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

[MIKA27]

John Oliver Reminds Us That America's Bridges Are S**t, And No One Cares

America’s cities haven’t devolved into a post-apocalyptic hellscape yet, but they do seem to be teetering on the brink of literal collapse. And no one in Congress seems to care enough to do a damn thing anything about it.

Obviously the mere mention of the word “infrastructure” doesn’t exactly send tingles shooting up anyone’s spine, but the fact that the nation’s bridges, roads, and dams seem to be constantly on the brink of collapse should.

Of course, no one wants to spend the tax dollars necessary to get us out of our long-overlooked mess. And while John Boehner has been spent years hollering that we need to turn things around, his refusal to back the necessary tax increase necessary makes that a little difficult.

What’s more, when Last Week Tonight tried to reach out to Boehner for some concrete examples of his actual plans, they were met with a big ol’ silence.

[MIKA27]

CHILEAN VOLCANO SPEWS A SPECTACULAR LAVA FOUNTAIN

EARLY THIS MORNING, Villarrica in Chile produced a spectacular eruption that sent a lava fountain hundreds of meters over the volcano’s summit crater (see above). The eruption spread ash over the neighboring region and an accompanying lava flow melted snow on the slopes of the volcano (see below) creating some small volcanic mudflows and debris flows. Currently, over 3,300 people have been evacuated from the small towns around Villarrica, including the vacation town of Pucón. The eruption started at ~3 a.m. (local time) and TV footage showed the deluge of lava bombs that rained down on the slopes during the peak of the eruption. The timelapse video (see below) taken by POVI shows the progression of the eruption from small explosions to the full on lava fountaining.

http://youtu.be/LTWfxOxuIGA

This eruption wasn’t entirely unexpected — over the last few weeks the volcano had been seeing increasing signs of unrest including much more activity from the summit vent. Normally a lava lake resides at Villarrica’s summit (one that you could hike to and see when conditions were right) but recently the volcano had started throwing bombs and scoria out and covering the top of Villarrica with dark grey volcanic debris. This new eruption was much more impressive than that, with a towering lava fountain producing an ash plume that reached a few kilometers above the volcano. By the time dawn broke (see below), the current eruption had ceased, but glowing lava and a thick cover of dark grey volcanic debris blanketed Villarrica. Seismicity remains high under Villarrica even after the eruption, suggesting that we likely have no seen the end of this unrest.

The slopes of Villarrica after the March 3 eruption, with dark grey volcanic tephra, along with mudflows produced by lava fountaining and flows.

Although Villarrica has produced a multitude of small eruptions over the past few decades, this is the most vigorous in at least 20 years. The eruption itself is very similar to one we saw at Villarrica’s neighbor, Llaima, in 2009 (along with other volcanoes like Villarrica, including Italy’s Etna.) These lava fountains are typical for strong strombolian style eruptions where gas-charged basaltic lava erupts vigorously, creating the fountaining that sends lava hundreds of meters upwards. As that vigor wanes, lava flows continue with new basaltic lava.

Villarrica has four webcams pointed as its slopes, so if activity resumes, you can be sure to be able to catch it there.

[MIKA27]

Weasel photographed riding on a woodpecker's back

Amateur photographer Martin Le-May, from Essex, has recorded the extraordinary image of a weasel riding on the back of a green woodpecker as it flies through the air.

The photograph was taken at Hornchurch Country Park in east London on Monday afternoon.

Speaking to BBC News, Mr Le-May said he had managed to capture the moment while he was out walking with his wife Ann.

He said: "I heard a distressed squawking noise and feared the worst.

"I soon realised it was a woodpecker with some kind of small mammal on its back.

"I think we may have distracted the weasel as when the woodpecker landed it managed to escape and the weasel ran into the grass."

Mr Le-May said he was astounded by the reaction to the picture on social media.

The wildlife shot has been retweeted several thousand times.

Martin Le-May: "It's almost a dream that you take a photograph that lots and lots of people not only look at but like"

He said; "I'm so proud so many people are getting to see my image. I'm totally taken aback by the response to it."

'Ferocious as a lion'

Wildlife expert Lucy Cooke told the BBC News Channel: "This is a truly extraordinary image.

"The green woodpecker is a ground-feeding bird, but weasels normally attack rabbits. The woodpecker is not its usual prey.

"But weasels are fearless.

"A female weasel weighs less than a Mars Bar but is as ferocious as a lion, so this is why the woodpecker would have been able to take off with it on its back."

Wildlife presenter Steve Backshall says he has no reason to doubt the photo is real

Wildlife presenter Steve Backshall agrees that while highly unusual it is not totally unheard of and has "no reason to doubt" the photo.

He compared the woodpecker to other animals like leaf cutter ants and rhino beetles, which can carry 850 times their body weight.

He said: "The weasel is pretty fascinating as well. It can kill things much bigger than itself, so it's an impressive little creature when you think about its size."

[MIKA27]

Mount Everest, Toilet

Sir Edmund Hillary, Mount Everest's iconic conqueror, once said "It is not the mountain we conquer, but ourselves." Increasingly though, since Hillary and Sherpa Tenzing Norgay first reached the summit in 1953, the world's tallest mountain has become ourselves.

A new scourge facing Mount Everest, according to Ang Tshering, the head of Nepal’s mountaineering association, is human waste. “Climbers usually dig holes in the snow for their toilet use and leave the human waste there,” the AP reported on Tuesday. If there is too much waste in a single hole, the material cannot decompose properly.

Tshering also noted that hundreds of foreign climbers visit the site each year and that there is no plumbing above base camp. In addition to making the mountain less pristine, officials say the dumping, if you will, also poses a health hazard.

The association has a detailed guide for the handling of human waste, dedicating as many lines of instruction to the endeavor as the disposal of garbage. Nepal requires climbers to bring down everything they take up or lose a $4,000 deposit, but there is no such penalty for improperly disposing of organic material. Wildlife can be drawn to the unfamiliar scent and vegetation can be disturbed, according to the association. The group is drawing attention to the hazard because the climbing season begins this week and as more adventurers chase the peak, camps are being spoiled with human waste.

Writing in The Atlantic, Kaid Benfield detailed an annual voyage by locals called the Eco Everest Expedition, which in 2011, sought to "bring down 8,800 pounds (4,000 kilograms) of garbage from the lower part of the mountain and another 2,200 pounds (1,000 kilograms) from near the 29,035-foot (8,850-meter) summit. As he writes, that detritus includes "empty oxygen bottles, ropes, tents, and other garbage."

Then, there are the human deaths on the mountain which, as Svati Kirsten Narula pointed out last year, total nearly 900 from 1950 until today. Some 16 climbers died in one deadly ice release last year, which some blamed on another man-made phenomenon: global warming.

[MIKA27]

The Amazing Rise and Fall of a Rodent Utopia

Human beings seem to have a tendency to take our society for granted. We expect that rules will be followed and that the comfortable world around us will continue to run smoothly as it always has. Even as the populations of major cities around the world soar, we trust that society will stand strong under the weight of so many souls and guide us towards a prosperous future. Those who lead comfortable lives become complacent, confident in their place in the world, their purpose, and their legacy. What many do not understand is just how thin a thread the balance of society often teeters upon and just how close the tipping point may loom. In 1972, one animal behaviorist by the name of John Calhoun got a frightening glimpse of what potential mayhem lurks behind the shiny veneer of our civilized society when he created a utopian paradise for rats that spectacularly disintegrated before his eyes, and shone a light on the dark forces that influence us at the basest levels.

John Calhoun was an ethologist and animal behaviorist who had had a long standing interest in how rodents interact and create societies. Starting in 1947, Calhoun began experimenting with rats and mice on a rural property in Rockville, Maryland in order to investigate the behavioral effects on the animals when provided with unlimited food and resources; essentially a rodent paradise. One of his main interests was the potential effects of overcrowding on human society and behavior, which was seen as a very real potential problem in the post-war 1940s, where worldwide populations were growing rapidly. In his early experiments, Calhoun observed a colony of Norway rats for 28 months, during which time he provided the animals with as much food as they needed as well as total safety from predators. It was expected that the population would skyrocket uncontrollably to around 5,000 animals during this period of time, however, the population oddly never went past 200. He also noticed that the colony split into smaller, separate groups of no more than 12 individuals per group.

