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

[MIKA27]

The US Military’s Disastrous Plan To Use Napalm-Strapped Bats In WWII

In 1942, after having finally entered WWII, the United States Marine Corp spent two million dollars on an insane new initiative. The mission? Strap napalm bombs to bats, and send them flying on deadly kamikaze runs. Seriously.

Holiday Inspiration

While most Americans spent the days following December 7, 1941 — the day of Japan’s infamous attack on Pearl Harbor — confused, angry, and afraid, dentist Lytle S. James decided to be inspired.

At the time of the attack, James was on a trip to famed bat-haven Carlsbad Caverns. Eager to do his part for his country, he took note of the ferocious fliers who ruled the the caves and suggested what seemed at the time to be a perfectly sensible retaliation plan: making unsuspecting patriots out of bomb-toting bats.

If it had been anyone else’s idea, this bizarre, PETA-angering, military absurdity would have died on the vine. But Lytle P. James had something other crackpots of his era could only dream of. He had the ear of First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt.

This Man Is Not a Nut

The concept itself is outlandish enough in its own right, but the truly bizarre part is that the National Research defence Committee decided to take the idea and run with it. Renowned psychologist Donald Griffin, who had worked extensively on bats’ system of echolocation, even helped overlook the trial as one of its biggest supporters, claiming in 1942:

This proposal seems bizarre and visionary at first glance, but extensive experience with experimental biology convinces the writer that if executed competently it would have every chance of success.

This was, apparently, enough to get President Franklin Delano Roosevelt on board, as a Presidential memorandum eventually went out stating:

This man is not a nut. It sounds like a perfectly wild idea but is worth looking into.

Ultimately known as Project X-Ray, the plan used Mexican free-tailed bats, which were kept calm during travel by jamming them into ice cube trays to be cooled down and forced into hibernation.

When it came time to release the (what would be thousands of) bats, a cardboard trap was supposed to spring open and send the napalm-loaded creatures deep into enemy lines. Ideally, the bats would roost in hard-to-reach places, set them on fire, and avenge the nation in the process. Unfortunately, things didn’t go quite according to plan.

Trial and Horrible Error

During a test run of just six of the flying bombers, the bats unexpectedly took off a little too early and headed not for their target, but straight for the barracks. The good news: the bombs were highly effective. The bad news: again, the bombs were highly effective. The barracks quickly burst into flames — along with the general’s car.

As Robert M. Neer notes in his new book, Napalm: An American Biography, “Flames… jumped from building to building. Many structures lay in ashes.” It could barely have been more catastrophic.

Apparently, in an effort to maintain the secrecy of their secret weapon, research team leader Louis Fieser and his team of scientists had chosen to forego fire equipment. Not the best idea where kamikaze bomb bats are concerned. Or as Fieser casually put it, “We made a little mistake out there.”

So fortunately for animal lovers and opponents of uncontrollable bomb-toting animals everywhere, this particular military mistake ended nearly as soon as it began. But not before going down as one of the most absurd military experiments in our nation’s history.

[Fuzz]

The US Military’s Disastrous Plan To Use Napalm-Strapped Bats In WWII

Don't forget about anti-tank dogs and pigeon bomb guidance system.

[MIKA27]

Don't forget about anti-tank dogs and pigeon bomb guidance system.

Only Russian and Americans would think of these

[MIKA27]

A Human Stem Cell Has Been Cloned For The First Time

Almost two decades ago, scientists succeeded in cloning Dolly the sheep. Now, the same process has been allowed scientists to clone embryonic stem cells from fetal human skin cells for the very first time. There are no more barriers between us and creating human clones.

Cloning in and of itself has been within our reach for a while. Cloning non-human animals has been on the table for nearly two decades, dating back to Dolly the sheep way back in 1996. Cloning human cells has always been a bit rougher of a prospect, partly because it’s just hard, and partly because experimenting with it is ground that needs to be tread very very carefully.

