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

[polarbear]

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.

Jeez...

That makes the 5 chin ups I managed this morning look kinda lame...

[NJP]

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.

I could see myself throwing out allot of undies doing that sort of training.

[MIKA27]

The Ultra-Laborious Way The FBI Matched Fingerprints To Paper Files

The FBI just switched over to Next-Generation Identification, a new digital system for keeping track of the 83 million fingerprint cards the bureau maintains. That means dismantling thousands of filing cabinets that were once hand-searched by Bureau employees, twenty-four hours a day. Here’s how they did it.

There’s something astounding about the notion that, for the better part of a century, our nation’s highest criminal and intelligence organisation operated entirely on a human sneakernet. At the time, there was no other way of doing it. But it makes you wonder how many typos, mis-filed papers, human errors, oversights, and other mistakes got lost in the cracks.

Computers might not make those types of mistakes any less likely, but at least it won’t involve as much rummaging around in musty old drawers.

Top Image: Al Capone’s fingerprint sheet,

[MIKA27]

Another Great Way To Prove Moon Hoax Conspiracy Theorists Wrong

Humans have landed on the moon six times, but conspiracy theorists still insist the actual number is zero. They cite bad science, misunderstandings of physics, and outright lies to try to convince you that American astronauts never set foot on our moon. Here’s one more way to prove those wackos wrong.

Space historian Amy Shira Teitel brings us this new video explaining yet again how the moon missions couldn’t have been faked on Earth. This time, the answer is all in the dust — specifically, how the moon dust kicked up by the wheels of the Lunar Rover falls in a way that couldn’t be recreated on Earth:

So, there you have it. As Amy explains in this article for Popular Science’s Vintage Space blog, the rising and falling motion of the dust kicked up by the Lunar Rover’s wheels simply couldn’t be recreated anywhere on Earth. And Hsiang-Wen Hsu and Mihály Horányi, scientists at the Laboratory of Atmospheric and Space Physics at the University of Colorado, Boulder, have proven it with cold, hard maths.

Of course, this is all in addition to the one biggest reason why the moon landings could never, ever have been faked: In the 1960s, not even NASA possessed the technology to make the slow-motion videos we saw from the surface of the Moon. Filmmaker S. G. Collins debunks the “moon hoax” theory in such clinical fashion, it’s amazing.

So there you have it folks: Even more proof that humans indeed set foot on the moon during the Apollo missions. Maybe bookmark it on your phone for easy reference the next time you run into a moon hoaxer.

[MIKA27]

SpaceX Rocket Exploded In The Air During A Test Launch

Well, that’s not supposed to happen. A SpaceX rocket exploded during a test flight in Texas earlier today. This was the second test for the three engine version of SpaceX’s reusable Falcon 9 rocket. There were no injuries.

SpaceX told USA Today that, “an anomaly was detected in the vehicle and the flight termination system automatically terminated the mission.” Elon Musk said on Twitter:

Three engine F9R Dev1 vehicle auto-terminated during test flight. No injuries or near injuries. Rockets are tricky…

http://youtu.be/_z9qbDhIgc8

[MIKA27]

California's Drought Is So Bad, Its Mountains Rose Half An Inch

Water is heavy — ask anyone who screwed up the Ice Bucket Challenge. And California and the rest of the West Coast have precious little of it. The water is so depleted, it’s not weighing down the earth’s surface — and geologists have measured a rise of up to 15 millimeters at GPS stations across the West.

Poring over data from the GPS stations that monitor earthquake activity throughout California, researchers at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography at U.C. San Diego found that the land across the west has experienced an average “uplift” of four millimeters, or 0.15 inches, in the past eighteen months. Stations located in California’s mountains show the greatest uplift, topping out at 15 millimeters or just over half an inch.

You and I might think of the ground beneath our feet as rigid and non-pliable, but that’s not really the case. “Think of the Earth as a big rubber ball,” Scripps geophysics professor Duncan Agnew explained to

Popular Science. “It’s made of material that is elastic, and if you push on it, it goes in a little bit. If that push is taken away, by water evaporating, there’s less weight on that part of the earth, and it goes up.”

Just how massive is that water loss? In a paper published this week in Science, the team estimates the deficit at nearly 240 gigatons, or 63 trillion gallons of water. That much water spread across the entire western United States would run four inches deep.

If there’s one piece of good news here, it’s that the uplift of the tectonic plates in the drought zone shouldn’t change the likelihood of earthquakes or other seismic events. “This will change the stress on faults, but by an amount that’s really small,” Agnew told Popular Science.

That’s probably small solace to the people living through the driest year in over a century, though.

[MIKA27]

The Prius Of Planes Could One Day Replace Helicopters And Jump Jets

Getting an aircraft to launch and land vertically is not difficult. Getting one to launch vertically and then complete a long-endurance flight, however, is an entirely different bag of cats. But a team from NASA’s Langley Research Center believe that they have developed a flight system that can do both tasks equally well. The secret: hybrid power.

The GL-10 “Greased Lightning” is a small-scale tilt-wing, tilt-tail, long endurance, VTOL aircraft prototype. A series of nine props mounted on the swivelling wings and tail structure provide lift, while a pair of tiny diesel engines stored in the fuselage run continually to recharge the plane’s Li-ion batteries — which provide the electric prop motors with the energy needed to get the whole shebang off the ground. It’s much the same premise as the Chevy Volt’s operation, except the diesel engines don’t ever turn off.

