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

[MIKA27]

Artificial Intelligence Might Kill Us Through Incompetence, Not Malevolence

Artificial intelligence has been looming large in the public consciousness recently, thanks to the likes of Elon Musk and Stephen Hawking telling us how we’re going to die at the hands of robots (the upcoming Terminator reboot probably doesn’t help, either). But amidst the techpocalypse talk, there’s been limited discussion of what constitutes A.I, and how it might look completely different to Skynet.

As Benjamin H. Bratton explains in the New York Times, our idea of artificial intelligence has been engineered from the beginning to be anthropomorphic: a truly ‘intelligent’ computer is one that reflects humanity back at us. The Turing test, the flawed but oft-quoted determination of artificial intelligence, really just requires a computer to pose as a human for a few minutes — something that Bratton finds bizarre:

That we would wish to define the very existence of A.I. in relation to its ability to mimic how humans think that humans think will be looked back upon as a weird sort of speciesism. The legacy of that conceit helped to steer some older A.I. research down disappointingly fruitless paths, hoping to recreate human minds from available parts. It just doesn’t work that way.

He goes on to point out that planes don’t fly like birds, so why should computers be hamstrung by human impressionism?

When it comes to the matter of the dangers of A.I, Bratton is concerned, but not about a robot coup. Rather, “what we really fear, even more than a Big Machine that wants to kill us, is one that sees us as irrelevant.”

In a technology landscape a little overrun with faux-humanoid digital assistants and a decades-old public perception of A.I, Bratton’s essay is an insightful take on an incredibly important topic. And, it might make you stop and think next time you swear at Siri.

[MIKA27]

This Power Rangers Fan Film Starring Katee Sackhoff Is Absolutely Amazing

Holy Ice-hockey-Jesus-on-a-Pogo-stick-christ. I can’t believe this new short by Joseph Kahn, a “deboot” of the Power Rangers, as he calls it. It’s a fan film, he says, “not a pilot, not a series, not for profit, strictly for exhibition.” A free short starring Katee Sackhoff, the iconic Starbuck in the Battlestar Galactica series. Wow.

As Kahn describes it:

This is a bootleg experiment not affiliated or endorsed by Saban Entertainment or Lionsgate nor is it selling any product. I claim no rights to any of the characters (don’t send me any money, not kickstarted, this film is free). This is the NSFW version. An alternate safe version is on youtube.

Talking to HitFix, Kahn says that he has no interest in actually rebooting it in a full feature film (I’m sure someone at Hollywood is already salivating at the prospect):

The irony here is that I wouldn’t even want to make “Power Rangers: The Movie’ for real. Like if I had to make a ‘Power Rangers’ movie, this is it. It’s 14 minutes long and it’s violent and this is what I have in me. If they offered me the 200 million version, the PG-13 version, I literally wouldn’t do it. It’s just not interesting to me.

[MIKA27]

The Black Plague Was Probably Caused By Cute Gerbils, Not Dirty Rats

Conventional wisdom has it that the Black Death was spread throughout Europe by nasty, evil dirty, disease-carrying rats. Well, prepare to have your mind blown (and find a new pet): according to a new study, gerbils are more likely to blame.

The Black Death — a mid-14th century epidemic of the bubonic plague that killed a significant proportion of the European population and had a lasting effect on modern civilisation — has long been blamed on rats. They jumped on ships and carried disease-ridden fleas around the continent, which then jumped on humans and transmitted the plague — or so the story goes.

According to a study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, gerbils — specifically, scary-as-f**k sounding giant gerbils — are more likely to have been the cause. Scientists studied tree rings from Europe to determine historical weather patterns, and then cross-referenced that information with historical records of plague outbreaks.

They found that plague outbreaks correlated positively with warmer, wetter weather in Asia, but not Europe — meaning that plague was mostly likely incubated in Asia, and then carried over the Silk Road into Europe, via gerbils. So next time you think a gerbil would make a fun pet for your seven-year-old, remember: it’s got the blood of 200 million Europeans on its cute little paws.

[MIKA27]

Valve Is Getting Ready To Debut 'SteamVR'

You’ve got your Oculus Rift. You’ve got your Sony Project Morpheus. You’ve got your Microsoft Hololens. Which gaming heavyweight is missing? OK maybe Nintendo, but I’m talking about Valve, and Valve just announced it’s making “SteamVR”.

