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

[MIKA27]

Ashya King's parents fight extradition from Spain

The parents of Ashya King are being held in police custody after they refused to consent to their extradition to the UK at a court appearance in Spain.

A High Court judge in Madrid ruled Brett and Naghemeh King will remain in custody for a maximum of 72 hours while he considers granting bail.

An international search was launched after the couple took the five-year-old, who has a brain tumour, from hospital in Southampton on Thursday.

Ashya is now in hospital in Malaga.

His parents were taken to the Soto de Real prison on the outskirts of Madrid following the court hearing.

No date was set for their return to court to hear the judge's decision on their bail application.

Ashya was found with his family in Malaga on Saturday, after they travelled to Spain where they have an apartment. Mr and Mrs King were arrested on the same day.

Hampshire Constabulary obtained a European arrest warrant on the grounds the Kings neglected their son, who was receiving specialist care for his condition when he was taken from the UK.

A Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) spokesperson said there was not yet sufficient evidence to charge the parents with an offence, but added that a decision on whether to prosecute will be made once further evidence is examined.

The five-year-old, from Portsmouth, was made a ward of court at the request of Southampton General Hospital.

Dr Michael Marsh, medical director at University Hospital Southampton NHS Foundation Trust, said he regretted that their communication and relationship with the King family had "broken down".

Julian Wooster, Portsmouth City Council's director for children's services, said: "At the request of Southampton Hospital the council obtained a temporary wardship order on Friday, only to direct that Ashya King be presented for medical treatment."

The BBC's legal affairs correspondent Clive Coleman said wardship means major decisions relating to the child must be approved by the court.

The order relating to Ashya will be reviewed on Wednesday.

Ashya King's father Brett spoke in a YouTube video explaining why they had travelled to Spain

Proton beam therapy

Ashya has been moved from a high dependency to a general ward.

A spokesman for the children's hospital where he is being treated said his condition was stable.

In a video on YouTube, Ashya's brother, Naveed King, said his parents ensured Ashya had the same resources available to him as in hospital when they took him to Spain.

Mr King said in an earlier video posted that the family wanted to seek proton beam therapy for Ashya - a cancer treatment that the NHS would not provide.

It is understood they travelled to Spain, where they have a holiday home, to sell the property and release funds to pay for the treatment.

Ashya's brother, Naveed King, posted a video on YouTube defending his parents' actions

The Proton Therapy Centre (PTC) in Prague, Czech Republic, which received a request from Brett King on 20 August, said it can treat Ashya immediately if he is eligible.

Iva Tatounova, director of strategy at PTC Czech, said: "The centre is keen on starting the treatment in a few days. The costs would be dealt with later on."

She said the centre would need the necessary medical documentation before they could agree on the appropriateness of treatment, which usually costs £60,000 - £65,000 for children.

Mr and Mrs King have not been charged with any offence in Spain. The extradition process could take several months.

Danny King said the family had found it incredibly difficult not being able to visit Ashya in hospital.

"They did allow a voice recording that was set-up to be played to Ashya... I'm grateful that the doctors appreciate how important it is for Ashya just to hear the voice of one of his brothers," he said.

"We never thought that this would be such a big deal, we just want to do what's best for Ashya.

"We're not oblivious, his life will be shorter than most kids, but we want his quality of life to be the best.

"We've done so much research on all treatment that is available to Ashya - I know that side effects for the proton beam therapy are less and he would have more or less a normal life if he received that treatment.

"We know it's not a miracle treatment."

Downing Street said the priority should be for Ashya to receive "the very best medical care".

A spokesman said it was an understandable parental instinct to want to do the best for your child and understandable that relevant authorities with responsibility for the welfare of children should also take an interest in such a case.

He added: "People will understand and be worried by the grave illness that Ashya is suffering."

A spokesman for Hampshire Constabulary said its officers in Spain had not interviewed the Kings and were not there to arrest them - they were there to deal with technical aspects of the arrest warrant.

On Sunday, Assistant Chief Constable Chris Shead refused to apologise for the way officers conducted their search for the family. He said medical advice was that Ashya had been in "grave danger".

Dr Marsh, from the trust said: "Our first concern is for Ashya's welfare and we are working with the police and the team in Spain to help him get the best care possible."

Referring to the proton beam therapy, he added: "There are some tumours that respond well to this type of treatment, but there are some cases where there isn't the evidence that this is a beneficial treatment. Where the evidence supports this treatment we have made a referral and patients have been treated abroad."

The charity Cancer Research UK says proton beam treatment is available on the NHS in the UK only for eye conditions.

The NHS said the medical treatment costs around £100,000, but the figure is based on sending someone to the US.

There are also numerous centres providing the treatment in Europe where it can cost less than £20,000.

It is perfectly possible to challenge medical advice. One of the most important principles of healthcare is that the patient must consent to treatment.

Anyone aged 16 and over can refuse treatment if they wish unless they are deemed not to have the ability to do so under the Mental Capacity Act.

For children under that age, additional consent from a person with parental responsibility is required unless the patient has enough understanding and intelligence to fully appreciate what is involved in their treatment.

If the person with parental responsibility refuses treatment and doctors believe that decision could lead to death or severe permanent injury an application can be made to the court of protection to overrule them.

When it comes to wanting treatment that is not being offered, it is less clear cut.

Patients do not have an automatic right to a second opinion although most hospitals will give them one.

Many also have ethical committees - or similar groups - that will consider individual cases when treatment options are disputed. Beyond that patients can - and have in the past - applied for a judicial review.

[MIKA27]

Turkey: Farmer finds two-headed snake

A rare two-headed snake has been found by a farmer in north-eastern Turkey, it's been reported.

It was discovered in the Black Sea province of Giresun and is currently being kept under quarantine at a reptile house in the city of Antalya on Turkey's south-western coast, Turkish daily Radikal reports. Ozgur Ereldi, in charge of caring for the snake, says it needs to be constantly monitored because of its size and shape.

"Since the snake has two heads, its neck is thinner than normal," he says.

"Snakes swallow their prey in full and then digest it. If you feed the snake a big portion it might choke. Hence we feed this snake in small portions."

The young snake appears to belong to the Coluber genus of thin-bodied, fast-moving snakes commonly known as racers. Cuneyt Alpguven, who works at Antalya Aquarium's reptile house, says two-headed snakes are very rare and have little chance of surviving in the wild. "Being two-headed is a major disadvantage, because its anatomical structure makes it more vulnerable to attacks while it also draws the attention of predators."

