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

[MIKA27]

Bloodletting And Bone Brushes: The White-Knuckle Days Of Early Dentistry

With all those gleaming, stainless-steel tools readied for painful prodding, few people look forward to visiting the dentist. But modern dentistry is a walk in the park compared with archaic methods of treating oral maladies: Be glad you’re not seeking treatment for mysterious “tooth worms” or using dentures filled with the syphilitic teeth of dead soldiers.

“Dentistry, as we understand it today, didn’t emerge as a licensed profession until the end of the 19th century, although practitioners had been calling themselves dentists since the late 1700s,” says Dr Lindsey Fitzharris, who studies the history of science, medicine and technology, and is the creator of The Chirurgeon’s Apprentice. Before dentistry became its own field, tooth-related issues were handled by any ordinary doctor, though little was understood about oral health and the reasons teeth might decay.

The important role of healthy teeth wasn’t lost on the ancients: Since at least 3000 BC, people in the Mesopotamian region used the frayed ends of fibrous twigs or chew sticks, also known as miswak or siwak sticks, to clean their teeth. “Different cultures have used twigs from trees and shrubs with wood grain that is very intertwined,” says Scott Swank, a dentist, historian, and curator of the National Museum of Dentistry. “You peel the bark off and chew it to get the fibres to fray out, and then you use those frayed fibres to clean your teeth. They’re still used today in some parts of Africa and the Middle East.”

Toothbrushes at the National Museum of Dentistry include, from left to right: A miswak or chew stick, an early 20th century celluloid toothbrush by Taub, a rubber-tipped gum stimulator and toothbrush from pre-1945, a Strockway rotary toothbrush from the 1950s, a Dr. Mayland’s rubber toothbrush from the 1920s, a 1930s Rotor toothbrush, and another chew stick.

Swank says the toothbrush design familiar to most Americans dates to the late 1490s in China. “The Chinese took wild hog bristles and attached them to bamboo handles,” explains Swank, “which evolved into bone handles. Bone was used right up to the early plastics, but boar’s hairs are hollow, so there’s no way to get bacteria out of these things — not bacteria from their hair, but bacteria that was already in your mouth.” While a boar’s hair toothbrush might remove some food particles, it could also distribute bacteria, thus causing problems like gingivitis, an inflammatory gum disease.

The modern, mass-produced toothbrush was invented in 1780 by William Addis, while he was languishing in an England jail for inciting a riot. At the time, most Europeans used a cloth to apply a gritty substance like salt, ground eggshells, chalk, or crushed charcoal to clean their teeth. Supposedly inspired by an ordinary broom, Addis carved holes into one end of an animal bone left over from one of his meals, into which he inserted knotted boar bristles. While Addis’ design was novel, the boar bristles were still susceptible to bacterial growth.

An advertisement and selection of bone-handled toothbrushes made by Addis’ company (eventually renamed Wisdom Toothbrushes), mid-19th century.

That disconnect is indicative of the poor understanding people had about the relationship between tooth care, diet, and dental health. “Many people in the past believed ‘tooth worms’ were the cause of tooth decay — tiny creatures that would bore holes in people’s teeth,” explains Fitzharris. Records indicate that the fear of tooth worms goes back at least to the time of the Sumerians, or around 5000 years ago.

Depending on the severity of a patient’s pain, healers might offer a variety of unfortunate tooth-worm treatments. “Often, practitioners would try to smoke the worm out by heating a mixture of beeswax and henbane seed on a piece of iron and directing the fumes into the cavity with a funnel,” Fitzharris says. “Afterwards, the hole was filled with powdered henbane seed and gum mastic, which may have provided temporary relief given the fact that henbane is a mild narcotic. Many times, though, the achy tooth had to be removed altogether. Some tooth-pullers mistook nerves for tooth worms, and extracted both the tooth and the nerve in what was certainly an extremely painful procedure in a period before anesthetics.”

Over the next few millennia, several advancements were made towards alleviating the symptoms of dental-health problems. The Etruscans invented dental bridges; the Romans created gold crowns and artificial teeth made from bone, ivory, or wood; the Chinese developed amalgam, a mixture of silver, tin, and mercury used for fillings.

This early 20th-century copy of an ancient Roman bridge shows how false teeth were secured with metal loops.

In medieval Europe, however, such advancements were rarely applied. During the Middle Ages, most doctors did research and prescribed treatment, restricting themselves to the detached realm of academia, while medical procedures like surgery were handled by a local barber-surgeon. “Until the early 19th century, barber-surgeons performed a variety of services,” explains Fitzharris. “They lanced abscesses, set bone fractures, picked lice from hair, and even pulled rotten teeth. The tradition of the striped barber’s pole harks back to that era, when it served as an advertisement for their proficiency as bloodletters.”

The use of bloodletting as a cure-all stemmed from the ancient belief that sickness was caused by an imbalance of the four humours or bodily fluids (black bile, yellow bile, blood, and phlegm). Though it was practiced up through the early 20th century, bloodletting almost always made patients sicker. The familiar red-and-white striped barber pole originally represented the bloodied cloth bandages that would twist in the wind as they were hung out to dry. To advertise their dental skills, barber-surgeons also hung rows of rotten teeth outside their shops.

“The tooth key was first mentioned in Alexander Monro’s Medical Essays and Observations in 1742,” says Fitzharris. “The claw was placed over the top of the decaying tooth; the bolster, or the long metal rod, was placed against the root. The key was then turned and, if all went well, the tooth would pop out of the socket. Unfortunately, this didn’t always go according to plan.” In many cases, the patient’s tooth shattered as the device was turned, and each piece had to be individually pulled from their bleeding gums.

