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

[MIKA27]

British Police Search for the Holy Grail, Find a Salad Bowl

British police raided the Crown Pub in Lea, Herefordshire last week in search of the missing Nanteos Cup, considered by many (almost certainly erroneously) to be the original Holy Grail. What they found was nearly as impressive, at least if you like salad:

Police and a dog handler locked all the staff inside while they searched every inch of the 15th century pub in their hunt for the stolen relic.

But after an hour the only thing they found that looked like the missing mediaeval cup was a wooden bowl used to serve mixed salad to customers.

The Nanteos Cup went missing last month following a break-in. A police spokesperson said at the time that “I don’t want to say we are hunting the Holy Grail,” so that implication has of course appeared in the headlines of almost every article written about the burglary and subsequent investigation.

British monks began hiding the Nanteos Cup in 1539. Legend has it that the last monk whispered on his deathbed that the cup is, in fact, the cup Jesus used at the Last Supper—the legendary Holy Grail—and that it possesses miraculous healing properties. He left it in the care of the Powell family, who watched after (and exhibited) it for some 400 years. It has passed from family to family ever since.

While the Nanteos Cup has never been carbon dated, archaeologists have suggested that the design and materials indicate a medieval origin. This is true of the vast majority of Holy Grail candidates, actually; they are generally ornate cups made of metal or gemstones, and at the Last Supper Jesus would have almost certainly used a simple clay goblet similar to those found at Qumran or, if he was feeling especially cosmopolitan, a decorated Roman-style glass cup.

First-century drinking goblets from Qumran.

The idea of an ornate goblet becomes more plausible if we follow the alternate theory that Joseph of Arimathea used a distinctive and precious goblet to capture the blood and sweat of Jesus, but then we have to answer the question of why a messiah who despised worldly wealth would have left as his primary earthly relic an expensive artifact that has passed through the hands of British aristocracy for centuries. In the case of the Holy Grail, it may be the theology—not the archaeology—that poses the greatest challenge.

[MIKA27]

Robin Williams and the Game of Golf

Of all the tributes to the late Robin Williams that have poured in during the past twenty-four hours, a couple of tweets in particular caught my eye, both of them by prominent golfers. The first was by Rory McIlroy, the Northern Irish boy wonder who just won his fourth major championship, and the tweet read like it may have been composed by a P.R. person: “RIP Robin Williams…. He brought joy to so many people all over the world, will be fondly remembered and sadly missed.” The second, from Gary Player, the legendary South African who won nine majors, was a bit more personal, and it included a couple of famous lines from “Dead Poets Society”: “RIP. Robin Williams. Oh Captain, my Captain. Carpe Diem. You will be missed.”

That’s for sure. But the tweets got me thinking about whether these golfers, and the millions of lesser hackers who are mourning the loss of Williams, know that he is responsible for what is probably the funniest, and the most profane, peroration on the sport that anybody has ever delivered. Many students of golf literature—yes, there is such a thing—consider P. G. Wodehouse’s gentle stories featuring Archibald Mealing (“one of those golfers whose desire outruns performance”), the Oldest Member, and other golfers, to be the pinnacle of links humor. (Back in the nineties, these stories were collected in a book called “The Golf Omnibus,” a copy of which I have just taken down from a shelf.) But Wodehouse, despite his inimitable (and yet often imitated) prose style, had nothing on Williams in full flow, as he was in July, 2002, when he performed a Grammy-winning one-man show.

In some circles, Williams’s golf bit is considered a cult classic. A clip of it on YouTube has been viewed more than seven million times. On Tuesday, Golf Digest posted a link to the clip. So did Business Insider.

I won’t spoil the fun or run the gauntlet of our arbiters of good taste by providing a full transcript. (Though you may do well to read one once you’ve stopped laughing.) Suffice to say that, in just under five minutes, Williams manages to send up almost everyone and everything associated with the sport: the Scots who invented it (“You realize how drunk they get, they could wear a skirt and not care!”); the out-of-shape lunks who play it (“It’s such an athletic sport: whack the ball, get in the car; whack the ball, get in the car”); the hideous outfits that it inspires (“Even the alligator’s going, ‘Asshole’ ”); and the hushed tones of its television commentators (“Could people be quieter? I’d like to hear the grass grow”).

And, yes, Williams also did what had to be done, skewering the racist country-club mentality with which the sport has long been associated. Aping the archetypal tight-lipped über-Wasp’s response to the rise of Tiger Woods, he howls, “My God, we’re doomed! How did he learn to play? We wouldn’t have let him join.”

Unlike many Hollywood actors, he doesn’t appear to have played the sport in any serious way. Certainly, he never appeared at the A. T. & T. Celebrity Classic, which draws the likes of Bill Murray and Clint Eastwood. Perhaps that’s not surprising. If the organizers of the annual shindig at Pebble Beach had seen Williams’s video, they would probably have locked the gates to him.

Yet, for all of its association with social and economic and privilege, golf is an excellent outlet for obsessives, and it provides a safe venue for the affluent unhinged to exorcise their demons. That probably explains why Alice Cooper and numerous other sobered-up celebrities are so keen on the sport.

Williams clearly understood the sport’s essential nature, which is frustration. In part of his skit, which Business Insider referred to as “the gold standard for making fun of golf,” he channels the foul-mouthed Scottish sadist who invented the game:

Not straight. I put s**t in the way. Like trees and bushes and high grass. So you can lose your f***ng ball. And go hacking away with a f***ng tire iron. Whacking away, and each time you miss you feel like you’ll have a stroke. F**k, that’s what we’ll call it, a stroke. Cause each time you miss you feel like you’re gonna f***ng die.

As McIlroy and Player said, the absence of Williams will be felt by many—including those of us wearing baggy pink Bermuda shorts and wielding tire irons.

[MIKA27]

FERRARI F80 SUPERCAR CONCEPT

Most automotive enthusiasts are always looking for the next big thing, and Italian designer Adriano Raeli is no exception. Although Ferrari debuted their LaFerrari not too long ago, Reli thought it was due time to pull the curtain back on his Ferrari F80 Supercar.

Sure it’s nothing more than a concept rendering, but the idea is certainly one worth taking a look at. The vehicle will be powered by a hybrid drivetrain that pairs a KERS system with a combustion engine to produce 1,200 horsepower. While this sounds pretty awesome, the manner in which it’s handled might ruffle more than a few feathers. The Art Center College of Design graduate has ditched the iconic V12 in favor of a 900 horsepower twin-turbo V8 setup (paired with the 300 horsepower KERS system). The vehicle’s proposed weight of 1,763 pounds means the 2-seater would sprint to 62 mph in just 2.2 seconds with a top speed of 310 miles per hour. While we’re not too sure about the twin turbo V8, it is a beautiful looking ride.

[MIKA27]

CALL OF DUTY: ADVANCED WARFARE MULTIPLAYER TRAILER

Activision and Sledgehammer Games have pulled the curtain back on the official multiplayer trailer for ‘Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare,’ and they’re hoping this will help get hardcore COD fans excited again.

We’ll be the first to say that although we love the COD franchise, and have been playing them since the early days, for us things really peaked with ‘Modern Warfare 2′ and the original ‘Black Ops.’ Since then, it seems like a downward spiral in game quality, with each new title being nothing more than a re-skinned version of the previous release – oh yeah, and plenty of new helmets, badges and other “stuff” you can purchase. From the official reveal trailer, ‘Advanced Warfare’ looks to be more ‘Halo’ and ‘Titan Fall’ than COD (although this could be a good or bad thing). The latest installment sees soldiers outfitted in exoskeleton suits that let them jump higher and run faster through the maps, along with the ability to regenerate health more quickly, and enable cloaking. Aesthetically speaking, the game looks beautiful, and at this point that’s to be expected. ‘Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare’ will be released on November 4th, 2014, and you better believe there are plenty of pre-order incentives to boot.

[MIKA27]

‘WORST PAIN KNOWN TO MAN’ BULLET ANTS RITUAL

On last night’s season finale of Hamish and Andy’s Gap Year: South America, comedian Hamish Blake wanted to end the season with a dumb quite impressive stunt: intentionally get bitten by bullet ants. And, it went just like you would imagine–lots of swelling, crying and swearing. Blake was tasked with taking part in a ritual where he had to put his hands in gloves full of South American Bullet Ants–and these aren’t your everyday carpenter ants.

Bullet ants sting, and when there’s a glove filled with them, they do so at a rate of hundreds of times in a matter of seconds, releasing a venomous toxin that causes “the worst pain known to mankind.” This isn’t the first time this ritual has been done for the sake of television though, as Steve Irwin from National Geographic also did this back in 2011 (he even passed out from the pain). Steve-o from MTV’s Jackass also did it in 2011. You would think that comedians would have learned through the video taped experience of others not to take part in this painful ritual, but Blake just had to see for himself. I’m sure he has no regrets.

[MIKA27]

Malaysian press charges Ukraine government shot down MH 17

A Thursday article in the New Straits Times, Malaysia's flagship English-language newspaper, charged the US- and European-backed Ukrainian regime in Kiev with shooting down Malaysian Airlines flight MH 17 in east Ukraine last month. Given the tightly controlled character of the Malaysian media, it appears that the accusation that Kiev shot down MH17 has the imprimatur of the Malaysian state.

The US and European media have buried this remarkable report, which refutes the wave of allegations planted by the CIA in international media claiming that Russian president Vladimir Putin was responsible for the destruction of MH17, without presenting any evidence to back up this charge.

The New Straits Times article, titled "US analysts conclude MH17 downed by aircraft," lays out evidence that Ukrainian fighter aircraft attacked the jetliner with first a missile, then with bursts of 30-millimeter machine gun fire from both sides of MH17. The Russian army has alreadypresented detailed radar and satellite data showing a Ukrainian Sukhoi-25 fighter jet tailing MH17 shortly before the jetliner crashed. The Kiev regime denied that its fighters were airborne in the area, however.

