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

[MIKA27]

Norway catches its 'first drink-driving Segway user'

Norwegian police have booked what's likely to be the country's first drink-driving Segway user - a mere month after a national ban on the devices was lifted.

The man was arrested in a smart restaurant area in central Oslo after several witnesses reported him for "strange behaviour" as he struggled to balance on his Segway, the Aftenposten daily reports. Police suspected him of being drunk in charge of a Segway and took him in. They are still awaiting the results of a blood test, but Finn Erik Groenliveien - head of Oslo traffic police - is already concerned Segway users may think rules about drinking and driving don't apply to them.

"I really hope we're not risking having lots of drink-drivers on two-wheeled vehicles," Groenliveien says. "These are treated like any other vehicle when it comes to the limit on blood alcohol." Police inspector Jan Guttormsen says it's the first case he's heard of. "I'm not surprised, but disappointed they don't appreciate the danger."

Before 1 July "self-balancing vehicles" were banned in Norway because their top speed of 20km/h (12mph) meant they would've been classed as mopeds, and the roads administration didn't think they were safe enough. But the government legalised them anyway, hoping the vehicles will help "revolutionise traffic patterns".

[MIKA27]

Abandoned Romanian Mine Converted Into A Stunning Museum

Now traveling deep underground into an abandoned mine might not sound like the a great way to spend your holiday.

But if you're talking about the old mine named 'Salina Turda' in Romania, that poses an entirely different proposition all together.

It was created to extract simple salt deposits, unlike most mines which focus on unearthing gold or other richer minerals.

Since being abandoned in 1932, it's been used for a variety of different purposes. First during World War 2, as an anti-aircraft shelter and then later as a cheese warehouse of all things. Back in 1992 however, the Romanian government declared it a tourism site - open for the world to visit and explore.

Today it's a breathtaking modern museum, filled with all manner of machinery with more than few nods to its former lives. As a result of its rich heritage and unique surroundings, it's now one of the most visited attractions in the country itself.

With views like these, it's easy to see why.

[MIKA27]

Touching Images of Unaccompanied Minors—From 100 Years Ago

A look back at the icon of American immigration, Ellis Island

An Italian family on board a ferry from the docks to Ellis Island, 1905.

From the time Ellis Island opened in 1892, to 1954 when it closed, more than 12 million immigrants from all over the globe—many of them children—passed through its doors. Almost 40 percent of Americans can trace at least one of their ancestors to Ellis Island. As child migration surges along the southwest border, a look back at some of the children that embarked on a long voyage across the ocean in the hope of becoming Americans.

A woman, a boy, and a girl at a chain link fence.

Italian child finds her first penny, 1926.

Lapland children, possibly from Sweden, date unknown.

Very young immigrants to Ellis Island are being taught by a teacher able to speak several languages, circa 1943.

Jewish family from England posing for the camera, unknown date.

Children playing in a wagon on a rooftop playground at Ellis Island Immigration Centre, circa 1943.

Johanna Dykhof with her 11 children. The wooden building behind them is a structure known as the Barracks Building that slept approximately 700 people, unknown date.

An immigrant family looking across New York Harbor at the Statue of Liberty, circa 1930.

Woman with Russian baby weighing 55 lbs, unknown date.

A photograph of a young immigrant boy holding a box, circa 1880.

Helen Bastedo and 13-year-old Osman Louis, a Belgian stowaway, 1921.

[MIKA27]

Inside job: the story of Witold Pileki, leader of the Secret Polish Army

With their homeland occupied, the underground band of freedom fighters had few options left. The ragtag band of the resistance — this group, at least — numbered only 8,000 (with arms for only half of them), a paltry sum compared to the heavily armed platoons patrolling their streets. With few options remaining, one of them came up with an idea: get arrested. If he did, he’d almost certainly be sent to the large prison in the area. The enemy had been transporting prisoners there by the trainload for months now. From the inside, he surmised, he could begin a prison uprising, overthrow the guards, and add the manpower of tens of thousands more to the resistance’s total.

The man’s name was Witold Pilecki. He was a leader in the Tajna Armia Polska (“TAP”) — the Secret Polish Army — in 1940. The prison he successfully entered was Auschwitz.

In mid-1940, Pilecki proffered his plan to TAP, and the organization approved. They pieced together a set of forged documents under the name Tomasz Serafinksi. On September 19, 1940, the plan went into action. That day, the Gestapo arrested 2,000 Poles in a lapanka — a roundup of innocent people who were simply in the wrong place at the wrong time. Pilecki made sure he was one of those 2,000, and, after two days of interrogation-by-torture, was sent to Auschwitz. His mug shot from there is above.

At the time, no one knew (or believed) that the Nazis were systematically murdering Jews and others in concentration camps such as Auschwitz. Pilecki and TAP were no exception. But Pilecki’s ability to infiltrate the camp began to change that. He managed to organize a small resistance group within the death camp, focusing mostly on increasing morale — any attempts to forcibly resist the Nazis would have certainly failed. Similarly, his ability to communicate with those outside of Auschwitz’s walls was limited, to say the least. So Pilecki did what few others were able to do: he broke out.

On the night of April 26, 1943, he and two others were assigned to work at a bakery located outside of the main fence. The three men overpowered the guards, cut the phone line, and Pilecki made his way to Warsaw — a trip which took four months. With him, Pilecki carried a trove of official documents he stole from the Germans; these documents and the experience of those he met in Auschwitz became a 100-page report detailing the horrors of the Nazi death camp.

After the war, Pilecki turned his attention to communism; he was a Pole-in-exile hoping to remove Poland from communist rule. He returned to Poland in late 1945, aiming to set up an anti-communist intelligence network, but his fake identity was compromised the next July. Rather than flee, Pilecki remained in Poland collecting information demonstrating the Soviets’ inhumane practices. This dedication to the cause would prove fatal. In May of 1947, he was arrested and, after a sham trial, was convicted of forgery, espionage, and a laundry list of other crimes against the Polish state. He was executed on May 25, 1948.

Pilecki’s heroism was mostly unknown until 1989. The communist Polish government kept his life and history under wraps; only when the Iron Curtain began to dissolve were Pilecki’s life acknowledged and his feats revealed.

Bonus fact: During the Holocaust, only about 800 people tried to escape from Auschwitz, even though an estimated 1.1 million prisoners were murdered there. Escaping from the concentration camp was not a simple task — only about 140 would-be escapees were successful — but that was not why the number of attempts is so low. According to British historian Laurence Rees, if a person escaped from Auschwitz, the Nazis would exact retribution on the escapee’s prison block mates, picking ten at random and starving them to death.

[Habana Mike]

CDC Accidentally Ships Deadly Virus, Hopes No One Will Notice

That wacky CDC is up to its old, potentially fatal-virus-spreading tricks again. But instead of anthrax or dengue, this time, the Centres for Disease Control brought a deadly strain of bird flu into its revolving cast of highly contagious characters. While rushing to get to a meeting, a CDC scientist accidentally tainted a tamer strain of bird flu with a far more deadly one — and then sent it out to another unsuspecting lab. Whoops.

This most recent set of hijinks took place at CDC Prevention headquarters in Atlanta in January, when a lab scientist accidentally mixed the two samples, sending what should have been a benign (at least to humans) strain of the virus to another lab. Except, you know, it wasn’t. So when that very same virus concoction was given to some unsuspecting chickens as part of a USDA study in March and all those chickens proceeded to immediately die, the USDA officials knew something wasn’t right.

The CDC lab responsible for the deadly mixed sample then confirmed that, yes, that virus was actually wildly dangerous but told, well, no one. Until June, that is, when a second lab reported a similar problem and CDC Director Dr Tom Frieden was finally notified.

Apparently, the lab scientist who had originally contaminated the sample completed what should have been 90 minutes of work (with both the tame and deadly viruses) in 51 minutes, in an attempt to make the noon meeting. Whether that meeting actually did begin as scheduled, though, remains inconclusive.

To the CDC’s credit, “the viral mix was at all times contained in specialised laboratories and was never a threat to the public,” according to an internal report. But then that’s what they said last time, too. And the time before that. Here’s to hoping Ebola’s not next.

Well, what would you expect from Government workers? Glad I don't live in Atlanta.....

[polarbear]

Well, what would you expect from Government workers? Glad I don't live in Atlanta.....

Its this sorta stuff that kick starts the Zombie Appocolaypse

[Fuzz]

Africa's First Indigenous Aircraft Will Compete With Surveillance UAVs

MIKA: Pre drilled holes.... Did IKEA build it?

Nope, it's a Revell Snaptite kit plane!

Cities Are Making Spiders Grow Bigger and Multiply Faster

Definitely some huge orb weaver spiders around Sydney. Last time I played out at Wakehurst, there were huge webs all over the place. You'd never want to go anywhere near the trees around the tee boxes.