An illustration of dental keys for tooth extraction from Savigny’s catalogue of surgery implements, circa 1798.

Around the same time, European surgeons began experimenting with implanting teeth. Patients who could afford the procedure chose between living or dead teeth — a classification that depended on the state of the human body the teeth were removed from. Dead teeth might have been removed from a previous patient or a body at the local morgue, while a live tooth would be selected from the mouth of a living donor, typically a poor person or slave whose desirable tooth was forcibly extracted without compensation. The replacement would then be fixed into the empty socket using silver wire or silk ligatures.

Scientific knowledge about dental health advanced rapidly during the 18th century, particularly through the research of Pierre Fauchard, referred to as the father of modern dentistry. But across the pond, Americans were still a bit behind the times when it came to dentistry. By the time Washington was elected president at age 57, he only had one natural tooth remaining in his mouth.

Diagrams from Fauchard’s 1728 book on dentistry showing methods of tooth restoration (left) and a dental drill (right).

George Washington’s personal records indicate that he bought toothbrushes and dentifrice, or tooth-cleaning substances, but to no avail. A former curator at the National Museum of Dentistry studied Washington’s oral-health problems and suggests they were the result of a common medicine used during Washington’s lifetime.

Left: this lower set of Washington’s ivory dentures included a hole for his last remaining tooth. Via the New York Academy of Medicine. Right: this complete set of Washington dentures was made from animal and human teeth, ivory, and lead. Via the Mount Vernon Estate.

By the mid-19th century, dentures were often referred to as “Waterloo Teeth,” after those surreptitiously ripped from the bodies of dead soldiers following the Battle of Waterloo in 1815. Eventually, human teeth were replaced by porcelain, vulcanite, and other materials as manufacturing processes improved their strength and longevity.

An 1827 engraving by Louis Leopold Boilly, entitled “The Steel Balm.”

“When you go to the dentist and the hygienist scrapes all that hard stuff off your teeth, that’s what scalers are used for,” explains Swank. “But in Victorian society, if you had enough money for them, you took your own set to the dentist instead of using the dentist’s. It was a status symbol, even though most sets were fairly plain with ivory or bone handles. Victoria’s set of dental scalers were awfully fancy — they have got mother-of-pearl handles and their fittings are gilded silver.”

This set of dental scalers was designed for Prince Albert in the 1840s, and matches Queen Victoria’s set with mother-of-pearl handles and gold fittings.

The first real push for universal oral hygiene came after World War I, when many men were left with a condition known as Trench Mouth. Due to the absence of preventive oral care, combined with an unhealthy diet and extreme stress, many soldiers developed this severe form of gingivitis. The disastrous results led the U.S. military to update its regulations for oral health and begin advocating for better daily care.

So the next time you’re dreading an easy-breezy tooth cleaning, remember the many patients who came before you, and be thankful you aren’t required to do a little unanesthetized bloodletting first.

[Fuzz]

Why China's Building A Military Base In The Middle Of The Ocean

You've heard of truck stops along the highway? Well, China is building the equivalent in the South China Sea. As the third busiest waterway, can you imagine the size of the drive-thru?... or should that be sail-thru?

[MIKA27]

Inside The Former Soviet Union's Secret Nuclear Test Cities

Though it played out on the international stage, the arms race between the United States and the USSR took place mainly in rural, isolated parts of the world. The Americans tested their nuclear bombs on a desolate patch of Nevada. The Russians chose a barren polygon-shaped patch of what is now Kazakhstan.

The photographer Nadav Kander was arrested twice while visiting this so-called Polygon — aka the Semipalatinsk Test Site, a desolate area as big as New Jersey where the USSR detonated almost 500 nuclear bombs between 1949 and the fall of the Soviet Union. Kander was visiting to shoot his latest book, Dust, which documents the places where Russia set up — and later abandoned — its nuclear program.

In some cases, scientists build faux-towns and structures to test the impact of their bombs. In other cases, the towns were real, because the Polygon wasn’t actually remote at all. In fact, it was quite close to human settlements, including the formerly closed city of Kurchatov, where The New York Times says Kander was arrested. By setting up the Polygon, the USSR set off a generations-long legacy of explosive cancer rates, birth defects, and other health problems in Kazakhstan, as io9 described last year.

And as the CTBTO explains, the people who lived there were, for all intents and purposes, part of the experiments:

They were normally told to refrain from lighting their iron cooking stoves when testing was taking place in case the fire flared back into the house. They were also warned to stay outside when an explosion was scheduled, since it might topple their house. Historical accounts of residents who were schoolchildren before 1962 indicate that windows were blown out of their schools and that their bodies convulsed when testing occurred.

The area became a closed, secret place which was only “put on the map,” so to speak, by the advent of satellite intelligence. Today, you can visit the area with the help of specialised tour outfits.

Though the testing is over, the Polygon still poses a threat to the world today. Because so few records were kept of the test sites, and because of the fall of the Soviet Union and rocky transition into present-day Kazakstan, radioactive material still litters the area. According to the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, the area was so saturated with plutonium and radioactive material, it would have been possible to make a dozen more bombs. And there it lay, free for the taking for anyone willing to look for it.

