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

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VVEGO GUNNER LEATHER BRACELET

If the word “bracelet” somehow turns you off due to any perceived feminine connotations—come on, it’s 2014. But still, if you’d like to wear one and want it as manly as possible, check out the Vvego Gunner Leather Bracelet.

This hand-built accessory features carefully machined .45 caliber solid brass bullet casings held in place by hammered solid brass rivets, vegetable-tanned leather stitched w/ saddle thread to a softy, durable glove leather lining, and a Mil-Spec low profile QRB quick release buckle that secures the strap. The 9.75″L x 5/8″W strap will fit most wrists, you can choose between brown and black, and you’ll rest easy knowing it’s backed forever by Vvego’s “Take It to the Grave” warranty. If you ever come back as a zombie, at least your man strap will still look good. [Purchase]

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BOTTLE GRINDER | BY MENU

We are loving these beautifully designed Bottle Grinders by Scandinavian Menu, a brand known for making kitchen accessories with minimalist design and functionality. The bottle-shaped grinder is available in black and white for the obvious salt and pepper mills, or you can choose other colors and sizes to use them as spice grinders to freshly mill larger and more unusual spices.

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Microsoft Band Launch Delayed In Australia

It shouldn’t come as much of a surprise at this point that when something cool happens in tech, it’s almost guaranteed to happen first in America. True to form, the funky-looking Microsoft Band isn’t coming to Australia just yet.

In addition to the obvious optical heart-rate monitor you can see in the picture above, it will include a UV sensor to keep track of your sun exposure, a galvanic skin response sensor to measure stress, and built-in GPS. The 18.5-millimetre band’s made of a “thermal plastic elastomer,” which means it’s probably nice, soft, and stretchy. It’s got a fairly tiny 1.4-inch touchscreen at just 320 x 106 resolution, and is powered by two 100mAh lithium-ion batteries.

The band is just one part of a new Microsoft Health initative to track and analyse the world’s health data, and is also just one way to collect it: Microsoft plans to let people use the Health app with other personal trackers. Much like Basis and Jawbone, which sell bands of their own, Microsoft hopes to turn that data into insights that people can actually use. Would you like to know whether eating breakfast helps you run faster? That’s literally one of Microsoft’s examples.

No word on how long you’ll have to wait to get it in Australia, but if you’re desperate, you can try importing it from the Microsoft US Store. Best of luck to you.

Here’s a fun video of what you’ll miss out on:

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Ex Machina Trailer: Sexy Lady Robots Can Love Too

Here’s the trailer for Ex Machina, a sci-fi thriller about a young programmer selected to serve as the human component in a Turing Test on a robot. A really hot lady robot.

Spoiler: The robot, Ava turns out to be more smart and clever than anyone could have expected, throwing everyone for a loop. (She’s also fine as hell). The trailer feels a little Blade Runner-y to me. The movie, which is directed by Alex Garland, who wrote both 28 Days Later and Sunshine is out March 5, 2015, in Australia, and promises to feature plenty of intrigue and weird feelings about sexy machines.

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Watch This Haunted Poster Come To Life And Scare The Hell Out Of People

Giant poster ads are bad enough. But they’re even worse when they suddenly come to life and attack you. As far as terrifying pranks go, this one is pretty high up there. And it just keeps getting better.

Created by Gröna Lund, a theme park in Stockholm, Sweden, the poster entices people passing by to scan the QR code to get a sneak peek at the park’s upcoming haunted house attraction. But little do they know that the poster itself is possessed — by a very patient guy inside who’s ready to scare the crap out of them. So while the ad might actually draw visitors to the theme park, it all but puts the nail in the coffin for the popularity of QR codes in Sweden.

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The Surprisingly Low-Tech Way NASA Decides When To Blow Up A Rocket

When the Antares rocket exploded seconds after launch on Tuesday night, NASA was able to account for all its employees very quickly after the failure thanks to a clearly very well-practised protocol. The launch gave us a peek into the processes that dictate every rocket launch, and one of them was particularly surprising.