[MIKA27]

Alzheimer's Patients Will Be Injected With The Blood Of Young People

It’s not often that science confirms ideas straight out of vampire lore, but here you have one: a spate of studies in mice have found that infusions of young bloodseem to reverse ageing. So now we’re moving to the next logical step: giving the blood of young humans to Alzheimer’s patients.

The first very human trials testing the effect of young blood will start in October at the Stanford School of Medicine. Patients with mild to moderate Alzheimer’s will receive blood plasma donated by volunteers 30 or younger. Despite vampiric-sounding premise, approval for human trials were quite easy to get, the study’s head Tony Wyss-Coray tells New Scientist. After all, we’ve been giving blood transfusions for long time — just without studying all the health effects.

If the blood transfusion works as well in humans as it does in mice, brain function could improve immediately — but perhaps temporarily. In mice, infusions of young blood also made their muscles heal faster and reverse the ageing of their organs. The opposite happened when young mice were given old blood.

“Blood might contain the fountain of youth after all,” Wyss-Coray tells New Scientist. ” And it is within us all — that’s the crazy thing. It just loses its power as we age.”

While blood plasma transfusions are common already, even more handy would be identifying exactly what in young blood heals. Scientists have one idea: a protein called growth differentiation factor 11 (GDF11) that declines with age. Mice injected with GDF11 had brains with more blood new vessels and stem cells, both signs of a better functioning brain.

And now we’re about to find out if young blood also works in humans, which, depending on your degree of cynicism, might be the best or worst thing to happen to the human race.

[MIKA27]

The Quantum Effect of Anaesthesia: A New Theory of Consciousness

One of the things we take for granted in this age of technology and science, is the medical knowledge that has been hard-won to the toll of billions of deaths over the centuries. The world’s respective medical establishments are advancing the front lines of research and patient care (usually), but for the general public there are some basic concepts in the endeavour that, while we know they exist, we don’t generally have any idea how they work. Of course, we trust that those who practice medicine do know precisely what they are doing and how their techniques, medications, and surgical procedures work. Sometimes though, that trust is a little misplaced.

I don’t mean to overstate the matter. Doctors the world over can be trusted, generally speaking, though there are always going to be individual exceptions. And I don’t mean to make you fear for the state of the medical establishment, but there are some things in general medicine that even our best doctors and scientists don’t really understand.

In 2010, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) reported a whopping total of 51.4 million inpatient surgical procedures in the US. Statistics Canada reports 2.9 million inpatient procedures (including births) over 2013. The vast majority of those millions of medical procedures required the use of some form of anaesthetic, whether general or local. What if I told you that no one really knows how anaesthetics work?

That’s kind of a loaded statement, and it requires some explanation.

Anaesthesiology is a highly specialised field, anaesthesiologists are dedicated to only that field. There are three basic kinds of anaesthetics, categorised by the goals doctors want to achieve with their use.

Those goals are:

• Hypnosis – which entails unconsciousness and memory loss (not to be confused with the common use of the term hypnosis)
• Analgesia – which entails a loss or reduction of sensation and autonomic reflex (think Advil)
• Muscle relaxation – often used in therapeutic settings

Each of those categories lists several drugs that are used to bring about the desired effect. Sometimes all of those goals or end-points are needed for a procedure, other times only a single type is needed. It depends on both the nature of the procedure (open cavity surgery, endoscopic surgery, etc.) and on risk factors in the patient – of which there are many. General anaesthetics, most of which achieve both hypnosis and analgesia, are the ones that offer us the biggest mystery.

Surgery in the best of conditions is a risky venture, and while the medical community has a solid understanding of how to apply anaesthetics to achieve those goals safely, that understanding has been gained, more or less, through a process of trial and error, rather than an understanding the chemical mechanics of the drugs.

Traditionally it’s been thought that the drugs have what’s called a pharmacological effect on neural receptors and/or ion channels in the brain. That means, effectively, that it was thought that chemical reactions in the brain were the active mechanism, though it’s never been adequately described through observation, for obvious reasons. Recent research, however, has shown that this may not be the case.

Dr. Luca Turin, and a team from the Alexander Flemming Research Center in Athens, Greece, has completed a study of the effect common general anaesthetics have on drosophila, also known as fruit flies. Turin and his team conducted a complicated experiment using two groups of flies, in which they essentially froze the flies (to immobilise them) and then exposed them to anaesthetics. They then measured electron spin resonance (ESR) in their brains. One group showed a pronounced increase in ESR, while the other group – which were a mutated species bred to be immune or highly resistant to anaesthetic effects – showed no increase at all.[1]

That may not mean much to you at all, and certainly it is a difficult thing to understand, but in simple terms, this means that the many various drugs that cause anaesthetic unconsciousness are actually employing a quantum effect on our brains. And that’s fairly big news.

You may recall, a few years ago, Anaesthesiologist Dr. Stuart Hameroff and Theoretical Physicist Dr. Roger Penrose presented a theory of quantum consciousness, called Orchestrated Objective Reduction (Orch-OR). Their theory has met with a good deal of criticism and skepticism, though it certainly hasn’t been defeated. Orch-OR says, in the most basic terms, that consciousness is the result of the state of sub-atomic particles in the brain.

It is a very complex idea, but at first glance it seems to be supported by Turin’s research and conclusions. If chemicals can have an electronic effect on our brains, the result of which is unconsciousness, as Turin claims they do, then it follows that consciousness is fundamentally electronic in nature (in this context, electronic refers electron spin resonance, or the quantum state of electrons).

Hameroff has weighed in on Turin’s experiment, and rightfully questions the methodology used. Since the flies had to be cooled to just above freezing to keep them immobilised (which was necessary for measuring ESR), the lowered temperature and the altered physiology of the flies could have had an unknown effect on their response to the anaesthetic. Turin admits that there are flaws in this experiment and is continuing with his research, but the simple fact that the two groups of flies had different ESR rates under the same conditions suggests quite strongly that he’s on the right track.

The broader meaning of these conclusions, whether flawed or not, is uncertain. If Hameroff and Penrose turn out to be correct with Orch-OR, it could revolutionise neuroscience, and it could both provide a lot of answers for some of the world’s biggest and longest pondered questions, and it could present a lot more questions.

1. Luca Turin, et al. Electron spin changes during general anesthesia in Drosophila. doi: 10.1073/pnas.1404387111

[Fuzz]

Alzheimer's Patients Will Be Injected With The Blood Of Young People

Lady Bathory would be so pleased to hear her early work in this field was justified! Though, I doubt her victims test volunteers would agree.

[MIKA27]

RUCK SACK | BY LOYAL STRICKLIN

Loyal Stricklin are crafters of beautiful leather products made with carefully chosen materials, and a smart, simple design. Their products age beautifully and patina with grace, like this handsome Ruck Sack, crafted in a rich horween leather and with a large opening to hold all your essentials plus two smaller pockets on the front for smaller items. All bags are made to order, expected delivery time is 4 weeks.

[MIKA27]

BAMBU INDAH HOTEL IN BALI, INDONESIA

Once again our search for the greatest hotels and resorts on the planet brings us to the beautiful Indonesian island of Bali. Welcome to paradise, or as it’s technically crowned, the Bambu Indah hotel.

This eco-luxury boutique hotel is the perfect destination for those of you really looking to let go, relax, and unwind. The resort consists of several different villas, all of which keep you connected with the surrounding elements. There are suites with open rooftops, outdoor patios, and even overwater bungalows with glass floors to see the ocean life below your feet. As with any high-end resort, guests can indulge in some of the best cuisine available, de-stress with a Balinese massage, cool off in the pool, or just kick back with the lucky person you chose to enjoy paradise with.

[MIKA27]

NOKE BLUETOOTH PADLOCK

There’s nothing worse than fumbling through that combination lock, trying your best to remember the combo. Or better yet, how about when you lose the key to your padlock? The team at FUZ Designs are changing all of this by introducing Noke.

Crowned the world’s first Bluetooth padlock, this thing is a real game changer. Keys, combos, forget about all that noise. Simply walk up to the Noke, give it a click, and it will automatically communicate with your Bluetooth device, all without you ever having to remove your phone from your pocket. You can even share access with friends and family using the app. The Noke itself is constructed from a durable, water-resistant shell, with absolutely no buttons, and an easy to replace battery (no tools required). Now what if you’re phone dies? No problem. You can also program your own “tap code” when your smartphone is unavailable, ensuring you’ll never be stranded again. The lock is set to hit the retail scene in February, 2015. [Purchase]

[MIKA27]

AVTOROS SHAMAN 8×8 ALL-TERRAIN VEHICLE

There’s all-terrain vehicles, and then there’s the Avtoros Shaman 8×8 all-terrain vehicle – the end all, be all for ATVs.