This breakthrough accomplishment, performed by Shoukhrat Mitalipov of Oregon Health & Science University and his colleagues, makes use of a technique called nuclear transfer. In its most basic sense, nuclear transfer is the process of taking one cell — in this case a skin cell — and inserting it into an egg cell, which is then coaxed into dividing. Or in other words, fertilizing an egg cell with a fully formed cell of another sort, instead of a sperm.

This process results in a ball of stem cells that can be grown into a full-fledged clone if it’s allowed to keep developing. That’s how we’ve gotten every successful clone to date, including Dolly back in 1996. But until now, that had never worked with human cells. As documented in the journal Cell, Mitalipov and company have managed to pull off the process using skin cells of a human foetus as fertiliser, creating a whole bunch of embryonic stem cells that could go on to grow into a cloned human being. Not that anyone’s planning to actually do that. Ever. These cells are for medical treatment. Stuff like treating nerve and heart damage.

Mitalipov attributes the recent success mainly to two things. First, there’s the use of healthy, donated eggs — previously eggs used for experiments like this were leftovers from IVF clinics. Second, there’s the slightly new approach to nuclear transfer, with several special tweaks and modifications including the infusion of caffeine at one point. The result is a reliable, high-yeild process that can create, on average, four embryonic stem cell lines from every eight eggs. Mitalipov put it this way:

We knew the history of failure, that several legitimate labs had tried but couldn’t make it work. I thought we would need about 500 to 1000 eggs to optimise the process and anticipated it would be a long study that would take several years. But in the first experiment we got a blastocyst and within a couple of months we already had an (embryonic) stem cell line. We couldn’t believe it.

The implications here are huge, from both a medicinal and ethical standpoint. In the past, other scientists experimented with cloning processes that avoided ethical quandaries like extracting fetal cells, but none of those were nearly as reliable as this one. And this approach might be able to work with adult skin cells — removing fetuses from the equation — but it’s still too early to tell.

And while the stem cells generated here definitely aren’t intended to be used to produce actual, living, human clones, there’s no reason to believe they couldn’t be. And life potential like that is bound to raise all sorts of questions.

But aside from all that, this cloning process holds promise for the treatment of all kinds of degenerative diseases, though you can bet it will be a long, hard road to any sort of standardisation for a whole wide variety of medical and legal reasons. Still, it’s a huge step forward for science, and for young megalomaniacs who aspire to live forever through clones someday.

MIKA: I know the arguments here can be about a great deal of wrong doings when it comes to cloning humans etc BUT, I truly believe stem cells and cloning as a whole for the greater good of mankind in finding permanent treatments for cancer(s), degenerative diseases like Parkinsons, Alzheimers, MS and the like is far more important IMO.

[MIKA27]

Here’s The First Trailer For The New Riddick Movie

What would Pitch Black look like if someone remade it today? From the looks of the first trailer for Riddick, exactly like this.

Monsters, bounty hunters, night vision, goggles, knives and Vin Diesel being gruff.

Riddick tells the story of our so-named anti-hero who has been marooned on an alien world to fight off beasts. He activates a rescue beacon, which triggers the arrival of mercenaries sent to hunt the vigilante down. Cue action.

The film sees Vin Diesel reprise his role as Riddick, while Katee Sackhoff of Battlestar Galactica fame plays a bounty hunter, while Australian actor and former footballer Matt Nable is also toting a gun in the wastes of space.

Riddick hits screens in September.

[MIKA27]

A 2,300 Year Old Mayan Pyramid Was Destroyed for a New Road

A construction company found it to be a good idea to destroy one of Belize’s largest Mayan pyramids just so they can use its materials for crushed rock in a road-building project. The 2,300 year old pyramid survived Mother Nature but fell to an idiot man. Nice.

The Nohmul pyramid, which is one of the most important sites in northern Belize (near the Mexico border), didn’t look as polished as what you imagine a pyramid to look like because it lacked “the even stone sides frequently seen in reconstructed or better-preserved pyramids”. But still, if you’re destroying something over a 100-foot tall that is clearly not man-made, you probably should ask for permission first.