In the press conference (Above) following the explosion, we learned that as Antares began behaving “erratically” a few seconds after liftoff, the launch crew responsible for tracking it initiated something called the flight termination system — which essentially pulls the plug on a rocket launch before it can climb too high and cause potential damage as it malfunctions. But who makes that decision, and with what split-second information?

In a fascinating story in National Geographic today entitled Why NASA Blew Up a Rocket Just After Launch, Brad Scriber explains. According to Scriber — who watched the Antares failure in person on Wallops Island — two employees at every launch play an important and dangerous role at every launch. Rather than staying protected with the rest of the team, these employees watch the launch’s first few seconds from behind carefully positioned wood and wire frames.

Why? Because at this point, radar is too imprecise to track the rocket’s position — and human sight is more reliable. Scriber writes:

In the early seconds of a launch, when the rocket is near the ground, there is too much interference from trees and nearby structures for radar and other monitoring systems to be accurate. So spotters watch the launch through wooden viewing frames fitted with guide wires. If the rocket crosses behind a wire, they know it’s veering off track and they send up an alarm telling the safety officers to abort. Then they seek shelter.

According to a 2008 Popular Mechanics story about these Range Safety employees, they’re responsible for manning the Launch Termination call for the first full two minutes of flight. “If something happens when it’s just off the pad, there’s only a couple of seconds [to react],” a former NASA shuttle commander told the magazine.

It’s fascinating to know that plain sight plays such a huge role one of humanity’s most complex and sophisticated technological achievements. After all, human errors have been responsible for at least one massive rocket launch screw up, known as the Most Expensive Hyphen in History, when a single errant hyphen in a launch code caused a $US60 million rocket to explode in 1962. But it seems that in the end, we still have to trust our own eyes.

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You'll Be Getting A Very Different Kind Of War Game In Two Weeks

Embodying a soldier has been a staple of video games for a while now. But, on November 14th, players will control the kind of ordinary citizen who the machines of war usually roll right over. Here’s what This War of Mine will look like when you play.

This trailer for 11-bit’s upcoming wartime survival title shows a few slices of gameplay, with a focus on scavenging and interacting with other survivors. I love how — despite being quite obviously a game that happens in 2D — the environments have been created in a way where you can see just how wrecked these homes and communities are. This War of Mine doesn’t look like the kind of game where amassing a big collection of guns or headshots will matter very much at all. We’ll get he chance to find out soon.

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A gold Moto 360 is coming soon, according to Amazon

Motorola hasn't announced the champagne gold Moto 360 seen above yet, but Amazon accidentally revealed it to the world early this morning. The listing has since been pulled, but remains visible through cached pages. So it's clear that Moto — now under Lenovo's ownership — will soon offer a gold Moto 360 with a matching steel band. It'll cost $299, which puts it right in line with other metal-band versions of the leading Android Wear smartwatch. And if the regular 23mm strap is too big for your liking, there will apparently be a smaller, 18mm option as well. The watch itself remains as big as ever, so this might not be the answer some were looking for to make the hulking 360 more manageable.

There's also another leather strap color on the way: Cognac. Paired with the silver 360, this might be the best looking configuration of Motorola's watch we've seen yet. It'll cost the same $249 as Moto's other leather variants. Sadly the listing for this new color vanished just like the gold hardware, so clearly Amazon spilled the details before Motorola was ready. Hopefully it won't be long before both options are available for purchase; recent software updates have seemingly cured the Moto 360's early battery ailments and eliminated some annoying lag. If you're a fan of Google's wrist-worn OS, it's not a bad time to be buying.

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Metallica will play for a week on Craig Ferguson's 'Late Late Show'

Craig Ferguson, host of the Late Late Show, announced he was leaving his gig for new horizons earlier this year. He'll be getting a slightly unexpected — but amazing — musical send-off: Metallica says they'll play a song on the show every night for a week to commemorate Ferguson's time as host, Rolling Stone reports.