John B. Calhoun – ethologist and behavioral researcher

Intrigued by these results, Calhoun continued his work with rats and mice, and finally in 1958 he created his own lab in the second floor of a barn from which to launch his most ambitious series of experiments yet, which consisted of creating a series of what he called “Universes” which were habitats designed to be rodent utopias, free of disease, predators, and providing unlimited resources. In each instance, the rodent populations experienced a rapid rise in population followed by a levelling off that seemed to go hand in hand with a variety of unusual, deviant behaviors, before finally the birthrate screeched to a halt, after which the rodent society would implode and cease to exist.

Calhoun would write a prominent paper on the experiments in 1962 called Population density and social pathology, which was published in Scientific American and outlined his observations of the effects of overcrowding on rodent behavior. In the paper, he coined the term “behavioral sink,” which referred to societal collapse in the face of behavioral degradation and signifying a point of no return leading to extinction marked by a reversion to deviant acts caused by overcrowding. The paper would put the sobering potential effects of overpopulation into the public consciousness and people were already comparing the findings made in these early experiments to human society. This paper became incredibly influential in the field of psychology and is still heavily referenced to this day.

A schematic of one of Calhoun’s early experiments.

These experiments culminated in Calhoun’s most famous and ambitious experiment of them all, “Universe 25.” Calhoun created a complex, controlled environment that was a large room that measured 2.7 meters square and was split into 4 separate interconnected pens. Surrounding this Universe were 16 tunnels leading to food, water, and various burrows, and there was a total of 256 “apartments,” each able to accommodate up to 15 mice, all connected for easy access by a series of ramps. Four breeding pairs of mice were introduced to this spacious enclosure and were given unlimited, easy access to food and water, with their only limiting factor being the size of their habitat. This sort of habitat was referred to as a “mortality-inhibiting environment,” basically with the aim of limiting transmittable diseases, providing limitless food, water, and nesting material, and basically doing everything possible to make sure the rats didn’t die; in essence emulating the conditions of humans in similar environments. The temperature was kept at a constant, balmy 20 degrees Celsius or more, and the mice had free reign to roam wherever they liked within the habitat. Throughout the whole experiment the enclosure would be kept clean and disease free, with the health of the mice constantly monitored by veterinarians. The only limitation faced by the mice would be that of physical space. Then Calhoun sat back and waited to see what would happen.

The rodents first spent around 104 days getting accustomed to their environment, a phase that Calhoun referred to as the “strive period,” or an initial period of adjustment when the mice were basically just establishing territories and creating nests. Then the rat population at first began to increase at a rapid rate as predicted, a phase that was called “the exploit period.” During this phase, the rat population of Universe 25 roughly doubled every 55 days until by day 315 their numbers had reached 620. At this point, the large enclosure was becoming a bit crowded in some places and the birthrate plunged to a much lower rate, about one third of what it had been before. It was also noticed that food was being consumed more in certain areas, despite the fact that all of the compartments were identical. The mice began to associate eating and drinking with being with others, rarely if ever eating alone, and the population started to gravitate towards certain compartments where all of the eating took place. This made some apartments and compartments crowded well beyond their intended capacity while others remained sparsely populated or even empty. The enclosure wasn’t truly overcrowded, as it had been designed for up to 3,000 mice, but rather, it had developed a very unbalanced distribution of individuals. This persistent gathering and eating in overcrowded gathering points seemed to result in three times more socially immature mice than socially established ones, suggesting that they were somehow losing their ability to form social bonds. That was around the time when the perfect society of unlimited resources that Calhoun had so meticulously created began to crumble.

Universe 25

From around Day 315 of the experiment, a wide variety of odd behavior started to surface among the animals. Some male mice who had no social role in the face of the burgeoning population suddenly seemed to lose their sense of purpose and became detached from these natural roles. They stopped trying to defend their own territory or pregnant females, lost interest in those around them, and whereas they would normally emigrate to other broods they found none willing to accept them and so became listless wanderers tending to congregate in the center of the Universe where they spent their days mindlessly eating or fighting amongst themselves. These males were seen as the “outcasts” of the society. The more dominant males among these became markedly more vicious and violent, attacking others without provocation and fighting for no apparent reason. Many of these roving males would roam about attacking or mounting other mice indiscriminately, regardless of gender or relation. The non-dominant males conversely became extremely meek and passive, with some of them becoming the targets of repeated attacks by other males while refusing to fight back. In some cases, cannibalism occurred among the mice, and there was generally a descent into feral, violent behavior punctuated by intense bursts of shocking brutality.

The female mice were not having much more luck. In the absence of any males willing to protect their nests, mothers began to become highly aggressive towards trespassers, essentially taking on the role typically reserved for the males. Unfortunately, this went into overdrive. Young mice were banished before they were weaned and often mothers ignored their young or seemingly forgot about them. Some females became unusually aggressive towards even their own offspring and would even sometimes attack and kill their own young, while others became morose hermits who refused to mate. All of this led to a quickly sinking birthrate and an infant mortality rate of over 90% in some areas of the enclosure. This era of bursts of explosive violence and hypersexual behavior came to be known as the “stagnation phase,” or “equilibrium period.” Calhoun speculated that a lack of social roles to fill combined with constant, unwanted social and physical contact in the face of the increased population density was at the root of the aggression, withdrawal, and sexual deviancy.

The final phase of the experiment was ominously referred to as “the death phase” or “die period.” By Day 560, the population increase had plunged to next to nothing, partly due to the alarming mortality rate that had reached nearly 100% and partly due to a disinterested attitude towards procreation that began to be exhibited in many of the male mice. Amid all of this turmoil and degradation within Universe 25, there was also a new generation of mice emerging that had not ever been subjected to a normal social upbringing and showed absolutely no interest in fighting, courtship, mating, raising young, or much of anything really. Calhoun referred to this aberrant group of mice as “the beautiful ones.” These “beautiful ones” were completely detached from society, had completely lost touch with normal mouse behavior, and spent all of their time eating, sleeping, or incessantly grooming and preening themselves, leading them to having a fine, robust, healthy appearance with keen and alert eyes, hence their name. Calhoun often referred to these mice as “handsome,” however, their beauty was truly only skin deep. Inside they were empty. The beautiful ones lived peacefully secluded and withdrawn from the rest of the society in the less crowded areas; eating, sleeping, avoiding conflict, grooming, and not mating in any way, and seemed to be spared any violence that broke out among the other mice, yet they did nothing to further the society either. They had essentially lost all of their desire to interact with others and spent their days in a lackadaisical daze.

Calhoun liked to refer to this drastic detachment and lack of will to participate in society as the “first death,” or basically the death of the animal’s spirit, which would occur before the “second death,” or physical death of the body. Once this “first death” was reached, the mice were no longer really mice anymore but rather empty husks merely killing time awaiting the inevitable death of their body and an end to their pointless existence. They had in a sense lost all will to live in any useful manner.

Calhoun would later muse on the reasons behind the rise of these “beautiful ones,” these mice which were healthy in appearance yet had died in spirit. He theorized that mice were in many respects like mankind, and that in the absence of any tension, pressure, or stress they had lost their sense of purpose and identity. With an overabundance of vital resources and no need to do anything to obtain them, the need for societal roles or jobs had faded, leaving the mice in a state of being unable and/or unwilling to perform all but the most basic functions of sustaining physiological life such as eating and sleeping. In essence, the thinking was that these mice, and indeed it could be inferred human beings as well, required conditions of stress and pressure in order to have a destiny and a desire to engage in society.

With the majority of mice becoming those who refused to mate, or indeed perform any useful societal functions at all, the population increase of Universe 25 ceased altogether, with the last conception recorded at Day 920. By this time the population had reached its peak of 2,200 individuals, which was somewhat crowded but still well under the enclosure’s maximum capacity of 3,000. With zero population increase, a shocking mortality rate, and a majority population now completely disinterested in procreation and living on the upper levels of the enclosure in seclusion, the rest of the remaining mice were still forming marauding gangs, congregating into crowded areas and devolving into a morass of endemic violence and cannibalism, with many of them completely missing tails or exhibiting brutal battle scars. Bear in mind that even at this turbulent point in time, the mice still had free access to all of the food and resources they could ever need. This was the unstoppable slide to catastrophe, the point of no return, the “behavioral sink” that Calhoun had talked about, and the mouse utopia’s apocalypse came crashing down as all of these factors conspired to cause the population to start barrelling rapidly towards extinction until there were none left.

