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

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Seeing The World's Most Complicated Watch Get Built Is Incredible

The amount of meticulous detail and genius craftsmanship and microscopic precision that goes into one of these Patek Philippe Grandmaster Chime 5175R is ridiculous. Just watching the little pieces fit together is like seeing the most beautiful puzzle ever get completed. It better be, since the watch costs $US2.5 million.

Patek just released the details on what they’re calling, the “most complicated wristwatch of the eminent family-owned watchmaking companies and decidedly one of the world’s most elaborate wristwatches.” Which, OK, cool. The Grandmaster Chime was made to celebrate Patek’s 175th anniversary. The watch is double faced (time face on one side, date face on the flip side) and packs as much watch speak as books about horology and expensive retail space do. Patek:

Its double-face case with a diameter of 47 mm, it accommodates four spring barrels and no fewer than 20 complications, including coveted functions such as a Grande and Petite Sonnerie, a minute repeater, an instantaneous perpetual calendar with a four-digit year display, a second time zone, and two patented global debuts in the domain of chiming watches: an acoustic alarm that strikes the alarm time and a date repeater that sounds the date on demand.

The watch’s movement has 1366 parts and the 18K rose gold case is hand graved. The watch is totally and unapologetically ostentatious but it’s sure as hell fun to see it get made. Watch the process below.

[MIKA27]

New Gulfstream Jets' Flight Deck Looks Like Sci-Fi Spaceship Cockpit

Gulfstream has new jets, the G500 and G600. They can fly at almost supersonic speed and come with lots of new cool stuff, like a new cabin that is supposed to make you feel like you are not flying or this new glass cockpit made by Honeywell — called Symmetry — which looks out of some sci-fi movie.

It looks to me like something out of Oblivion, perhaps because of the combination of the big glass windows and the all-LCD front.

The Symmetry glass controls are fully touchscreen, using large LCD displays that show a 3D colour synthetic view of the outside world, so the crew always knows what’s around them even in low visibility. It also has 2D and 3D airport moving maps, which show “runways, taxiways, airport structures and signs at many airports on the cockpit navigation displays, while the 3D moving map integrates the Synthetic Vision System for an ‘out the window’ view of the airport on the Primary Flight Display.”

The cockpit also shows air traffic information, showing nearly aircraft much like military aeroplanes, showing aeroplane both airborne and on the surface.

The entire thing is Wi-Fi, so pilots and ground crews can easily connect to the systems to obtain additional data without having to connect with a wire.

This is how the airport moving maps look:

Apart from having larger windows, the new pressurised cabin is designed to make you feel like like you are at a normal altitude, a tendency that was heralded by Boeing’s Dreamliner. The cabin also fully renews its atmosphere with new air every two minutes, which Gulfstream claims makes people feel great.

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US Air Force's Mysterious Spy Plane Is Landing After Two Years In Space

For nearly two years, the US Air Force’s X-37B autonomous space plane has been circling around the Earth doing who knows what. Now it’s finally coming back to Earth, carrying all its secrets with it.

The X-37B has been the subject of intense speculation ever since it was launched on its very first mission in April 2010 with very little explanation from the Air Force. A second plane followed in March 2012, In December 2012, that first plane was launched back into space, where it has been presumably spying on Earth ever since. It will land at an Air Force base in California on Tuesday, as long as the weather holds up.

The Daily Beast reports that the X-37B most likely carries a bevy of radars, cameras and other sensors that you might find on your regular spy satellite. But a plane that can go to space and back has a leg-up over a dumb old satellite:

The idea is that the X-37B carries “specialised” sensors packages that can be reconfigured as needed for each mission when the aircraft returns to Earth. That ability to reconfigure the robotic spacecraft makes the X-37B cheaper and more flexible than a satellite — which goes up once with one package of sensors and is eventually discarded. Satellites can often cost billions of dollars and cannot reconfigured or reused, unlike the X-37B.

That seems like a perfectly reasonable explanation, but that hasn’t stopped the fevered speculation over what the X-37B was really doing up in space. Rumours abound that the X-37B is supposed to ****** foreign satellites or strike our enemies as an orbital bomber. Whatever it is, the Air Force is still keeping mum.

[MIKA27]

Incredible Photo Of An F-18 Zooming Through The Golden Gate Bridge

Rich Shelton loves aeroplanes and San Francisco, which shows in all his beautiful photos. He was able to take this incredible image of a Blue Angels’ F/A-18 zooming through the Golden Gate bridge at Fleet Week in San Francisco. Here are some more images taken by him from previous editions.

Based in Tiburon, California, Rich Shelton is a Search and Personnel Manager at Marin County Search and Rescue who loves to photograph aeroplanes and San Francisco.

[MIKA27]

Are Insects The Future Of Food?

Emily Anthes braves locusts, beetles, mealworms and more as she asks whether eating insects is the answer to feeding ever more humans and livestock. At first, my meal seems familiar, like countless other dishes I’ve eaten at Asian restaurants. A swirl of noodles slicked with oil and studded with shredded chicken, the aroma of ginger and garlic, a few wilting chives placed on the plate as a final flourish.

And then I notice the eyes. Dark, compound orbs on a yellow speckled head, joined to a winged, segmented body. I hadn’t spotted them right away, but suddenly I see them everywhere — my noodles are teeming with insects.

I can’t say I wasn’t warned. On this warm May afternoon, I’ve agreed to be a guinea pig at an experimental insect tasting in Wageningen, a university town in the central Netherlands. My hosts are Ben Reade and Josh Evans from the Nordic Food Lab, a non-profit culinary research institute. Reade and Evans lead the lab’s ‘insect deliciousness’ project, a three-year effort to turn insects — the creepy-crawlies that most of us squash without a second thought — into tasty, craveable treats.

The project began after René Redzepi (the chef and co-owner of Noma, the Danish restaurant that is often ranked the best in the world) tasted an Amazonian ant that reminded him of lemongrass. Redzepi, who founded the Nordic Food Lab in 2008, became interested in serving insects at Noma and asked the researchers at the lab to explore the possibilities.

The Food Lab operates from a houseboat in Copenhagen, but Reade and Evans are in the Netherlands for a few days, and they have borrowed a local kitchen to try out some brand new dishes. I, along with three other gutsy gastronomes, am here to taste the results.

We take our seats at a long, high table as Reade and Evans wheel in a trolley loaded with our meals. We each receive a different main course. I get the Asian-style noodles and fixate on the bug I can see. “That’s a locust,” Reade says. “[it] was alive this morning. Very fresh.” But he’s much more excited about another, hidden ingredient: fat extracted from the larvae of black soldier flies (or, to put it less delicately, maggot fat). The whole dish has been stir-fried in it.

“I believe you’re the first human being on the planet to have ever been served anything cooked with this,” Reade tells me. But not to worry: “I’ve eaten some of it myself, an hour ago. I’m still alive.”

I inspect my plate.

Reade urges us to begin: “Eat before it gets cold.”

The next morning, Reade and Evans join 450 of the world’s foremost experts on entomophagy, or insect eating, at a hotel down the road in Ede. They are here for Insects to Feed the World, a three-day conference to “promote the use of insects as human food and as animal feed in assuring food security”.

