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

[MIKA27]

NASA Wants To Give The Moon A Moon

NASA’s Asteroid Redirection Mission (ARM) is an ambitious (and divisive) plan to take an asteroid, shunt it into lunar orbit, and then send astronauts to take a sample. The mission is a vital stepping-stone on the journey to Mars, and NASA has today announced how it will work.

Since the inception of ARM, there’s been two options. Number one was to capture an entire, very small asteroid and redirect it to the moon. The second is to land a craft on a bigger asteroid, lift off a 12m chunk, and tow it to the moon for examination. In a press conference today, NASA announce that it’s going with the ****** ‘n grab version.

There are two main reasons for going with option B. Firstly, there are a lot more targets — big asteroids near the moon are more plentiful than small ones. Secondly, landing a robot on an asteroid will give NASA a better chance to test out technology that will eventually take humans to Mars.

The final asteroid selection isn’t expected to be made until 2019, with the mission launching in 2020, and arriving at the asteroid two years later. From there, the craft would grab a boulder and conduct a few other pieces of research, managing to drag its trophy back to the moon by 2025.

That sets up the human asteroid exploration for sometime after EM-2, NASA’s second real-world test mission for the Space Launch System and Orion capsule, currently scheduled for 2021. [NASA]

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Skip The Taxidermy And Put Glowing Star Wars Heads On Your Walls

Continuing the recent decorating trend of glowing stuff smashing through walls we now have three of the most popular Star Wars characters joining the fray. Designed more for kids or gaming rooms these 3D heads are completely self-contained so there’s no unsightly power cords to be hidden, and thanks to LEDs inside they always remain cool to the touch.

They each come with a cracked wall decal that’s easy to apply and easy to remove, and everything you’ll need to mount them to any flat surface. You can pre-order them now from GeekShak for $US50 each, but you’ll have to wait until May 4 to put Yoda, Vader or Boba Fett on your walls. And if you can’t choose your favourite, they’re also available as a $US145 three-pack.

[MIKA27]

New Nanofibre Is Tougher Than Kevlar And Stretches 7 Times Its Length

Bullet-proof protection may be about to get more bullet proof. A team of researchers has created a new kind of nanofibre that can extend to seven times its original length — and is tougher than kevlar too.

Scientists at UT Dallas have created a new kind of fibre which makes use of its electromechanical properties to absorb energy. While Kevlar can absorb up to 80 joules per gram before it breaks, the new material can handle up to 98 joules per gram. That could make it extremely useful in applications like military vehicles and body armour.

The team took inspiration from the piezoelectric action — where pressure is converted into electrical charges — in collagen fibres within human bone. The researchers recreated the collagan fibres by spinning polyvinylidene fluoride (PVDF) and polyvinvylidene fluoride trifluoroethylene (PVDF-TrFE) — themselves piezoelectric materials — into nanofibres. They then twisted these strands into yarns.

When stretched, these polymer-based yarns create an electrical charge which acts to attracts the polymer back in on itself — an attraction found to be 10 times stronger than a hydrogen bond. (Hydrogen bonds are considered some of the strongest inter-molecular forces we know of.) The result is a material that can absorbs terrific amount of energy before it fails. The result are published in ACS Applied Materials and Interfaces.

Currently, the nanofibres are very small, so the next step for the researchers is to work out how to produce and use the material in bulk. If they can, the armour of the future may be made from little more than simple twisted yarn — one that just happens to be ultra-tough.

[MIKA27]

The Deadly Global War for Sand

Source: Wired

The Killers rolled slowly down the narrow alley, three men jammed onto a single motorcycle. It was a little after 11 am on July 31, 2013, the sun beating down on the low, modest residential buildings lining a back street in the Indian farming village of Raipur. Faint smells of cooking spices, dust, and sewage seasoned the air. The men stopped the bike in front of the orange door of a two-story brick-and-plaster house. Two of them dismounted, eased open the unlocked door, and slipped into the darkened bedroom on the other side. White kerchiefs covered their lower faces. One of them carried a pistol.

Inside the bedroom Paleram Chauhan, a 52-year-old farmer, was napping after an early lunch. In the next room, his wife and daughter-in-law were cleaning up while Paleram’s son played with his own 3-year-old boy.

Gunshots thundered through the house. Preeti Chauhan, Paleram’s daughter-in-law, rushed into Paleram’s room, her husband, Ravindra, right behind her. Through the open door, they saw the killers jump back on their bike and roar away.

Paleram lay on his bed, blood bubbling out of his stomach, neck, and head. “He was trying to speak, but he couldn’t,” Preeti says, her voice breaking with tears. Ravindra borrowed a neighbor’s car and rushed his father to a hospital, but it was too late. Paleram was dead on arrival.

Despite the masks, the family had no doubts about who was behind the killing. For 10 years Paleram had been campaigning to get local authorities to shut down a powerful gang of criminals headquartered in Raipur. The “mafia,” as people called them, had for years been robbing the village of a coveted natural resource, one of the most sought-after commodities of the 21st century: sand.

That’s right. Paleram Chauhan was killed over sand. And he wasn’t the first, or the last.

Our Civilization is literally built on sand. People have used it for construction since at least the time of the ancient Egyptians. In the 15th century, an Italian artisan figured out how to turn sand into transparent glass, which made possible the microscopes, telescopes, and other technologies that helped drive the Renaissance’s scientific revolution (also, affordable windows). Sand of various kinds is an essential ingredient in detergents, cosmetics, toothpaste, solar panels, silicon chips, and especially buildings; every concrete structure is basically tons of sand glued together with cement.

Sand—small, loose grains of rock and other hard stuff—can be made by glaciers grinding up stones, by oceans degrading seashells, even by volcanic lava chilling and shattering upon contact with air. But nearly 70 percent of all sand grains on Earth are quartz, formed by weathering. Time and the elements eat away at rock, above and below the ground, grinding off grains. Rivers carry countless tons of those grains far and wide, accumulating them in their beds, on their banks, and at the places where they meet the sea.

Apart from water and air, humble sand is the natural resource most consumed by human beings. People use more than 40 billion tons of sand and gravel every year. There’s so much demand that riverbeds and beaches around the world are being stripped bare. (Desert sand generally doesn’t work for construction; shaped by wind rather than water, desert grains are too round to bind together well.) And the amount of sand being mined is increasing exponentially.

Though the supply might seem endless, sand is a finite resource like any other. The worldwide construction boom of recent years—all those mushrooming megacities, from Lagos to Beijing—is devouring unprecedented quantities; extracting it is a $70 billion industry. In Dubai enormous land-reclamation projects and breakneck skyscraper-building have exhausted all the nearby sources. Exporters in Australia are literally selling sand to Arabs.