Calhoun was alarmed by the spectacular descent into ruin of the colony, and before the apocalyptic end of the “death phase,” he removed a few of the “beautiful ones” for the purpose of seeing if they could reintegrate into a mouse society under different conditions. A few small groups of these “beautiful ones” were removed from Universe 25 and placed in equally ideal conditions, yet with a small population and unlimited space. They were essentially placed in the same conditions that had been faced by the original breeding pairs of Universe 25, and it was expected they would snap out of their daze and begin populating the new habitat, in essence rebuilding society. Calhoun and associates were somewhat taken aback when the mice the mice displayed absolutely no change in their previous behavior. They continued to show a complete disinterest in social interactions or reproduction, and refused to mate, which led to no new births in the new habitat whatsoever. In the end, this small group of mice died of old age, having never shown the slightest interest in repopulating or rebuilding their society, despite living in ideal conditions. Calhoun would conclude his study on an ominous note, saying:

For an animal so simple as a mouse, the most complex behaviors involve the interrelated set of courtship, maternal care, territorial defense and hierarchical intragroup and intergroup social organization. When behaviors related to these functions fail to mature, there is no development of social organization and no reproduction. As in the case of my study reported above, all members or the population will age and eventually die. The species will die out. For an animal so complex as man, there is no logical reason why a comparable sequence of events should not also lead to species extinction. If opportunities for role fulfilment fall far short of the demand by those capable of filling roles, and having expectations to do so, only violence and disruption of social organization can follow. Individuals born under these circumstances will be so out of touch with reality as to be incapable even of alienation. Their most complex behaviors will become fragmented. Acquisition, creation and utilization of ideas appropriate for life in a post-industrial cultural-conceptual-technological society will have been blocked. Just as biological generativity in the mouse involves this species’ most complex behaviors, so does ideational generativity for man. Loss of these respective complex behaviors means death of the species.

Calhoun and his mice

Calhoun’s findings and observations on Universe 25 were published in the rather spookily titled paper Death Squared: The Explosive Growth and Demise of a Mouse Population, which immediately shot into the public consciousness and became at once controversial and a sobering look into what could happen to humans as well. It was also widely misinterpreted and misunderstood. The public mostly took the findings in a negative way, and with the country as it was at the time why wouldn’t they? After all, the Universe 25 study was done at a time when the population was soaring, urbanization was burgeoning, and at around the same time as incidences of urban violence such as the Watts Riots in 1965 and widespread civil unrest across the country in in the wake of the Martin Luther King Jr. assassination in 1968. Everywhere one turned it seemed that there was some riot, mass panic, outbreak of violence, or other signs of an imminent breakdown of social order stemming from the crowd, and Calhoun’s study of Universe 25 seemed to eerily mirror the world that seemed to be unravelling around them.

The study seemed to confirm the public’s darkest fears; that society had reached a tipping point towards disaster and that overcrowding directly equated to doom and degeneracy, nihilism and inevitable collapse. In certainly didn’t help matters that various books and movies were being released at the time that approached this topic in a negative way, such as Soylent Green in 1973, which depicts an overpopulated society unknowingly being fed the remains of the dead, as well as the book A Clockwork Orange in the 60s with its roving gangs of directionless, ultraviolent hooligans, among many others. In light of all of this, Calhoun’s paper became a dire warning, an omen even, of things to come and fueled a particular bleak, pessimistic public attitude.

Yet for all of this apocalyptic talk of looming societal collapse and Calhoun’s own somber, portentous wording, he in fact did not really intend to prove that overcrowding and lack of social roles would irreversibly lead to the inevitable downfall of mankind. Certainly Calhoun saw his mice as a social, psychological and physiological model for humankind, and his liberal use of anthropomorphic terminology such as “apartments,” “tower blocks,” “dropouts,” “juvenile delinquents,” and “beautiful ones” reflected that, but his real intentions were actually more positive than they seemed to most who had read his work. Although he saw the fate of his mice as a metaphor for the potential fate of humankind, Calhoun was more interested in how human beings had the power to reverse this trend; to heal, and to overcome the type of spiraling collapse that had befallen Universe 25. He even famously said himself:

I shall largely speak of mice, but my thoughts are on man, on healing, on life and its evolution. Threatening life and evolution are the two deaths, death of the spirit and death of the body.

Calhoun was dismayed that his work had been embraced by the portion of society that saw nothing but hopelessness in store for mankind, yet he tried to clarify his intent and put a positive spin on it. He was quick to point out that Universe 25, with its unlimited infinite resources in a limited space, was a decidedly unnatural environment and that it did not necessarily reflect the reality that we were faced with. He further theorized that mankind had averted a similar catastrophe because, unlike the mice, we have a different psychological sense of space and exhibit an understanding of what he called “conceptual space,” which meant that we are able to utilize ideas for the purpose of mining resources and guiding social interactions. In short, he believed that mankind’s self-awareness and knack for creativity and design could solve our problems and help us avoid the fate of the mice of Universe 25.

Calhoun had even observed this among the mice to some extent, noting that the ones that had become resourceful and creative, as well as those more able to handle social interactions, had been the ones most likely to survive the world crumbling around them. In spite of the negative connotations related to his work, Calhoun remained hopeful that mankind could utilize our innovation, creativity, imagination, and positivity to overcome our limitations. However, not everything was a cheerful, sunny vision of the future.

For all of his optimism for the future and faith in mankind’s ability to change it, Calhoun still warned that in spite of our sophistication and intelligence as a species, we still faced grave danger if we did nothing to change the way our cities operated. He still insisted that human society would face explosive collapse once the number of people capable of filling societal roles dramatically exceeded the number of roles available. The behavioral sink still loomed threateningly over us, and Calhoun maintained that once humanity had reached this event horizon, pathological behavior and deviancy would spiral out of control and we would have reached a tipping point from which there would be no return, just as had happened with the mice of Universe 25. If we reached that point, he theorized, we were doomed.

In order to avoid that doom, Calhoun continued his work well after the fall of Universe 25 with the intent of finding ways to minimize the negative effects of overcrowding and simultaneously maximize creativity. One of his more unusual ideas was to promote space colonization to advance our society, even going so far as to organize a multidisciplinary group called the Space Cadets to research and advocate this, but he also focused closer to home. There was the strong belief that the way we lived could be profoundly impacted by the way cities were designed. He wanted to find ways to creatively change our behaviors and how our cities were designed in order to promote innovation and positive interaction between us, and to prevent stagnation so that we would not reach that dreaded behavioral sink that would spell our certain extinction. To this end, Calhoun would go on to create over 100 additional rodent Universes and his work would become influential in city planning philosophies all over the world.

So where does this leave us as a species? In modern times more than half of the Earth’s population is packed into ever growing, ever more crowded cities. Is our rapidly urbanized society really as unshakeable and stable as we like to think it is? Are we experiencing the same effects that befell Universe 25 and if so, which phase are we at? If we do not change how we think about each other, our surroundings, and the way we live are we going to emerge unscathed or are we already firmly into the rut that will send us careening past the point of no return to a dismal end? Is it already too late? No matter how much stock one puts into Calhoun’s findings and how they relate to human society, the rise of the utopia of Universe 25 and its spectacular descent into hell certainly seems worth pondering. As the world population hurtles towards an estimated 9.6 billion people by 2050, it seems that there are perhaps some profound messages on the nature of our society and psyche to be found here that may help us come to an understanding of how safe we really are and what we can do to improve our world.

[MIKA27]

UFO Appears on News Channel Broadcast in Argentina

Repeat after me: “How can newscasters who get paid to report the news not see the UFO flying behind them???” That’s what a lot of people are asking after viewing a YouTube video of a news program in Argentina that shows a large UFO flying across the sky behind the three seemingly oblivious newscasters. What happened?

The telecast appears to have taken place on February 28, 2015, and the video was uploaded one or two days later. While it looks like the newscasters are sitting in front of a large picture window, it’s more likely that the image behind them is coming live from a camera on the roof of the studio. That would explain why neither the newscasters nor the camera operators in front of them noticed the UFO at the time it was visible to viewers. But what about the producers in the control booth and the millions (it’s a popular channel) of viewers of the cable news network TN, which stands for Todo Noticias or All News? Isn’t this news?

Magnified image of UFO on Argentine newscast

The disc-shaped UFO crosses the entire screen, at one point passing behind a multi-story building. It appears to be much larger than a drone and traveling too fast to be an odd-shaped blimp, airship or balloon. While the quality is good, it’s not clear enough for the magnification to help make a positive identification of the craft.