So for 17 years, a coalition of American, Russian and Kazakh scientists worked on a top-secret mission to map, uncover, and secure the dangerous evidence of the Polygon’s former life as the test bed for the USSR’s nuclear might. That is a story unto itself — and in fact, it’s already been written: Plutonium Mountain: Inside the 17-Year Mission to Secure a Legacy of Soviet Nuclear Testing. Despite the $US150 million effort, the area is still highly contaminated (though more secure), and the people who live near it are still struggling with the legacy of the tests, which will likely endure for generations.

You can check out Dust on Amazon, or see the images until October 11 at Flowers Gallery.

[MIKA27]

Listen To A Pilot With Hypoxia, Guided By ATC, Safely Land A Learjet

Commercial airliners (and other high-altitude craft) are pressurised for a reason — along with it being a fair bit colder up there, there’s less oxygen for us to breathe. Above 10,000 feet (3000m) It doesn’t take long for a condition known as hypoxia, or oxygen deprivation, to set in, causing a range of symptoms that replicate intoxication.

In 2008, the pilots of a Kalitta Learjet flying into Ypsilanti, Michigan found themselves suffering from hypoxia and without the help of air traffic control and a nearby plane, the flight would not have ended well — to put it mildly.

The pilot, who is not named in the video or its description, is clearly heard to be slurring his words, with his speech slow and deliberate. On the other end is Jay McCombs, an air traffic controller for the Cleveland Air Route Traffic Control Center, one of the busiest in the United States. As described on the clip’s YouTube page, the pilot’s microphone was stuck in the on position, allowing the controller to hear various cockpit alarms:

Over the radio, Jay McCombs tried hard to understand the slow, slurring words muffled among the blaring sirens sounding in the background. The radio was poor, and the pilot difficult to understand, leaving only unintelligible transmission and uncontrollable noise to be heard.

…

The events unfolded on July 26, 2008 when McCombs accepted the hand-off of KFS66, which appeared to have a stuck mike creating incomprehensible transmissions. Unclear to those in the Center, however, was that the co-pilots arm was all the while moving violently and uncontrollably on the other end as the captain worked hard to hand fly the aircraft.

It goes on to mention that a nearby pilot was able to help McCombs “translate” what the Kalitta pilot was trying to say and that another controller, Stephanie Bevins, deduced that he was suffering from oxygen deprivation:

Following Bevins initiative, McCombs begins bringing the aircraft to the lowest altitude available in order to alleviate the possible oxygen deprivation. Unable to answer questions, the pilot is only able to respond to direct commands that the controllers now begin to voice. Descend and maintain, they repeat.

Once the plane hit 3350m (11,000 feet), the Kalitta captain recovers almost instantly and his speech essentially normal.

[MIKA27]

Impressive Photo Of A Spaceship Over 400 Million Kilometres From Earth

You are looking at a photo of a spaceship flying 402.3 million kilometres away from Earth. It’s Rosetta, floating in the pitch black vacuum of space photographed by its Philae daughtership, a lander that will soon arrive to the object on the background, the comet Churyumov — Gerasimenko.

[MIKA27]

Edge Of Tomorrow Stunts And Practical Effects Are Surprisingly Crazy

Edge of Tomorrow was a pretty good movie — and spectacular too. So much that I thought most of the stunts and effects were computer generated. But no, a lot of those explosions and jumps were completely real, as this complete behind the scenes B-roll footage shows. Very impressive.

[MIKA27]

Scientists Made A Soft Exoskeleton That You Put On Like Pants

Exoskeletons that give you superhuman strength sound incredibly awesome but also look incredibly awkward and bulky and uncomfortable. So what about a soft exoskeleton that you wear like a pair of pants?

Harvard researchers recently won a DARPA grant of up to $US2.9 million to develop the Soft Exosuit. So far, they have created a proof-of-concept suit that resembles black leggings, threaded with cables and attached to a bulky battery pack at the waist.

So not exactly what you’d wear to a party. But the idea behind Soft Exosuit is less about fashion and more about utility. It could, for example, be wore under pants by soldiers and first responders to give them extra strength. It could also help stroke victims walk.

The smart suit is fitted with a network of elastic sensors, a microprocessor, and cables connecting the joints. The idea is that the stretchable sensors can detect which joints are moving, and the cables can provide a little extra tug. It won’t instantly turn you into Iron Man, but over long distances, it could save you quite a bit of juice.

[MIKA27]

Dog Gives A Masterclass In Canine Stretching

Dogs also suffer the consequences of a long road trip. Their legs get stiff, their backs hurt, and even their necks could use a good stretching. But if you have a dog, don’t worry, just sit him on your lap and watch this ad for a super-efficient car with him. He might learn something — if he does, send us the video.

[MIKA27]

Latin America's New Tallest Skyscraper Will Look Like A Quarter Pipe

Argentina’s planning to erect a new waterfront tower, and it looks like it belongs in a skatepark. President Cristina Fernández posted the winning design on Facebook this week. It’s wrapped in the same white and sky blue on Argentina’s flag. And it’s a quarter pipe.

The design seems silly at first. After looking through the plans, though, it’s easy to see that the architects were just getting creative, when faced with the task of building a true multi-purpose structure. Not only will the 355m tall tower and its many studios be the new home to Argentina’s entertainment industry, it will also be home to condo-owners, and will include a hotel on top. Finally, where the glass walls curve to the point of being parallel to the ground, there will be a soccer stadium that seats 15,000 people and is shaped like the Falkland Islands. (That part’s a little silly.)