Workers wash stone before it gets crushed into sand at an illegal mine near Raipur Village.

In some places multinational companies dredge it up with massive machines; in others local people haul it away with shovels and pickup trucks. As land quarries and riverbeds become tapped out, sand miners are turning to the seas, where thousands of ships now vacuum up huge amounts of the stuff from the ocean floor. As you might expect, all this often wreaks havoc on rivers, deltas, and marine ecosystems. Sand mines in the US are blamed for beach erosion, water and air pollution, and other ills, from the California coast to Wisconsin’s lakes. India’s Supreme Court recently warned that riparian sand mining is undermining bridges and disrupting ecosystems all over the country, slaughtering fish and birds. But regulations are scant and the will to enforce them even more so, especially in the developing world.

Sand mining has erased two dozen Indonesian islands since 2005. The stuff of those islands mostly ended up in Singapore, which needs titanic amounts to continue its program of artificially adding territory by reclaiming land from the sea. The city-state has created an extra 130 square kilometers in the past 40 years and is still adding more, making it by far the world’s largest sand importer. The collateral environmental damage has been so extreme that Indonesia, Malaysia, and Vietnam have all banned exports of sand to Singapore.

All of that has spawned a worldwide boom in illegal sand mining. On Indonesia’s island of Bali, far inland from the tourist beaches, I visit a sand mining area. It looks like Shangri-la after a meteor strike. Smack in the middle of a beautiful valley winding between verdant mountains, surrounded by jungle and rice paddies, is a raggedy 14-acre black pit of exposed sand and rock. On its floor, men in shorts and flip-flops wield sledgehammers and shovels to load sand and gravel into clattering, smoke-belching sorting machines.

“Those who have permits to dig for sand have to pay for land restoration,” says Nyoman Sadra, a former member of the regional legislature. “But 70 percent of the sand miners have no permits.” Even companies with permits spread bribes around so they can get away with digging pits wider or deeper than they’re allowed to.

Today criminal gangs in an estimated 70 countries, from Jamaica to Nigeria, dredge up tons of the stuff every year to sell on the black market. Half the sand used for construction in Morocco is estimated to be mined illegally; whole stretches of beach there are disappearing. One of Israel’s most notorious gangsters, a man allegedly involved in a spate of recent car bombings, got his start stealing sand from public beaches. Dozens of Malaysian officials were charged in 2010 with accepting bribes and sexual favors in exchange for allowing illegally mined sand to be smuggled into Singapore.

But nowhere is the struggle for sand more ferocious than in India. Battles among and against “sand mafias” there have reportedly killed hundreds of people in recent years—including police officers, government officials, and ordinary people like Paleram Chauhan.

The area around Raipur used to be mostly agricultural—wheat and vegetables growing in the Yamuna River floodplain. But Delhi, less than an hour’s drive north, is encroaching fast. Driving down a new six-lane expressway that cuts through Gautam Budh Nagar, the district in which Raipur sits, I pass construction site after construction site, new glass and cement towers sprouting skyward like the opening credits from Game of Thrones made real across miles of Indian countryside. Besides countless generic shopping malls, apartment blocks, and office towers, a 5,000-acre “Sports City” is under construction, including several stadiums and a Formula 1 racetrack.

The building boom got in gear about a decade ago, and so did the sand mafias. “There was some illegal sand mining before,” says Dushynt Nagar, the head of a local farmers’ rights organization, “but not at a scale where land was getting stolen or people were getting killed.”

The Chauhan family has lived in the area for centuries, Paleram’s son Aakash tells me. He’s a slim young guy with wide brown eyes and receding black hair, wearing jeans, a grey sweatshirt, and flip-flops. We’re sitting on plastic chairs set on the bare concrete floor of the family’s living room, just a few yards from where his father was killed.

The family owns about 10 acres of land, and shares some 200 acres of communal land with the village—or used to. About 10 years ago a group of local “musclemen,” as Aakash calls them, led by Rajpal Chauhan (no relation—it’s a common surname) and his three sons, seized control of the communal land. They stripped away its topsoil and started digging up the sand built up by centuries of the Yamuna’s floods. To make matters worse, the dust kicked up by the operation stunted the growth of surrounding crops.

As a member of the village panchayat, or governing council, Paleram took the lead in a campaign to get the sand mine shut down. It should have been pretty straightforward. Aside from stealing the village’s land, sand mining is not permitted in the Raipur area at all because it’s close to a bird sanctuary. And the government knows it’s happening: In 2013 a fact-finding team from the federal Ministry of Environment and Forests found “rampant, unscientific, and illegal mining” all over Gautam Budh Nagar.

Nonetheless, Paleram and other villagers couldn’t get it stopped. They petitioned police, government officials, and courts for years—and nothing happened. The conventional wisdom says that many local authorities accept bribes from the sand miners to stay out of their business—and not infrequently, are involved in the business themselves.

For those who don’t take the carrot of a bribe, the mafias aren’t shy about using a stick. “We do conduct raids on the illegal sand miners,” says Navin Das, the official in charge of mining in Gautam Budh Nagar. “But it’s very difficult because we get attacked and shot at.” In the past three years, sand miners have killed at least two police officers and attacked many others, as well as government officials and whistle-blowers. Just this March, soon after I returned from India, an assault by illegal sand miners put a television journalist in the hospital.

According to court documents, Rajpal and his sons threatened Paleram and his family as well as other villagers. Aakash knows one of the sons, Sonu, from when they were kids in school together. “He used to be a decent guy,” Aakash says. “But when he got into the sand business and started making fast money, he developed a criminal mentality and became very aggressive.” Finally, in the spring of 2013, police arrested Sonu and impounded some of his outfit’s trucks. He was soon out on bail, though.

One morning Paleram rode his bicycle out to his fields, which are right next to the sand mine, and ran into Sonu. “He said, ‘It’s your fault I was in jail,'” according to Aakash. “He told my father to drop the issue.” Instead Paleram complained to the police again. A few days later, he was shot dead.

Sonu, his brother Kuldeep, and his father, Rajpal, were arrested for the killing. All of them are currently out on bail. Aakash sees them around sometimes. “It’s a small village,” he says.

Sand mining boats work illegally on the Thane creek in Maharashtra, India

The broad, murky Thane Creek, just outside Mumbai, is swarmed with small wooden boats on a recent February morning. Hundreds of them are anchored together, hull to hull, in a ragged line stretching at least half a mile. The river’s banks are lined with green mangroves, towered over by apartment blocks. There’s a faint tang of salt in the air from the nearby Arabian Sea, mixed with diesel from the boats’ engines.