The band will sit down for an interview with Ferguson on November 17th, a Monday, and play through that Friday. (Ferguson will leave at an unannounced date in December.) Metallica does have something to promote — the 10th-anniversary re-release of the band's classic Some Kind of Monster documentary will be released on November 24th — but drummer Lars Ulrich told Rolling Stone, "Nothing to sell, nothing to promote (except a reissue DVD)...purely hanging at Craig's personal request. Bring it!"

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NASA's High Altitude Glider Can Fire Rockets Into Space From The Air

It still costs an arm and a leg (and sometimes an entire Antares rocket) to lift crews and cargo into space. So until we get around to building that space elevator we’ve always wanted, NASA will just have to use this drone-towed, pilot-less, rocket-launching glider.

It’s called the Towed Glider Air-Launch System (TGALS) and it’s designed to launch orbital rockets from high altitude at a fraction of the cost of current methods. So instead of trying to dead lift loads straight up through the atmosphere (and directly against the pull of gravity) atop an SLS rocket, this method gives the launch a running — or rather, flying — start.

The twin-fuselage glider is towed behind the the Dryden Remotely Operated Integrated Drone (DROID) to an altitude of 12km. At that height, the tow line is disconnected and the glider is set loose with a rocket-propelled payload strapped to its belly. As soon as the glider’s flight has stabilised, the rocket is launched to climb into space and unleash its orbital cargo while the glider gently floats back to Earth.

The DROID UAS next to an F-16 escort plane

NASA successfully tested its 1/3-scale prototype (which still measured 8m wingtip to wingtip) earlier this week at Edwards AFB in California as part of the Armstrong Flight Research Center’s Space Technology Mission Directorate’s Game Changing Development program. This test did not include a rocket launch, but rather it was a dry run to ensure that the glider’s mix of OTS and custom built components could hold together during its powered flight and landing. Turns out it totally did; bring on the rockets.

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The Four-Eyed Night Vision Goggles That Helped Take Down Bin Laden

When Seal Team Six kicked in the front door of Al Qaeda’s top brass back in 2011, you can be sure they didn’t spend any time looking for a light switch. Not when they had these cutting-edge, panoramic night vision goggles in front of their faces.

Don’t confuse these with the helmet-mounted FLIR systems also widely used by Special Operations forces. Night vision relies on image intensification, which gathers incoming low-level light, converts those photons into an electrical signal, amplifies the signal, and then displays the boosted light-level image on a green phosphor screen. Green is the colour of choice because the human eye is uncannily adept at differentiating between shades of green compared to other hues.

FLIR, on the other hand, doesn’t boost anything — it generates a false-colour display of the observed infrared radiation (aka heat) signature from whatever you’re looking at. When combined, the two technologies prove a potent pair — the night vision allows for long range spotting under normal conditions while the IR augments that capability when ambient light levels are low or the target is obscured by fog, dust, buildings, and whathaveyou.

But even among advanced NV/IR systems, the $US65,000 Ground Panoramic Night Vision Goggle (GPNVG, aka the GPNVG — 18 referring to its 18mm imaging tubes) from L-3 Warrior Systems stands out — largely because of the extra monocular lenses poking out from either side of the unit. They may look rather silly but these extra lenses afford a much wider field of view than that of conventional goggles which gives our warfighters a distinct advantage.

Per L-3:

The GPNVG is a helmet-mounted night vision device with a wide 97-degree horizontal field of view that allows for observation and/or target identification under adverse conditions and is ruggedised for ground applications. Individual monoculars can be detached from the system and powered with included power adaptor to provide a low profile handheld night vision monocular.

The two central intensifier tubes operate just like regular night vision goggles, providing the conventionally overlapping, binocular-like image. The two added tubes on either side provide a similarly offset views from the outer edges of the central image. Essentially, it’s like looking through two pair of binoculars set side by side for an unprecedented total field of vision of 97 degrees. This means our special forces will be able to clear corners faster and more securely with just a glance rather than swivelling their entire head like an owl. What’s more, the additional tubes can also be popped off the frame and used as standalone monocles.

