try they came juddering down into the sand.

The passengers were allowed to disembark and the hijackers then discovered the plane was carrying some heavy metal chests. It was cash being transported between bank branches - 700,000 Burmese kyat. That's about $700 (£400) in today's money but worth an awful lot more back then.

Karen rebels on the ground who were meant to guide the plane to a runway

"We figured it was enemy money so we took it," Saw says with a smile. The passengers and crew were allowed back on and somehow the plane managed to take off, as the rebels slunk off into the bush.

It's a story worthy - almost - of Hollywood. But under Burma's strict censorship rules, for the last 50 years you had to do what I did and go to Saw's house if you wanted to hear it. The generals didn't want people finding out about plucky rebels seizing government-owned planes.

But now, censorship of the printed word has been lifted and Saw's story was published in a book last year.

The title - The World's First Hijacking - is somewhat misleading. A quick search of the internet shows there were at least four hijackings around the world before this one.

Undeterred, the final touches are now being put to a film, with the same slightly dodgy name. Cinema censorship is still alive and well here. Scripts have to be approved and then permission granted again when the film has been finished.

For the last 11 years Anthony, who goes by just one name, has been trying to make films that will get past the censors.

It's been frustrating - in the past any reference to rebel groups was an immediate no no. Even vague, sometimes imagined allusions were sniffed out.

Anthony tells me he wanted to call one of his films Don't Cry Mother, but it was vetoed as it might have been an oblique reference to pro-democracy campaigner Aung San Suu Kyi.

"There was a time when we only made comedies as they made good money and we knew they'd make it past the censors," he says.

But now there are signs the film censors are catching up with the country's reforms.

Anthony's hijacking script was approved. The Burmese army even loaned them a plane and some guns for filming.

"At last we can do some true stories from here... the world's waiting for a good film from Myanmar," Anthony tells me.

Saw's hijacking is certainly quite a tale. Afterwards, he managed to avoid capture for several years before becoming a Baptist minister and then a go-between in talks between the government and the rebel leadership.

Incredibly, after more than 60 years, the Karen conflict is still unresolved.

[MIKA27]

Suarez banned for nine matches over 'bite' incident

Uruguay striker Luis Suarez has been suspended from all football-related activity for four months for biting Italy defender Giorgio Chiellini.

In addition, the Liverpool player, 27, has been banned for nine international matches, ruling him out of the rest of the 2014 Fifa World Cup.

He will also miss the first nine games of the Premier League season.

Uruguay say they will appeal, calling it an "excessive decision" for which "there was not enough evidence".

Uruguay Football Association president Wilmar Valdez added: "I have seen more aggressive incidents recently.

"It is a severe punishment. I don't know exactly which arguments they used but it is a tough punishment for Suarez."

The player has also been fined 100,000 Swiss francs (£65,680) for the incident, which occurred on Tuesday as Uruguay beat Italy 1-0 to finish second in group D and qualify for the last 16 in Brazil.

The ban is the biggest in World Cup history, beating the eight games given to Italy's Mauro Tassotti for elbowing Spain's Luis Enrique in 1994.

"Such behaviour cannot be tolerated on any football pitch and, in particular, not at a Fifa World Cup when the eyes of millions of people are on the stars on the field," Claudio Sulser, chairman of the Fifa disciplinary committee, said in a statement.

Suarez has now been found guilty of biting three opponents in his career and former Liverpool defender Mark Lawrenson felt the suspension should have been longer.

"Say my boy was about 11 or 12, how do you explain to your lad who's a football fan exactly what Luis Suarez keeps doing," he told BBC Sport.

"He is now a persistent offender and I thought actually the ban would have been much harsher."

Suarez was banned for 10 games for biting Chelsea's Branislav Ivanovic during a Premier League match in 2013 and was also suspended for seven games for biting PSV Eindhoven's Otman Bakkal in 2010.

Mexican referee Marco Rodriquez did not see Suarez bite Chiellini on the left shoulder, but Fifa ordered an inquiry after the match following protests by the Italian.

Suarez had tried to dismiss the incident, telling Uruguayan television: "These are just things that happen out on the pitch. It was just the two of us inside the area and he bumped into me with his shoulder."

Suarez's first match back for Liverpool could be in round four of the Capital One Cup, should the Reds win their first game after entering the tournament in the third round, with matches due to take place in the week commencing 27 October.

Reds chief executive Ian Ayre said: "Liverpool Football Club will wait until we have seen and had time to review the Fifa disciplinary committee report before making any further comment."

Under the terms of the ban, Suarez cannot train with Liverpool and is prohibited from entering the confines of any stadium during the period of his suspension.

But Liverpool would not be prevented from selling the former Ajax player this summer should they decide to offload him to another club.

He has already been linked with moves to Real Madrid and Barcelona.

Luis Suarez World Cup 'biting' mocked in memes

[MIKA27]

Pablo Escobar’s hippos: A growing problem

A herd of hippopotamuses once owned by the late Colombian drug baron Pablo Escobar has been taking over the countryside near his former ranch - and no-one quite knows what to do with them.

It was in 2007, 14 years after Escobar's death, that people in rural Antioquia, 200 miles north-west of Bogota, began phoning the Ministry of Environment to report sightings of a peculiar animal.

"They found a creature in a river that they had never seen before, with small ears and a really big mouth," recalls Carlos Valderrama, from the charity Webconserva.

He went to look, and found himself faced with the task of explaining to startled villagers that this was an animal from Africa. A hippopotamus.

"The fishermen, they were all saying, 'How come there's a hippo here?'" he recalls. "We started asking around and of course they were all coming from Hacienda Napoles. Everything happened because of the whim of a villain."

Situated halfway between the city of Medellin and Bogota, the Colombian capital, Hacienda Napoles was the vast ranch owned by the drugs baron Pablo Escobar. In the early 1980s, after Escobar had become rich but before he had started the campaign of assassinations and bombings that was to almost tear Colombia apart, he built himself a zoo.

He smuggled in elephants, giraffes and other exotic animals, among them four hippos - three females and one male. And with a typically grand gesture, he allowed the public to wander freely around the zoo. Buses filled with schoolchildren passed under a replica of the propeller plane that carried Escobar's first US-bound shipments of cocaine.

While Don Pablo masterminded the operations of the Medellin Cartel from his villa on the hill, the locals gazed at the strange animals and even stranger concrete dinosaurs that Escobar built for his son.

The giant dinosaurs at Hacienda Napoles

When Hacienda Napoles was confiscated in the early 1990s, Escobar's menagerie was dispersed to zoos around the country. But not the hippos. For about two decades, they have wallowed in their soupy lake, watching the 20sq km (8 sq mile) park around them become neglected and overgrown - and then transformed back into a zoo and theme park, complete with water slides. All the while, the hippos themselves thrived, and multiplied.

