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

[MIKA27]

ST. BERNARDUS CHRISTMAS ALE

Just about every brewery releases something to coincide with the holiday season, but none of them have the history, or the taste that you get from the Christmas Ale from St. Bernardus.

It's a Belgian Abbey ale brewed in the Quadrupel style at 10% ABV — bringing a warming meld of flavors that should ward off the deep chill of winter. It's also ideal to pair with traditional holiday dinners, as the Belgian yeast can balance out a starchy meal as well as any beer available. Look past the trends and consider a classic this holiday season.

[MIKA27]

Climate Change Could Make It Harder For Aeroplanes To Get Liftoff

Every once in a while, unlucky passengers get bumped because an overbooked aeroplane is too heavy. It’s maddening, and it makes you question the airline’s ability to do arithmetic. But there is a method to weight restrictions, and Earth’s rising temperatures could make it increasingly hard for planes to take off without shedding extra weight.

As air gets hotter, it gets less dense, and this can spell trouble for aircraft. Thin air can’t generate enough lift and thrust to get a plane safely airborne within the fixed length of a runway. If it’s too hot, aeroplanes will have to shed pounds, in the form of passengers and cargo, according to a study from Columbia University.

“This happens now,” says study author Ethan Coffel, “Temperature is one of the primary factors that goes into calculations for every flight.”

Coffel and his co-author Radley Horton looked at how rising temperatures would affect a common commercial aircraft, the Boeing 737-800, at four airports especially prone to weight restrictions during heat waves: Phoenix (for its high summer temperatures), Denver (for its high elevation), and LaGuardia and DC’s Reagan (for their relatively short runways).

If maximum temperatures rise by the projected 3C to 4C 2050-2070, the number of days when weight restrictions apply would jump from 50 to 200 per cent.

These projections are for several decades from now, but it does mean airlines will have to start thinking about adapting to climate change. Sure, we’ll have new planes by then, but technology may not solve everything.

“Aeroplane wings are designed to be effective in cruise where it spends most of its time,” says Coffel. That means the shape of a wing can only be changed so much to optimise it for takeoff.

Airports might have to put in longer runways, or flights may have to be shifted to cooler parts of the day. The study, which was published in the journal Weather Climate Society and presented at the American Geophysical Union meeting this week, forces us to reckon with yet another niggling consequence of climate change.

[MIKA27]

Simulations back up theory that Universe is a hologram

A ten-dimensional theory of gravity makes the same predictions as standard quantum physics in fewer dimensions.

A team of physicists has provided some of the clearest evidence yet that our Universe could be just one big projection.

In 1997, theoretical physicist Juan Maldacena proposed1 that an audacious model of the Universe in which gravity arises from infinitesimally thin, vibrating strings could be reinterpreted in terms of well-established physics. The mathematically intricate world of strings, which exist in nine dimensions of space plus one of time, would be merely a hologram: the real action would play out in a simpler, flatter cosmos where there is no gravity.

Maldacena's idea thrilled physicists because it offered a way to put the popular but still unproven theory of strings on solid footing — and because it solved apparent inconsistencies between quantum physics and Einstein's theory of gravity. It provided physicists with a mathematical Rosetta stone, a 'duality', that allowed them to translate back and forth between the two languages, and solve problems in one model that seemed intractable in the other and vice versa (see 'Collaborative physics: String theory finds a bench mate'). But although the validity of Maldacena's ideas has pretty much been taken for granted ever since, a rigorous proof has been elusive.

In two papers posted on the arXiv repository, Yoshifumi Hyakutake of Ibaraki University in Japan and his colleagues now provide, if not an actual proof, at least compelling evidence that Maldacena’s conjecture is true.

In one paper2, Hyakutake computes the internal energy of a black hole, the position of its event horizon (the boundary between the black hole and the rest of the Universe), its entropy and other properties based on the predictions of string theory as well as the effects of so-called virtual particles that continuously pop into and out of existence (see 'Astrophysics: Fire in the Hole!'). In the other3, he and his collaborators calculate the internal energy of the corresponding lower-dimensional cosmos with no gravity. The two computer calculations match.

“It seems to be a correct computation,” says Maldacena, who is now at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey and who did not contribute to the team's work.

Regime change

The findings “are an interesting way to test many ideas in quantum gravity and string theory”, Maldacena adds. The two papers, he notes, are the culmination of a series of articles contributed by the Japanese team over the past few years. “The whole sequence of papers is very nice because it tests the dual [nature of the universes] in regimes where there are no analytic tests.”

“They have numerically confirmed, perhaps for the first time, something we were fairly sure had to be true, but was still a conjecture — namely that the thermodynamics of certain black holes can be reproduced from a lower-dimensional universe,” says Leonard Susskind, a theoretical physicist at Stanford University in California who was among the first theoreticians to explore the idea of holographic universes.

Neither of the model universes explored by the Japanese team resembles our own, Maldacena notes. The cosmos with a black hole has ten dimensions, with eight of them forming an eight-dimensional sphere. The lower-dimensional, gravity-free one has but a single dimension, and its menagerie of quantum particles resembles a group of idealized springs, or harmonic oscillators, attached to one another.

Nevertheless, says Maldacena, the numerical proof that these two seemingly disparate worlds are actually identical gives hope that the gravitational properties of our Universe can one day be explained by a simpler cosmos purely in terms of quantum theory.