At two weeks old, Alpguven says the snake is expected to grow to a length of 20cm (8in) within a few months, Hurriyet Daily News says. Earlier this month, the same newspaper reported the discovery of a two-headed dolphin washed up on a beach in western Turkey.

[Habana Mike]

Hmmm, Turkish Frights. Any recent nuclear power plant meltdowns nearby?

[MIKA27]

Arms wide open: The story of Rio's Christ the Redeemer

There is a trapdoor on Christ's right shoulder.

To mount the steps and slowly, fearfully peer out is to see the world through the eyes of a bird, or even a god. Far below, white blocks of flats and offices cluster among folds of tropical green.

Down there are the poor in the favelas, the rich in the luxury high-rise apartments, the homeless, the famous football stadiums and Guanabara bay with its scattered islands and boats. Beyond the sands of Copacabana and Ipanema, the limitless Atlantic ocean.

To the left, standing twice a man's height, is the slightly bowed head of Christ, also looking down on the beauty of the city.

But unlike the forests or the ocean, this statue was the work of man and will not last for ever. Close up, the toll of 83 years of weathering is starkly apparent.

Unnoticed by the 5,000 who visit the landmark every day - and see it only from a distance - the surface is a patchwork of worn mosaic tiles resembling the skin of an aged reptile.

Lightning storms have been chipping away at it. In January, two direct hits in eight days blasted off a middle fingertip and scorched the back of the head, sparking a race to patch up Rio's favourite picture-postcard scene before the World Cup in June.

Such is the statue's popularity that even at 8am there is a babble of tourists taking photographs and enjoying the view. For them, the only sign of anything wrong is the scaffolding that leads up the 8m (26ft) pedestal to a discreet entrance in the hem of the cloak.

If the statue had a right ankle, the door reserved for workers would open into it. Once inside, the hubbub disappears.

There is little natural light and only a few bare bulbs. Flights of open stairs make their way up through the centre, between the criss-crossed concrete supports that give the statue its strength.

A thick skin of reinforced concrete means the inside is cool, despite the summer heat outside.

Climbing up, a number is crudely painted on the wall of each of the 12 floors in what feels like an abandoned, dusty warehouse.

There is no sign that this is the inside of Christ the Redeemer until an upper level, where a roughly shaped heart bulges from the inside of the chest. It is covered in the same stone mosaic as the outside of the statue - where the outline of the heart can also be seen - the only delicate detail in an interior that's otherwise rough around the edges.

From the top of the last set of stairs, a vertical steel ladder leads to a tunnel in the statue's arm. A dark, narrow passageway then stretches all the way to the fingers.

The only way to inspect the damage caused by the recent lightning strikes is to go out - through the top of the 30m-high statue.

The workers who crawl out of the holes in the arms, shoulders or head use ropes to tether them as they abseil down the torso or inch along the 28m-span of the arms, the city spreading out before them, far below.

Brazil’s tropical location makes it one of the lightning capitals of the world, which was never going to be good for a statue on a sharp 710m-high granite peak.

There are two, maybe four, direct hits each year, according to the Brazilian Institute of Space Research. Most cause no damage.

But recent storms have been unusually violent. “In the past few years, there have been some cases of storms registering more than 1,000 lightning bolts, which did not occur previously,” says Dr Osmar Pinto, chief of the institute’s atmospheric electricity group.

“It is necessary to review the structure of the statue periodically and revise the earthing system of the lightning rods.”

The statue has a conductor that covers its head in something resembling a crown of thorns, and stretches down each arm to the hands.

Part of the work now under way is to extend the lightning rods to the statue’s fingertips. Improving the earthing of the rods is just as important.

Effectively earthed, there would be less risk of damage to the statue in the immediate vicinity of the conductor. But earthing is tricky at the top of a big granite rock, as granite itself conducts electricity poorly.

The damage caused by January's dramatic lightning strikes was more serious than usual says Paolo Dal Pino, president of tyre company Pirelli in South America, which is footing the 1.9m real (£500,000, $790,000) bill for the current round of repairs.

“For a monument like this, that hosts two million guests a year - it’s going to be three million people probably in 2014 - a place like this, damaged, is something that cannot exist,” he says.

With bigger storms, and the statue getting older, it’s possible that such repair jobs will be needed more frequently. But the original pale grey-green stones that make up the mosaic surface have run out - so there is a possibility that the statue will gradually turn a darker shade.

Already, years of piecemeal repairs mean the statue is a patchwork of varying shades of grey, blue and green, when seen from close quarters. Future repairs will be further from the original colour, unless a new deposit of the stone is found.

Marcia Braga, the architect who led a restoration of the statue in 2010, says she faced difficulties finding the right stone. In the process of replacing 60,000 tiles, she rejected 80% of those supplied by the quarry.

“The idea is to do something as close to the original as possible because when you use different colours it’s not a pleasant aesthetic,” she says.

Reports that all the statue's six million stones will be replaced, and that Christ the Redeemer will change colour in one fell swoop, have been denied.

The next major renovation is expected in 2020, 10 years after the last. As yet no decision has been made on how many tiles to renew, but any new stones used will be a deeper shade, “a different, a darker green”, says spokesman for Brazil’s National Institute of Historic and Artistic Heritage.

“The stones of Christ are hard to find.”

Carlos Oswald's drawings show how the design developed

The stone tiles that cover Christ the Redeemer were one of the last pieces of the design to be finalised.

According to the project's Brazilian architect, Heitor da Silva Costa - seated, in the picture above - it was the first time mosaic would be used on a statue.

The original idea for a monument to Christ came from a group of Brazilians who, in the wake of World War One, feared an advancing tide of godlessness. Church and state had been separated when Brazil became a republic at the end of the previous century, and they saw the statue as a way of reclaiming Rio – then Brazil’s capital city – for Christianity.

The first proposal was for a bronze statue of Christ on Sugar Loaf - the giant lump of rock with a smooth, curved summit that rises out of the ocean at the entrance to Guanabara Bay. But it was soon decided that Corcovado (“hunch back”) - a peak in the forested hills behind the city - was a better location.

Da Silva Costa, whose design was chosen in February 1922, imagined the statue facing the rising sun: “The statue of the divine saviour shall be the first image to emerge from the obscurity in which the earth is plunged and to receive the salute of the star of the day which, after surrounding it with its radiant luminosity, shall build at sunset around its head a halo fit for the Man-God,” he wrote.

His initial design showed Christ carrying a large cross, which he hugged to his body with one hand, while holding a celestial globe with the other. Some people made fun of it, calling it “Christ with a ball”.

