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

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Woman Killed by Bus at Burning Man

A woman was killed at the Burning Man festival in Nevada's Black Rock Desert after falling under a moving bus just after midnight on August 27th. According to USA Today, the bus was transporting passengers around the festival when the accident occurred. The woman, whose name was not yet released, was pronounced dead at the scene. While vehicles are banned from festival grounds, the bus was part of the Burning Man transportation system and was required to travel no faster than 5 miles per hour. It's unclear whether drugs or alcohol played a role in the woman's death.

"This is a terrible accident," Burning Man co-founder Marian Goodell said in a statement. "Our thoughts and prayers are with her family, friends and campmates. Black Rock Rangers and Emergency Services Department staff are providing support to those affected." This marks the first death on the festival grounds since a festivalgoer fell under a trailer seven years ago, USA Today reports.

It's been a rough start for Burning Man 2014: As Rolling Stone reported earlier this week, the opening day ceremonies were canceled after rainstorms swept through the festival area on Tuesday, making the roads leading to the grounds "un-drivable." Organizers hoped that the area would dry out by midday Tuesday. "Weather on the playa is often violent and unpredictable. Dust storms, high winds, freezing temperatures, rain – Burning Man has seen each of these at various times," the Burning Man website warns. It's unclear whether any residual damage from the rainstorms played a role in this accident.

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This Crazy Ping Pong Table Houses A 2800W Sound System

If you feel like your table tennis set-up needs a little more… oomph, then look no further than Stiga’s new Studio table: a regulation playing surface that happens to pack a 2800W sound system. Beer pong will never be the same again.

Lurking beneath the table’s stealth-black surface are eight 6 x 9 speakers, two 12-inch subwoofers, an amplifier and Bluetooth connectivity. There’s also LED lighting that reacts to the music and a mic input for, I don’t know, MCing in your basement? Ping pong parties? Impromptu karaoke? Whatever you fancy, really.

The only drawback is is that the set-up costs a staggering $US15,000. You could, of course, buy a car instead, but ping pong is quite a lot of fun. And for that price they will generously throw in free delivery and premium installation service. Availability is, apparently, very limited though — so you better be quick if you want to grab one.

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The Mystery Of Death Valley's 'Sailing Stones' Is Finally Solved

On a dried-up lake bed in Death Valley are dozens of rocks that have puzzled us for decades. The rocks have each left a dusty trail, evidence of some unknown force propelling them forward. Scientists have now finally observed the rocks moving and settled on an explanation: thin ice and a gentle breeze.

Speculation about the origin of these sailing stones has ranged from hurricane-force winds to slippery algae films. In contrast, the rocks are actually being pushed around by delicate sheets of ice skating on sand, a solution that’s just gentle and non-grandiose enough to be true. The idea doesn’t come out of the blue; back in 2011, a scientist published his ice raft model after experimenting with sand in a Tupperware container.

What is really remarkable is that in a study published today in PLOS ONE, scientists observed the rocks actually moving for the first time. The whole experiment actually started four years ago, when a team of scientists — including our aforementioned Tupperware experimenter — set up cameras and actually GPS-tracked rocks on the dried lakebed of Racetrack Playa. They had no idea if the cameras and GPS would actually capture anything.

A GPS-tagged rock scooting on Racetrack Playa.

Then in December 2013, a perfect storm of ice and wind set hundreds of rocks sliding along the lakebed. The researchers observed the cracking of a thin layer of ice that had formed on Racetrack Playa. A light but steady wind then pushed the ice pieces around, where they would accumulate behind rocks and push them forward. The rocks travelled as much as 60m and as fast as 16km/h. For the first time, this was all captured on camera.

http://youtu.be/UCiBhmwAkGk

But is this the whole story? The scientists point out that the largest boulders didn’t budge during this perfect wind storm — there could be another explanation for how they move. There could still be mysteries yet at Racetrack Playa.

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Take A Birds-Eye Tour Of Apple's Huge Spaceship Campus

The internet is slowly being swallowed whole by an endless influx of drone videos, but sometimes they give stunning views of locations we’d never see otherwise. This time, one YouTuber strapped a GoPro Hero 3+ to a DJI Phantom 2 drone and took a peek at Apple’s upcoming “Spaceship” campus.

Steve Jobs announced Apple’s second campus way back in 2006. Since then, we’ve been teased with stunning renders of its circular design and statistics on just how massive this structure is going to be (Hint: Bigger than the Empire State Building and the Pentagon). In fact, people are so fascinated with the building that you can even take a digitally rendered exterior tour of the campus already.

The $US5 billion project officially broke ground in 2013, and construction crews are wasting no time. In late April, a San Francisco news affiliate KCBS caught aerial photos of the structure assuming its circular form.

In four short months, the building is much more pronounced, and it looks like its size has not been exaggerated. That’s no campus, it’s a Spaceship.