The New Straits Times article began, "Intelligence analysts in the United States have already concluded that Malaysia flight MH17 was shot down by an air-to-air missile, and that the Ukrainian government had had something to do with it. This corroborates an emerging theory postulated by local investigators that the Boeing 777-200 was crippled by an air-to-air missile and finished off with cannon fire from a jet that had been shadowing it as it plummeted to earth."

It cited "experts who had said that the photographs of the blast fragmentation patterns on the fuselage of the airliner showed two distinct shapes -- the shredding pattern associated with a warhead packed with 'flechettes,' and the more uniform, round-type penetration holes consistent with that of cannon rounds."

The New Straits Times cited several sources to substantiate its position. One was testimony by a Canadian-Ukrainian monitor for the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE), Michael Bociurkiw -- one of the first investigators to arrive at the crash site. Speaking to the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation on July 29, Bociurkiw said: "There have been two or three pieces of fuselage that have been really pockmarked with what almost looks like machine gun fire; very, very strong machine gun fire."

Another source the paper cited was an article, "Flight 17 Shoot-Down Scenario Shifts," by former Associated Press reporter Robert Parry, who now writes for the ConsortiumNews.com web site. Given the lack of any evidence supporting US charges that pro-Russian forces shot MH17 down with a Buk anti-aircraft missile, Parry said, "some US intelligence analysts have concluded that the rebels and Russia were likely not at fault, and that it appears Ukrainian government forces were to blame, according to a source briefed on these findings."

Perry indicated that sections of the US intelligence apparatus have concluded that US secretary of state John Kerry's claims that pro-Russian forces shot down the plane are lies.

"Only three days after the crash, Secretary of State Kerry did the rounds of the Sunday talk shows making what he deemed an 'extraordinary circumstantial' case supposedly proving that the rebels carried out the shoot-down with missiles provided by Russia. He acknowledged that the US government was 'not drawing the final conclusion here, but there is a lot that points at the need for Russia to be responsible,'" Perry wrote. "By then, I was already being told that the US intelligence community lacked any satellite imagery supporting Kerry's allegations, and that the only Buk missile system in that part of Ukraine appeared to be under the control of the Ukrainian military."

Finally, the New Straits Times and Parry both cited retired Lufthansa pilot Peter Haisenko, who has pointed to photographic evidence of MH17 wreckage suggesting that cockpit panels were raked with heavy machine gun fire from both the port and starboard sides. "Nobody before Haisenko had noticed that the projectiles had ripped through the panel from both its left side and its right side. This is what rules out any ground-fired missile," Parry wrote.

The New Straits Times report constitutes a powerful accusation not only against the Ukrainian government, but against Washington, Berlin, and their European allies. They installed the Kiev regime through a fascist-led putsch in February. They then deployed a series of intelligence operatives and Blackwater mercenaries who are closely coordinating the various fascist militias and National Guard units fighting for Kiev on the ground in east Ukraine, where MH17 was shot down.

These forces now stand accused not only of stoking an explosive political and military confrontation with Russia on its border with Ukraine over the MH17 crash, which threatens to erupt into nuclear war, but of provoking the confrontation through the cold-blooded murder of 298 people aboard MH17.

These charges from Malaysia are all the more significant, in that Malaysia is not a strategic adversary of the United States. Unlike Russia, which already presented evidence suggesting Ukrainian involvement in the crash, Malaysia has no political motive for trying to discredit the US, the European powers, or their puppet regime in Kiev.

While it has not aligned itself as openly as the Philippines or Vietnam with the US "pivot to Asia" aimed at isolating China, Malaysia has in fact pushed for deployments of its forces in the South China Sea to contest Chinese influence in the area, in line with the agenda of the US "pivot."

Indeed, the New Straits Times and its sources are basing themselves on sections of US intelligence that, disgruntled by the complete lack of evidence to back up US charges against Putin and fearing catastrophic military escalation, have criticized Washington's handling of the crisis (see: "Former US intelligence personnel challenge Obama to present evidence of Russian complicity in MH17 crash").

These events also constitute yet another indictment of the Western media, who have completely blacked out the investigation of the crash of MH17 and the latest material in the New Straits Times. Instead, the elements in the CIA and their Ukrainian proxies driving the war in east Ukraine have been able to escalate the confrontation with Russia and demonize Putin, without any of their unsubstantiated accusations of Russian involvement in the MH17 crash being challenged.

Kiev regime officials are continuing to stonewall the investigation, refusing Malaysian requests for information about MH17, such as the record of communication between the doomed plane and air traffic controllers in Kiev.

In an interview with the New Straits Times, Ukrainian ambassador to Malaysia Ihor Humennyi denied reports that the tapes had been seized by Ukraine's State Security Service (SBU). "There is no proof or evidence that the tapes were confiscated by the SBU. I only read this in the newspapers," he said.

When the New Straits Times asked where the tapes were, Humennyi said he did not know. "We don't have any information that it had not been given to the investigation team, or that it was not received by the [team of international] investigators," he said.

[NJP]

Like arming the Syrian rebels blaming the government forces for the chemical attacks then back peddling once the rebels were proven to be the culprits, I see the great fighter for freedom going quiet again. When will the western sheeple wake up are realise the **** they are fed.

[MIKA27]

Where Do You Draw The Line Between The Sky And Space?

On his 108-minute flight in 1961, the Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin, the first human being in space, reached a peak altitude of 327 kilometres (203 miles), after blasting off the planet atop a mighty Vostok rocket. After launch shook his tiny capsule violently, Gagarin experienced the feeling of weightlessness, and saw the curvature of the Earth first-hand. By all accounts, he crossed the mysterious border between the Earth and space. Or did he? It has been more than half a century since Gagarin’s historic journey, but there is still no universally accepted definition of where space begins.

The International Astronautical Federation marks the beginning of space, for aviation purposes, at the 100-kilometre mark, where the Earth’s atmosphere is so negligible that conventional aircraft cannot travel fast enough to generate aerodynamic lift. There are other, more arbitrary numbers. In the 1960s, 8 US pilots earned their astronaut wings by flying the arrow-shaped X-15 rocket plane above 80 kilometres. In the US, this standard still applies, meaning that any American who flies on one of Virgin Galactic’s private spacecraft will officially become an astronaut.

Recent scientific discoveries have further muddled our terrestrial-celestial border confusion. In 2009, an instrument called the Suprathermal Ion Imager (SII) pinpointed 118 kilometres as the point at which charged particles from space begin to overwhelm the relatively mild particle flow of the Earth’s upper atmosphere. That was the point, researchers argued, where space really begins. Headlines hailing the discovery of the ‘edge of space’ briefly splashed across the media, but the attendant stories were hesitant, bracketing any notions of finality with alternative edge-of-space definitions.

It could be argued that the question of where space begins intrigues us because it marks the borderline between a world where we are protected by Earth, and one where we must fend for ourselves. After all, the Earth’s atmosphere is our first and last line of defence against lethal ultraviolet radiation and rogue meteors.

This great shield is built of five layers, and each can stake a claim to the ‘beginning of space’ title. Most familiar to us is the troposphere, the layer that extends from the ground up to between nine and 17 kilometres, and contains most of what we would consider ‘atmosphere’. The troposphere is thick and stable, making it ideal for most commercial air travel. Next comes the stratosphere, up to 50 kilometres or so, then the mesosphere, which is where the US government says ‘space’ begins. The outermost layer, called the exosphere, is the vastest of the Earth’s atmospheric layers, extending from about 690 to 10,000 kilometres above the Earth’s surface. There’s not much atmosphere here and, if you reach the exosphere, you can with some confidence claim to be ‘in space’.

But it’s the layer below the exosphere where the edge-of-space battle is most vigorously contested. Sandwiched between the mesosphere and exosphere is the thermosphere, which is the realm of the ISS, and formerly the space shuttle and the Mir space station. Huge temperature variables exist here, because there is little air pressure and very few atoms by which to transfer heat, which means temperatures well in excess of 1,500 Celsius. In the thermosphere, the Earth appears decidedly curved, and beyond the terrestrial horizon all is very black indeed. Travellers here don’t much feel the effects of gravity, which is why we have so many videos of space station denizens floating happily in their shirtsleeves.

All of these competing thresholds suggest science isn’t the right tool to gauge where space begins. Its boundary lies wherever humans feel they have crossed a threshold of distance, or protection, or some other radical departure from terrestrial experience.

The Apollo 11 astronaut Michael Collins quipped that what the space programme needed was ‘more English majors’. Baumgartner would probably agree, having confessed frustration in interview after interview that he could not say something more profound about his experience than: ‘It was cool.’ But maybe that’s the point. Maybe we want to touch the edge of space because it’s the one place left to us that promises a shivering sense of primeval, inarticulate rapture; a place where language, like air, ceases to matter.

[MIKA27]

HANDS-ON: KLIPSCH R6I HEADPHONES

If you’re looking for an upgrade over those basic white earbuds that came with your iPhone, you’ve got a lot of options to jam in your earholes. We took the reasonably priced Klipsch R6i headphones for a spin to see if they’re an affordable option you should consider if you’re in the market.

WHAT ARE THEY?

A pair of noise-canceling in-ear headphones designed for comfort. At $99, they’re a more budget-friendly option than others out there.

WHO ARE THEY MADE FOR?

Fans of hip hop, EDM, and other bass-heavy genres that don’t want a pair of large over-ear headphones. Also those who aren’t looking to drop hundreds of dollars on a pair earbuds, but still want a pair that perform better than a cheap set

HOW DO THEY FEEL?

Lightweight but solid.