In an understated update to its Steam Universe page (where SteamOS and Steam Machines were introduced) Valve says the following about SteamVR:

Steam is bringing the best games and user-generated content to exciting new destinations. At GDC 2015, we’ll be giving demos of the refined Steam Controller, new living room devices, and a previously-unannounced SteamVR hardware system.

With the introduction of SteamVR hardware, Valve is actively seeking VR content creators. Are you a developer or publisher interested in experiencing the new SteamVR hardware? We’ll be giving scheduled VR demos during the week of GDC, March 4th-6th, 2015, at Moscone Center in San Francisco.

What will it be? Hard to tell. Definitely not the CastAR project Valve let go, but almost definitely something interesting. Just yesterday, a Valve VR developer tweeted something about falling asleep in VR:

So it must be comfortable? Only time will tell, and we’ll be at GDC (the Games Developers Conference) to see this thing in the flesh.

[MIKA27]

This Crazy Geodesic Dome Is Actually A Power Plant

Biomass cogeneration doesn’t scream “family fun for all ages” to most of us, but the city of Uppsala, Sweden, is hoping it might some day. Its plan involves a geodesic dome, stained glass and a zany Danish architect.

Last year, the city invited the architect Bjarke Ingels to design a new power plant that will use biomass cogeneration to generate electricity and heat in the winter. Cogeneration burns biomass — eg, excess plant matter and agricultural products as well as waste wood — to generate both electricity and steam, hence the name cogeneration. It’s been around for a century, but it’s gained new popularity in Europe and even the US over the past few years, since it’s an incredibly efficient way of generating energy.

The thing about Uppsala’s cogeneration plant is that it will only operate in the winter, when it’s really needed. So, as DesignBoom reports, the city asked Ingels to find a way to turn the power plant into an attraction during the summer. What resulted is, essentially, a giant rainbow-hued greenhouse, where every summer Uppsala can stage shows, festivals, and music events. The deformed geodesic facade will contain PV panels to generate electricity for the off-season use, when cogeneration stops or slows and public access revs up.

Oddly enough, this isn’t Ingels’ first power plant. Back home, in Denmark, the architect is in the process of building a hybrid power plant and ski slope on the Copenhagen-adjacent neighbourhood of Amager. The waste-to-power plant will burn garbage to harvest energy, and on top of its tall stacks, a public ski slop will loop down to ground level:

It’s not a coincidence that Ingels, who is really better known for residential and cultural projects, has been asked to design two of the same highly-specialised energy infrastructure projects. Over the past few years, he’s been promoting his vision for the future of sustainable architecture: He calls it “hedonistic sustainability,” a clever oxymoron that describes a kind of sustainable design that’s as luxurious and excitement-driven as it is efficient. At its core, it’s Ingels’ best effort at making sustainable design cool, and it’s been a relative hit — though his ski-slope-trash-incinerator has been sharply criticised as anything but green.

Whether or not sexed-up power plants are our future, they’re an interesting experiment. Can you borrow ideas from blockbuster urban projects — like the High Line — and use them to make working infrastructure just as celebrated? Only time will tell.

[MIKA27]

Chef Magically Cuts A Carrot Into An Elaborate Net

http://youtu.be/B6YhaOXGsTk

The chef is a magician - It's a gift...

[MIKA27]

This Soft Upper-Body Exo-suit Could Boost Your Strength Without Power

Exoskeletons can make it far easier and safer for workers to carry out heavy-duty labour. But not everyone needs to lift insanely heavy loads — and in those cases, something a little less robotic may just be the answer.

A new prototype designed by researchers from Hiroshima University in Japan claims to be able to enhance sensory and motor function in the upper body of the wearer. Referred to as the Sensorimotor Enhancing Suit (SEnS), it uses intricate understanding of the muscular and nervous system in our upper bodies to create an intelligently layered system of fabric.

Studies of perception of loading allowed the team to understand how the human body reacts to the forces it carries, and how the loads can be maximised with just a small amount of compensatory unloading at specific points of movement. Reducing the amount of voluntary muscle function allows for better sensing of the loads, the researchers claim, and in turn an improved ability to known when and how to apply more load.