Some of the commenters on the YouTube page say they saw the broadcast and others report they saw the actual UFO flying over Buenos Aires. The network website doesn’t appear to acknowledge the UFO and has no explanation of the video.

This is the second UFO sighting during a newscast in South America in less than a month. In early February in Peru, a TV crew shooting a television show on crime hosted by a local politician recorded a purple UFO hovering in the sky. Lima Congressman Renzo Reggiardo stopped his filming and allowed the crew to observe the UFO along with the numerous people in the area who also saw it. It’s been a month and no explanation has been given for that purple UFO.

http://youtu.be/Wpxv5y_BG9E

Two UFOs recorded by television cameras in South American in less than a month and no one is talking, go figure..

[MIKA27]

Petraeus Mistress Got Black Books Full of Code Words, Spy Names, and Obama Briefings

David Petraeus, a retired four-star general and former director of the CIA, pleaded guilty Tuesday to giving highly classified information to his ex-mistress. The information came in the form of eight black books that contained everything from identities of covert officers to discussions with President Obama.

The Justice Department and Federal Bureau of Investigation alleged back in 2012 that Petraeus gave secret information to Paula Broadwell, but the seriousness of the information wasn’t clear until now.

While he was commander of coalition forces in Afghanistan, Petraeus “maintained bound, five-by-eight inch notebooks that contained his daily schedule and classified and unclassified notes he took during official meetings, conferences and briefings,” the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Western District of North Carolina writes in a statement of fact regarding the case.

The notebooks had black covers with Petraeus’s business card taped on the front of each of them.

All eight books “collectively contained classified information regarding the identifies of covert officers, war strategy, intelligence capabilities and mechanisms, diplomatic discussions, quotes and deliberative discussions from high-level National Security Council meetings… and discussions with the president of the United States.”

The books also contained “national defense information, including top secret/SCI and code word information,” according to the court papers. In other words: These weren’t just ordinary secrets. This was highly, highly classified material.

While a historian from the Department of Defense gathered and organized classified materials that Petraeus collected while serving in the Pentagon, he “never provided the black books to his DOD historian.”

Instead, Petraeus kept the black books in a “rucksack” in his home, according to a conversation recorded by biographer and mistress Paula Broadwell in 2011.

“They are highly classified, some of them… I mean there’s code word stuff in there,” Petraeus said. Nevertheless, he emailed her and agreed to provide the black books.

Then Petraeus personally delivered the black books to a residence where Broadwell was staying in Washington, D.C. A few days later, he returned to retrieve them.

On Oct. 26, 2012, Petraeus was interviewed by FBI agents in CIA headquarters while he was still director. Petraeus told them he had never provided any classified information to Broadwell or facilitated her provision of the information.

“These statements were false. Defendant David Howell Petraeus then and there knew that he previously shared the black books with his biographer.”

On Nov. 9, 2012, Petraeus resigned from the CIA following the revelation of his affair with Broadwell. This came after Tampa socialite Jill Kelley told the FBI that Broadwell was harassing her via email. The FBI traced Broadwell’s emails and discovered she was communicating with Petraeus. The FBI told Petraeus’s boss, Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, of the suspected affair.

Upon leaving Langley, Petraeus signed a nondisclosure agreement saying “I gave my assurance that there is no classified material in my possession, custody, or control at this time.” This was when the black books, full of such material, were in his home.

Six months later, in April 2013, the FBI executed a search warrant on the Petraeus residence and seized the black books from an “unlocked desk drawer” on the first floor.

The U.S. Attorney writes that Petraeus “unlawfully and knowingly remove[d] such documents and materials without authority and thereafter intentionally retained” them in locations unauthorized for their retention.

Even now, more than two years after his downfall, news about Petraeus’s plea deal was met, in parts of the Pentagon, with shock. Some gasped upon learning the news that the most celebrated general since 9/11 was now pleading guilty to lying to his government.

At his height, Petraeus was the public face on an unpopular war who seemingly staved off violence in Iraq, albeit temporarily. Petraeus did it, in part, by bypassing the chain of command as the Iraq commander, speaking directly to then-President George W. Bush, the media, and the American public. His tactics and public persona are so unique that military academies students and lecturers still debate his approach.

Such standout conduct led to a perception that the generals no longer answered to a civilian leadership. And that set off tensions between the military and its civilian leadership that remain today. In his first weeks as defense secretary, Ashton Carter has repeatedly reminded commanders and troops of the importance of the chain of command.

Neither the news that Petraeus’s name appears as the defendant on a charging sheet or that he lied to federal investigators from his Langley office shook his standing in the military community—or so it seemed.

Even those who are outraged would never publicly say so. The lingering fear that confronting Petraeus could end one’s careers remains within the ranks.

Petraeus pleaded guilty to one count of unauthorized removal and retention of classified material. The deal lets Petraeus avoid a long, public trial that would reveal details of his affair with Broadwell (he’s still married to Holly Petraeus) and further sully the reputation of the best-known general of his generation.

The misdemeanor charge carries with it a one-year prison sentence, but prosecutors have suggested two years probation and a $40,000 fine. Petraeus awaits sentencing by a judge. It’s unclear if Petraeus would be stripped of his security clearance, which he kept after resigning from the CIA.

[MIKA27]

Is the Boston Bomb-Maker on the Loose?

Lawyers in the case against 21-year-old Boston Marathon bombing suspect Dzhokar Tsarnaev are set to present their opening statements on Wednesday. He’s pleading not guilty to all 30 charges against him, 17 of which carry the death penalty. The case will likely be tried in two phases, one where the jury decides if he’s guilty, and if they do, another trial will follow where the jury then decides whether to not to sentence him to death.

The general prediction is that there will indeed be a sentencing trial. Most people in eastern Massachusetts think Tsarnaev is guilty.

Sixty-eight percent of people called in the first phase of jury selection to be exact, and about 90 percent think he is guilty or probably guilty, according to a Boston Globe poll. Judging from pretrial motions, even though Tsarnaev is pleading not guilty, his lawyers don’t plan to shake the assumption of his guilt up entirely. In fact, the not-guilty plea may serve more as a legal strategy to lay the grounds for an appeal if he is sentenced to death.

Instead his lawyers seem poised to argue that Dzhokhar, who was 19 years old at the time of the marathon bombings, was coerced into setting off the deadly bombs by his older and more radical 26-year-old brother Tamerlan, who died in a shootout with police.

But while it’s true that Tsarnaev is facing “seemingly overwhelming evidence,” there is still a lot about the bombing that the public—and more importantly, the government—still doesn’t know.

Specifically, information regarding bombs themselves.

The government first admitted that there was a lingering mystery surrounding the explosives in a pretrial argument last May. The defense was attempting to bar the government from using Tsarnaev’s statements to FBI agents from his hospital bed at the Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center shortly after he was detained.

He was suffering from gunshot wounds to the throat and head. The agents never read his Miranda rights and denied his initial requests for an attorney.

The government justified this, citing a public safety exception, arguing that the pressure cooker bombs set off at the marathon finish lead investigators to believe the Tsarnaevs may have had co-conspirators.

“These relatively sophisticated devices would have been difficult for the Tsarnaevs to fabricate successfully without training or assistance from others,” said the Massachusetts U.S. Attorney’s Office.

The office also countered earlier reports leaked by anonymous law enforcement sources that the bombs were built at Tsarnaev’s apartment.

They added that Tsarnaev would have had to crush and empty hundreds of fireworks filled with fine black powder to obtain enough explosive fuel. Investigators expected to find traces of this powder, “Yet searches of the Tsarnaevs’ residences, three vehicles, and other locations associated with them yielded virtually no traces of black powder, again strongly suggesting that others had built, or at least helped the Tsarnaevs build, the bombs, and thus might have built more.”

More than a year after the attack, the government seemed to be countering the established narrative that the Tsarnaevs acted as “lone wolves” and planned the attack without any outside help. It was startling and, on the other hand, it is possible that prosecutors were emphasizing the risk that the Tsarnaevs had help building their bombs to win a legal argument.

The government later decided it would not use Tsarnaev’s hospital bed statements in court anyways, and the issue was brushed aside. Then, months later in October 2014, it came up again when Tsarnaev’s friend Robel Phillipos was tried for lying to the FBI.