Each boat carries a crew of six to 10 men. One or two of them dive down to the river bottom, fill a metal bucket with sand, and return to the surface, water streaming from their black hair and mustaches. Then two others, standing barefoot on planks jutting from the boat, haul up the bucket with ropes. Their lean, muscular physiques would be the envy of any hipster gym rat if they weren’t so hard-earned.

Pralhad Mhatre, 41, does about 200 dives a day, he says. He’s worked the job for 16 years. It pays nearly twice what the pullers get, but it’s still not much—about $16 a day. He wants his son and three daughters to go into some other profession, not least because he thinks the river’s sand will soon be mined out. “When I started, we only had to go down 20 feet,” he says. “Now it’s 40. We can only dive 50 feet. If it gets much lower, we’ll be out of a job.”

A sand diver gets ready for another trip to the bottom of Thane Creek

The next day Sumaira Abdulali, India’s foremost campaigner against illegal sand mining, takes me to see a different kind of mine. Abdulali is a decorous, well-heeled member of the Mumbai bourgeoisie, gentle of voice and genteel of manner. For years she has been traveling to remote areas in a leather-upholstered, chauffeur-driven sedan, snapping pictures of sand mafias at work. In the process she’s been insulted, threatened, pelted with rocks, pursued at high speeds, had her car windows smashed, and been punched hard enough to break a tooth.

Abdulali got involved when sand miners started tearing up a beach near Mumbai where her family has vacationed for generations. In 2004 she filed the first citizen-initiated court action against sand mining in India. It made the newspapers, which in turn brought Abdulali a flood of calls from others around the country who wanted her help stopping their own local sand mafias. Abdulali has since helped dozens file their own court cases and keeps a steady stream of her own well-documented complaints flowing to local officials and newspapers. “We can’t stop construction. We don’t want to halt development,” she says in British Indian–accented English. “But we want to put in accountability.”

Abdulali takes me to the rural town of Mahad, where sand miners once smashed up her car. Sand mining is completely banned in the area because of its proximity to a protected coastal zone. Nonetheless, in the jungled hills not far outside town, we come to a gray-green river on which boats, in plain view, are sucking up sand from the river bottom with diesel-powered pumps. The riverbanks are dotted with huge piles of sand, which men in excavators are shoveling onto trucks.

Soon after, back on a main road, we find ourselves behind a small convoy of three sand trucks. They rumble, unmolested, past a police van parked on the side of the road. A couple of cops idle next to it, watching the traffic going by. Another is inside taking a nap, his seat fully reclined. This is too much for Abdulali. We pull up alongside the van. An officer who appears to be in charge is lounging inside, wearing a khaki uniform, with stars on his shoulders and black socks on his feet. He has taken his shoes off. “Didn’t you see those trucks carrying sand that just went past?” Abdulali asks.

“We filed some cases this morning,” answers the cop, genially. “We’re on our lunch break now.”

As we drive away, we pass another sand truck parked just a few hundred yards down the road.

Some time later I ask a local government official about this. “The police are hand in glove with the miners,” says the official, who asks me not to name him. “When I call the police to escort me on a raid, they tip off the miners that we are coming.” Even in the cases he’d brought to court, no one was convicted. “They always get off on some technicality.”

Workers wash Thane Creek sand before trucking it away.

Back in Raipur, after I finish talking with Paleram Chauhan’s family, his son Aakash agrees to show me and my interpreter, Kumar Sambhav, the village lands where the mafia has taken over. We’d rented a car in Delhi that morning, and Aakash directs our driver to the site. It’s hard to miss: Right across the road from the village center is an expanse of torn-up land pocked with craters 10 and 20 feet deep, stippled with house-sized piles of sand and rock. Here and there trucks and earth-moving machines rumble around, and clusters of men, at least 50 all told, are smashing up rocks with hammers and loading up trucks with shovelfuls of sand. They stop to stare at our car as we drive slowly past on the rutted dirt track running through the mine. Aakash cautiously points out a tall, heavyset guy in jeans and a collared shirt: Sonu.

A short while later, deep inside the site, we get out to snap pictures of a particularly huge crater. After a few minutes Aakash spots four men, three of them carrying shovels, striding purposefully toward us. “Sonu is coming,” he mutters.

We start making our way back to the car, trying to look unhurried. But we’re too slow. “*******er!” Sonu, now just a few yards away, barks at Aakash. “What are you doing here?”

Aakash keeps silent. Sambhav mumbles something to the effect that we’re just tourists, as we all climb into the car. “I’ll give you sister****ers a tour,” Sonu says. He yanks open our driver’s door and orders him out. The driver obeys, obliging the rest of us to follow suit. Aakash, wisely, stays put.

“We’re journalists,” Sambhav says. “We’re here to see how the sand mining is going.” (This conversation was all in Hindi; Sambhav translated for me afterward.)

“Mining?” Sonu says. “We are not doing any mining. What did you see?”

“We saw whatever we saw. And now we’re leaving.”

[MIKA27]

It’s Remarkably Easy to Lock a Pilot Out of the Cockpit

THE INVESTIGATION INTO the crash of Germanwings Flight 9525 has turned toward the co-pilot, whom a French prosecutor says locked the captain cockpit before deliberately flying the plane into the ground and killing all 150 people aboard.

That revelation, which came today, casts Tuesday’s crash in a chilling light but would explain why an Airbus A320—an industry workhorse with an excellent safety record—with an experienced crew went down in picture-perfect conditions without raising an alert.

The captain, whom authorities have not identified, left the cockpit soon after the airplane reached cruising altitude for what was to be a two-hour flight from Barcelona to Dusseldorf. The captain could not get back into the cockpit. A military official told The New York Times the cockpit voice recorder, recovered from the crash site Tuesday, reveals “the guy outside is knocking lightly on the door, and there is no answer. You can hear he is trying to smash the door down.”

You might think that the captain, of all people, would have unfettered access to the cockpit. But the cockpit door appears to have worked exactly as it was designed. Since November 1, 2003, any aircraft carrying more than 60 people or certified with a maximum takeoff weight of 50 tons or more flying in European Union airspace must have an “approved flight crew compartment door that is designed to resist penetration by small arms fire and grenade shrapnel, and to resist forcible intrusions by unauthorized persons.”

The rule, which mirrors FAA regulations, was implemented after 9/11 to protect pilots in the event of a hijacking. “The purpose of the door is to keep out unwanted intruders,” says Douglas Moss, who flew A320s for 16 years before switching to a Boeing 777 about a year ago. But if the French prosecutor is correct, Germanwings Flight 9525 is a rare instance in which this rule worked against the safety of the aircraft and those aboard it.