Nobody knows how many there are. The local environmental authority, which bears responsibility for them, estimates between 50 and 60, with most living in the lake at the park. But 12 are known to have paddled past the flimsy fence and into the nearby Magdalena River - and maybe many more.

Here, conditions for hippos are idyllic. The river is slow moving and has plenty of shallows, perfect for larger animals which don't actually swim but push themselves off banks, gliding through the water. Moreover, the region never experiences drought, which tends to act as a natural brake on the size of herds in Africa.

How much the hippos like Colombia can be judged from how much sex they are having. In Africa they usually become sexually active between the ages of seven and nine for males, and nine and 11 for females, but Pablo Escobar's hippos are becoming sexually active as young as three. All the fertile females are reported to be giving birth to a calf every year.

Carlos Valderrama may be the only vet to have castrated a hippo in the wild

"It's just like this crazy wildlife experiment that we're left with," says San Diego University ecologist Rebecca Lewison. "Gosh! I hope this goes well."

Valderrama, whose job until recently included watching over the hippos in the Magdalena, has seen animals up to 250km (155 miles) away from Hacienda Napoles. Fishermen are terrified of the three-tonne herbivores, he says. At night, the animals roam the countryside, wandering into ranches, eating crops and occasionally crushing small cows.

Colombian people, he believes, are more vulnerable than Africans because they see hippos as cuddly, "floppy" animals. The respected El Colombiano newspaper recently reported that children in a school near Hacienda Napoles are sharing a pond with the animals, and having direct contact with hippo calves at home.

"My father brought a little one home once," an unnamed girl told the paper. "I called him Luna (Moon) because he was very sweet - we fed him with just milk." Another child, a boy, told the paper: "My father has captured three. It is nice because you have a little animal at home. We bottle-feed them because they only drink milk. They have a very slippery skin, you pour water and they produce a kind of slime, you touch them and it's like soap."

But adult hippos are dangerous. Despite their ungainly appearance, they are very agile in the water and can charge on land at up to 18 mph (29km/h). It's often said that hippos are responsible for more human deaths in Africa than any other animal - though it may be more accurate to say they cause more deaths than any other wild mammal.

Attacks happen when humans encroach on hippo territory, says Lewison. But the animals aren't like crocodiles, she points out - they don't see a thing and instinctively want to kill it - so in a sparsely populated area it may be safe to let Escobar's hippos be. In the 30-year history of Escobar's herd, there have been no reports of anyone being killed or even seriously injured. But living near the animals is inevitably a risk, Lewison says - one that local people have to decide whether they are willing to take.

For Carlos Valderrama, however doing nothing is not an option. "We have seen that hippos are very territorial and very aggressive," he says. "They are not a tame animal. The risk for local populations to just leave them to browse around will be huge."

The ideal solution would be to relocate them, he says. But it's not easy to move a hippo, and even if the government were to kit out teams of experienced vets with trucks and helicopters, there's nowhere to put the animals. They can't be returned to Africa because there is a risk that they carry diseases. That leaves captivity. A handful of hippo calves have been transferred to zoos in Colombia, but there are currently no takers for the adults.

Beyond that, options are limited.

Escobar's house and pool, photographed in 2004

Some - including those at the Hacienda Napoles park - favour containing the numbers with a programme of castration. But not only would this be costly and dangerous for the vets, it's thought many hippos would die. "Hippos are very sensitive to chemical compounds," explains Lewison. "It doesn't make any sense - they're enormous! - but they have this incredible sensitivity to sedation."

Valderrama also points out that it would be very difficult to ensure that all the males had been attended to, given that no-one knows how many there are - and it only takes one overlooked bull to do the procreation work of a whole herd.

Another idea, favoured by David Echeverri of the local environmental authority, is to build a reserve with proper hippo-proof fences. But it would be a huge challenge to round up all the feral hippos of Antioquia, and would cost an estimated $500,000 (£290,000).

"It is not going to be accepted in general by environmentalists and biologists here, because Colombia doesn't have a lot of money," says Patricio von Hildebrand, a biologist working in the Amazon region. "They don't think the money should be invested in maintaining a few hippos rather than conserving the original species in Colombia."

Hildebrand has another, more radical solution: "I think they should barbecue them and eat them."

He isn't joking. During experiments with electric fences a while ago, he recalls, someone misjudged the voltage and electrocuted one of the Hacienda Napoles hippos. "What did the local people do? They took him, they chopped him up, they barbecued him and they ate him!" The animal is said to have tasted similar to pork.

Valderrama doesn't recommend eating the meat, in case it is infected with a transmittable disease - one dead hippo was found to be carrying leptospirosis which can cause meningitis - but he does see the complete elimination of male hippos as the most practical solution.

This was also the view of international experts from the World Wildlife Fund and the Disney Foundation, who visited Colombia in 2010 - they described the hippo situation as a "time bomb". But Echeverri can see how this story would play internationally, and wants to avoid it.

"We do not want to choose the easy option and give the world this negative image, not with such a charismatic animal," Echeverri says.

"The country is changing the image it gives the world - we don't want to be in the headlines for such a story."

In 2009, Colombia did make the headlines for hunting down and killing a bull hippo, Pepe, that had been deemed a public nuisance. Even though a professional hunter shot the animal, a group of soldiers had helped to corner it, and a photograph of them posing next to the body caused an outcry.

The hunt for two other hippos, a female, Matilda, and her calf, Hip, had to be called off.

Valderrama, who was astonished at the backlash, calls it "the floppy effect". The reason why nothing has been done about the hippos, he says, is that whatever decision the government makes will be controversial. "They already castrated one, and there are people saying, 'Oh why do you have to castrate them? Just let them be. Castrate the politicians.'"

He believes, however, that Colombians are starting to see beyond the soft side of hippos, and perceive the real risks they pose.

The mixture of feelings in some ways resembles the complex attitude Colombians had towards Pablo Escobar himself.

Pablo Escobar 1949-1993

• In 1989. Forbes magazine ranked Escobar one of the 10 richest people in the world
• The same year, he was responsible for the bombing of Avianca Flight 203, killing 107 people
• In all, Escobar is thought to be responsible for some 4,000 deaths
• His gang targeted politicians, the police and journalists
• After he was arrested in 1991, Escobar was housed in a prison of his own design, nicknamed the Cathedral, where he continued to oversee the Medellin Cartel

Many thousands turned out for his funeral, after he was gunned down on the roof of his safe house in Medellin on 2 December 1993, thanks partly to his good works - he built homes for the poor and paid for football pitches to be floodlit. Yet it is impossible that any resident of Medellin in the early 1990s could have been untouched by the murderous violence that preceded Escobar's death.

In 1989, he came close to derailing Colombia's democratic system when three of the six presidential candidates were assassinated.