This new skyscraper will not only be the tallest building in Argentina. It will be the tallest building in all of Latin America, eclipsing the soon-to-be-completed Costanera Center in Santiago, Chile, which is only 300m. It’s not shaped like a quarter pipe either.

[MIKA27]

Virgin Galactic Has Delayed Its First Flight

Things don’t always run smoothly for Virgin Galactic, although it is increasingly making progress. Now, those eager to make it into space on a plane may have more of a wait than they’d like though — because the company has had to push back its maiden voyage.

While it was hoped that the first flight out of its New Mexico Spaceport America would happen before the end of 2014, Branson has told David Letterman that the first flight will now happen some time early next spring. The rest of the team is repeating that message, too. “Customers are eager to fly, but they know we’ll fly them when we feel ready,” Virgin Galactic CEO George Whitesides said Wednesday. “Obviously we want to do it as quickly as possible, but we don’t want to rush it.”

http://youtu.be/K5ctnUvHANA

Which is a good thing, even if it is frustrating for customers. I mean, when you’re spending $US250,000 on a flight, you want it to be on time — but you’d also like to survive it too right?

[MIKA27]

Watch This Giant Spider Dog Scare The Hell Out Of Everyone

If you ask most people what they're afraid of, a common answer that comes up will always be 'spiders'.

Maybe it's their hairy and creepy appearance or perhaps the way they malevolently skulk along the wall or maybe its their ferocious and deadly bite?

Rightly or wrongly they're universally one of the most feared creatures on the planet.

Which is what makes this clip all the more amusing!

Polish prankster Sylwester Wardega is the owner of Chica, a happy dog who just LOVES chasing people. Wardega had the hilarious idea to dress him up in a giant mutant spider outfit and unleash him on the unsuspecting public.....

How would you react if you thought you were being chased by a giant killer spider down a dark alleyway? You'd have a meltdown right?

So you can imagine what kind of hilarity ensues when strangers come face to face with the furry 12 legged DogSpider!

In just one week the clip has received 77M views on YouTube.

Yes, it really is that good.

[MIKA27]

HARRIER DROP TANK BOARDROOM DESK

I can only imagine that Bond villains could potentially have difficultly sourcing suitably cinematic furniture to kit out their volcano lairs, although on retrospect I guess this could also apply to hedge fund managers, political lobbyists and certain petite North Korean dictators.

Fortunately for the above mentioned scoundrels a company called Hangar 54 specialises in creating furniture from retired aviation parts – including in this case, a Harrier drop tank that’s been turned into a boardroom desk. It can comfortably accommodate 10 people (11 if you put the boss at the pointy end) and it’s currently for sale by Hangar 54, the price isn’t immediately available but as the old saying goes, if you have to ask, you can’t afford it.

Click here to visit Hangar 54.

[MIKA27]

The Mystery of The Deadly Double Dice

The year was 1941 and the world was at war. Although they didn’t know it yet, on November 22nd, 1941, the United States was on the eve of entering the escalating war that was raging across two oceans. It was a tense time on our planet, a couple of weeks before Japan would launch its fateful attack on Pearl Harbor, and Americans everywhere were scouring the news to keep a wary eye on the tumultuous events unfolding overseas. On this particular November day, two innocuous ads appeared in the the New Yorker magazine for a dice game called simply “The Deadly Double.” The advertisements were seemingly harmless and looked similar to many other ads that filled the newspapers and magazines of the time, so nobody gave them much thought and certainly no one was aware at the time that these innocent ads would go onto become one of the most perplexing mysteries of World War II.

The ads themselves at first glance seem to have a sort of strange design to them but are fairly nondescript for the most part. The first ad, which was placed near the front page of the magazine, has an illustration of two dice depicted in mid tumble. On the visible faces of one die is written the numbers 0, 5, and 7. The other die shows the numbers 12, 24, and the Roman numeral XX. The dice are positioned under a dramatic heading announcing a warning in a few different languages “Achtung! Warning! Alerte!” At the bottom of the ad the reader is encouraged to see an advertisement on pg. 86, and the bottom reads “Monarch Publishing Company. NY.” It was a little odd that the dice would have numbers that don’t typically appear on regular dice, but it didn’t really raise any eyebrows at the time.

The first of the ads.

When one follows the instructions and opens to pg. 86, they find another ad that is more elaborate and appears to be the main ad, while the other is merely a teaser. It has the same heading of “Achtung! Warning! Alerte!” with another illustration showing an air raid in progress and under that a group of people huddling in an air raid shelter playing a dice game. At the very bottom is a stylized drawing of a double headed eagle. There is also some copy written in the ad. This first part says:

We hope you’ll never have to spend a long winter’s night in an air-raid shelter, but we were just thinking . . . it’s only common sense to be prepared. If you’re not too busy between now and Christmas, why not sit down and plan a list of the things you’ll want to have on hand. . . .

This is followed by a list of necessary items for an air raid. The list ends with another piece of copy which reads:

And though it’s no time, really, to be thinking of what’s fashionable, we bet that most of your friends will remember to include those intriguing dice and chips which make Chicago’s favorite game: THE DEADLY DOUBLE.

This part is followed by two X’s inside of a shield within the double headed eagle, and finally a tag line announcing that the game was available in department stores everywhere. The ads were perhaps in poor taste and certainly a bit weird, but many ads at the time displayed a certain dramatic flair and nothing about this one in particular really caused any concern. It was not until Japan launched its deadly attack on Pearl Harbor 16 days later that a spotlight would be cast on the advertisements and their mysteries would become apparent.