The doors Airbus uses on the A320 is by default programmed to lock. But there is a switch in the cockpit that can be toggled from “norm,” “unlock,” and “lock.” In normal circumstances, crew members entering the cockpit push a single button on a 12-digit key pad. It works much like a doorbell: A chime rings in the cockpit, and the captain or co-pilot presses “unlock” to open the door.

Should the pilots be incapacitated, a fail-safe allows authorized crew to open the door by entering an emergency code in the keypad. That sounds an alarm inside the cockpit; if there is no reply within 20 to 30 seconds, the door unlocks for approximately five seconds.

[MIKA27]

Jeremy Clarkson: 'Leave Ois alone... none of this is his fault'

Jeremy Clarkson has said that he wants people to stop blaming the producer he hit for his departure from Top Gear.

Oisin Tymon has been the subject of threats on social media.

Mr Clarkson told reporters that it was not the producer's fault, but did not respond to a question about whether he was worried about being arrested.

[MIKA27]

Killer Seals Are Ripping Apart Sharks and Eating Their Guts

Forget Sharknado. Based on a new study, the aquatic creature you don’t want to see falling from the sky isn’t sharks – it’s seals. Seals are attacking and eating sharks off the coast of South Africa and marine biologists are trying to figure out why.

Cape fur seals and blue sharks normally leave each other alone in the tropical waters off the South African coast. Each feed on smaller fish, squid and crustaceans and there seem to be plenty for both species to survive without nibbling on each other. Fur seals are a little smaller than blue sharks but these sharks don’t seem to find the seals as tasty as great whites do. While groups of fur seals have been known to surround great white sharks, it seems to be a defensive maneuver designed to scare the predator away.

In 2004, dive boat operator and marine photographer Chris Fallows first witnessed a fur seal attacking a blue shark off the coast of Cape Town. He saw a larger attack by multiple seals on five blue sharks in 2012. After other reports came in, Fallows joined with marine experts to study the behavior and possible causes and recently released their findings in the African Journal of Marine Science.

A cape fur seal with a blue shark dinner

Dr. Neil Hammerschlag, a marine biologist at the Rosenstiel School of Marine and Astmospheric Science in Florida, observed that the seals attack the sharks from underneath and eat their guts, most likely because those organs give them the most energy.

OK, so shark guts are tasty and better than Red Bull. Is that a good enough reason for the fur seals to attack them? Hammerschlag thinks the seals may also be eliminating the blue sharks from the competition for fish, which are becoming increasing scarce due to over-fishing and pollution.

Hammerschlag warns that this behavior is upsetting the natural balance of the sea.

The consumption of large sharks by a Cape fur seal is a departure from the prevalent view of this species’ diet, which is generally reported to consist of a diverse diet of small fish species, cephalopods and birds … These observations are important not just for understanding the interactions between these two species but more broadly for their implications in understanding the trophic ecology of pinnipeds – many populations of which have increased while numerous shark populations have declined.

Should we be worried? Anytime the balance of nature is upended, it’s a cause for concern. Sharks are becoming more scarce by the day. And who wants to see a movie about killer seals?

Sealnado?

[MIKA27]

Monster Wall Versus Killer Tsunami Coming Soon to Japan

Can a 250-mile long, 41-foot high wall of concrete stop a killer tsunami like the 130-foot high waves that devastated the coast of Japan in 2011? That’s what the government of Japan is hoping as it unveiled plans to build a so-called Great Wall of Japan to stop future monster waves. Will it work?

The Great East Japan earthquake, a magnitude 9.0 tremor off the Pacific coast of Tohoku that was the fourth-strongest recorded since 1900, triggered the 2011 killer tsunami that smashed into northeast Japan, killing over 18,000 people and causing the deadly meltdowns at Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant. Demands to prevent or lessen the damage of future tsunamis began immediately.

The 2011 tsunami hitting the city of Miyako

At a cost of an estimated $6.8 billion (so far), the new wall would reach 41 feet in some spots – taller than a 4-story building – and be made with cement. While it’s being called a wall, the barrier will actually be a series of smaller walls to aid in the construction.

Would a wall like this – or another type of wall – have stopped the 2011 tsunami? The answer is unclear at this point. The largest seawall in the world is already off the coast of Japan … or was. The 1.25 mile long Kamaishi seawall was only two years old – sitting in the harbor at a depth of 206 feet – yet 12-foot waves went over it and submerged the city center. On the other hand, the city of Fudai has a 51-foot wall and a 673-foot floodgate over the Fudai River that can be lowered to block tsunamis. The combination stopped the 66-foot waves of the 2011 tsunami and the city suffered minimal damage.

The wall that protected Fudai from the 2011 tsunami

Opponents of the Great Wall of Japan say it will seriously affect marine life, hurt local fishing industries and destroy the view. Even with the wall, coastal residents will still be evacuated to higher ground during a tsunami. Political leaders say it’s an attempt by ruling Liberal Democratic Party create jobs and support the construction industries.

Can this monster wall stop a killer tsunami? Can technology tame nature? Should it? What are consequences? The debate continues.

[MIKA27]

THE INSPIRATIONAL STORY BEHIND THIS PHOTO OF A POOR FARMER & HIS SON

Whichever part of the world you might find yourself in, parents always want the best for their children. Whether that's in the form of a better quality of life, more opportunities or even just a a greater sense of happiness there is an inNate sense of wanting the very best for the next generation.

That's why this photo of a young Thai man who graduated from Ratchapat University in Chiang Rai, alongside his father (a poor farmer) has gone viral around the web. It's a photo that strikes at the very core of that feeling, of parents sacrificing themselves to give their children a better chance in the world.

The young man is one of 5 brothers, tragically his mother died during childbirth, whilst 3 of his siblings past away due to ill health. After losing so much, his father worked long and backbreaking hours every day in the fields to scrape together some money to send his son to University and to change the fate of his family.

Consider it mission accomplished.

For a pair that have been dealt with and had to endure so much tragedy and hardship in their lives, thanks to a fathers love and a sons determination (he's now graduated from medical school in England and on his way to become a successful doctor) the future is finally a little brighter for them both.

[MIKA27]

WHISKAS CATSTACAM: WEARABLE CAT CAMERA

Ya know, we were just saying the other day how social media needs more cats. Sure, there’s 18.6 trillion cat videos on YouTube, but where are all the cat POV photos on Instagram? Here they come.