Jaime Awe, head of the Belize Institute of Archaeology, said:

“Just to realize that the ancient Maya acquired all this building material to erect these buildings, using nothing more than stone tools and quarried the stone, and carried this material on their heads, using tump lines. To think that today we have modern equipment, that you can go and excavate in a quarry anywhere, but that this company would completely disregard that and completely destroyed this building.”

Apparently it’s a common problem in Belize (the destruction of Maya sites for road fill) but no one has ever destroyed a pyramid so large before. There’s a time and place to move forward from the past but if something is still standing from 2,300 years ago and you’re just using it for road fill, um, you should find something else.

[MIKA27]

This is What Richard Branson Looks Like Dressed Up in Drag

When you’re a billionaire who owns a Formula 1 team, what do you put up as collateral in a bet with rival F1 team and airline-owning billionaires? Why, your dignity of course. This is what happens when you lose a bet over whose team is better.

Back in 2009, Branson apparently bet Tony Fernandes of Air Asia and Caterham F1 fame, that his Virgin team would beat out the Caterhams (then known as Lotus) in the 2010 season. Unfortunately for Branson, the Virgins sucked, and lost the bet he did.

As punishment, Branson had to dress-up as cabin crew in drag on an Air Asia flight, but since a skiing accident and the royal wedding got in the way, it’s only now that Branson could get his dress on. Beautiful, don’t you think?

The two used the humiliation as a way to raise money for Starlight Foundation, generating some £200,000-odd. Oh, the life of an airline-owning billionaire must be so much damn fun.

[BrotherBear]

This is What Richard Branson Looks Like Dressed Up in Drag

[MIKA27]

BWAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!!

[MIKA27]

Natural Disasters Have Cost The Global Economy $2.5 Trillion Since 2000

Economic losses from disasters since 2000 are in the range of $2.5 trillion, a figure at least 50 per cent higher than previous international estimates, according to a U.N. report released Wednesday.

The U.N. Office for Disaster Risk Reduction warned in the 246-page report that economic losses from floods, earthquakes and drought will continue to escalate unless businesses take action to reduce their exposure to disaster risks.

U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon launched the report saying the review of disaster losses in 56 countries clearly demonstrates that “economic losses from disasters are out of control” and can only be reduced in partnership with the private sector.

“Our startling finding is that direct losses from floods, earthquakes and drought have been underestimated by at least 50 per cent,” Ban said. “So far this century, direct losses from disasters are in the range of $2.5 trillion. This is unacceptable when we have the knowledge to reduce the losses and benefit from the gains.”

For too many years, the secretary-general said, financial markets have placed greater value on short-term returns than on sustainability and resilience, which in the long-term are far more attractive and can save millions of dollars.

“In the years ahead, trillions of dollars will be invested in hazard-exposed regions,” Ban said. “If that money fails to account for natural hazards and vulnerabilities, risk will increase. Where such spending does address underlying risk factors, risk will go down.”

The report said recent major disasters such as Hurricane Sandy in 2012, the 2011 floods in Thailand and the 2011 Japanese earthquake and tsunami put a spotlight on the growing impact of disasters on the private sector.

The report says increasing globalization, the search for lower costs and higher productivity, and quick delivery “are driving business into hazard-prone locations with little or no consideration of the consequences on global supply chains.”

For example, it said Toyota lost $1.2 billion in product revenue from the Japanese quake due to parts shortages that caused 150,000 fewer cars to be manufactured in the United States and a 70 per cent reduction in production in India and a 50 per cent reduction in China.

On the other hand, Orion, which owns and operates one of the largest electricity distribution networks in New Zealand, invested $6 million in seismic protection that saved the company $65 million in the 2010 and 2011 earthquakes, the report said. And preventive investments by fishermen in Mexico saved each individual entrepreneur US$35,000 during Hurricane Wilma in 2005, it said.

But Margareta Wahlstrom, the U.N. special representative for disaster risk reduction, said: “In a world of ongoing population growth, rapid urbanization, climate change and an approach to investment that continually discounts disaster risk, this increased potential for future losses is of major concern.”