The attendees are all familiar with the same dire facts. By the year 2050, the planet will be packed with nine billion people. In low-income and middle-income countries, the demand for animal products is rising sharply as economies and incomes grow; in the next few decades, we’ll need to figure out how to produce enough protein for billions more mouths. Simply ramping up our current system is not really a solution. The global livestock industry already takes an enormous toll on the environment. It’s a hungry and thirsty beast, gobbling up land and water. It’s a potent polluter, thanks to the animal waste and veterinary medicines that seep into soil and water. And it emits more greenhouse gases than planes, trains and automobiles combined.

The insect authorities assembling in Ede believe that entomophagy could be an elegant solution to many of these problems. Insects are chock-full of protein and rich in essential micronutrients, such as iron and zinc. They don’t need as much space as livestock, emit lower levels of greenhouse gases, and have a sky-high feed conversion rate: a single kilogram of feed yields 12 times more edible cricket protein than beef protein. Some species of insects are drought resistant and may require less water than cows, pigs or poultry.

Insect meal could also replace some of the expensive ingredients (e.g. soybeans and fishmeal) that are fed to farm animals, potentially lowering the cost of livestock products and freeing up feed crops for human consumption. As an added bonus, bugs can be raised on refuse, such as food scraps and animal manure, so insect farms could increase the world’s supply of protein while reducing and recycling waste.

Officials at the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) became interested in the role of insects in food security about a decade ago, after documenting the significant part that insects play in Central African diets. Since then, the FAO has been commissioning studies, issuing reports and arranging small meetings on eating insects. The gathering in Ede, jointly organised by the FAO and Wageningen University and Research Centre, is the culmination of all these efforts — the first major international conference to bring together entomologists, entrepreneurs, nutritionists, chefs, psychologists and government officials. They are here to discuss how to expand the use of insects as food and feed, particularly in the Western world, and to lay the foundation for an edible insect industry — to review the science, identify the obstacles and talk about how to move forward.

Over the next three days, they will lay out their vision for the future. It is ambitious and optimistic. They will speculate about creating an insect aisle at the supermarket and fast-food restaurants that serve bug burgers. They will imagine putting packages of ‘beautiful, clean’ shrink-wrapped mealworms on display at the meat counter, alongside the skirt steak and chicken wings. And they will dream about a world in which forests are thick, land is fertile, the climate is stable, water is clean, waste is minimal, food prices are low, and hunger and malnutrition are rare.

This conference, they hope, will be the beginning of it all. The experts assembled in the darkened auditorium are fired up, ready to give the world the gift of six-legged livestock. Are we ready to receive it?

Turning to insects for nourishment is not a novel idea — the Bible mentions entomophagy, as do texts from Ancient Greece and Rome. But insect eating never became common in Modern Europe. The reasons are unknown, but the spread of agriculture — and, in particular, the domestication of livestock — may have made insects, and undomesticated plants and animals in general, less important as food sources. The advent of agriculture may have also contributed to a view that insects were primarily pests and that insect eating was primitive. What’s more, Europe’s temperate climate makes wild harvesting less practical than in the tropics, where insect populations are larger and more predictable.

Nevertheless, entomophagy remains common in some parts of the world: at least two billion people worldwide eat insects, according to the FAO. Yellow jacket wasp larvae are popular in Japan, cicadas are treasured in Malawi, and weaver ants are devoured in Thailand. Termites, a food favourite in many African nations, can be fried, smoked, steamed, sun-dried or ground into a powder. The list of edible insect species is at 1900 and growing.

Laura D’Asaro’s first brush with entomophagy came in Tanzania. In 2011, D’Asaro — a tall, freckled Harvard student with a relentlessly cheerful disposition — had gone to East Africa to take classes in Swahili. One day, she came across a Tanzanian woman standing by the side of the road, selling fried caterpillars out of a big basket. D’Asaro, an on-again off-again vegetarian, wasn’t sure she wanted to eat an insect, but curiosity trumped apprehension. “When else am I going to try fried caterpillar?” she wondered. So she tried not to look too hard at the brown, inch-and-a-half long caterpillar as she placed it in her mouth and chewed. She was pleasantly surprised — the texture and the taste reminded her of lobster.

When the summer ended, D’Asaro returned to the USA and moved on with her UNIVERSITY life until, two years later, she stumbled across an article on a newly released FAO report called Edible Insects: Future prospects for food and feed security. As she read about the benefits of bug eating, she thought back to her time in Tanzania. “All these things clicked,” she recalls. “It made me reconsider why I was vegetarian and made me realise that insects could be this more sustainable protein that I’d been looking for pretty much my whole life.”

D’Asaro decided to start a company to introduce insects to American diners and enlisted two of her university classmates, Rose Wang and Meryl Natow, to join her. They began ordering boxes of bugs from pet food companies and playing around in the kitchen, making waxworm tacos and smothering crickets in soy sauce. “We were immediately very impressed with the taste of it all,” D’Asaro says. They partnered with a Boston-area chef and started developing recipes. But when they shared samples with friends, or bravely brought some of their new dishes to potluck dinners, it did not go well. “People seemed very frightened.”

They had run smack into what may be the biggest hurdle in expanding insect cuisine: getting people to eat it. Some foods, like chocolate, sell themselves. Insects are not one of those foods. “Insects,” says Paul Rozin, a psychologist at the University of Pennsylvania, “are disgusting. Things that are disgusting are offensive because of what they are. It’s not that insects taste bad. It’s that the idea of an insect is upsetting to people.”

Rozin, who is known as ‘the father of disgust in psychology’, has come to the conference in Ede to present his work on consumer attitudes toward insects, and he outlines the challenges that entomophagic entrepreneurs will face. At one point during his talk, he clicks forward to a slide that displays two photos, side by side: a cockroach and Adolf Hitler. “In my research on disgust,” he tells the audience, “these are my two best stimuli. Because they reliably produce negativity.”

Insects are so repellent that most Americans, at least, don’t want to consume anything that bugs have ever touched. In the 1980s, Rozin conducted a study in which he invited volunteers to try two different kinds of juice and rate them on a 200-point scale. Then, he briefly submerged a dried, sterilised cockroach in one of the glasses of juice and a birthday candle holder in the other. The participants were asked to evaluate each juice again; their ratings of the ‘cockroached’ juice plummeted, by 102 points on average. The candleholder, by contrast, produced a ratings drop of a measly three points.

Why do we find insects so disgusting? The answer, Rozin says, is simple: because they’re animals. As a general rule, most of the foods that humans find disgusting are animal products and most animal products are disgusting; even the most insatiable carnivores eat only a small fraction of the species that exist on the planet. In some ways, roaches are no different to gorillas, gerbils or iguanas, or any other creatures that we don’t routinely eat. In other ways, though, they’re much worse. Many insect species are found on, in or around waste, and they’re commonly associated with dirt, decay and disease, all of which can significantly up the yuck factor.

D’Asaro and her partners realised that they’d need to ease consumers into the idea of bug gastronomy, so they abandoned the idea of serving whole insects and decided to work instead with cricket flour, which could be invisibly incorporated into familiar foods. They decided to launch their company, which they named Six Foods, with a product Americans already love: chips [crisps]. They created ‘Chirps’, a triangular chip made of black beans, rice and cricket flour, which is lightly spritzed with oil and then baked. Chirps are high in protein and low in fat and taste similar to tortilla chips, D’Asaro says, although the cricket flour adds a slightly nutty, savoury flavour. Six Foods plans to begin shipping them in October 2014.

In some ways, however, Chirps are a Trojan horsefly, a way to sneak bugs into American diets and transform sceptics into insectivores. Six Foods hopes to eventually introduce products in which the critters aren’t so hidden. “That’s our ultimate goal,” D’Asaro says. “Where you can go to the store or a restaurant, and you can get a beefburger or a chicken burger or what we call an ‘ento’ burger. But we’re just not quite there yet in society.”