From the folks at Whiskas comes Catstacam, a 1.5-ounce wearable collar camera that promises to automatically take pictures from your kitty’s point of view and then post them onto your cat’s Instagram account. (You cat does have an IG account, right? OK, just checking.) Six photos are snapped every minute, and that batch then gets uploading to Instagram when the device gets within range of your Wi-Fi. The camera package also doubles as a cat toy, as if this weren’t already an embarrassment of kitty riches. Celebrity cat owners are testing out Catstacams right now, but there’s no official word if us commoners will ever be able to enjoy this technological breakthrough. [Purchase]

[MIKA27]

SKI JUMP PENTHOUSE IN OSLO, NORWAY

Perched 197 feet above the ground, this astounding apartment is also shoulder-to-shoulder with a ski jump platform. Need to make a quick beer run? Strap on those goggles! Oh, and an oxygen tank for the 250-step walk back to your place. (We’re assuming there’s an elevator.) The pad itself smartly features floor to ceiling windows for sensational views of Norway’s capital, and it’s decorated in a contemporary style. Above the penthouse is the highest roof terrace in Oslo, while downstairs is the world’s first ski museum. Not too shabby. [Purchase]

[MIKA27]

DOUBLE O BIKE LIGHT

Double O Light is a new and cool bike light brought to us by the brilliant British designer Paul Cocksedge. It features two lights to mount on your bike, a white one at the front and a red one at the rear. At the front you get more lighting power, around 85 lumens, so you can lighten your path, and at the rear you get around 50 lumens, to make sure you´re seen. It features a built in rubber strap so you can fix it around your bike´s frame, or attach it to your backpack, clothing, or helmet, and it´s hollow in the middle so that you can secure it with the anti-theft lock too! It´s also water resistant, uses 3 AAA batteries and runs up to 50 hours. Another interesting feature is the magnet they have inside that allows them to easily be attached and removed.

[MIKA27]

BAC MONO

If you've ever dreamed of driving a legit Formula One car that is street legal, theBAC Mono is a dream come true. The first street legal, track day car from Briggs Automotive, this single seater is made using high-strength carbon fiber composite, making it incredibly light at only 1,190 pounds. That weight and the 2.3 liter four-cylinder engine help deliver a top speed of 170 mph and a zero to 60 of just 2.8 seconds. What it may lack in straightaway speed compared to some of the big boys it makes up for thanks to it's ultra light chassis and a flat-shifting, 6-speed transmission. It's fast, sleek, and sure to be the envy of, well everyone.

MIKA: Maybe McLaren can just buy two of these and be more competitive in Malaysia this weekend!

[MIKA27]

How Easter Island’s Heads May Lead to a “Fountain of Youth”

In the 16th century, a long-held legend about a supposed restorative fountain, the waters from which could reverse the effects of aging, began to appear again with fervent interest.

This was no doubt as a result of rumors the likes of which appeared in the published memoirs of Hernando D’Escalante Fontaneda, who wrote of Spanish explorer Juan Ponce de Leon’s supposed search for a “fountain of youth” while surveying the New World. Fontaneda more specifically described a river called Jordan, that possessed such magical youth-restoring capacities. It was supposedly long-lost, though even in Fontaneda’s estimation, it was perhaps more likely to be non-existent.

The legends about waters that could restore youth, or at very least prolong one’s lifespan, have much earlier roots. An equally tantalizing account, though of slightly more thorough detail, appeared in the writings of Herodotus, who recounted the land of the Macrobians, of whom it was said that “most of them lived to be a hundred and twenty years old, while some even went beyond that age.” Apart from a diet mostly consisting of boiled fish and milk, there was another staple of their existence to which they credited their prolonged lives:

“When the Ichthyophagi showed wonder at the number of the years, he led them to a fountain, wherein when they had washed, they found their flesh all glossy and sleek, as if they had bathed in oil, and a scent came from the spring like that of violets. The water was so weak, they said, that nothing would float in it, neither wood, nor any lighter substance, but all went to the bottom. If the account of this fountain be true, it would be their constant use of the water from it which makes them so long-lived.”

This account, like many of the recollections in Herodotus’ writings, at best seems fanciful; as would the the notion of anything similar to a “fountain of youth” being uncovered during excavations around the enigmatic faces that famously tower over Easter Island. But in some rare cases, truth can prevail in being stranger than it’s fictional cousin, and here, one of our world’s most famous ancient mysteries may have hidden a key to the future… and anti-aging science.

A recent cover story in Bloomberg Businessweek featured the story of biochemist Suren Sehgal, and how he stumbled onto what may be the “holy grail” of anti-aging science; of all places, this mysterious link to what may promise greater human longevity was unearthed from beneath one of Easter Island’s stony heads:

A Canadian medical expedition had collected the soil from beneath one of the mysterious stone heads on Easter Island, a speck in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. In the dirt, Sehgal had discovered Streptomyces hygroscopicus, a bacterium that secreted a potent antifungal compound. This intrigued him; he thought perhaps it could be made into a cream for athlete’s foot or other fungal conditions.

He purified the stuff and named it rapamycin, after Easter Island’s native name, Rapa Nui.

A test presented itself when one of Sehgal’s neighbors became afflicted with a skin condition, for which Sehgal created an ointment with his rapamycin that effectively worked as a cure.

The plaque near Rano Kau (in Brazilian Portuguese) that commemorates the discovery of Sirolimus, the chemical from which rapamycin is synthesized, on Easter Island.

“Over the past decade, it has shown promise as a drug that not only can extend life by delaying the onset of ageing-related diseases such as cancer, heart disease, and Alzheimer’s disease, but also postpone the effects of normal ageing,” Bloomberg reports.

Looking back to the ancient Macrobians, an interesting parallel to modern anti-aging science may actually be found in the diet these ancient people had consumed; as Herodotus had noted, their diet had consisted of “boiled fish and milk”. Fish is a staple of dietary recommendations for consumption of Omega-3s, and as the introduction to Bill Gifford’s Bloomberg article notes, salmon and mackerel are chief among these fishy food sources, along with avocados, the large green fruit (botanically a berry, actually) once believed by bodybuilders to be avoided due to being “pure fat.”

While rapamycin may prove hopeful for measures in creating an actual “forever pill”, as the Bloomberg Businessweek article describes, many are still hesitant to leap onboard. The article quotes S. Jay Olshansky of the University of Illinois at Chicago, one of the premiere critics of life-extending drugs and their use. “There are no interventions that have been documented to slow, stop, or reverse aging in humans,” he told Bloomberg. “The batting average is zero.”