Apple plans to move into its new digs in 2016

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The New Alienware Area-51 Is The Weirdest Gaming PC I've Ever Seen

Alienware is famous for two things: 1) selling ever more powerful gaming computers, and 2) making them look like they were designed by aliens. But its latest full-size desktop gaming PC isn’t just another box sculpted to look like it’s out of this world. In fact, the new Alienware Area-51 is trying to challenge the assumption that PC gamers need a “box” at all.

Three years ago, Alienware decided to figure out how people actually use desktop towers at home. Usually, the answer was tucking them away under a desk, creating chiropractic nightmares. “It’s pretty uncomfortable to interface with the system if you have look under the desk and try to find the port,” says Alienware boss Frank Azor. “And if you wanted to plug something into the back of your desktop, that was a mission all its own.”

But Azor asserts that the new Area-51, with its 22-inch tall triangular-hexagonal body, which they call a Triad chassis, cuts down on back-breaking incursions into the shadowy PC underworld. The cabinet’s front sloping interface offers easy access to USB ports and headphone jacks, and better still, the entire chassis can also be pulled forward, pivoting on its front edge, to help plug in cables and additional devices on the back. The back also includes LEDs to light up the rear panel so you can actually see what you’re doing.

The new design also minds the gap, specifically between the wall and the computer, to help create what the Alienware engineers call “a controlled thermal exhaust.” Basically, as a triangle, it’s pretty impossible to have the back vents pushed up right against the wall compared to a traditional setup. The tower (can we still call it that?) is even easier to transport because of the built-in handles in each corner and the tilt-friendly design. LAN parties just became much, much easier, assuming you can manage its 20kg bulkiness.

But despite the triangular configuration, the Area-51 finds room to pack in plenty of premium hardware. Two giant, quick-release interchangeable side panels allow access to every inch of the computer, and it can fit in some serious horsepower: The particular setup I saw ran three NVIDIA GeForce GTX 780s running Assassin’s Creed IV: Black Flag at 45 fps at a gorgeous 4K resolution.

On the CPU side, Area-51 supports Intel’s new six- and eight-core (!) Haswell-E series processors, and both overclocking and liquid cooling will come standard. There’s room for up to 32GB of DDR4 memory, bays for up to three full-size hard drives and two solid state drives, and an optional 1.5-kilowatt modular power supply to feed all the components you add. While almost all the specs are customisable and upgradeable (as you’d expect from a high-powered gaming rig), you’ll also find that high-speed 802.11ac Wi-Fi and Killer Gigabit Ethernet come standard.

For the creative decorator inside all of us, the chassis also has nine separate lighting zones that can be changed to one of 20 different colours. You control them Alienware’s proprietary Control Center app, which also now lets you fine-tune settings, overclock processors from within Windows, and even create widgets to keep track of your PC’s performance while doing other tasks.

Alienware is still working out pricing and availability for the Area-51, but you can probably expect to pay multiple thousands of dollars when units begin shipping in October in the US and globally this holiday season. It won’t be the only outlandish-yet-impressive new product from the company during that timeframe. Alienware is displaying an experimental spirit recently with several new gaming PC options, including a slim new 13-inch laptop and the relatively inexpensive Alienware Alpha console.

But if you want Alienware’s new flagship, the future is a triangle.

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This Amazing Starry Sky Is A Cave Full Of Glowworms In New Zealand

NASA’s Astronomy Picture of the Day features an amazing photo by Phill Round. It looks like a frame from a Spielberg movie — an humanoid figure appearing at the base of a mountain, with the unknown starry sky of an alien world behind it. In reality, it’s a man getting into New Zealand’s Hollow Hill Cave.

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Recovered ISIS Laptop Reveals Terror Group's Bio-Warfare Plans

When fighters belonging to a moderate Syrian rebel force raided an ISIS hideout earlier this year, they could never have expected to come away with a haul as valuable as this. What they found wasn’t weapons or ammo or money, it was a laptop. A laptop filled with thousands of hidden files filled containing schemes, bomb-making instructions and research on building a homebrew biological weapon of mass destruction.

The raid occurred in January in the Syrian province of Idlib, near the Turkish border. And earlier this week, the moderate group’s commander, Abu Ali, handed the computer over to Foreign Policy reporters Harald Doornbos and Jenan Moussa for a look:

The laptop’s contents turn out to be a treasure trove of documents that provide ideological justifications for jihadi organisations — and practical training on how to carry out the Islamic State’s deadly campaigns. They include videos of Osama bin Laden, manuals on how to make bombs, instructions for stealing cars, and lessons on how to use disguises in order to avoid getting arrested while travelling from one jihadi hot spot to another.

But after hours upon hours of scrolling through the documents, it became clear that the ISIS laptop contains more than the typical propaganda and instruction manuals used by jihadists. The documents also suggest that the laptop’s owner was teaching himself about the use of biological weaponry, in preparation for a potential attack that would have shocked the world.

The laptop appears to have originally belonged to a former chemistry and biology student by the name of Muhammad S. who studied at a Tunisian University before dropping off the radar and presumably making his way to Syria to fight for the Islamic State. We know this because he not only left a bunch of his college exams on his hard drive but a picture of himself as well.