WHAT WE LIKED:

The bass. So many in-ear models we’ve tried in the past fell flat in the rumble department. Not the case here, the Klipsch R6i headphones deliver deep bass ideal for hip hop and other genres with a beat. They’re also one of the more comfortable pairs we’ve ever tried out.

WHAT WE DIDN’T LIKE:

As with other affordable earbuds, when you really pump the volume, you lose clarity. Also, while the bass is solid, no other aspect of the audio overly impressed us. Not that it was bad, it just wasn’t comparative to some pricier models we’ve tried.

COOLEST FEATURE:

Each pair comes with four sets of different silicone tips so you can select which ones fit you best. Whereas the hard and round design of many earbuds makes them uncomfortable after extended periods of use, we found the R6i headphones to be pleasant enough after hours of being stuck in our ears.

WOULD WE BUY THEM?

If we were on a budget, yes. They’re more comfortable than other sub-$100 pairs, and they block out noise well while delivering impressive bass. The best earbuds out? Probably not, but at the price, they’re seriously worth considering.

[MIKA27]

This New Technology Will Finally Bring Flexible Displays To Market

Flexible touchscreens have been “just round the corner” for some time now. Heck, Samsung showed off a flexible screen at CES in January 2013. Sadly, it was just a prototype. The truth is that flexible displays just haven’t been durable enough for mass production. Until now.

A Menlo Park-based startup named Kateeva will start shipping manufacturing equipment that could finally be used to bring flexible displays to market. Flexible displays use organic LEDs (OLEDs), which must be protected at all times from water vapor and oxygen. This means that once you manufacture a display, it must be sealed tightly.

“Just a few molecules of oxygen or moisture can kill the display,” Greg Raupp, an expert on display technology at Arizona State University, tells MIT Technology Review. “So the encapsulation requirements for an OLED display are quite significant.”

Kateeva’s room-sized inkjet printer applies a protective coating to OLEDs that is not only much faster than previous methods but also cuts manufacturing costs in half. It also nicely integrates into existing production lines.

All major manufacturers are working on foldable displays, according to Raup, so flexible touchscreens — once again — are just round the corner.

[MIKA27]

Retro Soundtrack For 'Guardians Of The Galaxy' Hits Number One Spot In Billboard Charts

The only thing more awesome than Marvel’s Guardians of the Galaxy is Star-Lord’s Awesome Mix Volume 1. It provides the epic soundtrack to this year’s best superhero movie, and despite the fact that it’s full of legendary tracks for the 1970′s, it has just hit number one on the Billboard charts.

The soundtrack, literally dubbed Awesome Mix Vol. 1, has just hit #1 on the Billboard 200 charts. It’s the first album full of previously released tracks to make #1 on the charts.

[MIKA27]

Drive The Future: One Month 'Til Formula E Starts Racing

There’s only one month to go until the first Formula E road race. To build hype, the all-electric racing series has a new TV commercial, and the ad presents a vaguely unsettling, but completely awesome, peek into an electric future.

One day, stop signs will be start signs. Smoke and oil will be electric sparks. And the city will be ours.

The car sounds cool, there’s a bit of tyre spin, and there’s plenty of slow-mo. Nothing too fascinating, but it’s still good fun and the series itself should be good to watch. /DRIVE did a great shakedown video on the cars a year or so ago which is well worth a watch:

[MIKA27]

The Best (And Worst) Browser For Your Laptop's Battery Life

Ever wondered how much the weight of 10,000 open browser tabs is dragging down your laptop’s battery? Fear not: AnandTech just dug into the particulars with a delightfully detailed test to find out which browser is the biggest battery hog. This information could save mankind(‘s laptop batteries).

More:

Google Is Finally Working On Fixing Chrome’s Battery-Draining Bug

You really should go read the entire test over at AnandTech — it gives a great, in-depth look at how different browsers work, how different settings affect page-loading speeds, and more. But here’s the bottom line: the number of minutes each browser cruised along before the laptop’s battery drained to 7 per cent:

Of course, your exact battery mileage may vary: AnandTech used a Dell XPS 15 laptop with a high-res display, and the actual number of minutes will no doubt vary between manufacturers and OSes. But proportionally, this gives a good idea of how Chrome (both the current stable build and the beta), two versions of Explorer, and the latest Firefox stack up.

Go ahead and read the full fascinating report at AnandTech. Just maybe plug in before you do.

[MIKA27]

Trojan Horse Gold Particles Could Finally Treat Brain Tumours

Glioblastoma multiforme is a cancer that’s as deadly as it sounds. It’s the most common and aggressive brain tumour in adults that’s especially difficult to remove surgically — but we now have a technique to treat it.

It’s so tricky to remove because the tumour cells invade the surrounding, healthy brain tissue. Victims typically die within a few months of diagnosis, and just six in every 100 patients make it past the five-year mark. The new “trojan horse” treatment involves using tiny nano particles containing both gold and cisplatin, a conventional chemotherapy drug, according to Phys.org. Here’s how the process works:

These [particles] were released into tumour cells that had been taken from glioblastoma patients and grown in the lab. Once inside, these “nanospheres” were exposed to radiotherapy. This caused the gold to release electrons which damaged the cancer cell’s DNA and its overall structure, thereby enhancing the impact of the chemotherapy drug.

Apparently, the process was super-effective, and 20 days later all evidence pointed to cancer cells being completely destroyed, leaving healthy tissue unharmed.

The study was led by Mark Welland, Professor of Nanotechnology and a Fellow of St John’s College, University of Cambridge, and Dr Colin Watts, a clinician scientist and honorary consultant neurosurgeon at the Department of Clinical Neurosciences. Head over to Phys.org for more fascinating insights.

[MIKA27]

Call Me Ed: A Day With Edward Snowden

THE MESSAGE ARRIVES on my “clean machine,” a MacBook Air loaded only with a sophisticated encryption package.

“Change in plans,” my contact says. “Be in the lobby of the Hotel ______ by 1 pm. Bring a book and wait for ES to find you.”

¶ ES is Edward Snowden, the most wanted man in the world. For almost nine months, I have been trying to set up an interview with him—traveling to Berlin, Rio de Janeiro twice, and New York multiple times to talk with the handful of his confidants who can arrange a meeting. Among other things, I want to answer a burning question: What drove Snowden to leak hundreds of thousands of top-secret documents, revelations that have laid bare the vast scope of the government’s domestic surveillance programs? In May I received an email from his lawyer, ACLU attorney Ben Wizner, confirming that Snowden would meet me in Moscow and let me hang out and chat with him for what turned out to be three solid days over several weeks. It is the most time that any journalist has been allowed to spend with him since he arrived in Russia in June 2013. But the finer details of the rendezvous remain shrouded in mystery. I landed in Moscow without knowing precisely where or when Snowden and I would actually meet. Now, at last, the details are set.

I am staying at the Hotel Metropol, a whimsical sand-colored monument to pre-revolutionary art nouveau. Built during the time of Czar Nicholas II, it later became the Second House of the Soviets after the Bolsheviks took over in 1917. In the restaurant, Lenin would harangue his followers in a greatcoat and Kirza high boots. Now his image adorns a large plaque on the exterior of the hotel, appropriately facing away from the symbols of the new Russia on the next block—Bentley and Ferrari dealerships and luxury jewelers like Harry Winston and Chopard.

I’ve had several occasions to stay at the Metropol during my three decades as an investigative journalist. I stayed here 20 years ago when I interviewed Victor Cherkashin, the senior KGB officer who oversaw American spies such as Aldrich Ames and Robert Hanssen. And I stayed here again in 1995, during the Russian war in Chechnya, when I met with Yuri Modin, the Soviet agent who ran Britain’s notorious Cambridge Five spy ring. When Snowden fled to Russia after stealing the largest cache of secrets in American history, some in Washington accused him of being another link in this chain of Russian agents. But as far as I can tell, it is a charge with no valid evidence.

I confess to feeling some kinship with Snowden. Like him, I was assigned to a National Security Agency unit in Hawaii—in my case, as part of three years of active duty in the Navy during the Vietnam War. Then, as a reservist in law school, I blew the whistle on the NSA when I stumbled across a program that involved illegally eavesdropping on US citizens. I testified about the program in a closed hearing before the Church Committee, the congressional investigation that led to sweeping reforms of US intelligence abuses in the 1970s. Finally, after graduation, I decided to write the first book about the NSA. At several points I was threatened with prosecution under the Espionage Act, the same 1917 law under which Snowden is charged (in my case those threats had no basis and were never carried out). Since then I have written two more books about the NSA, as well as numerous magazine articles (including two previous cover stories about the NSA for WIRED), book reviews, op-eds, and documentaries.

But in all my work, I’ve never run across anyone quite like Snowden. He is a uniquely postmodern breed of whistle-blower. Physically, very few people have seen him since he disappeared into Moscow’s airport complex last June. But he has nevertheless maintained a presence on the world stage—not only as a man without a country but as a man without a body. When being interviewed at the South by Southwest conference or receiving humanitarian awards, his disembodied image smiles down from jumbotron screens. For an interview at the TED conference in March, he went a step further—a small screen bearing a live image of his face was placed on two leg-like poles attached vertically to remotely controlled wheels, giving him the ability to “walk” around the event, talk to people, and even pose for selfies with them. The spectacle suggests a sort of Big Brother in reverse: Orwell’s Winston Smith, the low-ranking party functionary, suddenly dominating telescreens throughout Oceania with messages promoting encryption and denouncing encroachments on privacy.

Of course, Snowden is still very cautious about arranging face-to-face meetings, and I am reminded why when, preparing for our interview, I read a recent Washington Post report. The story, by Greg Miller, recounts daily meetings with senior officials from the FBI, CIA, and State Department, all desperately trying to come up with ways to capture Snowden. One official told Miller: “We were hoping he was going to be stupid enough to get on some kind of airplane, and then have an ally say: ‘You’re in our airspace. Land.’ ” He wasn’t. And since he disappeared into Russia, the US seems to have lost all trace of him.