Japanese fighters geting ready to attack Pearl Harbor.

On December 7, 1941, the Japanese sent two waves of a total of 353 fighters, bombers, and torpedo planes, which laid waste to the US naval base at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii and would be the trigger for America’s active participation in WWII. The wake of the devastation would leave an estimated 188 U.S. aircraft destroyed, 30 vessels crippled, 2,403 Americans killed and 1,178 wounded. It was in the aftermath of this shocking surprise attack that Americans became obsessed with the idea that traitors, Japanese spies, and Nazi secret agents were infiltrating the homeland. The FBI for its part methodically tracked down and arrested thousands of people it had deemed as “subversives,” and were actively investigating every lead, piece of evidence, or rumor connected with sabotage from enemies of the state.

It was during this rising tension and fear of the enemy among us that the FBI became interested in the New Yorker “Deadly Double” ads, and the previously seemingly harmless ads started to be seen in whole new light. A large number of readers pointed out that the numbers and imagery in the ads were a little too close to the events at Pearl Harbor to be mere coincidence or serendipity, and the FBI started to think that perhaps the attacks were not as much of a surprise for some that it seemed. The ads were soon deemed to be a possible coded communication from Japan and Germany to their agents, spies, and sympathizers within the US warning that war was upon them, and the mystery of the “Deadly Double” would begin its ascent into the annals of great WWII mysteries.

The ads were interpreted by the FBI as conveying several pieces of covert information within the innocent looking ads, some of it subtle and some of it not so much so in retrospect. In the first ad, the numbers 12 and 7 written on the dice were seen as perhaps showing the date of the Pearl Harbor attacks, December 7, or 12/7. The numbers 5 and 0 were interpreted as signifying 5 out of 24 hours, or the time of the attack, and the Roman numerals XX, or 20, represented the latitude of the target. This left the number 24, the exact meaning of which could not be discerned but was deemed to possibly be some kind of code to identify the person or persons who had placed the ads.

A ship exploding following the attack on Pearl Harbor.

The second, main part of the ad on pg. 86 prominently displayed a picture of an air raid in progress, which depicted what appeared to be bombers heading out over water, searchlights, and an exploding bomb on the water’s surface, all imagery that suggests Pearl Harbor in Hawaii. The double headed eagle was reminiscent of a sort of combination of the two versions of the Nazi Iron Eagle symbols. Even the product of the ads, “The Deadly Double,” was seen to represent the two main Axis powers, Germany and Japan.

Add to all of this that no game called “The Deadly Double” was found to be available in department stores as promised, or to indeed have ever existed at all, and all of these clues added up to being something that was seen as beyond coincidence. The FBI looked into the apparent publisher of the ad, the Monarch Trading Company, but found that the company did not exist and so it was suspected to be merely a dummy corporation. The FBI then turned its attention to the New Yorker and conducted an investigation of their offices looking for answers, but instead uncovered more puzzles. It was revealed that the ads had been set into type somewhere else and their matrix delivered to the New Yorker by a white male who had not given his name. The man had reportedly physically passed the plates by hand over the counter at the magazine office himself and paid in cash. It was surmised that the man had likely created the plates himself. The FBI was eventually able to track down a man by the name of Roger Craig, who they suspected as being the one who placed the ads, but in a menacing turn of events it turned out the suspect had died in an accident under mysterious circumstances. When Mr. Craig’s widow was questioned about the events, she reportedly told the FBI that the whole thing was nothing more than a coincidence.

Finding nothing but dead ends and being swamped with an ever growing deluge of other leads, the FBI dropped the case and to this day it has remained unresolved. What was The Deadly Double? Were the ads a sophisticated coded message from Germany and Japan to warn co-conspirators of the Pearl Harbor attacks? Was it just a coincidence or the result of people just reading too much into the ads? Over the years there has been a good amount of debate on the nature of The Deadly Double ads and a lot of discussion on the supposed clues hidden within them, yet there has never been any concrete resolution to the mysteries they pose. For now these bizarre ads remain a somewhat haunting enigma and one of the most enduring mysteries of World War II.

[MIKA27]

KORMARAN CONCEPT LUXURY CONVERTIBLE BOAT

If you’re going to create a luxury convertible boat, there’s really no excuse to not leave it all out on the floor and exhaust every possibility you can come up with. Designed by a small Australian company, the Kormaran concept answers that challenge and then some.

For starters, this thing is like the Optimus Prime of the ocean, as it goes from monohull to catamaran to trimaran to bathing deck, and then finally into “flight mode,” as the use of hydrofoils decreases water resistance by 80%, giving you a landspeeder kind of effect as you cruise the coast. The hydrofoils also mean higher speeds while using less energy, and with Formula 1 and lightweight aircraft technology onboard, the Kormaran promises to be a truly unique sea creature. And we haven’t even touched on the styling yet, with its gorgeous carbon fiber hull and that teal light enveloping the craft in a cloud of soft blue. Fingers crossed that we see this thing soon. [Purchase]

[MIKA27]

Tag Heuer Wants To Make A Smartwatch

It looks like luxury watchmakers were waiting to see what Apple had planned before entering the smartwatch race. Less than a week after the company’s Apple Watch announcement, Tag Heuer spoke with a local Swiss newspaper about its own smartwatch plans and how it will be nothing like Apple, Reuters reports.