This combines the best aspects of both fuel types: the instant torque generated by electric power supplies, melded with the incredible energy density of diesel. Where a purely electric UAV with the same power capacity would only have enough reserves for about a half hour of flight, the GL-10′s diesel tanks can — though theoretically at this point — keep it in the air for up to a full day.

As Langley’s Operational Report on the GL-10 explains:

The GL-10 prototype aircraft efficiently combines two challenging mission objectives: long endurance and Vertical Take-Off and Landing (VTOL) flight. At full scale the design exploits the advantages of a hybrid diesel electric drive train, namely, scalable Distributed Electric Propulsion (DEP). Exploiting this advantage allows an efficient airframe design with lightweight propulsion providing sufficient power required for vertical takeoff as well as efficiently providing significantly lower power required in forward flight for 24 hour endurance.

This increase in efficiency causes a proportional increase in control system and aerodynamic modelling complexity. Propulsion and aerodynamic interactions add to the aerodynamic modelling and control design complexity. Additionally, the aircraft must traverse a difficult flight mode between hover and wing born forward flight, the transition flight mode.

This distributed propulsion approach, though complex aerodynamically, offers advantages: excess power in transition, propulsive control power in all flight modes, beneficial downwash over the wing and tail during low speed transition providing some control surface control power, and downwash that creates a lower wing incidence angle during transition avoiding stall.

The current GL-10 iteration is a 1:2 scale model, measures 3.2m from wingtip to wingtip, and weighs just 27kg. It made its maiden flight (albeit a tethered one) on August 19 and should undergo untethered testing later this year. Even if it proves successful, there isn’t much chance that we’ll see a full-sized version in the skies above anytime soon — NASA is using this prototype exclusively for propulsion research.

Still, the Langley team believes the system they have designed could easily be adapted to aircraft of any size, from hobby R/C planes to hulking commercial airliners. It’s just a matter of scaling up the system.

[MIKA27]

F-16s Flying Over Greenland Look Like Snowspeeders Over Hoth

Enjoy this cool video of some Royal Danish Air Force’s F-16s flying low level over Greenland. I imagine the pilots wearing rebel helmets looking for Imperial AT-AT walkers. Pew pew.

I love the minimalist HUD and cockpit of the F-16s

[MIKA27]

BAE Wants To Make Aeroplanes With Skin That Feels Its Surroundings

BAE’s had another mad brainstorming session, this time developing the concept of a “smart skin” for aeroplanes to help them “feel” their surroundings and detect damage.

Engineers from BAE’s Advanced Technology Centre are testing the idea of embedding “tens of thousands of micro-sensors” into an aeroplane skin that, once applied, could give a pilot more accurate data on things like wind speed, temperature and any physical strain being placed on the plane.

The sensors are so small they could potentially be sprayed on like paint, allowing the easy retrofitting of older planes. Once on, they would run themselves via their own power sources and relay data back to flight computers “in much the same way that human skin sends signals to the brain,” according to BAE.

Obviously aeroplane skin is some way from being a real thing — but it will be interesting to see if or how it gets put to use.

[MIKA27]

The Bird That Builds Nests So Huge They Pull Down Trees

My father worked for over 30 years in construction, falling off of ladders and getting slivers of metal in his eye and generally bleeding profusely. He toiled like a maniac so our family could eat, all while furthering one of humanity’s most indispensable inventions: large-scale construction of shelter. From the most modest roof that my dad once nearly tumbled off of, to Dubai’s 2,716-foot Burj Khalifa, the tallest building in the world, nothing builds like a human.

For its size (and lack of opposable thumbs) though, Africa’s incredible social weaver surely comes close. These birds, about the size of the sparrows here in the States, come together in colonies of as many as 500 individuals to build by far the most enormous nests on Earth, at more than 2,000 pounds and 20 feet long by 13 feet wide by 7 feet thick. The structures are so big they can collapse the trees they’re built in, and so well-constructed they can last for a century, according to Gavin Leighton, a biologist at the University of Miami. Occupying as many as 100 chambers, these are quite possibly the biggest vertebrate societies centered around a single structure—outside of human beings and their skyscrapers, of course.

The social weaver with some building material. Or is that a tiny cigar. I can’t tell.

Calling the semi-arid plains of Namibia and South Africa its home, social weavers make use of several different materials, building the nest by weaving in twig after twig. Then they line the insides of the chambers with luxurious grass and feathers and, occasionally, cotton balls that Leighton accidentally drops in the field (perhaps it’s their keen sense of symbolic justice—he uses the cotton after drawing blood from the birds for genetic sampling).

The weavers will pack into the nest’s chambers three or four at a time, and when they do, the benefits of the enormous structure become clear. Winter nights here regularly dip below freezing, even down under 20 degrees Fahrenheit in the coldest places. At one point in his field work Leighton dropped thermal recorders into chambers, which weavers later that day took up residence in. “I think the nighttime temperature was 30 or 35, and the temperature inside the chamber with three or four birds in it was 70 or 75 degrees Fahrenheit,” he said. “So there’s this really huge thermal benefit to staying in these giant nests.” In the baking summer, too, the chambers provide the birds with a fairly tolerable climate both day and night. Far from the top of the nests, which bake in the sun, the chambers enjoy the shade. And the nest as a whole lags behind the ambient air temperature a bit like a swimming pool, whose waters retain the cool of the evening into the morning and the heat of the afternoon back into the night.

Social weavers build entrances to their nests at the bottom, which makes them more inaccessible to predators other than the dreaded tape-measure-handed human being.

