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

[MIKA27]

This Golf GTi Concept Is Flat-Out Mad

Sketching out some insane-looking beast is all very well, but actually making it? Now that’s a real challenge. Here’s an awesome 503HP Volkswagen GTI concept in the flesh, wheels and all. I want one of these beauties parked outside my house.

It’s almost like the Audi R8 and the Golf mated, and there’s nothing wrong with that. Compared to some of VW’s other insane-looking concepts, the design and specs of this one are practically down to Earth. In fact, who knows, VW might actually make this one. The Golf GTI needs a bit of a spruce-up to make it a proper sports-car-cum-hatchback.

[MIKA27]

Watch This Badass Pilot Save The Day With A Ballsy No-Wheel Landing

Last night, the pilot of US Airways Express Flight 4560 was having some bad luck. The landing gear on his turboprop twin-engine plane just wouldn’t go all the way down. So with some quick thinking and righteous piloting skills, he went in for a wheel-less, sparky touchdown, and pulled it off without a hitch.

After trying the landing gear a bunch of times and failing to get it fully deployed, the pilot — named Edward Powers according to witnesses — decided that a carefully controlled skid was the way to get out of the sky safely and minimize any dangerous veering on the runway. In perparation, he circled Newark airport until he was out of fuel, to minimize the chance of a fire, and took her down with all due care. A nearby air traffic control tower caught the footage.

It’s hard to make out much more than the rain of sparks, but there were plenty, and the plane was accordingly doused in foam the second it came to a stop. But thanks to Powers’ fuel-burning circles and piloting skills, there was no fire at all. In fact, there weren’t even any injuries.

A spokesman for US Airways told The Daily Mail that the NSTB will be looking into the cause of the incident, but also gave Power’s some well-earned compliments:

The landing of the aircraft on the ground safely is testament to how well our crews are trained. They are trained to think quickly and assess the situation and act with the utmost professionalism.

Or in other words: “Awesome job, you badass.”

[MIKA27]

Meet The Teen Whose Invention Could Charge Your Phone In Seconds

While you are hanging out on the Internet (in your underwear, maybe?) on a Sunday, kids that are smart than either you or I are out there getting ready to change the world. Eesha Khare, for instance, not only invented a super-capacitor that could someday charge your phone in 20 seconds; she also won $US50,000 for it.

Khare is one of the three big winners from the Intel International Science and Engineering Fair. She and 17-year-old Henry Lin (who created a model that simulates thousands of galaxies) picked up Intel Foundation Young Scientist Awards. Meanwhile, 19-year-old Ionut Budisteanu won the Gordon E. Moore Award and $US75,000 for his AI model that could lead to a cheaper self-driving car.

Khare’s invention is the one with some really immediate potential though, and quick-charging phones is something we all want.

So far, the super-capacitor has only been tested to light up a LED, but it was able to do that wonderfully and the prototypes new format holds potential to be scaled. It’s also flexible and tiny, and should be able to handle 10,000 recharge cycles, more than normal batteries by a factor of 10.

It’s a great step in the right direction, especially since we all know that battery life is the most important feature a phone can have. But like all super-capacitor tech, it’s not exactly close to commercial development yet. But hey, if an (admittedly super smart) 18-year-old can get this stuff figured out, multi-national corporations with an even bigger cash profit incentive on the table should be able to as well, right? Hurry up already. I’ll take either solution so long as one comes soon.

MIKA: I just love the reaction to the winners face (The guy holding the flag), see... Geeks do win!

[MIKA27]

NASA Records The Brightest Meteor To Hit The Moon In Close To A Decade

It’s hard to forget the record-setting meteor that exploded above Chelyabinsk, Russia in February this year. Looks like the Moon didn’t want to be left out of the fun, with NASA recently announcing it suffered its own flashy impact in March — the largest ever recorded by the agency.

As the video above from Space.com explains, the meteor strike occurred on March 17, inside an area known as “Mare Imbrium”, a massive crater and one of the largest in the Solar System. In the eight years of observing the Moon — part of the Lunar Impact Monitoring Program run by NASA — it is the brightest impact yet seen.

“Anyone looking at the moon at the moment of impact could have seen the explosion, no telescope required. For about one second the impact site was glowing like a fourth-magnitude star”, said Dr Bill Cooke of NASA’s Meteoroid Environment Office, according to The Age.

The meteor itself was around 40kg and 40cm in diameter and hit the Moon at 90,000km/h, leaving a crater estimated at 20m across.

The explosive force was equivalent to five tonnes of TNT. True, it doesn’t hold much against what Earth recently experienced — the Chelyabinsk object was ~20m in diameter and detonated with the power of 300-500kt, but as far as the Moon is concerned, it was a big ‘un.

[MIKA27]

GoPro, Now Providing Us The Experience Of Being Chewed By A Bear

GoPros… not only are they handy, but delicious, apparently! A fellow by the name of Brad Josephs left a GoPro inconspicuously secured to a rock on the Alaska Peninsula, in an attempt to capture footage of grizzly bears. And he got a look at grizzlies alright, both inside and out.

The bear in question doing its best to ingest the GoPro is a three-year old cub. Those of you hoping for the full gastrointestinal experience will be disappointed — the bear only manages to “gently mouth” the camera, in Josephs own words. The device came out the other end of the trauma undamaged, the camera (and memory card) was used “many more times”.

The footage was captured for a BBC / Discovery Channel documentary called “Great Bear Stakeout” and I must say, getting that close to the inside of a bear’s mandibles made me a little queasy — not the thought of being devoured, just all those teeth and the saliva.