As he studied the Corcovado from various vantage points in the city - at that point topped with a radio transmission tower erected by Westinghouse - a new design took shape. In this new version, developed with artist Carlos Oswald, Christ was himself the cross, his outstretched arms signifying the redemption of mankind at the crucifixion.

But the new design introduced new challenges. Da Silva Costa had already concluded the structure would need to be huge, to be visible from the city centre 4km (2.5 miles) away. It would also have to be immensely strong, to support the massive arms. Da Silva Costa decided on reinforced concrete, “the material of the future” as he saw it, and headed for Europe in 1924 to seek help from the leading French engineer in the field, Albert Caquot.

A 4m-high scale model was made in Landowski's studio in Paris

While there, he also met a number of European sculptors. Antoine Bourdelle, who had worked with Rodin, was one of those approached to make a 4m-high scale model based on Oswald’s drawings, but it was French-Polish sculptor Paul Landowski who received the commission.

Oswald’s sketches were already voguishly art deco – but Landowski intensified this stylisation, working particularly on the head and hands, which he produced full-sized in clay, to be shipped to Rio where they were reproduced in concrete.

By 1927 a preliminary steel frame had already been erected on the top of Corcovado and yet the problem of the statue’s finish had still not been solved. Da Silva Costa regarded concrete itself as unacceptably rough and crude.

Only the head and hands were sculpted life-size and shipped to Brazil

“We were marching towards the inevitable artistic failure, without being able to go back,” he wrote later.

Inspiration came in an arcade which had recently opened on the Champs Elysees, where, after work one evening, he saw a fountain covered in a silvery mosaic.

“By seeing how the small tiles covered all the curved profiles of the fountain, I was soon taken by the idea of using them on the image which I always had in my thoughts,” wrote Da Silva Costa. “Moving from the concept to the making of it took less than 24 hours. The next morning I went to a ceramic studio where I made the first samples.”

For the material, Da Silva Costa chose soapstone, according to his great-great-granddaughter, Bel Noronha, partly because it had been used by the 18th Century sculptor Aleijadinho (“the cripple”) in the state of Minas Gerais, just north of Rio. After losing his fingers to disease, Aleijadinho miraculously continued to carve ornate statues using a hammer and chisel tied to what was left of his hands. That these were still in good condition 120 years later, in Da Silva Costa’s view, testified to the stone’s durability.

He selected a pale-coloured example from quarries near the city of Ouro Preto, where Aleijadinho had worked – unaware that eight decades later it would run out.

Small triangles of the stone, 3cm x 3cm x 4cm, and 5mm thick were then glued on to squares of linen cloth by women volunteers in one of the parishes at the foot of the Corcovado.

They often added a personal touch to their work by writing messages or their boyfriends' names on the back of the tiles.

“I wrote many wishes on the soapstones,” said one of the workers, Lygia Maria Avila da Veiga, in a film shot by Bel Noronha.

“They are up there, up there on top.”

Santa Marta favela

There is still a strong connection between the statue and those who live closest to it.

During Carnival, a street party called Christ’s Armpit, or “Suvaco do Cristo”, weaves its way beneath Corcovado in tribute to the outstretched arms overhead. Crowds of dancers and drummers samba through the streets wearing T-shirts bearing the image of Christ.

For those who live in the Santa Marta favela nearby, the monument is constantly visible.

“I’m aware of it every day – it’s a nice thing to have on the landscape,” says Silvana Castro da Silva. “It’s beautiful at night when it’s all lit up.”

A mile away, as the crow flies, the figure of Christ appears like a white cross gleaming on the hill top. Or on special occasions it may be illuminated in a coloured light – lilac for Mother’s Day, pink for a breast cancer charity or blue for an autism awareness day.

“We’re privileged to have a view of Christ – it’s a symbol of our community,” says Daniel Nascimento who sells a popular Brazilian sorbet made from the Amazonian acai berry.

“I’m not religious so for me, it’s just one of the most beautiful places in Rio. There’s a trail here up the hill to Corcovado that only the residents know about – it’s something special.”

Despite the religious inspiration behind the statue, it was never seen exclusively in a religious light. Count Celso, one of the instigators of the project in the 1920s, described the completed work as a “monument to science, art and religion”.

“It’s a religious symbol, a cultural symbol and a symbol of Brazil,” says Padre Omar, rector of the chapel in the base of the statue. “Christ the Redeemer brings a marvellous vista of welcoming open arms to all those who pass through the city of Rio de Janeiro.”

The image of the statue is reproduced everywhere - in graffiti art, sand sculptures on Copacabana beach - and even on skin.

Edilson Porfirio Dantas, who has lived in Rio for 18 years, has a Christ tattoo covering his entire back. "It took eight hours to complete," he says. "I'm not from Rio but the city is in my heart and Christ is beautiful."

According to Marcio Roiter, president of Brazil's Art Deco Institute, Christ the Redeemer has multiple meanings - "for each person a different meaning".

As he sees it, it's not explicitly religious. "It's more like somebody giving you a hug - welcoming you."

His words echo a 1969 song, That Hug, by one of Brazil's most famous singers, Gilberto Gil, which is sometimes said to have been inspired by the statue's arms-wide pose.

After a spell as a political prisoner, the newly released Gil rejoices in the vibrancy of Rio, the girls of the favelas, the famous Portela samba school, the Flamengo football team, the Banda de Ipanema street parade…

"Hello, Rio de Janeiro - that hug!

"The Brazilian people - that hug!"

Like the statue, Gil embraces everyone - and is embraced in return.

[MIKA27]

Australian Tech Knows When You're Texting While Driving (And Tells You To Stop)

A decade ago, you’d assume that the idiot on the highway in front of you weaving back and forth across the yellow lines was drunk. Today, there’s a pretty good chance that they’re just trying to navigate some particularly complicated emoji. GM wants to stop the madness, and it’s betting on eye-tracking to do so.

In an effort to curb driver distraction, GM has announced that it will install half a million eye-tracking devices in cars over the next few years. It will be the first major automaker to do so, and according to a report byThe Financial Times (paywall), it’s buying the technology from an Australian company called Seeing Machines.

Seeing Machines makes a couple of different tracking devices; some of them are aimed at monitoring exhaustion in long-haul truckers, others can detect distraction in users in situations that range from flight simulators to actual pilot cockpits. It seems like GM will be utilising the company’s Fovio model, since it’s listed as a partner on the device’s website, though it’s possible that some other device is being developed for GM.