[MIKA27]

Amazing Rock Unearthed In Russia Contains 1000’s Of Diamonds

The sparkly mass was pulled from Russia’s huge Udachnaya diamond mine and donated to science. It was a lucky break for researchers, because the diamond-rich rock is a rare find in many ways, scientists reported Monday Dec. 15th at the American Geophysical Union’s annual meeting.

The concentration of all the diamonds in the rock is millions of times greater than that in typical diamond ore, which averages 1 to 6 carats per ton, Taylor said. A carat is a unit of weight, not size, and is roughly equal to one-fifth of a gram, or 0.007 ozs.

The unbelievable amount of diamonds, and the rock’s unusual Christmas coloring, will provide important clues to Earth’s geologic history as well as the origin of these prized gemstones, Taylor said. “The associations of minerals will tell us something about the genesis of this rock, which is a strange one indeed,” he said.

Although diamonds have been desired for centuries, and are now understood well enough to be recreated in a lab, their natural origins are still a mystery.

30.000 Diamonds Found in Strange Rock

Scientists think diamonds are born deep below the Earth’s surface, in a layer between the crust and core called the mantle. Explosive volcanic eruptions then carry hunks of diamond-rich mantle to the surface.

Most mantle rocks disintegrate during the trip, leaving only loose crystals at the surface. The Udachnaya rock is one of the rare nuggets that survived the rocketing ride.

Taylor works with researchers at the Russian Academy of Sciences to study Udachnaya diamonds. The scientists first probed the entire rock with an industrial X-ray tomography scanner, which is similar to a medical CT scanner but capable of higher X-ray intensities. Different minerals glow in different colors in the X-ray images, with diamonds appearing black.

The thousands upon thousands of diamonds in the rock cluster together in a tight band. The clear crystals are just 0.04 inches (1 millimeter) tall and are octahedral, meaning they are shaped like two pyramids that are glued together at the base. The rest of the rock is speckled with larger crystals of red garnet, and green olivine and pyroxene. Minerals called sulfides round out the mix. A 3D model built from the X-rays revealed the diamonds formed after the garnet, olivine and pyroxene minerals.

Altogether, the findings suggest the diamonds crystallized from fluids that escaped from subducted oceanic crust, likely composed of a dense rock called peridotite, Taylor reported Monday. Subduction is when one of Earth’s tectonic plates crumples under another plate. The results will be published in a special issue of Russian Geology and Geophysics next month (January 2015), Taylor said.

The unusual chemistry would represent a rare case among diamonds, said Sami Mikhail, a researcher at the Carnegie Institution for Science in Washington, D.C., who was not involved in the study. However, Mikhail offered another explanation for the unusual chemistry. “[The source] could be just a really, really old formation that’s been down in the mantle for a long time,” he said.

[MIKA27]

Massive Da Vinci fire in downtown L.A. was arson, investigators say

Federal investigators have concluded the fire last week that consumed a downtown Los Angeles apartment complex under construction was deliberately set, according to a source close to the investigation.

Investigators have been digging through the rubble left by last week's blaze, sometimes wading in knee-deep rainwater during the storms that swept through the area, collecting samples from suspected points of origin. A national response team with the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives was called to assist in investigating the scene because of the magnitude of the fire.

The blaze, which broke out in the middle of the night, all but obliterated a seven-story building of the Da Vinci apartment complex and caused extensive damage to the adjacent 110 Freeway and city buildings. It took 250 firefighters an hour and half to put out the flames that rose to heights taller than many downtown buildings. The total damage was estimated to be in the tens of millions of dollars.

Fire officials said previously that they suspected arson because of how quickly the building appeared to be engulfed. Even though a fire station was a few hundred yards away, two-thirds of the building was already burning by the time firefighters received the initial report at 1:09 a.m. and rushed over, Los Angeles City Fire Chief Ralph Terrazas told the LA TIMES.

The ATF national response team, at the end of its investigation, reaches one of three conclusions – incendiary, accidental, or undetermined. Given Thursday’s conclusion that the fire was determined to be "incendiary," or deliberately set, local authorities will probably launch an arson investigation to identify those responsible for the blaze.

Earlier this week, authorities announced that they were looking for two potential witnesses who were present at or near the scene of the fire. One man is seen in a surveillance video calmly walking down the street before the start of the fire. The second was captured on freelance news footage after the fire is in full force appearing to attempt to get through a construction fence into the burning building. As of Thursday, investigators had yet to identify the men.

Authorities said they were not suspects or persons of interest, but "purely someone we are seeking to interview as an investigative lead."

[MIKA27]

Mike Myers Returns To SNL As Dr Evil To Make Fun Of North Korea

http://youtu.be/gPAPNHbzCE4

Source: Go F**k yourself Smallclub

The Sony hack is now more confusing that ever. The FBI says that North Korea is involved, yet the denies involvement, suggesting a joint investigation into the matter. The whole situation has devolved into a game of “he said/she said,” and there’s only one person who can help set it all straight — Dr Evil, of course.

For the SNL cold open this weekend, Mike Myers reprised Dr Evil from the Austin Powers trilogy to show North Korea and Sony what true evil is all about. Myers describes NK’s attack on Sony (and a James Franco comedy nonetheless) as similar to two bald men fighting over a comb — who cares? He also takes a few predictable jabs at the Guardians of Peace (GOP) name and even makes fun of himself by mentioning the Love Guru ( which admittedly, was a pretty terrible movie).