The GPNVG-18 weighs 27 ounces and is powered for as much as 30 hours of continual use by a quartet of CR123As. You can actually pick up a pair for yourself on either Amazon or eBay, if you’ve got an extra $US35,000 burning a hole in your pocket.

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Spectacular Sequences Of Rafale And Mirage Jets In Slow Motion

http://youtu.be/IbTy3M1Yo_o

Their armed forces may have been failing ridiculously since Napoleon’s Russian campaign, but one thing the French military can really nail is their films. This video of the aircraft on the carrier Charles de Gaulle is an excellent example of this. Beautiful.

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Video: F-35 Lands On An Aircraft Carrier For The First Time Ever

The US Navy variant of the F -35 Lightning II has landed aboard an aircraft carrier for the first time ever. This arrested landing by Navy test pilot Cmdr. Tony Wilson on the USS Nimitz marks a new two-week period of testing at sea.

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Of Course This Six-Figure Watch Was Inspired By A Space Captain Cartoon

You can say what you will about the subdued stylings of the Apple Watch, but deep down we’re probably all a little glad it perfectly married form and function — a balance that not all watch makers strive for. MB&F has just revealed its latest creation, the HM6 Space Pirate that more than lives up to its moniker, at least when it comes to styling.

Inspired by an actual animated series called Captain Future, the HM6 borrows design elements from the previous pieces in the company’s HM line, but still manages to achieve an overall look that sets it apart from almost anything that has come before it.

Five separate domes are used to display the actual time (a function that almost seems like an afterthought), a flying tourbillon that can be protected from UV light with a retractable shield, and a pair of vaned turbines that actually spin to help absorb energy and reduce wear and tear on the Space Pirate’s self-winding mechanisms. The watch’s case is also made from two chunks of milled titanium that require about 100 hours of polishing and brushing to achieve the HM6′s desired finish.

Does the design and functionality of the HM6 Space Pirate justify its $US230,000 price tag? That’s a question certainly left to horologists and watch collectors, because by the time the rest of us scrape together that much cash, the limited edition run of just 50 specimens will no doubt be completely sold out.

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'Chappie': A Reject Robot Learns To Be Cool In Neill Blomkamp's New Movie Trailer

This is the trailer for Chappie, from writer/director Neill Blomkamp (Elysium, District 9) about a childlike robot who’s kidnapped by criminals, must learn how to be cool, and at some point figure out the difference between right and wrong. Just like high school!

The movie is out March 6, and it stars Hugh Jackman, Dev Patel, and (and!) Ninja and Yo-Landi Vi$$USer of South African electro-rap duo Die Antwoord. Hell yeah. We don’t know much about it, other than the themes of machines grappling with human feelings. But we do know the presence of Die Antwoord means there has to be at least an overtone of weird.

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Real Life Scientist Suing Over The Microwave Scene In American Hustle

Remember that scene in American Hustle when Jennifer Lawrence’s character sticks some metal in the microwave? It starts a fire and Lawrence’s character dismisses the entire technology, claiming that it zaps the nutrition out of food. She even has an article to back up her claim. Now the real life scientist who was quoted for that real life article is suing for $US1 million, claiming libel and defamation.

“I read that it takes all of the nutrition out of our food,” Lawrence’s character tells Christian Bale’s character in the movie that’s set in the late 1970s. Microwaves were first becoming mainstream in the 1970s and people were concerned about all kinds of health effects from this new-ish household technology. Bale’s character calls the claims bullshit and Lawrence replies, “It’s not bullshit, I read it in an article, look,” she says handing him a magazine. “By Paul Brodeur,” she says.

What’s the magazine? It’s never named in the movie, but in real life Brodeur wrote a piece for The New Yorker and was interviewed for People magazine. Brodeur points to the People article where he doesn’t claim that it zapped the nutrition from food. Rather, his contention in the interview (which you can read for yourself) was that microwave technology in the U.S. was still too unproven and leaky and that the risk of radiation exposure was high.