Other notable files the reporters unearthed include a 26-page fatwa written by Saudi jihadi cleric Nasir al-Fahd rationalizing how the Prophet would be totally cool with them killing off all of Europe with bubonic plague — the biological weapon Muhammad S. was researching — as well as instructions for testing any potentially-developed weapons on animals and livestock before attempting to infect humans.

Of course, terrorist plots employing weapons of mass destruction are nothing new. Al-Qaeda has been try to get its hands on such technology for years without luck. But as Magnus Ranstorp, research director of the Center for Asymmetric Threat Studies at the Swedish National Defence College told Foreign Policy, “The real difficulty in all of these weapons…[it is] to actually have a workable distribution system that will kill a lot of people. But to produce quite scary weapons is certainly within [the Islamic State's] capabilities.” Luckily, ISIS’ UAV program is nowhere near capable of acting as that sort of distribution system.

And while their online recruitment tactics are proving remarkably effective at getting their message of hatred and intolerance out — an estimated 2,400 Tunisians alone have flooded into Syria to join ISIS as a result — for now, ISIS’ WMD bark appears to be worse than its bite. Though the notion of fundamentalist yahoos developing weapons to kill everyone that doesn’t believe in the same thing they do is not a reassuring one.

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Bitcoin’s Earliest Adopter Is Cryonically Freezing His Body to See the Future

Some bitcoin enthusiasts have used their cryptocurrency to travel around the world. Others have spent it on a trip to space. But the very earliest user of bitcoin (after its inventor Satoshi Nakamoto himself) has now spent his crypto coins on the most ambitious mission yet: to visit the future.

Hal Finney, the renowned cryptographer, coder, and bitcoin pioneer, died Thursday morning at the age of 58 after five years battling ALS. He will be remembered for a remarkable career that included working as the number-two developer on the groundbreaking encryption software PGP in the early 1990s, creating one of the first “remailers” that presaged the anonymity software Tor, and—more than a decade later—becoming one of the first programmers to work on bitcoin’s open source code; in 2009, he received the very first bitcoin transaction from Satoshi Nakamoto.1

Now Finney has become an early adopter of a far more science fictional technology: human cryopreservation, the process of freezing human bodies so that they can be revived decades or even centuries later.

Just after his legal death was declared Thursday at 9 a.m., Finney’s body was flown to a facility of the cryonics firm known as the Alcor Life Extension Foundation in Scottsdale, Arizona. As of Thursday night, Finney’s blood and other fluids were being removed from his body and slowly replaced with a collection of chemicals that Alcor calls M-22, which the company says are designed to be as minimally toxic as possible to his tissues while preventing the formation of ice crystals that would result from freezing and destroy his cell membranes.

Over the next few days, the temperature of his body will be slowly lowered to -320 degrees Fahrenheit. Eventually, it will be stored in an aluminum pod inside a 10-foot tall tank filled with 450 liters of liquid nitrogen designed to keep him in that state of near-complete suspended animation. “That’s where he’ll remain until such time as we have technologies to repair the problems he had such as ALS and the aging process,” says Max More, Alcor’s director and Finney’s friend of many years. “And then we can bring Hal back happy and whole again.”

No human, to be clear, has ever been revived from a state of cryonic freezing. Many scientists consider the idea impossible. But Finney’s wife Fran says that doubters never stopped her husband from exploring a technology that intrigued him.

“Hal respects other people’s beliefs, and he doesn’t like to argue. But it doesn’t matter to him what other people believe,” says Fran, who alternatingly spoke about her husband in the present and past tense. “He has enough confidence in how he figures things out for himself. He’s always believed he could find the truth, and he doesn’t need to convince anyone.”

In fact, Finney and his wife both decided to have their bodies cryonically frozen more than 20 years ago. At the time, Finney, like Alcor’s president More, was an active member of the Extropians, a movement of technologists and futurists focused on transhumanism and life extension. “He’s always been optimistic about the future,” says Fran. “Every new advance, he embraced it, every new technology. Hal relished life, and he made the most of everything.”

Finney was also an avowed libertarian and well-known figure within the cypherpunks, another early ’90s, mailing-list-centered group focused on empowering individuals with encryption, preserving privacy, and foiling surveillance. Finney created the first so-called “cypherpunk remailer,” a piece of software that would receive encrypted email and bounce messages to their destinations to prevent anyone from identifying the sender. He also became the first coder to work with Phil Zimmermann on Pretty Good Privacy or PGP, the first freely available strong crypto tool, and designed the software’s “web-of-trust” model of verifying PGP users’ identities.

That same forward-looking spirit led Finney to embrace bitcoin before practically anyone other than its creator thought it might be a viable system, let alone a multi-billion dollar economy. Finney spotted Satoshi Nakamoto’s bitcoin whitepaper on a cryptography mailing list in 2008 and immediately began exchanging emails with him, eventually helping to debug its code, perform its first test transactions, and mine a substantial hoard of the cryptocurrency. “I’ve noticed that cryptographic graybeards…tend to get cynical. I was more idealistic; I have always loved crypto, the mystery and the paradox of it,” Finney wrote on the BitcoinTalk forum last year. “When Satoshi announced Bitcoin on the cryptography mailing list, he got a skeptical reception at best…I was more positive.”