In an interview with a local Swiss newspaper NZZ am Sonntag, Tag Heuer’s head of watchmaking Jean-Claude Biver said that the company “want to launch a smartwatch … but it must not copy the Apple Watch.”

The Apple Watch has been both criticised and celebrated for its design with one expert lauding Apple’s attention to the watch’s feel and respect for tradition but worried about the timepiece’s limited lifespan. Apple even hired Patrick Pruniaux, a former VP sales rep for Tag Heuer, along with other luxury watch designers to prepare for the device’s launch.

Now that Apple and Google have played their hands, it’s not surprising that luxury watchmakers are starting to make their move. After Intel and Fossil announced a partnership last week, it’s possible that Tag Heuer could consider a similar route. However, it seems one thing is for certain, it won’t look like an Apple Watch, and any hope for Android Wear option would probably be misplaced as Biver also mentions “we cannot afford to just follow in somebody else’s footsteps.” Whether that urge for originality also extends to software is uncertain.

A smartwatch’s limited lifespan would probably make car-level pricing on timepieces a hard sell to most consumers, but Tag Heuer is probably only the first of many luxury smartwatch rumours to come.

[MIKA27]

NASA Asteroid Defence System Is A Failure, Says Audit

NASA Inspector General Paul Martin has alerted of the awful state of the asteroid defence system, a program mandated by US Congress in 2005 to detect and track at least 90 per cent near-Earth objects greater than 140m in diameter by 2020. This is bad news.

From the report:

While the program has discovered, categorized, and plotted the orbits of more than 11,000 NEOs since 1998, NASA estimates that it has identified only 10 per cent of all asteroids 140 meters and larger and will not meet the 2020 deadline [...]

a single program executive who manages a loosely structured, non-integrated conglomerate of research activities with little coordination, insufficient program oversight, and no established milestones to track progress.

In addition to that, the audit criticises the fact that the program is not working with the authorities to put programs in place in case a dangerous asteroid is detected, spending only seven per cent of its admittedly ridiculous $US40 million budget in planning defence strategies and emergency evacuations:

[L]ack of planning and resources has prevented the NEO Program from developing additional agreements that could help achieve program goals.

For example, establishing formal partnerships with the Department of Defence, the National Science Foundation, and international agencies could give the NEO Program access to additional Earth-based telescopes and thereby increase its ability to detect, track, and characterise a greater number of NEOs.

While some people may take all this lightly, this is not a joke. The possibility of an asteroid coming out of nowhere and hitting us is certainly there. It almost happened not so long ago, when an 18m meteor exploded over Chelyabinsk in 2013, unleashing the force of “30 atomic bombs, blowing out windows, destroying buildings, and injuring more than 1000 people.” Had that meteorite hit the ground, the local damage would have been extraordinary. And, in that case, an early detection system could have saved hundreds of thousands of lives.

Which is exactly why this program was mandated by Congress and why the international community should get their act together to make this detection and track system a reality. We can’t just sit here and wait till one of these rocks hits some major city and kill a few millions out of the blue. No matter how low the probability may be, the danger is out there and it’s very solid and real.

[MIKA27]

Short Film: The Tough Everyday Life Of An Orc In Mordor

The everyday life of orcs in Mordor is tough. Any given day they end up with a knife slicing their stomach, an arrow piercing their jugular, or their head severed by who knows what. This short film tells the story of an Orc in one of those complicated days.

The film — directed by Sam Gorski and Niko Pueringer — is based on a soon-to-be-released video game called Shadows of Mordor.

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This Dunkable Drone Will Suck Up Whale Snot For Science

Collecting biological samples from a whale is about as difficult as it sounds. The animals are easily stressed by the rumblings of large research vessels or manned helicopters and quick to run. Instead, a team of researchers has developed a novel quadcopter solution that collects a different sort of secretion than blood: expelled mucus.

Appropriately named “SnotBot,” this multicopter is a collaboration — several years and five prototype iterations in the making — between the Intelligent Vehicles Lab at Olin College’s and Ocean Alliance. Since whales are difficult to study up close and the rules for observing them are so strictly enforced, getting blood samples is a difficult task. And it’s nearly impossible if you’re collecting to the samples to study the creature’s stress levels since the very act of you approaching the whale and drawing blood is already freaking it out.

So, a new method was clearly necessary, one that didn’t stress the whales but could still provide researchers with the valuable hormonal concentration data that they require. Olin College researchers believe that method involves “a multicopter that the marine biologists could use to collect a sample of whale ‘snot’ — the fluids that are expelled from the blowhole of whales. Marine biologists expect to find hormones, DNA, dead skin tissue, and a concentration of pollutants in the snot,” according to Weeprojects, the UAV company contracted to help design and build the platform.

The current, fifth, iteration of the flyer is slightly smaller than a mini-fridge and bears little resemblance to its predecessors due to a recent and severe design change: its un-waterproofing. The team spend years trying to make the SnotBot an ruggedised UAV, protected from corrosive saltwater in its water-tight shell and collecting snot samples in a small dangling pail. That plan did not work out. Instead, the new iteration forgoes the hanging pail for a sterilized surgical sponge strapped to its belly and ditches its waterproof shell for a quick bath of distilled water after returning from missions.

The team still faces a number of other technological and regulatory hurdles before the SnotBot gets off the ground, from making the control scheme easy enough that even a marine biologist can use it to giving the drone enough autonomous smarts to know what kind of whale it’s following. The biggest challenge, however, is convincing the FAA to change its rules regarding UAV operations.