Dr Evil’s take on the Sony hack isn’t the most illuminating or witty piece of comedy we’ve seen on the subject, but it was great to see Myers return to SNL and reprise a much-loved role. These Sony hacks have mostly been a steaming pile of suck, but at least we got to see Dr Evil again.

[MIKA27]

How The Soviet Union Used Nuclear Explosions To Create Giant Canals

I know the Soviets made tons of crazy stuff back in the 20th century, but this is beyond insane: They blasted an entire forest and the adjacent land with the help of nuclear explosions to carve a canal. Atomic terraforming makes so much sense, doesn’t it?

The United States also conducted Plowshare experiments in the 1960s and 1970s. Plowshare was the technical name of the use nuclear explosives for peaceful construction purposes. You know, like bloody nuclear fracking. Yes, sometimes scientists and engineers can be real idiots too, especially when paid by politicians and corporations.

[Maplepie]

Atomic terraforming makes so much sense, doesn’t it?.

I don't see why not.

Atomic terraforming would've made the Panama Canal much easier .

Controlled hydrogen bomb directed detonation might very much be a possibility.

I think I've done that on Minecraft . And hell. That worked!

Sent from my Q10 using Tapatalk

[NJP]

I think the highest honour "What we're you thinking" of nuclear testing should go to the high altitude program both the U.S. and Soviets ran.

[MIKA27]

I think I've done that on Minecraft . And hell. That worked!

Sent from my Q10 using Tapatalk

[MIKA27]

The Strange Medieval Origins Of Modern Logos

When we think of early logos, we think of 19th and 20th century classics like Levi’s or Coke. But the origins of logos and trademarks go back way further than that — back thousands of years, when merchants and craftspeople used “merchant’s marks” to designate the origins of goods and their authors.

But I was curious about how modern logos and trademarks emerged. It turns out that even though we think of logos and branding as global, they’re an essentially urban concept. They emerged to protect both businesses from the unfair competition across the street — as well as customers from being duped.

Those Ray-Bon sunglasses you bought from a street vendor in SoHo? That’s a trick that dates back hundreds of years.

First Came the Bakers

London in the 13th century was a booming city — it had begun installing pipes to deliver clean water, for example, and was enacting measures to keep the city relatively clean and orderly for its estimated 25,000 inhabitants. As more and more people congregated in European cities, more and more businesses sprang up — and competition flourished between bakers, brewers, artisans, and other craftspeople.

And with more businesses came more competition — and more swindlers. In roughly 1266, Henry III created what’s often called the first law regulating food in England: A set of rules called the Assize of Bread and Ale. The statute was designed to protect consumers from all sorts of nonsense by regulating the size and weight of bread and the purity of flour, as well as the prices tied to those items. This is supposedly how the “baker’s dozen” evolved: Bakers would plan an extra 13th loaf for every dozen, just in case one was underweight or not up to the Assize’s snuff.

It wasn’t just about protecting the public, though. The law was also about protecting greedy business owners from themselves, as a fascinating Harvard Law School trove explains:

Unscrupulous bakers could have increased the price of bread out of proportion to rising price of grain, and thousands would have starved, or perhaps taken vengeance on the bakers. Enforced by local bailiffs, these highly detailed regulations attempted to keep the populace fed while protecting bakers from a potentially angry mob.

Which brings us back to logos. In order for regulators to correctly identify the origins of a loaf of bread, they needed a simple way to track the bread back to the source. So bakers were required to develop a “baker’s mark” to imprint all their products with a distinctive mark. This Bakers Marking Law is often credited as the first trademark law, and though few of the originals seem to survive, we can get a sense from these early 1600s marks from Germany — posted online by Elinor Strangewayes, who awesomelyexperimented with recreating the marks:

Strangewayes cites this image from The Baker’s Book: A practical hand book of the baking industry in all countries, from 1901.

These marks could be used to track down a baker that had shortchanged a customer or added sawdust to their flour. But they also let bakeries market themselves, which means these marks were an early form of branding.

Then Came the Brewers, and Everyone Else

If the Assize of 1266 is any indication, both bread and ale were at the forefront of life in European cities. And ale was just as tightly regulated as bread — if not more so. In Ale, Beer, and Brewsters in England: Women’s Work in a Changing World, Judith Bennett describes how everything from quality, measurement, and price was monitored locally, and any brewer (often female) who failed to follow the rules was subject to “fines, forfeitures and even corporeal punishment.”

The strict rules — and threat of bodily harm — for brewers might help to explain why breweries were some of the first businesses to maintain logos and trademarks of their own. Another interesting guess is that as adding hops to beer became more common, the distances a beer could travel before spoiling grew longer — and brewer’s marks became necessary to connect a keg with its origin brewery.

Munich’s Lowenbrau, for example — now owned by Anheuser-Busch — started brewing beer around 1383. The company claims that its roaring lion logo emerged shortly after, which would make it one of the oldest continuously-used logos in the world. Around the same time in 1366, according to The Economics of Beer, tax records show the existence of a brewery called Den Hoorn, in Leuven, Brussels — it would eventually become Stella Artois, which even today uses the horn-bedecked logo of its 14th century processor:

Both Stella and Lowenbrau can trace their logos back almost 700 years, but even modern trademark law is bound up with beer. In 1875, when the UK began accepting trademarks into its patent office, the very first application came from a brewery, Bass Ale, which ended up being granted its trademark on January 1, 1876, the first day of the act. Bass still holds England’s Trademark UK00000000001.