[MIKA27]

Unglamorous Space Catastrophes That You’ll Never See In A Movie

We were all impressed with the dramatic trailer for Gravity, with George Clooney weathering an explosion on an orbiting space station and Sandra Bullock spinning off into the void of space. Things like that make good cinema. There are other space crises, though, that will never get their own movies. Here are some space disasters that are just too awkward for the cinema.

Sewage System Failures

If there’s a failing system somewhere on a spaceship in a movie, something that’s spraying things all over, it’s always going to be either water or fire. Possibly, if the movie is set in the future, it’s antimatter. Whatever it is, it’s elemental and anodyne. It lets someone announce over the intercom system, “The coolant leak is shorting out the life support systems!” What it isn’t, however, is literal crap bursting out of the walls and spraying all over the delicate equipment.

This is strange, since biological leavings are the one thing that we’ll never get rid of in human space travel. And, no matter what level of technological sophistication you are at, any sewage spill is always going to be a massive emergency. The most basic, retro movie could have something as simple as, “poo bag explodes!” Because astronauts had to go in a bag, put in some chemicals that dissolve the product, and knead the bag to work the chemicals through, it’s not an unthinkable possibility. Any bursting of the bag would send liquid poo flying through the capsule, doing a lot of damage.

More recent spacecraft have toilets that shunt human leavings to an unheated compartment that then opens into space. This means that solid waste, and sometimes even liquid waste, freezes. Any sort of pressure from the outside would send frozen poo bullets and pee-cicles flying into the space craft. Again, causing a lot of damage. And not just damage to the equipment. There’s a reason people don’t live in sewers. With the limited availability of cleaning facilities, and the possibility of getting impaled by frozen faeces, you’re looking at massive infections for the entire crew.

Even in the future, sewage problems present a major crisis. If you look at the Enterprise, it was a long-haul space ship that was meant to cross vast distances, and when it came across new civilizations it was not allowed to interfere with them in any significant way. This presumably included not dumping megatons of sewage on them and taking all their food. This, in turn, meant that the crew was eating food, and leaving waste. You figure out the connection there. Any problem with the sewage system would mean cutting, or changing, the food supply. Imagine the effect this would have on crew morale. Sure, it’s easy to be an enlightened, peace-loving civilisation if every time you want a sundae the computer will give it to you. If Picard, or even Spock, had to chow down on barely-processed crap patties to scrape by on 5000 kilojoules a day, they’d turn into a raiding party in about a week.

Minor Health Problems In Space

Movies are rife with space plagues and space madness and evil space worms that creep into your ear and burst out of your chest — but rarely does any space movie deal with the minor, annoying health problems that inevitably crop up. We know about the host of medical problems brought about by the sudden loss of significant gravity. Generally this causes headache, nausea, and back ache, because the body naturally curves into a foetal position during weightlessness.

This, in turn, leads to a hell of a lot of crankiness and eventually, depression. Even during relatively short voyages, this is a problem — especially when there’s a lot of work to do. There have been missions, even during the hyper-competitive space race days, that have been cut short because the some of the astronauts simply couldn’t take any more. In one case, on Skylab-4, there was a 24-hour mutiny during which the crew switched off communications and relaxed for a day, in rebellion against a punishing work schedule. This isn’t a glamorous fight-the-man kind of problem, but exhaustion, overwork, and a myriad minor pains can make people simply stop working, even if that means cutting off communication with the people whose job it is to keep them alive.

Again, this would be more of a real emergency if this were set in the future. It’s one thing for a crew of five to 20 to have a few aches and pains between them. It’s another when a ship of thousands, complete with families, suddenly loses artificial gravity so that everyone has a health problem. Imagine the chaos if everyone in an entire city got sick. Some are violently nauseous. Some have blinding headaches. Some have minor health problems that are suddenly exacerbated by the crisis. Some just have constant pain that denies them any adequate rest. No place could ever be built to deal with one hundred per cent of the population getting hurt. It would be a death of a thousand cuts. A thousand, mundane, annoying little cuts.

The Depopulation Of The Earth

Have you ever watched a program about space voyages and thought, “Man, I wish during this amazing age of discovery, I was still on Earth, wearing neutral-coloured jumpsuits and growing grapes?” No. Nobody has. Most movies and TV shows get around the fact that it’s cooler to be in space by showing spaceships as grungy or colony worlds as miserable wastelands that look, I’m sure by coincidence, like the bleaker parts of California’s southern deserts. It’s no surprise that no one wants to go there.

And yet, in a future where space ships jet around the galaxy filled with attractive people doing interesting things and discovering worlds that are semi-paradises, it doesn’t seem like the Earth would be a major attraction. Yes, we’ve all seen the nature documentaries. The Earth is a wondrous place. But there are plenty of wondrous places on Earth — wide majestic deserts, fertile rolling valleys, silent solemn mountaintops — that have all been depopulated because some people discovered birth control and others decided that they’re going to New York to make performance art or become a stock broker.

The world is full of ghost towns. In a future that, seemingly, has birth control available to everyone and a star ship ready to take you to any planet you desire, would you hang around the Earth? There are movies about space prisons. Maybe they’ve got it the wrong way around. Maybe the only way people will stay on Earth is if it’s turned into a prison.

Non-Evil Sentient Computers

HAL is one of the best movie villains ever. So is the Terminator. Evil, sentient computers are cool. They make for riveting movies. But there’s no real guarantee that, when a computer gains sentience, it’s going to be evil. The problem is, it’s equally unlikely that its sentience is going to be suited for space travel. The vast majority of people aren’t candidates for NASA not because they are serial killers, but because they’re distracted, lazy, ignorant of the subject material, and not interested enough in learning it. They’d be a disaster if they went up on a mission.