A new global risk model developed by the U.N. office demonstrates that average losses just from earthquake and cyclonic wind damage are expected to be about $180 billion per year throughout this century — and this figure doesn’t include damage from floods, landslides, fires and storms, the report said.

[MIKA27]

NY Cops Reminded It’s Totally Legal For Ladies To Walk Around Topless

The New York Times reports that commanding officers reminded each of New York’s 34,000 cops every morning for 10 days that women could go topless on city streets.

The “topless” reminder was revealed in a lawsuit that performance artist Holly Van Voast filed against the NYPD, which arrested her 10 times for baring her breasts.

Van Voast was nabbed for going topless while performing as “Harvey Van Toast,” a mustachioed “topless paparazzo.”

She also strolled toplessup the centre aisle at St. Patrick’s Cathedral and told cops, “I have something to say. This is how I say it,” the NY Post reports. During the most recent episode, police took her to a hospital for psychiatric evaluation, according to the federal lawsuit.

The suit, which includes the NYPD memo, accuses police of violating her civil rights.

New York’s highest court ruled 20 years ago that women are entitled to the same legal rights as men when it comes to going topless. The NYPD memo states that topless women or men can be charged with indecency for lewd acts including masturbation, though.

[MIKA27]

NASA’s Kepler Spacecraft Might Be Damaged Beyond Repair

According to the New York Times and the twitter rumour mill, NASA’s exoplanet hunting space craft, Kepler is having some major problems.

An issue with the observatory’s “reaction wheels” which move and point the spacecraft.

Kepler was launched in 2009 to search for planets outside of our solar system. The obervatory watches for dips in light coming from stars in the constellations of Cygnus and Lyra that could indicate possible planets.

So far it has found 115 confirmed planets and has created a list of 2,740 possible others.

The spacecraft was supposed to keep functioning until 2016, but the wheel failure may cut the mission short. NASA is holding a press conference at 4:00 PM EST on the spacecraft’s issues.

The spacecraft’s most recent contribution was the discovery of two new planetary systems, each which contain planets that circle sun-like stars and within a distance of that start that would allow the planet to support liquid water.

[MIKA27]

Gripping Photos Capture The Mirror Worlds Of North And South Korea

Architectural photographer Dieter Leistner was born the same year East Germany began construction on the Berlin Wall. He was 37 when it fell. Maybe that’s why his interest in North and South Korea feels so personal — he spent 40 years in another divided country.

Leistner’s new book, Korea – Korea, is a compendium of images that were shot in 2006, in Pyongyang, and 2012, in Seoul. Each spread compares two different public spaces in each city, including bus stops, subway cars, and public squares. In a foreword to the book, curator Klaus Klemp explains his perspective as a German:

Up until 1989, Koreans and Germans shared the same fate, although for quite different reasons. While the division of Germany was the result of a terrible war unleashed by Germany across the whole of Europe, the creation of a capitalist South and a communist North Korea was the result of Japanese occupation and a proxy war that the former World War II allies and later Cold War antagonists carried out on Korean soil.

German division into West and East and the Korean division into South and North are thus not entirely comparable. But this constellation of the division of a nation, with people cut off from each other, families torn apart, a total blackout on all contact, and the suffering of many victims who paid with their lives or years in labour camps for any attempts to flee is particularly painful for the German observers who can remember their own similar experiences.

The side-by-side image comparison could’ve easily become gimmicky (or even exploitive). But Leistner manages to avoid that pitfall — mainly because of his talent as a photographer, but also because he focuses on the everyday experiences that the two cultures still share.

[MIKA27]

Google And NASA Are Building The Future Of AI With A Quantum Supercomputer

Google and NASA have announced that they’re teaming up to create a laboratory focused on developing the future of artificial intelligence — using quantum supercomputers.

The Quantum Artificial Intelligence Lab, based at NASA’s Ames Research centre in California, will be home to a quantum computer from D-Wave Systems. Researchers will work to, in Google’s words, “study how quantum computing might advance machine learning”.