After all, beer is arguably as socially and culturally important to cities as bread. So maybe it’s not surprising that breweries hold many of the oldest trademarks on the books. The fact that breweries needed to protect the use of their names and logos meant that clients kept coming back, and that breweries were anchors of neighborhoods and whole cities for decade (or centuries).

As people flocked to Europe’s emerging cities in the 16th and 17th centuries, there were even more businesses, which meant even more customers and even more competition. Modern trademark law began to fill itself in between the cracks of the booming trade towns, as clothiers sued other clothiers for fraudulently using their marks, for example. So of course, there’s plenty more to say about how modern logos and trademarks evolved — but it’s fascinating to know that they emerged around the essentials of urban life: bread and beer.

[MIKA27]

US Air Force's Stealth Cruise Missile Just Got Even More Stealthy

In order to keep its pilots out of enemy cross-hairs but still be able to deliver devastating strikes against hardened bunkers, the USAF has spent the better part of two decades developing a family of long-range, semi-autonomous cruise missiles called the Joint Air-to-Surface Standoff Missile. And the latest JASSM progeny now can hit targets more than twice as far as its predecessors.

These stealth subsonic cruise missiles measure 4m long with a Teledyne turbojet engine, and are shaped to minimise their radar cross sections. Each is packed with a 450kg conventional warhead and can be carried by a variety of US aircraft including the B-2A Spirit stealth bomber, B-1B Lancer, B-52H Stratofortress, F-15E Strike Eagle and F-16 Falcon. The missile’s onboard GPS provides navigation from launch until its final approach of the target, up to 370km away, whereupon its infrared seeker takes over.

The US Air Force began developing the AGM-158 JASSM line back in 1995, though the program has been beset by a number of near-cancellations since then due to performance and design issues. However, the Air Force has used the lessons learned from these setbacks to steadily improve the JASSM line, culminating in the newest iteration: the JASSM-ER (extended range).

The JASSM-ER can travel 925km to its target — more than 2.5 times farther than the JASSM — thanks to a larger fuel tank and more efficient turbofan engine. Plus, it has been electronically hardened to withstand GPS jamming signals. Other improvements, including a submunition dispenser, had been considered but were ultimately left out of the ER design. Still, the two variants share more than 70 per cent of the same hardware, which helps reduce production costs.

The JASSM-ER officially entered service in April of this year and was approved for full-rate production earlier this month. In all, the USAF reportedly plans to purchase 2400 of the $US700,000 JASSMs and nearly 3000 of the ER variants, each costing around $US1.32 million apiece, throughout the missile line’s production cycle — which is expected to last throughout the 2020s. By then, presumably, the USAF will have developed an even more efficient means of blowing buildings up from the other side of the horizon.

[MIKA27]

Tim Cook 'Deeply Offended' By BBC's Portrayal Of iPhone Factory Working Conditions

The BBC’s Panorama recently aired its report into working conditions on the iPhone factory floor, and things don’t look good — and Apple CEO Tim Cook has allowed Senior Vice President of Operations, Jeff Williams, to internally comment on the matter for him.

First thing’s first — the report clearly shows illegal activity and broken promises in device production, made possible by undercover cameras carried by workers who applied through recruitment agencies. They dealt with 16 hour days, and one was made to work 18 days in a row.

In response, Williams sent an email describing the reaction of both he and Cook:

Like many of you, Tim and I were deeply offended by the suggestion that Apple would break a promise to the workers in our supply chain or mislead our customers in any way.

There’s no denying what was seen on the factory floor, no matter how offended the two gentlemen feel as a result. But the Panorama report also finds its way to Indonesia, and encounters youth labour in dangerous conditions — a subject on which Williams had more concrete things to say.

Tens of thousands of artisanal miners are selling tin through many middlemen to the smelters who supply to component suppliers who sell to the world. The government is not addressing the issue, and there is widespread corruption in the undeveloped supply chain. Our team visited the same parts of Indonesia visited by the BBC, and of course we are appalled by what’s going on there.

Tin is of course a problem not limited to Apple, but the first world’s reliance on it for electronics, along with the conflict minerals we make use of every day. A lot of pressure surrounding these materials is to pull out and not support the human rights abuses interwoven with their use. But Jeff Williams contends that Apple’s involvement will improve conditions for Indonesia:

Apple has two choices: We could make sure all of our suppliers buy tin from smelters outside of Indonesia, which would probably be the easiest thing for us to do and would certainly shield us from criticism. But it would be the lazy and cowardly path, because it would do nothing to improve the situation for Indonesian workers or the environment since Apple consumes a tiny fraction of the tin mined there. We chose the second path, which is to stay engaged and try to drive a collective solution.

We spearheaded the creation of an Indonesian Tin Working Group with other technology companies. Apple is pushing to find and implement a system that holds smelters accountable so we can influence artisanal mining in Indonesia.

One third of the world’s tin supplies used in manufacturing comes from Indonesia. As of 2012, 179 Apple suppliers use it, and Foxconn (the Apple factory previously infamous for workplace conditions) buys 100% of its tin from Indonesia.

Both Pegatron and and Apple have stated they will be committed to taking the necessary actions to look after employees.

[MIKA27]

Remarkable Stories of Humans Who Hibernated

In the winter of 1981, teenager Jean Hilliard was on her way home at around midnight when the family car she was driving ran off the road near Lengby, Minnesota. Unable to free the vehicle, she made the dangerous decision to leave the car on foot, and attempt to walk to the nearby home of her friend, Wally Nelson.