An agent testified that a year and a half after the explosions that the FBI still didn’t know where the Tsarnaevs allegedly built their bombs.

I was concerned. To me, it seems as if the government still doesn’t know where the bombs were built, then a big part of the story about the 2013 Boston Marathon is still missing, and I wasn’t alone.

Kade Crockford, the director of the Technology for Liberty program, at the Massachusetts chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union, has been following this case closely.

“There is potentially a master bomb maker on the loose,” she said.

She argues that the lingering mystery surrounding the bombs is proof that government surveillance “amassed in the wake of 9/11” is ineffective.

Here is what we do know about the bombs: They were made out of pressure cookers and filled with nails and shrapnel. According to the U.S. attorney’s office, “The Marathon bombs were constructed using improvised fuses made from Christmas lights and improvised, remote-control detonators fashioned from model car parts.” Dzhokar allegedly bought gunpowder from a New Hampshire fireworks chain. And on his hospital bed, Tsarnaev reportedly told investigators that he learned to build the bombs from the English-language al Qaeda magazine Inspire.

But while it’s true the Summer 2010 issue of Inspire boasts the infamous instructional feature “How To Build A Bomb In The Kitchen of Your Mom,” and a later issue of the magazine took credit for teaching the Tsarnaevs how to make the explosives, there isn’t anything in the magazine about adding a remote transmitter.

So should we be freaking out? According to the explosive experts I spoke to, yes and no. Surprisingly, none of the explosives experts I spoke with were concerned about uncertainty around the exact location of where the bombs were built.

Jimmi Oxley, a professor who runs University of Rhode Island’s Explosives Lab, said finding trace residue simply concerns how messy the bomb builders are—kind of like cooking.

“I usually start with a chocolate chip cookie," she explained. "Say some of you spilled the crumbs on the couch and some of you didn’t and some of you who spilled the crumbs [used] the vacuum.”

In general, the experts told me, pipe and pressure bombs are easy to build—maybe alarmingly so. But Van Romero, vice president of research at the New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology, believes the explosions that went off at the marathon were sophisticated.

The institute where Romero works operates the Energetic Materials Research and Testing Center, the most active explosives testing facility in the U.S.

Investigators use the center to test models of bombs used in terrorist attacks, and Romero frequently helps build them.

Romero says what concerned him about the marathon attacks was that the bombs went off seconds apart—and flawlessly.

“The fact that the two were almost set of simultaneous explosions within a short period of time would indicate, to me, that there was certainly some coordination planning,” said Romero. “You just can’t count [on] luck to do something like that.

“Well, I guess you could, but the probability would be pretty low,” he said.

“Whenever you trigger something, there is a sequence of events that has to take place—particularly if it’s not a suicide-type machine. You have to plant the bomb, [then] you have to get away from it.”

Romero added that, even if the Tsarnaevs were helped, it may have only been indirectly.

“It depends on what you mean by help. If there is a co-conspirator in the laboratory someplace, I don’t think they needed it. If you mean by help someone who provided them insight or training—that could be a real possibility.”

Spokesperson Christina Sterling from the Massachusetts U.S. Attorney’s Office declined to comment for this story, citing the ongoing trial.

[MIKA27]

LAMBORGHINI AVENTADOR LP 750-4 SUPERVELOCE

The Italian auto makers at Lamborghini have finally stamped the beloved Aventedor with the iconic SV badge, proving that this 2-door can be even more beastly. Meet the Lamborghini Aventador LP 750-4 Superveloce.

Crowned the fastest production Lamborghini ever built, this Raging Bull is certainly worthy of the badge. The naturally aspirated 6.5-liter V12 engine pumps out an Earth rattling 750 horsepower along with 690 lb-ft of torque through the four-pipe free-flow exhaust system, helping the Lambo sprint to 62 miles per hour from a standstill in just 2.8 seconds and top out at 217 mph. The 3,362 pound all-wheel drive machine sees plenty of carbon fiber used throughout (including the carbon fiber monocoque chassis), a set of 20 inch-wheels up front, 21-inch wheels out back, and a new wing that provides up to 70 percent more downforce than the standard Aventador. This much awesomeness is going to cost you though. Lambo’s new supercar will set you back about $370,000.

[MIKA27]

HTC GRIP FITNESS TRACKER

We’ve seen HTC’s ability to turn out some great phones, and now the company is making a bid for more of your electronic gizmo dollar with a fitness tracker, dubbed Grip.

Teaming up with Under Armour, the GPS-enabled device is waterproof with a 1.8-inch curved monochrome touchscreen display and an integrated workout tracking mode where you can keep tabs on everything from weight lost, sleep had, and steps taken, as well as a number of different fitness activities. When synced with your phone you can receive and respond to notifications too. Grip comes in two colors (deep teal and lime) and three sizes, and it’s compatible with both Android and iOS devices. Look for it this 2015 at the $199 price point.

[MIKA27]

10 GREAT OFF-THE-GRID AIRBNB RENTALS

Airbnb has opened up a world of traveling possibilities. You’re no longer locked into hotel locations and prices. And while the company and hosts have given you more options in crowded cities and standard travel spots, they’ve also provided some off the beaten path. Yes, Airbnb is a godsend for the outdoorsman. For the times you want an adventure that doesn’t involve pitching your own tent, consider one of these killer stays courtesy of Airbnb.

TREEHOUSE AT KILAUEA VOLCANO

This is nothing like the fairly unsafe structure you helped build as a kid. This treehouse is tucked away in the rainforest in Hawaii next to a volcano and offers incredible views when you step out the front door. The treehouse sits in the ohia trees over a lava tube and offers access to the Hawaii Volcanoes National Park. The one bedroom treehouse even has a hot tub you can relax in while looking out on the amazing foliage. ($225/night) Link

THE GOLD RUSH CABIN

Standing alone among towering Jeffery pines, this cabin offers some serious peace and quiet. Built in 1870, the cabin was originally the home for a family who moved west when the Gold Rush happened. It’s the oldest wooden building in Southern California and a throwback to a time gone by. Gold not guaranteed. ($99/night) Link

PRIVATE FIJI ISLAND

If your reason for leaving the city behind is to enjoy some solitude, here you go. Nanuku Island is a 10-acre piece of heaven that you can enjoy all by yourself (or with up to nine guests). It’s your own private island for the duration of your stay, aside from the turtles, sea birds, and other exotic animals that call the area home. Your rental includes two buildings, one with rooms and sleeping space, and another with the kitchen and more space for guests. ($500/night) Link

“HALF MOON” OFF-GRID CABIN

Like the idea of the just having the necessities, but would rather have a bit more shelter than a tent? This off-grid cabin in the Six Rivers National Forest should suffice. The simple, rustic cabin was built by hand and is situated next to a few similar cabins along with some goats, dogs, frogs, and all the natural beauty you can handle. Inside you’ll find an old woodstove, a bed, and little else. You know, for kinda roughing it. ($50/night) Link

ELQUIDOMOS ASTRONOMIC HOTEL

If your favorite part of a camping trip is resting your tired body after a long day of hiking and looking up at the stars, this is the stay for you. The geodesic abode is one of seven of its kind in the world. The roof is detachable so you can gaze at the sky whenever you please. There’s ample terrace space, a two story design, and even some literature on astronomy so you can appreciate what you’re looking at while you rest your head. ($190/night) Link

AUSTRIAN IGLOO

More of a cold weather enthusiast? Well, tucked away in Tyrol, Austria is an igloo village you can be a guest at. You and up to five friends can spend the night in an actual igloo with some sheep skin mattresses while you down shots at the ice bar. Easy access to the slopes and a warm restaurant for the times it gets to be a bit too much for your North Face jacket and gloves.($115/night) Link

FRENCH CABLE CAR

This one is tricky because you actually have to win a stay, you can’t just go off and book it. But if you and your friends are the lucky (up to interpretation) winners, you’ll spend the night 9,000ft up with views adventurists would kill for. The best part is you’ll be the first one carving down Courchevel’s slopes in the morning. The claustrophobic crowd probably shouldn’t apply. Link

MUSHROOM DOME CABIN

A simple but funky little cabin located in Aptos, CA. The Mushroom Dome Cabin is one of the highest rated outdoor stays on Airbnb. It feels isolated and removed from the world, but you can get to stores, the beach, hiking trails, and more all in 10 minutes or less. Hit up Big Sur in 1 1/2 hours if you need more outdoor activity. ($110/night) Link

PRIVATE BUNGALOW IN JURASSIC PARK

No, not that Jurassic Park, this one offers lazy hammock evenings instead of Velociraptor attacks. The island off the coast of Costa Rica offers incredible scenery, little in the way of pollution, and two waterfalls withing walking distance of the property. The terrace looks out on the tropical valley and ocean making it an ideal spot to relax with a beer or two. ($35/night) Link

SIOUX TIPI

You can stay up in Woodstock, NY and rough it a little with this listing. For $150/night, you can spend the evening in an 18-foot Sioux tipi. The location overlooks a waterfall and has access to trails right around the corner. There are actual furnishings inside. ($150/night) Link

[MIKA27]

THE BRUERY OR XATA BEER

You'd be hard pressed to find a drink that goes better with Mexican cuisine than Horchata, but the folks at The Bruery have come up with a strong contender. Originally a bottle only sold to members of their Preservation Society, Ox Xata is now receiving a wide release as the brewery's new Spring seasonal. The beer itself is a blonde ale brewed with loads of rice, cinnamon, and fresh vanilla beans. Add in some lactose for a creamy finish, and you have the ideal choice to sip next some chips and salsa or a plate of enchiladas.