I do my best to avoid being followed as I head to the designated hotel for the interview, one that is a bit out of the way and attracts few Western visitors. I take a seat in the lobby facing the front door and open the book I was instructed to bring. Just past one, Snowden walks by, dressed in dark jeans and a brown sport coat and carrying a large black backpack over his right shoulder. He doesn’t see me until I stand up and walk beside him. “Where were you?” he asks. “I missed you.” I point to my seat. “And you were with the CIA?” I tease. He laughs.

Snowden is about to say something as we enter the elevator, but at the last moment a woman jumps in so we silently listen to the bossa nova classic “Desafinado” as we ride to an upper floor. When we emerge, he points out a window that overlooks the modern Moscow skyline, glimmering skyscrapers that now overshadow the seven baroque and gothic towers the locals call Stalinskie Vysotki, or “Stalin’s high-rises.” He has been in Russia for more than a year now. He shops at a local grocery store where no one recognizes him, and he has picked up some of the language. He has learned to live modestly in an expensive city that is cleaner than New York and more sophisticated than Washington. In August, Snowden’s temporary asylum was set to expire. (On August 7, the government announced that he’d been granted a permit allowing him to stay three more years.)

Entering the room he has booked for our interview, he throws his backpack on the bed alongside his baseball cap and a pair of dark sunglasses. He looks thin, almost gaunt, with a narrow face and a faint shadow of a goatee, as if he had just started growing it yesterday. He has on his trademark Burberry eyeglasses, semi-rimless with rectangular lenses. His pale blue shirt seems to be at least a size too big, his wide belt is pulled tight, and he is wearing a pair of black square-toed Calvin Klein loafers. Overall, he has the look of an earnest first-year grad student.

Snowden is careful about what’s known in the intelligence world as operational security. As we sit down, he removes the battery from his cell phone. I left my iPhone back at my hotel. Snowden’s handlers repeatedly warned me that, even switched off, a cell phone can easily be turned into an NSA microphone. Knowledge of the agency’s tricks is one of the ways that Snowden has managed to stay free. Another is by avoiding areas frequented by Americans and other Westerners. Nevertheless, when he’s out in public at, say, a computer store, Russians occasionally recognize him. “Shh,” Snowden tells them, smiling, putting a finger to his lips.

DESPITE BEING THE subject of a worldwide manhunt, Snowden seems relaxed and upbeat as we drink Cokes and tear away at a giant room-service pepperoni pizza. His 31st birthday is a few days away. Snowden still holds out hope that he will someday be allowed to return to the US. “I told the government I’d volunteer for prison, as long as it served the right purpose,” he says. “I care more about the country than what happens to me. But we can’t allow the law to become a political weapon or agree to scare people away from standing up for their rights, no matter how good the deal. I’m not going to be part of that.”

Meanwhile, Snowden will continue to haunt the US, the unpredictable impact of his actions resonating at home and around the world. The documents themselves, however, are out of his control. Snowden no longer has access to them; he says he didn’t bring them with him to Russia. Copies are now in the hands of three groups: First Look Media, set up by journalist Glenn Greenwald and American documentary filmmaker Laura Poitras, the two original recipients of the documents; The Guardian newspaper, which also received copies before the British government pressured it into transferring physical custody (but not ownership) to The New York Times; and Barton Gellman, a writer for The Washington Post. It’s highly unlikely that the current custodians will ever return the documents to the NSA.

Edward Snowden explains in his own words why he decided to reveal secret details of the domestic surveillance being conducted by US intelligence services.

That has left US officials in something like a state of impotent expectation, waiting for the next round of revelations, the next diplomatic upheaval, a fresh dose of humiliation. Snowden tells me it doesn’t have to be like this. He says that he actually intended the government to have a good idea about what exactly he stole. Before he made off with the documents, he tried to leave a trail of digital bread crumbs so investigators could determine which documents he copied and took and which he just “touched.” That way, he hoped, the agency would see that his motive was whistle-blowing and not spying for a foreign government. It would also give the government time to prepare for leaks in the future, allowing it to change code words, revise operational plans, and take other steps to mitigate damage. But he believes the NSA’s audit missed those clues and simply reported the total number of documents he touched—1.7 million. (Snowden says he actually took far fewer.) “I figured they would have a hard time,” he says. “I didn’t figure they would be completely incapable.”

Asked to comment on Snowden’s claims, NSA spokesperson Vanee Vines would say only, “If Mr. Snowden wants to discuss his activities, that conversation should be held with the US Department of Justice. He needs to return to the United States to face the charges against him.”

Snowden speculates that the government fears that the documents contain material that’s deeply damaging—secrets the custodians have yet to find. “I think they think there’s a smoking gun in there that would be the death of them all politically,” Snowden says. “The fact that the government’s investigation failed—that they don’t know what was taken and that they keep throwing out these ridiculous huge numbers—implies to me that somewhere in their damage assessment they must have seen something that was like, ‘Holy ****.’ And they think it’s still out there.”

Yet it is very likely that no one knows precisely what is in the mammoth haul of documents—not the NSA, not the custodians, not even Snowden himself. He would not say exactly how he gathered them, but others in the intelligence community have speculated that he simply used a web crawler, a program that can search for and copy all documents containing particular keywords or combinations of keywords. This could account for many of the documents that simply list highly technical and nearly unintelligible signal parameters and other statistics.

And there’s another prospect that further complicates matters: Some of the revelations attributed to Snowden may not in fact have come from him but from another leaker spilling secrets under Snowden’s name. Snowden himself adamantly refuses to address this possibility on the record. But independent of my visit to Snowden, I was given unrestricted access to his cache of documents in various locations. And going through this archive using a sophisticated digital search tool, I could not find some of the documents that have made their way into public view, leading me to conclude that there must be a second leaker somewhere. I’m not alone in reaching that conclusion. Both Greenwald and security expert Bruce Schneier—who have had extensive access to the cache—have publicly stated that they believe another whistle-blower is releasing secret documents to the media.

In fact, on the first day of my Moscow interview with Snowden, the German newsmagazine Der Spiegel comes out with a long story about the NSA’s operations in Germany and its cooperation with the German intelligence agency, BND. Among the documents the magazine releases is a top-secret “Memorandum of Agreement” between the NSA and the BND from 2002. “It is not from Snowden’s material,” the magazine notes.

Some have even raised doubts about whether the infamous revelation that the NSA was tapping German chancellor Angela Merkel’s cell phone, long attributed to Snowden, came from his trough. At the time of that revelation, Der Spiegel simply attributed the information to Snowden and other unnamed sources. If other leakers exist within the NSA, it would be more than another nightmare for the agency—it would underscore its inability to control its own information and might indicate that Snowden’s rogue protest of government overreach has inspired others within the intelligence community. “They still haven’t fixed their problems,” Snowden says. “They still have negligent auditing, they still have things going for a walk, and they have no idea where they’re coming from and they have no idea where they’re going. And if that’s the case, how can we as the public trust the NSA with all of our information, with all of our private records, the permanent record of our lives?”

The Der Spiegel articles were written by, among others, Poitras, the filmmaker who was one of the first journalists Snowden contacted. Her high visibility and expertise in encryption may have attracted other NSA whistle-blowers, and Snowden’s cache of documents could have provided the ideal cover. Following my meetings with Snowden, I email Poitras and ask her point-blank whether there are other NSA sources out there. She answers through her attorney: “We are sorry but Laura is not going to answer your question.”

OUT OF THE Army, Snowden landed a job as a security guard at a top-secret facility that required him to get a high-level security clearance. He passed a polygraph exam and the stringent background check and, almost without realizing it, he found himself on his way to a career in the clandestine world of intelligence. After attending a job fair focused on intelligence agencies, he was offered a position at the CIA, where he was assigned to the global communications division, the organization that deals with computer issues, at the agency’s headquarters in Langley, Virginia. It was an extension of the network and engineering work he’d been doing since he was 16. “All of the covert sites—cover sites and so forth—they all network into the CIA headquarters,” he says. “It was me and one other guy who worked the late shifts.” But Snowden quickly discovered one of the CIA’s biggest secrets: Despite its image as a bleeding-edge organization, its technology was woefully out-of-date. The agency was not at all what it appeared to be from the outside.

As the junior man on the top computer team, Snowden distinguished himself enough to be sent to the CIA’s secret school for technology specialists. He lived there, in a hotel, for some six months, studying and training full-time. After the training was complete, in March 2007, Snowden headed for Geneva, Switzerland, where the CIA was seeking information about the banking industry. He was assigned to the US Mission to the United Nations. He was given a diplomatic passport, a four-bedroom apartment near the lake, and a nice cover assignment.

It was in Geneva that Snowden would see firsthand some of the moral compromises CIA agents made in the field. Because spies were promoted based on the number of human sources they recruited, they tripped over each other trying to sign up anyone they could, regardless of their value. Operatives would get targets drunk enough to land in jail and then bail them out—putting the target in their debt. “They do really risky things to recruit them that have really negative, profound impacts on the person and would have profound impacts on our national reputation if we got caught,” he says. “But we do it simply because we can.”

While in Geneva, Snowden says, he met many spies who were deeply opposed to the war in Iraq and US policies in the Middle East. “The CIA case officers were all going, what the hell are we doing?” Because of his job maintaining computer systems and network operations, he had more access than ever to information about the conduct of the war. What he learned troubled him deeply. “This was the Bush period, when the war on terror had gotten really dark,” he says. “We were torturing people; we had warrantless wiretapping.”