Fovio looks a bit like a small Kinect and can be mounted or embedded within the dashboard. It’s able to not only track things like your eye movement and how much you’re blinking, but also where your head is in relation to the rest of the car. According to FT, Seeing Machines is also working on adding biometric tracking data like your BAC and heart rate — which is specific enough to raise issues of data privacy, even this early in the game.

From GM’s perspective though, it’s all in service of being able to know when you need a gentle (or not so gentle) reminder to watch the road. And if the technology catches on, it could be a major step towards eradicating texting-and-driving — surely one of the dumbest, most preventable reasons for accidents.

[MIKA27]

The Dirty Truth About Where Your Old Electronics Go

We all know we should recycle our electronics, but we don’t really know what happens after we drop them off at the e-waste centre. So filmmaker Alex Gorosh followed his old iPhones, all the way to Agbogbloshie, Ghana, the largest electronics dump in the world. It’s a place so dirty and dangerous it’s nicknamed “Sodom and Gomorrah.”

It turns out about half of our discarded electronics are shipped overseas to places like Agbogbloshie where environmental regulations aren’t as strict. At this particular site, some of the gadgets are taken apart, their salvageable components sold. But the large majority of them are burned so the workers — largely teenagers — can scrap the metals inside.

Watching Gorosh traipse through inky swamps of shattered flatscreens and flattened tablets, the haze of melting plastics and unpronounceable pollutants whipping around him, it’s clear that electronics “recycling” isn’t working out the way we’d hoped.

There is a better way. The film is a promotional piece for a service called Gizmogul, where you can donate your electronics via FedEx so they can be properly repaired, refurbished, or repurposed. There are many similar services out there, but Gizmogul seems especially comprehensive. And this way you can be sure your iPad never ends up smouldering in Agbogbloshie.

[MIKA27]

Mystery (Partially) Solved: Stonehenge Was A Complete Circle

One of the mysteries of Stonehenge has been solved because someone was too lazy to get a longer hose.

Usually, the grass around the puzzling collection of Neolithic stones is watered by stewards, but this year, the hose used was too short, and didn’t reach the entire grounds. The unwatered grass dried out. It looked gnarly, but the barren land ended up showing archeologists the answer to a lingering question: Whether Stonehenge was actually supposed to be an incomplete circle.

Tim Daw, who works on the grounds, first noticed parches revealing “stone holes” as he surveyed the dried-out area. These holes confirmed that Stonehenge, at one point, had been a full circle.

“I called my colleague over and he saw them and realised their possible significance as well. Not being archaeologists we called in the professionals to evaluate them,” Daw told Telegraph.

“I am still amazed and very pleased that simply really looking at something, that tens of thousands of people had unwittingly seen, can reveal secrets that sophisticated machinery can’t.”

This doesn’t mean Stonehenge is now short on unanswered questions. We still don’t know who built it, or why (though a theory that it’s a giant musical instrument has gained some traction). And now there’s another puzzle: What happened to the stones that used to complete the circle?

[MIKA27]

The US Navy Built Its Own Indoor Ocean To Test Ships

The world’s seven seas may be wildly unpredictable, but if you ever find yourself itching to play Poseidon, you might want to consider enlisting. Because at the Naval Surface Warfare Center just outside Washington DC, the US Navy gets to control every inch of its very own indoor ocean.

And now, thanks to 216 newly acquired electronic waveboards, this mini-ocean is the most high-tech wave-testing basing the world has to offer. As Smithsonian Mag explains:

Scaled-down fibreglass models, cruisers the size of canoes, ride waves that max out at a few feet high. But it’s the motion of the ocean that matters. The hinged wave boards, each with its own motor synced up to software, can precisely recreate eight ocean conditions (from flat calm to typhoonlike) across all seven seas, pushing the water and moving up and down like giant piano keys whose scales and chords are waves.

The US Navy needs the football field-sized storm center to test its ship models before it actually builds them — which can end up costing billions of dollars. This way, it knows whether sailors will be able to perform their duties in a variety of conditions as well as how vessels handle themselves. And the old wave-modelling system just couldn’t cut it:

A relic from the 1960s, the old pneumatic-powered wave system couldn’t replicate complicated open-ocean conditions, which are driven by local winds and far-off hurricanes. The testing team sometimes had to take remote-control models to the actual ocean, scouring weather reports for the perfect chop. Other seafarers have mistaken the models for “Cuban drug-smuggling submarines,” says test director Calvin Krishen. “We hear about it in the bars afterward.

With the new system in place, the US Navy can cover all the necessary simulations in six weeks when it would previously have taken months to finish.

[MIKA27]

You Can't Buy These Underwater Iron Man Thrusters Without Government Approval

If you combined the SkyMall catalogue with the Christmas list of some spoiled rich kid you’d end up with Hammacher Schlemmer: an impossible menagerie of everything from shoe polishers, to talking scales, to this amazing set of underwater thrusters that you wear like a pair of Iron Man’s pants. If there’s a better way to spend $US31,000 we haven’t seen it.

A pair of six-inch electric thrusters silently propel a swimmer to speeds of up to three-and-a-half knots, and on a full charge the propulsion pants have a range of about 3.2km. But, you can extend that by bringing along an extra battery that can actually be swapped in while underwater.

But if that isn’t hardcore enough for you, check out the limitations on who can buy a pair, and where they can use it:

Only available from Hammacher Schlemmer for recreational use by U.S. citizens within U.S. territorial waters, its advanced design requires purchase approval from the U.S. Department of State.

It seems like it’s easier to buy a gun, high-end explosives, or even a small army than it is to order one of these for a fun weekend on the lake. America

[MIKA27]

Destiny's Planet View Lets You Explore The Universe Through Google Earth

This is probably one of the coolest pieces of video game marketing I’ve seen in while. Dear God it felt gross to type that. Shudder.

It’s a website called Destiny Planet View and it’s sort of like Google Maps for the world of Destiny. It’s something of a guided tour — there is literally a voiceover guiding you — and you can click throughout the universe of destiny, before heading to some super interesting Google-maps style 3D pictures of the game’s environments.

It’s all super impressive. My favourite part was this: the website actually launches you from your current location and shoots you into space, before allowing you to travel to the different planets available in the game. That was cool. Very cool.

I won’t spoil any more for you, I’ll just encourage you to explore the website for yourself.

[MIKA27]

Sonos Adds Simpler Wi-Fi Streaming to All of Its Speakers

Can’t decide what song to listen to on your Sonos speakers today? You should start with “The Bridge Is Over” by Boogie Down Productions. That’s because you won’t need the $50 Sonos Bridge to stream music to the company’s speakers anymore—but you may still want to use one in many cases.