[MIKA27]

Mind-Control Breakthrough: Quadriplegic Woman Flies F-35 With Her Mind

The F-35 simulator in action

Arati Prabhakar — director of the Pentagons advanced research arm DARPA — has revealed a breakthrough achievement in machine mind control: Jan Scheuermann, a 55-year-old quadriplegic woman with electrodes implanted in her brain, has been able to fly an F-35 fighter jet using just her mind. This is her:

Scheuermann — who is quadriplegic because of an hereditary genetic disease — was recruited by DARPA for its robotics programs. Scientists and doctors implanted electrodes in the left motor cortex of her brain in 2012 to allow her to control a robotic arm, which she did successfully. But she’s not using the robotic arms to control the joystick in the Lockheed Martin F-35 Lightning II simulator used for the tests. She is controlling the plane with “nothing but her thoughts,” according to Prabhakar, pure neural signaling:

Instead of thinking about controlling a joystick, which is what our ace pilots do when they’re driving this thing, Jan’s thinking about controlling the aeroplane directly. For someone who’s never flown — she’s not a pilot in real life — she’s flying that simulator directly from her neural signaling.

Prabhakar, who made the announcement at the first Future of War conference, celebrated last week in Washington, expressed some concern about the future applications of this technology, which was initially created to enable soldiers and people affected by motor problems, extending their bodies using robotic parts:

In doing this work, we’ve also opened this door. We can now see a future where we can free the brain from the limitations of the human body and I think we can all imagine amazing good things and amazing potential bad things that are on the other side of that door.

I can’t see the “bad potential” of this overweighting the good potential. Sure, we can use machine mind control to remotely control killing robot soldiers on the field, but we can already do that just like we control drones.

What I can see on this is one more step closer to enable people with motor problems to overcome whatever limitations they have. If DARPA has really achieved what Prabhakar is talking about, this is an amazing breakthrough for the seamless integration of robotics and humans — and a giant leap towards the singularity.

[MIKA27]

You Can Now Buy a Town from The Walking Dead . . . on eBay

If derelict, run down buildings are your thing, then have we found the deal for you. You can now buy a stretch of a Georgia town that was featured in Season 3 of The Walking Dead. B.Y.O. Zombies, I’m afraid.

Former mayor Jim Sells has listed nine buildings in the downtown area for sale on eBay. Don’t think The Walking Dead fans will bite? You might be surprised. Sells said:

Our main industry right now is Walking Dead tourists. We have people coming from all across the world because they love The Walking Dead. That’s paying the bills downtown.

But Sells is hoping to squeeze a little bit more than souvenirs and tourist meals out of some Walking Deadsuper-fan. Sells has listed the buildings for $680,000 O.B.O.

Having trouble placing downtown Grantville from this listing? Maybe this stunning shot will jog your memory. Look closely, it moves.

Yep, that’s Grantville’s very own train depot that was converted into a café for the episode “Clear.” The rest of the downtown was transformed thanks to Morgan’s maze of lethal booby traps. But you won’t get any elaborate zombie death traps for the low, low price of $680,000. Those’ll cost you extra.

[MIKA27]

Joseph Gordon-Levitt as Edward Snowden Is Probably Not What You Were Expecting

For such a famous person, the prevailing image of Edward Snowden is surprisingly limited: a young guy in glasses, with light facial hair, sitting in a hotel room in Hong Kong. It’s how we first met him in the famous first interviews and then got to know him in Laura Poitras’s Oscar-winning documentary, Citizenfour. And it’s a apparently an image that Oliver Stone is aiming to dismantle with his upcoming biopic about the whistleblower.

How else to explain this first image from the film, posted today by Joseph Gordon-Levitt to hisFacebook page. If you’re surprised to see Snowden in a military uniform, so was Gordon-Levitt, as he explained in an accompanying note:

I was surprised when I first learned this about Snowden--that he enlisted in the US Army in 2004. He wanted to go fight in Iraq, but during basic training at Fort Benning, he broke both of his legs and received an administrative discharge. After that, he was still determined to serve his country (love him or hate him, you gotta admit the guy's strong-willed) and so he ended up getting a job at the CIA, which is where his career in Intelligence began.

The film is currently in production and is scheduled to open December 25—yes, if you’re inclined, you can already start the Oscar buzz. Open Road Films has also shared a second image, similar to the first one, though without the Snowden name patch visible you might not even realize who you’re seeing.

[MIKA27]

A Silencer Cut In Half Is Pretty Cool Indeed

Since I was a kid and I saw James Bond screwing a silencer into his gun I kept wondering two things: What a silencer’s inside looks like, and how can it mute the sound of a gun firing so efficiently. Well, the picture above answers the first question and this animated infographic by SilencerCo, the second.

[MIKA27]

Hamburg fights back against urination on streets with walls that 'pee back'

Source: OLIVERDST - Brazilian Correspondent

An area of the German city of Hamburg known for its nightlife is fighting back against drunken revellers who relieve themselves in the streets - by modifying the area's walls to "pee back".

A neighbourhood association has begun repainting walls along the famous Reeperbahn street, in the heart of the city's St Pauli nightlife district, with a water-repellent paint.

The offending urine bounces straight off the wall – and on to the shoes of the perpetrator.

Signs have been put up around the district that read "Don't pee here. We pee back."

The menace of what is known as the Wildpinkler, or "wild urinator", is something of an obsession in Germany.

Penalties vary from city to city, but anyone relieving themselves on the streets of Munich risks a fine of €100 (£73), while in Cologne it is a hefty €200.

But Hamburg's Reeperbahn, which attracts more than 20 million visitors a year, is just too crowded to police the Wildpinklers.

Known as die sündigste Meile, or the most sinful mile, the Reeperbahn is both a red-light district and a centre for bars and nightlife, somewhat like London's Soho.

The St Pauli neighbourhood association says the Wildpinklers have become such a serious problem that it had to act.

"On the streets here, it's like being in a sewer," Julia Staron, a spokesman, told Spiegel magazine.

The water-repellent paint the association is using to fight back is more often found on ships – and it is highly effective, accoding to Ms Staron.

"The liquid rebounds with almost the same force with which it hits," she said.

The neighbourhood association has even produced a video entitled St Pauli Pinkelt Zurück, or "St Pauli Pees Back", which has already attracted more than 180,000 hits

Would-be Wildpinklers should not think they can just go round the corner and relieve themselves against the next wall, she warned.

"Not every wall has a sign," Ms Staron says with a grin in the video.

MIKA: Haha!! Wildpinklers, love it!

[MIKA27]

New Avengers: Age Of Ultron Trailer!

The next Avengers movie is going to be awesome. I know it, you know it, we all know it. Avengers: Age Of Ultron is out in cinemas on 23 April, but until then, whet your appetite with this latest trailer.

The new movie centres around nemesis Ultron — as you might have guessed from the title — and the new trailer gives you a little bit more of a look at the world he’s tasked with decimating. So, without further ado, here’s that 2-minute clip:

[MIKA27]

Sony Still Thinks There's A Market For Tiny Rolling Speakers

The Rolly, a dancing, rolling, glowing MP3 player, was yet another intriguing product in a long line of curiosities from Sony. Unfortunately, it wasn’t intriguing enough for consumers to actually spend $US400 on it. But someone at Sony is obviously still carrying a torch for the Rolly, because the company’s new rolling Bluetooth speaker seems eerily familiar to a product that already failed.