Even today a section of poor Colombian society still has fond memories of the bandit, says the Medellin-based travel writer David Lee. He describes a recent trip to Escobar's grave, when he witnessed an old woman approach and begin tapping the headstone - a way for her to make her presence felt wherever Escobar might now be residing.

Most backpackers who make the trip to Hacienda Napoles don't go for the waterslides or the hippos, Lee says, but to take a path that leads from an enclosure containing the park's mascot, Vanessa - a small hippo that responds to her name - up to Escobar's mansion.

It was ravaged by looters after the drug baron's death, but a sign says the house will not be restored because "it's technically difficult and morally impossible".

"Colombians are having a hard time trying to figure out what to do with Escobar's legacy - and that includes his property," says Lee.

The parallels between El Patron and his pets formed a central theme of the 2010 documentary film Pablo's Hippos - and the animal was used by Mexican novelist Juan Pablo Villalobos as a metaphor for the absurd, ugly, violent world of the drug baron even before he had heard of Escobar's herd. In his novella Down the Rabbit Hole, a seven-year-old boy persuades his drug kingpin father to add a Liberian pygmy hippo to the collection of wild animals kept at their Alice-in-Wonderland palace, including man-eating tigers.

Villalobos regards the real-life runaway hippos as a sort of living, breeding metaphor for Escobar's place in Colombia's national psyche.

"It's like a sign of what's happened in Colombia in the last 20 years," he says. "And this past is still present, and Colombians maybe don't know how to deal with this memory, with Pablo Escobar's heritage.

"All those contradictions are still alive there, and I think now in the most absurd way - in hippos reproducing in a river."

[MIKA27]

HAND FORGED MINI KEYCHAIN BOTTLE OPENER

Each of these handmade bottle openers are forged from a single piece of ¼” stock round iron, reinforced with welding at the at the touch point for increased strength. The weld is creatively hidden within the copper wire wrap around the handle, giving off an earthy tone that will age as it is past down for generations. Each opener is unique leaving an outstanding weight and feel as crack open your next brew.

DETAILS

Handmade

Forged ¼” round stock single piece of iron

Copper wrapped handle

3 ½” length

Keyring included

BUY:

[MIKA27]

NOMADCLIP

Forget toting a cable in your pocket, or worse yet, a bag — with the NomadClip, you'll always have a charging cable with you. How, you ask? Well, the clip is actually a carabiner, with ends that fold out to reveal a male USB 2.0 plug and a either a Lightning or Micro USB plug. It's also built from high-end materials like engineering-grade polycarbonate from Bayer, high-grade steel, and scratch-resistant metal on the contacts. But while it will safely hang from a belt loop or keychain, we wouldn't recommend using it for climbing — after all, where are you going to find a charging station in the wilderness?

[MIKA27]

Fighter Jet Loses Front Landing Gear, Lands Vertically On Padded Stool

What happens when your front landing gear fails and you are flying a AV-8B Harrier that can land vertically? You ask your ship crew to place a comfy padded stool to softly put your aeroplane’s nose down. That’s exactly what happened to this Harrier on the Wasp-class USS Bataan on June 7.

Apparently, the stool is something that they have at hand at all times in case something like this happens. The pilot, US Marine Corps Capt William Mahoney, was able to execute a perfect albeit bumpy landing.

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The First Drive Of The Insane Koenigsegg One:1 Will Have You Drooling

The Koenigsegg One:1 is insane. The engineers were obsessed with power versus weight, so for every kilogram added to the One:1, the boffins added one more horsepower. As a result, the One:1 weighs 1360kg, and therefore packs a blistering 1360 horsepower. The only two in existence are about to take to the track at the Goodwood Festival of Speed. This preview is a beautiful symphony of noise.

The One:1 is a true hypercar, lined up next to the legendary McLaren P1 and the Porsche 918 Spyder.

Interestingly, despite the massive numbers this thing has under the hood, the boss of Koenigsegg is fairly non-plussed about having 1000+ horses on tap.

“It sounds like a lot, but we don’t think about horsepower that way. We just find a balance…between a responsive engine with no turbolag, a good throttle response like on a naturally aspirated car and try and have as good an engine as we can. It’s just a side-affect that we end up with these power figures,” he said.

Watching this thing go around a track is incredible.

[MIKA27]

How The Most Poisonous Fish On Earth Can Kill Humans

The stone fish is the most poisonous fish in the sea and one of the most dangerous in the world. It can easily kill you if you step on it, injecting its venom deep inside your foot. If not treated promptly, the poison will kill you. This video by SmarterEveryDay shows how this simple killing machine works.

They would be underwater, hiding under the sand or camouflaged over rocks, but also outside water, where they can survive for 24 hours. Apparently, stonefish antivenom is the second second-most administered in Australia.

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Andy Serkis Unleashes His Inner Gollum On Conan O'Brien

The master of motion capture, Andy Serkis was the guest of Conan O’Brien last night and he did a little improvisation using the two characters he’s most known for: Gollum from The Lord of the Rings and Planet of the Apes‘ Caesar.

He’s going to be great in Star Wars Episode VII.

[MIKA27]

A Melbourne Guy Is Allegedly Blackmailing Subway With Its Secret Sandwich Recipes

Ever been upset by a former employer? Melbourne man, Arun Singhal, knows how you feel. Unlike other disgruntled former employees, however, Singhal is taking matters into his own hands against sandwich giant Subway, threatening to release secret sandwich recipes online if he’s not paid $35 million.

It all started when Subway reportedly terminated a franchise agreement with Singhal following “breaches” in the contract back in April. Unhappy with the result, Singhal has reportedly made a series of online videos detailing how to make Subway’s famous sandwiches and has threatened to release them to the whole world unless Subway pays up.

Subway closely guards its sandwich-making techniques, which it describes internally as “The System”. Singhal reportedly details The System in his videos and has apparently already shared some information with other publications around the world.

Subway wants to shut him up without giving him a cent, and has gone to the Victorian Supreme Court to protect itself, accusing Singhal of blackmail and releasing confidential information.

Who knew that the secret to tessellated cheese was so important?

[MIKA27]

Fun With Kirk And Spock: A Kid's Book And Adult Parody Of Star Trek

“Kirk refuses the advances of a woman. This is a bad universe.” This is just one punch line — of many — from “Fun with Kirk and Spock”, a soon-to-be-released, 64-page book from Cedar Mill Press. It’s a humorous take on the first series of Star Trek that portrays James T Kirk and Spock as a pair of trouble-making adolescents.

It’s also parody of “classic **** and Jane stories”, according to author Robb Pearlman. Featuring illustrations from Gary Shipman that would look right at home in any mid-century children’s book, “Kirk and Spock” attempts to succinctly deliver “some iconic moments and characters from The Original Series”… with an added dash of ridiculousness (though you could argue some scenarios require no help).

In an interview on Star Trek, Shipman explains that it’s a book for all ages, perfectly suited as a hilarious look back at Gene Roddenberry’s sci-fi show, or a “totally accessible introduction for kids”.