Finney’s positivity extended to his personal interactions, too. Colleagues from as early as college say he was as kind and generous as he was brilliant. “Hal is a rare genius who never had to trade his emotional intelligence to get his intellectual gifts,” Zimmermann told me in an email when I was writing a profile of Finney last March. “He is a fine human being, an inspiration for his attitude toward life. I wish I could be like him.”

Even Finney’s ALS diagnosis in 2009 didn’t slow his technological experimentation. As paralysis set in, he continued to contribute to bitcoin discussions and write code using software that translated his eye movements into text. He even created software that allowed him to use his eyes to adjust his own mechanized wheelchair’s position.

When I visited Finney in his Santa Barbara home earlier this year, his eye control was beginning to fail, too, and he was mostly reduced to delivering yes-and-no answers to my questions based on eyebrow movements. Even then, he was extraordinarily kind—he spent the first 10 minutes of our conversation composing a sentence on his computer telling me not to feel bad that I had gotten caught in traffic and arrived 15 minutes late.

Finney never quite got rich from his early bitcoin involvement, according to Fran. Much of their savings went toward his health care as his condition deteriorated. They traded the majority of his bitcoins for dollars long before the currency’s spike in value late last year.

After my story on Finney’s life and work, bitcoiners donated 25 bitcoins to Finney and his family, a sum that’s worth close to $12,500 today. Initially, Fran Finney tells me, the family intended to spend that money to buy Finney a new computer interface that would use an electromyographic (EMG) switch to read electric signals from surface muscle, allowing him to better control his voice and writing software. But the interface was incompatible with the few muscles Finney still controlled, leaving him locked in a body that increasingly prevented him from communicating at all.

So instead, the bitcoin donations will now go toward Finney’s cryonic procedures, along with a life insurance policy the Finneys have maintained for years to prepare for Alcor’s substantial fee. “Once we realized that Hal wasn’t going to be able to use the EMG switch, this was our next choice,” says Fran. “The bitcoins will cover a large fraction of the cost.”

Already, Fran says, the idea that her husband has been preserved in some sense comforts her. “It isn’t going to take away the fact that he’s not here now,” she says. “But it’s been very calming and reassuring for me to know that he might come back.”

Around the time of his diagnosis, Finney said he found that his cryonics plan gave him some comfort, too. “It was actually extremely reassuring as the reality of the diagnosis sunk in,” he wrote in 2009. “I was surprised, because I’ve always considered cryonics a long shot. But it turns out that in this kind of situation, it helps tremendously to have reasons for hope, and cryonics provides another avenue for a possibly favorable outcome.”

Fran Finney says that her husband had no illusions about the certainty of his resurrection. But until his final moments, he put his faith in the progress of technology. “He never said to me, ‘I will come back.’ But he told me, ‘I hope to be back,’” Fran says. “Hal liked the present. But he looked towards the future. He wanted to be there. And this is his way to get there.”

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NASA Will Reformat Mars Rover From 200 Million Kilometres Away

NASA’s Opportunity rover is still trundling across the surface of Mars, more than 11 years after its 90-day mission began. But its software is getting bogged down, so NASA’s doing a full system backup, memory wipe and reboot. It’s just like your routine computer clean-up, just from the next planet over.

Both Spirit and Opportunity carry 256MB of flash memory, used to store data that’s uploaded back to earth. After years and years of overwrites, it seems some of the flash memory cells are starting to fail — causing Opportunity to reboot itself unprompted a dozen times this month. Each reboot takes about a day to complete, stealing time away from Opportunity’s research tasks.

So NASA will back up all of Opportunity’s current data to earth, then wipe Opportunity’s flash memory to try and fix the problem. It’s the same method they used when Opportunity’s twin, Spirit, started developing amnesia in 2009.

“The flash reformatting is a low-risk process, as critical sequences and flight software are stored elsewhere in other non-volatile memory on the rover,” said John Callas, project manager for NASA’s Mars Exploration Rover Project. Still, something about remote-backup from over 200 million kilometres away sounds a bit more dicey than your routine laptop maintenance.

Forget about backing up to the cloud, Opportunity stores data on a whole ‘nother planet.

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The Most Extreme Marathon Deserves An Extremely Cool Ad Like This One

This ad is so cool it makes me want to run the Mizuno Uphill Marathon, one of the toughest and most demanding races I’ve ever heard of. It takes place at the gorgeous Serra do Rio do Rastro, a beautiful mountain in Brasil with a winding road with a drop of 1429m.

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Unmanned F-16 Jet Dodges A Live Missile For The First Time

Boeing has successfully tested the QF-16 against live fire for the first time. The QF-16 is a modified version of the F-16 Fighting Falcon designed to be controlled remotely by a human pilot so companies can test new weapons systems against it. It’s pretty awesome to see it dodging the bullet in the skies.