The resulting prototype maximises how much force the wearer’s upper limb can provide for a given loading, throughout a wide range of motion. Unlike other exoskeleton designs there’s no rigid framework, motors or electronics. That means two things: firstly, that it will never take huge loads; but secondly, that it’s light in and of itself. Not surprising, then, that its designers suggest that it could be used to improve the quality of life of the weak — the old and injured — as well as those that “work under extreme conditions.”

It’s not the first soft exo-suit we’ve seen. Just last year, scientists showed off a soft exoskeleton that you wear like a pair of pants to provide the wearer with extra strength to work. That system did, however, use on-board electronics. Taken together, though, they suggest that the future of exo-skeletons for most regular folks won’t look like something out of Tony Stark’s garage — instead, they will look more like an intelligent wetsuit.

[MIKA27]

Atari Engineer Steve Bristow Passes Away

The man who helped birth the Atari 2600, as well as the classic game Tank, died this past Sunday.

Steve Bristow, who was in charge of Atari’s Coin-Op Division during the glory days of stand-up arcade machines, was one of the pivotal players in the era that brought arcade machines into the home. He also came up with the concept for Breakout with Atari founder Nolan Bushnell and later rose to the position of Vice-President in the engineering division. News of his passing (via Gamasutra) comes Atari Inc. author Martin Goldberg, who posted in an Atari Facebook group.

MIKA: Ahhh.. what wonderul memories I have about this gaming system. One of the very best.

[MIKA27]

Four New Giant Siberian Craters Found After a Flash of Light

Scientists in Siberia report four new giant craters have appeared in the Yamal Peninsula and one of them was discovered shortly after local residents reported seeing a giant flash of light. Two of the craters quickly filled with water and are now lakes. One is surrounded by up to 20 mini-craters and many more smaller holes are opening up in the same area with no warnings, no general agreement on causes and no known ways to predict them. Is it time to panic? Or too late?

Black dots are existing craters, red dots are new ones

Three large mysterious craters were discovered last year in northern Russia. At first, speculation on causes ranged from meteors and bombs to eruptions from underground fault lines to aliens and subterranean creatures. Two possible natural causes are tied to global warming. Giant subsurface ice accumulations called pingos may be melting quickly and causing sinkholes. The most worrisome possibility is that underground methane gas is mixing with water, salt and heat to cause explosions. That could explain the flash of light reported before the discovery of one of the new craters at Antipayuta.

Before and after satellite pictures of a newly discovered Siberian crater that has already filled with water and is surrounded by mini-craters.

The four new giant craters and dozens of small ones have been discovered by locals and reindeer herders and by experts like Professor Vasily Bogoyavlensky, deputy director of the Moscow-based Oil and Gas Research Institute, using satellite images. He’s calling for an “urgent” investigation of the new craters.

We know now of seven craters in the Arctic area … But I am sure that there are more craters on Yamal, we just need to search for them. I would compare this with mushrooms. When you find one mushroom, be sure there are few more around. I suppose there could be 20 to 30 craters more … We need to answer now the basic questions: what areas, and under what conditions, are the most dangerous?

If you don’t want people to panic, Professor, maybe you shouldn’t talk about craters and mushrooms at the same time. Whatever the cause, these giant craters are now forming closer to inhabited communities and mining and refining operations. Is it time to stop, take a deep breath and smell the methane? Or should we be looking for another cause for these mysterious Siberian holes?

[MIKA27]

BRABUS 850 6.0 BITURBO COUPE

For some people, Mercedes-Benz’s S63 AMG 4MATIC just isn’t enough in its standard form. For those demanding clients, we present the Brabus 850 6.0 Biturbo Coupe.

Based on the aforementioned S63, this is the world’s fastest and most powerful all-wheel drive coupe. The 2-door luxury vehicle pumps out 850 horsepower (hence the name) and 848 lb-ft of torque through a 5.9-liter V8 twin-turbo engine, helping it sprint from 0-62 mph in just 3.5 seconds, with a top speed of 217 miles per hour. A seven-speed automatic transmission means butter smooth shifts every time, and a 4MATIC all-wheel drive system means you’ll never have issues getting traction, no matter the weather – although there is also a rear while drive option available as well. Other updates include plenty of carbon fiber body parts, 21-inch forged high performance copper wheels, and matching copper details found all throughout the all black cabin. Long story short, if you see that massive B on the grille coming your way, you might wanna get the hell out of the way.