The perks don’t stop there. According to Leighton, by situating the chamber entrances at the bottom of the nest, the birds also likely protect themselves from predation by hawks flying above. And this positioning also helps keep water out. (Interestingly, chambers are never connected—each has a single entrance. Leighton reckons social weavers may have long ago started off building typical weaver nests, which are essentially a tube with an entrance at the bottom, then started bundling them into larger structures.) And from an evolutionary perspective, living in such big groups boosts an individual’s chances of not getting picked off by a predator. You don’t have to run faster than the bear to get away, the maxim goes, you just have to run faster than the guy next to you.

The social weaver’s setup is so sweet that other species are more than happy to squat in their digs. African vultures are fond of hanging out on the roof, and red-headed finches will raise their families in the chambers—as do pygmy falcons, birds of prey more than capable of killing their landlords. Indeed, while it’s not common, “it has been documented that pygmy falcons will sometimes eat social weavers,” said Leighton. “Which is kind of a depressing thought, because social weavers are building and maintaining this giant apartment complex, and then a predator moves in and starts eating them.”

“But given that it is very rare for pygmy falcons to take sociable weavers,” he added, “it may be worth the risk to have them around if they intimidate not only snakes but potentially other bird species looking to squat in one of the nest chambers.” Thus do the falcons act as the apartment complex’s doormen of sorts—doormen that may lose their cool and eat a resident every once in a while.

That’s not to say social weavers don’t stand up for themselves. Should a snake wander up the tree or a pygmy falcon land on their roof, they’ll crowd around the menace and fire out high-pitched alarm calls—incessantly. While this may scare away smaller birds, it does little good on falcons and serpents. Curiously, the weavers won’t aggressively take to the air and flock to scare away their enemies, as crows or mockingbirds do. Why that is, Leighton can’t say for sure.

Make a call in South Africa and your voice could well travel through a social weaver nest.

Social weavers can also fall victim to their own success. While some nests may stand for decade after decade, others can get so waterlogged in the rainy season that the trees that support them collapse under the weight. “And actually the nest I was working on, this most recent summer the entire tree just fell over,” said Leighton. “It ruined part of the nest, but some of the tree limbs that are still sticking out of the ground” are supporting active chambers.

But oddly enough, in these days of human-induced mass extinction, social weaver populations are actually on the rise. For that they can thank telephone poles, which they’re more than happy to use as artificial trees to build on—indeed Leighton says he finds posts colonized one after the other as far as the eye can see.

If that’s not a good call, I don’t know what is.

[MIKA27]

Actor and director Richard Attenborough dies aged 90

Oscar-winning British film director Richard Attenborough has died at the age of 90, his son has said.

Lord Attenborough was one of Britain's leading actors, before becoming a highly successful director.

In a career that spanned six decades, he appeared in films including Brighton Rock, World War Two prisoner of war thriller The Great Escape and later in dinosaur blockbuster Jurassic Park.

As a director he was perhaps best known for Gandhi, which won him two Oscars.

Sir Ben Kingsley, who played the title role, said he would "miss him dearly".

"Richard Attenborough trusted me with the crucial and central task of bringing to life a dream it took him 20 years to bring to fruition.

"When he gave me the part of Gandhi it was with great grace and joy. He placed in me an absolute trust and in turn I placed an absolute trust in him and grew to love him."

Lord Attenborough had been in a nursing home with his wife for a number of years, BBC arts editor Will Gompertz said.

He had also been in a wheelchair since falling down stairs six years ago, our correspondent added.

His son told the BBC that Lord Attenborough died at lunchtime on Sunday.

His family is expected to make a full statement on Monday.

'Huge impact'

Paying tribute, Prime Minister David Cameron tweeted: "His acting in "Brighton Rock" was brilliant, his directing of "Gandhi" was stunning - Richard Attenborough was one of the greats of cinema."

Actress Mia Farrow tweeted: "Richard Attenborough was the kindest man I have ever had the privilege of working with. A Prince. RIP 'Pa' - and thank you."

Chris Hewitt from Empire Magazine told BBC News Lord Attenborough had a "huge impact" on cinema, describing him as a "universally beloved" figure.

Tribute was paid to the Labour peer from his party.

"Lord Attenborough made an enormous contribution to our country and to the film industry both as an actor and a director. His films will be loved for generations to come," it said.

"He believed passionately in social justice and the Labour Party and was a vocal campaigner against apartheid. He will be sadly missed. Our thoughts are with his family and friends."

[MIKA27]

The Mystical Forbidden Mountain of the Himalayas

As human civilization advances and our technology progresses, the world is in a sense becoming smaller and smaller. We have poked prodded at, explored, and conquered so much of our planet that there seems to be nowhere humanity has not touched, nowhere that has managed to stay hidden from our gaze. Besides perhaps the deep seas, there is the feeling that few uncharted frontiers remain concealed from us or unconquered by us. It sometimes seems we live in a world where whatever mysteries have long gestated in the remote places of the world have already been brought out for all to see, that the darkest corners of the world have already been illuminated, and that such mysteries have faded from our planet over time as we push ever deeper into the wilderness.