But they wouldn’t be a fascinating movie-type disaster. They’d just be a miserable co-worker that everyone around them had to compensate for. But no one can compensate for the computers on a space ship, or space station, if they turn out to be sentient and lazy. Computers on space ships need to be non-sentient, not because of the remote chance that they’ll be evil, but because of the very real chance that they’ll just not feel like doing the millions of boring things that we require them precisely when we require them to do it.

Astronauts would have to spend hours cajoling a computer into doing the calculations necessary for navigation. They’d have to nag it to keep up the air filtration. (I’m guessing maintaining the sewage systems would also be a point of contention.) And that’s just routine maintenance. When timing really counts — like landing on planets, taking space walks, or manoeuvring up to other ships — there would be moments of sheer terror while everyone wonders if the computer will be distracted by a cat video and forget to run the numbers at some crucial point. It would be like living with a negligent coworker who could kill you if they don’t feel like making a fresh pot of coffee. And that’s scary, but not glamorous.

This is the problem with being in an environment where anything that goes wrong can kill you. Anything can go wrong. But not anything makes a death you’d want to admit to. Or watch someone else suffer.

[MIKA27]

Tomorrow’s Corporate Jets Will Be Flying Johnny Cabs

Being a commercial airline pilot isn’t as glamorous as Leonardo di Caprio would have you believe; in practice, it’s more akin to long haul trucking than aerial acrobatics. So rather than force a human pilot to endure the monotony of maintaining course, a European research consortium wants to replace them entirely — with software.

The idea of an autonomous airliner isn’t that much of a stretch, really. The US military already employs autonomous UAVs that can fly themselves (and now takeoff and land as well), the technology simply needs to be adapted to existing civilian air traffic control schemes. To that end, ASTREA, a £62 million public-private research consortium between the UK and seven major contractors — AOS, BAE Systems, Cassidian, Cobham, Qinetiq, Rolls-Royce and Thales UK — launched a remotely-operated Jetliner from Warton, Lancashire last month and flew it to Inverness, Scotland.

Well, technically, an o-nboard human handled the takeoff and landing bits (and acted as a backup should the system fail) but the flight computer was at the helm for a vast majority of the 800km trip. A second pilot monitored the plane’s performance from the ground and remotely issued commands to the flight computer, though the autonomous systems did most of the work.

While this is a major milestone for civilian UAS technology, it’s still just a glorified auto-pilot. Numerous systems require further development, such as the obstacle avoidance routine. Autonomous aircraft need to be able to differentiate between, say, thunderheads and 747s, at least as well as their meat-sack counterparts.

“Because we were in shared airspace, all the sense-and-avoid maneuvers we tested used synthetic targets [fake obstacles injected into the flight control system]. Any changes to the flight route were communicated to the ground-based pilot by air traffic control, with the pilot then instructing the aircraft to amend its course accordingly,” Lambert Dopping-Hepenstal at BAE Systems, ASTRAEA’s program director, said in a press release.

The test concluded successfully — in that the flaming wreckage of a private jet didn’t fall from the sky after mistaking a hot air balloon for a cirrus cloud — and paved the way for further development and testing. ASTREA has already announced a second round of flights beginning in June, grading an IR obstacle avoidance system that activates during emergency landings as well as a air traffic control communications module and the next iteration of the sense-and-avoid system.

[MIKA27]

Domino’s Makes Awesome DVDs That Smell Like Pizza When They’re Played

How’s this for a brilliant marketing campaign? To help sell the notion that there’s no better way to spend an evening than with a pizza and a movie, Domino’s in Brazil created custom DVDs with a heat-reactive flavoured varnish that actually smelled like pizza once they were played.

The DVDs, which included such popular titles as Argo and The Dark Knight Rises, were distributed at movie rental shops in Sao Paulo and Rio de Janeiro. And to further drive the point home, the discs were also printed with a thermal ink so not only did they smell like pizza when removed from a DVD player, they also looked like one too with the message: “Did you enjoy the movie? The next one will be even better with a hot and delicious Domino’s Pizza.” Who could possibly resist?

[MIKA27]

How Google Maps Helped A Chinese Abductee Find His Family

Over 23 years ago, Luo Gong — just five years old at the time — was on his way to kindergarten in the Sichuan region of China, when he was abducted and taken over 1609km to Fujian in the southeast. But now, he’s used the power of internet to find his family again.

A Fujian news service, Nhaidu, reports that Lou — being only five at the time when he was snatched — had no way of finding his way back. The only thing he remembered was that he lived in a town somewhere close to two bridges.

After years of struggling to come to terms with his situation, Lou came across a website dedicated to reuniting missing children with their families. He quickly posted his story, which was spotted by a volunteer — and soon found out that a family in Guangan city had lost a son 23 years ago. From there, he turned to Google Maps to try and identify his old neighbourhood. Eventually, he spotted the two bridges he remembered — and headed home to find his family.

He’s now been reunited with his parents, 23 years after being abducted. It’s currently not clear if Lou’s adoptive family will face charges over his abduction.

[MIKA27]

Commies, Nukes And Flying Cars: What Seniors Predicted For 2076

The 1970s was a tough decade for the United States. Widespread distrust in government, rising inflation, the oil crisis and disco were all wreaking havoc on the nation.

There was tremendous uncertainty about the future of the country. And yet, 1976 was the US Bicentennial; 200 years since the founding of the United States and Americans were reflecting on not only the last 200 years, but the next 100.

Throughout 1976, US newspapers would often publish predictions for the year 2076. Some of my favourite predictions come from average citizens. The kids of 1976 would often combine the most optimistic visions of the time (like Jetsons-eque homes) with the dominant Cold War fears of the era (like images of mushroom clouds destroying all life on Earth). I’ll let you decide for yourself if the robot president of 2076 is an optimistic or pessimistic vision.