[MIKA27]

ANCHOR FLYING CLOUD STOUT

During the Gold Rush, one of the most popular beer styles was the export stout. It was brewed at a higher gravity to survive the long overseas voyage from Dublin.Flying Cloud San Francisco Stout from Anchor Brewing is made with this history in mind, and is part of The Argonaut Collection, a series of adventurous beers from one of America's oldest breweries. The 7.4% stout arrives with a dark, chocolaty maltiness and a dry finish. It hits store shelves in March and is the first beer Anchor has released in 4-packs since 1971.

[NJP]

Oh my Brabus. That's sexy and Naughty.

[Fuzz]

Atari Engineer Steve Bristow Passes Away

Always wanted an Atari when I was growing up, but never got one. I had an Intellivision instead.

Oh, and I used to play Pong on this old timer...

[MIKA27]

Always wanted an Atari when I was growing up, but never got one. I had an Intellivision instead.

NICE!

I truly LOVED the Atari 2600, the simplicity of the controller. We sat around for hours and hours playing Pitfall, Kung Fu, Centipede and many others. Always been a console gamer, always will.

[Fuzz]

I played a lot of "International Karate" on my C64.

[MIKA27]

I played a lot of "International Karate" on my C64.

OSU!

[MIKA27]

Two Ex-Army Rangers Believe Thongs And Sarongs Will Defeat ISIS

I recently met two ex-Army Rangers in a bar, and got onto the topic of the war against ISIS. They told me they knew the solution: flip flops (or thongs). I scoffed, which probably isn’t something you should do to an Army Ranger’s face. And they put me in my place.

Matthew “Griff” Griffin and Donald Lee both served multiple tours in Afghanistan fighting Al Qaeda and the Taliban. These are the guys behind Combat Flip Flops. They still see it as their mission to defeat Islamic extremism in Afghanistan and they think they can do so more effectively with jobs than they ever could by dropping bombs.

Combat Flip Flops makes thongs in Colombia, bags in America and sarongs, shemaghs and jewelry in Afghanistan.

“The guys who make our flip flops? They used to farm cocaine,” explains Lee. “Your average fighter just wants to go make money to feed their families. The average annual income for an Afghan is $US600. If you give them the option and say ‘Hey, I’ll give you $US50 to go plant this bomb or I’ll give you a job where you can make an honest wage and you don’t have to worry about getting killed,’ they will take the job. It’s proven, it works.

“We started making flip flops in Afghanistan, but now we make them in Colombia,” continues Griff. These days, Colombia is South America’s next big tourist destination, but not long ago, it resembled something closer to present day Afghanistan. “Fighting in the mountains, a narco-financed counterinsurgency war…what the Colombians did was take our targeting methods and our JDAMs and our precision munitions and hunted the top guys with those. They took the head off the snake and then they granted amnesty to everyone else.”

“They said, ‘Hey guys, here’s the deal: we’re going to subsidise you and give you technical training to launch small businesses in Colombia.’ And then, in the US, we got behind it and we established a free trade agreement.”

“The guys who make our flip flops? They used to farm coke” says Lee. “They don’t do that anymore, they make flip flops. And that’s pretty rad. We use that as an example, people need jobs and we have a really successful, veteran-owned case study of that succeeding.”

“In Iraq, back in 2009, a group of guys rolled up to a checkpoint full of Americans, came to a stop and detonated a bomb,” Griff says. “After it went off, more cars rolled up and machine gunned down anyone who survived. We caught it all on a Predator feed and were able to watch as they drove back to their house. 45 minutes later, my buddy’s standing there with a dog doing the interrogation. He asked ‘Why are you doing this?’ They answered ‘What else are we going to do? There’s no jobs here.’”

“Lee and I’s first trip together was to Afghanistan,” continues Griff. “Our whole thing was to deny Al Qaeda fighters access to safe havens during the winter. Essentially, these guys roll up to 10,000 foot plus villages and just hang out all winter and think they’re safe. Well, SOCOM figured they had some guys that would go and get ‘em and so we rolled up to the mountains and we hunted guys for a few months in the snow. But, in doing so, we were dependent on local villages and local people to help us out. There we were living in schools and these guys are feeding us all the food they had in the middle of winter. That was definitely a moral dilemma.”

Lee says that experience changed the way they thought they should be fighting the war. “We weren’t fighting imams preaching hate, we were fighting in villages that are still, to this day, feeling the effects of polio, where they don’t have access to education, where they don’t even know what a vaccination looks like. It’s biblical, is the way I’d describe it. And that’s the environment in which the enemy is recruiting people and where they’re hanging out.”