He began to consider becoming a whistle-blower, but with Obama about to be elected, he held off. “I think even Obama’s critics were impressed and optimistic about the values that he represented,” he says. “He said that we’re not going to sacrifice our rights. We’re not going to change who we are just to catch some small percentage more terrorists.” But Snowden grew disappointed as, in his view, Obama didn’t follow through on his lofty rhetoric. “Not only did they not fulfill those promises, but they entirely repudiated them,” he says. “They went in the other direction. What does that mean for a society, for a democracy, when the people that you elect on the basis of promises can basically suborn the will of the electorate?”

It took a couple of years for this new level of disillusionment to set in. By that time—2010—Snowden had shifted from the CIA to the NSA, accepting a job as a technical expert in Japan with Dell, a major contractor for the agency. Since 9/11 and the enormous influx of intelligence money, much of the NSA’s work had been outsourced to defense contractors, including Dell and Booz Allen Hamilton. For Snowden, the Japan posting was especially attractive: He had wanted to visit the country since he was a teen. Snowden worked at the NSA offices at Yokota Air Base, outside Tokyo, where he instructed top officials and military officers on how to defend their networks from Chinese hackers.

But Snowden’s disenchantment would only grow. It was bad enough when spies were getting bankers drunk to recruit them; now he was learning about targeted killings and mass surveillance, all piped into monitors at the NSA facilities around the world. Snowden would watch as military and CIA drones silently turned people into body parts. And he would also begin to appreciate the enormous scope of the NSA’s surveillance capabilities, an ability to map the movement of everyone in a city by monitoring their MAC address, a unique identifier emitted by every cell phone, computer, and other electronic device.

Even as his faith in the mission of US intelligence services continued to crumble, his upward climb as a trusted technical expert proceeded. In 2011 he returned to Maryland, where he spent about a year as Dell’s lead technologist working with the CIA’s account. “I would sit down with the CIO of the CIA, the CTO of the CIA, the chiefs of all the technical branches,” he says. “They would tell me their hardest technology problems, and it was my job to come up with a way to fix them.”

But in March 2012, Snowden moved again for Dell, this time to a massive bunker in Hawaii where he became the lead technologist for the information-sharing office, focusing on technical issues. Inside the “tunnel,” a dank, chilly, 250,000-square-foot pit that was once a torpedo storage facility, Snowden’s concerns over the NSA’s capabilities and lack of oversight grew with each passing day. Among the discoveries that most shocked him was learning that the agency was regularly passing raw private communications—content as well as metadata—to Israeli intelligence. Usually information like this would be “minimized,” a process where names and personally identifiable data are removed. But in this case, the NSA did virtually nothing to protect even the communications of people in the US. This included the emails and phone calls of millions of Arab and Palestinian Americans whose relatives in Israel-occupied Palestine could become targets based on the communications. “I think that’s amazing,” Snowden says. “It’s one of the biggest abuses we’ve seen.” (The operation was reported last year by The Guardian, which cited the Snowden documents as its source.)

Another troubling discovery was a document from NSA director Keith Alexander that showed the NSA was spying on the pornography-viewing habits of political radicals. The memo suggested that the agency could use these “personal vulnerabilities” to destroy the reputations of government critics who were not in fact accused of plotting terrorism. The document then went on to list six people as future potential targets. (Greenwald published a redacted version of the document last year on the Huffington Post.)

Snowden was astonished by the memo. “It’s much like how the FBI tried to use Martin Luther King’s infidelity to talk him into killing himself,” he says. “We said those kinds of things were inappropriate back in the ’60s. Why are we doing that now? Why are we getting involved in this again?”

In the mid-1970s, Senator Frank Church, similarly shocked by decades of illegal spying by the US intelligence services, first exposed the agencies’ operations to the public. That opened the door to long-overdue reforms, such as the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. Snowden sees parallels between then and now. “Frank Church analogized it as being on the brink of the abyss,” he says. “He was concerned that once we went in we would never come out. And the concern we have today is that we’re on the brink of that abyss again.” He realized, just like Church had before him, that the only way to cure the abuses of the government was to expose them. But Snowden didn’t have a Senate committee at his disposal or the power of congressional subpoena. He’d have to carry out his mission covertly, just as he’d been trained.

THE SUN SETS late here in June, and outside the hotel window long shadows are beginning to envelop the city. But Snowden doesn’t seem to mind that the interview is stretching into the evening hours. He is living on New York time, the better to communicate with his stateside supporters and stay on top of the American news cycle. Often, that means hearing in almost real time the harsh assessments of his critics. Indeed, it’s not only government apparatchiks that take issue with what Snowden did next—moving from disaffected operative to whistle-blowing dissident. Even in the technology industry, where he has many supporters, some accuse him of playing too fast and loose with dangerous information. Netscape founder and prominent venture capitalist Marc Andreessen has told CNBC, “If you looked up in the encyclopedia ‘traitor,’ there’s a picture of Edward Snowden.” Bill Gates delivered a similarly cutting assessment in a Rolling Stone interview. “I think he broke the law, so I certainly wouldn’t characterize him as a hero,” he said. “You won’t find much admiration from me.”

Snowden with General Michael Hayden at a gala in 2011. Hayden, former director of the NSA and CIA, defended US surveillance policies in the wake of Snowden’s revelations.

Snowden adjusts his glasses; one of the nose pads is missing, making them slip occasionally. He seems lost in thought, looking back to the moment of decision, the point of no return. The time when, thumb drive in hand, aware of the enormous potential consequences, he secretly went to work. “If the government will not represent our interests,” he says, his face serious, his words slow, “then the public will champion its own interests. And whistle-blowing provides a traditional means to do so.”

The NSA had apparently never predicted that someone like Snowden might go rogue. In any case, Snowden says he had no problem accessing, downloading, and extracting all the confidential information he liked. Except for the very highest level of classified documents, details about virtually all of the NSA’s surveillance programs were accessible to anyone, employee or contractor, private or general, who had top-secret NSA clearance and access to an NSA computer.

But Snowden’s access while in Hawaii went well beyond even this. “I was the top technologist for the information-sharing office in Hawaii,” he says. “I had access to everything.”

Well, almost everything. There was one key area that remained out of his reach: the NSA’s aggressive cyberwarfare activity around the world. To get access to that last cache of secrets, Snowden landed a job as an infrastructure analyst with another giant NSA contractor, Booz Allen. The role gave him rare dual-hat authority covering both domestic and foreign intercept capabilities—allowing him to trace domestic cyberattacks back to their country of origin. In his new job, Snowden became immersed in the highly secret world of planting malware into systems around the world and stealing gigabytes of foreign secrets. At the same time, he was also able to confirm, he says, that vast amounts of US communications “were being intercepted and stored without a warrant, without any requirement for criminal suspicion, probable cause, or individual designation.” He gathered that evidence and secreted it safely away.

By the time he went to work for Booz Allen in the spring of 2013, Snowden was thoroughly disillusioned, yet he had not lost his capacity for shock. One day an intelligence officer told him that TAO—a division of NSA hackers—had attempted in 2012 to remotely install an exploit in one of the core routers at a major Internet service provider in Syria, which was in the midst of a prolonged civil war. This would have given the NSA access to email and other Internet traffic from much of the country. But something went wrong, and the router was bricked instead—rendered totally inoperable. The failure of this router caused Syria to suddenly lose all connection to the Internet—although the public didn’t know that the US government was responsible. (This is the first time the claim has been revealed.)

Inside the TAO operations center, the panicked government hackers had what Snowden calls an “oh shit” moment. They raced to remotely repair the router, desperate to cover their tracks and prevent the Syrians from discovering the sophisticated infiltration software used to access the network. But because the router was bricked, they were powerless to fix the problem.

Fortunately for the NSA, the Syrians were apparently more focused on restoring the nation’s Internet than on tracking down the cause of the outage. Back at TAO’s operations center, the tension was broken with a joke that contained more than a little truth: “If we get caught, we can always point the finger at Israel.”

MUCH OF SNOWDEN’S focus while working for Booz Allen was analyzing potential cyberattacks from China. His targets included institutions normally considered outside the military’s purview. He thought the work was overstepping the intelligence agency’s mandate. “It’s no secret that we hack China very aggressively,” he says. “But we’ve crossed lines. We’re hacking universities and hospitals and wholly civilian infrastructure rather than actual government targets and military targets. And that’s a real concern.”

The last straw for Snowden was a secret program he discovered while getting up to speed on the capabilities of the NSA’s enormous and highly secret data storage facility in Bluffdale, Utah. Potentially capable of holding upwards of a yottabyte of data, some 500 quintillion pages of text, the 1 million-square-foot building is known within the NSA as the Mission Data Repository. (According to Snowden, the original name was Massive Data Repository, but it was changed after some staffers thought it sounded too creepy—and accurate.) Billions of phone calls, faxes, emails, computer-to-computer data transfers, and text messages from around the world flow through the MDR every hour. Some flow right through, some are kept briefly, and some are held forever.

The massive surveillance effort was bad enough, but Snowden was even more disturbed to discover a new, Strangelovian cyberwarfare program in the works, codenamed MonsterMind. The program, disclosed here for the first time, would automate the process of hunting for the beginnings of a foreign cyberattack. Software would constantly be on the lookout for traffic patterns indicating known or suspected attacks. When it detected an attack, MonsterMind would automatically block it from entering the country—a “kill” in cyber terminology.

Programs like this had existed for decades, but MonsterMind software would add a unique new capability: Instead of simply detecting and killing the malware at the point of entry, MonsterMind would automatically fire back, with no human involvement. That’s a problem, Snowden says, because the initial attacks are often routed through computers in innocent third countries. “These attacks can be spoofed,” he says. “You could have someone sitting in China, for example, making it appear that one of these attacks is originating in Russia. And then we end up shooting back at a Russian hospital. What happens next?”