Not sure what that would look like exactly? Here’s an example:

The book will be available starting tomorrow from Amazon for $US9.45 (RRP $14.95). There’s a listing on the Book Depository for the title, however, it won’t have stock until 1 September.

Check out the full cover below:

[MIKA27]

If Einstein Had Never Been Born, Would We Still Have Nuclear Weapons?

Albert Einstein and his equation E=mc² are famously connected to the modern atomic age. But as nuclear historian Alex Wellerstein writes in this counter-factual account of history, the great physicist mattered less than you’d think in the invention of the nuclear bomb.

If Albert Einstein had never been born, would it have changed when nuclear weapons were first produced? For whatever reason, I’ve seen this question being asked repeatedly on internet forums, as odd as it is. It’s kind of a silly question. You can’t go in and tweak one variable in the past and then think you could know what the outcome would be. History is a chaotic system; start removing variables, who knows what would happen. Much less a variable named Albert Einstein, one of the most influential physicists of the 20th century and whose importance extended well past the equations he wrote… and those were pretty important equations, at that!

On the other hand, this kind of science-fiction counter-factual can have its usefulness as a thought experiment. It isn’t history, but it can be used to illustrate some important aspects about the early history of the atomic bomb that a lot of people don’t know, and to undo a little bit of the “great man” obsession with bomb history. Albert Einstein has been associated with the bomb both through his famous mass-energy equivalence calculation (E=mc²) and because of the famous Einstein-Szilard letter to Roosevelt in 1939. On the face of it, this gives him quite a primary role, and indeed, he usually shows up pretty quickly at the beginning of most histories of the Manhattan Project. But neither E=mc² nor the Einstein-Szilard letter were as central to the Manhattan Project’s success as people realise — either scientifically or historically.

In terms of the science, E=mc² gets a lion’s share of attention, most perfectly expressed by Einstein’s portrait on the cover of Time magazine in 1946 (above) with his equation emblazoned on a mushroom cloud. A lot of people seem to think that E=mc² played a key role in the development of the bomb, that the weapon just falls out of the physics. This is wrong. The equation can help one understand why atomic bombs work, but it doesn’t really tell you how they work, or whether you would expect them to even be possible.

The way I like to put it is this: E=mc² tells you about as much about an atomic bomb as Newton’s laws do about ballistic missiles. At some very “low level” the physics is crucial to making sense of the technology, but the technology does not just “fall out” of the physics in any straightforward way, and neither of those equations tell you whether the technology is possible. E=mc² tells you that on some very deep level, energy and mass are equivalent, and the amount of energy that mass is equivalent is gigantic. But it says nothing about the mechanism of converting mass into energy, either whether one exists in the first place, or whether it can be scaled up to industrial or military scales. It gives no hints as to even where to look for such energy releases. After the fact, once you know about nuclear fission and can measure mass defects and things like that, it helps you explain very concisely where the tremendous amounts of energy come from, but it gives you no starting indications.

Eddington’s famous plate of the 1919 solar eclipse, which helped confirm Einstein’s theory of General Relativity. Very cool looking, and interesting science. But not relevant to atomic bombs.

What about the rest of Einstein’s main theoretical work, both Special and General Relativity Theory? They are pretty irrelevant to bomb-making. The physical processes that take place inside atomic bombs are what physicists call “non-relativistic“. Relativity theory generally only shows its hand when you are talking about great speeds (e.g. large fractions of the speed of light) or great masses (e.g. gravitational fields), and neither of those come into play with fission bombs. You can neglect relativity when doing the maths to make a bomb.1

An intelligent follow-up question might be: “well, just because relativity theory didn’t play a role in the bomb process itself doesn’t answer the question of whether it started physics on a path that led to the bomb, does it?” Without getting into a long timeline of the “science that led to the bomb,” here, I think we could reasonably summarize the situation like this: Einstein’s 1905 papers (of which E=mc² was one) did indeed play a role in the subsequent developments that followed, but perhaps not as direct a one as people think.

E=mc² didn’t inspire physicists to start looking into processes that converted mass to energy — they were already looking into those through an entirely separate (and earlier) line of development, namely the science of radioactivity and particle physics. The fact that huge amounts of energy were released through nuclear reactions, for example, had already been studied closely by the Curies, by Ernest Rutherford, and by Frederick Soddy prior (but only just) to 1905.

Arguably, the most important work Einstein did in this respect was his work on the photoelectric effect (for which he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics for 1921), which helped establish the physical reality of Max Planck’s idea of a quantum of energy, which helped kick off investigations into quantum theory in earnest. This had a big influence on the later direction of physics, even if Einstein himself was never quite comfortable with the quantum mechanics that developed in subsequent decades.

The Hahn-Meitner-Strassman experiment apparatus, at the Deutsches Museum in Munich.

Did any of the relativity work lead, though, down the path that eventually arrived at the discovery of fission in 1939? I don’t think so. The experiments that Hahn, Meitner, and Strassman were doing in Berlin that lead to the discovery of fission in uranium were themselves careful replications of work that Fermi had done around 1934. Fermi’s work came directly out of an experimentalist, nuclear physics context where physicists were bombarding substances with all manner of subatomic particles to see what happened. It was most directly influenced by the discovery of the neutron as a new sub-atomic particle by Chadwick in 1932. This came out of work on atomic theory and atomic modelling that was being done by Rutherford and his students from the early 1910s-1920s. And this early nuclear physics came, most directly, out of the aforementioned context of radioactivity and experimental physics of the late 19th century.

None of which has a strong, direct connection to or from Einstein’s work in my mind. They have some overlaps of interest (e.g. Bohr was a student of Rutherford’s), but the communities working on these sorts of experimental problems are not quite the same as the more theoretical circle that Einstein himself worked in.2 If we somehow, magically, removed Einstein’s early work from the equation here, does the output change much? There would be some reshuffling, probably, but I sort of think that Rutherford would still be doing his thing anyway, and from that much of the other work that led to the bomb would eventually come out, even if it had a somewhat different flavour or slightly different timeline.

This is my least-favourite way of depicting the fission process, where energy (E) is a magic lightning bolt coming out of the splitting atom. In reality, most of the energy comes in the form of the two fission products (F.P. here) repelling from each other with great violence.

Do you even need to know that E=mc² to make an atomic bomb? Perhaps surprisingly, you don’t! There are other, more physically intuitive ways to calculate (or measure) the energy release from a fission reaction. If you treat the fission process as being simply based on the electrostatic repulsion of two fission products, you get essentially the same energy output in the form of kinetic energy. This is how the physics of fission is often taught in actual physics classes, because it gives you a more concrete indication of how that energy is getting released (whereas E=mc² with the mass-defect makes it seem like a magical lightning bolt carries it away). There are other more subtle physical questions involved in making a bomb, some of which have Einstein’s influence on them in one way or another (e.g. Bose — Einstein statistics).