Measuring in at 6 meters long, 3 meters high, and 2.5 meters wide, this 2.5-ton beast can tackle literally any terrain, from land and snow right down to floating through water. The vehicle is powered by an Iveco F1C 3.0-liter turbo diesel that pumps out 146-horsepower through a 6-speed manual gearbox, but it’s the steering system that makes this thing really unbeatable. The 8-wheel drive Shaman has 3 different steering systems, allowing the driver (from the captain’s chair) the ability to switch between On-Road (front 4-wheel drive), Off-Road (active rear wheel steering), and Crab Mode (turns all 8 wheels in sync to move sideways). Each off-road monster can carry up to 1.5 tons of cargo, is capable of scaling 45-degree inclines, and according to those who have sat behind the wheel, is actually “pretty easy to drive.” The Shaman takes 2 months to manufacture, which means there are plenty of customization options (as if this thing wasn’t unique enough). Check out the video below to see this thing in action. [Purchase]

[MIKA27]

Giant Goliath Fish Swallows A Shark Whole In Just One Bite

Sometimes the shark plays the role of David. Especially when it goes up against the giant Goliath Grouper who looks more like a swimming Godzilla than a fish. And in real life, David the shark doesn’t have a shot against the Goliath fish because the ginormous creature can swallow the 1.2m shark whole in one bite.

I’m not messing with those groupers ever.

[MIKA27]

The First Automata Trailer Is Finally Out, And It Looks Spectacular

http://youtu.be/d0lSG1oOF-M

If Blade Runner and I, Robot gave birth to a new movie starring a bald Antonio Banderas, it would look just like Automata, the latest vision of our inevitably dystopian future. That future — or at least the way director Gabe Ibáñez has imagined it — also looks pretty dang awesome. Well, spectacular is probably a better word.

The movie’s plot line admittedly sounds a little familiar: In the future, there are robots, and those robots are starting to turn against us (maybe). There’s surely some big man-versus-bot battle at the end that probably involves Antonio Banderas screaming. There are some interesting twists, though. The Antonio Banderas character is actually a robot insurance agent who investigates cases when humans manipulate robots. But when a mysterious robot starts manipulating other robots, things get interesting.

It would be disingenuous to judge a movie by its trailer. That set design, though, is fair game. That and what we can glean from the movie’s art direction in what little we see of this imagined future is a spectacle of the best variety. I want to know everything about those giant hologram devices hanging out next to the skyscrapers, and I definitely want to know more about those robots — silly faces and all.

One more thing: Automata will open in theatres and On Demand simultaneously on October 10. So I don’t even have to leave my house to enjoy this spectacle. Now that’s what I call progress!

[MIKA27]

New Crystal Clear Solar Cells Could Power Your Smartphone One Day

The idea of a completely transparent solar panel has always been a bit of a dream. Such revolutionary technology would mean that we could turn windows into power generators and build phones with self-charging screens. Well, guess what? That dream is becoming a reality.

A team of researchers from Michigan State University has developed a completely transparent, luminescent solar concentrator. Whereas most traditional solar panels collect light energy from the sun using dark silicon cells and converted into electricity using the photovoltaic effect, solar concentrators actually focus sunlight onto a heat engine that produces electricity. In the case of this new technology, the plastic-like material channels specific wavelengths of sunlight towards the photovoltaic solar cells on the edge of the panel. “Because the materials do not absorb or emit light in the visible spectrum, they look exceptionally transparent to the human eye,” Richard Lunt, who led the research, explains in a release.

Scientists have created partially transparent solar cells in the past, but the existence of crystal clear cells opens up some very exciting new possibilities. “It can be used on tall buildings with lots of windows or any kind of mobile device that demands high aesthetic quality like a phone or e-reader,” says Lunt. “Ultimately we want to make solar harvesting surfaces that you do not even know are there.”

This is clearly exciting. (Pun intended.) Again, a solar-powered smartphone sounds like a dream for anyone who hates charging cords. It also sounds like a once impossible future that’s closer than we thought.

[MIKA27]

Motorized Roller Skates That Make 12 MPH Feel Absolutely Terrifying

Here’s the first thing I learned when riding a pair of RocketSkates: 12 mph might seem slow, but strap a pair of motorized roller skates to your feet and that speed becomes instantly terrifying.

After a quick tutorial, I donned on these hefty electric skates, pushed off, heard the motor kick in with a delightful digitized afterburner sound effect, and… then I immediately freaked out and bailed onto my toes like a chump. This happened roughly 10 times in a row. Luckily, the RocketSkates are easy to stop: You can either lean back on your heel to engage the brake, or you can simply step onto your toes like I did. The footplates of each skate end at about mid-sole, so your toes are always available for freak-out braking.

I’ve ridden electric bikes, electric unicycles, and electric lawnmowers, and nothing felt quite like the feeling of those skates kicking in. That probably has to do with the fact that these wheels are attached directly to your feet. The best balance scenario involves riding with one foot out in front of the other, giving you a wider base for balance. I couldn’t get the hang of using them right away, but I wanted to keep trying.

It seems like a lot of people want to try them, too. The Acton RocketSkates have surpassed their KickStarter goal ($50,000) by nearly 10 times ($486,727) at the time of writing. This ample funding would suggest that people want their electric roller skates, and they won’t have to wait much longer. The RocketSkates are slated to ship in October.

When they’re not on your feet, the skates look a bit like tiny futuristic wheelchairs. When they’re strapped on—the belts fit securely around your ankles, and the adjustable footplates are made to accommodate different foot sizes—they feel like open-toe ski boots. Each skate weighs around 7 pounds, and the fact that you can always stop yourself (or climb stairs with them on) by shifting your weight onto your tiptoes is a good safety mechanism.

Acton co-founder and CTO Peter Treadway says the motorized roller skates were inspired by a combination of science fiction, 1950s futurism, and the harsh reality of driving in southern California.

“I couldn’t park my car, and the idea of wearing your transportation appealed to me,” explains Treadway. “I had a feeling that someday we’d be able to do superhero things. All the future stuff from the ’50s—flying cars, jet packs, and rocket skates—now sort of exist. This is the one that consumers will be able to get first.”

The RocketSkates have a sidecar app, but it’s not for actively controlling the skates. All the accelerating, braking, and steering is done with your actual feet. After selecting a “lead foot” with the app, pressing the big light-up buttons on the back of each skate to power them on, and giving yourself a little push-off, the motors kick in with a fun video-game sound effect. The skates can go from zero to 12 mph in about two seconds.

That modest 12 mph maximum speed is a strategy to help keep the RocketSkates sidewalk-friendly in the future. Regulations for powered personal vehicles vary at the state and local levels. And while there are no state or local laws regarding the use of magical future-skates on the sidewalk yet, personal mobility vehicles such as Segways are allowed on the sidewalk in many states at speeds of up to 12.5 mph.

“Most of those laws revolve around concerns over big, heavy vehicles making contact with pedestrians,” says Treadway. “At 7 pounds each, the skates really don’t fall under that umbrella.”

Along with two larger, heavier wheels on the sides of each skate that are powered by 50W electric motors, there’s a smaller third wheel on the heel to provide stability when you’re balanced on them. There’s also a mechanical brake on the back that makes contact with that smaller wheel when you push down with your heel.

The mobile app lets you select a lead skate, and it also adds some games and a dashboard to the mix. After connecting via Bluetooth, you can check your skates’ battery life, receive any overheating warnings, look at the weather forecast, or compete against other RocketSkate owners in stats or pattern-skating games.

If you’re a better RocketSkater than I am, weigh less than 275 pounds, and keep away from inclines steeper than 8 degrees, you can ride for up to an hour and a half per charge. That depends on the model: There’ll be three versions of the RocketSkates at launch, color-coded and priced based on battery capacity.

The lowest-end “Rocket Red” skates run for 45 minutes per charge, with an estimated range of six miles, the mid-range “Terminator Chrome” skates roll for 70 minutes (8 miles) per charge, and the highest-end “Deep Space Black” skates are rated at 90 minutes/10 miles.

Charging times for each version range from 60 to 150 minutes, so you’ll need to plan ahead. And a slice of the roller-skating future will cost you: The Rocket Red skates cost $500 per pair, the Terminator Chrome skates are priced at $600, and the Deep Space Black skates will set you back $700.

[Habana Mike]

Giant Goliath Fish Swallows A Shark Whole In Just One Bite

Sometimes the shark plays the role of David. Especially when it goes up against the giant Goliath Grouper who looks more like a swimming Godzilla than a fish. And in real life, David the shark doesn’t have a shot against the Goliath fish because the ginormous creature can swallow the 1.2m shark whole in one bite.

I’m not messing with those groupers ever.

Saw one of those monsters out on the Great Barrier Reef - huge!