However, even as human progress and exploration inexorably scratches and pounds at the fringes of our world and understanding, there are still some places in the world that have remained mostly untouched and undefeated by man. One such place lies high in the cold remoteness of the Himalayan mountains. In this place of desolate, bitter cold, unforgiving biting winds, and jagged peaks looms a virtually unexplored mountain steeped in myth and magic known as Gangkhar Puensum, located in Bhutan near the border with China. It may seem surprising that despite the fact that humankind had already summited the 20 highest peaks in the world by 1975, Gangkhar Puensum remains even in modern times untouched, unmounted, and indeed at an elevation of 7,570 metres (24,836 ft) the highest unclimbed mountain in the world.

Gangkhar Puensum

Gangkhar Puensum has always been somewhat of an enigma, and has presented numerous challenges to those who would climb it. When the elevation of the mountain was first measured in 1922, the maps of the region were shockingly inaccurate. For years, different maps would show the mountain as varying heights and even place it in entirely different locations. It was hard for people to even locate Gankhar Puensum let alone climb it, and some of the first expeditions to the mountain were unable to even find it at all. In addition, there are disputes even to this day over which country the mountain lies in, with Bhutan claiming the entirety of it and China claiming a border that cuts through its northern half.

Until 1983, mountaineering was not even permitted in Bhutan since the country sought to preserve the pristine condition and spiritual importance of its sacred peaks. Local mythology gives further reason for the traditional closure of the mountains, as they were said to be the haunts of various spirits of myth and legend. When Bhutan finally opened its doors to mountaineering as a commercial pursuit for the purpose of tourism, many mountain climbers immediately set their sights on Gangkhar Puensum, the country’s highest mountain and therefore the one with the most prestige waiting for those who could fight their way to the top.

The unconquered Gangkhar Puensum

In the ensuing years, 4 expeditions would be mounted to try and reach Gangkhar Puensum’s summit, a goal that would ultimately remain elusive. None of the expeditions managed to accomplish the feat, either due to being poorly equipped or by encountering impassable terrain, and even freak weather changes as if the mountain itself did not want to be climbed. All of these expeditions went home in failure, and conquering the elusive summit of Gangkhar Puensum became almost a mythical quest among climbers in the mountaineering community. They would never have the chance. Although further expeditions were in the pipeline, as suddenly as Bhutan’s peaks had been opened, they were closed again. Bhutan’s government finally caved into pressure from locals who were unhappy that the mountains, long thought to be the domain of ancient spirits, had been opened to outsiders. In response to the outcry, Bhutan ended up prohibiting the climbing of mountains higher than 6,000 meters in 1994, thereby making sure that the towering, unclimbed Gangkhar Puensum would remain that way forever.

The closing of Bhutan’s peaks did not discourage everyone. In 1998, a well-funded Japanese expedition made an attempt to scale the mountain by exploiting what they saw as a loophole. They surmised that although Gangkhar Puensum was closed from the Bhutan side, they could simply climb it from China, who claimed a border cutting through the mountain. They subsequently obtained permission from the Chinese Mountaineering Association and it seemed everything was in order for the well-equipped team. However, it was not meant to be, and Gangkhar Puensum would prove to defeat yet another team. Bhutan, who had always claimed sole ownership of the mountain, was less than thrilled with the Japanese expedition’s antics and the border dispute caused China to withdraw its permission and thus block the Japanese team’s bid to climb it.

Humbled but not defeated, the Japanese team settled on being the first to climb a subsidiary peak of Gangkhar Puensum called Liankang Kangri, at an elevation of 7, 535 m (24,413 ft). Notes taken by the team during their ascent suggested that with their expertise and high tech equipment, they could have technically made it to the top of Gangkhar Puensum, but no one knows for sure if they would have been successful, or joined prior expeditions in being thwarted by the mountain. Would they have been the first to climb this mystical mountain? Can anybody do it? The fact is that it is quite likely that no one ever will know the answer to these questions.

Gangkhar Puensum is a place full of mystery. Yeti, strange lights, magnetic anomalies, and strange disappearances have all been reported from here. What secrets does this insurmountable peak hold? For the time being, it appears that no one will ever know, and that this towering giant will remain one of the last great untouched frontiers of the world for quite some time.

[MIKA27]

What Caused the Earth to Crack in Mexico?

On or about August 15, 2014, a one kilometer (.6 mile) long, eight meter (26 feet) deep and up to 5 meters (16 feet) wide crack opened in the ground near Hermosillo in Mexico, cutting across Highway 26 between Hermosillo and the coast and puzzling experts and locals as to its cause.

This video footage was taken by the Hermosillo Desde El Cielo (Hermosillo From the Sky). The video was made using a drone and was initially thought to be a fraud because of its quality. Local residents and farmers are being forced to detour around it using extreme caution because the soil is loose and the ground still unstable. In fact, another smaller crack opened nearby across Highway 4.

Initial speculation pointed to an earthquake at the San Andreas Fault at about the same time. It’s believed that there was once an underground stream, now dry, in this area and the quake could have caused the unsupported ground to collapse. There has also been heavy rains in the area that could have saturated the ground with water before the collapse, but the land shown in the video appears to be pretty dry.

Location of Hermosillo where the crack occurred.

According to the El Imparcial newspaper, investigators discovered that local farmers had built a rainwater levee that was leaking, which could be another cause of an underground stream.

No one has said with any degree of certainty what caused the collapse, so let’s look at some other possibilities. It could be a dormant Mexican volcano beginning to rumble. It’s a remote area of Mexico, a country with sizable oil resources. Could it be the result of drilling or fracking? Are the fracking-related earthquakes in the U.S. gaining intensity and crossing the border? Although it’s a crack and not a hole, could it be related to the Siberian holes which still haven’t been explained conclusively?