Hilliard trudged along in the snow, her cowboy boots slipping occasionally and slowing her progress. She began to grow tired, and was nearly to the point of collapsing by the time she could see the shape of Wally’s home off in the distance.

Whether or not Hilliard could make it or not in those final moments may have been far from her mind, but there in the frigid early morning hours, she collapsed into the snow, only 15 feet from Nelson’s front door.

The following morning, Wally was leaving his home at approximately 7 am when he saw Hilliard’s body in the snow. He quickly lifted her up, and finding her body quite literally “stiff as a board”, he loaded her into the back of his car at an angle (“diagonally”, as he told reporters after the incident), and hurried her off to the hospital in the nearby town of Fosston, and probably with little hope that she might be revived.

Once Hilliard was admitted to the hospital, doctors found her flesh so frozen that hypodermic needles couldn’t puncture her skin.

However, almost miraculously, her body had maintained a low pulse throughout the evening, and as Hilliard was admitted to the ICU her heart had been beating at a mere 12 beats a minute, with a body temperature of around 88 degrees. Her caretakers wrapped her in an electric heating pad, and hoped to slowly thaw the frozen girl.

Despite the odds, Hilliard not only revived, but suffered few of the lasting affects many would sustain after such an ordeal, namely that of amputation. ”At worst, I might lose a couple of toes,” she told the New York Times. Also quoted had been Dr. George Sather, who marveled over her remarkable ability to survive what seemed impossible:

”I can’t explain why she’s alive,” Dr. George Sather, who helped treat the young woman, said today. ”She was frozen stiff, literally. It’s a miracle.”

Hilliard’s case isn’t the only remarkable instance where a human being apparently fell into a hibernation-like state in the face of extreme cold. An even more extreme example involved Mitsutaka Uchikoshi, who went missing on October 7, 2006 during a climbing expedition with friends on Mount Rokko in western Japan. As he lay down in a field where sunlight could strike his body, Uchikoshi’s temperature dropped to 71 degrees, and he remained there undisturbed for 24 days.

Upon discovery, it might easily have seemed that only remains were left of Uchikoshi; he had almost no pulse, and his organs had nearly entirely shut down, as was reported by BBC News:

Medics say they are still puzzled how he survived because his metabolism was apparently almost at a standstill. Mr Uchikoshi is believed to have tripped and lost consciousness after leaving his party to descend from the mountain on his own.

“I lay down… in a grassy area, which felt good in the sunshine, and eventually I fell asleep,” Mr Uchikoshi told reporters at a news conference at a hospital in Kobe, where he was treated. “That’s the last thing I remember,” he said.

He was found by rescuers on 31 October.

“He fell into a hypothermic state at a very early stage, which is similar to hibernation,” said Dr Shinichi Sato, who treated Mr Uchikoshi. “Therefore, his brain functions were protected without being damaged and have now recovered 100%. This is what I believe happened,” he said.

Another remarkable case, albeit one which some have viewed somewhat questionably, involved a Swedish man who purportedly survived for two months in sub-zero temperatures by “hibernating” in a car. Peter Skyllberg was said to have had nothing but snow to eat, and comic books to pass the time, and yet the 44-year-old man somehow managed to survive until a snowmobile operator spotted his vehicle, and contacted rescue workers. While his attending doctor suggested Skyllberg’s was another case of “human hibernation,” others believed he lived because his car had insulated him in much the same way an igloo functions.

In addition to cases like these mentioned, there is some scientific literature that seems to support the idea that humans can hibernate in rare instances, perhaps a latent sort of ability carried over from our animal cousins who still do it. In more recent studies, hydrogen sulfide gas has been used during experiments that succeeded with inducing hibernation states in laboratory mice, who emerged once their source of air was returned to being normal oxygen. It is believed that such techniques could be used in the future to induce hibernation in humans along the same lines, for purposes of things the likes of space travel over long periods.

Knowing that induced states of hibernation can occur doesn’t fully explain what allows certain individuals to succeed at doing it naturally; doing so has not only been achieved, but arguably, it also saved the lives of those who managed to do it. Could humans truly possess the ability to enter a hibernation-like sleep in extreme cold, and if so, how might understanding the way it happens be useful in the future?

[MIKA27]

Two Cops ‘Assassinated’ in Brooklyn

The execution of two police officers in cold blood has shocked the city and driven a deeper wedge between the cops and the mayor.

In a crime sure to shock all decent souls and to shame those protesters who were chanting for dead cops a week ago, a gunman walked up to a marked NYPD car on Saturday afternoon and shot two uniformed police officers, killing both.

“Five days before Christmas,” a senior law enforcement official noted.

From a shooting stance by the passenger side window, 28-year-old Ishmael Brinsley repeatedly fired a silver Taurus semi-automatic pistol. The bullets struck Officer Rafael Ramos and Officer Wenjian Liu in the head as they sat in their patrol car parked near the corner of Tompkins and Myrtle Avenues. Ramos had been at the wheel. They had no opportunity to draw their guns and may not have even realized the gunman was there.

Police Officer Wenjian Liu, left, and Police Officer Rafael Ramos.

Brinsley then fled into a subway station a block away. Other cops chased him down onto the westbound platform.

“Get down! Get down!” a cop shouted to the waiting passengers.