From the January 30, 1978 issue of People magazine:

In 1975 over 800,000 microwave ovens were sold in this country, more than the sales of gas ranges for the first time. Nobody knows for sure what constitutes a safe level of exposure to microwave radiation. Some studies indicate that effects of microwave radiation are cumulative. If so, the risk from repeated exposure for young children is high.

Brodeur was interviewed by People in 1978 because he had a new book out, called The Zapping of America, which elaborated on some of his fears about bringing microwaves into the American home. But the “zapping nutrition” angle wasn’t his concern. In fact, household microwaves were really a side issue to much larger accusations of government conspiracy surrounding military applications of microwave technology.

From the February 2, 1978 review of The Zapping of America in the Harvard Crimson:

In addition to the mind-control applications, microwaves are being harnessed for what Brodeur dubs “total electronic warfare.” Both the United States and the USSR are rapidly learning how to use microwaves to inflict severe burns on humans, as well as refining their surveillance, radar and rocket-jamming techniques. The microwave race spirals endlessly, leaking more radiation into the environment and into our bodies.

The most horrifying part of the story is that, despite Brodeur’s seemingly comprehensive research and documentation, he himself claims to know only the “tip of the iceberg.”

As Entertainment Weekly reports, the lawsuit insists “Paul Brodeur has never written an article or ever declared in any way that a microwave oven ‘takes all the nutrition out of our food.’” “By misquoting Mr. Brodeur in this manner, the Defendants have suggested to the audience that Mr. Brodeur made a scientifically unsupportable statement,” the complaint says. “By attributing the untenable statement to Mr. Brodeur, Defendants have damaged his reputation.” If Brodeur wins the libel suit he also wants to get his name taken out of future copies of the movie. From a filmmaking perspective, this wouldn’t actually be that difficult since we see Jennifer Lawrence’s back when she’s delivering the line: “By Paul Brodeur.” It would be easy enough to loop in a different name, but it would no doubt rankle plenty of people. Messing with film history, especially for a movie nominated for Best Picture, really riles up movie nerds.

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Mirror Prank Shocks People With Horrifying Demonic Reflections

October 31 has come and gone and it’s now time to start thinking about turkey and stuffing and shopping, but not before mentioning this wonderful Halloween prank by Pepsi that had moviegoers seeing more than just their faces reflected in these special haunted bathroom mirrors.

Using a hidden camera, sophisticated real-time face tracking software, and augmented reality techniques, the bathroom patrons’ reflections were suddenly enhanced to look like terrifying clowns, werewolves, and even horned versions of themselves.

As kids we probably all heard stories about ghosts appearing in mirrors when saying their name, but seeing it suddenly come true while you’re just trying to wash your hands would be even more terrifying

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Tri-Fold Touchscreen OLED Could Give You Way More Smartphone Real Estate

In addition to satellites and computers smaller than a giant room, Arthur C. Clarke also predicted mobile touchscreen devices that could be crumpled up like a handkerchief and stuffed in a pocket. Thanks to researchers at Japan’s Semiconductor Energy Laboratory company, we’re almost there.

At a recent display-focused trade show in Yokohama City in Japan, the company revealed the new foldable 8.7-inch touchscreen OLED display that features full HD resolution and a pixel density of 254ppi, but more importantly can be folded three times. That puts it somewhere between the iPhone 3GS and iPhone 4, but over time that will certainly be further improved to compete with screen technologies currently in use.

And while the tri-fold display can’t quite be crumpled up and stuffed into a pocket, it does represent a novel way to increase the screen size of a smartphone, without pushing the hardware closer to the size of a tablet. With the screen folded away a smartphone could still be easily stashed in a pocket and used like a compact device. But when you wanted to watch a movie, browse photos, or even use multiple apps side-by-side, you could unfold the display so your pocket-friendly device was as spacious as a tablet. More importantly: we’d never have to hear the term phablet ever again.

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North Korea's Brand New Ballistic Sub Discontinued By Soviets In 1990

Looks like North Korea’s engineers have been hard at work brushing up on their obsolete Soviet-era technology. Because after acquiring 10 discontinued Soviet subs, everyone’s favourite little warmongering-dictatorship-that-could has finally rendered the outdated ballistic vessels seaworthy — and it only took them 21 years.