[MIKA27]

SPHELAR SOLAR FLASHLIGHT

This elegant, efficient, and eco-friendly flashlight features an innovative technology called Sphelar, it consists of small orbs that capture sun rays from all directions(unlike conventional flat solar cells), maximizing the amount of light absorbed. The Flashlight is a MoMA Store exclusive and comes with a handsome wooden base and can be used also as a ambient light, a bike light, or as a spotlight by threading a lanyard trough the handle. A full charge will provide up to 4 hours of LED brightness. Expensive? yes, but you´ll never have to buy batteries again

[MIKA27]

Where the Five-Day Work week Came From

“Seven days,” wrote Witold Rybczynski in the August 1991 issue of The Atlantic, “is not natural because no natural phenomenon occurs every seven days.” The year marks one revolution of the Earth around the sun. Months, supposedly, mark the time between full moons. The seven-day week, however, is completely man-made.

If it’s man-made, can’t man unmake it? For all the talk of how freeing it’d be to shave a day or two off the five-day workweek, little attention has been paid to where the weekly calendar came from. Understanding the sometimes arbitrary origins of the modern workweek might inform the movement to shorten it.

The roots of the seven-day week can be traced back about 4,000 years, to Babylon. The Babylonians believed there were seven planets in the solar system, and the number seven held such power to them that they planned their days around it. Their seven-day, planetary week spread to Egypt, Greece, and eventually to Rome, where it turns out the Jewish people had their own version of a seven-day week. (The reason for this is unclear, but some have speculated that the Jews adopted this after their exile in Babylon in the sixth century B.C.) At the very latest, the seven-day week was firmly entrenched in the Western calendar about 250 years before Christ was born.

The earliest recorded use of the word “weekend,” Rybczynski notes, occurred in 1879 in an English magazine called Notes and Queries:

In Staffordshire, if a person leaves home at the end of his week’s work on the Saturday afternoon to spend the evening of Saturday and the following Sunday with friends at a distance, he is said to be spending his week-end at So-and-so.

Some 19th-century Britons used the week's seventh day for merriment rather than for the rest prescribed by scripture. They would drink, gamble, and enjoy themselves so much that the phenomenon of “Saint Monday,” in which workers would skip work to recover from Sunday's gallivanting, emerged. English factory owners later compromised with workers by giving them a half-day on Saturday in exchange for guaranteed attendance at work on Monday.

It took decades for Saturday to change from a half-day to a full day’s rest. In 1908, a New England mill became the first American factory to institute the five-day week. It did so to accommodate Jewish workers, whose observance of a Saturday sabbath forced them to make up their work on Sundays, offending some in the Christian majority. The mill granted these Jewish workers a two-day weekend, and other factories followed this example. The Great Depression cemented the two-day weekend into the economy, as shorter hours were considered a remedy to underemployment.

Nearly a century later, mills have been overtaken by more advanced technologies, yet the five-day workweek remains the fundamental organizing concept behind when work is done. Its obsolescence has been foretold for quite a while now: A 1965 Senate subcommittee predicted Americans would work 14-hour weeks by the year 2000, and before that, back in 1928, John Maynard Keynes wrote that technological advancement would bring the work week down to 15 hours within 100 years.

There’s reason to believe that a seven-day week with a two-day weekend is an inefficient technology: A growing body of research and corporate case studies suggests that a transition to a shorter workweek would lead to increased productivity, improved health, and higher employee-retention rates.

The five-day work week might be limiting productivity. A study in the American Journal of Epidemiology found that those who worked 55 hours per week performed more poorly on some mental tasks than those who worked 40 hours per week. And Tony Schwartz, the author of Be Excellent at Anything, told Harvard Business Review that people work best in intense 90-minute bursts followed by periods of recovery. Taken together, these findings suggest that with the right scheduling of bursts and rests, workers could get a similar amount of work done over a shorter period of time.

Moreover, there’s some anecdotal evidence that a four-day workweek might increase productivity. Google’s Larry Page has praised the idea, even if he hasn’t implemented it. And Jason Fried, the CEO of Basecamp, has his employees work four-day, 32-hour weeks for half of the year. “When you have a compressed workweek, you tend to focus on what’s important. Constraining time encourages quality time, ” he wrote an op-ed in The New York Times. “Better work gets done in four days than in five,” he concluded.

Beyond working more efficiently, a four-day workweek appears to improve morale and well-being. The president of the U.K. Faculty of Public Health told the Daily Mail that a four-day work week could help lower blood pressure and increase mental health among employees. Jay Love of Slingshot SEO saw his employee-retention rate shoot up when he phased in three-day weekends. Following this line of thought, TreeHouse, an online education platform,implemented a four-day week to attract workers, which has contributed to the company's growth.

That said, the five-day workweek might already have so much cultural intertia that it can’t be changed. Most companies can’t just tell employees not to come in on Fridays, because they'd be at a disadvantage in a world that favors the five-day workweek.

But there’s a creative solution to this problem. David Stephens, a consultant based in Houston, detailed in a post on LinkedIn the clever system devised at a company he used to work for. The company was divided into two teams. One would work from 7 a.m. until 6 p.m. from Monday to Thursday, and the other would work those hours from Tuesday to Friday. The teams would switch schedules every week, so every two-day weekend would be followed by a four-day weekend. The results, Stephens reports, were positive. The company was open five days a week, from 7 a.m. to 6 p.m. instead of 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. He claims that morale skyrocketed. Employees took fewer sick days, visiting the doctor in off hours rather than during the workday.