D’Asaro isn’t the only one hoping we get there: in the past few years, there’s been an explosion in businesses trying to put the ‘meal’ into mealworms. A Belgian outfit called Green Kow makes carrot-mealworm, tomato-mealworm and chocolate-mealworm spreads. Ento, based in the UK, sells mealworm and cricket pâtés at food festivals and last year created a pop-up restaurant devoted to insect cuisine. In the USA, Chapul and Exo sell protein bars chock-full of cricket flour, while New Generation Nutrition, in the Netherlands, has experimented with a falafel-like chickpea and buffalo worm patty.

Then there are the companies that are raising insects for animal feed, such as Agriprotein, which is based in South Africa and building “a damn big fly factory”, as co-founder David Drew puts it. The plant is scheduled to open next year and will produce 24 tons of larvae and 7 tons of maggot meal, or MagMeal, every day. Agriprotein plans to create nine more of these factories across the globe by 2020. Enviroflight (in the USA), Ynsect (in France) and Protix (in the Netherlands) have also built large-scale insect production facilities.

Representatives of many of these enterprises have made their way to Ede, carting along product samples or prototypes to display in a large foyer at the conference hotel. During coffee and lunch breaks, participants can ponder whether they prefer miso made with grasshoppers or silkworms, buy a plastic container of freeze-dried mealworms for €3.50, or lean against the enormous sacks of black soldier fly meal stacked up at the back of the room. These businesses may one day be competitors, but for now, they have got an industry to build, so the atmosphere is one of camaraderie and collaboration. They trade strategies and suggestions and commiserate about the obstacles ahead.

Many companies have arrived at the same conclusion as Six Foods — that it’s best not to confront consumers with insects too directly. That often involves processing and disguising the bugs, but it can also mean doing a little clever rebranding. Take waxworms, which live in beehives and eat honeycomb. By all accounts, they’re delicious: buttery, with a taste reminiscent of bacon. But the word ‘worm’ can be a deal-breaker for diners, so Six Foods has re-christened them ‘honey bugs’. Ento calls them ‘honeycomb caterpillars’. Florence Dunkel, an entomologist at Montana State University, recommends borrowing from their scientific name, Galleria mellonella. “We say ‘We’re having Galleria quesadilla’, and it sounds much more exotic,” she tells the audience at one presentation. “It’s very romantic.” Dunkel also suggests using the euphemism ‘land shrimp’ for insects.

The arthropod advocates know they have some convincing to do, but they are optimistic. In consumer surveys, many people report that they’d be willing to try insects, at least in some form. When Rozin conducted an online survey of several hundred Americans, he found that 75 per cent said they’d rather eat an insect than raw goat meat, and 53 per cent reported that they’d rather eat an insect than endure 10 minutes of moderate pain. “So this isn’t the worst thing in the world,” Rozin reassures the audience during his talk. “It’s just something you’d rather not do.”

The conference-goers seem to find comfort in telling and re-telling the story of sushi — a strange, foreign dish that showcased raw fish (raw fish!) and yet became not just acceptable but trendy in the West. “There’s no question that food preferences can change,” says D’Asaro, whose words tend to come rushing out in an enthusiastic tumble. “I mean, there are 450 people here who believe in the future of insects as food. So I think it’s going to happen, it’s going to happen now, and I would certainly — I mean, I am putting my money on it.”

The entomophiles are not just putting their money where their mouths are — they’re putting their mouths where their money is. There is audible excitement on the first morning of the conference when the organiser, entomologist Arnold van Huis, announces that each day’s lunch will feature at least one insect snack. That day, it’s miniature quiches sprinkled liberally with dried mealworms. They don’t look particularly appetising to me, but I’m in the company of true believers. It’s easy to get caught up in their passion and energy, their conviction that ‘land shrimp’ are the key to fixing food.

I put a mealworm quiche on my plate. I don’t want to miss my chance to help save the world.

Adrian Charlton is a major buzzkill. A biochemist at the Food & Environment Research Agency in the UK, Charlton is one of the scientists working on PROteINSECT, a €3 million, EU-funded project that launched last year. The team, which includes researchers in seven countries and three continents, is trying to nail down the nitty-gritty details involved in turning insects into animal feed. The scientists are testing different methods of fly farming, conducting livestock feeding trials and analysing the environmental impact of insect factories, among other things. Charlton is heading up the safety and quality analyses, and he’s here at the conference at 9am, the day after we’ve all chowed down on mealworm quiche, to warn us that “not all insects are safe”.

Whether they’re used in animal feed or human food, insects present a slew of hazards. Bugs scooped up from the wild may be covered in pesticides or other contaminants, but even raising insects in industrial, indoor facilities won’t necessarily eliminate the risks. One of the benefits of insects is that they can be raised on waste, but food scraps may be contaminated with fungus, some species of which produce nasty toxins. Animal manure may contain disease-causing bacteria, such as Salmonella and Campylobacter, as well as antibiotics or other drugs given to livestock. Heavy metals such as arsenic, cadmium and lead can also accumulate in animal manure and agricultural waste — and then in the bodies of insects that feed on it. “We know in some cases insects will tolerate much higher levels of metals than mammals,” Charlton warns. “And therefore that’s a risk in terms of using them as a feedstock.”

In his initial tests, Charlton has found that some flies raised on animal and food waste have cadmium levels higher than limits set by the EU. Other researchers have also documented elevated levels of lead in dried grasshoppers from Mexico and dangerous levels of fungal toxins in the mopane caterpillar, which is eaten in many parts of Africa. “This is not all speculation,” says Charlton.

Insects also have their own pathogens: viruses, bacteria and fungi that colonise their tiny bodies. Although there’s still a lot to learn about these microorganisms, some could potentially pose risks to humans or livestock.

Then there’s the allergy question. Insects are arthropods, and several other arthropods — most notably shrimp — can cause severe allergic reactions. One of the major triggers of shellfish allergies is a muscle protein called tropomyosin. The protein sequence of tropomyosin is similar in insects and crustaceans, and people with shellfish allergies may also react to insects.

That’s not to say that all these potential dangers will turn out to be actual dangers, or that they’re insurmountable. But, right now, there’s very little data. “We need to know a lot more, really — that’s the bottom line,” says Charlton.

Given that, Charlton says, it makes sense for legislators to take a cautious approach. In the EU, companies that want to introduce edible insect products may be subject to the Novel Food Regulation, which applies to any food that wasn’t ‘used for human consumption to a significant degree’ in Europe before the law was enacted in 1997. Any of these so-called ‘novel’ products or ingredients must undergo a thorough safety assessment, and then be approved by food safety regulators, before being placed on the market. The situation in the USA is similar: companies can sell whole insects as long as they are clean, wholesome and raised specifically for human consumption, but if they want to use a novel insect-derived product (e.g. protein powder) as an additive, they may need to petition the Food and Drug Administration to designate the ingredient as safe.

The Novel Food Regulation sounds straightforward enough, but in practice it’s caused profound confusion. Owing to what many people consider to be an oversight, the law currently applies to ingredients that are ‘isolated’ from animals, but not animals that are eaten whole. And yet some US food authorities have rejected whole-insect products, and future versions of the novel food regulation may encompass them. Meanwhile, some companies are already selling products that may be forbidden under the current regulation, without any apparent consequence. These and other ambiguities can leave companies in an uncomfortable grey area, unsure of whether they are actually allowed to sell their products.