But some of the most decidedly pessimistic predictions for the future came from the most senior of American citizens. The July 4, 1976 edition of the Grand Prairie Daily News in Grand Prairie, Texas included predictions from elderly people who were asked to envision America in the year 2076. Some of those predictions are below.

The last prediction is for the year 2000, which really speaks to how dominant that number was in the minds of 20th century Americans — the big round number of the future. The predictions were all handwritten, and if I may say so they wouldn’t sound very different from predictions you’d hear from some people in the year 2013.

To whom it may concern —

If you are reading this 100 years from now one of my predictions will not have come true. I believe that with every atomic weapon on this Earth there is sure to be some foolish individual to set at least one of them off. If this “idiot” succeeds in doing this, nuclear devastation is inevitable.

If we aren’t all destroyed in this manner it is reasonably safe to say that Communism is the next of our troubles. At some point in the future of this country I believe a Communist takeover will befall us. In some cases that could be worst than total destruction.

This is a definitely pessimistic outlook, but who’s to say it won’t come true.

Donald Prince

I’m fascinated by the next letter from a man named Andy: war, disease, flying cars and push button jobs all in one.

One hundred years from now people will be riding moving sidewalks and riding airborn vehicles. The street will be too crowded to get around in and people will be fighting to protect what property they do have. They will have no farm land left because the Earth will be crowded with houses and apartments. People will live on the ocean, in big houseboats. They will work hard to get enough to pay for things.

Most of the work will be pushing buttons. The Earth will have very much pollution and it will cause many diseases. There will be pills of all kinds to eat for their meals and to protect from diseases. Many wars will destroy more land and everyone will be afraid of the atomic bomb blowing up their country. There will be a TV telephone to see the one you are talking to, and the world will be one big mess.

-Andy

In this next letter a woman named Anna really seems to be hedging her bets for the year 2076 — could be better, but could be much worse.

Dear Sir,

I think the world will be like 100 years from now maybe better but then maybe worse than the way it is now. I think that it’s up to the people in this world to make it better. Cause the people make the world the way it is, and if they want to do and make it better they can try. I think alot of things can improve and make the things that aren’t so good better, life for the people to live in. But then I feel the world is going to worse if people don’t start improving.

-Anna Talley

Looking to the year 2000 was so common that it’s likely the person who wrote this next letter wondered why anyone would bother to write about the year 2076. But whether it’s the year 2000 or the year 2076, this letter certainly has the most outlandish of predictions: Martians living on Earth, and the threat of people from the lost continent of Atlantis attacking us!

In the year 2000 there may be Martians inhabiting the earth. All people will be adapted to other places. We might find another solar system.

People from the lost continent Atlantis may come and teach us new ways of life or again some sickness might have struck them and they may attack us.

If there are such people, and if they do attack us, we must be ready.

Sincerely [unreadable]

I know that we haven’t seen Martians (or Communists) invade just yet, but just remember that we still have a few years before 2076.

[MIKA27]

How Much Would It Cost To Build The Starship Enterprise?

So you want to build the Enterprise. Don’t we all! Well good news: according to some quick, messy, napkin maths, it’s possible. Kind of. The bad news? It’s going to be stupid expensive. But not unfathomably so! Start scrounging up your space-pennies.

One Little Constraint

Since we can’t predict the future, or even come close to gauging the cost of development for revolutionary new inventions or substances like impulse drives and dilithium, we’re going to stick to what we know. It might not make us a real Enterprise, but it’s about as close as you’re going to get.

So Where Do We Start?

First we have to pick our Enterprise. Obviously, with Star Trek: Into Darkness out, we’re going to go with the one from that universe. According to some stats we got back when the original Star Trek reboot came out a few years ago, we know the new Enterprise — or as the Star Trek wiki calls it: USS Enterprise (Alternate Reality)— is 725.35m long. So, huge. And while the exact measurements vary, other sources give us a height of 190.5m, and a saucer diameter of 304.8m. She’s a big girl.

Raw Materials

The closest thing we have to compare this to in the real world is probably a Nimitz-class aircraft carrier. The new Gerald R. Ford-class suckers will be bigger and more expensive, but we haven’t finished one of those yet, so we’ll stick with a Nimitz-class, specifically the George H.W. Bush, the most recent — and last — of the Nimitz breed.

At 332m long, the GHWB comes in at just under half the length of the Enterprise. And with a 76.8m wide flight deck, it’s a fair bit thinner. But there’s a lot of empty space in the Enterprise, whereas aircraft carriers are more like solid chunks. Getting really specific with a starship’s actual volume would involve some annoyingly real maths and measurements we don’t have, but we can safely assume it would take about two GHWBs-worth of material to build a suitably sized,Enterprise-shaped brute when you stretch it all out. Make it air-tight and we’ll call it a spaceship.

Unlike the Nimitz-class cruisers before it, which cost about $US4.5 billion, the GWHB cost more like $US6.2 billion thanks to modern day perks, and we need two. And we’re just getting warmed up.

Running Total: $US12,400,000,000

Some Assembly Required

According to the first JJ Abrams Star Trek film, the specific Enterprise we’re talking about here was built in Iowa. We’ll assume it’s getting the ISS treatment: Build it on Earth as a series of trivially sized modules that get assembled in orbit.

This is where the real cost comes in. If we go by the numbers from SpaceX, the Falcon Heavy can transport stuff to space for the low, low price of about $US1,000 per pound. A GHWB worth of stuff weighs about 103,419 tonnes. So a pair of them are 206 838 tonnes. Multiply that by $US1000 dollars per 0.45kg and… Yeah. We’re talking $US456 billion just to get this into orbit, or $US468.4 billion for an Enterprise-shaped space station, total. And that’s not including labour.

That’s a lot of scary zeros, but really it’s not too too bad. This year, the United State’s defence expenditure was $US3.803 trillion. So it’s not like the cash doesn’t exist somewhere.