In this scenario, employees still work 40-hour weeks, but they do so over the course of four days rather than five. This arrangement still sounds sub-optimal, though, as working at full capacity for 10 hours is more demanding than doing so for eight. Despite that, the employees at Stephens’s company still preferred 40 hours in four days to 40 hours in five days. They might be even happier—and work even better—if they worked fewer hours in addition to fewer days.

Given the ongoing conversation about how most of the old ways are just sitting there, waiting to be disrupted, it’s surprising that the traditional workweek remains wholly intact. On top of that, one would think that the slew of corporate perks deployed to attract top talent would have by now extended to a re-envisioning of the two-day weekend. But it hasn’t.

Of course, the upsides of a four-day weekend have yet to be truly borne out, but there’s a lot of evidence that suggests it’s a good idea. So, for now, there appears to be an untapped way for companies to bring on and retain high-quality employees: Shorten the work-week. And figure out a way to do that before everyone else does.

[MIKA27]

Northrop Grumman Shows Off Its Experimental Spaceplane Concept

In mid-July the Defence Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) awarded contracts to Boeing, Masten Space Systems, and Northrop Grumman to develop an unmanned spaceplane to travel hypersonic speeds in the upper atmosphere — as easily as a commercial airliner.

This week we got to see what Northrop Grumman’s vision of such a spacecraft would look like.

Working with Scaled Composites, an aerospace company owned by Northrop Grumman, and Richard Branson’s Virgin Galactic, the XS-1 (which means experimental spaceplane) must travel Mach 10 or higher, travel 10 times in 10 days, and carry 3,000 to 5,000-pound payloads for less than $US5 million as per DARPA’s rules.

A press release details that the XS-1 will have a reusable booster that Grumman stresses is “affordable” with “aircraft-like” operations. This first stage looks to be at the heart of the design as the team says the booster enables “new generations of lower cost, innovative, and more resilient spacecraft.” The upper stages of the aircraft will help deploy satellites and other possible payloads into orbit.

“We plan to bundle proven technologies into our concept that we developed during related projects for DARPA, NASA, and the U.S. Air Force Research Laboratory,” said Doug Young, a vp with Northrop Grumman, in an official statement. So it seems Grumman will be pulling from its portfolio of projects to meet DARPA’s lofty goals.

Landings and takeoffs will also need to be as efficient (if not more) than the spaceplane’s fuel-guzzling appetite. Grumman says it will use a transporter erector launcher(!), minimal ground crew and autonomous in-flight systems. On its return trip, the XS-1 will land horizontally, just like your everyday 747. Branson’s Virgin Galactic will offer a majority of its expertise helping with XS-1′s commercial operations. Boeing is also getting a little commercial spaceflight help from Jeff Bezos’ company Blue Origins. We won’t get to see the products of these companies’ combined efforts until DARPA holds its phase 2 competition sometime in 2015. And a few years after that we’ll see the first spaceplane mission launch.

[MIKA27]

Just Six Months After The Olympics, Sochi Looks Like A Ghost Town

It’s been almost exactly six months since the Sochi Olympics wrapped up and the world promptly moved on to speculating about the Rio 2016. Since then, the town of Sochi has been left holding the proverbial bag — which as Russian photographer Alexander Belenkiy shows us, is full of too many buildings and not enough people to occupy them.

Belenkiy traveled to Sochi in early August to shoot the town on its six month anniversary of the Olympics, and he describes what he found as a “ghost town,” a “huge wasteland” that’s “abandoned.” Now, in fairness, it’s the summer season in Sochi, an essentially winter-specific resort. And it’s worth pointing out that Sochi is preparing to open Russia’s first F1 racetrack, which could serve to bolster tourism in the city.

Still, his photos paint a bleak picture, showing a neighbourhood — Rosa Khutor — that’s all but abandoned, strewn with toilets that were never installed and stacks of bricks that never made it into actual walls.

It’s a sad scene — and it’s one that’s been repeated across the world as Olympic host cities struggle with the economic burden of their investments. A few weeks ago, we looked at how the Olympic Village in Athens is now in ruins. Unless something changes, it seems Sochi could eventually follow in its path.

[MIKA27]

How Skype Translator Learns Language From Social Media

When Microsoft and Skype revealed Skype Translator in May, everyone displayed awe and wonder at a service that could finally traverse the language barrier. The premise was that the Skype Translator app would convert speech in real time allowing fluid conversation between speaking partners with different lingual tongues.

Accomplishing something so monumental (and also releasing the beta later this year) is, in itself, a massive challenge. However, there’s another layer to this science fiction babel fish, and that’s learning the differences between writing and speaking.

Teresa Chong with IEEE Spectrum spoke with the Microsoft development team in Redmond, Wash., about how exactly Skype Translator will handle all the “ums,” “ahs,” you knows,” and “likes” that pockmark everyday speech as well as vocal inflections, which separate a question from a statement. Chong highlights the main problem:

The gap exists between translating text and translating speech because some of the best machine translation systems today are taught using large volumes of high-quality text, which does not include the awkwardness that speech recognition systems deal with.

First, Microsoft took the traditional approach, but instead of only mapping phrases between languages, the team went a step further and mapped individual words as well. This helped overcome grammatical inconsistencies across languages. However, this soon brought them to social media where each platform — primarily Facebook, SMS, and Twitter — brought a unique challenge. The researchers adapted “social media text nomalization platform” to their existing system and improved text translation by six per cent with one developer saying “it really did move the needle on understanding and translating that type of data better.”