[MIKA27]

Space Station Cosmonauts Find Life In The Vacuum Of Space

The Russian press agency ITAR-TASS is reporting something so surprising that I’m having a hard time believing it: Cosmonauts have found microorganisms on the exterior of the International Space Station. Russian scientists are shocked by this discovery and can’t really explain how it is possible.

According to the chief of the Russian ISS orbital mission, Vladimir Solovjev, these findings “are absolutely unique”.

We have found traces of sea plankton and microscopic particles on the illuminator surface. This should be studied further.

At this point the Russian space agency can’t really explain how sea plankton ended on the International Space Station. They have discarded spaceships taking the microorganisms there. Their only explanation is that atmospheric currents may be lifting these particles from the ocean all the way to the station, 205 miles (330 kilometers) up in the sky — which seems absolutely nuts to me:

Plankton in these stages of development could be found on the surface of the oceans. This is not typical for Baikonur. It means that there are some uplifting air currents which reach the station and settle on its surface.

The microorganisms were found on samples collected by the cosmonauts during a space walk. It was a complete surprise when they analysed them, as they only expected for find the contaminants produced by the engines of the incoming and outgoing spaceship traffic.

It is not clear if the organisms were growing or multiplying but, if confirmed, this discovery may give even more credibility to the theory that organic life may have spread across space travelling on comets and asteroids.

[MIKA27]

You’re Buying: The Great Antivirus Software Conspiracy

Your computer is running more slowly than usual, and everything loading on your browser seems to be working on a ten-second delay. You’ve closed programs, cleaned out old files you no longer need, run disk utilities cleanups, diagnostics, data packets, and just about everything else you can imagine. Then the anti-virus scanner window opens, and alerts you that virus definitions have been updated, system scans have completed, and your computer is no longer at risk.

Most of us recognize virus-thwarting software as a necessary evil; after all, how much does the cumbersome antivirus software running in the background actually contribute to the sluggish performance of your computer? But perhaps a more important question to ask is, “was your computer really at risk to begin with?”

According to many experts, the real risk of virus infection may be something that most anti-virus software wouldn’t even be able to stop.

In March of 2012, Wired featured an interview with Jeremiah Grossman, an internet security expert and Chief Technology Officer at White Hat Security, who admitted that, despite his background working with security for web businesses that include Yahoo and other companies, he isn’t a fan of using anti virus software. Furthermore, many of his pals in the business don’t use it either:

As it turns out, many of his security-minded peers don’t use it either. The reason: If someone is going to try and attack them, they’re likely to use a new technique, one that most antivirus products will miss. “If you asked the average security expert whether they use antivirus or not,” Grossman says “a significant proportion of them do not.”

Dan Guido, also quoted in the article, stated that most of his colleagues felt the same, and that if they didn’t work in areas of industry where their clients required it, “almost nobody in the security industry would run it.”

These are indeed strange things for security experts to be saying about anti-virus software… unless, of course, anti-virus software weren’t as helpful as most of us are led to believe it is.

Granted, not everyone in the industry would probably agree that antivirus software is essentially useless; but that doesn’t mean it isn’t costly, and that what customers pay for the services may not be of equal worth to the services rendered.

An assessment made in 2004 (that’s right, a decade ago) at Net-Security.org had already made similar damning statements:

From press releases to interviews on television, radio, and newspapers, antivirus industry executives race to establish their companies and products as the most vigilant and capable on the market, an activity often made more amusing when backed by questionable, if not fabricated, statistics and predicted damage assessments (usually in the billions of dollars) from each outbreak — and almost always followed by a pitch espousing the cost-effective security that only their products provide.

True, antivirus software may not necessarily be cost-effective, or effective in general. So is there a “conspiracy” to encourage you to buy and renew it?

Well, perhaps no more than there is a conspiracy to get you to buy anything else… but this, in large part, is actually what has made the act of selling conspiracies so useful: if a product you sell offers a variety of “protection” from certain unsavory elements of existence (whether that be computer viruses, real viruses, or eventual attacks by militarized police forces as the coming global apocalypse eventually ensues), it seems that customers are more likely to buy into it.

One must note that those cashing in on “conspiracy culture”, though more obvious, employ a very similar approach that has proven successful the antivirus software industry. While many experts in the field question it’s effectiveness (as we’ve seen earlier), people continue to buy it if they are told it will offer a protection to their life and investments. And while antivirus software does often provide some protection (particularly warnings against fraudulent links in emails, malware defense, and the like), the services rendered often are preventative in nature; in other words, you pay for a sort of insurance against something that may be harmful on down the road… key term here being “may be,” further employing the adherence to paranoia that seems to pervade Western culture.

Unfortunately, finding out whether antivirus software is right for you isn’t something you can just consult your doctor about… but you can go read for yourself (here andhere, for instance) and try to consider, at very least, whether it’s as useful as you may have been led to believe. But rather than being taken as a criticism solely against AV software companies, the act of questioning what’s going on around you–and recognizing the way that “conspiracy minded” culture succeeds in convincing you to purchase things you may not need–should be applied broadly.

If there really is a pervading “conspiracy” in our culture today, arguably it has more to do with the way that people can very easily persuaded to buy just about anything, and with little more required than simply having to be told to do so.

[MIKA27]

Two Ancient Maya Cities Unearthed In Mexican Jungle

Archeologists are starting to unlock even more Maya secrets with the exciting discovery of two ancient cities in a Mexican forest.

The cities, which were found in the state of Campeche, Yucatan peninsula, remained undiscovered for centuries as they were cloaked in dense vegetation, appearing as nothing more than mounds of grass and trees to the untrained eye. Archeologists working in Central America know all too well what usually lies beneath these grassy humps, but this particular site had been largely inaccessible for many years and thus remained untouched.

According to expedition leader Ivan Sprajc, the team located the cities with the assistance of aerial photographs, Discovery News reports. The site is actually close to another Maya city called Chactun that was also discovered by Sprajc back in 2013. The area hosting these ancient ruins is massive, some 1800 square miles, stretching between the Rio Bec and Chenes regions.

Amongst the findings was an impressive façade with an entrance set in the stone jaws of a monster. Maya façades are temple doorways that were usually elaborately decorated, often with huge, ornate masks.

The façade and various other parts of this particular city were actually first documented in the 70s by an American archeologist, Eric Von Euw, who visited the site and coined it Lagunita. While he may have made some useful sketches, he did a very poor job of recording the location of the city and thus no one was able to re-trace his footsteps.

When the researchers compared the façade with Von Euw’s illustrations it was clear that the city discovered was indeed the long lost Lagunita. According to Sprajc, the façade represents a Maya earth deity associated with fertility. “These doorways symbolize the entrance to a cave and, in general, to the watery underworld,” he added.

Alongside the monster façade, the team also discovered various palace-like buildings encircling four plazas, a ball court and a 65 foot tall pyramid. Some of the stones also featured inscriptions, one of which was etched on November 29, A.D. 711.

The second city, which was a new find, has been named Tamchen, which means “deep well” in Yucatec Mayan. This is due to the fact that it features an impressive number of underground chambers that were installed to collect rainwater. Similar to Lagunita, Tamchen also had several plazas lined with buildings and a large pyramid temple. While the team is not certain when these cities were built, there is some evidence to suggest that Tamchen could date as far back as 300 B.C.

[MIKA27]

These Guys Are So Strong That They Can Walk Invisible Walls In The Air

As far as I can tell, I don’t think there’s an invisible wall where this guy is pushing his legs off to make it look like he’s walking on thin air. But I can’t be sure though because I assume once you get as strong as these guys, you unlock all sorts of secret life powers. I mean these tricks are unreal.

Watching them work out makes me question if we have the same body.

[MIKA27]

This Nexus Smartwatch Concept Is Bonkers

We’ve complained before that some smartwatches are just boring remotes for your smartphones, and that they need to actually do something genuinely useful. But what if you didn’t need to purchase a secondary smartwatch device to have a phone on your wrist? What if you had a flexible phone that transformed into a wrist-cuff? That’s the key point of this new Nexus 360 concept.

Designed by the folks over at 91Mobiles, the Nexus 360 as it’s being dubbed is a small phone with a retractible strap concealed in the back. Once deployed, the 360 can wrap around your wrist and converts itself into watch mode, replacing the need for the smartwatch entirely.

[MIKA27]

The Strange & Curious Tale of the Last True Hermit

For nearly thirty years, a phantom haunted the woods of Central Maine. Unseen and unknown, he lived in secret, creeping into homes in the dead of night and surviving on what he could steal. To the spooked locals, he became a legend—or maybe a myth. They wondered how he could possibly be real. Until one day last year, the hermit came out of the forest

The hermit set out of camp at midnight, carrying his backpack and his bag of break-in tools, and threaded through the forest, rock to root to rock, every step memorized. Not a boot print left behind. It was cold and nearly moonless, a fine night for a raid, so he hiked about an hour to the Pine Tree summer camp, a few dozen cabins spread along the shoreline of North Pond in central Maine. With an expert twist of a screwdriver, he popped open a door of the dining hall and slipped inside, scanning the pantry shelves with his penlight.