According to Yonhap, a South Korean news agency, the submarines were actually first built in 1958, when the Soviet Union began developing Golf-class diesel-electric subs under the name Project 629. Overall, each individual sub was made to carry three liquid-propellant ballistic missiles, one nuclear warhead, and six torpedo tubes.

The subs were actually decommissioned in 1990, a year before the Soviet Union first fell; then in 1993, about ten were allegedly sold to North Korea. Of course, even 20 years later, the hermit country still has a bit of a ways to go. According to Yonhap:

In a move to mount a missile tube on the new vessel, the communist country has carried out dozens of tests both on the ground and at sea, another source said. “According to the analysis of satellite imagery revealed by 38 North, a ground test facility for the SLBM launch has been up and running at the Sinpo shipyard,” he said, adding a dozen more tests would be required to perfect the technology.

“It would take one or two years before the North completes the test for the vertical launch of missiles from the sea,” said a military source in Seoul, expressing security concerns as Pyongyang has also been working on miniaturizing nuclear warheads for its missiles.

Not to mention the fact that equipping a submarine with ballistic missiles would require Kim Jong-Un to trust the vessel’s captain to make deployment calls, requiring the sort of autonomy practically unheard in North Korean affairs.

So while the addition of submarine-launched ballistics missile would certainly give North Korea some disconcerting leverage in nuclear talks, the 50-some-odd-year-old tech still isn’t quite there yet.

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How A Secret Squad Saved London From Flooding In The WWII Blitz

When bombs rained down on London during the Blitz, they fell on houses, on churches, and, less famously, on embankments along the River Thames. The damaged embankments could have sent devastating floods through London, but they didn’t — thanks to a group of engineers who worked secretly and at night.

Cities have a fraught relationship with their rivers. The Thames water that made London’s very existence possible could also taketh away, occasionally flooding whole neighborhoods and drowning unfortunate souls. London had built up walls and embankments over the years to keep water in its place. By World War II, 2o square miles of the city laid below the Thames’s highest recorded tides and 10 square miles below the river’s usual spring tides. A breech in a river wall could have devastated those areas.

Londoners had no idea how often and how close the city came to flooding. Records show that the Thames wall was hit by bombs 121 times during the war. Each time, they were repaired by a team from the Thames Flood Prevention Emergency Repairs, which worked under the cover of darkness to keep the London’s vulnerability secret from its residents and its enemies.

“It could have brought London to its knees very, very easily,” said Gustav Milne, director of the Thames Discovery Programme, told the Associated Press. “Not just people drowning — we would have lost buildings, it would have flooded the sewers and brought up all the sewage, it would have contaminated the water supplies, cut off gas and electricity. There would have been widespread devastation and huge loss of life.”

The man behind all this was the engineer Thomas Pierson Frank, who was recently commemorated with a new plaque in Victoria Tower Gardens. His story, secret at first and then simply forgotten, had been unearthed by archeologists with the Thames Discovery Programme.

Gustav Milne, director of the Thames Discovery Programme, points to a patch of concrete where the embankment river wall was repaired.

Under Frank’s direction, the Thames Flood Prevention Emergency Repairs was sent out, often when bombs were still falling, to repair broken river walls. They worked quickly and in the dark, piling up sand bags to temporarily slow the flow of water until the walls could be permanently repaired with concrete. Today, you can still see a patch of concrete in a wall otherwise made of granite near the Houses of Parliament in London.

Repairing river walls hardly sounds like the most heroic deed to come out of World War II, but war, ultimately, is all about logistics. Had London been less prepared, it would have sustained even more damage. Thames Flood Prevention Emergency Repairs, a little known piece of the government bureaucracy, saved London from the devastation of floods.

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Our First Look At The Radical Design Of George Lucas' Art Museum

A few months ago, noted traditionalist George Lucas surprised everyone by announcing he had chosen the avant-garde architect Ma Yansong to design his Museum of Narrative Art. Today in Chicago, we got a first look at what Lucas and Ma have in mind — and it could transform Chicago’s lakeshore.