“The government could issue rules that say, ‘Never fly lower than this altitude over a whale with a drone,’ ” said Andrew Bennett, a professor of mechanical engineering at Olin told the Boston Globe. “Right now, the rule for flying over a whale is 1,000 feet, because they assume you’re a person in an aeroplane. And the FAA gets angry if we fly a drone higher than 400 feet.”

To convince the FAA that their drone is safe enough and quiet enough to use around these massive sea creatures, the team went ahead and built a “whale surrogate”: a small inflatable raft outfitted with audio sensors that mimic what a whale would hear both above and below the waves. They have been performing flyover testing with the SnotBot Mk V to great effect. “We found that at 10 feet above our whale surrogate, it was basically almost undetectable,” Iain Kerr, chief executive of Ocean Alliance, told the Boston Globe. Results from these tests will be folded into the team’s report the National Marine Fisheries Service at the end of the month. [Boston Globe]

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Goodbye, Space Shuttle Carrier, And Thank You For Being Awesome

You are looking at the second of the two Boeing 747 space shuttle carriers being taken to its resting place at the Joe Davies Heritage Airpark, in Palmdale, California. After two decades ferrying space shuttles across the United States of America, the two legendary aircraft are now retired.

Over the past 20 years, it made 66 flights with a shuttle atop its fuselage, including 17 missions in which it ferried shuttles from NASA’s Dryden (now Armstrong) Flight Research Center after landings at Edwards Air Force Base to the Kennedy Space Center on Florida’s east coastline. Upon its retirement on Feb. 8, 2012, it had amassed 33,004 flight hours over its 38-year flight career.

Here are a few shots and a video of one of the coolest airplanes to ever fly the skies.

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Apple Just Made It Easier To Delete That Free U2 Album It Gave You

Hell hath no fury like an iTunes user with a free U2 album. For all the haters who despise the very concept of Songs of Innocence casually rubbing up against their curated iTunes collection, Apple just published a very quick one-click fix to rid your life of the Irish menace forever.

Though there have been slightly more involved ways to do this removal trick (i.e. just deleting it), the unadulterated anger at the thought of such an inconvenience has seemingly stirred Apple to action.

So without further ado, here you go:

• Go to http://itunes.com/soi-remove.
• Click Remove Album to confirm you’d like to remove the album from your account.
• Sign in with the Apple ID and password you use to buy from the iTunes Store.
• You’ll see a confirmation message that the album has been removed from your account.

This will absolutely, positively wipe all evidence of this record from your account, so finally — finally — you’ll be able to sleep at night after this traumatic week of complimentary music downloads.

[MIKA27]

Atari Arcade Games Inspired The Original Apple Mouse

It’s hard to say if the Macintosh would have been so successful if it hadn’t had such a revolutionary interface — namely, the mouse. While Apple didn’t invent the mouse, it did commission the now legendary engineer Jim Yurchenco to make it viable. And he looked to Steve Jobs’ former employer for inspiration.

That company, of course, was Atari, and the inspiration was a relatively new device that Atari called the “Trak-Ball.” The original mouse that Steve Jobs tinkered with during a visit to Xerox PARC in the early 1980s worked a bit like the Trak-Ball, but the whole set up was wildly expensive. Apple contracted the design firm Hovey-Kelley to bring the cost of a comparable device from Xerox’s estimated cost of $US400 a piece down to $US25 a piece, and Yurchenco took the lead.

The problem with the Xerox design, Yurchenco quickly realised, was that it was just too complicated. The mouse forced a ball down onto the table and used a series of switches to track the movement of the ball which would send a signal to the graphic user interface to move a cursor around on the screen. While looking at other input devices, Yurchenco settled on the Atari Trak-Ball as a terrific alternative.

As the name implied, the Trak-Ball also tracked the movement of a ball and rendered that movement on the screen of arcade games. Rather than force the ball onto the table, however, he design simply allowed the ball to float and let gravity do the work. And rather than rig up an elaborate labyrinth of sensors, the Atari device used beams of light to track the ball’s movement. It wasn’t quite as accurate as the Xerox device, though Yurchenco quickly realised that it didn’t make much of a difference to the user who was staring at the cursor and not the mouse.

Apple’s borrowed design effectively ruled the mouse market for decades, until the ball was completely replaced by optical devices. Yurchenco himself would go on to secure some 80 patents, become one of the first employees at IDEO, and design the Palm V, a truly revolutionary device in its day. If you’re intrigued, check out Wired‘s new profile of Yurchenco who started out as a sculptor and is now regarded as one of the most influential industrial designers of his generation. He seems like a pretty cool guy, too!

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Uncovering Hidden Text on a 500-Year-Old Map That Guided Columbus

The 1491 Martellus map

Christopher Columbus probably used the map above as he planned his first voyage across the Atlantic in 1492. It represents much of what Europeans knew about geography on the verge discovering the New World, and it’s packed with text historians would love to read—if only the faded paint and five centuries of wear and tear hadn’t rendered most of it illegible.

But that’s about to change. A team of researchers is using a technique called multispectral imaging to uncover the hidden text. They scanned the map last month at Yale University and expect to start extracting readable text in the next few months, says Chet Van Duzer, an independent map scholar who’s leading the project, which was funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities.

The map was made in or around 1491 by Henricus Martellus, a German cartographer working in Florence. It’s not known how many were made, but Yale owns the only surviving copy. It’s a big map, especially for its time: about 4 by 6.5 feet. “It’s a substantial map, meant to be hung on a wall,” Van Duzer said.