Candy! Always good. Ten rolls of Smarties, stuffed in a pocket. Then, into his backpack, a bag of marshmallows, two tubs of ground coffee, some Humpty Dumpty potato chips. Burgers and bacon were in the locked freezer. On a previous raid at Pine Tree, he'd stolen a key to the walk-in, and now he used it to open the stainless-steel door. The key was attached to a plastic four-leaf-clover key chain, with one of the leaves partially broken off. A three-and-a-half-leaf clover.

He could've used a little more luck. Newly installed in the Pine Tree kitchen, hidden behind the ice machine, was a military-grade motion detector. The device remained silent in the kitchen but sounded an alarm in the home of Sergeant Terry Hughes, a game warden who'd become obsessed with catching the thief. Hughes lived a mile away. He raced to the camp in his pickup truck and sprinted to the rear of the dining hall. He peeked in a window.

And there he was. Probably. The person stealing food appeared entirely too clean, his face freshly shaved. He wore eyeglasses and a wool ski hat. Was this really the North Pond Hermit, a man who'd tormented the surrounding community for years—decades—yet the police still hadn't learned his name?

Hughes used his cell phone, quietly, and asked the Maine State Police to alert trooper Diane Perkins-Vance, who had also been hunting the hermit. Before Perkins-Vance could get there, the burglar, his backpack full, started toward the exit. If the man stepped into the forest, Hughes understood, he might never be found again.

The burglar eased out of the dining hall, and Hughes used his left hand to blind the man with his flashlight; with his right he aimed his .357 square on his nose. "Get on the ground!" he bellowed.

The thief complied, no resistance, and lay facedown, candy spilling out of his pockets. It was one thirty in the morning on April 4, 2013. Perkins-Vance soon arrived, and the burglar was placed, handcuffed, in a plastic chair. The officers asked his name. He refused to answer. His skin was strangely pale; his glasses, with chunky plastic frames, were extremely outdated. But he wore a nice Columbia jacket, new Lands' End blue jeans, and sturdy boots. The officers searched him, and no identification was located.

Hughes left the suspect alone with Perkins-Vance. She removed his handcuffs and gave him a bottle of water. And he started to speak. A little. When Perkins-Vance asked why he didn't want to answer any questions, he said he was ashamed. He spoke haltingly, uncertainly; the connection between his mind and his mouth seemed to have atrophied from disuse. But over the next couple of hours, he gradually opened up.

His name, he revealed, was Christopher Thomas Knight. Born on December 7, 1965. He said he had no address, no vehicle, did not file a tax return, and did not receive mail. He said he lived in the woods.

"For how long?" wondered Perkins-Vance.

Knight thought for a bit, then asked when the Chernobyl nuclear-plant disaster occurred. He had long ago lost the habit of marking time in months or years; this was just a news event he happened to remember. The nuclear meltdown took place in 1986, the same year, Knight said, he went to live in the woods. He was 20 years old at the time, not long out of high school. He was now 47, a middle-aged man.

Knight stated that over all those years he slept only in a tent. He never lit a fire, for fear that smoke would give his camp away. He moved strictly at night. He said he didn't know if his parents were alive or dead. He'd not made one phone call or driven in a car or spent any money. He had never in his life sent an e-mail or even seen the Internet.

He confessed that he'd committed approximately forty robberies a year while in the woods—a total of more than a thousand break-ins. But never when anyone was home. He said he stole only food and kitchenware and propane tanks and reading material and a few other items. Knight admitted that everything he possessed in the world, he'd stolen, including the clothes he was wearing, right down to his underwear. The only exception was his eyeglasses.

Perkins-Vance called dispatch and learned that Knight had no criminal record. He said he grew up in a nearby community, and his senior picture was soon located in the 1984 Lawrence High School yearbook. He was wearing the same eyeglasses.

For close to three decades, Knight said, he had not seen a doctor or taken any medicine. He mentioned that he had never once been sick. You had to have contact with other humans, he claimed, in order to get sick.

When, said Perkins-Vance, was the last time he'd had contact with another person?

Sometime in the 1990s, answered Knight, he passed a hiker while walking in the woods.

"What did you say?" asked Perkins-Vance.

"I said, 'Hi,' " Knight replied. Other than that single syllable, he insisted, he had not spoken with or touched another human being, until this night, for twenty-seven years.

Christopher Knight was arrested, charged with burglary and theft, and transported to the Kennebec County jail in Augusta, the state capital. For the first time in nearly 10,000 days, he slept indoors.

News of the capture stunned the citizens of North Pond. For decades, they'd felt haunted by…something. It was hard to say what. At first, in the late 1980s, there were strange occurrences. Flashlights were missing their batteries. Steaks disappeared from the fridge. New propane tanks on the grill had been replaced by old ones. "My grandkids thought I was losing my mind," said David Proulx, whose vacation cabin was broken into at least fifty times.

Then people began noticing other things. Wood shavings near window locks; scratches on doorframes. Was it a neighbor? A gang of teenagers? The robberies continued—boat batteries, frying pans, winter jackets. Fear took hold. "We always felt like he was watching us," one resident said. The police were called, repeatedly, but were unable to help.

Locks were changed, alarm systems installed. Nothing seemed to stop him. Or her. Or them. No one knew. A few desperate residents even left notes on their doors: "Please don't break in. Tell me what you need and I'll leave it out for you." There was never a reply.

Incidents mounted, and the phantom morphed into legend. Eventually he was given a name: the North Pond Hermit. At a homeowners' meeting in 2002, the hundred people present were asked who had suffered break-ins. Seventy-five raised their hands. Campfire hermit stories were swapped. One kid recalled that when he was 10 years old, all his Halloween candy was stolen. That kid is now 34.

Still the robberies persisted. The crimes, after so long, felt almost supernatural. "The legend of the hermit lived on for years and years," said Pete Cogswell, whose jeans and belt were worn by the hermit when he was caught. "Did I believe it? No. Who really could?"

Knight's arrest, rather than eliminating disbelief, only enhanced it. The truth was stranger than the myth. One man had actually lived in the woods of Maine for twenty-seven years, in an unheated nylon tent. Winters in Maine are long and intensely cold: a wet, windy cold, the worst kind of cold. A week of winter camping is an impressive achievement. An entire season is practically unheard of.

Though hermits have been documented for thousands of years, Knight's feat appears to exist in a category of its own. He engaged in zero communication with the outside world. He never snapped a photo. He did not keep a journal. His camp was undisclosed to everyone.

There may have been others like Knight, whose commitment to isolation was absolute—he planned to live his entire life in secret—but if so, they were never found. Capturing Knight was the human equivalent of netting a giant squid. He was an uncontacted tribe of one.

Reporters across Maine, and soon enough across the nation and the world, attempted to contact him. What did he wish to tell us? What secrets had he uncovered? How had he survived? He stayed resolutely silent. Even after his arrest, the North Pond Hermit remained a complete mystery.

I decided to write him a letter. I wrote it by hand, pen on paper, and sent it from my home in Montana to the Kennebec County jail. I mentioned I was a journalist seeking explanations for his baffling life. A week later, a white envelope arrived in my mailbox. The return address, printed in blue ink in wobbly-looking block letters, read "Chris Knight." It was a brief note—three paragraphs; 272 words. Still, it contained some of the first statements Knight had shared with anyone in the world.

"I replied to your letter," he explained, "because writing letters relieves somewhat the stress and boredom of my present situation." Also, he didn't feel comfortable speaking. "My vocal, verbal skills have become rather rusty and slow."

I'd mentioned in my letter that I was an avid reader. From what I could tell, Knight was, too. Many victims of Knight's thefts reported that their books were often stolen—from Tom Clancy potboilers to dense military histories to James Joyce's Ulysses.

Hemingway, I wrote, was one of my favorites. It seemed that Knight was shy about everything except literary criticism; he answered that he felt "rather lukewarm" about Hemingway. Instead, he noted, he'd rather read Rudyard Kipling, preferably his "lesser known works." As if catching himself getting a little friendly, he added that since he didn't know me, he really didn't want to say more.

Then he seemed concerned that he was now being too unfriendly. "I wince at the rudeness of this reply but think it better to be clear and honest rather than polite. Tempted to say 'nothing personal,' but handwritten letters are always personal." He ended with: "It was kind of you to write. Thank you." He did not sign his name.