But I think it is not totally crazy to say that even if you somehow imagine a world in which Einstein had never existed, that the physics of an atomic bomb would still work out fine — Einstein’s specific technical work wasn’t central to the problem at all. We also have not brought up the question of whether without Einstein, relativity in some form would have been discovered anyway. The answer is probably “yes,” as there were people working on similar problems in the same areas of physics, and once people started paying a close attention to the physics of radioactivity they were bound to stumble upon the mass-energy relationship anyway.

This isn’t to denigrate or underestimate Einstein’s influence on physics, of course. What makes Einstein “Einstein” is that he, a single person, pulled off a great number of theoretical coups all at once. But if he hadn’t done that, there’s no reason to think that other people wouldn’t have come up with his theoretical insights individually, if slightly later.

What about Einstein’s most direct role, the famous Einstein-Szilard letter of 1939 that influenced President Roosevelt to set up the first Uranium Committee? This is a tricky historical question that could have (and may at some point) an entirely separate blog post relating to it. Its writing, contents, and influence are more complex than the standard “he wrote a letter, FDR created the Manhattan Project” understanding of it that gets boiled down in some popular accounts. My feeling about it, ultimately, is this: if the Einstein-Szilard letter hadn’t been written, it isn’t clear that anything would be terribly different in the outcome in terms of making the bomb. Something like the Uranium Committee might have been started up anyway (contrary to popular understanding, the letter was not the first time Roosevelt had been told about the possibility of nuclear fission) and even if it hadn’t, it isn’t clear that the Uranium Committee was necessary to end up with a Manhattan Project.

The road from a fission program whose primary output was reportsand a fission program whose primary output was atomic bombs was not a direct one. By early 1941, the Uranium Committee had failed to convince scientist-administrators that atomic bombs were worth trying to build. They had concluded that while atomic bombs were theoretically feasible, they were not likely to be built anytime soon. Had things stayed there, it seems unlikely the United States would have built a bomb ready to use by July/August 1945.

The “push” came from an external source: the British program. Their MAUD Committee (an equivalent of the Uranium Committee) had concluded that a nuclear weapon would be much easier to build than the United States had concluded, and sent an emissary (Mark Oliphant) to the United States to make sure this conclusion was understood. They caught Vannevar Bush’s ear in late 1941, and he (along with Ernest Lawrence, Arthur Compton, and others) wrested control of the uranium work out of the hands of the Uranium Committee, accelerated the work, and morphed it into the S-1 Committee. The name change is significant — it is one of the more vivid demonstrations of the increased degree of seriousness with which the work was taken, and the secrecy that came with it. By late 1942, the wheels for the full Manhattan Project were set into motion, and the work had become a real bomb-making program.

Einstein wasn’t involved with any of the later work that actually led to the bomb. He almost was, though: in late 1941, Bush considered consulting Einstein for help on the diffusion problem, but opted not to push for it — both because Einstein wasn’t regarded as politically reliable (he had a fat FBI file), and his approach to physics just wasn’t very right for practical problems.3 Bush decided that Einstein would stay out of the loop.

Unusual, rare anti-Nazi propaganda postcard from 1934, showing Hitler expelling Einstein from Germany, titled “The Ignominy of the 20th Century.” It is one of the most blatant visual renderings of Einstein as a “scientific saint.”

Let’s sum it up. Did Einstein play a role in the creation of the atomic bomb? Of course — his physics isn’t irrelevant, and his letter to Roosevelt did start one phase of the work. But both of these things are less prominent than the Time-magazine-cover-understanding makes them out to be. They weren’t central to what became the Manhattan Project, and if you could somehow, magically, remove Einstein from the equation, it isn’t at all clear that the atomic bomb wouldn’t have been built around the time it actually was built. I don’t think you can really credit, or blame, Einstein for the atomic bomb, in any direct fashion. Einstein did play a role in things, but that role wasn’t as crucial, central, or direct as a lot of people imagine. If you could magically drop him out of history, I think very little in terms of atomic bombs would have been affected.

So why does the Einstein and the bomb myth persist? Why does everybody learn about the Einstein letter, if it wasn’t really was sparked the Manhattan Project? There are two answers here, I think. One is that Einstein was, even before the war, one of the best-known, best-recognised physicists of the 20th century, and was synonymous with revolutionary science and genius. Having him “predict” the atomic bomb with equations in 1905 — 40 years before one was set off — is the kind of “genius-story” that people love, even if it obscures more than it enlightens. It also has a high irony quotient, since Einstein was forced to flee from Germany when the Nazis took power.

But there’s another, perhaps more problematic aspect. In many early copies of the Smyth Report that were distributed by the government, copies of the Einstein letter were mimeographed and loosely inserted. The magnification of Einstein’s role was purposefully encouraged by the government in the immediate period after using the weapon. (And it was even a convenient myth for Einstein, as it magnified his own importance and thus potential influence.) Hanging the atomic bomb on Einstein’s head was an act of self-justification, of sorts. Einstein was the world’s greatest genius in the eyes of the public, and he was a well-known pacifist, practically a scientific saint. After all, if Einstein thought building a bomb was necessary, who could argue with him?

[MIKA27]

France Is Still Cleaning Up 100-Year-Old Bombs From The First World War

A century ago today, the first shots of WWI were fired. It was the first modern conflict, fought with fatally efficient technology. Even today, crews must safely destroy bombs left untouched for a century. Erik Olsen traveled with one of those crews for The New York Times, bringing us a video glimpse at the delicate task of cleaning up history.

The companion story from NY Times is an excellent read. Go check it out here.

There’s something morbidly fascinating about the thought of so many bombs surviving untouched for a hundred years. The war ended, and Europe settled into an uneasy peace, only to do it all over again on an even more destructive scale. These bombs are the historical finding of modern archaeology, but these decaying weapons can’t be saved for posterity.

So they get taken out to a field and detonated. Fulfilling their long-held promise of powerful destruction, a century after the conflict that necessitated their existence.

[MIKA27]

The 180,000-Tonne Titan Is Now The Largest Oil Rig In The World

The largest oil rig* in the world got placed today on its drilling spot off the Russian Pacific coast, near Sakhalin Island, north of Japan. The $US12 billion, 180,000-tonne structure — without counting its base — will suck up to four million tonnes of hydrocarbons per year in the harsh subarctic conditions of the Sea of Okhotsk.

Berkut is specially built to cope with brutal subarctic conditions. Scientists studied the effects of sea ice and it uses a new concrete ice protection belt which is a first, is cheaper and provides better protection. The platform can handle 60-foot waves, the pressure of over six-foot of ice, temperatures as low as minus 47.2 Fahrenheit and a magnitude 9 earthquake.