Tell that, of course, to futurists like Ray Kurzweil, who has continued to promote not only anti-aging science, but also the idea of humans extending consciousness–and thus, life–indefinitely, by perfecting an eventual process of uploading human minds into a non-biological carrier. Such concepts formed the basis of the 2014 film Transcendence starring Johnny Depp, in which a dying researcher’s mind is successfully uploaded to a computer, from which he seeks to innovate technology capable of reanimating himself.

Granted, rapamycin may not be the “miracle drug” for anti-aging just yet, as present studies in mice show that, while it effectively regulates the mTOR gene conducive to prolonging life by about 20%, mice who have rapamycin incorporated into their diets also tend to be 30% smaller on average, and also show some signs of loss of testicular function, in addition to a propensity for developing cataracts, as well as the onset of diabetes. Similar observations have been made with humans who have taken rapamycin to help prevent the body’s rejection of transplanted organs following a kidney transplant.

Currently, the proponents of anti-aging technologies still hope to be able to make drugs available within the next few years that will increase human longevity by considerable amounts. The average lifespan of humans could well exceed 120 years according to experts; an interesting parallel in that it roughly matches the lifespans of the fabled Macrobians of Herodotus’ writings, thanks to their fabled and mysterious fountain of youth.

Perhaps modern medicine is finally catching up with these fabled people, thanks in large part to an unprecedented discovery at another site among our world’s mysterious ancient wonders.

[MIKA27]

The UN Is Ordering 10,000 Of IKEA's Brilliant Flatpack Refugee Shelters

A few years ago, IKEA announced it had designed a better refugee shelter, using its flatpack furniture as a basis for engineering. As great an idea as it was, it wasn’t clear how the concept would ever find its way to reality. Now, these IKEA refugee shelters will be deployed — by the thousands.

The IKEA Foundation is the mega-corporation’s wing devoted to social issues in the developing world. Working with UN, the Foundation spent years prototyping shelters that could replace the fragile tents that are used by the UN to house refugees right now — which are beholden to the cold (or hot), and provide little protection from storms, not to mention privacy. It was a worthy cause, but more was at stake than design — cost, logistics, politics, and the way aid organisations supply their workers on the ground make the issue of refugee housing incredibly complex.

Interior of a Better Shelter prototype in Kawergosk Refugee Camp, Erbil, Iraq. Picture: © Better Shelter.

Still, out of that collaboration came a modular home called Better Shelter and the Housing for All Foundation, a stand-alone organisation that’s further developing the design and manufacturing it for sale.

At the Dubai International Humanitarian Aid & Development Conference & Exhibition this week, the group announced its first order: The UN’s High Commissioner for Refugees has placed an order for 10,000 units of Better Shelter, which it will use to house refugees around the world. The units were tested by displaced families in Iraq and Ethiopia, and according to Irin News, the first of the UN’s 10,000 units will be sent to house some of the 2.5 million people in Iraq who have been displaced over the past year.

Better Shelter is a piece of extreme engineering. It’s not so much a shelter as a precisely-designed package. It arrives in two cardboard boxes — not unlike your bookshelf or bed! — with all the tools needed to assemble it. Each box can be lifted by four people, and assembled by the same team in no more than eight hours. The group says that the package even contains an image-based user manual.

Inside, there are details that make these shelters actually livable for long periods of time: A door that actually locks. Windows and ventilation, unlike most cargo container shelters. A photovoltaic system to supply electricity. The frame itself fits together modularly, much like the company’s own furniture. They’re also built to last as long as three years, which is another major step forward — since refugee housing tends to wear out before the displaced have permanent housing.

Top: Assembly of Better Shelter prototype, Hilawyen Refugee camp, Dollo Ado, Ethiopia, July 2013. Picture: © R. Cox. Bottom: Riyad with sons, daughters and mother in law inside a Better Shelter prototype, Kawergosk refugee camp, Iraq, March 2015.

From the word-free instruction drawings to the packaging, there are plenty of IKEA features that found their way into the design.

And why not? Regardless of how you feel about the company, IKEA has more experience with the logistics, engineering, and packaging of objects — objects that must be assembled by humans that speak many languages — than any other group in the world. It also knows something about design that’s universally welcoming, no matter the country or culture it’s dropped into.

[MIKA27]

SPECTRE: Here's The First Trailer For The New James Bond Movie

It’s a new age of Bond. There’s a new MI6, a new M and a new Moneypenny. So now let’s watch all that new stuff in the first trailer for Spectre.

[MIKA27]

Tony Stark Should Have Painted His Iron Man Suit Stealthy From Day One

It’s not that there’s anything wrong with the hot rod-inspired gold and red colour scheme of Tony Stark Iron Man’s armour. It’s just that this Stealth Mode Version, pegged to the upcoming Avengers sequel, looks about a thousand times more sleek and stunning. And Hot Toys 1/6th-scale version of the re-painted Mark VII perfectly captures every last detail of the armour. [Hot Toys]

[MIKA27]

Russian Oligarch: Let's Build A Superhighway From Russia To The US

Route 66. The Autobahn. The Trans-Eurasian Belt Development? The head of Russia’s railway system has proposed a superhighway through Siberia across the Bering Strait that would link Europe with the United States through Russia.

According to a report from The Siberian Times, the highway would run alongside much of the current Trans-Siberia Railway, and end on the eastern edge of Russia with a tunnel or perhaps a bridge over the Bering Strait. It was proposed by the chief of Russia’s railway system, Vladimir Yakunin, a “powerful oligarch”.

The Siberian Times also reports that Yakunin unveiled his plan last week to the Russian Academy of Science, where he busted out some serious high-level pseudo-academic jargon:

He also said that Western-style globalisation is no longer seen as an incentive but as a hindrance on the economic, scientific, moral and spiritual development of society.

He said: ‘This is an inter-state, inter-civilisation, project. It should be an alternative to the current (neo-liberal) model, which has caused a systemic crisis. The project should be turned into a world ‘future zone’, and it must be based on leading, not catching, technologies.’

This is far from the first time someone has imagined bridging Russian with Alaska. In the 1890s, the designer of the Golden Gate Bridge, Joseph Strauss, envisioned a bridge or tunnel across the Bering Strait, “within the lifetime of the present generation, to create a rail and highway route between points as distant as New York and Paris.”

Yakunin’s is probably destined to join Strauss’s in the deep file of Bering Straight superhighways that were never built — fun though it is to imagine driving thousands of miles through some of the most inhospitable environments in the world.

[MIKA27]

A Custody Battle Is Raging Over The Contents Of This 1894 Time Capsule

This past Sunday workers demolishing a former telescope factory in Pittsburgh were surprised to find a 19th century time capsule in the cornerstone. Now the demolition company is claiming that it has every right to keep the capsule — along with the incredibly cool telescope artefacts that they found inside.