This is another example of how social media is indispensable for research, not just in the social sciences, but in computer science as well. Hopefully, Microsoft will also benefit from Reddit, Imgur, and Twitch’s recent endeavours with the Digital Ecologies Research Partnership (of course, called “DERP“), which allows researchers access to community-driven data across their platform.

The evolution of machine language learning is constantly evolving, and now our hashtags, posts, tweets, and digital slang will be a part of Skype Translator’s future.

[MIKA27]

Russia Is Already Invading Ukraine

A military helicopter accompanies the Russian truck convoy that entered Ukraine on Friday.

On Friday, Russia sent a supply column of more than 200 trucks rumbling into Ukraine and then, the next day, back out again. Since the Ukraine crisis began, Moscow has done many dangerous and deadly things. But this convoy ranks as one of the oddest. Until now, Russia has discreetly supplied the pro-Russian militias in eastern Ukraine with tanks, rockets, and other heavy equipment. This time, however, Russia invited reporters to view a fleet of vehicles violating the border. Why? The question becomes even more perplexing when you consider that, according to the BBC, many of the trucks were “mostly empty.”

Russia itself described the convoy as a humanitarian act, designed to carry necessary supplies (including baby food) to the shrinking Russian-controlled enclave in eastern Ukraine. But while Russian state media broadcast video of the trucks driving toward Ukraine, they did not bother with images of the trucks unloading their aid to grateful recipients. It’s as if they didn’t much care whether their propaganda convinced anyone or not. Their coverage leaves the impression that so publicly violating the border was the end in itself.

Russia started with the so-called “little green men”—Russian soldiers without insignia on their green uniforms—then proceeded with uniforms with epaulets and the annexation of Crimea. Russia has been the force behind, and on the ground, with the separatists in eastern Ukraine.

It is an invasion that is already well in place.

The comments above are from an August 18 interview with Strobe Talbott, a longtime Russia expert and the current president of the Brookings Institution. Talbott identifies a fact of this crisis that cannot be repeated often enough: Throughout, Russia has pursued a policy of escalation, acting more aggressively and more visibly from month to month to month. Russia escalated the conflict after the annexation of Crimea. It escalated when Ukraine finally began to fight back against the pro-Russian militias that seized cities in the east. It escalated even as the casualty count rose from zero to hundreds to now more than 2,000. It escalated despite global shock after the shootdown of a Malaysia Airlines flight killed almost 300 citizens of 10 countries. It’s escalating again now.

On the same day as the convoy’s theatrical but seemingly pointless mission, NATO officials publicly charged that “Russian artillery support—both cross-border and from within Ukraine—is being employed against the Ukrainian armed forces.” Russian military units are now firing at Ukrainian forces from positions on Ukrainian territory. If that’s not an invasion, it’s hard to know what else to call it.

Invasion is the reason why this conflict is not just a local story, of interest only to neighbors. Russia has been rejecting the post-1991 division of the Soviet Union’s former territories for many years: in Transnistria, in South Ossetia, in Abkhazia, and in other places that might be difficult for Americans to find on a map. Now that rejection of the post-1991 division has provoked open warfare between two of Europe’s largest states.

Ukraine did not resist the Russian annexation of Crimea. But as Russian aggression has continued against mainland Ukraine, resistance has gathered—and grown ever more lethal for civilian populations. Only around 330 of the 2,000 recorded casualties have been Ukrainian soldiers. Poorly trained and equipped, the Ukrainian armed forces have fought back by blasting artillery and rocket launchers in the general direction of Russian and pro-Russian occupying forces. It’s wise practice to disbelieve most of what you hear on Russian state TV, but not all the allegations of misdirected Ukrainian fire are false.

On a visit to Kiev to celebrate the country’s August 24 independence day, German Chancellor Angela Merkel urged both Russia and Ukraine to reach a peaceful settlement. She backed her emollient words with a pledge of 500 million euros for reconstruction and the resettlement of refugees. But it takes two to make peace, and only one to force war. As newly elected Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko told Merkel: “Please, take away armed men from our territory and I can guarantee that peace in Ukraine will be established very soon.”

[MIKA27]

Forget The Rest. Here's The Greatest Tribute To Robin Williams

As the world mourned the truly tragic death of Robin Williams thousands of compilation videos, quotes, outtakes, stories and photos circulated around the web.

All wonderful odes to the man that brought so much laughter to the world and put so many smiles on so many faces.

But out of all the tributes I've seen, this is one that we think even Robin Williams himself would love.

Created by YouTube user Melodysheep its a musical tribute to the man himself, complete with references from Patch Adams, Hook and the timeless Mrs. Doubtfire.

And whilst it's sure to tug on the heartstrings, it will also put a smile on your face.

That's why I think it's perfect tribute to a man who was celebrated & loved around the world for doing just that.

[MIKA27]

Raising the Dead, Kind Of…

While most people are content to let the dead remain dead – even if they would dearly like to see their loved just one last time – that is certainly not always the case. Take, for example, Giovanni Aldini. Although many have seen fit to dismiss him as an outright crank, or as a definitive mad professor-type, this is not the case at all.

Born in 1762, Aldini, at the age of thirty-six, achieved the position of a professor of physics at the University of Bologna, in northern Italy. Although much of his work was focused upon issues of a very much down to earth nature, there was a darker, and highly controversial side to Aldini, too.