Sonos just announced a firmware update that eliminates the need for the Bridge, which had to be physically connected to a router with an Ethernet cable for any Sonos system to work. Now, you can connect to one or more Sonos speakers directly via Wi-Fi, with no hard-wired connection. During configuration, a speaker will form an ad hoc connection with your mobile device. You can set up one of the speakers to act as a wireless bridge for multi-speaker setups, although there are some limitations as compared to a Bridge setup.

The free over-the-air update will go out today, and the new feature is backwards-compatible. All new Sonos speakers will come with the new firmware, and the update is also being pushed out to all older Sonos systems. You’ll be able to choose between a “Standard Setup”—the new way that just uses Wi-Fi—and a “Bridge Setup” that uses the traditional wired-in hub.

According to Nick Millington, vice president of product development at Sonos, the Wi-Fi setup won’t impact performance. Millington says that network reliability and synchronization between speakers won’t be issues, and you’ll get “95 percent-plus” of the performance of a Bridge-equipped system. However, there are still scenarios in which a Bridge will still be the best route.

If you’ve already got a Sonos setup with a Bridge in place, you will likely want to keep it that way. Although the Wi-Fi connectivity is a simpler way to configure a single-room or single-speaker system, Sonos says that the Bridge is still the best way to drive more-elaborate and farther-reaching setups.

For the Wi-Fi-only setup, all speakers will need to be in range of your Wi-Fi router, which means you are limited in terms of speaker placement. And although the Wi-Fi feature will work with the company’s Playbar soundbar by itself, a hardwired Bridge is still required for 5.1- and 3.1-channel Sonos home-theater setups.

We haven’t had any hands-on time with the new “Standard Setup” feature, but it’s a welcome option especially for users of the compact and affordable Play:1. You won’t need a separate piece of hardware to stream music to it, and one less wire and one less gadget are generally good things.

MIKA: Great, can I have my money back now....

[MIKA27]

The Mystery of St. Louis's Veiled Prophet

Racial and class tensions are nothing new in the city, as the story of a parade founded by white elites in 1877 to protect their position shows.

There’s a lot that I love about St. Louis: baseball, the free zoo and art museum, a rich cultural history that stretches from T.S. Eliot to Miles Davis. But the city’s inability to deal with its history of racial inequality, always closely tied to class issues, has run parallel to the city’s cultural and economic decline, leaving it in something resembling a stupor. A case study in this long decline can be found in the emblematic history of the annual Fair Saint Louis.

Held annually every Fourth of July, usually in downtown St. Louis, Fair St. Louis is a festival that includes food, music, hot-air balloons, and fireworks. Touted as “America’s Biggest Birthday Party”, it’s basically just a fun excuse to enjoy the usually hot and humid St. Louis Fourth of Julys with friends and family. This summer, due to construction along the Mississippi riverfront, the fair was held in Forest Park, a jewel of a turn-of-the-century public park built for the 1904 World’s Fair.

Attaching Fair St. Louis to these monuments of St. Louis’ former grandeur, the Gateway Arch and Forest Park, is fun and completely in the spirit of civic celebration, but also overshadows the dark and sordid history of the fair itself. Until the early ’90s I knew Fair Saint Louis by its older name, the VP Fair. VP stands for “Veiled Prophet”, and the name of the fair wasn’t officially changed to Fair Saint Louis until 1992. “Veiled Prophet” is an admittedly odd name, and the history behind it is just as strange.

In 1878, grain executive and former Confederate cavalryman Charles Slayback called a meeting of local business and civic leaders. His intention was to form a secret society that would blend the pomp and ritual of a New Orleans Mardi Gras with the symbolism used by the Irish poet Thomas Moore. From Moore’s poetry, Slayback and the St. Louis elite created the myth of the Veiled Prophet of Khorassan, a mystic traveller who inexplicably decided to make St. Louis his base of operations.

The entire process was suffused with elaborate ritual: A person would be chosen by a secret board of local elites to anonymously play the role of the Veiled Prophet. The Veiled Prophet would chose a Queen of Love and Beauty from among the elite ball attendees (of course, invitation list to be kept strictly confidential as well) with whom he would dance a “Royal Quadrille” before presenting her with an expensive keepsake such as a tiara or pearls. Often these gifts were so expensive that they became family heirlooms. The ball would be accompanied by a just-as-spectacular parade and fair. In October of 1878, civic elites organized the first parade. It attracted more than 50,000 spectators.

There were at least two reasons Slayback and his peers created the Veiled Prophet Organization and staged the lavish events. One was 300 miles north. By the late 1880s, Chicago was beginning to overshadow St. Louis as transportation and manufacturing hub. St. Louis needed, in every way, including symbolically, to remind its citizens of its stature. The VP Parade recalled the antebellum St. Louis Agricultural and Mechanical Fair, a sort of trade show and harvest festival combined.

A float from the 1955 VP Fair.

Perhaps more fundamentally though, the VP activities were a response to growing labor unrest in the city, much of it involving cooperation between white and black workers. A year before the founding of the Order of the Veiled Prophet was the Grand Railroad Strike of 1877, in which railroad workers across the country brought cars to halt in protest of abominable pay and working conditions.

In St. Louis, nearly 1,500 striking workers, both black and white, brought all rail freight to a standstill for an entire week. The involvement of the St. Louis Workingman’s Party eventually expanded the demands of the protest to include things like a ban on child labor and an eight-hour workday. Of course, this was untenable to the municipal and national powers. The strike ended when 5,000 recently deputized “special police” aided federal troops in forcing the strikers to disperse. Eighteen strikers were killed. The strike ended nationally within 45 days.

According to historian Thomas Spencer in The St. Louis Veiled Prophet Celebration: Power On Parade 1877-1995, the primary goal of the VP events was to take back the public stage from populist demands for social and economic justice. More than just a series of gaudy floats traversing the city streets, the parade and all its pomp was meant to reinforce the values of the elite on the working class of the city. The symbol of a mystical, benevolent figure whose identity is a mystery—only two Veiled Prophets have ever had their identity revealed—was meant to serve as a sort of empty shell that contained the accumulated privilege and power of the status quo.

In fact, to underline the message of class and race hegemony, the image of the first Veiled Prophet is armed with a shotgun and pistol and is strikingly similar in appearance to a Klansman. On October 6, 1878, the Missouri Republican reported, “It will be readily observed from the accoutrements of the Prophet that the procession is not likely to be stopped by street cars or anything else.” Spencer takes “streetcar” to be a reference to the labor strikes. The message was clear: We, the bankers and businessmen, have a monopoly on violence and wealth. We are grand and mysterious, and also to be feared. The first Veiled Prophet, the only one ever willingly revealed by the organization, turned out to be St. Louis Police Commissioner John G. Priest, an active participant in quelling the railroad strikes the year before.