Construction cost (ex-labour): $456,000,000,000

Running Total: $US468,400,000,000

Tea, Earl Grey, Hot

Now that we’ve got our big, hulking shell assembled, it’s about time that we start filling it up with some awesome tech. One of the (many) iconic technologies in the Star Trek universe is the ubiquitous replicator, making pesky things like staying fed a piece of cake. Sometimes literally. We don’t have anything close to the kind of build-anything-from-anything replicators from the series, but we do have something called the Replicator. The Replicator 2, as a matter of fact. Even better.

While MakerBot’s Replicator 2 is stellar 3D-printing tech here on Earth, the thought of outfitting our enormous, enormously badass Enterprise with just one seems ludicrously cheap and lame. That being the case, let’s set it up with a suite of 50 and just pretend we’ve got five that are 10 times the size. One MakerBot Replicator 2 retails for a scant $US2200, so we’re talking an acquisition cost of (a still scant) $US110,000. We need stuff to print with too, though. Let’s say 45kg of plastic, assorted colours. MakerBot plastic is $US48 to the kilo, so that’s $US112,160 in printers and ink.

The shipping weight of each Replicator 2 is 16.7kg, or 839kg total, plus our 45kg of plastic which brings us to 884kg. Launch that into space ($US195,000) and now we’re talking.

We looked into estimating the cost of something like one of Organovo’s crazy Bio-Printers, but they couldn’t help us out with any kind of number regarding price or weight, so we had to leave it out.

Total Replicator Cost: $US307,160

Running Total: $US468,400,307,160

Hit The (Holo)Deck

Microsoft has a promising little at-home holodeck on the way with its IllumiRoom tech, but while that’d be great in your living room, we can probably spring for something a little fancier on our Enterprise. How about the CAVE 2, complete with 320 degree, panoramic 3D LCD display?

This isn’t exactly a retail product, so we’ll have to piece together the cost (and weight) in broad strokes. The awesome curved, 3D TV we saw at CES has recently been priced at around $US14,000 and we’ll need 72 for a total of $US1,008,000 in TVs. We also need 36 “high performance PCs” that are maybe $US3,000 a piece? And also a setup of 10 motion tracking cameras that we’ll just say costs about $US10,000. We wind up at $US1,126,000 for procurement.

After a little black magic involving shipping weights and wild estimation, we can guess that this rig weighs somewhere around 5,378 pounds. As for software development, well, you’re you’re going to have to program you own games. Sorry.

Holodeck cost: $US6,504,000

Running Total: $US468,406,811,160

Fire Photon Torpedoes!

But really that’s only half the battle. Or really it’s none of the battle; this thing can’t shoot yet. The GHWBalready had some armaments that are theoretically on our Enterprise now, but they are pansy Earth-weapons. We need photon torpedos and phaser arrays.

When it comes to photon torpedos — well, we don’t have photon torpedos. But tactical nukes seem pretty close, preferably in missile form. The UGM-133 Trident II is a modern-day ballistic missile that can rock a nuclear warhead. And, it can be launched from a submarine which means it’s pretty much a torpedo, right? Kinda? Sorta? Regardless, it seems like it could be strapped to — and fired from — a spaceship just fine.

It’s pretty unclear how many photon torpedoes the Enterprise — specifically the reboot Enterprise — has, but we know the USS Voyager was designed specifically for scientific missions and had 38, so that seems like a fair bare minimum. Each Trident II costs $US30.9 million to make, and weighs 58,513kg. So that means the cost of buying one “photon torpedo” and getting it into space is $US159,900,000. The whole kit of 38 will cost us $US6,076,200,000.

Photon Torpedo Cost: $6,076,200,000

Running Total: $US474,483,011,160

Don’t Phase Me, Bro

And of course, what would any good Enterprise be without its phasers? The Enterprise is said to have six phaser banks and fortunately, the Navy has some lasers that would be a decent substitute.

The Navy’s LaWS system cost $US40 million to develop and build, so we’ll peg the sticker price at maybe $US15 million per unit, for a total cost of $US90 million for all six. The Navy’s been tight-lipped about how much they weigh though, so we’ll have to pull something really iffy out of the air and say each is about as heavy as a radar-guided Phalanx machine-gun bank just because that looks kind of similar-ish. So that’s 13,600 pounds each, or 81,600 pounds of gear (total) to blast into space.

Phaser Bank Cost: $171,600,000

Running Total: $US474,654,611,160

Man Up

And what good is any of this if the ship is a ghost town? While it’s technically not a cost of building theEnterprise per se, we’d be remiss if we didn’t at least briefly consider the cost of manning this beast. Who knows exactly how many people man the Enterprise, including all the (hundreds of?) low-level nobodies, so we’ll just set it up with a skeleton command crew.

Going by a list of notable crew members, we can figure we need — at minimum — 11 people on this thing. Luckily for us, a recent agreement between NASA and Russia pinpoints the cost of flight-training a ‘naut and shooting him/her into the great void at $US70.7 million. So assuming our cadets already know how to do their jobs, and only need a little space-training, that gives us a transportation cost of $US777,700,000

Of course, you also have to pay these guys and keep them alive. Recent estimates put the cost of keeping a soldier in Iraq for a year at between $US850,000 and $US1.4 million, so let’s go with the higher end of that spectrum since we’re talking exclusively about officiers and they are also going to space. That nets us a $US15,400,000 additional personnel cost.

Lastly, they’ve got to be fed and watered and whatnot. In 2008, NASA awarded a roughly $3.5 billion dollar contract to SpaceX and Orbital Sciences Corp to perform that very same job of ferrying cargo, except to the ISS. That seems like a perfect estimate so let’s just steal that wholesale as our supply cost.