Getting insects into animal feed could prove even tougher than getting them onto people’s plates, thanks to rules enacted in response to the outbreak of mad cow disease in the UK in the 1980s and 1990s. The disease spread as the remains of sick animals were processed into feed for other livestock. To combat this problem, the EU instituted a series of new policies, including a ban on feeding ‘processed animal proteins’ to farmed animals. There are some exceptions for fishmeal and fish feed, but as the law currently stands, insect meal is a non-starter. Another problem for would-be insect farmers is a law that forbids ‘farmed animals’ — a category that includes insects raised for food and feed — from being reared on certain kinds of waste, including manure.

The restrictive (and sometimes confusing and contradictory) regulatory system is the target of particular scorn at the conference, where the heads of various insect enterprises point out that these policies were developed before bugs were on the agricultural and gastronomic radar.

“Insects will be allowed to be fed to chickens in Europe,” David Drew, of Agriprotein, says in his talk. “It’s just a mistake — let’s be honest… At the time the legislation was created, there was no insect feed. Otherwise, it would be there in the legislation. It’s absolutely absurd that the natural food of chickens, which is maggots… is banned, and fish, which they have never eaten, is permitted.”

The audience breaks into a hearty, spontaneous round of applause, but Drew isn’t done yet. “It’s a bit like banning giant pandas from eating bamboo. It just ain’t right.”

But while the entrepreneurs seem to be growing restless — some have brought products to display at the conference that they’re not yet allowed to sell — some scientists are worried about moving too fast. “Until we know more, then the legislation shouldn’t change to allow insects into the food chain,” says Charlton.

When I catch up with him a few weeks after the conference, Charlton makes clear that he’s not trying to shut the bug businesses down or keep insects out of animal feed forever. “I actually do think that this is a good idea,” he says. “It just needs the data behind it to prove that.”

I ask him whether I was foolish to eat the mealworm quiche. “It depends how cautious you are and how adventurous you feel,” he says diplomatically. “I guess I’m more of an evidence-based person.”

Eating the mealworm quiche had given me a good sense of what the insectivores are up against. The dish tasted perfectly fine — the mealworms had a slightly nutty, toasted flavour and gave the quiche an extra crunch — but it still made my stomach turn. After taking a few bites, I found myself pushing the quiche to the side of my plate. I pulled a piece of bread off the top of my insect-free cheese sandwich and used it to cover the quiche; I didn’t want to look at the worms while I was eating the rest of my lunch.

But I’d survived the quiche, as well as the maggot fat at that first tasting by the Nordic Food Lab. Over my week in the Netherlands, I’d tried other delicacies: locust tabbouleh; chicken crumbed in buffalo worms; bee larvae ceviche; tempura-fried crickets; rose beetle larvae stew; soy grasshoppers; char-grilled sticky rice with wasp paste; buffalo worm, avocado and tomato salad; a cucumber, basil and locust drink; and a fermented, Asian-style dipping sauce made from grasshoppers and mealworms.

Although I found many of the dishes to be psychologically difficult to stomach, none of them had actually tasted bad. The insects themselves were quite bland. The crickets had a slightly fishy aftertaste and the buffalo worms a metallic one. The rose beetle larvae were vaguely reminiscent of smoked ham. Mostly, the insects were carriers for whatever other, stronger flavours were in a dish.

In fact, the Nordic Food Lab’s Josh Evans and Ben Reade declared their tasting a failure, largely because the star ingredients — which came from Dutch insect farms — were nearly flavourless. The insects were a far cry from the delectable specimens they would caught in the wild during their research trips around the world.

Over the past year, they have been to five continents and discovered an astonishing world of insect flavour. In Australia, they savoured the sweet-and-sour tang of honey ants and sampled scale insect larvae, which taste like fresh mushrooms and pop softly in the mouth. In Uganda, they feasted on queen termites, which are fatty — like little sausages — with the texture of sweetbreads, the fragrance of foie gras and a delicate sweetness. In Mexico, they enjoyed escamoles, desert ant eggs with a creamy mouthfeel and the aroma of blue cheese.

Rather than carting crates of escamoles to Copenhagen, Evans and Reade hope to identify European insects that are similar to the ones they tasted on their travels or can be prepared in similar ways. (One pro tip, which they picked up from a farmer in southwestern Uganda: crickets should rest for a few minutes after being cooked.) The goal, they say, isn’t necessarily to get everyone eating insects. Rather, it’s to introduce diners to delicious, under-used ingredients, expand food choice and encourage people to embrace the edible resources that surround them.

They sometimes seem frustrated by what they hear at the conference, by all the talk of scaling up insect production enormously, using insects in highly processed products, and creating a global insect trade, with a few easy-to-farm species shipped all around the world. They object to large-scale insect farming partly on gastronomic grounds — in their experience, farmed, freeze-dried insects taste “like cardboard,” Evans says — but also on ecological ones, worrying that we may end up merely replacing one industrial protein-production system with another.

“Insects themselves could be the most sustainable thing, they could have no carbon footprint at all,” Reade says. “But then if we insisted on freeze-drying them all using huge amounts of energy and sending them halfway across the planet for energy-consuming protein extraction and then decided to sell that protein in another part of the world shaped like chicken breasts in a little plastic packet — well, there’s nothing sustainable about that at all.”

Indeed, just because insects have a killer feed-to-food conversion ratio doesn’t mean that anything we do with or to insects will be eco-friendly. Bart Muys, an ecologist at KU Leuven in Belgium, tells the conference-goers that although insects can be reared on relatively tiny plots of land, producing insect meal requires significantly more energy than fishmeal or soymeal does, largely because the bugs need to be raised in warm conditions. The environmental impact of each production system will vary, depending on countless factors, including location, species and feedstock. The golden rule, Muys warns, is “Do not claim before you know.”

Although everyone at the conference is dreaming of a future with more insects on the menu, the exact natures of those dreams vary widely — from the chefs who want to showcase insects’ unique flavours at the world’s best restaurants to the businessmen who believe the best use of bugs is as a feedstock to help lower the price of beef. There’s no central authority dictating the next steps; although there’s talk of gathering for another conference in two or three years, all the experts and advocates will pursue their own priorities in the meantime.

The edible insect industry is still in its infancy, and it’s too soon to tell how it will develop or whether it will succeed. Will we accept insect flour in our snack foods? Can we be persuaded to make waxworm tacos in our own kitchens? Will crickets become a supermarket staple? And will any of this add up to real change? Many other innovations are also being hailed as the future of food, from fake chicken to 3D printing and from algae to lab-grown meat. Whether any of them, including insects, will turn out to make a real contribution to food security and sustainability remains an open question.

For their part, Evans and Reade reject the notion that insects will be some sort of silver bullet. Bugs, they say, will only be a real part of the solution if we are careful and thoughtful about how we integrate them into the food system. In their eyes, entomophagy is about more than merely getting a precise amount of protein on a plate — it’s about making sure everyone on the planet has access to food that is affordable, healthy, diverse, environmentally sound and, yes, delicious. “Insects can be a vehicle for something,” Reade says. “But it has to be recognised that it’s not the insects themselves that are going to make it sustainable. It’s the humans.”

This article first appeared on Mosaic

[MIKA27]

Elephants Can Sense Rainstorms From 240km Away

Elephants are amazing creatures for a lot of reasons. The latest one to be confirmed by science? They can sense rainstorms from 240km away. What’s more amazing is that researchers think they do it by simply listening to the sound of the air.