The time capsule included the photo above dated August 1894, apparently showing workers from the Brashear Telescope Factory. The Brashear Company, founded by astronomer Dr. John A. Brashear, manufactured not only telescopes but other scientific equipment from the 1880s until the early 20th century. By the 1940s the building was being used to make bombsights for the US military.

While most time capsules have little more than a few newspapers, some photographs, and maybe a book or two, this one also contains some pretty unique items from the 1890s. Items like the piece of optical glass seen below, which the demolition company would now like to call their own.

The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette reports that Jadell Minniefield Construction Services is the company that was hired by the city to destroy the building at a cost of $US235,000. The building was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 2012, but was condemned shortly thereafter. The city issued an emergency order to destroy the building last week after one of its walls collapsed onto an apartment building next door.

But now Jadell Minniefield doesn’t want to hand over the time capsule that it found to the city of Pittsburgh. And it claims that it has no legal obligation to do so.

“We have a contract, and it basically states that any salvage belongs to the contractor,” Odell Minniefield Jr told the Post-Gazette. Minniefield says that the 10-person demolition and construction company received a call from the city’s legal department that “wasn’t courteous”.

But the city of Pittsburgh insists that the company’s claims are nonsense, and that it’s the rightful owners of the time capsule — which includes the optical glass which has writing on it proclaiming it to be, “one of the first pieces of optical glass made in America.” The rest of the writing has been too smudged to make out clearly.

“The city is reviewing its legal options and will do all it can to preserve this artefact for its rightful owners, the people of Pittsburgh,” Mr McNulty told the Post-Gazette. “Pittsburgh already suffered one heartbreaking blow when the historic Brashear building had to come down for safety reasons, and it is sad that someone would consider taking economic advantage of this tragic situation.”

The city wants to preserve the capsule and claims it would like to put its contents on display — pretty standard stuff for time capsules. But the Minniefiled company says that for now the capsule will remain in its control under lock and key. We probably haven’t heard the last of this time capsule tug-of-war.

[MIKA27]

MOUNTAINEERING SUNGLASSES BY NORTHERN LIGHTS

Northern Lights is an emerging luxury eyewear brand from Canada, they are re-inventing early mountaineering styles into modern fashion pieces. Originally developed to protect early mountain climbers from the snow and sun´s blinding glare, the Mountaineering sunglasses featured removable side shields, and moderate to dark tinted lenses. The Northern Lights Optic interpretation is a stylish, unisex model available in several styles, outfitted with genuine leather sides, and fitted with Aurora CR39 high quality lenses. Check out their website for the full collection

[MIKA27]

Inmate Walks Free After Emailing Release Instructions To Prison Staff

An inmate who was in prison for multiple charges of fraud is apparently up to his old tricks. Posing as a senior court clerk, Neil Moore, 28, used an illicit mobile phone to email fake bail instructions to prison staff, who released him. Well, that’s embarrassing.

Moore was being held at Wandsworth Prison in the UK for persuading organisations to give him nearly 3 million US dollars, by posing as staff from Barclays Bank, Lloyds Bank and Santander. In his most recent deception, which a trial judge describes as “ingenious,” Moore set up a fake web domain closely resembling that of the court service’s official address. He used it to email the prison’s custody inbox with instructions for his release. The deception was uncovered three days later, when solicitors went to interview Moore, only to find him gone.

Apparently, Moore felt guilty about his latest, because he surrendered himself only three days after he was discovered missing. He’ll be sentenced on April 20th for 8 counts of fraud and one count of escape. For his next trick, Moore will spend 20 years tunnelling himself out with a rock hammer.

[Fuzz]

Tony Stark Should Have Painted His Iron Man Suit Stealthy From Day One

Not really stealth mode armor, just a re-finished Mk VII. The Mk XV "Sneaky" and Mk XVI "Nightclub" are the current stealth armors.

[MIKA27]

Not really stealth mode armor, just a re-finished Mk VII. The Mk XV "Sneaky" and Mk XVI "Nightclub" are the current stealth armors.

You bloody geek you are Fuzz

[MIKA27]

The Walking Dead Spinoff Finally Has A Name

Fear The Walking Dead. For years, we’ve been wondering how the zombie apocalypse represented in Robert Kirkman’s The Walking Dead graphic novels actually started, and it’s looking more and more certain that we’ll find out very soon. There’s a new spin-off series from Kirkman, it’s called Fear The Walking Dead, and it’s about the start of the outbreak.

US home of The Walking Dead and other great shows like Breaking Bad, Mad Men and Halt And Catch Fire, AMC recently announced that it would bankroll two full seasons of Fear The Walking Dead. The show will at least initially focus on the outbreak of the virus in Los Angeles, and from this fifteen-second teaser, it looks like it should be a lot of fun — especially if you’re already a fan of TWD.

[MIKA27]

Is the Legend of Spring Heeled Jack Worth a Second Look?

Beginning in the Spring of 1888, a series of grizzly murders would shake the city of London so badly that, even today, they remain among the most famous crimes ever committed. Attempts at bringing the killer to justice have led to numerous theories about the identity of the man who became known to history as Jack the Ripper. Today, despite a number credible leads that have been presented since Jack’s reign of terror, along with new evidence that employs modern science to try and crack the case, a conclusive case for The Ripper’s identity has remained elusive.

The infamous killer of Whitechapel was by no means the first eerie figure to terrorize Londoners by night. Five decades before Jack the Ripper first scrawled his name in red ink on a letter sent to London’s Central News Agency, a less murderous–though far more strange–series of incidents would arouse similar terror among the people of London, and under a similar name that remains one of the most odd and evocative in the annals of Forteana.

Bearing clawed hands, strange metallic armor, and the ability to leap the high walls of London’s suburban sprawl with ease, Spring Heeled Jack would become one of the most recognizable characters in London’s Victorian-era folklore. Purported sightings date back to 1837, with close encounters reporting a ghastly, demonic villain clad in oilskin and a long cloak, who would belch flames at his victims.

The stories of Spring Heeled Jack are well known, and have been written and re-written as items of mystery and intrigue for more than a century already. Hence, we won’t worry with recollection of the more popular events in the narrative here; instead, we will shift our focus to some of the stranger additions to the legend, and how a few interesting comparisons begin to emerge in relation to similar traditions around the world.