Personnel and supply cost: $US4,293,100,000

Running Total: $US478,947,711,160

To Boldly Go …Nowhere

Now that our Enterprise can defend itself, the only think left is to make it move. Unfortunately, that’s pretty impossible under even the vaguest realism constraint. Warp drives, while they are being researched, aren’t close to existing. And impulse drives — essentially fusion rockets — aren’t much closer; we almost had a fission rocket once, but it got mothballed.

More recently, there’s also been discussion of an impulse drive that could actually run on something stunningly like dilithium crystals: deuterium (a stable isotope of hydrogen) and Li6 (a stable isotope of lithium). This engine doesn’t exist yet though. And it’d likely require some very delicate orbital-construction that we can’t really hack yet.

That being said, we’re going to have to call it quits here, with our weaponised, Enterprise-shaped space-station, which is pretty damn cool in its own right.

Grand Total: $US478,947,711,160

(Or: 12.59 per cent of 2013 US defence expenditure)

[MIKA27]

What Online Scams Would Look Like If They Were Real People

When we see Nigerian princes or weird links or invasive people who want to much personal information pop up in our email inbox, we immediately know that they’re scams. It’s part of the internet. But what if it was a part of real life too? It would be absolutely terrifying to see online scams and viruses as people.

[Fuzz]

This Golf GTi Concept Is Flat-Out Mad

The front end makes it look like it swallowed a smaller car....

How Much Would It Cost To Build The Starship Enterprise?

Grand Total: $US478,947,711,160

(Or: 12.59 per cent of 2013 US defence expenditure)

Just wait until the late 22nd century. It will be free then as money will be obsolete.

[MIKA27]

These Crazy Aussie Trick Shots Are Beyond Belief

It’s amazing what can be done when you give a bunch of GoPro action cameras to a handful of good-looking Aussies. In this case, they decide to venture into Australia’s most beautiful rainforest and dive off waterfalls, throw trick shots with footballs and generally lark about. Beneath all the aesthetically pleasing athletic display, however, is some of the best-looking cinematography I have seen in an action cam video. Check this out.

The video is actually produced by Queensland’s tourism authority to get people to visit Tropical North Queensland.

18 GoPro cameras are used to capture the action here, and they’re deployed perfectly. Fish-eye close-ups, first-person waterfall diving, a random mermaid. There’s even a bullet-time rig fashioned at one stage.

Presumably if you visit Tropical North Queensland, one of the attractions include a bunch of yellow buckets around the rainforest with good-looking people messing around with them.

[MIKA27]

Get In Here And Check-out The Gorgeous Cars In Gran Turismo 6

http://youtu.be/MRkSyrtM6w0

[MIKA27]

A Mum Tried To Sell Her Three-Year-Old Son On Craigslist

A bicycle. An old jailbroken iPhone. Maybe used furniture. Some free dirt. Those are the type of things you expect to buy off Craigslist. You definitely don’t expect a mum to offer up her three-year-old son on the seedy but useful classifieds website. But that’s just what Stephanie Redus did. She used Craiglist to get her son adopted by a new family.

The Craigslist ad stated:

Hi, I’m trying to adopt out my 3yr old son. I’m not in a good place in my life and don’t feel like I can care for him properly but I don’t know where to start. If you or know anyone who is interested in caring for him, please let me know. I’m a single mum and can’t do this.

Thanks, Desperate.

If Redus, a 29-year-old single mother, didn’t feel equipped to continue being a mother to her son, that’s totally her decision to make.

But to put the adoption alert out on Craigslist? Um. Yeah. The only thing worse would be if Redus tried to pawn him off at a Flea Market with old stamps, broken typewriters and handmade jewelry. It’s clear that a woman who would do this to her son needs a bit of help.

Redus, who admitted to posting the ad, told the police that she has been depressed and suffers from anxiety but hasn’t been taken her medication because… she’s pregnant with another child. She’s been charged with “advertising for placement of a child”, which apparently is a misdemeanour (for now). The three-year-old is now in care with a relative as Redus awaits her day in court.

[MIKA27]

Bees Are Being Trained To Hunt Down Land Mines

Sending animals to do our dirty work — specifically of the drug-sniffing, bomb-hunting variety — isn’t a novel concept by any means. But while an animal bomb-sniffing squad might conjure up the image of a noble K9 dog, Croatians are now depending on a very different, perhaps not quite as loveable bomb fiend: the common honeybee.

Because though the Balkan wars may have ended several decades ago, there’s still over 1200sqkm of territory just brimming with unexploded mines. The European Union, which will finally call Croatia its own come July 1, understandably has a bit of problem with this. Since the start of the Balkan war in 1991, it’s estimated that around 2500 people have died from land mine explosions, and the 90,000 mines scattered around the country were placed at random and without any sort of map.

So Nikola Kezic, a professor at Zagreb University and honeybee behaviour expert, has been working with a team of researchers to bend the bees to our bomb-hunting will. Honeybees, conveniently, have a perfect sense of smell — all the better to track down delicious nectar with. Making use of this (figurative) nose that far surpasses our own, the scientists have been drizzling a team of bees’ food with TNT particles. This way, the bees begin to associate the smell of real, live explosives with their next meal.

Apparently, it’s been working. To test whether or not the bees were able to retain their newfound knowledge, the researchers set up multiple feeding points, only sprinkling the explosives on a few. And just as Kezic hypothesized, the bees generally avoided the pure sugar water, preferring to go towards the now familiar, TNT-seasoned batches instead. But their work isn’t over yet. According to Kezic:

It is not a problem for a bee to learn the smell of an explosive, which it can then search. You can train a bee, but training their colony of thousands becomes a problem.