This discovery is the result of a seven-year-long study that tracked elephant migration in Namibia. Researchers planted GPS receivers on nine elephants around the country and found a curious pattern to their movement during the rainy season. When the storm were sometimes up to 240km away, these elephants “exhibited statistically valid non-random near-simultaneous changes in movements” that sent them in the direction of the rainfall.

“The elephants undergo these sudden migrations that previously have not been explained,” Texas A&M professor Oliver Frauenfeld, who co-authored the study, told Popular Science. “They need the rain. After a prolonged dry season, once the elephants hear the rain, they start moving towards it, and it allows them to get the water sooner.”

The researchers think that the uncanny meteorological abilities stem from their extraordinary hearing. We’ve long known that elephants communicate using extremely low frequency sounds, known as “infrasounds”, that are well below the human range of hearing. It’s entirely possible that the storms send out sound waves that the elephants can also hear and respond to.

The hope is that this new insight into elephant movements will help conservationists come up with strategies to keep the beautiful creatures away from poachers. Because by the time anyone hears a gunshot, it’s too late.

[MIKA27]

Canada Ushers In Clean Coal With A Carbon-Capturing Power Plant

Saskatchewan has been a coal-powered province for years, its Boundary Dam power plant burning the most polluting forms of lignite since 1959. But thanks to a modern retrofit, Boundary Dam now serves as the demarcation line between dirty and clean Canadian coal power.

“Natural gas prices rise and fall unpredictably, while coal is abundant and affordable in Saskatchewan,” reads Saskpower’s website. “Government regulations and the need to reduce greenhouse gas emissions around the world means we need to find a way to keep producing affordable power, but in a way that reduces our impact on the environment.”

The Boundary Dam has been in operation since 1959 when its first two 62 MW boilers were installed. Two more 139 MW boilers were brought online in 1970, a third 139 MW unit joined in 1973, and a 273 MW unit powered up in 1978; bringing the total to six boilers and 752 MW of total capacity. The plant has traditionally utilised locally sourced coal for its fuel, including what’s known as “brown coal”, a highly polluting form of lignite considered one of the dirtiest forms of coal power. Even worse the Boundary Dam plant would simply port any excess CO2 generated by the energy conversion process directly into the atmosphere.

But beginning October 22nd of this year, that greenhouse gas stopped being dumped into the air and started being pumped deep underground. The technique, known as the aquastore project, involves dissolving the gaseous CO2 into a nearby saltwater aquifer, thereby sequestering up to 1 million tons of CO2 annually — thats roughly 90 per cent of what the power plant produces and the equivalent of taking a quarter million cars off Canadian roads.

Boundary Dam is the world’s first Post-Combustion Coal-Fired CCS, which required a $US1.4 billion retrofit to unit 3. The carbon capture process will also reduce unit 3′s capacity from 139 MW down to 110 MW.

As Scientific American explains:

Boundary Dam also burns brown coal, the most polluting form of the most polluting fossil fuel. Saskatchewan has an estimated 300-year supply of the dirty fuel to burn at present rates of consumption. The unit uses amines — a nitrogen-based molecule that can bond with CO2 — to capture a projected 1 million metric tons of the leading greenhouse gas each year. The amine captures the CO2 and then when further heated releases it again, meaning it takes away some of the plant’s power to take away the plant’s CO2. The captured CO2, compressed and liquefied, will then travel 66 kilometers via pipeline to the nearby Weyburn oil fields and join the CO2 captured at a plant that turns brown coal into a gas in North Dakota. At Weyburn, the CO2 will be used to scour more oil out of the ground. Of course, the eventual burning of this oil will also release CO2 into the atmosphere.

It’s not a perfect solution — a perfect solution would be the global implementation of pebble bed or thorium reactor technology — but it marks a huge step forward in the establishment of a low-carbon economy. The plant is the 13th facility worldwide — 10 of which are in the US — to implement capture and store technologies.

[MIKA27]

'Captain America 3' To Kick Off Marvel's Civil War Story Arc, Robert Downey Jr To Return As Iron Man

Captain America: The Winter Soldier was one of the best stand-alone Marvel movies yet. It played beautifully on modern themes of privacy, safety and surveillance, with some of the coolest goddamn action scenes yet. That’s going to be hard to top for Cap, but it’s being reported that Marvel have another slam dunk in the works. Variety is reporting that the third Captain America movies will trigger one of the most epic Marvel comic arcs yet: the Civil War. Whose side are you on?

The Civil War storyline centres around a piece of fictional legislation called the Superhuman Legislation Act, which requires anyone with superpowers living in the US to register themselves on a database, and act under a formal charter.

One of the most interesting things about the Marvel Universe Civil War is that Captain America led the charge against the Registration Act, whilst Tony Stark as Iron Man led the charge for it. According to the report, Marvel Studios plans to stay pretty close to that storyline, with Robert Downey Jr signing on to reprise his role as everyone’s favourite genius/billionaire/playboy/philanthropist.

Depending on how closely the film would follow the multi-part comic series, we’d see fights between various Avengers-members who are split between pro- and anti-Registration Act members.

The next Cap movie would get a mid-2016 release, meaning we would have already had the next Avengers instalment: Age Of Ultron. Hopefully there’s some sort of reference to the Registration Act in the next Avengers romp, be it post-credits or otherwise.

Regardless of the film rumours, however, Marvel has tweeted today that it will be starting up a new Civil War book series in 2015, which may change the events to tie into the film.

Either way, I need to re-read my Civil War books!

[polarbear]

Do you also wear a foil cone on your head Fuzz?

I prefer Armadillo helmets, myself

[MIKA27]

Bad Lip-Reading Turns The Walking Dead Into The Best Comedy On TV

Last month, Bad Lip-Reading turned The Walking Dead into a musical. This month, they have turned the series into the best comedy on TV.

Funny S**t can't stop laughing!

[MIKA27]

Buzz Aldrin's Amazing View While Riding Gemini XII With The Hatch Open

This is the nose of the Gemini XII spacecraft as photographed by Buzz Aldrin. He was standing up on his seat with his hatch open while orbiting at 8000m per second 300km over the Earth. I wish I were able to imagine the sensation of what this felt like.

This is how it looked from the outside.

That is Buzz Aldrin standing up on Gemini XII, with the Agena rendezvous vehicle on the background. Agena was used as a target spaceship to test the orbital rendezvous technique that was needed to go to the Moon in the Apollo missions — a technique that Aldrin himself developed in his “Manned Orbital Rendezvous” thesis, which earned him a Doctorate of Science in Astronautics by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

This publicity photo gives a better idea of the proportions and posture.

Aldrin established a Extra-Vehicular Activity record at the time, demonstrating for the first time that humans could do actual work floating in space without risking their lives.

Aldrin during EVA.

The view of Agena from Gemini XII.

Aldrin and Lovell after the splashdown.

[Fuzz]

Do you also wear a foil cone on your head Fuzz?

I prefer Armadillo helmets, myself

Pfft. Tin foil hats don't work, they actually make it easier to read your thought and make you more susceptible to mind control.

Now a tight-weave fully enclosed Faraday suit, that'll protect you from the Illuminati.