According to Boeing, while the missile didn’t hit its target, that doesn’t mean it was a miss. Because they don’t want to destroy their multi-million dollar toys every time they test a missile, the rocket is rigged so it never hits the target. However, both the missile and the aeroplane have sensors that tell the researchers if the weapons test was a success or a failure.

Here’s more background information on the QF-16:

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The World's Toughest Bike Race Is Absolutely Crazy

The Red Bull Harescramble Erzbergrodeo might be the toughest enduro competition on the planet. Five hundred bikers compete in this crazy race that takes place in an old Austrian iron mine. This year’s winner, Johnny Walker, attached a camera on his helmet to share his adrenaline-charged ride.

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ETÓN HAND-CRANK TWO-WAY SURVIVAL RADIO

The Etón Hand-Crank Two-Way Survival Radio is a small communications system designed to be used during or shortly after earthquakes, as well as floods, tsunamis, bush fires and other natural or man made disasters. It has a built in AM/FM/NOAA weather radio, a two-way GMRS radio, an SOS beacon, an LED flashlight, a siren and cell phone charger so you can keep your devices powered on the go.

The hand-crank allows the radio to be powered by hand if you happen to run out of batteries or if there’s no external power supply – potentially making it useful on camping trips as well as after the end of the world.

Grab yours here

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Why Mosquitos Are Humanity’s Deadliest Enemy

When we think about animals that can kill us, we tend to think of fast-moving predators with teeth: sharks, tigers, wolves, snakes, and so on. But our deadliest enemy is probably the humble mosquito, which inadvertently spreads deadly diseases like malaria, dengue, yellow fever, and West Nile while going about its business. These diseases can be survived in theory, but they kill millions in practice.

Media attention has more recently turned to the chikungunya virus, which infectedmore than a quarter-million people in Haiti and the Dominican Republic, hasrecently appeared in the United States and has been present in Australia for more than a decade. Although chikungunya has a relatively low mortality rate,most mosquito-borne illnesses have a relatively low mortality rate; what makes them (and most epidemic diseases) deadly is widespread infection, not high lethality. Surviving mosquito-borne illness is a numbers game: if enough people get sick, a large number of people will die from a theoretically non-fatal illness.

U.S. scientists have recently developed a three-stage chikungunya vaccine that appears to be successful, but (as has been true with respect to the malaria vaccine) the vaccine is likely to be too expensive to be of much help to people in developing nations who are most at risk of dying from the virus. A vaccine won’t stop chikungunya from joining mosquitos’ considerable arsenal of epidemic, hard-to-treat illnesses that are theoretically survivable on an average individual scale, and still manage to kill millions of us anyway.

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Is There a Cure for Oil Spills?

The 2010 BP Deepwater Horizon spill was the third-largest in the history of the world. About 210 million gallons of oil spewed into the Atlantic Ocean over 87 days, permanently transforming the shoreline of the southeastern United States, destroying subsistence fishing as a viable regional occupation, and driving countless species closer to extinction.

Satellite image of Deepwater Horizon oil spill. May 24, 2010.

It wasn’t the first catastrophic oil spill in the world’s history, or even in BP’s history, but it raised an important question: is there any way to mitigate the damage these things cause? Because the way things are right now, you can’t un-spill oil; the industry relies on toxic oil dispersants, which are of limited effectiveness and may cause more environmental problems than they solve.

Arden Warner, a physicist at Fermilab, has wrestled with this question more boldly—and more effectively—than most of us:

“My wife asked me, what would I try to do?” says Warner. “In my naïve way of thinking about things, I thought, ‘there are four forces we know about, and only one I really know about: electromagnetic force.’” But how could he magnetize oil? …

That night Warner went to his garage. He shaved some iron off a shovel and mixed those filings into a bit of engine oil. Then he applied a small magnet to the solution and tried to move it – and it worked. This was proof enough of concept to fuel “countless hours” of experimentation.

Warden’s hard work paid off, and has attracted the interest of investors. Although damage from existing oil spills is probably irreversible in the short term, future work based on Warden’s research may allow environmental engineers to clean up immediately after a future oil spill by magnetizing the oil and drawing it in from the water. The question, as always, is whether the implantation of the theory can live up to its promise.

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Bidding is Underway For Shipton’s Yeti Footprint Photographs

They’re icons of the cryptid world and now they can be yours. From August 28 until September 10, Chrisie’s Auctions and Private Sales will be accepting bids on four of the photographs taken by British explorer Eric Earle Shipton in the Himalayas in 1951 of what many believe are footprints of a Yeti.

Shipton discovered the footprints on November 8, 1951, at about 19,000 feet while on his fifth expedition on Mount Everest. He estimated the single Yeti footprint to be 12 inches long by five inches wide and took photographs of the footprint next to a ice axe and a man’s bootprint for perspective. There was also a set of tracks that went for a mile and showed the creature had an 18 inch gait and walked on two legs.

The Yeti tracks.

James Hyslop, who cataloged them for Christie’s online auction, describes the importance of the photographs.