The TNT itself presents another obstacle, since its smell tends to evaporate relatively quickly, leaving only trace amounts to act as the bees’ guide. The final controlled test will come when they send the bees off into actual (marked) minefields. Of course, the bees will never be able to uncover every single mine lying around, but by sending them off into supposedly de-mined minefields and tracking their movement with heat-seeking cameras, they could prove invaluable in uncovering the missed explosives. And save countless lives in the process.

[MIKA27]

The Most Awesome F-35 Video I’ve Ever Seen

Lockheed Martin just completed the latest high angle of attack test series. It was a complete success, as this video shows.

The video footage is spectacular, especially that unreal first shot:

EDWARDS AIR FORCE BASE, Calif., May 16, 2013 —

The latest in a series of Lockheed Martin [LMT] F-35A high angle of attack (AOA) testing was recently completed. The testing accomplished high AOA beyond both the positive and negative maximum command limits, including intentionally putting the aircraft out of control in several configurations. This included initially flying in the stealth clean wing configuration. It was followed by testing with external air-to-air pylons and missiles and then with open weapon bay doors. The F-35A began edge-of-the-envelope high AOA testing in the Fall 2012. For all testing, recovery from out of control flight has been 100 per cent successful without the use of the spin recovery chute, which is carried to maximise safety.

[CanuckSARTech]

Get In Here And Check-out The Gorgeous Cars In Gran Turismo 6

http://youtu.be/MRkSyrtM6w0

Looks interesting - I'm curious to know how the final product will turn out.

I remember waiting for YEARS for the delays and whatnot for GT5. I finally ponied up and got a PS3 when that game was finally released. Definitely took the GT name to new heights, gaming-wise.

It'll be interesting to see what GT6 can do to top that.

[MIKA27]

Xbox One: Everything You Need To Know About Microsoft’s New Console

It’s been eight years and nine days since Microsoft showed the world the Xbox 360 on May 12, 2005. Today, we see what’s next. The Xbox One.

New consoles are exciting in a way that it’s hard for other product releases to match, even anticipated ones like an iPhone, because they’re so infrequent. This is at least a five-year bet on Microsoft’s part about what the future of gaming will look like. We’ve already seen what Sony and Nintendo think. Now it’s Microsoft’s turn.

Microsoft can only hope it’s half as right as it was last time around. The 360 was built to last. That eight-year stretch of dominance makes it the oldest of the current generation of systems, and the last to be cast off in favour of a new system. Over that time the Xbox has picked up new features, like the Kinect motion sensor and ever more media streaming capabilities, but its core has remained the same.

Today’s event is only supposed to run for an hour — far shorter than the almost three hours the Sony crew was on stage for the PS4 event — which means it should have a bunch of information packed into a very short time. We’ll have impressions from further sessions.

All-in-One Entertainment

We’re underway, and the intro video for the new Xbox has users saying that the new Xbox is going to “recognise my name, my voice, my movies” and know what you like. That’s a big cue that this generation is going to focus heavily on entertainment. Don Mattrick, President of the Interactive Entertainment Business at Microsoft, says that Xbox 360 is leading the industry in entertainment, because gamers are quick to adopt new tech.

The focus for the next gen is going to focus on different types of content, and use new tech, like cloud interfacing and streaming. It’s the all-in-one home entertainment system.

New Controls

The console turns on just from you saying “Xbox on”. It will launch into what you were doing last. This passive listening is a huge deal for natural interface. It seems incredibly responsive in the demo, but for now it’s unclear if this is an actual demo or if it’s being simulated.

It also integrates right into your TV. “Xbox, watch TV” drops you right into a live television feed. The amazing part of this is that you can switch quickly from movies, TV, games, a browser or anything else, just by saying “Xbox, go to”, or even just “Go to movies”.

Two at Once

You can also use Windows 8′s snap mode (with one app “snapped” to the side of the screen” to run another app on the side of the screen while your movie, or TV or game is playing. This is kind of an amazing addition, not just for browsing movies while watching one, like an onscreen IMDB, which is what the demo is showing, but you can also, say, snap a walkthrough for a game you’re playing.

Oh, and Skype! You can use Skype while watching a movie or playing a game too.

Watching TV

Or! You can go to ESPN to watch sports (“Xbox, go to ESPN”) and get update cards in the top of your screen whenever one of your fantasy team scores or accumulates other stats (or just snap in the full panel).

Microsoft also added its own TV guide, with full voice Kinect voice controls (which seem far more accurate than current Kinect voice controls in this demo). You can go to any channel or program by telling the Xbox to go to it, or you can just go to a Trending page with the most popular content.

Update: Xbox One’s live TV won’t be available in Australia at launch. Read more at Kotaku.

Hardware

There are three ways the Xbox One is upgraded. Hardware and new architecture, the new accessories like Kinect and SmartGlass, and a new Xbox Live.

The new architecture is what is responsible for the fast switching between apps and content. But it also means it’s not backward compatible with older Xbox games. Microsoft did not address this at the show, but it’s been speculated that it will use game streaming, like the PS4, to play older games on the new hardware. We’ll update you once we get a chance to shake down some Microsoft employees.

Kinect is “completely redesigned” to respond to you and your voice, and is made to be more conversational. It picks up motion at 13 billionths of a second, the time it takes light photons to bounce off you and make it back to the sensors.

New Kinect

The new Kinect has a 1080p sensor, and captures videos at 60fps and far finer detection. It detects the twist of a wrist or how balanced you are. it can read your heartbeat while watching you exercise. This is next level stuff. The sensor field is expanded by 60 per cent, uses a modulated IR beam and “time-of-flight” tech to measure the time it takes photos to travel back to the Kinect.

Microsoft claims it works in complete darkness.

The controller has heaps of new features too, like the ability for designers to send feedback right into the triggers.