Of course, few things struck as much fear into the hearts of city fathers as white/black labor cooperation. Cooperation between black and white workers during the 1877 strike led anti-labor newspapers to label a parade thrown in support of the strikes a “riot.” Inevitably, after a few minor looting incidents lead to the theft of bread and soap from a few local stores, the St. Louis Dispatch “characterized the strikers as ‘tramps and loafers’ who were ‘anxious to pillage and plunder’,” Thomas Spencer writes. The specter of the interracial flexing of labor muscle inspired to an armed citizens militia that marched in a counter-protest to the working-class demonstration. It sounds tragically reminiscent of recent events in St. Louis.

The first Veiled Prophet took the theme of progress and wisdom, and, according to Spencer, “equated wisdom with wealth.” While many 19th century parades were fairly democratic and celebrated a sort of play or reversal of social order, a major element of the Mardi Gras parades that inspired it, the Veiled Prophet proceedings emphasized the existing power structure. The 1878 parade displayed a tableau of inevitable “progress” over 17 floats, beginning with the icy desolation of early Earth and culminating in the grand excess of Gilded Age industrialism with all of its attendant pomp. This notion of progress was portrayed as the inevitable result of unfettered capitalism, instituted by its white, male leaders. Slayback, the organizer of the proceedings, also threw in a grab bag of odd mythological references to properly mystify the throngs of people gathered to witness the procession.

According to a St. Louis city website, “The traditional VP celebration has represented for St. Louisans a perceived link between different components of the community in a holiday celebration, while also reinforcing the notion of a benevolent cultural elite.” Many of the average citizens of St. Louis knew exactly what the VP Ball and Fair represented, and their dissent became nearly as much of a convention as the fair itself. Spencer reports that in the earliest years of the parade there was public backlash against upsetting racial stereotypes depicted on the floats. (It probably shouldn’t come as a surprise that African and Jewish Americans weren’t allowed in the VP Organization for many years). Peashooters were sold at local stores around the time of the parade so that bystanders could pelt the ostentatious floats. Unions held mocking counter-parades that skewered the lavishness of the VP Organization.

The tradition of protest in St. Louis is a heartening counter-narrative to the divisions that makes it necessary. That’s been apparent from the railroad strikes of 1877 to the #handsupdontshoot response to the killing of Michael Brown. The 1972 Veiled Prophet was unmasked in what was one of the most dramatic guerrilla protests ever organized by local civil-rights leader Percy Green. The Ball that year was held in cavernous Kiel Auditorium. Activist Gena Scott, dramatically sliding down a power cable a la Mission Impossible, unmasked the enthroned Prophet. It turned out to be the then-executive vice president of Monsanto, Tom K. Smith. Scott’s car was bombed and her house vandalized.

The unmasking in Kiel Auditorium helped highlight the embarrassing inequities that the VP Fair and Ball represented. The organization loosened up a bit, even opening its ranks to African-American members in 1979, but by the late ’70s, even the members seemed a bit embarrassed of the spectacle. Spencer quotes William Martiz, a VP member, as saying, “A lot of members in the late 70’s ‘felt uneasy with the social connotations’ and people were saying ‘get that goddamn ball off the television, don’t force that on the community.’” By 1992 the name of the event was changed to Fair Saint Louis, nominally erasing the connection to its past.

The VP Fair and Ball had to change in response to social pressure, but the monopoly of power held by the people who constituted its elite ranks stayed the same. In 2000, Spencer told Riverfront Times, “one of the roles that organization plays is to keep these people on top with business contacts to put little Johnny into a corporate job, and by the 1950’s and 1960’s, all the corporate CEO’s in St. Louis had the same names as the major business leaders did in the 1880’s. If you know much about St. Louis history, when is it the corporations really started going into the Dumpster? It was under the leadership of these folks.”

Feeling the heat from industrial competitors to the North and labor unrest inside the city, the business elite of St. Louis decided in 1878 to double down on the static racial and economic power structure of the city. The Veiled Prophet Ball and Fair was a powerful symbol of that reassertion of control. But the underlying social issues continued to fester. St. Louis declined, suffering countless self-inflicted wounds, visible and invisible. Michael Brown is part of that story now. If the 1972 unmasking of the Monsanto executive unveiled the secret power structure running St. Louis, Brown’s shooting was equally revealing of the victims of the inequality institutionalized by the Veiled Prophets.

[MIKA27]

The London Rocket Conspiracy

Seventy years ago, on 8 September 1944, a gas main exploded in London. Well, that’s what the newspapers said the next day, but can you believe everything you read in the press? Not many Londoners did. For one thing, it wasn’t an isolated incident. The papers went on to report a whole series of “gas main explosions” – dozens of them – over the course of the next two months.

What was causing the sudden spate of explosions? Britain had been at war for five years, but there were no longer any German bombers in the skies over London – the Royal Air Force had total air supremacy. A few months earlier the city had suffered a flurry of “flying-bomb” attacks – essentially small unmanned kamikaze aircraft – but these had stopped when the French coast was controlled by the advancing Allies.

The war was coming to an end, and the British government wanted to get that message across to the public. Newspapers only printed good news. London life was returning to normal; blackout restrictions had been lifted and evacuees were being told to return to the city. Two or three “gas main explosions” per day was no cause for alarm.

Few people believed the “exploding gas main” stories. The British often boast about their wartime spirit – whereby everyone feels they are on the same side against a common enemy – but for Londoners in September 1944 the wartime spirit became distinctly frayed. It was replaced by something far more cynical and familiar – a conspiracy theory. The government knew perfectly well what was causing all these explosions, and so did anyone who had seen the aftermath of one.

In the bottom of each smoking crater was the tangled wreckage of a rocket.

The first V-2 rocket landed in London on 8 September 1944, a few hours after a similar weapon had been fired at Paris. In the course of the next six months, some 3,170 V-2s were launched from sites in German-held territory. Almost half of them were targeted at London, with the remainder aimed at allied targets on the continent. The V-2 caused far more fatalities than a similar tonnage of conventional bombs, partly because of its enormous kinetic energy and partly because it struck without any warning.

Falling from the edge of space at several times the speed of sound, the first thing anyone on the ground heard was the warhead exploding. This was followed by the long drawn-out rumble of the rocket falling through the air, long after it had already hit the ground.