They are incredibly rare. The photographs are the earliest documentation of the famous Yeti and the pictures made all of the headlines in the 1950s. They are on a par with the footage which showed Bigfoot in America. But these pictures were the first real evidence that the Yeti could be real. There had been myths that people had seen the Yeti before the 1951 sighting, but this is the first picture showing photograph evidence of the Yeti. Others before have just speculated.

The auction package consists of four of Shipton’s 12-by-13-inch photographs. Two show the Yeti footprints alongside human footprints and the two showing the footprint next to the ice axe and boot print. They are probably the most intensely studied photographs of evidence of a Yeti in existence.

Yeti track next to a boot.

The set of four pictures is expected to sell for at least $8,3000 (£5,000) and bidding is already underway. If you want to own a piece of cryptid history, get your bid in soon!

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1954 ORVIS AIRSTREAM FLYING CLOUD TRAVEL TRAILER

The average person might scoff at the thought of going cross-country in a trailer that was built in 1954, but that all changes when you see this immaculately restored Airstream Flying Cloud.

The crew at Timeless Travel Trailers has worked their magic on this onetime hunting and fishing lodge, and you don’t have to be a Baby Boomer to find the whole thing pretty glorious. The makeover was meticulous, but we’ll start with the interior which features a liberal use of natural hickory wood, along with aged oak flooring, copper sheet, and genuine leather to soothe the senses. The exterior is hand-polished, while a new axle, brakes, running gear, suspension, wheels, tires, and coupler solidify the ride. The trailer was created for Orvis, a family-owned retail and mail-order company that’s been around since 1856

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WHISKY POTATO CHIPS EXIST AND NEED TO BE EATEN

We’ve gorged ourselves on many a bag of potato chips after we’ve had a bit too much to drink. Now, we can just combine the experience into one event. Mackie’s of Scotland has created some whisky potato chips to stuff in your booze-craving gullet. The only kicker is they’re whisky and haggis flavored and the latter is not on our top ten list of favorite foods. Still, some booze in crisp form is an idea we could get behind. We’ll have to wait and see if they get sent over stateside, but we like what Mackie’s is doing.

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THE BLINK(1) IS A LIGHT-UP NOTIFICATION DEVICE

Instead of using your USB ports to power quirky things like coffee warmers androcket launchers, why not use one of them for something a little more helpful. The Blink(1) is a USB dongle that lights up to alert you when you get an email, when you have to go into a meeting, or just to alert you to anything you set up with IFTTT. The device is customizable so you can set whatever color you want to correspond to the type of alert you are getting.

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Watch Iceland's Amazing Volcanic Eruption Live Here Right Now

Bárðarbunga is the latest unpronounceable Icelandic volcano to start spewing forth molten lava from the depths of the earth, and thanks to the magic of the internet, you can watch science unfold live online.

The Bárðarbunga volcanic eruption is currently being streamed live on YouTube from several different locations, and includes an amazing overlay of data to boot.

The stream includes seismic data, a map of where the eruption can be seen from and synoptic charts of the pyroclastic cloud.

Science!

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End of chemotherapy within 20 years as pioneering DNA project launched

Cancer patients will no longer have to put up with the debilitating side-effects of chemotherapy after David Cameron launched a new landmark project to map the genetic causes of disease

Chemotherapy will be obsolete within 20 years, scientists have predicted after launching a landmark project to map 100,000 genomes to find the genes responsible for cancer and rare diseases.

By the time children born today reach adulthood, invasive drugs and their devastating side-effects, will have been replaced by sophisticated medicines that can fix individual faulty genes, according to those behind the project.

Britain is the first country in the world to embark on a program to map the genomes of thousands of people in the hope of finding which genes are responsible.

In a joint £300 million project, universities across Britain are coming together, alongside the Department of Health, the Wellcome Trust, Great Ormond Street Hospital and the Medical Research Council.

David Cameron, the prime minister, said the venture would ‘unlock the power of DNA’ to deliver ‘better tests, better drugs and better care for patients.’

"As our plan becomes a reality, I believe we will be able to transform how devastating diseases are diagnosed and treated in the NHS and across the world,” he said.

The first few hundred pilot participants in London, Cambridge and Newcastle have already donated DNA samples and the project is expected to be completed 2018.

"20 years from now there will be therapies, instead of chemo, that will be a much more targeted approach to treatment,” said Prof Jeremy Farrer, head of the Wellcome Trust.

“We will look back in 20 years time and the blockbuster chemotherapy drugs that gave you all those nasty side effects will be a thing of the past and we will think ‘gosh what an era that was’.

“Understanding humanity’s genetic code is not only going to be fundamental to the medicine of the future. It is essential part of medicine today. In rare congenital disease, in cancer and in infections, genomic insights are already transforming diagnosis and treatment.”

Prof Farrer also predicted that genome sequencing to find the causes of the disease will become standard within our lifetime.

The first human genome was sequenced in 2003 following 13 years of work at a cost of £2 billion. Now it takes around two days and costs just £1,000.

A genome consists of a person’s 20,000 or so genes and the DNA in between. Each genome consists of a code of 3 billion letters.