Lee (left) and Griff (right), riding on top of 2,000 pairs of not-good-enough thongs. They’d donate them to locals in need.

“We could never fight or win a war there because we could never sustain ourselves there long enough to do that,” says Griff. “That’s coupled with the fact that they’re growing opium — poppies — and they’re forced to because that’s the only way they can feed their families. It’s their only cash crop, they have to.”

“So here we have hyper-violent organisations going into remote rural villages where we can’t sustain a presence and forcing people to put their economic dependence on them,” explains Lee. “If we go in there and cut that down, we just create another enemy. So what the **** are we going to do?”

After leaving the Army, Griff spent a few years working for defence contractors installing medical clinics in both Afghanistan and in the parts of Africa that are being radicalized. His job was to liaise between pharmaceutical companies and local governments, securing permission to bring in the drugs, medical equipment and personnel necessary to establish western-level medical care in areas that had never seen it before. And it showed him a different side of the war.

“They were like ‘Cool, you’re bringing in dollars.’” Griff says the local community valued him as a result, protecting him from bombs and other violence. And, during that time, he visited a boot factory where he found the inspiration for Combat Flip Flops.

“The international community, we sponsored a 340,000 member police force in Afghanistan. That means at least 340,000 pairs of boots, pants, backpacks and all that. And, instead of buying the stuff in China and shipping it there, they gave preferential treatment to Afghan factories. This one factory I visited was turning out a thousand pair of boots a day and employing 300 people to do it. Each of those was supporting five to 15 family members, so the social impact was amazing.”

But, when the responsibility for procurement shifted from the coalition to the local government, they decided to save money and import the equipment from China, so the factory Griff was visiting was about to close down.

“There in the factory was a flip flop thong punched through a combat boot sole. I picked it up, through it looked pretty cool and the proverbial lightbulb went off. I figured we could ramp up commercial production in this factory so when the military production went down, we could export commercial products to keep these guys employed. That was the plan.”

A detail on the flip flop is a 7.62x39mm shell casing, the kind used in AK-47s.

The product that gives the company its name is still that combat boot sole topped by a leather flip flop thong. But, despite everything they tried, producing them in Afghanistan just proved impossible. The challenges of doing business in a culture where credit is haram are daunting for a new company, particularly during the chaos of an ongoing war. An original batch of 2,000 pairs turned out to be duds when the guys flew over to pick them up and, when the border was closed shortly after, they found themselves with a shipping container full of the raw materials for 4,000 pairs of shoes, but nowhere to assemble them. The first 4,000 Combat Flip Flops were made in Griff’s garage, outside Seattle.

Those were sold out before they even sat down to make them, the team was subsequently able to put a claymore/laptop bag into production in America and eventually found its shoe production facility in Bogota.

“So now we’re making bags in America, flip flops in Colombia and everyone wants to get back into Afghanistan,” Lee explains. “We found this woman-owned factory in Kabul and we said, ‘Hey, can you make a sarong?’”

“We didn’t know it at the time, but the woman who runs this factory is a ******* badass,” says Griff. “Her name’s Hassina Sherjan. She’s Afghan-born and American raised and, back in the 90s, heard that girls in Afghanistan were unable to go to school there. So, she flys over and engages with the Taliban about educating girls. They said no, so she started doing it anyways, funding underground schools and smuggling in teachers. Post-2001, she was able to start building schools for women who had not been educated under the Taliban and tackled the issue of giving them employable skills so they could contribute to the country.”

“It doubles the workforce, imagine the effect on the economy,” says Lee.

“She started a textile manufacturing facility and now we’re her only customer at a woman-run facility making sarongs and shemaghs,” says Griff.

“She started a textile manufacturing facility and now we’re her only customer at a woman-run facility making sarongs and shemaghs,” says Griff.

“We send them back pictures sent to us by our customers,” Lee explains. “Blonde haired, blue eyed American women wearing the sarongs they make on the beach. They make those in Afghanistan and that’s national pride. They haven’t had that since the 1960s. We’re giving them a sense of themselves.”

“The cool part is, we entered into an agreement where for every piece that we buy from them, they will match a donation to Aid Afghanistan for Education, so that each of these sarongs puts a girl in school for a week.”