Londoners knew they were being attacked by long-range rockets, and they resented the way the government persistently denied the truth. The ridiculous notion that the city was suffering from a sudden epidemic of spontaneously exploding gas mains was an insult to the public’s intelligence.

As is so often the case with “disinformation”, the government’s excuse – when it finally came out – was that the deception was aimed not at the general public but at the enemy. As Prime Minister Winston Churchill said on 10 November 1944, in the government’s first public acknowledgement of the rocket attacks:

No official statement about the attack has hitherto been issued because it might have given information useful to the enemy, who may well have been uncertain as to whether any of these missiles had actually struck this island. No doubt by now he has acquired some information, and in any case the Government do not feel they should any longer withhold all information from the public.

There’s an obvious analogy here with the official attitude toward UFOs – with the difference that everyone today knows that the V-2 rockets were real. They weren’t exploding gas mains. As far as the authorities are concerned, though, UFOs are still weather balloons, swamp gas, the planet Venus, etc.

There’s another parallel between the V-2s and ufology. One of the commonest reasons scientists give for refusing to believe in UFOs is that they are “a physical impossibility.” In exactly the same way, British scientists maintained that long-range liquid-fuelled rockets were “a physical impossibility”… right up until the moment they started to rain down on London.

To British scientists, the idea of a powerful liquid-fuelled rocket was the stuff of science fiction and nothing more. To produce the required thrust from the available volume of fuel, enormous pressures would be needed – far more than could be contained by any conceivable fuel tank. If the Germans claimed they were developing liquid-fuelled rockets, then it must be a bluff that could safely be ignored. If intelligence operatives claimed to have seen rocket production facilities, they must have been mistaken. You can’t argue with the laws of physics.

The scientists were right to some extent. It’s true that you can’t break the laws of physics, and that a rocket exhaust requires an enormous pressure. But who said the fuel had to be stored at that pressure? The Germans used a turbopump, similar to a car’s turbocharger, to vastly increase the pressure at the nozzle of the rocket. The laws of physics were right – it was just the British scientists, who couldn’t think “out of the box”, who were wrong.

The German V-2 campaign saw long-range rockets used as weapons of war for the first time in history, and it all started seventy years ago this month. If you’d like to know more about the subject, you might want to take a look at an ebook The V-2 Offensive On London.

[MIKA27]

Try Out Your Coffin At This Japanese Festival

Ah yes, yet another zany tale from the mystical East.

Japan’s ‘Shukatsu Festa’ is an increasingly popular festival, attracting around 5,000 people each year. “Shukatsu”, meaning “preparing for one’s end”, is the general premise of the event, inviting participants to plan out their funerals.

Amusingly named the ‘try before you die’ festival, 50 suppliers to the industry are dying to win your business.

With decisions ranging from coffin choice, outfits to wear into the afterlife, flower selection and morbid makeovers, participants are photographed so they can see and critique what they will look like on their big day.

[MIKA27]

The Strange & Supernatural World Of Boliva's Witch Doctors

Latin American culture is brimming with a rich array of superstitions, traditional rituals and tales of magic - none more so than Bolivia.

Best friends and visual artists Thomas Rousset and Raphael Verona, travelled to the Altiplano region of the South American country to document the local medicine men, deities, mystics and witch doctors.

Their fascinating series 'Waska Tatay' depicts all manner of colourful (and strange) costumes that are worn during the traditional rituals and ceremonies, which are all still practiced today.

You can see the entire series and suffice your taste for the supernatural in their book 'Waska Tatay'. It features 144 pages documenting all manner of magical practices, beliefs, incantations and myths. Limited copies are still available here.

[MIKA27]

LIVING WITH JIGSAW

I think I've previously posted this between pages 1 - 40 but though it would be funny to repost for a laugh.

No matter how many lame room mates you’ve had to endure over the years, you’ve never had one as bad as Jigsaw. OK, so technically Jigsaw is the sick old dude from the Saw movies, and the puppet’s name is actually Billy, but you get the point.

In this brilliantly funny video, our protagonist, Gary, is forced to live with the demented puppet who can’t help but play his twisted tricks on his roomie. First, the toilet has been clogged with two-ply paper towel and dirty socks, and Gary must walk barefoot over a floor covered in “razor blades” (actually just disposable razors) to get to his mobile devices before the toilet overflows. Then Gary gets woken up to find out he’s surrounded by mouse traps, and finally, he learns that his keys have been force-fed to his dog, and he can only use an ice cream scooper to retrieve them. Kudos galore to Chris Capel, who wrote and directed this gem.

[MIKA27]

UPSLOPE BARREL AGED BROWN ALE

I can't get enough of barrel aged beers, and I'm guessing you might not be able to either, so let me introduce you to yet another one worth your time.

Barrel Aged Brown Ale from Upslope Brewing in Boulder, Colorado is the first quarterly release in their new Lee Hill series, which celebrates the breweries original location in Lee Hill. Volume 1 is this 7.6% ABV Brown Ale aged for four months in Maryland Rye Whiskey barrels from Leopold Bros. that also happens to come in these sharp looking 19.2oz cans.

[MIKA27]

A very odd mystery: Human foot washes ashore in Pacific Northwest, and it’s the 15th!

A human foot, still inside a New Balance tennis shoe washed ashore in Seattle this week — and if that wasn’t mystery enough, it’s the FIFTEENTH foot that’s washed ashore along the Pacific Northwest coast since 2007!

15 human feet have washed ashore along the Pacific Northwest coast — from Canada down to Tacoma — over the last seven years.

And no one seems to know where they’re coming from.

“Who knows where they originated?” resident Albert Hulsen told FOX31 sister station Q13 FOX in Seattle. “Maybe it’s not from this area at all but from one of the surrounding islands.”

FOX6’s sister station, Q13FOX in Seattle says the latest foot was discovered last Tuesday, August 19th — by volunteers picking up trash.

A forensic anthropologist with the King County Medical Examiner’s Office, where the foot is being examined says the foot likely wasn’t severed, but detached from the body as it decomposed at sea.

“The bones fall apart. They (feet in shoes that have washed ashore) are not being severed. They’re not being purposely cut off. Tennis shoes not only protect the feet but they’re also buoyant, and so they either float on the surface, or they’re in the high part of the water column, so they will float in with the tide,” the forensic anthropologist said.

The Medical Examiner’s Office has released a picture of the tennis shoe in which the foot was found in an attempt to identify the person who wore the shoes.