In practical terms, Google thinks that quantum computing could transform web searching and speech recognition technology, while some of the collaborating researchers will be hoping to learn how similar tricks can be used to model disease and climate It’s obviously unclear what will come of the project, or how long the results will take to appear — this is cutting edge stuff, in its very early stages, after all — but it sure sounds like it could be exciting.

[MIKA27]

How Lasers May Have Revealed A Legendary Lost City Of Gold

One year ago, a team of researchers traveled deep into the Honduran rainforest in search of Ciudad Blanca, the legendary lost city of treasures. Yesterday, they revealed images — uncovered by lasers — of structures that they believe to be the White City itself.

The legend of the White City has captured explorers’ imaginations for centuries; Hernán Cortés detailed his interest in the purportedly gold-laden metropolis as far back as 1526. But the Mosquitia region where it was rumoured to exist is densely packed with rainforest, and the conquistadors never penetrated deep enough to claim their prize.

Modern archaeologists have been just as stymied. Mosquitia has been the focus of a half dozen intensive explorations in the last century alone, some of which have yielded signs of some ruins and mounds. No one, though, despite their best efforts, had found anything close to a full city structure.

The team of researchers from the University of Houston, though, had something none of those expeditions did. They had lasers.

Major Laser

The National centre for Airborne Laser Mapping does just what you would think; uses highly advanced lasers to see things the human eye can’t. Specifically, in this case, the team — led by a Los Angeles-based filmmaker — used a Lidar system to penetrate the thick foliage of Mosquitia and discover the treasures that lay beneath.

Lidar itself isn’t particularly new. Developed in the 1960s, it was originally used to measure cloud densities, but comes in handy today for everything from mapping the Amazon rainforest to hunting down modern-day pirates. In this implementation, the system spits out laser pulses and measures how they’re reflected off vegetation and the ground, to map the surface hidden beneath the forest’s canopy.

By stripping away layers of reflections the researchers were able to remove detail from the canopy and reveal the ground beneath, shown on the right in the image above. Yesterday, the researchers revealed these images for the first time, at the American Geophysical Union Meeting of the Americas in Cancun.

The White Cities?

After others had spent centuries trying to unearth a single city of gold, the NCALM exploration made a surprising find: not one city, but two.

It might hard for the untrained eye to see, but the Lidar images revealed regularly spaced mounds — and a few other linear features — that possibly make up two distinct city centres. Either of which could very well be the legendary Ciudad Blanca.

We should know soon enough. The team is now closely studying the data to work out which sections contain the most promising features. Once they have, they’ll deploy archaeologists to investigate the site further.

What will they find? Maybe rubble. Maybe gold. Maybe thousands of inexplicable golden orbs. The possibilities are endless when you uncover a legend right here in real life.

[MIKA27]

Oldest Water Cache Ever Discovered May Hold 1.5 Billion-Year-Old Life

After kindly asking a group of Canadian miners for a sample of some water they’d struck, a team of scientists who had been investigating similar finds discovered that the fluid they were looking at may have been sealed up for 1.5 billion years.

And that’s just the lower limit. The decaying radioactive atoms in the potential primordial soup told them that this cache of water (the oldest ever discovered) could actually have been waiting patiently in that rock for anywhere up to 2.5 billion years.

But this prehistoric time capsule isn’t just toting stale water, it’s also full of hydrogen which, as luck may have it, acts as food for certain microorganisms. Even better — the rock is able to supply a steady flow of hydrogen into its cozy little crevice, which may just have been enough to sustain at least some form of life for all this time.

So should it contain the descendants of ancient microbes — which it very well may — not only do we have a perfectly preserved specimen of ancient life, but we’ll also be able to glean a better idea of how we evolved. Because the potential life held within has been so isolated, it would have most likely evolved in distinctly different ways from our own microbial ancient ancestors.