[MIKA27]

BOSS 429 WALLPAPER

The Boss 429 Mustang was produced in 1969 and 1970 due to the homologation requirements of NASCAR’s Sprint Cup Series. Ford needed something extraordinary to challenge the 426 Hemi from Chrysler – so the 429 was shoehorned into the Mustang by the engineers at Kar Kraft, using existing 428 Cobra Jet and Super Cobra Jet Mach 1 Mustangs.

Only 859 Boss 429s were made by the time the production line in Brighton, MI drew to a halt – this rarity coupled with the mystique associated with the model has seen prices shoot upwards, now approaching or surpassing a quarter million dollars apiece.

[MIKA27]

The Terrible Ghoul of Glamis

Situated just west of Forfar, Scotland, Glamis Castle is referred to by Shakespeare in Macbeth; Macbeth of its title having killed Duncan there in 1040. And it is also at the castle where assassins murdered King Malcolm II in 1034. In addition, Glamis Castle was the childhood home of both Queen Elizabeth II and the Queen Mother, and the birthplace of Princess Margaret. And then there is the castle’s very own monster.

Jon Downes – of the Center for Fortean Zoology – notes that “he castle is the site of a well known and semi legendary beast known as the Monster of Glamis. It’s said that the creature was supposed to have been the hideously deformed heir to the Bowes-Lyon family and who was, according to popular rumor, born in about 1800, and died as recently as 1921.”

Downes digs further into the puzzle: “Legend has it that the monster was supposed to look like an enormous flabby egg, having no neck and only minute arms and legs but possessed incredible strength and had an air of evil about it. Certainly, there is a family secret concerning the monster, which is only told to the male heir of the Bowes-Lyon family when they attain majority.

“But according to the author Peter Underwood, who has looked into this case, the present Lord Strathmore knows nothing about the monster, presumably because the creature has long been dead, but he always felt that there was a corpse or coffin bricked up behind the walls.”

There is another other matter worth noting, too : according to James Wentworth Day, an author who extensively researched and wrote about the legend, the creature of the castle was “hairy as a doormat.” Should we, therefore, ponder on the possibility that the monster of Glamis was a strange, wild animal, rather than a deformed human?

According to folklore and oral tradition, the existence of the creature was allegedly known to only four men at any given time, namely the Earl of Strathmore, his direct heir, the family’s lawyer, and the broker of the estate.

At the age of twenty-one each succeeding heir was told the terrible secret and shown the rightful – and horrendously deformed – Earl, and succeeding family lawyers and brokers were also informed of the family’s shocking secret.

As no Countess of Strathmore was ever told the story, however, one Lady Strathmore, having indirectly heard of such rumors, quietly approached the then broker, a certain Mr. Ralston, who flatly refused to reveal the secret and who would only say by way of a reply:

“It is fortunate you do not know the truth for if you did you would never be happy.”

The crypt at Glamis Castle

Was the strange creature of the castle a terribly deformed soul with some bizarre genetic affliction, a captured wild man or something else? While the jury, inevitably, remains steadfastly out, it’s an intriguing reality that in 1912, in his book, Scottish Ghost Stories, Elliott O’Donnell published the contents of a letter that he had received from a Mrs. Bond, who had spent time at Glamis Castle and who underwent an undeniably weird encounter.

In her letter to O’Donnell, rather notably, she described a somewhat supernatural encounter with a beast possessed of distinct ape-like qualities.

Mrs. Bond wrote to O’Donnell the following words:

“It is a good many years since I stayed at Glamis. I was, in fact, but little more than a child, and had only just gone through my first season in town. But though young, I was neither nervous nor imaginative; I was inclined to be what is termed stolid, that is to say, extremely matter-of-fact and practical.

“Indeed, when my friends exclaimed, ‘You don’t mean to say you are going to stay at Glamis! Don’t you know it’s haunted?’ I burst out laughing. ‘Haunted!’ I said, ‘How ridiculous! There are no such things as ghosts. One might as well believe in fairies.’”

Despite her skepticism, after retiring to her room, and having fallen into a deep sleep, Mrs. Bond had a vivid, horrific nightmare that actually sounds far more like an encounter with something supernatural, experienced in a profoundly altered state, rather than just a regular dream. She told O’Donnell:

“Slowly, very slowly, the thing, whatever it was, took shape. Legs – crooked, misshapen, human legs. A body – tawny and hunched. Arms – long and spidery, with crooked, knotted fingers. A head – large and bestial, and covered with a tangled mass of grey hair that hung around its protruding forehead and pointed ears in ghastly mockery of curls.

“A face – and herein was the realization of all my direst expectations – a face – white and staring, pig-like in formation malevolent in expression; a hellish combination of all things foul and animal, and yet withal not without a touch of pathos.

“As I stared at it aghast, it reared itself on its haunches after the manner of an ape, and leered piteously at me. Then, shuffling forward, it rolled over, and lay sprawled out like some ungainly turtle – and wallowed, as for warmth, in the cold grey beams of early dawn.

“At this juncture the handle of the chamber door turned, someone entered, there was a loud cry – and I awoke – awoke to find the whole tower, walls and rafters, ringing with the most appalling screams I have ever heard – screams of something or of someone – for there was in them a strong element of what was human as well as animal – in the greatest distress.

“Wondering what it meant, and more than ever terrified, I sat up in bed and listened,–listened whilst a conviction – the result of intuition, suggestion, or what you will, but a conviction all the same – forced me to associate the sounds with the thing in my dream.

And I associate them still.”

Just a bad dream, born out of hearing disturbing stories of the Glamis ghoul? Or, an encounter of the supernatural kind, one in which the aforementioned ghoul supernaturally invaded the sleep state of terrified Mrs. Bond…?

Perhaps the answer still remains hidden, somewhere within the dark confines of Glamis Castle…

[MIKA27]

What Made Mexico’s Most Mysterious Beach?

There’s an islet off the Pacific coast of Mexico with a pristine beach drilled into its central core like the hole of a donut. This hidden Eden continues to baffle geologists with its oculus of volcanic stone.

It’s sunset in the pre-Columbian wilds of Nayarit. The jays silence their song as night falls. The jaguars lurk nearby. Smoke rises above the canopy as gentle chanting rumbles across the jungle floor. The Huichol—ancient dwellers of Mexico’s Pacific coast—burn flowers and seeds in honor of their gods. They sing songs and recite prayers in order to maintain the holy balance of nature between Father Sun and Mother Ocean.

“For thousands of years the Huichol have performed these sacred rituals,” explains Enrique Alejos, the cultural concierge at the Four Seasons Punta Mita. “The masculine deities of light and the female goddesses of the dark work in unison through dutiful tribute in order to protect the precarious lives of the indigenous people.” And the gods’ Olympus, if you will, is a small couplet of islands just beyond the luxury hotel, where the sun rejoins the sea after its daily journey across the clouds.

Uninhabited by humans since its explosive inception over five million years ago, the volcanic Marieta Islands symbolized the tangible union of sea and sky to the god-fearing Huichol. But when modern-day conservationists surveyed the offshore rocks they discovered something even more ethereal lurking within.

At the center of Isla Redonda was a quirk of nature seen only on the pages of a fantasy novel—a sandy beach carved into the rounded core of the island like the hole of donut. Although completely invisible from the shoreline, a bird's eye view reveals lapping crystal waters and an empty dune like dazzling colors at the end of kaleidoscope's funnel.

“You see a lot of bizarre geological formations from limestone, like in the Thailand, but with volcanic rocks it’s much more surprising to find a beach encased in stone like this,” posits Dr. Benjamin Black, a volcanologist and post-doctoral scholar at the University of California, Berkley. “Volcanic rocks tell a continuing story from the moment they form after an eruption. This tale of erosion—the slow grind of the sea against the rocks—is particularly unique.”