A shot rang out as Brinsley took his own life, sprawling with the gun at his side. He had shot and wounded his ex-girlfriend early that morning in Baltimore and headed for his native Brooklyn. He was SAID to have paused to post photo of what was almost certainly the same silver Taurus semi-automatic pistol on Instagram, along with these words:

“I’m Putting Wings on Pigs Today. They take 1 of Ours…Let’s Take 2 of Theirs #ShootThe Police #RIPErivGardner (sic) #RIPMikeBrown This May Be My Final Post…I’m Putting Pigs In A Blanket.”

At least some people had seen the posting and failed to notify the authorities, hopefully because they had not taken it seriously. Ramos and Liu were now rushed to nearby Woodhull Hospital, where one was pronounced dead. The other officer also proved to be beyond saving.

Both Mayor De Blasio and Police Commissioner William Bratton rushed to the hospital. They there met the families of the murdered officers. Liu had been married just two months before and his wife now stood in this Brooklyn hospital, a sudden widow because of a madman. Ramos’ 13-year-old son stood nearby, suddenly without a father.

A senior law enforcement official suggested one early lesson from the tragedy.

“You start shouting ‘shoot cops!’ and some nut might listen to you,” he said.

On December 15, some of the protesters demonstrating in Manhattan against the failure of grand juries in Staten Island and Missouri to indict police officers in the deaths of Eric Garner and Michael Brown were videotaped chanting, “What do we want!? Dead Cops!” Thousands of others chanted, “How do you spell murder? NYPD!”

The message was that all cops should be condemned by the actions of the very few, and that is just the sort of fevered ignorance that incites violence in those who find meaning in nothing else. Brinsley had apparently not even been in New York that weekend, but he certainly shared that way of thinking and took it to an extreme.

Around 10:30 a.m. on Saturday, Brinsley posted on his Facebook page that, “I Always Wanted To Be Known For Doing Something Right... But My Past Is Stalking Me And My Present Is Haunting Me.”

He had by that point shot his ex-girlfriend and he had to know the police were looking for him.

By mid-afternoon he had apparently decided to escape his past and present by striding up to a radio car as a self-imagined avenger. He shot the two officers just about the time the NYPD receiving an alert from the Baltimore police saying that Brinsley was wanted for a shooting and may be in Brooklyn.

After the demonstrations, the Patrolman’s Benevolent Association, the police union, had blasted the mayor for supporting the protestors at the expense of the cops. The PBA president. Patrick Lynch, had said that De Blasio should stay away from the funerals of any police officers killed in the line of duty.

Now there would be two funerals and police officers turned their backs on De Blasio as he strode with Bratton towards an evening press conference in the hospital auditorium. They were not likely to be appeased by the remarks De Blasio would make to the assembled media about the sacrifices cops make in protecting all of us.

Bratton noted that the murdered officers were posted outside their usual precinct in downtown Brooklyn to help reduce violence in the Tompkins Houses in Bedford Stuyvesant, as part of the ongoing effort that has made New York the safest big city in America. He added that the officers were murdered not because of who they were but what they were.

“They were quite simply assassinated,” Bratton said. “Targeted for their uniform.”

Police had heard that the killer may have had ties to a prison gang called the Black Guerilla Family, which was said by an anonymous caller to 911 in Baltimore to be planning to kill cops, though the caller had not mentioned the death of Garner or Brown. Bratton was not ready to say that Brinsley was acting as part of a group or as anything but a lone monster.

Bratton did note that this was the seventh time since 1972 that a pair of NYPD partners had been murdered. He went on to say that even such double horrors had never kept cops from continuing on.

“They grieve and they mourn but then they go out into the streets of the city to protect us every day and every night,” Bratton said. “It’s not easy. It’s not easy at all.”

He said that the NYPD will be in deepest mourning this Christmas season.

“But they’ll go out and they’ll do what we expect of them because that's what cops do,” he went on.

He then said again, “But it’s not easy.”

[MIKA27]

Muhammad Ali Hospitalized With Pneumonia

Boxing legend Muahmmad Ali was hospitalized with pneumonia onSaturday. The 72-year-old American sports icon and three-time world heavyweight champion is being treated at anundiagnosed location. "Muhammad Ali... is being treated by his team of doctors and is in stable condition," Ali's rep said in a statement. "He was admitted earlier this morning and because the pneumonia was caught early, his prognosis is good with a short hospital stay expected." Ali has suffered from Parkinson's disease since 1984 and has become an advocate for people with the illness.

[MIKA27]

GAEMS M155 PERFORMANCE GAMING MONITOR

So you just picked up Shadow of Mordor for the PS4, or maybe Sunset Overdirve for Xbox One, and you can’t bear to be away from your game during your trip back home for the holidays. GAEMS M155 Performance Gaming Monitor might be worth getting to know.

This is an ultra-lightweight (less than 2 lbs.) 15.5” 720p LED monitor that promises virtually lag-free gaming for any device with an HDMI output. It powers up with just a USB plug and will safely fit inside most laptop bags (and fit perfectly inside every GAEMS Backpack). At less than 1-inch thick you’ll have plenty of space for other gear, and the flexible protective M155 Shield doubles as a multi-positionable stand. Note that there is no speaker built-in, so your headphones will be needed—unless you’re playing FreeCell. [Purchase]

[MIKA27]

JACK DANIEL’S WHISKEY BARREL SLED

Sleigh riding on a hand-crafted sled made from Jack Daniel’s whiskey barrels is the kind of crazy thing that you usually dream of at 4 in the morning. This time, the dream is a reality—at least for a few lucky people.