SmartGlass also gets a lot of upgrades, because it’s going to be treated as a native part of the platform, and not just an add-on, as it previously was.

Xbox Live is getting a massive overhaul as well. It currently runs on 15,000 servers, but it’s going to go to 300,000 this year. Insane. You’ll be able to access your movies, music, games and saves from anywhere. The Xbox One is NOT always online. But developers will be able to use Microsoft’s Azure computing (perform rendering tasks remotely), which would require even singleplayer games to be online if those are used. Those aren’t mandatory, but Microsoft hopes developers use them.

It also seems the new online gaming feature will restrict your ability to play used games, since they will be tied to your specific used Xbox Live account once activated online.

It will have a native editing and sharing DVR tool to snap highlights of your gameplay and share them. Matchmaking is also more advanced to hopefully make sure you’re not repeatedly sent up against the same jerk who wipes out your whole party before they even get out of the APC. And it’s going even further globally, so hopefully bring in more people to the games (though it’s unclear how latency plays into this).

EA Partnership

EA’s making an effort to use the new innovations from Microsoft and Xbox Live especially with a roster of new titles. FIFA 14, Madden 25, NBA Live 14 and UFC will all launch in the next 12 months, and EA promises that they will all change the way you play.

They’ll be powered by a new game engine, called EA Sports Ignite, unveiled today.

EA Sports Ignite is supposed to make decision-making and contextual contact more realistic. It will supposedly have 10 times more animation detail, called “True Player Motion”, and the crowds are 3D, with dynamic sidelines. Basically, everything’s going to look even more realistic.

Oh, and FIFA 14‘s Ultimate Team mode, the most popular mode, is exclusive to the new Xbox.

Watching the demos of the new engine on Xbox One, where you really see the detail is in the lighter contacts, like a defensive lineman trying to slip a block, or Lionel Messi shedding a tackler trying to drag him down by the arm. You can really see intricate movements and motions in a way you can’t on current hardware.

Exclusive Games

Obviously, there will be some exclusive games through Microsoft Studios. It will release 15 games in the first year of the Xbox One, eight of which will be brand new franchies. Microsoft is trying to focus on new ways to play games. We got to see Forza Motorsport 5 running on the Xbox One, and the reflections, textures of the materials, and lighting looked awesome, but driving game eye porn always looks great in the cinematic cuts.

We also got a look at a new game from Remedy, responsible for the Max Payne series, called Quantum Break. It will let the choices you make affect the entire world around you. The preview was deeply confusing, with some adults talking to a little girl, a cut to a boat tearing through a bridge, the tagline “Time is the fire”, and a character landing in the wreckage.

All Call of Duty downloadable content (DLC) will launch first on Xbox One.

Original Xbox Content

Xbox One wants to be immersive, personal (with smart recommendations) and social. The Studios are going to use the immersive capabilities to do new stuff with comedy, drama, sports, and all the rest of the stuff you watch on TV. It’s starting with Halo.

343 Studios announced a new live-action Halo TV show created by Steven Speilberg. So, like, holy crap. Microsoft and 343 this will be a premium show, on par with Game of Thrones, which is mighty big talk, but we’ll see.

There’s also a new NFL partnership with exclusive content for the Xbox, but it seems like some in-depth fantasy stats and the ability to use natively formatted apps next to live broadcasts. Nice, but not as groundbreaking as Microsoft is making it out to be.

The New Future

This is what we were hoping Microsoft would show us. We saw a new and massively updated Kinect. New game engines, with improved graphics (but still such cold, dead eyes). Some issues, like backwards compatibility and streaming games, we hope will be cleared up throughout the day of events.

The Xbox One will be available “later this year”, which almost certainly means in time for the Christmas shopping season. For some frame of reference, the Xbox 360 was announced in May of 2005 and went on sale six months later.

MIKA: Yes, this is what I am waiting for. Been an Xbox fan since the first console and love it!

[MIKA27]

First Footage Of An F-35B Taking Off Straight Into The Air

Finding a suitable runway to launch your multibillion dollar fighter jet from isn’t always as easy as it sounds. That’s why the F-35B Lightning II is designed to with the ability to both take off and land without ever needing to taxi. Here’s the first look at its vertical launch.

Earlier this month at the Naval Air Station in Patuxent River, Maryland, the F-35B demonstrates its VTOL (Vertical Takeoff/Landing) abilities for the first time on camera. This not only allows the plane to hop short distances, it also allows the crew to carry heavier loads than otherwise possible. By using both the downward thrust of the jets in addition to the aerodynamic lift generated by the wings, the F-35B is capable of taking off with limited runway space and while carrying extra fuel or ammo.

MIKA: I kinda thought the plane was about to take a dump at the very start prior to take off.

[Fuzz]

Xbox One: Everything You Need To Know About Microsoft’s New Console

MIKA: Yes, this is what I am waiting for. Been an Xbox fan since the first console and love it!

I was tossing up between a Playstation (for FF and Gran Turismo) and Xbox in the beginning. Halo tipped the scales for me, and ever since, I've been an Xbox fan. Can't wait to get me grubby little hands on the One!

First Footage Of An F-35B Taking Off Straight Into The Air

Can you imagine a low flying bird going over the plane as it was taking off? It'd get sucked straight down and trash the intakes.

[CanuckSARTech]

Sorry....did I completely miss and fall asleep for a PS4 unveiling????

[MIKA27]

Sorry....did I completely miss and fall asleep for a PS4 unveiling????

Keith, PS4 still yet to be unveilled officially. Sony are keeping tight lipped about the PS4 thus far.

But... found something for you.

[CanuckSARTech]

Ummmmm....

...

...

...but it doesn't reveal / show much. Guess I still have to wait for the mid / end of June then.