Over the next four years, about 75,000 patients with cancer and rare diseases, plus their close relatives, will have their whole genetic codes, or genomes, sequenced.

Cancer patients will have the DNA of both healthy and tumour cells mapped, making up the 100,000 total.

Scientists expect the project to be pivotal to the development of future personalised treatments based on genetics, with the potential to revolutionise medicine.

A £78 million partnership between Genomics England, the body set up by the Department of Health to oversee the project, and the Californian DNA sequencing technology company Illumina was unveiled by Mr Cameron today.

Illumina, originally "spun out" by Cambridge University scientists, will invest around £162 million into the project over its lifetime.

By the end of next year that figure is expected to have risen to about 10,000.

Strict confidentiality rules will be enforced and under normal circumstances, patients will not be told of unforeseen surprises that might effect their health - or insurance premiums.

But helpful findings will be fed back to the doctors in charge of their treatment. In return, those consenting to having their DNA sequenced must agree to drug companies having access to the information as well as academic scientists.

One example of such a therapy that already exists is Herceptin, a drug specifically designed for women with a type of breast cancer characterised by over-activity of the Her2 gene. .

Simon Stevens, chief executive of NHS England, said: "The NHS is now set to become one of the world's 'go-to' health services for the development of innovative genomic tests and patient treatments.”

[MIKA27]

Oil tanker 'vanishes' with $100M cargo off Texas

The U.S. Coast Guard has lost track of a Kurdish tanker carrying $100 million in disputed oil off the coast of Texas, the Independent reports.

Headed for Galveston, the United Kalavyrvta was anchored at least 60 miles off-shore when it vanished from radar screens. The ship's haul fell under legal dispute when Iraq filed a lawsuit in U.S. courts, urging American officials to grab the ship's oil in Galveston because it belongs to Iraq, not the Kurdish National Government.

But Kurds say it's theirs, and insist they need oil-export dollars to survive and fund their future independence, the Washington Post reports.

In any case, a U.S. court denied the lawsuit Monday because America has no jurisdiction over ships more than 60 miles off the coast.

Meanwhile, the United Kalavyrvta may have moved beyond U.S. antennas or could be suffering technical problems, the U.S. Coast Guard says (or maybe it "voluntarily switched off its transmitter," says the Daily News).

It's not unusual for ships to vanish from radar systems when transporting disputed oil, Reuters notes: A few days ago, a Kamari ship with Kurdish oil "went dark" near Egypt's Sinai and turned up near Israel two days later, its oil gone.

[MIKA27]

Mexico's Deadly Drug Cartels Have A New Target In Their Sights

The world is pretty screwed up in some parts of it. At different levels. Cue in Mexican drug cartels.

Mexico is one of the most beautiful countries in the world with some of the warmest and positive people in this planet. However, the drug industry has reached an incredible magnitude.

So big that cartels are branching out to the other global “addiction” and stealing...oil.

VICE founder Suroosh Alvi traveled to Mexico to see the effects of cartel oil theft firsthand. As police fight the thieves, and the cartels fight each other, the number of victims caught in the battle for the pipelines continues to climb.

It's no longer a war over narcotics, it's a war over a product that fuels the nation.

[MIKA27]

Step Inside The Most Expensive Apartment On The Planet

It's in the final stages of construction but The Sky Penthouse, situated in the opulent Golden Citadel of Monte Carlo, Monaco will soon become the world's most expensive apartment.

So just how much are we talking?

In short, you'd better start saving, because you'll have to stump up a shade under $400,000,000 USD (around £240M) to become its resident.

What do you get for such a phenomenal amount of money? A 5 storey complex, a 360 view of the world around and 35,500 sqft to live your lavish lifestyle in.

Naturally it has floor-to-ceiling windows for uninterrupted views and a giant infinity pool to float around in with your friends and even a balcony water slide.

Now you might be wondering who on earth could possibly afford such a place right? But approximately 25-30% of Monaco's residents are millionaires, so finding a buyer won't be as hard as you'd imagine.

One has to appeal to the locals after all.......

[MIKA27]

When Labor Day Meant Something

Remembering the radical past of a day now devoted to picnics and back-to-school sales

Labor Day online specials at Walmart this year “celebrate hard work with big savings.” For brick-and-mortar shoppers, several Walmart stores are open all 24 hours of Labor Day. Remember, this is a company so famously anti-union that it shut down a Canadian store rather than countenance the union its workers had just voted in. The fact that Walmart “celebrates” Labor Day should draw laughter, derision, or at least a few eye-rolls.

But it doesn’t—or at least not many. Somewhere along the line, Labor Day lost its meaning. Today the holiday stands for little more than the end of summer and the start of school, weekend-long sales, and maybe a barbecue or parade. It is no longer political. Many politicians and commentators do their best to avoid any mention of organized labor when observing the holiday, maybe giving an obligatory nod to that abstract entity, “the American Worker.”