To begin one year after the first appearance of the senior “Jack”, on January 9th, 1838, Sir John Cowan stood before the public at the Mansion House, reading from an anonymous message sent to him about the devil known as Spring Heeled Jack. Signed, “a resident of Peckham”, the Lord Mayor read the following before the curious onlookers:

“It appears that some individuals (of, as the writer believes, the highest ranks of life) have laid a wager with a mischievous and foolhardy companion, that he durst not take upon himself the task of visiting many of the villages near London in three different disguises — a ghost, a bear, and a devil; and moreover, that he will not enter a gentleman’s gardens for the purpose of alarming the inmates of the house.”

We needn’t read much further in the dialogue to learn what sorts of phenomena this “resident of Peckham” had been addressing. Three months later, this “ghost-bear” of a character would carry out an “attack” so similar to that described here that one must begin to guess about the popular image of “Jack” that so many have held over the years:

A peculiar report, which according to The Brighton Gazette had first appeared in the April 14, 1838 edition of The Times, told of a gardener at Rosehill, near coastal Sussex, described a series of events that purportedly transpired one day earlier. The gardener, the story read, was attacked by some kind of monster, “in the shape of a bear or some other four-footed animal”. The creature scaled the garden wall, and ran the perimeter of the wall on four legs before leaping down into the garden and chasing the caretaker. The man was unharmed, but left badly frightened, as the “creature” climbed the wall again after pursuing the gardner for several minutes, and left the same way it entered.

A rather curious side note about this affair: The Times article cited for this, purportedly once available at their website, is listed by Wikipedia as having being titled “The Whitechapel murder”, dated 14 April 1838, and appearing on page 7. Obviously, the date would not have allowed this mention of a murder in Whitechapel to have been confused with the junior “Jack” (The Ripper), who would terrorize the city many decades later. Therefore, one must wonder what a beast attacking a gardener in Sussex has to do with any coincidental murder that took place in Whitechapel, even if the latter had occurred around the same time, and a good five decades before The Ripper murders ever made headlines. Hence, one begins to wonder whether there could there have been a mix-up somewhere with the dates, as it pertains to the reporting of two similarly-named, but very different Victorian folk devils.

One of the more “beastly” depictions of Spring Heeled Jack adorns the cover of this “Penny Dreadful” of the era.

Regardless, the tale of the gardener is an interesting one, in that it has begged the question of whether an unrelated incident had merely been lumped in with the entire “Spring Heeled Jack” affair, purely because it was popular news at the time. Another interesting parallel has to do with the fact that there have been similar crossovers with bear and monkey-like “folk devils” that appear from time to time, but occurring in other parts of the world, which, rather strangely, bear in equal measure those “armored” and “leaping” character traits more common to the “Jack” mythos.

Writing for the New Page Books blog, I noted some of these curious crossover elements in relation to an equally curious Fortean occurrence, which involved a so-called “monkey man” witnessed near New Delhi, India:

“What, if anything, was the Monkey Man of Delhi? Many have compared the beast to the Himalayan Yeti or its cousin, the famed Abominable Snowman of the Americas known today as Bigfoot, with some reports marking the Indian monster well above seven feet in height, and possessing not only superhuman strength, but the curious ability to leap great distances, often making its escape by ascending to the tops of buildings and leaping from roof to roof. These epic reports were likened to some manifestation of the Indian god Hanuman, whose hybrid appearance bore aspects of both man and ape. However, despite these depictions of Delhi’s monster as being of truly monstrous stature, generally the more consistent reports of the Monkey Man topped the creature off at just four feet tall. But perhaps the very strangest aspect of this beast was the fact that in many cases, it hardly seemed to resemble any “monkey” at all.

A variety of alternative descriptions paint the picture of a small, helmeted man, clad in armor or some kind of bodysuit with large buttons upon the breast. Additionally, many of those alleging to have been injured by the beast described having been clawed by what appeared to be metallic claws the monster wore. Stranger still, there are entirely different reports from either of these monkey-like or armored-man scenarios, which describe the creature as looking bandaged like an Egyptian mummy, giving it a more classically horrific appearance the likes of which one would expect in American cinema. Still others would describe the beast as being “machine like”, and while resembling a monkey, also sporting blinking red and blue lights.”

I find it quite intriguing that such interesting parallels exist between the more obscure “Spring Heeled Jack” reports, and the leaping “Monkey Man” of New Delhi. Similar legends about what I’ve come to refer to as “leaping louts” have appeared elsewhere over the years: during the Second World War, there was a folk tale about a sort of superhuman character called “Perak the Spring Man”, who was said to be a sort of protector of Prague, and much like “Jack”, was able to leap about in extraordinary ways.

To end on a rather intriguing note that brings us to modernity, there have been continued reports into the present of strange things, often compared with “Jack”, that are seen in parts of England. An article by Lauren May appearing in the Thursday, February 23, 2012 edition of Your Local Guardian tells an unusual story about a family who, along with the driver of their taxi, witnessed a strange, featureless “something” moving at blinding speed across the road ahead of them.

Scott Martin, the father, described being en route with his family on their way from Stoneleigh. It was Valentine’s Day, and shortly after 10 PM when a ‘dark figure with no features’ was observed passing quickly on foot in front of their taxi, and then leaping an estimated 15ft over an embankment near the Ewell bypass:

“We didn’t pay much attention until he started crossing over to our side of the road, the next thing he jumped over the centre fencing in the road and ran across our two lanes.

“On the side of our road is a bank easily 15ft in height and this figure crossed our road, climbed this bank and was gone from sight all in about two seconds.

“All four of us were baffled and voiced our sighting straight away with the same detail. A dark figure with no real features, but fast in movement with an ease of hurdling obstacles I’ve never seen.

“My last image was of him going through the bushes at the top of the bank.”

Mr Martin said the driver of the taxi shared his fears as the mysterious figure made off.

“I’m not usually one to be freaked by these sightings but the cab driver was petrified,” he added.

It is indeed a curious report, which, as one might imagine, actually has been compared with the infamous “Spring Heeled Jack” reports of the early 1800s. Yet, as would be obvious to the reader, the description seems to bear more similarity to the varied reports of the “wild” creature that pepper the more obscure areas of the senior Jack’s folklore, or even that of New Delhi’s “Monkey Man”. It’s hard to guess what one should be expected to make of these kinds of odd crossovers, if anything… could there be a natural explanation underlying all of these incidents?

Was Spring Heel Jack merely a prankster who enjoyed getting a rise out of the London night-timers, and do the tall tales of “leaping louts” actually stem from their association with the curious, but potentially explainable, tales of “monsters” seen nearby? Or would a sociological explanation, one the likes of which researcher Stanley Cohen offered in 1972, present a better case for these supposed “folk devils”, and the strange connections between them that have continued to appear over the years?