When George Lucas announced he’d be building his museum in Chicago, fans were shocked — why not San Francisco, where Lucas has built his earthly empire? It’s unclear exactly what went wrong with San Francisco’s bid to host the museum, but it likely had something to do with its rejection of Lucas’ first proposed site. Chicago, on the other hand, offered up what is possibly the city’s most prime cut of real estate on a silver platter: 17 acres of lakefront next to Soldier Field, within walking distance of some of the city’s biggest tourist attractions. Bingo.

San Francisco, meanwhile, developed a serious case of sour grapes, with the Business Times‘ Chris Rauber calling Chicago mayor Rahm Emanuel “a foul-mouthed Darth Vader, calling in favours and threatening harm to those who stand in his path.”

Whatever your opinion of Chicago, Darth Vader — and Rahm — could get **** done. And today, only a few months after Lucas chose Chicago, the project team introduced the first renderings of the building. In a suite at the Waldorf Astoria in Chicago, the Beijing-based architect Ma Yansong walked me through his vision for the building, which will stretch over a long piece of lakefront between the city and Lake Michigan.

The Lucas Museum of Narrative Art looks less like an art museum and more like a college campus from some imagined future: A long, stately procession of small parklets and public spaces kept in order by an organic knot of sidewalks paved in light grey stone, which rises up to become the facade of the building itself, a sinuous white mass of conical forms that house the museum, along with four theatres, an education center, archival space, and more, totaling about 400,000 square feet.

It’s less of a building than a sponge, a sticky substance that curves through the lakefront and carves out buildings, parks, and sidewalks where it wants them. The idea, Ma told me today, was to turn an area that feels like a warren of parking and backstreets into useable public space. “This should be a successful public park,” he said. “Right now, it’s parking.” It rises up to cover a parking lot and through-street, then dips down to create an outdoor amphitheater for screenings.

It rises back up to form the mass of the museum itself, a conical space with a circular plan that looks a lot like Frank Lloyd Wright’s iconic Guggenheim Museum. Visitors will enter the museum and see a huge, naturally-lit white cone, the walk upwards through gallery spaces until they arrive at a metallic 360-degree observation deck and restaurant, which will be free to the public to visit — a “new way to view the city,” says the architect.

If it looks like a super-sized version of a creature you might find swilling a drink at the Mos Eisley Cantina, it’s entirely coincidental. The museum will include some Star Wars art, but most of its collection will be unrelated to Lucas’ most famous films, including everything from Norman Rockwell paintings to MAD Magazine cover art. But as Ma put it today, the design does have something in common with classic films like Star Wars. “Historically, sci-fi movies have played an important role in inspiring young people,” he said. “That’s the goal of this museum, as well.”

How Chicagoans will react to this alien of a building remains to be seen, but it’s worth pointing out the city’s progressive take on contemporary architecture throughout history, from the Aqua Tower to the Marina Towers. Not to mention Mies van der Rohe, who you might describe as the patron saint of Chicago architecture (alongside Burnham and Root, of course), and who impressed a deeply rational logic on the downtown. But as Ma — who worked as an intern architect in Chicago before founding his own firm — pointed out today, “even Mies was alien to Chicago” at one point. In the end, his Bauhaus-era ideas came to define the city.

Ma and his collaborators — still have a long ways to go before these early ideas are made real. Now the team will go into schematic design and, next spring, present a final proposal to the city. In the meantime, the museum still needs to pick an Executive Director and get its ducks in a row, not to mention convince preservationists and critics who argue that the project is “ill-conceived” and possibly illegal. But considering that Lucas chose a place and an architect for his museum within the span of just a few months, we might be hearing more very soon.

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The British Museum Will Now Let You 3D Print Copies Of Its Artifacts

Following in the footsteps of New York’s Metropolitan Museum, London’s British Museum is about to revolutionise the gift shop experience by allowing visitors to download and 3D print replicas of its priceless antiques and artifacts.