For its annual It’s the Thought That Counts contest, Jack Daniels’s is giving away this unique beauty made by the craftsmen at Kartwheel in Austin, Texas. Using retired whiskey barrels, Kartwheel used a “big roofing torch” to evenly darken the wood, an old Japanese burn technique apparently. Of course the coup de gras is the leather whiskey bottle holster with straps mounted on the back end. We knew it was fun to ride in a one-horse open sleigh, but somehow a one-bottled sled seems more up our alley. [Contest]

[MIKA27]

NINEBOT ONE SELF-BALANCING ONE-WHEELED SCOOTER

For most of us, the word “scooter” still probably conjures up youthful toys that we rode into the ground over summer break. But Ninebot One is threatening to infuse the word with more cool clout than we ever could’ve guessed.

This is a battery-powered, self-balancing, one-wheeled transportation device that looks like it came out of a George Lucas film (just not American Graffiti). But no, it comes from a Beijing-based company that has used a magnesium alloy frame and non-slip pedals to create something unique. So how fast can it go? The Ninebot One promises a clip of 10-12.5 miles per hour with a maximum range of 18 miles. Charging up the 28-pound scooter takes 1-2 hours. It features iridescent lights that can be set to show different effects, and you can further customize the device with multiple colors for the shell. [Purchase]

[MIKA27]

DUET DISPLAY

Duet is a new app that turns your iPad into a Mac display! Built by ex-Apple engineers, Duet is the first app that lets you connect your iPad to your Mac, giving you an extra display and therefore increasing your productivity (can increase productivity up to 48%). Perfect for engineers, musicians, designers, artists, photo and video editors that work with a lot of apps open.

[MIKA27]

TREEHOUSE DRINKING CHOCOLATE

Your crumpled pack of Swiss Miss from the office kitchen, this is not. Founded by a former cacao farmer, Treehouse Drinking Chocolate aims to do justice to the craft and spirit of the plant. It's available in four flavors: Original, Camp (which blends the chocolate with organic coffee), Cherrywood (which mixes in cherrywood-smoked Oregon sea salt), and Nectar (sweetened with coconut nectar and a bit of organic coconut milk for good measure). No matter the variety you choose, you'll be getting a drink that's 72% cacao and crafted in small batches using cacao sourced from a farmer-owned coop in Northern Peru. And no, they don't have a variety with the mini marshmallows mixed in — you'll have to add those on your own.

[MIKA27]

A.H. RIISE CHRISTMAS RUM

While Christmas beers and egg nog hog the holiday spotlight, there are some spirits that are more than worthy of a spot in your holiday rotation. A.H. Riise Christmas Rum might be the best fit, hand blended by Rum distillates up to 20 years old, and then finished in sherry casks. The result is a rum that tastes like Christmas, with cinnamon, cloves, and citrus flavors that finishes smooth and sweet. Each festive Single Barrel bottle is specially selected and hand labeled in the US Virgin Islands.

[MIKA27]

Riding Thailand’s WWII Death Railway

To aid their effort in WWII, the Japanese government built a railroad between Thailand and Burma, enlisting POWs and Asian laborers in a horrifying and deadly race to the finish.

Kanchanaburi, Thailand — At the Kanchanaburi train station each morning, the same ritual unfolds. A woman in a smart uniform scribbles out tickets for a growing line of tourists eager to take a trip on the old-fashioned train. Then, tickets in hand, small groups wander across the street to drink tea in the cafe, waiting cheerfully for the inevitably delayed service, made worse by the need to add extra wagons at this stop, before the trip on Death Railway begins.

Built by the Japanese during WWII to connect Yangon, the then-capital of Burma, with Bangkok, the Thai Burma Rail Link was immortalized in the David Lean blockbuster The Bridge on the River Kwai. The film helps to draw scores of visitors to this sleepy river town year after year.

The railway earned its nickname—the Death Railway—from the suffering the tens of thousands of POWs and cheap local labor went through to construct it, surviving on meager rations, sleeping on lice-infested bamboo mats, and working with ribs clearly visible beneath their browned skin and furrowed brows.

Thousands died in the process of building the 250 miles of rail over 15 months, and their makeshift graves dotted the sides of the tracks, before being moved to neatly kept graveyards in Kanchanaburi and two other cemeteries along the route after the war ended.

Today, the history is still vivid. One can walk across the bridge late at night and imagine what it was like for those workers as spotlights cast an eerie light of ominous shadows on the green water and the wooden tracks disappear through the dark bushes, like a tunnel towards death. And even now, disaster isn’t only an increasingly distant memory. On one recent morning during my train ride north, the rail’s nickname took on more significance when an attaché to the Greek embassy was crushed beneath the wheels of the train, dying on the spot.

Today, only a portion of the original rail line is in operation, reopened in 1956 and taking travelers as far as Nam Tok, two hours from the Burmese border. Recently, the Burmese government announced plans to rebuild its side of the tracks, says Terry Manttan of the Thailand Burma Railway Center and Museum, which is located in Kanchanaburi next to the War Cemetery, where scores of the soldiers who died during construction are buried.

Burma’s borders have reopened in certain places recently. “There was a sign up saying they were reopening the pass in 2015 at Three Pagodas Pass,” Manttan said about the original crossing between the two countries. “But it has since come down. It has been closed since the war. Since then they have gone quiet about plans.”