* While there are other oil platforms with largest ballast structures in deeper waters, Berkut has the biggest upper part in the world.

The rig is now in the Sea of Okhotsk 15 miles from the northern part of Sakhalin Island and in the Arkutun-Dagi field.

Oil exploitation is scheduled to start in December 2014. Berkut is Russian for Golden Eagle.

[MIKA27]

This Armoured 4X4 Is A Warthog For The Modern Day Super Soldier

Is there any more exhilarating rush than plowing your Warthog through wave after wave of Covenant Grunts while your buddy goes to town with the onboard autocannon? There is, now that Israel Military Industries has gone ahead and built a real one.

The CombatGuard is an armoured 4×4 sitting atop a monster truck suspension (and 54 inch rims) that, like the fictional M12, can be adapted to a number of combat scenarios. Its passenger compartment can accommodate up to eight fully equipped soldiers or be converted into an all-terrain medivac, anti-aircraft platform, fast attack vehicle or light reconnaissance vehicle.

The 300hp, 6.5-litre turbo diesel propels it to 120km/h off road and a staggering 150km/h on asphalt with an 800km combat radius while its oversized tyres and matching suspension allow it to boulder over 70-degree inclines. Its wraparound ballistic armour also offers protection from small arms fire, armour-piercing rifle rounds, even IEDs and landmines.

More impressive is the vehicle’s onboard Bright Arrow automated protection system. As General Dynamics’ website explains,

Bright Arrow utilizes a sensor suite and remote fire capability to rapidly detect, engage and overmatch threats typically encountered during military missions. The sensor suite provides robust detection capability of anti-tank threats and small arms bursts. The soft kill layer is based on a directional electro-optical jammer to engage a threat’s tracking and sensing behaviour.

The interceptor-based hard kill layer protects against close-range anti-tank rockets and guided missiles by physically destroying or deflecting the threat a safe distance from the defended platform. The blast interceptor effectively destroys or deflects an incoming threat with minimal fragmentation, minimising collateral damage or injury to nearby personnel.

The Israeli military is rumoured to be interested in procuring a number of these vehicles in the near term. Hopefully they will find a place in the US arsenal as well.

[MIKA27]

There's No Threat This Foxhound Can't Intercept

During the Cold War, the US leaned heavily on the insane multi-mach speeds its SR-71 spy plane could achieve. This speed allowed it to outrun virtually every plane, anti-aircraft battery, and guided missile that the Soviets could throw at it. That is, until Moscow rolled out one of the fastest and most far-seeing planes in history: the MiG-31 Foxhound. The SR-71 had finally met its match.

The Mikoyan MiG-31 Foxhound is a Russian-built interceptor aircraft — it’s designed to go straight, very fast, in order to intercept and destroy invading planes — as a modernised replacement to the older MiG-25 Foxbat in the late 1970s and early 1980s. The main issue with the Mig-25s was the fact that they simply couldn’t pull off low altitude supersonic flights — their engines just didn’t have the power. The MiG-31′s efficient low-bypass-ratio turbofan engines, however, allowed it to do just that.

The 23m long two-seater features a 13m wingspan. Its airframe and wings are both far sturdier than the older MiG-25 design, which enables a Mach 1.23 top speed at low altitudes and a high-altitude observed top speed of Mach 2.83. The jet’s design does allow it to break Mach 3, although doing so drastically reduces the operational life of its engines. Despite this speed, the Foxhound is not very good at making high-speed or tight turns, which limits its use as a dogfighter or air superiority platform. Instead, the MiG-31 relies on hit and run, flyby tactics.

The MiG-31 entered production in 1979 and service in 1982. It was built largely in response to a pair of US technological advancements in the 1960s: the advent of strategic cruise missiles, which could be lobbed over the North Pole and fly low over the terrain while remaining out of site of Soviet satellites until they reached the USSR’s doorstep, and the obvious radar gap along the Northern Russian border that would have enabled these attacks. So rather than build new terrestrial radar installations, the Soviets simply packed as much cutting-edge sensory capabilities as they could into the MiG-31.

Dubbed the “Flying Radar” by its pilots, the MiG-31 carries the distinction of being the first aircraft with both a phased array antenna and passive electronically scanned array radar. This allowed each Foxhound unprecedented detection capabilities — they can spot as many as 24 individual objects at a range of 200km and track eight of them simultaneously, while the onboard computer determines the four most threatening pings and automatically locks R-33 long-range air-to-air missiles onto them. The four that the MiG doesn’t destroy are then immediately targeted by anti-aircraft fire and Soviet fighter jets, thanks to the MiG automatically relaying their coordinates to HQ. Basically, if you flew within 200km of a MiG-31, you’d be found out.

And it’s not just long-range tactical bombers that these Interceptors went after. With their extreme speed and sensory abilities, MiG-31s were easily able to interdict fast-moving targets that had until then simply outrun Soviet defenses: Cruise missiles and spy planes, specifically the SR-71 Blackbird. The SR-71, which used to fly over the USSR with impunity, was intercepted on numerous occasions beginning in 1986. In fact, the MiG-31′s capabilities are so impressive that a number of defence analysts worry that neither the US nor any other nation has the air power to counter these impressive machines — and they won’t have an answer within the next decade.

As the Russia & India Report explains:

All modern fighters (except for the fifth generation fighter aircraft) are not fully supersonic, since their supersonic flight time is limited to 5 — 15 minutes, due to various kinds of restrictions in the airframe design. Duration of the MiG-31 supersonic flight is only limited by the fuel supply. Moreover, the MiG-31 is able to pass the sound barrier in level flight and in climb mode, while the majority of supersonic aircraft pass the M=1 speed in a shallow dive.

Unfortunately, the MiG-31′s demanding maintenance schedule made it too much of a burden for many units in the USSR’s Air Force, which resulted in as many as 20 per cent of the 400-500 Foxhounds estimated to have been produced be abandoned. The all-out implosion of the Soviet Union in 1991 didn’t help matters either. But once the Russian economy had sufficiently rebounded around 2006, roughly 75 per cent of the planes reentered service. Today, an estimated 370 MiG-31s remain in service in Russia, with another 30 serving in the Kazakhstan Air Force.

[MIKA27]

The Mysterious Man-Eating Dune of Indiana

Mother Nature can be a truly frightening force to be reckoned with. With very little effort, our sturdiest constructions, the pinnacle of all of our technological know-how can be dashed to pieces by her wrath. She can also confound us with her inscrutable mysteries, leaving us with no clue of how or why she was able to inflict her deadly touch. Such is the story of the dangerous roving dune of Indiana, a mysterious wandering behemoth with the potential to swallow people without warning and with no known reason.

Mt. Baldy is an enormous sand dune located at Indiana Dunes National Lakeshore, a 15,000 acre national park which lies along the long coastline of Lake Michigan, a place so renowned for its beaches that it is sometimes referred to as America’s Fourth Coast.