The Martellus map during preparations for multispectral imaging.

The Martellus map is interesting for several historic reasons, Van Duzer says. One is it’s relevance to Columbus. “It’s extremely likely, just about unquestionable that Christopher Columbus saw this map or a very similar one made by the same cartographer, and that the map influenced his thinking about the world’s geography,” Van Duzer said.

There are several lines of evidence for this, Van Duzer says. Columbus sailed west from the Canary Islands hoping to find a new trade route to Asia. Writings by Columbus and his son suggest that he began searching for Japan in the region where it appears on the Martellus map, and that he expected to find the island running north to south, as it does on the Martellus map, but not on any other surviving map made before his voyage. (You can see Japan floating too far off the coast of Asia in the top right corner of Martellus’s map above).

Of course, what Columbus found instead was something Martellus hadn’t known about—the New World.

Martin Waldseemüller’s 1507 map was influenced by the earlier map by Martellus (

Most of the text still isn’t legible in those older UV images, but some of the parts that are appear to be drawn from the travels of Marco Polo through east Asia. There are also indications of where sailors could expect to find sea monsters or pearls. “In northern Asia, Martellus talks about this race of wild people who don’t have any wine or grain but live off the flesh of deer and ride deer-like horses,” Van Duzer said. Waldseemüller copied much of this.

A photo of the Martellus map taken in 1960 with ultraviolet light (right) reveals text in places where it’s not normally visible

There are also interesting differences between the two maps. Waldseemüller gets the shape of Africa more or less right, but on the Martellus map, southern Africa juts out way too far to the east (Africa is on the left side of both maps). In addition, Martellus’s depiction of rivers and mountains in the interior of southern Africa, along with place names there, appear to be based on African sources. It’s likely that this information came from an African delegation that visited the Council of Florence in 1441 and interacted with European geographers. Three other surviving maps contain some of this same information, but the Martellus map covers more territory than any of them, making it the most complete surviving representation of Africans’ geographic knowledge of their continent in the 15th century. “In my mind, that’s absolutely amazing,” Van Duzer said.

Van Duzer hopes to learn more about Martellus’s sources from the new images the team is creating. Scanning the map only took a day, after two and a half days of set up, he says. The team used an automated camera system developed by a digital imaging company called Megavision. The system uses LEDs to deliver light within a narrow band of wavelengths and minimize the amount of heat and light the map was exposed to. The camera has a quartz lens, which transmits ultraviolet light better than glass. The team photographed 55 overlapping tiles of the map, using 12 different types of illumination, ranging from ultraviolet to infrared.

Conceptually, the process isn’t very complicated, says team member Roger Easton, an expert on imaging historical manuscripts at the Rochester Institute of Technology. “We’re really just looking at the object under different colors of light and trying to find the combination of images that best enhance whatever it is that we’re trying to see.”

But extracting legible text from all those images will take a lot of imaging processing and analysis, and a lot of trial and error, Easton says. A combination that works on one part of the map might be useless for another part. “It depends on the details of how the map has eroded or how the color of the pigments has changed,” Easton said. “Different pigments reflect different wavelengths of light, and they deteriorate differently too.”

When the project is complete, probably sometime next year, the images will be available for scholars and the general public to examine on the website of theBeinecke Digital Library at Yale.

[MIKA27]

Journey inside a giant spider

Take a unique journey inside the body of a giant tarantula, to see how it moves, breathes, hunts, eats and defends itself

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Thailand woman dead after jumping into crocodile pit

A 65-year-old woman from Bangkok has killed herself by jumping into a pit of crocodiles at a reptile farm near the capital, police say.

Witnesses saw Wanpen Inyai jumping into a pond at Samut Prakarn Crocodile Farm and Zoo on Friday, reported The Bangkok Post. Staff failed to rescue her.

Police said they were told by family members that Ms Wanpen appeared depressed prior to her death.

Thai tourist attractions are said to often have lax safety rules.

Thai police confirmed Ms Wanpen's death on Tuesday afternoon.

According to reports, she took off her shoes before jumping into the middle of a pond said to be up to 3m deep that contained hundreds of adult crocodiles.

Staff tried to use long sticks to stop the crocodiles from attacking her, according to the Bangkok Post.

Earlier that day, Ms Wanpen's family had tried to file a missing persons report after they discovered her disappearance, but they were reportedly told to wait for 24 hours.

Her death mirrored that of a woman who killed herself in 2002 the same way at the same farm, and another suicide reportedly took place a decade before that.

The farm claims it has more than 100,000 crocodiles housed in its ponds

Samut Prakarn made the news in 2001 when a two-headed baby crocodile was born there

Farm owner Uthen Youngprapakorn told a local radio station that the farm had already installed additional fences and other security measures along the walkways.

The farm claims on its website that it has more than 100,000 crocodiles.

Pictures of the farm show wooden pagodas on stilts, connected by walkways that have chest-high railings, situated over large ponds.

[MIKA27]

Hysterical Fail Clips Proving Super Mario Is A Total Jerk

Who knew Super Mario was a jerk?

Apparently there's two sides to the little Italian plumber, whose passions include saving princesses, leaping down drain pipes and wrecking all manner of havoc on the unsuspecting public.

It is still hard to believe the proof is in this video. All those epic fail compilations you have watched endlessly before a exam have a common catalyst: Super Mario.

Utterly stupid and ridiculously entertaining, you'll be in tears of laughter by the end.