But there’s an added twist. Before the area fell under the jurisdiction of Mexico’s national park system, the lonely islands were used as a bombing test site by country’s military.

For years the government detonated explosives on the Marietas, far away from human contact, until a movement led by Jacques Cousteau encouraged the navy to cease their testing in order to protect the surrounding reefs and delicate breeding grounds of the migrating humpback whales.

“Tests measuring cosmogenic nuclides can determine exactly how the hidden beach was formed, but regardless of whether or not it began with erosion or a bomb, it’s nonetheless a perplexing geological oddity,” continues Black, who likens the rocky terrain to a cherry bon bon.

“Erosion always proceeds from the top down, so the interior of the island, before it was hollowed out, was likely made up of what we call ‘explosive’ rocks—fragments belched up by volcanic activity. These stones erode more quickly, while the island’s thick exterior shell is made of a substance that is less susceptible to decay.”

According to Black’s initial assessment, a few thousand years remain before erosion eats away at the delicate structure, turning the hidden beach into a crescent-moon cove.

“We are more concerned, however, of the impact that excessive visits might cause to the eco-system,” says Marc Murphy, the managing director of Riviera Nayarit’s convention and visitor’s bureau, who has witnessed a massive spike in tourism to the Marietas after a photo of the hidden Eden went viral approximately two years ago. “Excessive tourism could lead to a more rapid destruction of this sanctuary.”

Alejos and his colleagues at the Four Seasons count an average of 300 people a day who cross the shallow straight beyond the hotel to explore the now-famous ring of hidden peach sand.

Although tourists aren’t allowed to climb on the islands, according to the national park laws, they gain access to the secreted beach within through a submarine tunnel that is naturally chiseled into the island’s side. When the tides recede, the top of the long passageway emerges just above the waves allowing the right amount of space to swim through James Bond-style, sans scuba gear.

Once inside, there’s plenty of space to sunbathe or relax under the crown of arcing shrubs and rocks high above. From deep within, looking up at the tropical sky is like staring through the dome of some kind of earthen cathedral.

“The natural formation of an oculus in nature is extremely rare,” adds Black, who cites the prominence of rounded portals across many ancient cultures—“the Romans, for example, built oculi in their temples as a representation of their gods’ watchful eyes.”

“Here you have two mysterious openings, one from the sea and one to the sky,” Black continues, “no wonder the Huichol believed it was the holy place where Father Sun and Mother Ocean united.”

[MIKA27]

AMCHIT RESIDENCE IN LEBANON

Fighting for the crown of the baddest bachelor pad in Lebanon, the mind blowing Amchit Residence was designed by the team at Blankpage Architects.

Located in Nahr el Mott, Lebanon, this home has everything you could ask for – right down to the ocean view. Nestled on the coastline, this modern residence flows seamlessly with its natural surroundings, which includes citrus, olive and sea-salted palm trees found all around the property. The multi-level structure is extremely minimal and open, with rooms being connected by outdoor bridges. The mid-level living room and kitchen are surrounded by floor to ceiling glass windows, suspended lighting, and dark hardwood floors creating an environment that is not only modern, but also cozy at the same time. The best part of this dwelling is the master bedroom located on the upper deck. The bedroom is completely surrounded by windows, providing panoramic water views that would rival your favorite vacation destination. And as if that wasn’t awesome enough, there’s also a glowing rooftop lap pool right outside the bedroom door – with staircase access to the shoreline of course.

[MIKA27]

MERCEDES-BENZ G-CLASS EDITION 35

One of our all-time favorite SUVs (the iconic G-Wagon) has officially turned 35 years old this year. To celebrate the milestone, Mercedes-Benz is releasing the G-Class Edition 35.

This new G-Class will be available in both the G350 BlueTECH and G500 models, both of which come in your choice of Designo Mystic White Bright, Palladium Silver, and Obsidian Black. All 3 metallic paint jobs are outfitted with 18-inch alloy wheels, a gloss black rooftop, AMG sports package, and a chrome kit for both the grille out front and the spare wheel cover out back. The G500 also comes with a sports exhaust to finish off the exterior. The interior cabin is available in your choice of Designo Black leather with contrasting red stitching or a two-tone Deisgno Porcelain and Black leather combination. There’s also a few subtle chrome and carbon fiber accent pieces, AMG performance steering wheel, that gorgeous Designo black piano lacquer trim and an ultra soft microsoft roof liner. As of right now, we don’t if/when this brute will be released here in the U.S.

[MIKA27]

IPAD FOOSBALL TABLE

Get the tactile joy of real-life foosball and all the benefits of a digital scorekeeper with the iPad Foosball Table. This tabletop game hooks to your older iPad via 30-pin connector, letting the four spinners on each side accurately control the digital players on the field. Other features include sliding colored markers on either end for keeping score, rubber feet to keep everything in place, and a number of options in the companion app, including customizable players and fields, tournament tracking, and the ability to add cheering crowds and other sound effects. While it might not match the resounding "thunk" of a goal scored on a real table, it also won't take up a ton of room in your house.

[MIKA27]

I Got Lost In Another Dimension While Watching These Kids Shuffle Cards

I don’t know how many finger exercises it takes to pull this off or how much wizard potion these kids from Singapore drank but they make shuffling cards look like a dancing symphony. Each finger seems to be powered by its own brain and yet they all work in concert to make complicated movements look graceful.

[MIKA27]

Google's Nexus 6 Superphone Is Here, And It's A Monster

The long-awaited (and long-rumoured) Nexus 6, the 6-inch (technically 5.96-inch) monster phablet, is finally, officially here. The Nexus 6, like its predecessors before it, will be the first device in the world to ship with Android’s new operating system, Lollipop. It’s the purest vision of what an Android phone should be. Apparently Android phones should be huge.

AU Editor’s Note: We’ve heard from Google Australia that for both the Nexus 6 and 9, there will be local device pre-orders starting from November, but prices aren’t yet confirmed. No news on the Nexus Player box for Android TV, though.

As all those rumours suggested, the Nexus 6 is basically a super-sized and super-specced Moto X, which Motorola released in September. It comes with a simply massive 5.96-inch 2K screen, a speedy Snapdragon 805 processor, 3GB of RAM and 32GB of onboard storage (a 64GB version is also available). The device weighs in at about 184g with a 10mm thickness, making it one of the thickest phablets you can buy. That bulk could be due in part to Google continuing the awesome tradition of wireless charging in its devices. The Nexus 6 is powered by a 3220mAh battery, supported by Motorola’s Turbo Charger ability to get 6 hours of battery life after only 15 minutes of charging.

Besides its Kaiju-esque size, the Nexus 6 retains many elements of the Moto X’s design. Google keeps the same dual speaker set up, aluminium chassis and the ring flash on the back. The camera itself is a 13-megapixel sensor (2 megapixel on the front), also like the Moto X, but with optical image stabilisation for better low-light images and HDR+. Samsung’s new Galaxy Note 4 and Apple’s own phablet, the iPhone 6 Plus, also came with this nifty feature, so it seems like a big phone requirement at this point.

As for Lollipop, it will be available stock on the new Nexus 6 and HTC’s Nexus 9 tablet, which was also revealed today along with the Nexus Player, a collaboration with ASUS that “is a streaming media player for movies, music and videos,” according to Google. Lollipop will arrive for Nexus 5, 7 and 10 and Google Play edition devices within a few weeks.