Manttan is keen to carry out research on that Burmese side of the railway as his father worked on that section. A dam now in place on the Thai side of the line prevents the railway from being reconstructed in its entirety, he explains.

Each year, the museum accompanies approximately 200 to 300 relatives of those who worked to build the railway on personalized trips up and down the tracks, going as far as the border, while they also conduct research along the lines. They have amassed a growing database of information on some 105,000 POWs.

Inside the two-floor space the museum, there are placards bearing facts and figures, moving images and photographs, and interesting snippets of information that tell the history of the Death Railway line. A map shows each station on the route, along with marking POW camps and other landmarks along the way.

Construction began in 1942 and the challenge for the Japanese was whether or not it could be built quickly enough to aid the war effort using local resources. POWs were brought in by train in dismal conditions, with 28 soldiers crammed for days into seven-meter-long wagons filled with Japanese supplies. There was no room to lie down or sleep.

That was just the beginning of the horror. By the end of the construction period, the number of deaths had reached roughly twenty percent of the workforce. Although there were fewer deaths in the first eight months of construction, the numbers grew starting in July 1942 when the wet season and furious push to finish the line began. Between June and October 1943, 4,283 British, 1,303 Dutch, 1,630 Australian, and 88 American soldiers died.

All in all, approximately 13,000 Allied POWs and 90,000 Asian laborers perished while working on the railway. While Asian laborers were hired and paid, many more died than POWs, as they did not have the support networks provided to the soldiers through the military hierarchy.

The highest number of deaths came from Malaysian workers, of which 42,000 out of 75,000 died. The Burmese had the next highest death rate, 40,000 deaths from 90,000 employees, followed by the British with some 6,904 soldiers dying out of approximately 30,131.

The POWs were allowed to bury their dead in marked graves, and their Japanese bosses would attend the funerals in the early days, providing wreaths and paying $10 for additional mourning services.

Both the Japanese, in keeping with the Geneva Convention, and the POWs kept death records, which were handed to the War Graves Search Party after the end of the war. They recorded 10,549 graves on or near the railway in 144 cemeteries, failing to locate only 52 graves.

Today, the train chugs north out of Kanchanaburi over the famous bridge before it hits a spectacular bend in the river. The scenery that unfolds through the windows of the dusty train is unforgettable in its beauty, the pale green of the rice paddies, the mountains peeking in spectacular glory, wild trees and crumbling houses that dot the route. At the end of the line at Nam Tok, some of the tracks lead to an old waterfall where visitors can get off and splash in the cool waters.

And then, on one recent morning, the train made a stop at a small station near an especially beautiful section of the river. A Greek woman stepped off to take a photograph, and her camera strap got trapped in the train doors, which typically remain open while travelling so passengers can get a better view. The train was already in motion as she tried to step inside, and her body was crushed beneath it.

Tourists filed off the train, mostly unaware. Like the locals here, we walked along the tracks as directed, wandering over trestle bridges with no hand rails, the path bending around a sheer section of a much photographed cliff before the train resumed its journey an hour or so later. We were left behind on the river with a quiet young Thai man who fed us, unaware of what had happened until later that night when the local media reported the details. The Greek embassy confirmed the death, which has barely registered by the international press. Locals screamed as the accident happened, but tourists were mostly none the wiser and walked along the tracks like soldiers marching silently on.

[MIKA27]

Sony Emails Reveal Studio Head Wants Idris Elba For the Next James Bond

Leaked emails show Sony Pictures Entertainment co-chairman Amy Pascal confessing that the dashing Elba should be 007.

During a particularly droll year-end press conference on Friday, President Obama channeled his inner Louis C.K., entertaining a horde of reporters on subjects ranging from Congress to Cuba to a hybrid NFLer/actor by the name of "James Flacco."

One of the first questions lobbed at the Commander-in-Chief concerned the Sony hack and subsequent cancellation of The Interview’s film release—a destructive cyber-terror attack on the film studio as supposed retribution for their Kim Jong Un assassination comedy, which FBI officials believe to be the work of North Korea (though cybersecurity experts have their doubts).

“[sony] suffered significant damage, there were threats against some employees. I am sympathetic to the concerns that they faced,” Obama said. “Having said all that, yes, I think they made a mistake.”

He added, “We cannot have a society in which some dictator someplace can start imposing censorship here in the United States.”

Plenty of the Sony emails have focused on Sony’s prized horse—the James Bond franchise, including the 24th Bond flick Spectre, scheduled to hit theaters on November 6, 2015. Reports have indicated that the script has leaked, the film’sbudget ballooned to over $300 million, and that it may feature Blofeld as the villain.

For years, there’s been a lot of online chatter suggesting that Idris Elba, the suave British actor, should be the next James Bond—making him the first black 007.

Current superspy Daniel Craig has even voiced his desire to vacate the post, telling Rolling Stone in 2012, “I've been trying to get out of this from the very moment I got into it. But they won't let me go, and I've agreed to do a couple more, but let's see how this one does, because business is business and if the **** goes down, I've got a contract that somebody will happily wipe their ass with.” Craig is signed on for just one more Bond flick after Spectre.

[Maplepie]

Source: Go F**K yourself NAME EDITTED OUT

Ummmmmmmmmmm.... Mika. Not to detract from this. But when I was quoting the article above, this was outlined as the 'source'.

There's no way in hell you wrote it. But may be something you want to check into.

In fact, if you go to ALL the past few articles, all of them have that very derogatory source. Might be something you want to URGENTLY check into