But the new Sony BSP60 might be more accurately compared to Amazon’s Echo, since the device is far more than just a wireless speaker on wheels. When paired with an Android smartphone it uses voice recognition for basic functions like setting alarms, forecasting the weather, and checking a user’s messages. It also functions as a speakerphone, which is pretty common for a Bluetooth speaker these days, and those tiny wheels underneath let it scoot around on a flat surface, presumably in sync with what music is playing.

So compared to the Rolly, Sony’s BSP60 is packing far more functionality, and useful functionality if the popularity of Amazon’s Echo is any indication. The only thing that hasn’t changed between the two devices is the $US400 price tag when it’s available in a few months, which might mean consumer’s interest in such a device won’t change either.

[MIKA27]

A Satellite Exploded In Orbit And No One's Quite Sure Why Yet

How many satellites would you say are currently orbiting the Earth? A few hundred? Maybe a thousand? No. There are about 3700 satellites hurtling through orbit above us — so when one of them “breaks up”, it’s a big deal.

This week, Space.com reported that a US Department of Defense satellite exploded on February 3, creating a debris field of 43 objects. The satellite in question? The 13th in a 1990s-era project called the Defense Meteorological Satellite Program, designed to give the US Department of Defense weather data and atmospheric conditions in combat zones. For example, DMSP-13 relayed flight conditions for Operation Enduring Freedom and Operation Iraqi Freedom, says Space.com.

According to the US Air Force, the satellite died of natural causes: “a catastrophic event associated with a power system failure.” After all, it was 20 years old — although considering that the oldest satellite still orbiting and intact is 57, it was still a premature death. Meanwhile, Reuters says that while the satellite did experience a “spike in temperature” before it exploded, the investigation continues.

It’s unclear if the US Air Force would have actually announced the death of the satellite, since it was actually the operator of a private site called CelesTrak that first noticed DMSP-13 was gone, weeks after the event occurred.

The US Air Force later confirmed the breakup, saying in a statement to Reuters that “while the initial response is complete, (Space Operations) personnel will continue to assess this event to learn more about what happened.”

As far as space debris goes, the 43 pieces isn’t extraordinary at all. As io9′s Mika McKinnon explained last year, collisions or breakups in space have created hundreds or thousands of pieces of garbage whizzing through space at a speed of, oh, roughly 28,000km/h. Each of those thousands of bits must be carefully tracked and avoided by any mission looking to leave or enter the Earth’s atmosphere.

It’s a dangerous problem, and no one is quite sure how to deal with it; NASA estimates that there are 20,000 pieces of the stuff larger than a softball orbiting Earth right now.

Of course, there’s a complex multi-national infrastructure devoted to tracking what’s happening in orbit around the Earth. An agency called the US Joint Space Operations Center, which is headquartered in Vandenberg, California, is in charge, providing a centralised command centre that can provide vital information about everything from launch safety to catastrophic events that occur in orbit.

The USJSOC keeps a comprehensive database of everything man-made that’s whizzing around the Earth at any given time, and tracks the status of those objects, called the Space Surveillance Network — which dates all the way back to the 1950s. According to the US Strategic Command, the network is tracking more than 16,000 objects orbiting Earth. “About 5 per cent of those being tracked are functioning payloads or satellites, 8 per cent are rocket bodies, and about 87 per cent are debris and/or inactive satellites,” says Stratcom.

By historical standards, the breakup of DMSP-13 isn’t a huge deal. After all, 43 more pieces of debris is chump change considering that some of the biggest breakups have spewed thousands of pieces of debris into orbit, all of which the USJSOC must carefully track to insure a bigger accident doesn’t happen.

Still, as the orbital infrastructure of the early space age begins to fall silent and fail — and as more and more private companies launch their own satellites — orbital traffic jams are only going to get more complex.

[MIKA27]

UK Government Backs Plans To Build Spaceport

The US may have been the first country to open a commercial spaceport, but the UK is doing its best to make sure it can open the first one in Europe. Those plans have taken another step forward thanks to backing from the government.

Government support was confirmed following the publication of a three month consultation into the possibility of making commercial spaceflight operations in the UK. Apparently everything is on track to have the spaceport open by 2018, though the government has yet to decide where the spaceport will call home.

Of the shortlisted sites announced last July, the government has already ruled out RAF Lossiemouth and Kinloss Barracks in Scotland due to their role in national defence. That means the locations still in the running are Stornoway, Glasgow Prestwick and Campbeltown in Scotland, along with Newquay and the Welsh town of Llanbedr.

So what now? Apparently the Department of Transport has to draw up a list of requirements for potential spaceports, and will then ask the relevant parties to submit their proposals. When that will be is unclear, but the specification details are set to be published sometime before the end of the year.

[MIKA27]

This Photo Of A Soldier Suspended In Midair Is So Cool It loos Fake

Unreal photo by US Army Visual Information Specialist Jason Johnston: The soldier looks so casual doing his salute that, instead of jumping outside of the aeroplane, it looks like he is walking on air towards the bay of the C-130 Hercules — like a real world superhero.

A US Soldier assigned to 1st Battalion, 10th Special Forces Group (Airborne) salutes his fellow Soldiers while jumping out of a C-130 Hercules aircraft over a drop zone in Germany, Feb. 24, 2015.

[MIKA27]

Found: A Legendary Lost Civilisation Buried In The Honduran Rainforest

The City of the Monkey God. La Ciudad Blanca, or The White City. All the names given to the lost city rumoured to exist in a pristine Honduran rainforest sound mythical, but National Geographic reports that now we have evidence that the legendary city was real.

This week, an expedition returned from a remote — and still secret — Honduras location where they confirmed the long-rumoured existence of not just a hidden city, but a whole civilisation, one that is so foreign to archaeologists that it doesn’t even have a name yet. It’s an incredible discovery, but before we get to the details, let’s look at how long this news has been coming.

What Is the City of the Monkey God?

For a long time, it was just a rumour — a so-called lost city in the remote jungle of a part of Honduras called La Mosquitia, on the eastern coast of the country. The city has been sought after by explorers for hundreds of years, and was rumoured to be a pre-Colombian community of considerable size and wealth dating from around 1000 AD. The moniker “City of the Monkey God” originated from one American explorer who claimed locals called it by that name.

Why Was It Never Found?

For one thing, the area in question is incredibly remote. Like so much rainforest, it’s inhospitable territory for explorers — especially ones who don’t know what they’re looking for. But the rumours and supposed sightings have continued.

The most famous claim came from a man named Theodore Morde, whose unconfirmed discovery was reported in the New York Times in the 1940s, above. But there were plenty of other high profile claims, too. In a book about Morde’s expedition called Jungleland: A Mysterious Lost City, a WWII Spy, and a True Story of Deadly Adventure, the author Christopher Stewart innumerates a few:

In 1928, on his flight over Central America, Charles Lindbergh spied an expansive stretch of white ruins — “an amazing ancient metropolis.” Several years later, an anthropolist named W.D. Strong claimed that he’d found ancient artifacts scattered about the Honduran river basins and that during his six-month expedition, he had heard “many stories of stranfe archaeological ruins.” Not long after, S.J. Glassmire, a mining engineer and gold prospector from New Mexico, announced that he’d found a lost city that was “five square miles” with “crumbling limestone walls.”

For decades, it seemed like the City of the Monkey God would remain a forever-unsubstantiated rumour.

So what changed?

Well, technology changed. The advent of lidar — or Light Detection And Ranging — is letting archaeologists see the Earth in completely new ways. To generate a super-accurate 3D model of the Earth’s surface, Lidar sends laser pulses down from a plane, cutting through the foliage and jungle sprawl that would conceal large-scale earthworks to anyone standing nearby.

In a fascinating New Yorker article from 2013, Douglas Preston — who also wrote about this week’s news for National Geographic — followed a team that was using lidar to image the surface of the area rumoured to be home to the lost city, and was there to witness the revelation of a detailed image of man-made pillars, pyramids, and earthen mounds. It was very real evidence of a lost city, and as Preston explained, it had massive implications for how archaeologists understood pre-Columbian civilisation:

Earlier theories held that the rain-forest soils of Central and South America were too poor to support large populations, and that many areas could support only scattered hunter-gatherer tribes. Increasingly, it appears that the Amazon jungle once harbored sophisticated farming civilizations that cleared huge areas and built cities, towns, and networks of roads and canals.