I wrote him back and sent him a couple of Kiplings (The Man Who Would Be King and Captains Courageous). His response, two and a half pages, felt as raw and honest as a diary entry. He was suffering in jail; the noise and the filth tore at his senses. "You asked how I sleep. Little and uneasy. I am nearly always tired and nervous." In his next letter, he added, in his staccato, almost song-lyric style, that he deserved to be imprisoned. "I stole. I was a thief. I repeatedly stole over many years. I knew it was wrong. Knew it was wrong, felt guilty about it every time, yet continued to do it."

We exchanged letters throughout the summer of 2013. Rather than becoming gradually more accustomed to jail, to being around other people, Knight was deteriorating. In the woods, he said, he'd always carefully maintained his facial hair, but now he stopped shaving. "Use my beard," he wrote, "as a jail calendar."

He tried several times to converse with other inmates. He could force out a few hesitant words, but every topic—music, movies, television—was lost on him, as was most slang. "You speak like a book," one inmate teased. Whereupon he ceased talking.

"I am retreating into silence as a defensive move," he wrote. Soon he was down to uttering just five words, and only to guards: yes; no; please; thank you. "I am surprised by the amount of respect this garners me. That silence intimidates puzzles me. Silence is to me normal, comfortable."

He wrote little about his time in the woods, but what he did reveal was harrowing. Some years, he made it clear, he barely survived the winter. In one letter, he told me that to get through difficult times, he tried meditating. "I didn't meditate every day, month, season in the woods. Just when death was near. Death in the form of too little food or too much cold for too long." Meditation worked, he concluded. "I am alive and sane, at least I think I'm sane." As always there was no formal closing. His letters simply ended, sometimes mid-thought.

He returned to the theme of sanity in a following letter. "When I came out of the woods they applied the label hermit to me. Strange idea to me. I had never thought of myself as a hermit. Then I got worried. For I knew with the label hermit comes the idea of crazy. See the ugly little joke."

Even worse, he feared his time in jail would only prove correct those who doubted his sanity. "I suspect," he wrote, "more damage has been done to my sanity in jail, in months; than years, decades, in the woods."

His legal proceedings were mired in delays, as the district attorney and his lawyer tried to figure out how justice could be served in a case entirely without precedent.

After four months in jail, Knight had no clue what punishment awaited. A sentence of a dozen or more years was possible. "Stress levels sky high," he wrote. "Give me a number. How long? Months? Years? How long in prison for me. Tell me the worst. How long?"

In the end, he decided he could not even write. "For a while writing relieved stress for me. No longer." He sent one last, heartbreaking letter in which he seemed at the verge of breakdown. "Still tired. More tired. Tireder, tiredest, tired ad nauseam, tired infinitum."

And that was it. He never wrote me again. Though he did finally sign his name. Despite the exhaustion and the tension, the last words he penned were wry and self-mocking: "Your friendly neighborhood Hermit, Christopher Knight."

Three weeks after his final letter, I flew to Maine. The Kennebec County jail, a three-story slab of pale gray cinder blocks, permits visitors most evenings at six forty-five. I arrived early. "Who you here to see?" asked a corrections officer.

"Christopher Knight."

"Relationship?"

"Friend," I answered unconfidently. He didn't know I was here, and I had my doubts he'd see me.

I sat on a bench as other visitors checked in. Beyond the walls of the waiting room, I could hear piercing buzzers and slamming doors. Eventually an officer appeared and called out, "Knight."

He unlocked a maroon door and I stepped inside a visitors' booth. Three short stools were bolted to the floor in front of a narrow desk. Over the desk, dividing the booth into sealed-off halves, was a thick pane of shatterproof plastic. Sitting on a stool on the other side of the pane was Christopher Knight.

Rarely in my life have I witnessed someone less pleased to see me. His lips, thin, were pulled into a downturned scowl. His eyes did not rise to meet mine. I sat across from him, and there was no acknowledgment of my presence, not the merest nod. He gazed someplace beyond my left shoulder. He was wearing a dull green overlaundered jail uniform several sizes too big.

A black phone receiver was hanging on the wall. I picked it up. He picked his up—the first movement I saw him make.

I spoke first. "Nice to meet you, Chris."

He didn't respond. He just sat there, stone-faced. His balding head shone like a snowfield beneath the fluorescent lights; his beard was a mess of reddish brown curls. He had on silver-framed glasses, different from the ones he'd worn forever in the woods. He was very skinny. He'd lost a great deal of weight since his arrest.

I tend to babble when I'm nervous, but I made a conscious effort to restrain myself. I recalled what Knight wrote in his letter about being comfortable with silence. I looked at him not looking at me. Maybe a minute passed.

That was all I could endure. "The constant banging and buzzing in here," I said, "must be so jarring compared with the sounds of nature." He shifted his eyes to me—a small victory—then glanced away. His eyes are light brown. He scarcely has any eyebrows. I let my comment hang in the air.

Then he spoke. Or at least his mouth moved. His first words to me were inaudible. I saw why: He was holding the phone's mouthpiece too low, below his chin. It had been decades since he'd used a phone; he was out of practice. I indicated with my hand that he needed to move it up. He did. And he repeated his grand pronouncement.

"It's jail," he said. There was nothing more. Silence again.

I shouldn't have come. He didn't want me here; I didn't feel comfortable being here. But the jail had granted me a one-hour visit, and I resolved to stay. I settled atop my stool. I felt hyperaware of all my gestures, my expressions, my breathing. Chris's right leg, I saw through the scuffed window, was bouncing rapidly. He scratched at his skin.

My patience was rewarded. First his leg settled down. He quit scratching. And then, rather shockingly, he started talking.

"Some people want me to be this warm and fuzzy person. All filled with friendly hermit wisdom. Just spouting off fortune-cookie lines from my hermit home."

His voice was clear; he'd retained the stretched vowels of a Down East Maine accent. And his words, when he deigned to release them, could evidently be imaginative and entertaining. And caustic.

"Your hermit home—like under a bridge?" I said, trying to play along.

He presented me with an achingly long blink.

"You're thinking of a troll."

I laughed. His face moved in the direction of a smile. We had made a connection—or at least the awkwardness of our introduction had softened. We began to converse somewhat normally. He called me Mike and I called him Chris.

He explained about the lack of eye contact. "I'm not used to seeing people's faces," he said. "There's too much information there. Aren't you aware of it? Too much, too fast."

I followed his cue and looked over his shoulder while he stared over mine. We maintained this arrangement for most of the visit. Chris had recently been given a mental-health evaluation by Maine's forensic service. The report mentioned a possible diagnosis of Asperger's disorder, a form of autism often marked by exceptional intelligence but extreme sensitivity to motions, sounds, and light.

Chris had just learned of Asperger's while in jail, and he seemed unfazed by the diagnosis. "I don't think I'll be a spokesman for the Asperger's telethon. Do they still do telethons? I hate Jerry Lewis." He said he was taking no medications. "But I don't like people touching me," he added. "You're not a hugger, are you?"

I admitted that I do at times participate in embraces.

"I'm glad this is between us," he said, indicating the glass. "If there was a set of blinds here, I'd close them."

There was a part of me that was perversely charmed by Chris. He could seem prickly—he is prickly—but this was merely a protective cover. He told me that since his capture, he'd often found himself emotionally overwhelmed at unexpected moments. "Like TV commercials," he said, "have made me teary. It's not a good thing in jail to have people see you crying."

Everything he said seemed candid and blunt, unfiltered by the safety net of social niceties. "I'm not sorry about being rude if it gets to the point quicker," he told me.

That's fine, I said, though I expected to ask questions that might kindle his rudeness. But I started with a gentle one: What was your life like before you went into the forest?

Before he slept in the woods for a quarter century straight, Chris never once spent a night in a tent. He was raised in the community of Albion, a forty-five-minute drive east of his camp; he has four older brothers and one younger sister. His father, who died in 2001, worked in a creamery. His mother, now in her eighties, still lives in the same house where Chris grew up, a modest two-story colonial on a wooded fifty-acre plot.

The family is extremely private and did not speak with me. Their next-door neighbor told me that in fourteen years, he hasn't exchanged more than a word with Chris's mom. Sometimes he sees her getting the paper. "Culturally my family is old Yankee," Chris said. "We're not emotionally bleeding all over each other. We're not touchy-feely. Stoicism is expected."

Chris insisted that he had a fine childhood. "No complaints," he said. "I had good parents." He shared vivid stories of moose hunting with his father. "A couple of hunting trips I slept in the back of the pickup, but never alone and never in a tent." After he'd disappeared, his family apparently didn't report him missing to the police, though they may have hired a private detective. No one uncovered a clue. Two of Chris's brothers, Joel and Tim, visited him in jail. "I didn't recognize them," Chris admitted.

"My brothers supposed I was dead," said Chris, "but never expressed this to my mom. They always wanted to give her hope. Maybe he's in Texas, they'd say. Or he's in the Rocky Mountains." Chris did not allow his mother to visit. "Look at me, I'm in my prison clothes. That's not how I was raised. I couldn't face her."