It’s important to note that Aldini was the nephew of one Luigi Galvani, also of the University of Bologna. Galvani – from whose name the term “galvanism” is directly derived – was someone who spent a great deal of time experimenting on dead frogs.

Galvani came to realize that while it was not possible to breathe new life into the dead creatures, directing an electric current through the spinal cord of the frogs caused the creatures to twitch and move as if they were alive – or had been successfully brought back from the other side.

Not only was Aldini deeply influenced by the work of his uncle Luigi, he took matters yet another step further. It was, in fact, just about the most controversial step of them all that anyone could take.

To say that Aldini literally reanimated the dead would be incorrect. It would be right on target, however, to say that he animated them. And he did so in a fashion that followed directly in the path of Luigi Galvani. But, Aldini’s grisly experiments were not undertaken on frogs: his test-subjects were nothing less than the human dead.

Unlike Edison, Aldini’s subjects were already dead. *cough* Topsy *cough*

Such was the scale of the public and media fascination with Aldini’s work in the fields of galvanism – that some even perceived as being outright devilish in nature – he traveled the length and breadth of Europe demonstrating how, in an uncanny and disturbing fashion, the dead could be made to appear not quite so dead, after all. As was the case with his Uncle Luigi, Aldini’s work was all based around the careful application and use of electric currents.

Certainly, the most memorable and fear-inducing of all Aldini’s experiments occurred in 1803, at the London, England-based Royal College of Surgeons. Aldini’s test-subject was a man named George Forster, who had been hanged by the neck on January 18, 1803, after being found guilty of murdering – by drowning – both his wife and his youngest child.

Aldini wasted no time in securing Forster’s fresh corpse for his strange experimentation. The result was uncanny and amazing: only mere hours after his death, Forster was on the move again, so to speak.

As a captivated and spellbound audience looked on in near-hypnotic fashion, Aldini attached two conducting rods to a large battery.

The other ends of the rods were affixed, respectively, to Forster’s right ear and mouth. When the surge of electricity hit Forster’s body with full force, something incredible and obscene occurred: Forster’s left-eye opened wide, appearing to stare wildly and malevolently at the shocked crowds, and his jaw began to move and quiver, as if he was about to utter something awful and guttural.

If that was not enough to provoke terror in all those in attendance, when the electrified rods were attached to Forster’s right arm, his hand rose and his fist clenched. There were audible gasps in the audience and more than a couple even fainted on the spot.

Aldini was not a carnival showman, however. That’s to say he did not deceive his audiences into thinking that he had literally raised the dead. Certainly, he was careful to point out that the power of electricity only appeared to make the dead come back to life.

Nevertheless, in later years, and hardly surprisingly, Aldini became known as a definitive, real-life Dr. Frankenstein, even though he was actually nothing of the sort.

Aldini died in 1834, at the age of seventy-two. His reputation as an animator of the dead remains intact two centuries after his death (from which, in case you may be wondering, he did not return).

[MIKA27]

China Says New Supersonic Sub Would Reach San Francisco In 100 Minutes

China claims it has found a way to create a supersonic underwater vessel that could travel from China to San Francisco in less than two hours using new developments in supercavitation. This could be extremely useful for travel — but also for the development of underwater weapons. In fact, this is a military project.

This technique was originally developed for Shakval, a torpedo capable of reaching 370 km/h developed by the Soviet Navy during the Cold War. The size of the bubble and the speed was limited.

Now this new Chinese research claims they have found a way to generate a much bigger air bubble, drastically reducing friction of large underwater vessels. They say they would be able to create a full-size supercavitating submarine capable of reaching the speed of sound underwater — about 5800km/h. That or a sneaky, big arse supersonic nuclear missile, of course.

[MIKA27]

BEER FREEZE: SELF-CHILLING BEER GLASS

There’s nothing worse than getting home from a long day of work, and popping open a lukewarm bottle of beer. Ensure you never have to experience this agony again with Beer Freeze, the self-chilling beer glass.

Crafted from BPA-free plastic, the glass’s built-in proprietary cooling gel will keep your brew colder, longer. Simply throw this bad boy in the freezer, and you’ve got cold beer on demand – a full pint of it at that (well almost a pint). The insulated rubber grip keeps your hands warm, and while this thing could technically be used for any beverage you could think of, it was created specifically for beer. So, we’ll keep it that way. [Purchase]

[MIKA27]

OVERADE PLIXI FOLDING HELMET

Helmets are an essential piece of equipment for bike commuters, but after the ride is over they become quite a hassle to put away. The Pixi helmet helps make life a lot easier, it features an unique and patented folding mechanism so you can easily tuck it into a bag, while still providing a maximum level of safety and comfort.

[polarbear]

Forget The Rest. Here's The Greatest Tribute To Robin Williams

As the world mourned the truly tragic death of Robin Williams thousands of compilation videos, quotes, outtakes, stories and photos circulated around the web.

All wonderful odes to the man that brought so much laughter to the world and put so many smiles on so many faces.

But out of all the tributes I've seen, this is one that we think even Robin Williams himself would love.

Created by YouTube user Melodysheep its a musical tribute to the man himself, complete with references from Patch Adams, Hook and the timeless Mrs. Doubtfire.

And whilst it's sure to tug on the heartstrings, it will also put a smile on your face.

That's why I think it's perfect tribute to a man who was celebrated & loved around the world for doing just that.

Ok... That one got me a little misty