It seemed as though the lost city had finally been found — though the discovery would need to be confirmed on the ground.

Beneath the ground?

Yes — a ground expedition returned from the area imaged by lidar last week, bearing news that it had uncovered 52 artifacts buried in the soil, as well as all manner of earthenworks. Oh, an a were-jaguar:

The most striking object emerging from the ground is the head of what Fisher speculated might be “a were-jaguar,” possibly depicting a shaman in a transformed, spirit state. Alternatively, the artifact might be related to ritualized ball games that were a feature of pre-Columbian life in Mesoamerica.

National Geographic sent Preston and photographer Dave Yoder on the expedition to report, and has agreat account and photo essay of the discoveries made by the team. Apparently, the amount of human-made features led the team to believe that there were probably many cities:

It was indeed an ancient city. Archaeologists, however, no longer believe in the existence of a single “lost city,” or Ciudad Blanca, as described in the legends. They believe Mosquitia harbours many such “lost cities,” which taken together represent something far more important — a lost civilisation.

What next?

Well, as National Geographic’s Preston explains, the biggest issue right now is protecting the site from looters and the encroaching deforestation. Once the area is safe, the process of cataloguing and studying the ruins will begin.

But in a broader sense, it’s incredible that the advent of laser imaging led to the discovery of a whole lost civilisation — just imagine what other lost cities and histories will emerge as lidar and other technologies emerge into regular use by archaeologists.

[MIKA27]

NVIDIA’S NEW CONSOLE DOUBLES AS A SUPERPOWERED STREAMER

It's tempting to ignore Nvidia’s new Shield box if you’re not a gamer. A $200 streaming box and console, with powerful enough guts to run Crysis 3 and other serious games, certainly seems to have a very specific demo in mind. But when you consider that this Shield can also pump out 4K video and runs Android TV—the same newish smart TV platform found on the Nexus Player and upcoming TVs from Sharp and Sony—it starts to look less like a niche product, and more like the most future-proof media streamer you can buy today.

Eventually, all of the major set-top boxes—Apple TV, Roku, Amazon Fire TV, you name it—will have versions that output at 4K. That could be years away, though. The Shield, meanwhile, will do so when it launches this May. Not only that, but it includes HEVC and VP9 decoders, meaning it should run 4K video from Netflix, YouTube, and the Android TV version of Google Play. It’ll also work like a Chromecast, acting as middleman to stream content from your device to your television. Amazon Instant Video isn’t part of the Android TV offerings, which cuts into the potential 4K content available, but there should still be plenty to watch.

Between the inevitable transition to 4K over the next several years, Google’s continued investment in the Android TV platform, and the Shield box’s robust guts, it’s not unreasonable to assume that this little black box could have a useful life expectancy that’s far longer than any of its competitors.

And all that’s before you even get to the gaming. The Shield was announced at the Game Developers Conference 2015 in San Francisco, and will be the first piece of hardware that runs on Nvidia’s new Maxwell-based Tegra X1 system on a chip. That insane tiny chip has a 256-core GPU, an eight-core processor, and 3GB RAM. It’s a whole lot of power packed in a relatively small space.

That mighty little chip won’t have to do all of the processing for games. According to Nvidia, the box ties into the Nvidia Grid gaming service, which streams “PC-quality games” from supercomputer servers to the device. There are no 4K game-streaming plans at the moment, though. The highest-level Grid Plus plan supports 1080p streaming at 60fps, while a cheaper Grid plan streams games at 720p. Pricing is still to be announced.

Grid also won’t be the only way to get games for the new Shield. There will be ports of major titles available through Google Play for Android TV, offered on a pay-per-download basis. While set-top boxes like Amazon Fire TV and Google’s Nexus Player also offer gaming experiences, they don’t have nearly enough horsepower to run the sort of titles Shield will offer.

Along with HDMI-out, dual-band 802.11ac Wi-Fi, and Bluetooth 4.1 support, the new box also has a Gigabit Ethernet jack, a pair of USB 3.0 ports, and a microSD slot. You’ll probably end up needing that microSD slot or USB ports for storage, because the box only has 16GB onboard.

So yes, at $200 the Shield box comes about double the price of most full-feature set-top boxes. But it’s also significantly more capable than its current competition, as it’s the first big-name offering to support 4K, and its guts and services should make gamers pretty happy. Keep in mind that you’ll actually need a 4K TV to see any 4K. And if you can afford to sit tight, non-gamers will probably want to wait it out until a 4K version of Roku is ready.

[MIKA27]

'First human' discovered in Ethiopia

Scientists have unearthed the jawbone of what they claim is one of the very first humans.

The 2.8 million-year-old specimen is 400,000 years older than researchers thought that our kind first emerged.

The discovery in Ethiopia suggests climate change spurred the transition from tree dweller to upright walker.

The head of the research team told BBC News that the find gives the first insight into "the most important transitions in human evolution".

Prof Brian Villmoare of the University of Nevada in Las Vegas said the discovery makes a clear link between an iconic 3.2 million-year-old hominin (human-like primate) discovered in the same area in 1974, called "Lucy".

Could Lucy's kind - which belonged to the species Australopithecus afarensis - have evolved into the very first primitive humans?

"That's what we are arguing," said Prof Villmoare.

But the fossil record between the time period when Lucy and her kin were alive and the emergence of Homo erectus (with its relatively large brain and humanlike body proportions) two million years ago is sparse.

The 2.8 million-year-old lower jawbone was found in the Ledi-Geraru research area, Afar Regional State, by Ethiopian student Chalachew Seyoum. He told BBC News that he was "stunned" when he saw the fossil.

"The moment I found it, I realised that it was important, as this is the time period represented by few (human) fossils in Eastern Africa."

The fossil is of the left side of the lower jaw, along with five teeth. The back molar teeth are smaller than those of other hominins living in the area and are one of the features that distinguish humans from more primitive ancestors, according to Professor William Kimbel, director of Arizona State University's Institute of Human Origins.

"Previously, the oldest fossil attributed to the genus Homo was an upper jaw from Hadar, Ethiopia, dated to 2.35m years ago," he told BBC News.

"So this new discovery pushes the human line back by 400,000 years or so, very close to its likely (pre-human) ancestor. Its mix of primitive and advanced features makes the Ledi jaw a good transitional form between (Lucy) and later humans."

A computer reconstruction of a skull belonging to the species Homo habilis, which has been published in Nature journal, indicates that it may well have been the evolutionary descendant of the species announced today.

The researcher involved, Prof Fred Spoor of University College London told BBC News that, taken together, the new findings had lifted a veil on a key period in the evolution of our species.

"By discovering a new fossil and re-analysing an old one we have truly contributed to our knowledge of our own evolutionary period, stretching over a million years that had been shrouded in mystery," he said.

Climate change

The dating of the jawbone might help answer one of the key questions in human evolution. What caused some primitive ancestors to climb down from the trees and make their homes on the ground.

A separate study in Science hints that a change in climate might have been a factor. An analysis of the fossilised plant and animal life in the area suggests that what had once been lush forest had become dry grassland.

As the trees made way for vast plains, ancient human-like primates found a way of exploiting the new environmental niche, developing bigger brains and becoming less reliant on having big jaws and teeth by using tools.

Prof Chris Stringer of the Natural History Museum in London described the discovery as a "big story".

He says the new species clearly does show the earliest step toward human characteristics, but suggests that half a jawbone is not enough to tell just how human it was and does not provide enough evidence to suggest that it was this line that led to us.

The jawbone was found close to the area where Lucy was discovered

He notes that the emergence of human-like characteristics was not unique to Ethiopia.

"The human-like features shown by Australopithecus sediba in South Africa at around 1.95 million years ago are likely to have developed independently of the processes which produced (humans) in East Africa, showing that parallel origins are a distinct possibility," Prof Stringer explained.

This would suggest several different species of humans co-existing in Africa around two million years ago with only one of them surviving and eventually evolving into our species, Homo sapiens. It is as if nature was experimenting with different versions of the same evolutionary configuration until one succeeded.

Prof Stringer added: "These new studies leave us with an even more complex picture of early humans than we thought, and they challenge us to consider the very definition of what it is to be human. Are we defined by our small teeth and jaws, our large brain, our long legs, tool-making, or some combination of these traits?"