In addition to the possibility of accidentally starting a war, Snowden views MonsterMind as the ultimate threat to privacy because, in order for the system to work, the NSA first would have to secretly get access to virtually all private communications coming in from overseas to people in the US. “The argument is that the only way we can identify these malicious traffic flows and respond to them is if we’re analyzing all traffic flows,” he says. “And if we’re analyzing all traffic flows, that means we have to be intercepting all traffic flows. That means violating the Fourth Amendment, seizing private communications without a warrant, without probable cause or even a suspicion of wrongdoing. For everyone, all the time.” (A spokesperson for the NSA declined to comment on MonsterMind, the malware in Syria, or on the specifics of other aspects of this article.)

Given the NSA’s new data storage mausoleum in Bluffdale, its potential to start an accidental war, and the charge to conduct surveillance on all incoming communications, Snowden believed he had no choice but to take his thumb drives and tell the world what he knew. The only question was when.

On March 13, 2013, sitting at his desk in the “tunnel” surrounded by computer screens, Snowden read a news story that convinced him that the time had come to act. It was an account of director of national intelligence James Clapper telling a Senate committee that the NSA does “not wittingly” collect information on millions of Americans. “I think I was reading it in the paper the next day, talking to coworkers, saying, can you believe this ****?”

Snowden and his colleagues had discussed the routine deception around the breadth of the NSA’s spying many times, so it wasn’t surprising to him when they had little reaction to Clapper’s testimony. “It was more of just acceptance,” he says, calling it “the banality of evil”—a reference to Hannah Arendt’s study of bureaucrats in Nazi Germany.

“It’s like the boiling frog,” Snowden tells me. “You get exposed to a little bit of evil, a little bit of rule-breaking, a little bit of dishonesty, a little bit of deceptiveness, a little bit of disservice to the public interest, and you can brush it off, you can come to justify it. But if you do that, it creates a slippery slope that just increases over time, and by the time you’ve been in 15 years, 20 years, 25 years, you’ve seen it all and it doesn’t shock you. And so you see it as normal. And that’s the problem, that’s what the Clapper event was all about. He saw deceiving the American people as what he does, as his job, as something completely ordinary. And he was right that he wouldn’t be punished for it, because he was revealed as having lied under oath and he didn’t even get a slap on the wrist for it. It says a lot about the system and a lot about our leaders.” Snowden decided it was time to hop out of the water before he too was boiled alive.

At the same time, he knew there would be dire consequences. “It’s really hard to take that step—not only do I believe in something, I believe in it enough that I’m willing to set my own life on fire and burn it to the ground.”

But he felt that he had no choice. Two months later he boarded a flight to Hong Kong with a pocket full of thumb drives.

THE AFTERNOON OF our third meeting, about two weeks after our first, Snowden comes to my hotel room. I have changed locations and am now staying at the Hotel National, across the street from the Kremlin and Red Square. An icon like the Metropol, much of Russia’s history passed through its front doors at one time or another. Lenin once lived in Room 107, and the ghost of Felix Dzerzhinsky, the feared chief of the old Soviet secret police who also lived here, still haunts the hallways.

But rather than the Russian secret police, it’s his old employers, the CIA and the NSA, that Snowden most fears. “If somebody’s really watching me, they’ve got a team of guys whose job is just to hack me,” he says. “I don’t think they’ve geolocated me, but they almost certainly monitor who I’m talking to online. Even if they don’t know what you’re saying, because it’s encrypted, they can still get a lot from who you’re talking to and when you’re talking to them.”

More than anything, Snowden fears a blunder that will destroy all the progress toward reforms for which he has sacrificed so much. “I’m not self-destructive. I don’t want to self-immolate and erase myself from the pages of history. But if we don’t take chances, we can’t win,” he says. And so he takes great pains to stay one step ahead of his presumed pursuers—he switches computers and email accounts constantly. Nevertheless, he knows he’s liable to be compromised eventually: “I’m going to slip up and they’re going to hack me. It’s going to happen.”

Indeed, some of his fellow travelers have already committed some egregious mistakes. Last year, Greenwald found himself unable to open the encryption on a large trove of secrets from GCHQ—the British counterpart of the NSA—that Snowden had passed to him. So he sent his longtime partner, David Miranda, from their home in Rio to Berlin to get another set from Poitras. But in making the arrangements, The Guardian booked a transfer through London. Tipped off, probably as a result of GCHQ surveillance, British authorities detained Miranda as soon as he arrived and questioned him for nine hours. In addition, an external hard drive containing 60 gigabits of data—about 58,000 pages of documents—was seized. Although the documents had been encrypted using a sophisticated program known as True Crypt, the British authorities discovered a paper of Miranda’s with the password for one of the files, and they were able to decrypt about 75 pages. (Greenwald has still not gained access to the complete GCHQ documents.)

Another concern for Snowden is what he calls NSA fatigue—the public becoming numb to disclosures of mass surveillance, just as it becomes inured to news of battle deaths during a war. “One death is a tragedy, and a million is a statistic,” he says, mordantly quoting Stalin. “Just as the violation of Angela Merkel’s rights is a massive scandal and the violation of 80 million Germans is a nonstory.”

Nor is he optimistic that the next election will bring any meaningful reform. In the end, Snowden thinks we should put our faith in technology—not politicians. “We have the means and we have the technology to end mass surveillance without any legislative action at all, without any policy changes.” The answer, he says, is robust encryption. “By basically adopting changes like making encryption a universal standard—where all communications are encrypted by default—we can end mass surveillance not just in the United States but around the world.”

Until then, Snowden says, the revelations will keep coming. “We haven’t seen the end,” he says. Indeed, a couple of weeks after our meeting, The Washington Post reported that the NSA’s surveillance program had captured much more data on innocent Americans than on its intended foreign targets. There are still hundreds of thousands of pages of secret documents out there—to say nothing of the other whistle-blowers he may have already inspired. But Snowden says that information contained in any future leaks is almost beside the point. “The question for us is not what new story will come out next. The question is, what are we going to do about it?”

[MIKA27]

Cristiano Ronaldo Just Starred In The Weirdest Japanese Commercial Ever

Have you been keeping up with your 'facial fitness' exercises? Footballing superstar Cristiano Ronaldo has.

The secret of looking young, apparently isn't found in facial creams or gels, but in the muscles around your mouth. It's those muscles that sag as you get older, meaning you appear to age faster.

MTG a Japanese company, has launched a new produced call PAO - which is designed to give your face a genuine workout.

Not only will you look totally stupid using it, the device itself actually looks like some kind of bizarre sex toy / inhaler.

But then again, in the quest for eternal youth and in the privacy of your own home, who cares?

Does it work?

It's interesting to note, that out of all token individuals included the clip, Cristiano (who was paid a small fortunate to endorse the product) is the only once sensible enough to not be seen with the item in his mouth.

Perhaps there's something he's not telling us?

Either way, it will certainly go down as one of the more unusual celebrity endorsements in recent memory.

MIKA: Seriously... WTF!?

I'm sure Fuzz will be buying one

[MIKA27]

The Rise And Fall Of America's Greatest Convicted Counterfeiter

Art Williams Jr says he never really knew how money worked until he went to prison three times. It’s ironic because Art Williams is also one of the most infamous money counterfeiters in recent American history. And he almost got away with it.

The Chicago native is best known for cracking the 1996 series $US100 bill. That was the design that took American currency into a new era of (somewhat) high tech security. The Feds deemed it unbreakable. But thanks to half a lifetime of experience and an uncanny sense of determination, Williams perfected a process that allowed him to print an infinite supply of almost virtually undetectable bills.

When one of Williams friends emailed me asking if I might be interested in learning about the life of a former counterfeiter, I wanted to know everything about that process. But when Williams and I chatted over the phone, his story was about more than just inkjet printers and razor blades. It’s about the life-changing power plain paper can have, and how it can take you from the streets, to the penthouse apartment, to the inevitable prison cell.

How to make money

He was born in the comfortable Chicago suburbs, but Williams’ youth took a dark turn when his father abandoned the family and forced his mother to move into a Salvation Army homeless shelter. She would later take up with a local criminal who went by the name “DaVinci.” He earned the nickname for being an excellent drawer and, ultimately, a counterfeiter. Before too long, DaVinci took Williams in as an apprentice and taught him the art of making money with an offset printer.

A photograph of Williams at 15 years old, along with a few counterfeiters’ tools

Williams later described DaVinci as a “pure traditionalist” in an interview with Rolling Stone. “In those days, counterfeiting was something that was handed down through generations,” he said. “He told me I was one of the last apprentices. I took the knowledge he gave me and I amplified it.”

Eventually, Williams perfected his own method of so-called “hybrid” counterfeiting. It started in 1992, when the young student got his hands on a bootleg copy of Adobe Photoshop, an old Apple, and a diazotope blueprint machine. Since the blueprint printer couldn’t reproduce the green background of real money, he’d run the paper through an offset printer first, and then print the Photoshopped details onto the tinted paper with the high tech printer. According to Rolling Stone, he was printing about $US50,000 a month in a basement studio dubbed “The Dungeon” and selling them to local gangsters for 20-cents on the dollar. He also lived like a king in the meantime.

It was an improvement over the small time burglary jobs that he’d once done. But in retrospect, there was no escape from a life of crime. “I tried to run from the streets,” Williams told me, “but unfortunately the streets were already in me.”

Faking it the right way

Williams stayed pretty small-time until 1996, when the U.S. Bureau of Engraving and Printing announced a new, super secure $US100 bill. The old Benjamins largely relied on the unique weight and feel of its special 75-per cent cotton, 25-per cent linen paper stock, but the new $US100 bill introduced a new fluorescent security thread, micro-printing, colour-shifting ink, and watermark that was difficult — nigh impossible — to duplicate. When his girlfriend joked that he couldn’t crack the security, Williams took it as a challenge.