Google’s decision to team up with Motorola was motivated, in part, by their actual breakup. When Google sold off Motorola to Lenovo earlier this year, the split allowed Google to turn around and work with Motorola on new devices and completely avoid first-party favouritism among manufacturers.

It’s clear from the Nexus website that Google believes the Nexus 5 to be an integral part of the family as a low-cost, small-sized (in comparison) option for customers not ready to accept the phablet way of things. However, Asus’ Nexus 7 tablet appears to be facing extinction as every version of the device is out of stock on the Google Play Store and isn’t part of the official Nexus lineup. After all, do you really need a 7-inch tablet when you have a 6-inch phone?

Motorola says the device will come in two colours (pictured above) called Midnight Blue and Cloud White. Pre-orders will be available on October 29 for $US650 ($US700 for 64GB) through the Google Play Store and shipping will begin in November. Australian pricing and availability is yet to be announced.

[MIKA27]

Uber Has Helicopters In Australia Now

Ordering a fancy Uber car with your phone and starting out at the plebs on in their normal cabs is already a pretty #firstworld experience, but Melbourne Uber users are about to take it to the next level on the weekend: you can order a helicopter with your phone to take you to the races.

That’s right: on 18 October, UberCHOPPER will be taking off from Melbourne, giving users access to an Air Melbourne helicopter service to get to the races.

Uber will pick you up in the new Mini Cooper and drive you to the helipad, where you’ll be greeted with champagne pre-flight. After that, you’ll be flown to the Caulfield Racecourse for the Caulfield Cup, with VIP passes to the elite marquees. Fancy.

All you need to do to claim the offer is enter the FREECHOPPER code to activate the Chopper tier. They’ll become available from 10am on Saturday.

Unfortunately, only around 20 people will get access to UberCHOPPER in Melbourne this weekend, so be quick on the draw with your app come Saturday morning. [Uber]

[MIKA27]

Lockheed Martin's New Fusion Reactor Can Change Humanity Forever

This is the interior of an invention that could change civilisation as we know it: A compact fusion reactor developed by Skunk Works, the stealthy experimental technology division of Lockheed Martin. It is the size of a jet engine, power aeroplanes, spaceships, and cities — and they say it will be operative in only 10 years.

Aviation Week had exclusive access to their secret laboratories and talked to Dr Thomas McGuire, the leader of Skunk Work’s Revolutionary Technology division. And revolutionary it is, indeed: Instead of using the same design that everyone else is using — the Soviet-derived tokamak, a torus in which magnetic fields confine the fusion reaction with a huge energy cost and thus little energy production capabilities — Skunk Works’ Compact Fusion Reactor has a radically different approach to anything people have tried before. Here are the two of them for comparison:

Above: The traditional Soviet tokamak design of the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor, a gigantic installation being built in France.

Above: The Skunk Works’ new compact fusion reactor design.

The key to the Skunk Works system is their tube-like design, which allows them to bypass one of the limitations of classic fusion reactor designs, which are very limited in the amount of plasma they can hold, which makes them huge in size — like the gigantic International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor. According to McGuire:

[The traditional tokamak designes] can only hold so much plasma, and we call that the beta limit. [Their plasma ratio is] 5% or so of the confining pressure. [...] We should be able to go to 100% or beyond.

This architecture allows it to be 10 times smaller at the same power output of something like the ITER, which is expected to generate 500 MW in the 2020s. This is crucial for the use of fusion in all kind of applications, not only in giant, expensive power plants.

Skunk Works is convinced that their system — which will be the size of a jet engine — will be able to power everything, from spaceships to aeroplanes to vessels — and of course scale up to a much larger size. At the size of the ITER, it will be able to produce 10 times more energy, McGuire claims:

It’s one of the reasons we think it is feasible for development and future economics. Ten times smaller is the key. But on the physics side, it still has to work, and one of the reasons we think our physics will work is that we’ve been able to make an inherently stable configuration. In our case, it is always in balance. So if you have less pressure, the plasma will be smaller and will always sit in this magnetic well.

The road ahead

But we all know that the road to the dream of clean, unlimited energy is paved with failed inventions. The situation here seems quite different. First, Lockheed Martin is not a crazy dude working in a garage. It’s one of the world’s largest aerospace and military companies.

McGuire knows that they are just starting now, but he claims the design is sound and they will advance quickly until its final implementation in just a decade:

We would like to get to a prototype in five generations. If we can meet our plan of doing a design-build-test generation every year, that will put us at about five years, and we’ve already shown we can do that in the lab. So it wouldn’t be at full power, like a working concept reactor, but basically just showing that all the physics works.

Five years after that, they expect to have a fully operative model ready to go into full-scale production, capable of generating 100MW — enough to power a large cargo ship or a 80,000-home city — and measure 7m x 13m, so you “could put it on a semi-trailer, similar to a small gas turbine, put it on a pad, hook it up and can be running in a few weeks.”

I really hope this works out.

[MIKA27]

Report: Samsung Has Made Rollable Batteries That Bend Into A Hoop

Wearables: great, apart from the fact that batteries last about five minutes. Samsung, though, may have a solution: it’s just announced a new type of battery that is so flexible that it can be rolled up into a hoop.

The announcement, made at InterBattery 2014 in Seoul — how about that for an expo name? — claims that the new style of battery can work even when it’s rolled up into the shape of a paper cup. While details are scant according to a report by G for Games, the new flexibility apparently stems from changes in structural design and improved materials.

It may be a little early to get too excited though: these things certainly aren’t ready for the masses yet. Indeed, the reliability of the cells is apparently still low, which suggests that, even if they do work when deformed, that performance doesn’t last for long.

G for Games claims that “reports claim that the units will be commercially available within the next three years.” But, even if that’s accurate, three years is quite a long time; flying cars might exist in three year’s time, to be honest. Still, it’s a leap forwards in terms of battery design — let’s just hope it arrives, from Samsung or anyone else for that matter, sooner than those reports suggest.

[MIKA27]

Short Film: A Strange Tale Of Mice And Men With A Disturbing Ending

I watched this short film last night, and I’m still thinking about it. Who is this guy? Why are there clones of him? Why is there a time loop? Is the guy actually a mouse in some experiment? Is it a metaphor of the futility of life itself? Thanks filmmaker Justin Tagg for screwing up my mind a little bit more.

[MIKA27]

The Next Justice League Movies Will Come Out In 2017

If you’ve been wondering about the exact timeline for when Warner Bros would be expanding their cinematic universe based off DC Comics, then wonder no longer. Movies based off Suicide Squad, Justice League and Wonder Woman are coming in the next five years.

At a Warner Bros investor event today, where Wall Street Journal writer Ben Fritz is in attendance, executives revealed the timing for a slew of DC Comics-based films. The next production after 2015′s Batman v Superman will be Suicide Squad, which centres on villains forced to take on high-risk black ops missions for the government.

The Justice League and Wonder Woman movies are scheduled for 2017, with films based on The Flash and Aquaman in 2018 and Shazam and a Justice League sequel in 2019. Mention was also made of a Cyborg movie, a reboot for Green Lantern and standalone films for Batman and Superman. Of course, Hollywood film production schedules change all the time. But much is riding on the success of these movies, as Warner Bros. is looking to imitate the success that Marvel has had with its comic-book film franchises.SlashFilm has a lot more on the news, including the info that Zack Snyder will be directing the Justice League two-parter.