The two ex-soldiers are adamant that employment, socially-conscious business and education are the most effective weapons against our enemies in the region. “Our economy is the most powerful weapon we have,” explains Griff. “That’s why we’re putting embargoes on Russia and why we’re crashing oil prices. It’s the most powerful tool we have against foreign forces we don’t like, period.”

The former Ranger concludes, “You know we’ve been at war in Afghanistan for 14 years now and we still don’t have a free trade agreement?”

[MIKA27]

Oh God, This Horrifying Footpath Sinkhole

If you’re a person with irrational fears of urban horror stories, stay far far away from this real life video of two people falling into a sinkhole in Seoul, a mysterious and apparently growing problem in the city, thanks in part (maybe?) to supertall skyscrapers. They step off a bus — only to have the ground literally fall away. Luckily, they somehow escape with only minor injuries.

UPI reports that the whole thing, captured by CCTV, happened near a construction site in the Yongsan area of Seoul. Officials are still looking into the exact cause of the 3m hole. Last year, there were reports of mysterious sinkholes around the construction site for Lotte World Tower in another part of Seoul.

So add sinkholes to the long list of pedestrian terrors. Ack, you can’t even avoid them like cellar grates.

[MIKA27]

Astronomers Discover Mysterious Black Hole As Massive As 12 Billion Suns

In a galaxy far, far away — 12.8 billion light-years away to be more exact — is a newly-discovered supermassive black hole that weighs as much as 12 billion of our suns. The most surprising thing about the black hole, though, is not its size but its age.

Black holes grow as they age, gobbling up gas and stars that foolishly venture too close. Astronomers have found more massive black holes before, but this one is surprisingly young. Because it is so far away, we “see” the black hole as it was 12.8 billion light-years ago, or only about 875 million years after the Big Bang. Astronomers are puzzled how this black hole grew so huge in so short a time.

The age of this new black hole doesn’t square with existing theories of black hole formation, but astronomers do offer up some alternatives. Perhaps early stars that collapsed into black holes were larger than we thought, or perhaps two black holes merged into one. National Geographic has more details about the birth of black holes.

Astronomers found this black hole by detecting light from the quasar that surrounds it. A quasar is made up of the material swirling around a black hole that has not yet fallen in; as the material accelerates, it gets hot and emits light. This quasar is the brightest — and its black hole the biggest — found in the early universe. It’s 40,000 times as luminous as the entire Milky Way.

Yet it is so far away that it is but a tiny pinprick of light on our most powerful telescopes.

[MIKA27]

First Images Of The World's Largest Aeroplane

Behold the first glimpse of Microsoft’s co-founder Paul Allen’s crazy space venture: the largest airplane in history, a 117m wingspan beast designed to carry and launch a giant rocket to space, with a combined weight of 540,000kg! Check out these two photos. They blew my mind.

But first, watch this video to observe the tail sections on the twin fuselage.

Now look at the scale of part of those tail sections compared to the humans in the photos.

Insane. This graphic compares the Roc — as they call it — with other planes, like the 747-8, the Airbus A-380-800 or the ill-fated Hughes H-4 Spruce Goose.

If you think this will go nowhere, remember that we are talking about Paul Allen — who has more money than god — and Gary L. Wentz Jr, the project leader who was the former Chief Engineer of the Science and Mission Systems at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama.

[MIKA27]

Aston Martin’s $2.3M Hypercar Is So Bonkers Buyers Need Special Training

Aston Martin has a new carbon-fiber rocket that makes its utterly insane One-77, a $1.2-million, handmade 700-horsepower supercar, look downright tame. It’s called the Vulcan, it’s got an 800-horsepower V12 and it will cost a cool $2.3 million. Oh, and Aston will build just two dozen of them.

The esteemed British automaker is following a path well travelled by automakers who have found it can be difficult to keep people coming back once you’ve sold them a seven-figure supercar. So they do what Hollywood does: release a sequel. It’s a strategy that has in the past year alone seen McLaren riff on the P1 by offering the P1 GTR and Ferrari top its LaFerrari with the FXX K. These are track-only machines, unfettered by things like emissions or safety regulations, allowing them to offer heart-stopping performance with prices to match.