The park is well known for its sand dunes, but in particular for the monstrous Mt. Baldy, which at 123 feet high is the largest sand dune on the southern shore of Lake Michigan. The dune is popular among hikers, who climb to the top for picturesque view of Lake Michigan, as well as a well-known spot for sunbathing. Around the dune itself are numerous hiking trails and a popular birdwatching spot called Cowles Bog. The nearby beach is very famous for its swimming, drawing visitors from all over the U.S.

Mt. Baldy is what is known as a “wandering dune,” sometimes known as a “living dune,” which means that it shift and moves over time. In the case of Mt. Baldy, the dune has a normal speed of 5 to 7 feet per year, but due to erosion and loss of vegetation caused by the large number of visitors, it’s speed has increased considerably to a disturbing 10 to 20 feet per year just within the last decade. This still might not seem particularly fast, but it is shockingly fast for this type of dune, and with a hulking, unstoppable mountain of sand there is not much to do but get out of its way as it inches ever closer. Wandering dunes such as Mt. Baldy are known to swallow up trees, boulders, cars, and even buildings.

Mt. Baldy’s mystery lies not in the fact that it moves or that it moves so fast, but rather in the unique geological enigma it has presented in recent years. The story starts when a young boy was suddenly and inexplicably swallowed by the dune. 6-year-old Nathan Woessner of Sterling, Ill., was walking along the dune one day in July, 2013 when without warning he disappeared into a hole that abruptly opened under him like a mouth belonging to the dune itself. People nearby were alerted by the boy’s screams and ran to find that he had been completely engulfed by the dune. By the time rescuers arrived, the boy was buried underneath 11 feet of sediment. A desperate battle to free the boy from the clutches of the dune ensued, and finally, after an 11 hour ordeal, the boy was pulled from his sand prison alive.

Geoscientists at first were doubtful of the story, as it is not known for such holes to open up in sand dunes since they are made up of grains of sand and thus have no room for air. In addition, there is no water flowing beneath them to account for holes of this nature. Yet, to the bafflement of experts, more holes began to appear in the ensuing months. Other stories began to emerge of other visitors encountering the holes as well. Hikers walking Mt. Baldy told of suddenly having the ground open up beneath their feet and causing them to trip or become stuck. Luckily, the holes in these cases did not exceed more than 5 feet in depth, and the incidents caused no fatalities. Nevertheless, it certainly seemed that the dune was a place of potential danger and that it was only a matter of time before someone was seriously injured or worse.

The holes were mostly around a foot in diameter and seemed to appear and vanish without warning, with most opening for only a day before closing up as if they had never been there. Concern over these mysterious holes prompted the Environmental Protection Agency to conduct a survey using ground-penetrating radar, which uncovered 66 anomalous spots under the dune.

However, due to the fleeting nature of the holes, it has been difficult to properly study them or even form a link between the anomalies and the holes themselves.

One of the mysterious holes of Mt. Baldy.

Although many of the appearing and disappearing holes have been identified, no one is sure where they come from. The phenomenon has baffled scientists, who have studied the sediment, analyzed wind patterns, and mapped terrain in the area yet still are mystified as to what is causing the anomalous and potentially dangerous holes to form. Geologist Erin Argyilan, one of the many dedicated researchers of the mystery of Mt. Baldy, has stated that the holes represent a new geological phenomenon. Argyilan explained that the holes in Mount Baldy are distinct from the usual sink-holes that make the news for swallowing houses and cars, since those usually develop when rock surfaces dissolve over time due to water damage.

For the time being, the mysterious holes pose a threat to the thousands of visitors that come to see the dune every year. In order to ensure public safety and make sure the huge, rogue dune claims no more victims, the National Park service has closed access to Mt. Baldy and barred entry to the immediate vicinity until more is understood about what is going on. Various signs and fences have been installed to turn people away, and rangers are conducting patrols to enforce the measures. In the meantime, it is hoped that erosion can be somewhat controlled by planting marram grass on the dune, the roots of which hold sand together.

Researchers plan to continue to monitor and study the mysterious holes of this monstrous, rogue dune but for now there are only hypotheses. One idea is that buried trees decaying beneath the sand might account for the holes. Mt. Baldy’s rate of movement has increased at an alarming rate in recent years due to corrosion caused by a loss of vegetation on its slopes due to human activity.

Historical mining of sand to make glass may have also contributed to the erosion. This alarming increase in speed is speculated to have caused the dune to engulf trees or other structures under its sands, after which they rot, become unstable, and cause the holes to spontaneously form.

Theories such as this may help us to come to an understanding as to why this enormous dune is trying to swallow people alive, but as of yet it is all speculation. Until we have some answers the ominous Mt. Baldy will hold on to its mysteries as it continues its slow, inexorable march across the land, devouring all in its path.

[MIKA27]

The Search for the Hanging Gardens of Babylon

When we talk about the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World, we’re generally talking about things that we can safely assume actually existed. This becomes a little trickier when you’re talking about the Hanging Gardens of Babylon, which is a lost wonder in more than one sense: not only can we find no remaining pieces of the gardens now, but we have only outlandish and contradictory documentary evidence that they ever existed in the first place. This doesn’t mean that they didn’t; it just means that they may as well not have, as far as we’re concerned.

The first writer to document the existence of the Hanging Gardens was the third-century BCE physician Berossus, who wrote the Babylonica as a way of describing Mesopotamian history and culture to his Greek overlords. Only fragments survive. One, quoted by the later Roman historian Josephus, tells the most well-known version of the Hanging Gardens story but provides minimal description of the Gardens themselves:

“When [Nebuchadnezzar II] had thus admirably fortified the city, and had magnificently adorned the gates, he added also a new palace to those in which his forefathers had dwelt, adjoining them, but exceeding them in height and splendor. Any attempt to describe it would be tedious: yet notwithstanding its prodigious size and magnificence it was finished within fifteen days. In this palace he erected very high walks, supported by stone pillars; and by planting what was called a pensile paradise, and replenishing it with all sorts of trees, he rendered the prospect an exact resemblance of a mountainous country. This he did to gratify his queen, because she had been brought up in Media, and was fond of a mountainous situation.”

Except for the bit about the Babylonian people building a massive palace in two weeks (and remember: Berossus was writing 300 years after Nebuchadnezzar’s reign), this sounds plausible enough—he’s basically describing a rooftop garden, ordinary now but extremely rare in the ancient world (though it’s likely that the Babylonians knew how to build screwpumps, which would have made these kinds of gardens possible). There’s no reason any evidence of it should still exist.