Labor Day, though, was meant to honor not just the individual worker, but what workers accomplish together through activism and organizing. Indeed, Labor Day in the 1880s, its first decade, was in many cities more like a general strike—often with the waving red flag of socialism and radical speakers critiquing capitalism—than a leisurely day off. So to really talk about this holiday, we have to talk about those-which-must-not-be-named: unions and the labor movement.

The labor movement fought for fair wages and to improve working conditions, as is well known, but it was its political efforts that did nothing less than transform American society. Organized labor was critical in the fight against child labor and for the eight-hour workday and the New Deal, which gave us Social Security and unemployment insurance. Union workers sacrificed in America’s historic production effort in World War II and pushed for Great Society legislation in the 1960s. Michael Patrick, a former local Machinists president from Galesburg, Illinois, where I’ve done research, cites his union’s support for Medicare and the Civil Rights Act, now celebrating its 50th anniversary, as among his local’s proudest moments.

These were victories that went well beyond the bread-and-butter issues of union members. They were shared achievements worthy of a national holiday for all. As Samuel Gompers, the founder of the American Federation of Labor, wrote in the New York Times in 1910, Labor Day “glorifies no armed conflicts or battles of man’s prowess over man… no martial glory or warlike pomp signals Labor Day.” Rather, “Of all the days celebrated for one cause or another, there is not one which stands so conspicuously for social advancement of the common people as the first Monday in September.”

Those shared victories came at a cost. Agitation for anti-trust legislation, shorter workdays and workweeks, and the right to organize was often portrayed as un-American and violently repressed. In 1914, John Kirby, president of the National Association of Manufacturers, called the trade union movement, “an un-American, illegal, and infamous conspiracy.” Anti-labor employers fought against what they saw as incipient communism with strikebreaking, blacklisting, vigilante violence, and by enlisting government force to their side. During the Red Scare of 1919-1921,many states passed blanket sedition laws against radical speech and banned the flying of the red flag. The fiery but pragmatic president of the United Mine Workers, John L. Lewis, spoke to the overwhelming patriotism of union men and women when he said to a Senate Committee in 1933, “American labor stand between the rapacity of the robber barons of industry of America and the lustful rage of the communists, who would lay waste to our traditions and our institutions with fire and sword.”

Labor Day began not as a national holiday but in the streets, when, on September 5, 1882, thousands of bricklayers, printers, blacksmiths, railroad men, cigar makers, and others took a day off and marched in New York City. “Eight Hours for Work, Eight Hours for Rest, Eight Hours for What We Will” read one sign. “Labor creates all wealth,” read another. A placard in the following year’s parade read, “We must Crush the Monopolies Lest they Crush Us.” The movement for the holiday grew city by city and eventually the state and federal authorities made it official.

The national holiday emerged 12 years later in the face of a federal crackdown on labor. In 1894, at the behest of railroad companies and industrialists, President Grover Cleveland deployed more than 10,000 U.S. Army troops to break the Pullman strike in Chicago—the first truly nationwide strike, which involved more than 150,000 workers from coast to coast. Protesters were jailed, injured, and killed. Amid the turmoil that summer, and as an olive branch, Cleveland signed legislation to make Labor Day a national holiday.

Eugene Debs, the leader of the Pullman strike, dismissed the corporate paternalism of industrialist George Pullman, who sought to take care of “our poor workingmen.” The real issue, Debs said, was “What can we do for ourselves?” This—the labor movement's foundational values of self-determination and self-reliance—is what makes Labor Day a quintessentially American celebration.

Perhaps the main reason Labor Day’s meaning has been lost amid picnics and holiday sales is the decline of unions. Union membership across the country has shrunk to less than one in eight (35.3 percent among public-sector workers and just 6.7 percent among private-sector workers in 2013) from nearly one in four throughout the 1970s. As membership declined, so did public support. According to a just-released Gallup tracking poll, a slim majority of Americans approve of labor unions—down from as high as three out of four in the booming postwar years.

In the global, post-industrial era, industrial unions have less clout, and public-sector unions face well-resourced attacks from the right. In some cases, unions have left themselves open to criticism by retreating to the bread-and-butter concerns of its membership like wages and benefits, and by not embracing change, continuous reform and accountability, and an expansive vision of shared progress. Important new campaigns, though, are underway in retail stores like Walmart, in the tobacco fields and slaughterhouses where immigrants toil, and in charter schools where idealistic young teachers soon enough realize that they need a collective voice in the workplace to be treated and paid like professionals.

Shoppers this weekend could hardly be blamed for going to Walmart for the latest feather-light flatscreen television from China or Mexico—I’ll admit I’m dazzled by the low prices and pixel counts too. Or, better, people could go to Costco, where workers make about twice the Walmart wage, and don’t have to rely on federal benefits like food stamps and Medicaid (which, according to Americans for Tax Fairness, cost taxpayers $6.2 billion a year). In addition, Costco lets its workers unionize while Walmart instructs managers to report union activity or grumblings about wages to the company’s “Labor Relations Hotline.”

Holiday shoppers will have to wait until Tuesday, though, because Costco is closed on Labor Day. Its workers are where they should be—at the family barbecue or the parade, celebrating our national holiday.