Which leads to a, perhaps, even more exciting prospect; this may actually aid us in our quest to find life on other planets. If a living thing can exist in a location as remote and desolate as sealed off stone, it certainly gives hope to the prospect of something similar occurring on other planets — say, Mars, perhaps. According to Carol Stoker, a research scientist with NASA:

If you go back to the very early history of Earth and Mars, sort of the first billion years after the surfaces cooled, Earth and Mars looked very similar. The logic is if that happened on Earth, why shouldn’t it have happened on Mars?

Mars is desolate now, sure — but so is that sealed off rock.

[MIKA27]

The New Pacific Rim Trailer Is An Orgy Of Everything You Love

Giant mechs. Intense score. Inspiring speech. That voiceover. Monsters. Check, check, check, check, and check. If you weren’t excited about Pacific Rim before, you are now.

Guillermo del Toro’s mechs-versus-monsters mega-movie won’t be out until July 12th, but in the meantime you can satiate your craving for its high-flying fun times by watching this main trailer on repeat.

I mean, for goodness sake, they use a cargo ship as a giant creature-crushing baseball bat.

[MIKA27]

What Kind Of Wallet Do You Carry? Sleek And Slim Or Over-Stuffed?

Zippo, a brand long associated with smokers and arsonists, has now decided to use its expertise in stainless steel to help those burdened with a giant Costanza wallet as it’s come to be known. The company’s new wallet is just under half an-inch thick, and its stainless steel housing will help block wireless signals if you’re worried about ID theft.

But what do you think? Have you already made the switch to a minimalist wallet to slim down your pockets? Or will one day someone have to pry that over-stuffed monstrosity from your cold, dead back pocket?

[MIKA27]

Creative’s Airwave HD Adds NFC So You Just Tap To Tether Your Tunes

No one has yet to unseat Jawbone’s Jambox from the Bluetooth speaker throne, but the king of the heap is starting to show its age, leaving room for feature-packed competitors to challenge its reign.

Creative hopes its updated Airwave HD might be in line for the throne by offering the citizens NFC capabilities so it’s easy to sync their smartphones with nothing but a tap.

The added functionality does come at the cost of reduced battery life, seven hours compared to twelve for the NFC-less model. But battery life has always been about give and take, and the $160 Airwave HD will still blast your tunes for an entire day’s work, minus your lunchbreak.

It also doubles as a speakerphone which is standard Bluetooth speaker fare these days, and should be available sometime after June when it’s first introduced in Singapore.

[MIKA27]

A Tropical storm making ripples in the ocean like a pebble in a pond:

Normally, we see storms as clouds and rain, but there’s invisible power lurking inside. This amazing satellite shot shows that hidden chaos in the form of gravity waves, blasting out from a storm’s center like ripples in a pond.

Tropical Cyclone Mahasen, which you can see off to the right there, is heading through the Indian Ocean, due to make landfall in Bangladesh today. But on May 13, the Suomi NPP satellite caught a unique picture of Mahasen off the coast with its VIIRS Day-Night Band camera.

The dash of light you can make out is actually the lightning flashes from the center of the storm, and the waves spreading outwards are gravity waves—ripples in both the water and the air above it—bursting out from the storm’s core. And because of the moon’s new phase, the clouds that would ordinarily cover this up are practically invisible to the camera’s infrared gaze. It may look like a little dropped in a puddle, but those are giant ripples you don’t want to be near.

[CanuckSARTech]

LOL. Pot, meet kettle.

I'm sure Art would agree, after the apparent full-length-mirror incident....

[bugman78629]

I KNOW THERE IS ROOM FOR CIGARS; HERE!!!!!!

[bugman78629]

I GOTTA HAVE ONE!!!!!

[Fuzz]

I GOTTA HAVE ONE!!!!!

Old school, but done wrong. The pencil is the wrong way around. How else do you get it to stick into the ceiling tiles if it isn't going pointy end first?

[MIKA27]

Old school, but done wrong. The pencil is the wrong way around. How else do you get it to stick into the ceiling tiles if it isn't going pointy end first?

I'm sitting in my office as im reading this post and collecting all the required 'tools' to make my own.