But later writers describe something more durable, something we would be less likely to overlook. Consider for example this description by Strabo of Amaseia (ca. 64 BCE to 25 CE), who writes:

“The garden is quadrangular in shape, and each side is four plethra (123.2m/404’) in length. It consists of arched vaults, which are situated, one after another, on checkered, cube-like foundations. The checkered foundations, which are hollowed out, are covered so deep with earth that they admit of the largest of trees, having been constructed of baked brick and asphalt—the foundations themselves and the vaults and the arches. The ascent to the uppermost terrace-roofs is made by a stairway; and alongside these stairs there were screws, through which the water was continually conducted up into the garden from the Euphrates by those appointed for this purpose. For the river, a stadium in width, flows through the middle of the city; and the garden is on the bank of the river.”

Note the detail about the screws. The screwpumps, known in Greece as Archimedes’ screws, were probably known to the Babylonians of Nebuchadnezzar’s day—so this is entirely plausible. But how on Earth did archaeologists manage to miss a 160,000-square-foot structure in Babylon?

Oxford University’s Stephanie Dalley, who has spent her entire professional life studying the Ancient Near East, wrestled with this question and has come to a surprising answer: the Hanging Gardens of Babylon can’t be found in Babylon because they never were in Babylon to begin with. They were in Nineveh, the Assyrian capitol referred to colloquially as the “new Babylon,” and classical historians who suggested otherwise were a bit confused as to its location. (This is quite plausible, actually; historians of the era were notorious for using secondary sources, and it’s unlikely that many of them ever personally visited the region.) This would also explain why we can’t find any evidence of their existence; Nineveh was functionally destroyed in 612 BCE, and we have only a sketchy understanding of what the city looked like in its prime.

As for Berossus, who actually did live in Babylon? Perhaps his more modest Hanging Gardens existed, too—and perhaps the stories of Nebuchadnezzar’s smaller garden in Babylon were conflated with stories of a much larger garden in “new Babylon,” leading to the elusive ancient wonder so many classical historians dreamed about. It’s hard to say, and it will probably remain so.

[MIKA27]

How NASA is Eliminating the Asteroid Threat

There aren’t many things scarier than a large incoming asteroid. A recent study has uncovered 26 nuclear-grade asteroid collisions since the year 2000, and any one asteroid could wipe out humanity at any given time. Statistically, it probably won’t—because it hasn’t—but the scale of this threat is massive. And we’re completely helpless in the face of it, right?

Actually, not so much. We’ve already learned how to non-invasively intercept asteroids, and we’re perhaps 20 or 30 years away from never having to worry about another asteroid collision again. Last week, NASA announced the selection of 18 proposals for viable technology that can be used to collect or redirect asteroids within the near future. Among these are four proposals to break material off of larger asteroids, altering their trajectory—and a specific mission to actually do this to a small asteroid by 2021, putting an asteroid of up to 30m (98 feet) in diameter into a harmless lunar orbit for future study.

If you want to hear more details, NASA has prepared a two-hour streaming TV special about its new asteroid initiative:

NASA has already worked for several years on designs for a Hypervelocity Asteroid Intercept Vehicle (HAIV) that would nuke incoming asteroids from orbit (it’s the only way to be sure), but these kinds of asteroid disruption and redirection technologies haven’t been developed beyond the planning stage. After the 2020 mission, we will have successfully redirected one asteroid and we’ll be well on our way to knowing what we will need to do in order to redirect more.

Actually locating these asteroids in time to do something about them is, of course, also necessary. NASA is crowdsourcing that problem with the Asteroid Grand Challenge.

[MIKA27]

Can Coffee Make You a Better Person?

I love scientific studies, I really do. Empirical evidence makes the world go round—or at least it’s the reason we know the world’s going round. But as somebody who needs a steady-ish supply of coffee to get through the day, I’ve pretty much learned to stop paying attention to most coffee-related studies.

On the one hand, coffee is on the American Institute for Cancer Research’s list offoods that fight cancer and may also reduce the risk of stroke and heart failure. On the other, caffeine is undeniably an addictive, mood-altering drug that has been linked anecdotally to a wide range of health complaints, and in addition to caffeine coffee is one of the many foods containing the potential carcinogen acrylamide. One 2014 Mayo Clinic piece summed up the research in a way that I think most of us would agree with: “The best answer may be that for most people the health benefits outweigh the risks.” In other words: it doesn’t seem to be hurting most of the people who drink it.

More recent studies have focused on the degree to which coffee affects our personalities, and that gets a little trickier. It has long been suggested that coffee can make us more anxious and subsequently more aggressive, but a new study suggests that it may make us behave more ethically as well—at least if we’re tired:

“Our research shows that sleep deprivation contributes to unethical behavior at work by making you more susceptible to social influences, such as a boss who tells you to do something deceptive or unethical,” said Michael Christian, an organizational behavior professor at UNC Kenan-Flagler Business School. “Caffeine can help you resist by strengthening your self-control and willpower when you’re exhausted.”

It’s worth noting that all of these behavioral changes are slight and haven’t been verified using large-scale, long-term studies. But assuming coffee makes you more anxious, aggressive, and principled, is it making you a better person or a worse one?

[Habana Mike]

A Melbourne Guy Is Allegedly Blackmailing Subway With Its Secret Sandwich Recipes

Who knew that the secret to tessellated cheese was so important?

Tessellate, a new word every day! Stack it straight beyotches!!!

[MIKA27]

Tessellate, a new word every day! Stack it straight beyotches!!!

Ahhh Haaaaa!! It is you!

[Fuzz]

A Melbourne Guy Is Allegedly Blackmailing Subway With Its Secret Sandwich Recipes

I hardly think the recipes are that difficult to replicate. Then again, after being asked what salads I wanted on my BLT, I may have reconsider...

[polarbear]

I hardly think the recipes are that difficult to replicate.

I was thinking the same thing

[MIKA27]

This McLaren Sports Bike Will Set You Back $20,000

Supercar-manufacturer McLaren don’t exactly make bargain-basement products. In truth, they make some of the most technically accomplished cars in the world. For those who can’t afford the likes of the McLaren P1, you might consider two wheels instead? Specifically the new S-Works McLaren Tarmac Bike which will cost you an eye-watering $20,000.

The Tarmac was developed in tandem with a company called Specialized who work with McLaren to develop racing bikes.

Specialized worked with McLaren to use the same carbon fibre material you find on the hybrid P1 hypercar, and shed further weight from the frame by redesigning the frame and front wheel fork.

The Tarmac was even built in the same factory where McLaren makes some of its best work: the Special Operations Center it has in Surrey, UK. Only 250 of the bikes will be made for people around the world, and every single bike will be made to measure.

With all the fine materials and meticulous engineering work that went into the Tarmac, it’s no great surprise it costs $20,000. Considering you’re spending a packet with the company to buy the bike, McLaren and Specialized at least want you to match, so they’ll throw in a bespoke pair of S-Works Road Shoes and a custom helmet.

When you do the maths per wheel, however, you find that the Tarmac is still cheaper than getting even a used McLaren MP4-12C, so technically you’re coming out ahead, right?