The most important part, it turns out, was finding the right kind of paper. Along with the 1996 series bills’s new security measures came the introduction of the counterfeit detection pen. You’ve surely seen the pen’s iodine-based ink in action. When you mark a bill, the ink will turn brown if the paper contains starch — as almost all counterfeit paper does. If it stays yellow, that means the paper is authentic, in theory at least. But Williams didn’t need to find genuine currency paper. He just needed to find a starch-free substitute.

A Series 1996 $US100 bill. The green “100″ in the lower-right turns black when viewed from a different angle.

“It was kind of a freak accident actually,” Williams told me. “It wasn’t anything intelligent.” In a moment of frustration, after trying and failing to find a match among countless paper samples, his girlfriend started marking every piece of paper in the house. Of all things — toilet paper, card stock, printer paper — it was actually the phonebook that marked correctly. Directory paper, a form of newsprint, was the key.

The only problem was that directory paper was too thin. To solve this problem, Williams would simply glue two pieces of the starch free paper to a piece of thicker paper to create a sort of counterfeit sandwich. This also made it easy to embed homemade security strips and fake a watermark on each bill. In order to beat the colour-shifting ink problem, the Williams made a “100″ rubber stamp at Kinko’s and used iridescent car paint to create a similar effect. The final security measure, microprinting, was difficult to reproduce perfectly, but luckily, it was also the measure people checked least often, since you needed a magnifying glass to tell the difference.

The subtle skill of spending

In the end, changing the serial numbers on the bills proved to be the most dangerous part of the process. All bills eventually flow back to a bank, and the banks send them to the Federal Reserve which uses a 13-point check system to spot batches of counterfeit bills. However, Williams figured out that if he spent only a few bills at a time and moved around the country constantly, he’d be sheltered enough. And for the most part, he was right.

For a while, Williams and his girlfriend traveled around the country, mostly splitting their time between the Chicagoland area and Texas, spending as much money as they could. As counterfeiters do, they’d make small purchases with a $US100 bill, and then pocket the (real) change as profit. Williams would also unload sell batches of counterfeit bills to local gangsters like he used to but for a higher rate: about 30 cents on the dollar. He used a whole slew of tricks to stay off the police radar. “I as a real gadget guy,” Williams told me. “I was kind of like James Bond in a way.”

Williams posing with a Mustang that he bought about a year before his 2001 arrest in Alaska.

In the late 90s, millions of dollars passed through Williams’ press and inkjet printer. He couldn’t spend it fast enough. At one point, he and his girlfriend started buying toys and things for kids and just donating it all to local charities. It wasn’t so much the spending that was intoxicating, though. It was the challenge of turning each single piece of paper into one hundred US dollars. “Seeing a piece of blank paper as a canvas, and knowing it’d be a legitimate piece of currency by the time I was done with it, was the biggest thrill for me,” Williams said. He added, “I slowly started to lose myself.”

It all hit the fan in February of 2001, when Williams was caught with $US60,000 in counterfeit bills, drugs, and his wife’s naked sister in a Chicago hotel room. That bust should have sent him to jail for a very long time, but the judge let him walk due to an illegal search and seizure. Still sweating from the close call, Williams decided to get out of the game. Or at least to try.

Giving it all away

It was a good decision, but it didn’t last for long. Soon after his close call, Williams then found out that his father, who’d had his own trouble with the law, was living in Alaska. When he went to visit, the younger Williams learned that his father had been growing weed and had run into some trouble with the Hell’s Angels. Rather than help his son stay straight, his father encouraged Williams to make more money. “I had my father back,” he said. “I wanted to make him proud.”

In Alaska, William’s began printing money again, but without the proper equipment this time. The elder Williams gave it away to his friends, who spent it freely, ignorant of the proper ways to unload counterfeit bills. Williams himself continued to travel, stashing some exceptional batches of cash into PVC pipes, and buried them in a forest reserve. But of course, the sloppiness in Alaska came back to haunt him.

In 2001, some family friends were arrested with counterfeit money in Anchorage. It didn’t take long for wiretaps to bust Williams and his father, who both went to prison. After 31 months, the younger Williams was released, only to learn on the car ride home that his father had died of a heart attack in his cell that same morning. The news sent Williams spiraling into grief and, eventually, towards an effort to reconnect with his own son, who dreamed about a music career.

Once on the outside, Williams’ story attracted a lot of attention, including the 2005 feature in Rolling Stone. While making public appearances to talk about going to prison for counterfeiting, though, Williams ended up digging up the money in the PVC pipes and even printing more to fund his son’s quest. He even started researching again, since the Russian gangs that used to buy big batches of his bills were more interested in the Euro. “Here I am doing speaking engagements talking about counterfeit money,” he said, “and I’m trying to crack the Euro at the same time.”

Williams told me that he was frighteningly close doing it, too. The holographic strip was the tough part, but when he was experimenting with the same material used in baseball cards in 2007, Williams caught his son making counterfeiting money on an inkjet printer. A fight ensued, and it spilled onto the street, ending with a flourish of angrily thrown counterfeit bills.

Williams went away for six-and-a-half years that time. His son was later busted for trying to counterfeit and ended up in the same prison in 2010.

Making it the right way

Upon leaving prison in January, Williams got right to work. This time he stayed away from the printing presses and found a job as a janitor. And for Williams, going from toting duffel bags full of cash one year to scrubbing a toilet for $US5-an-hour a few years later was one hell of a change. “I didn’t have any respect for money [before],” Williams explained. After all, he’d spent most of his life literally printing money.

But things have turned out pretty alright for Williams. He’s not drowning in cash any more, but the former criminal — now in his early 40s — transports exotic cars for a living. When he’s not driving Ferraris, Williams is working on becoming an entrepreneur. He’s been busy trying to fire up a clothing line called Julius DaVinci. The name, of course, is borrowed from his original counterfeiting teacher, and the aesthetic borrows from the art that Williams created while in prison.

You might call the style a sort of Federal Reserve chic, with symbols borrowed from U.S. currency and hat tips toward the Medici legend. Williams also plans to publish a book of fiction, Cain’s Dagger, this fall. Meanwhile, a documentary about Williams’ life after prison is nearing completion. Of course, Williams can’t make money directly from chronicling his crimes, but enough of his projects lie on the periphery that his small empire of creative projects will certainly benefit from the exposure the former counterfeiter’s enjoyed lately.

The whole saga sounds like a hell of a movie. In fact, Jason Kersten expanded his Rolling Stone article about Williams into a book that was optioned by Paramount Pictures. Rumour has it that actor Chris Pine of Star Trek fame will play Williams. Depending on if and when the movie makes it to the screen, how his own book does, and the success of Julius DaVinci, it’s entirely possible that Williams could get rich all over again. But, you know, in a more legit sort of way. In the meantime, Williams says he also figured out how smartphones work, a common challenge for folks who spent time in the slammer.

Throughout his whole Hollywood-friendly adventure, Williams has learned how money works on so many levels. Not only does he understand the mechanics of the printed currency itself, he also knows how it moves around the country, fueling markets of all kinds. Williams also learned the worth of a hard day’s work at minimum wage. His attitude still seems somehow street smart. In Williams’ own words, “You need money to make things happen.” And even if you can just print it, it probably pays to find another way.

[MIKA27]

There's A Skate Park In An Old Tunnel Under London, And You Can Visit

Amongst the abandoned diggers, unexploded bombs, and Medieval bodies, a labyrinth of Tube tracks — both fully functional and obsolete — wind beneath the streets of London. Last week the city got a whole new subterranean social scene at the House of Vans, a series of five disused tunnels outfitted with bars, a diner, gallery, music venue, and skate park.

This might seem like a stretch, but it’s actually not the first time the space will be used for an artsy good time. In 2010, the 30,000-square-feet of disused transport passages were all but forgotten, until they were “discovered” in what sounds like a modern archaeological Mad Libs story: Kevin Spacey’s executive assistant Hamish Jenkinson was entering a Banksy exhibition at a popular graffiti spot near Waterloo when he noticed a side door, which he kicked through, and found himself in this gritty urban oasis under the station. Sure! Why not??

The Old Vic Theatre purchased the site, and Jenkinson became the creative director of the Old Vic Tunnels, which themselves transformed into a thriving hub for pop-ups and performances until it closed last year.

Now, the footwear giant has given the whole area a major makeover — in the spirit of its Brooklyn venue — and reopened it to the public.

Based on its origin story and unassuming entrance, it’s cool to imagine how many other long-lost zones are just waiting patiently below the light of day for a chance to thrill a brand new generation.

[MIKA27]

Is That a New Hangar in Area 51?

There’s always something going on in Area 51, the US government’s secretive air base in Nevada. This time it’s not accidental tourists but what appears to be the construction of new hangar at the end of a runway.

This is not the first unusual hangar built recently in Area 51. In 2007, satellite images showed a new large hangar that analysts believed was built for testing a new super bomber to replace the B-2 Stealth Bomber.

An artist’s depiction of the B-3 stealth bomber.

New satellite images taken in 2014 show that a second massive hangar has been built, this time located at the end of a runway.

While that sounds like a logical place for a hangar, it’s not at Area 51. In fact, this 225-foot-wide building is a long way from the main facility and hidden from the view of most workers inside Area 51. What could be inside to warrant this extra layer of secrecy?

Some Area 51 watchers speculate it will house an ultra-rapid response combat or spy aircraft that can be on the runway and in the air in minutes. The aircraft is rumored to be the replacement for the Lockheed SR-71 Blackbird which uses a hypersonic propulsion system that is highly volatile, thus the need to keep it off in the far reaches of Area 51.

The SR-72 propulsion system.

Another possibility is that the hangar will house a new stealth transport aircraft to deliver and pick up special forces units as well as weapons and supplies. The remote location of the aircraft in Area 51 would keep the missions secret from satellites.

Stealth cargo planes from Lockheed and Northrup.

Of course, I obviously already have satellite images of the hangar, courtesy of the aviation website Foxtrot Alpha, which spotted the new hangar and provides much of the speculation.