Q13FOX reports it is a New Balance shoe, men’s size 10 1/2. It is a white sneaker with blue trim.

This model of shoe was first available for purchase in April of 2008.

A black, cotton Hanes sock was on the foot when it was found.

There is no word on whether authorities have made any effort to link this foot to the other 14 that have washed ashore since 2007.

So where are these feet coming from?

A local expert on tides told Q13FOX the feet could be local — or they could be winding up in the Northwest by way of the Strait of Georgia in Canada or the Strait of Juan de Fuca that connects the Puget Sound near Seattle to the Pacific Ocean.

CLICK HERE for more on this story via Q13FOX.com.

[MIKA27]

Sony's Rumoured QX1 Lens Could Turn Your Smartphone Into A DSLR

That camera breakdown above is reportedly Sony’s new ILCE-QX1 lens camera system. Originally leaked by the Xperia Blog, this lens is the next evolution in Sony’s determination to transform your smartphone lens into a more professional grade shooter.

The biggest addition to Sony’s QX lineup, which includes the QX10 and the QX100 fixed lenses, is that this new lens system has a mounting module that will let you switch among different E-mount lenses, more akin to a DSLR or MILC shooting experience. The photography philosophy behind the QX1 remains the same, take a professional grade lens, make it as portable as possible (about the size of a baseball), and attach it when you need it. The lens’ Wi-Fi syncs with your phone and can also connect via NFC. Last year’s QX100 could work completely autonomously from a smartphone itself, but a phone’s display actually helps frame what you’re looking at and capture the image you want. Most likely the QX1 will work in a similar vein, only allowing the additional function of switching among lenses.

Sony Alpha Rumours says the system will come with an APC-S sensor and will cost almost $US400 for the body and near $US600 with a 16-50mm lens in tow. If these prices are true, Sony’s impressive but pricey QX lenses will stay a niche product.

Equally interesting is the smartphone model they have chosen to display the QX1. This could be the first “official” photography of the upcoming Xperia Z3 we’ve seen from Sony. However, the QX1 would probably work on a variety of smartphones, Android or otherwise, much like previous lenses in the QX line.

Luckily, we won’t have to wait much longer to get a deeper dive into the Z3 as we’re expecting its debut later this week at IFA 2014 in Berlin.

[MIKA27]

This New Wireless Hard Drive Cuts Out Cords And Adds An SD Card Slot

External hard drives are essential; the cords they come with are a pain. And finally, after watching its competitors go wireless one by one, Western Digital has joined the party. My Passport Wireless does away with cords and adds a nifty built-in SD card slot as a nice little bonus.

The My Passport Wireless also has its own Wi-Fi connection and internal battery, enabling it to stream files and media to your computer or smartphone, and pairs with WD’s My Cloud App on up to eight devices at once. It has its very own rechargeable battery that will allow for six hours of streaming, or 22 hours of standby mode. If streaming isn’t your thing, you could also simply use the My Passport Wireless for backing up data and freeing up space on your tablet or phone.

What’s most appealing though — especially for photographers — is that built-in SD card slot. Combined with the battery power, you can transfer all your photos or videos without the annoyance of taking out your computer and hooking up the drive.

Of course, does still come with a USB 3.0 port for traditionalists who feel safer tethered to their computer. The My Passport Wireless is available now for pre-order from the Western Digital online store, with 1TB for $US180, and 2TB for $US220. That’s about comparable with the wireless competition, but that SD slot bonus might just make it a better buy.

[MIKA27]

Logitech's New Bluetooth Keyboard Docks Tablet And Phone At Once

Bluetooth wireless keyboards are so prolific that it’s hard to tell one from the other. But

Logitech’s new K480 has a surprisingly neat feature: a cut-out groove that lets you dock both a phone and tablet at the same time.

There’s no direct connectivity on offer — so there’s no data syncing or charging going on — but the keyboard does allow you to neatly see both screens at once. If, that is, they’re the right size: you probably won’t squeeze an iPad Air and a Galaxy Note on here in landscape mode (you sick whack), but you could, say, fit an iPad Mini and an HTC One M8 in there. It also has Logitech’s Easy-Switch function, which means jumping between devices is pretty straightforward — you just spin a wheel to choose from three pre-paired devices.

Obviously, the keyboard also pairs up with your laptop or desktop — in fact it works with Windows, iOS, Android and iOS — so you could use it on your desk at home and then stuff it in your bag for travel. It will be available in black or white later this month for $50. The only real decision left to be made is: work on the tablet and Netflix on the phone, or the other way round?

[MIKA27]

Is This The iPhone 6? This Russian Leaker Certainly Thinks So

It’s rumoured that the next iPhone will be bigger, smoother, faster and all-round sexier. This Russian YouTuber claims to have the real deal, but we’re not quite sure.

Obviously with all iPhone leaks, it’s best to take them with a huge grain of salt. With that said, let’s continue.

The leak says that the phone will be made from Liquid Metal, have its home button moved to the side and, of course, a much bigger screen.

Turn on the English subtitles for this one if you don’t speak perfect Russian.

[MIKA27]

Hmmm, Turkish Frights. Any recent nuclear power plant meltdowns nearby?

Nope but the next story is 'Sort of relative"

[MIKA27]

Radioactive Boars From Chernobyl Are Still Wandering Around Germany

Nearly 30 years later, radiation from Chernobyl still scars the landscape. Perhaps most remarkably, some of that radiation travelled hundreds of kilometres downwind, settled into the soil, and moved up through the food chain. So now we have radioactive wild boars, still roaming around Germany causing trouble.

Since 2012, according to the Telegraph, the state government of Saxony has required that boars hunted for food be tested for radiation. One in three regularly exceeds the safety limit. How did wild boars born decades after the Chernobyl disaster become radioactive? The Telegraph explains:

Even though Saxony lies some 700 miles from Chernobyl, wind and rain carried the radioactivity across western Europe, and soil contamination was found even further away, in France.

Wild boar are thought to be particularly affected because they root through the soil for food, and feed on mushrooms and underground truffles that store radiation. Many mushrooms from the affected areas are also believed to be unfit for human consumption.

Wild radioactive boars may be dangerous to eat, but wild boars in general are a menace across Germany. They’re digging up gardens, shutting down the Autobahn, and even attacking the occasional poor soul.

[MIKA27]

Today's View Of The ISS Shows Once Again How Amazing Earth Is

NASA astronaut Reid Wiseman tweeted this wonderful picture of what he describes as “My favourite views from space — just past sunrise over the ocean.” Gorgeous.