Now comes Aston Martin, which blew everyone away a few years back with the stunning One-77. This time around it’s dropping jaws with the Vulcan, a name we like because it doesn’t seem like something pulled from a bag of Scrabble tiles. It’s made entirely of carbon fiber, with the 7.0-liter V12 mounted just behind the front axle and driving the rear wheels.

Reading Aston’s description of the car is dizzying. It’s all top-shelf stuff. Carbon monocoque. Magnesium torque tube and carbon driveshaft. Brembo calipers clamping down on carbon ceramic rotors. The six-speed gearbox is mounted at the back for better balance. No word on what this car weighs, but Aston says the power-to-weight ratio exceeds that of the GTE-class cars that compete in the World Endurance Championship races.

Made entirely out of carbon fiber, it uses a front mid-engined, rear-wheel drive layout.

Aston Martin breaks with the current trend in propulsion. The world’s fiercest cars have gone hybrid, but Aston is stuffing a naturally aspirated V12 under the hood. That’s right. No turbocharger, no supercharger.

The Vulcan is designed solely for the track, and Aston promises it “will comply with all relevant FIA race safety requirements.” That means you’ll be able to race it, no additional hardware required. When you’re dropping seven figures on a car, you can have it in any color you like, but we thoroughly recommend Aston’s traditional alloro green.

The world’s fiercest cars have gone hybrid in recent years, using motors to improve the acceleration provided by exploding gasoline. But the Vulcan isn’t battery powered.

In a further nod to the car’s racing cred, the decision to build just 24 of them is a nod to Aston’s history with 24-hour endurance races. There are few people on earth capable of exploring this car’s potential, which is why Aston’s here to help. Owners will be offered an “extensive and detailed program of intensive track driver training.” In other words, before the company turns you loose with a Vulcan, it will train you on something like the V12 Vantage S, which has just 560 horsepower. Students will then graduate to a Vantage GT4 race car and eventually to the Vulcan. You’ll also hone your skills a racing simulator so you can find, and exceed, your limits without the need for things like a tow truck or medevac helicopters.

Look for further specs and performance figures at the Geneva auto show next month, and for the car on race tracks by the end of the year.

[MIKA27]

BUFFALO TRACE SINGLE OAK BOURBON

For bourbon lovers who are looking to step up their game when it comes to tasting and being able to distinguish the nuances from different barrels, Single Oak Project Bourbon from Buffalo Trace is an incredible education. The project began in 1999 when Buffalo Trace picked 96 trees with different wood grains and divided them up, yielding 192 unique selections. Since 2011, a handful of the bourbon from those barrels has been released every three months, ending early this year. Get your hands on a few and see if you notice the variations that range from different recipes, varying stave seasoning, or just what warehouse they were stored in.

[MIKA27]

'This Is Really Extreme Science': Adrift in the Arctic Ice With a Shipload of Norwegians

In January, scientists wedged the R.V. Lance into this Arctic ice floe, thinking it would be their climate research station well into June. But fierce winds blew the ship far south, splintering the floe.

R.V. LANCE, 82.6 Degrees North—Curious polar bears, venturing too close to working scientists, have had to be scared off with flares shot from a gun. Temperatures plunging 40 degrees below zero have snapped cables and crippled electronic instruments. But after six weeks of total darkness, the faintest daylight is finally reaching the frozen Arctic Ocean, where a Norwegian research vessel has been drifting through the polar night, tethered to a block of sea ice.

Going with the floe is the whole idea. To better understand how sea ice behaves in the Arctic, scientists aboard the R.V. Lance have embarked on a six-month study, sponsored by the Norwegian Polar Institute (NPI), to closely monitor sea ice across its entire seasonal life cycle—from the time when the new ice forms in winter until it melts in early summer.

Although Norwegians have a long history of polar exploration—in the coming months the Lance should cross the path of the illustrious Fram, the ship on which Fridtjof Nansen and his crew allowed themselves to be locked in the ice in 1893—this is still an unprecedented scientific expedition. (Read about the voyage of theFram.)

"Most scientific cruises to the Arctic are conducted in summer, and this is where we have the most data," says Gunnar Spreen, an NPI sea-ice physicist on board the Lance. "The continuous changes that occur from winter into spring is a huge gap in our understanding, for example, the way the Arctic ecosystem wakes up in the spring or how melt ponds form on top of sea ice."