Whatever the hangar is for, its existence means there’s plenty of secret new activity happening in Area 51. Watch for UFO sightings to pick up soon.

[MIKA27]

CONFEDERATE X132 HELLCAT SPEEDSTER

Confederate Motorcycles is a name we’ve become all too familiar with over the years, thanks to the badass X132 motorcycle. We’ve already seen several different iterations of this 2-wheeler, and today we bring about another – the X132 Hellcat Speedster.

Like many of you, I wondered how in the world these guys could improve upon an already amazing bike. To do this, Confederate called in the help of a former Ducati designer to dial in some of the details. Details that include a carbon fiber fuel tank and fenders, along with plenty of lightweight aluminum components that serve as both form and function. Limited to only 65 bikes worldwide, this monster has been outfitted with a 132-inch V-twin engine pushing 120 horsepower along with 140 lb-ft of torque. As you may have already guessed, this beauty also carries a hefty price tag, selling for roughly $65,000.

[MIKA27]

IXION WINDOWLESS JET CONCEPT

Flying on an airplane always leaves something to be desired–it’s uncomfortable, aggravating, and usually quite boring. Now, IXION is looking to change all of that by making your flight more majestic with their windowless jet concept that will surely leave you in awe.

IXION’s windowless jet uses external cameras to capture a full 360-degree panoramic view of the exterior of the plane, which is then adjusted for perspective and displayed on the cabin’s interior display panels that cover most of the cabin. This gives the passenger the illusion of transparency, albeit a 2-dimensional one. The displays could also be customized to show any other animated wallpaper you so chose, such as a beach scene or outer space. Of course, if you have a fear of flying, you might want to sit this one out. Just a suggestion. Check out the video below.

[MIKA27]

THE AMBUSH | BY SMITH & BRADLEY

The Ambush is a new tactical digital analog watch, designed for the field, but is also a great looking and solid casual watch for everyday use. Created by Smith & Bradley, the watch´s design was inspired by the clean lines of the AR-15 assault rifle, it is made with the best possible components, but is both affordable enough to own, and rugged enough to wear. Powered by a Swiss movement, the Ambush provides multiple timezones, alarm, chronometer, calendar, an electronic compass, and a blue back-lit LED digital display.

The Ambush will eventually retail for $565, but is available now for pre-order on Kickstarter for $350

[MIKA27]

5 Important Artifacts That Were Lost -- And Found -- In Museum Storage

“It belongs in a museum!” It’s a common refrain among archaeologists who are passionate about preserving artifacts for future generations. But anyone who’s seen the end of the 1981 documentary Raiders of the Lost Ark knows that precious relics can be easily forgotten once they make it into storage.

OK, Indy’s not real. But it turns out the endless unmarked boxes piled up as the credits rolled hinted at a truth that is — if not quite stranger than — pretty damn close to that fiction. There have been a surprising number of big-time, real-life discoveries made at museums themselves, when mislabeled, mishandled, or misplaced archeological, paleontological, and highly illogical remains are found, as if by chance, in storage on-site. Here are five recent finds.

Found: A 6500-year-old human skeleton

Where: Penn Museum, Philadelphia

When: 2014

How: When pros at Philadelphia’s Penn Museum began the process of digitizing the collection, project manager William Hafford realised that some of the notes describing a full skeleton found on a 1930s-era exploration of Sumeria were missing the corresponding bones. As it turns out, Janet Monge, chief curator of cultural anthropology, knew of an unlabeled box with human remains that she hadn’t been able to ID for over three decades. And hey hey — it was a match! Monge deemed the exceptionally old dude a “healthy individual,” and a rare, well-preserved find for the place and time period.

Found: Barosaurus bones

Where: Royal Ontario Museum, Toronto, Canada

When: 2007

How: When David Evans got a gig as Associate Curator of Vertebrate Palaeontology at the Royal Ontario Museum in 2007, his first order of business was sourcing a long-necked, long-tailed Sauropod to display in the new dino wing. He searched; and he searched; and he searched; until he was unexpectedly tipped off to the existence of a 150-million-year-old Barosaurus skeleton — at the ROM. While catching up on some light in-flight reading in the form of an academic journal he brought on the plane, he noticed a mention of some bones acquired by his institution way back in the 1960s that had all but disappeared from the archives; upon further investigation, it turns out there were hundreds of stray specimens on-site that hadn’t been properly logged. Staffers had just enough time to construct “Gordo” the Barosaurus — one of two full displays in the world, and the most complete skeleton of its kind — for the grand opening.

Found: Electrotettix attenboroughi, a new species of grasshopper

Where: Illinois Natural History Survey at the University of Illinois

When: 2014

How: Amber is really friggin old tree resin. When it was fresh and sticky eons of years ago, it would trap tons of living things — everything from beetles to bees and flies to flowers — that were then preserved intact. In the 1950s, entomologist William Sanderson collected 160 pounds of the stuff from what is now the Dominican Republic. He checked out a (very) small sampling of the itty bitty pieces for ancient goodies, then stowed the whole collection away in a few big buckets under a sink at the University of Illinois. These were forgotten about until four decades later, when they were happened upon by Sam Heads, a paleontologist at the Illinois Natural History Survey. Heads teamed up with lab tech Jared Thomas, and together they took on the painstaking task of studying the remains — which included a brand new species of 20 million year old flightless grasshopper with vestigial wings. They named it Electrotettix attenboroughi after gentle-voiced friend of flora and fauna David Attenborough.

Found: Alfred the Great’s pelvic bone (probably)

Where: Winchester City Museum

When: 2014

How: Today’s (living) British royalty are comfortably set up in Buckingham Palace, but remains of rulers from the past are continually being unearthed all over the sceptered isle. Alfred the Great was in charge of the country back in the late 800s, but the whereabouts of his body was a mystery to archaeologists, presumed to have gone from two cathedrals in Winchester to Hyde Abbey and then — who knows. After a promising lead that he was located in an unmarked grave at a church cemetery turned out to be a dead end, a pelvic bone found earlier this year in a Winchester City Museum storage box has all the right features — radiocarbon dating, proper age at time of death — to belong to the former King. And if not him, then experts think it’s his son or bro (keeping it all in the family).

Found: Venice: the Molo from the Bacino di San Marco by Canaletto

Where: Denver Art Museum

When: 2012

How: The Denver Art Museum did an entire online series that chronicled the discovery of a pretty beat up painting by Venetian artist Canaletto, which was hidden in storage for years before the careful conservation efforts that eventually led to the artwork’s unveiling. “Yes, even unknown works by old master artists can be found in museum storage areas,” explained Timothy J. Standring, who approved the piece’s acquisition forms in 2001 but didn’t quite realise what he was dealing with until tracking down the misfiled paperwork all that time later.

[MIKA27]

This Disposable Space Camera Will Record Its Own Destruction On Re-Entry

The European Space Agency’s Break Up Camera might be the most badass disposable camera ever. When the agency’s space station resupply ship completes its final journey and plunges to a fiery death in the Earth’s atmosphere, the camera will record data up to the very last second — until it burns up with the rest of the ship.

The Break Up Camera is currently onboard the Automated Transfer Vehicle 5 (ATV-5), which just docked on the International Space Station (ISS) yesterday. The fifth and last of the ESA’s line of ISS cargo ships, the ATV-5 is also making its final voyage. After it leaves ISS six months from now, it will — like old satellites and space stations before it — disintegrate as it falls through Earth’s atmosphere.

The whole process will be captured by the infrared Break Up Camera. The camera itself will burn up, but it will store the final 20 seconds of footage in a ceramic-shielded Rentry SatCom — essentially a blackbox that will keep the images safe from 2,700 F heat.

Once the ATV breaks up, the SatCom will immediately begin transmitting the data to Iridium communication satellites. But even talking to satellites is not easy when you’re falling at 7km per second. In the words of the ESA, there’s the pesky problem of “the blackout effect of the blowtorch-like ‘plasma’ of electrically charged gases enveloping reentering objects.” The SatCom has an omnidirectional antennae designed to find a small gap in the plasma behind the falling object.

The Break Up Camera is making its first and only voyage on this ATV-5′s mission. But it will join Japan’s i-Ball optical camera and NASA’s Re-entry Break-up Recorder, which have been used before to study how other resupply ships broke up in the atmosphere. With the Break Up Camera’s infrared instruments on board, we’ll have the most complete picture yet of the final moments of a dying spaceship.

[MIKA27]

Apple Is Banning Two Hazardous Chemicals From iPhone Production

You can buy your pretty new iPhone 6 with somewhat of a clearer conscience later this year. Apple announced today that it’s eliminating two known toxins — benzene and n-hexane — from the production of iPhone and iPads.

Activists groups have been pressuring Apple to remove the toxins for months, launching a petition that claims that over 1.5 million workers in China are exposed to the chemicals, which can cause leukemia, nerve damage, liver and kidney failure. In an independent investigation Apple said that they found no evidence the chemicals have harmed workers, even though there have been reports that workers have been sickened and at least one worker has died from exposure to n-hexane.

There’s a small catch: Apple will still allow the chemicals to be used at earlier points in the production process (benzene and n-hexane are used for the cleaning and polishing of things like electronic components and touch screens). However, Apple will require testing of those environments to make sure the levels are lower than they are now.

“This is doing everything we can think of to do to crack down on chemical exposures and to be responsive to concerns,” Lisa Jackson, Apple’s vice president of environmental initiatives, told the AP. “We think it’s really important that we show some leadership and really look toward the future by trying to use greener chemistries.”

Hopefully these chemicals will join the list of recently phased-out toxins like arsenic, lead, and phthalates which Apple has proudly eliminated from their factories across the board. And here’s also to hoping that this move towards safer manufacturing is paving the way for Apple to make more of their products in the U.S.