He said he had excellent grades in high school, though no friends, and graduated early. Like two of his brothers, he enrolled in a nine-month electronics course at Sylvania Technical School in Waltham, Massachusetts. Then, still in Waltham, he took a job installing home and vehicle alarm systems; valuable knowledge to have once he started stealing.

He bought a new car, a white 1985 Subaru Brat. His brother Joel co-signed the loan. "I screwed him on that," Chris said. "I still owe him." He worked less than a year before he quit. He drove the Brat to Maine, went through his hometown without stopping—"one last look around"—and kept driving north. Soon he reached the edge of Moosehead Lake, where Maine begins to get truly remote.

"I drove until I was nearly out of gas. I took a small road. Then a small road off that small road. Then a trail off that." He parked the car. He placed the keys in the center console. "I had a backpack and minimal stuff. I had no plans. I had no map. I didn't know where I was going. I just walked away."

It was late summer of 1986. He'd camp in one spot for a week or so, then hike south, following the natural geology of Maine, with its long, glacier-carved valleys. "I lost track of where I was," he said. "I didn't care." For a while, he tried foraging for food. He ate roadkill partridges. Then he began taking corn and potatoes from people's gardens.

"But I wanted more than vegetables," he said. "It took a while to overcome my scruples. I was always scared when stealing. Always." He insists he never encountered anyone during a robbery; he made sure there was no car in the driveway, no sign of anyone inside. "It was usually 1 or 2 A.M. I'd go in, hit the cabinets, the refrigerator. In and out. My heart rate was soaring. It was not a comfortable act. I took no pleasure in it, none at all, and I wanted it over as quickly as possible." A single mistake, he understood, and the outside world would ****** him back.

He roamed about for two years before he discovered the campsite he would call home. He knew at once it was ideal. "Then," he said, "I settled in."

The majority of North Pond residents I spoke with found it hard to believe Knight's story. Many insisted that he either had help or spent the winters in unoccupied cabins. As the time allotted for our visit wound down, I challenged Chris myself: You must, I said, have had assistance at some time. Or slept in a cabin. Or used a bathroom.

Chris's demeanor changed. It was the only time in our meeting that he held eye contact. "Never once did I sleep inside," he said. He never used a shower. Or a toilet.

He did admit to thawing meat in a microwave a few times during break-ins. But he endured every season entirely on his own. "I'm a thief. I induced fear. People have a right to be angry. But I have not lied."

I trusted him. I sensed, in fact, that Chris was practically incapable of lying. I wasn't alone in this thought. Diane Perkins-Vance, the state trooper present at his arrest, told me that much of her job consisted of sorting through lies people fed her. With Chris, however, she had no doubts. "Unequivocally," she said, "I believe him."

Before he hung up the phone, Chris added that if I could see where he lived and how he survived, I'd know for sure.

It was my plan to find his camp. Afterward, I said, I'd like to return to the jail. Could we meet again?

His answer was unexpected. He said, "Yes."

The Belgrade Lakes area, where Knight lived, is cow-and-horse rural, nothing like the vast North Woods of Maine, wild and unpeopled. Knight's camp was located on private property, just a few hundred feet from the nearest cabin, in an area crisscrossed by dirt roads.

When I saw Knight's woods myself, I understood how he could remain there unnoticed. The tangle of hemlock and maple and elm is so dense the forest holds its own humidity; one step in and my glasses fogged.

But what made navigation truly treacherous were the boulders—vehicle-sized glacier-borne gifts from the last ice age—scattered wildly and everywhere. I thrashed about for an hour, wrenched a knee between two moss-slick rocks, then gave up and retreated to a road.

My goodness. Chris had carved from the chaos a bedroom-sized clearing completely invisible from a few steps away, situated on a slight rise that allowed enough breeze to keep the mosquitoes away, but not so much as to cause severe windchill in winter. It was surrounded by a natural Stonehenge of boulders; overhead, tree branches linked to form a trellis-like canopy that masked his site from the air. This is why Chris's skin was so pale—he'd lived in perpetual shade. I ended up staying there three nights, watching the rabbits by day, at night picking out a few stars behind the scrim of branches. It was as gorgeous and peaceful a place as I have ever spent time.

The police had dismantled much of his camp, but during my next visit with Chris, and several after that, he described his living space in meticulous detail. In total, Chris and I met at the jail for nine hours.

He slept in a simple camping tent, which he kept covered by several layers of brown tarps. Camouflage, he felt, was essential; he didn't want to risk anything shiny catching someone's eye, so he spray-painted, in foresty colors, his garbage bins and his coolers and his cooking pot. He even painted his clothespins green.

The breadth of his thievery was impressive. He'd fled the modern world only to live off the fat of it. Inside his tent was a metal bedframe he'd removed from the Pine Tree Camp; he had hauled it across the pond in a canoe. He didn't steal the canoe. He just borrowed one, as he often did, from a lakeside cabin—"there's a wide selection"—then returned it, sprinkling pine needles inside to make it seem unused. He also stole a box spring and mattress and sleeping bags.

He stole toilet paper and hand sanitizer for his bathroom spot. He took laundry detergent and shampoo for his wash area. There was no fire pit, as he'd insisted. He cooked on a Coleman two-burner stove that he connected to propane tanks. He stole a tremendous number of tanks, pillaging gas grills along the thirty-mile circumference of the pond. He never returned them. He buried the tanks—possibly hundreds of them—in his dump at the camp's edge.

He stole deodorant, disposable razors, flashlights, snow boots, spices, mousetraps, spray paint, and electrical tape. He took pillows off beds. He kept three different types of thermometers in camp: digital, mercury, spring-loaded. Knowing the exact temperature was mandatory. He stole watches—he had to be sure, while on a raid, that he could return to camp before daybreak.

Deeper into the forest, in his "upper cache," as he called it, he'd stashed plastic totes filled with enough supplies—a tent and a sleeping bag, some warm clothes—so that if he heard someone approach his camp, he could instantly abandon it and start anew. He was committed.

His diet was terrible. "Cooking is too kind a word for what I did," Chris told me. He'd not been sick in the woods, and his worst accident was a tumble on some ice, but his teeth were rotten, and no wonder. I dug through his twenty-five years of trash, buried between boulders, and kept inventory: a five-pound tub that once held Marshmallow Fluff, an empty box of Devil Dogs, peanut butter, Cheetos, honey, graham crackers, Cool Whip, tuna fish, coffee, Tater Tots, pudding, soda, El Monterey spicy jalapeño chimichangas, and on and on and on.

He stole radios and earphones and hid an antenna up in trees. For a while, he listened to a lot of conservative talk radio. Later he got hooked on classical music—Tchaikovsky and Brahms, yes; Bach, no. "Bach is too pristine," he said. He went through a spell of listening to television shows on the radio; "theater of the mind," he called it. Everybody Loves Raymond was a favorite. But his undying passion was classic rock: the Who, AC/DC, Judas Priest, and above all, Lynyrd Skynyrd. We covered hundreds of topics while chatting in jail, and nothing received higher praise than Lynyrd Skynyrd. "They will be playing Lynyrd Skynyrd songs in a thousand years," he proclaimed.

He also stole the occasional handheld video game—Pokémon, Tetris, Dig Dug—but the majority of his free time was spent reading or observing the forest. "Don't mistake me for some bird-watching PBS type," he warned, but then proceeded to poetically describe the crunch of dry leaves underfoot ("walking on corn flakes") and the rumble of an ice crack propagating across the pond ("like a bowling ball rolling down an alley").

He stole hundreds of books over the years; his preference was military history—he named William Shirer's The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich as his favorite book—but he took whatever was available. Magazines were more common. When he finished them, he'd create bricks of magazines, bound with electrical tape, and bury them in the ground to level out his camp. Beneath his tent area were dozens of these bricks.

I unearthed a stack of National Geographics with the dates still legible: 1991 and 1992. I also saw People, Cosmopolitan, Glamour, and Vanity Fair. There was even a collection of Playboys. One book Chris never stole was the Bible. "I can't claim a belief system," he said. He celebrated no holidays. He meditated now and then but did not pray.

With one exception. When the worst of a Maine winter struck, all rules were suspended. "Once you get below negative twenty, you purposely don't think," he told me. His eyes went wide and fearful from the memory. "That's when you do have religion. You do pray. You pray for warmth."

Chris lived by the rhythms of the seasons, but his thoughts were dominated by surviving winter. Preparations began at the end of each summer as the lakeside cabins were shutting down for the year. "It was my busiest time," he said. "Harvest time. A very ancient instinct. Though not usually associated with crime."