Departing in early January from Spitsbergen, an island in the Svalbard archipelago, a Norwegian Coast Guard vessel broke a path for the Lance north through the growing winter sea ice to the 83rd parallel, where it began its wayward drift. Buoys, oceanographic instruments, ice-coring drills, air-particle sensors, a weather mast—a full laboratory—were deployed across a kilometer-wide (0.6 mile) floe, its sectors given cheeky nicknames like "no walk land" and "end of the world."

Last week photographer Nick Cobbing and I reached the Lance by Coast Guard ship and then helicopter from Longyearbyen, the world's northernmost town. We joined a second shift of scientists—hailing from Norway, Russia, Korea, Japan, Portugal, Germany, France, Denmark, and the United States—who will continue the study. In a series of dispatches over the next four weeks, we'll be capturing some of the action unfolding here at the top of the globe.

Preparing to abandon the floe, scientists retrieve rods they'd used to mark transects across the ice. Their unprecedented six-month study is looking at sea ice from the time it forms until it melts.

A Cap That Cools

For thousands of years, this vast blanket of bright white ice floating on the surface of the Arctic has cooled the planet by reflecting sunlight back into space. Though the ice cap has always expanded and contracted with the seasons, reaching its maximum extent in March and its minimum in September, over the past two decades it's been shrinking dramatically.

In September 2012, according to the National Snow and Ice Data Center, the ice cover was the smallest ever documented—just 52 percent of the average for the period 1981 to 2010. The ice is getting thinner as well. In September 2012 its total volume was only about 40 percent of the long-term average. What was once mostly a layer of thick ice floes that lingered for years has given way to large tracts of thin ice that forms and melts during a single year.

The loss of ice accelerates Arctic warming. Scientists have found that first-year ice reflects about 10 percent less solar energy than multiyear ice. That means it melts faster—it loses about five inches (13 centimeters) a month more in thickness than does multiyear ice, according to NPI data. As ice melts and exposes darker ocean water, more solar energy is absorbed by the water, producing clouds and escalating temperatures.

Indeed, data show that the temperatures in the Arctic have been warming twice as fast as the global average. "The results come out strongly in model outputs," explains Kim Holmén, NPI's international director. "The Arctic warms first, most, and fastest." All climate models are now in agreement: Coverage of summer sea ice will continue to decline. Later in this century it will be possible to sail across the open ocean to the North Pole.

This will of course have disastrous consequences for the entire ecosystem that depends on sea ice, from polar bears to the minuscule phytoplankton at the opposite end of the food chain. The loss of Arctic ice will likely affect weather patterns across the entire Northern Hemisphere as well. Some scientists already see a link to the polar vortex that's been bringing deep cold again to the eastern United States.

The K.V. Svalbard, a Norwegian icebreaker, heads back to the Lance to guide it deeper into the growing ice pack and deliver a second crew of researchers.

Arctic Data Dive

Over the course of NPI's six-month-long study (January 9 to June 27), scientists will plunge into nitty-gritty measurements of how sea ice behaves and all the factors that affect it, from the warmth and turbulence of the ocean below to the snow and clouds above it. They'll study the underside of the ice, and the algae that bloom below it, with autonomous and remotely operated vehicles.

"Every effort to enable a better description of how ice behaves is important for making our climate models better," says Holmén. For other scientists working with data collected by satellites or airplanes, the area around the Lance will become a unique ground-truth reference point.

For now, though, the crew and science team are recovering from a small setback. Back in January a Norwegian Coast Guard icebreaker, the K.V. Svalbard, had escorted the Lance to a position that was thought to be securely within the growing ice pack. But strong winds over the past six weeks pushed the vessel south, too close to the crackled edge of the ice. The day before Cobbing and I arrived from Spitsbergen with the new crop of scientists, the floe under study splintered into shards.

For three days and nights, in temperatures well below zero, the scientists scrambled to salvage their instruments, with mixed results. "It's the Arctic that's controlling our expedition, and the Arctic is unpredictable," said Amelie Meyer, an oceanographer with NPI. "We're going to break instruments, we're not going to be where we think we're going to be, and we don't know what the weather will bring us. This is really extreme science."

As I write, on Sunday, February 22, the K.V. Svalbard is cutting a new path for us, leading the Lance farther north and east, deeper into the ice. Within a few days we hope to begin drifting again.

That's the plan, anyway. Stay tuned.

Dmitry Divine of the Norwegian Polar Institute and other scientists scramble to gather data and instruments to take back to the Lance.

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