Given the size of the museum’s collection it will hopefully be posting hundreds of artifacts for visitors to download and 3D print. But for now there are just 14 3D models available on Sketchfab, including everything from a bust of Amenemhat III, an iconic Hoa Hakananai’a statue from Easter Island, and even an Egyptian granite sarcophagus — although you’ll have to settle for a plastic version if you’re making a copy at home with your 3D printer.

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Tom Cruise Outside Of A Plane At 5,000ft Must Be His Craziest Stunt Yet

We have seen Tom Cruise doing some crazy stunts in the past, but this must be the craziest yet. The 52-year-old actor — who is shooting Mission Impossible — held to the door of an Airbus A400M Atlas military transport as it took off and flew at 5,000 feet above the British countryside.

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Louisiana Loses A Football Field Of Land Every Hour To The Ocean

If you compare a map of the Louisiana coastline in the 1920s to today, the difference is striking. About 4876 square kilometres of land has just disappeared — swallowed into the Gulf of Mexico. And each year Louisiana loses more. In fact, roughly a football field’s worth of land is lost every hour.

From ProPublica:

In 50 years, most of southeastern Louisiana not protected by levees will be part of the Gulf of Mexico. The state is losing a football field of land every 48 minutes — 16 square miles a year — due to climate change, drilling and dredging for oil and gas, and levees on the Mississippi River.

This, of course, will continue to have an enormous impact on the regional economy, as the Gulf Coast’s water levels are anticipated to rise 4.3 feet by the year 2100. As the old saying goes, they’re quite literally not making land anymore.

To read more about the history and future of Louisiana, and the devastating effects of climate change on the region, be sure to check out The Lens‘ and ProPublica‘s analysis.

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U.N. Panel Reaffirms That Climate Change Is "Irreversible"

The U.N. panel charged with a five-year mission to assess global climate change and provide a necessary course of action in order to stem its negative effects finally released a Synthesis Report detailing their findings in stark black-and-white. The news was all pretty doom and gloom.

“Human influence on the climate system is clear,” says the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), “recent climate changes have had widespread impacts on human and natural systems.” By 2100, IPCC has “high confidence” that high temperature and humidity will completely compromise farming and even the ability to work outdoors in certain areas. Ocean acidification will continue to wreck havoc on marine life, and even if we abandoned fossil fuels tomorrow, these warming effects would still affect the planet for centuries.

The Synthesis Report is the final piece of IPCC’s fifth assessment of climate change and combines all the knowledge gathered from the group’s recent studies looking at the cause, impact, and possible solutions to our slowly warming world. The document itself serves as a 116-page compendium of how energy consumption is altering the planet.

In many ways, this five-year mission has come to many of the same conclusions discussed in the fourth assessment in 2007, only this time the authors are much more forthright about the necessity of a worldwide solution. Despite this very intense and depressing report, The Guardian notes that reports like these often “err on the side of understatement,” meaning what’s actually happening is probably even more alarming that what’s being reported.

Of course, fossil fuels are the dastardly villain in this dystopian climate change tale, contributing to 78 per cent of total greenhouse gasses from 1970 to 2010. The IPCC panel sets a deadline that fossil fuel should be “phased out by 2100,” or at the very least, no systems should be in place that don’t use carbon capture and storage, a method of snatching waste carbon and depositing it underground.

The 40-page condensed version, a no-bullshit breakdown of the seriousness of these issues, was created for policymakers six weeks before a climate meeting in Peru that will set the stage for the 2015 UN Climate Change Conference in Paris. That meeting, almost a year away, has the explicit goal to create legal and universal agreement on what needs to be done to help curb damage caused by our warming world.

This specific focus on the political challenges in the IPCC report signifies that the climate change debate has shifted stages. This is no longer a scientific question. The Synthesis Report lays out clearly what is happening and what needs to happen. Scientists now pass the baton to politicians to figure out how we’ll be able to reach these alternative energy goals.

You can read the full report, and all its dismaying details, on IPCC’s website.