His first goal was to get fat. This was a life-or-death necessity. "I gorged myself on sugar and alcohol," he said. "It's the quickest way to gain weight, and I liked the inebriation." The bottles he stole were signs of a man who'd never once, as he admitted, ordered a drink at a bar: Allen's Coffee Flavored Brandy, Seagram's Escapes Strawberry Daiquiri, something called Whipped Chocolate Valley Vines (from the label: "fine chocolate, whipped cream & red wine").

As the evenings began to chill, he grew his beard to the ideal length—about an inch, long enough to insulate his face, short enough to prevent ice buildup. He intensified his thieving raids, stocking up on food and propane. The first snow usually came in November. Chris was always fearful about leaving a single boot print anywhere, which is impossible to avoid in a blanket of snow. And so for the next six months, until the spring thaw in April, Chris rarely strayed from his clearing in the woods.

I asked him if he just slept all the time, a human hibernation. "Completely wrong," he replied. "It's dangerous to sleep too long in winter." When seriously frigid weather descended, he conditioned himself to fall asleep at 7:30 P.M. and get up at 2 A.M. "That way, at the depth of cold, I was awake." If he remained in bed any longer, condensation from his body could freeze his sleeping bag. "If you try and sleep through that kind of cold, you might never wake up."

The first thing he'd do at 2 A.M. was light his stove and start melting snow. To get his blood circulating, he'd pace the perimeter of his camp. His feet never seemed to fully thaw, but as long as he had a fresh pair of socks, this wasn't a problem. "It's more important to be dry than warm," Chris said. By dawn, he'd have his day's water supply. "Then, if I had had food, I'd have a meal."

And if he didn't have food? There were, he said, some very hard winters—desperate winters—in which he ran out of propane and finished his food. The suffering was acute. Chris called it "physical, emotional, and psychological pain." He hinted to me there were times he contemplated suicide.

Why not just leave the woods? Chris said he thought about it. He even kept a whistle in his camp. "If I blew on it in sequences of three, help might come." But he never used it. Rather, he made a firm decision that unless forcibly removed, he was going to spend the rest of his life behind the trees.

When he heard the song of the chickadees, he told me, he could finally relax. "That alerted me that winter is starting to lessen its grip. That the end is near. That spring is coming and I'm still alive."

The cold never got easier. All his winter-camping expertise felt offset by advancing age. "You should have seen me in my twenties," he boasted. "I was lord of the woods. I ruled the land I walked upon. I was tough and clever." But over time, like an aging athlete, his body began to break down. The biggest issue was his eyesight. "For the last ten years, anything beyond an arm's length was a blur. I used my ears more than my eyes." If he saw a pair of glasses during a break-in, he always tried them on, but was unable to find a better prescription. His agility faded; bruises took longer to heal. His teeth constantly hurt.

The victims of his thefts, after years of waiting for a police breakthrough, eventually took matters into their own hands. Neal Patterson, whose family has owned a place on the pond for fifty years, began hiding all night in his dark house with a .357 Magnum in his hand. "I wanted to be the guy that caught the hermit," he said. He stayed up fourteen nights one summer before he quit.

Debbie Baker, whose young boys were terrified of the hermit—to quell their fears, the family renamed him "the hungry man"—installed a surveillance camera in their cabin. And in 2002, they captured a photo of Knight. The police widely distributed the photo and figured an arrest was imminent.

It took eleven more years. After a robbery in March of 2013 at the Pine Tree Camp, Sergeant Terry Hughes, who often volunteered there, contacted the border patrol for advice. "It had gone on long enough," said Hughes. He installed a motion detector that sounded an alarm at his house and practiced dashing from his bed to the camp until he had it down under four minutes. Then Hughes waited for the hermit to return.

Following his arrest, the court of public opinion was deeply divided. The man who wanted to live his life as invisibly as possible had become one of the most famous people in Maine. You could not walk into a bar in the Augusta area without stumbling into a debate about what should be done with Christopher Knight.

Some said that he must immediately be released from jail. Stealing cheese and bacon are not serious crimes. The man was apparently never violent. He didn't carry a weapon. He's an introvert, not a criminal. He clearly has no desire to be a part of our world. Let's open a Kickstarter, get him enough cash for a few years' worth of groceries, and allow him to go back to the woods. Some people were willing to let him live on their land, rent-free.

Others countered that it wasn't the physical items he robbed that made his crimes so disturbing—he stole hundreds of people's peace of mind. Their sense of security. How were they supposed to know Knight wasn't armed and dangerous? Even a single break-in can be punishable by a ten-year sentence. If Knight really wanted to live in the woods, he should've done so on public lands, hunting and fishing for food. He's nothing but a lazy man and a thief times a thousand. Lock him up in the state penitentiary.

On October 28, 2013, Chris appeared in Kennebec County Superior Court and pleaded guilty to thirteen counts of burglary and theft. He was sentenced to seven months in jail—he'd already served all but a week of this, waiting for his case to be resolved. The sentence was far more lenient than it could have been, though even the prosecutor said a long prison term seemed cruel in this case. Chris was ordered to meet with a judge every Monday, and avoid alcohol, and either find a job or go to school. If he violated these terms, he could be sent to prison for seven years.

Before his release, I met with Chris again. He said he'd be returning home, to live with his mother. His beard was unruly—"my crazy hermit beard," he called it. He was alarmingly skinny; he itched all over. We still didn't make much eye contact.

"I don't know your world," he said. "Only my world, and memories of the world before I went into the woods. What life is today? What is proper? I have to figure out how to live." He wished he could return to his camp—"I miss the woods"—but he knew by the rules of his release that this was impossible. "Sitting here in jail, I don't like what I see in the society I'm about to enter. I don't think I'm going to fit in. It's too loud. Too colorful. The lack of aesthetics. The crudeness. The inanities. The trivia."

I told him I agreed with much of his assessment. But, I wondered, what about your world? What insights did you glean from your time alone? I had been trying to ask him these questions every visit, but now I pushed the point harder.

Anyone who reveals what he's learned, Chris told me, is not by his definition a true hermit. Chris had come around on the idea of himself as a hermit, and eventually embraced it. When I mentioned Thoreau, who spent two years at Walden, Chris dismissed him with a single word: "dilettante."

True hermits, according to Chris, do not write books, do not have friends, and do not answer questions. I asked why he didn't at least keep a journal in the woods. Chris scoffed. "I expected to die out there. Who would read my journal? You? I'd rather take it to my grave." The only reason he was talking to me now, he said, is because he was locked in jail and needed practice interacting with others.

"But you must have thought about things," I said. "About your life, about the human condition."

Chris became surprisingly introspective. "I did examine myself," he said. "Solitude did increase my perception. But here's the tricky thing—when I applied my increased perception to myself, I lost my identity. With no audience, no one to perform for, I was just there. There was no need to define myself; I became irrelevant. The moon was the minute hand, the seasons the hour hand. I didn't even have a name. I never felt lonely. To put it romantically: I was completely free."

That was nice. But still, I pressed on, there must have been some grand insight revealed to him in the wild.

He returned to silence. Whether he was thinking or fuming or both, I couldn't tell. Though he did arrive at an answer. I felt like some great mystic was about to reveal the Meaning of Life.

"Get enough sleep."

He set his jaw in a way that conveyed he wouldn't be saying more. This is what he'd learned. I accepted it as truth.

"What I miss most," he eventually continued, "is somewhere between quiet and solitude. What I miss most is stillness." He said he'd watched for years as a shelf mushroom grew on the trunk of a Douglas fir in his camp. I'd noticed the mushroom when I visited—it was enormous—and he asked me with evident concern if anyone had knocked it down. I assured him it was still there. In the height of summer, he said, he'd sometimes sneak down to the lake at night. "I'd stretch out in the water, float on my back, and look at the stars."

At the very end of each of our visits, I'd always asked him the same question. An essential question: Why did he disappear?

He never had a satisfying answer. "I don't have a reason." "I can't explain why." "Give me more time to think about it." "It's a mystery to me, too." Then he became annoyed: "Why? That question bores me."

But during our final visit, he was more reflective. Isn't everybody, he said, seeking the same thing in life? Aren't we all looking for contentment? He was never happy in his youth—not in high school, not with a job, not being around other people. Then he discovered his camp in the woods. "I found a place where I was content," he said. His own perfect spot. The only place in the world he felt at peace.

That was all he had to tell me. He'd grown weary of my visits. Please, he begged, leave me alone; we are not friends. I don't want to be your friend, he said, I don't want to be anyone's friend. "I'm not going to miss you at all," he added.

I liked Chris, a great deal. I liked the way his mind worked; I liked the lyricism of his language. But he was a true hermit. He could no longer disappear into the wild, so he wished to melt away into the world.

"Good-bye, Chris," I said. A guard had appeared to escort him away, but there was time for Chris to express a last thought. He did not. He hung up the phone. No wave; no nod. He stood, turned his back on me, and walked out of the visitors' booth and down a corridor of the jail.