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

[MIKA27]

Can't sleep? Try the 4-7-8 breathing technique that claims to help you nod off in 60 SECONDS

You've tried a warm bath, a hot, milky drink and even counting sheep, but you're still lying wide awake wondering why you can't fall asleep.

Now, one scientist claims he has a way of getting insomniacs to slip into a slumber in just 60 seconds – and it doesn't involve prescription drugs or strange lighting.

Dubbed the 4-7-8 breathing technique, the method is described as a 'natural tranquiliser for the nervous system' helping to reduce tension in the body.

It was pioneered by Arizona-based Dr Andrew Weil who says on his YouTube channel: 'It is utterly simple, takes almost no time, requires no equipment and can be done anywhere.'

To do the 4-7-8 breathing technique, you first need to exhale completely through your mouth while making a 'whoosh' sound.

Close your mouth and inhale quietly through your nose to a mental count of four.

Now hold your breath for a count of seven.

After this time has elapsed, exhale completely through your mouth, making another whoosh sound for eight second in one large breath.

Now inhale again and repeat the cycle three times for a total of four breaths.

'Note that you always inhale quietly through your nose and exhale audibly through your mouth.

'The tip of your tongue stays in position the whole time,' Dr Weil says.

'Exhalation takes twice as long as inhalation.

'The absolute time you spend on each phase is not important; the ratio of 4-7-8 is important.'

The technique is based on pranayama, an ancient Indian practice that means 'regulation of breath.'

The Harvard-trained doctor claims that 4-7-8 is such a powerful technique because it allows oxygen to better fill the lungs.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_AK9xPcwW90

This extra oxygen can have a relaxing effect on the parasympathetic nervous system, which promotes a state of calmness.

During times of stress, the nervous system becomes over stimulated leading to an imbalance that can cause a lack of sleep.

As well as relaxing the parasympathetic nervous system, Dr Weil says 4-7-8 helps you feel connected to your body and distracts you from everyday thoughts that can disrupt sleep.

He says it can also help anxiety.

On a Youtube video explaining the technique, a commenter wrote: 'I tried it and immediately felt better.

'I take meds for OCD and anxiety...I was feeling anxious when I stumbled onto this. One set of four and I feel way less anxious.'

Dr Weil suggests practicing the technique twice a day, for six to eight weeks until you've mastered it enough to fall asleep in just 60 seconds.

THE WORLD'S SLEEPING HABITS

From the best night's kip being enjoyed on a Wednesday to rising the earliest on a Sunday, new data is giving fascinating insights into how the world sleeps.

Using statistics from Sleep Cycle app users, researchers have discovered that the earliest wake-up time worldwide is on a Monday in South Africa.

MONDAY: The world wakes up earliest on Mondays with South Africa rising first at 6:09 am

TUESDAY: Americans rise early at 7am and are consequently in the worst mood all week.

Other countries that also wake-up grumpy on Tuesdays include Singapore, Spain, Switzerland, South Africa and Brazil

WEDNESDAY: 58% of countries surveyed - including the US - experience sleep best on Wednesdays, with China recording the highest sleep quality in the world that night.

THURSDAY: Middle East users sleep longer on Thursdays than any other day, and Kuwait, Saudi Arabia and UAE also report the best mood on Thursdays.

FRIDAY: Americans sleep latest on Fridays, not rising until 8:24am. They also report the best wake-up mood.

People in Costa Rica, Canada, New Zealand and Sweden also wake up the happiest on Friday.

However, the majority of the world (71 per cent), wake up in the best mood on Saturdays.

SATURDAY: Nearly 90% of countries surveyed sleep more and wake up later on Saturday compared to any other day of the week.

SUNDAY:The majority of the world (66% of countries) spends the least amount of time in bed on Sundays.

Topping the list is South Korea where users only sleep 5 hours and 53 minutes on Sunday nights.

[MIKA27]

The Ageing Giant Of Telescopes, Shrouded In Tropical Mist

The Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico is one of the most famous telescopes in the world — it’s been in a James Bond film (GoldenEye) as well as Contact. Now that the telescope is ageing, though, it’s only looking more dramatic.

Enrico Sacchetti, whose portraits of telescopes, space shuttles and remote locations have been featured on various forums and reports over the years, sent along these new shots of Arecibo Observatory’s William E. Gordon Telescope from his latest trip. The telescope is grounded by a massive 300m wide reflecting dish nestled into the tropical forest.

Above the extremely wide pan, a thicket of wires and steel mechanisms hang in midair. It looks extraordinarily precarious — but the observatory describes the structure akin to a suspension bridge. It’s all to support the reflectors, motors, and antennas that are needed to receive radio waves that arrive from space and the bounce back from the reflector dish. The tessellated mushroom is called a Gregorian focus dome — which focuses the waves. The Observatory calls it a “giant eye.”

Amazingly, even though it was built more than 50 years ago in 1963, the telescope is still unique and super-powerful — it’s the world’s largest and most sensitive of its kind. That doesn’t mean it’s impervious to age — as Sacchetti’s photos show, the humidity has covered it in rust, and just last year, an earthquake severely damaged the structure. But after emergency surgery, it’s still alive and kicking.

In Sacchetti’s photos, the telescope really looks like an object that embodies the space race, along with Sputnik and other engineering icons. In these photos, it’s almost hard to believe it was designed by humans.

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The Monsters Of The Witcher 3

The Witcher 3. I’m pretty excited. I have been ever since playing it for a couple of hours a while back. It felt more like Red Dead Redemption than, say, Skyrim. This is a good thing as far as I’m concerned.

The developer diary focuses on the ‘monsters’ of The Witcher 3, about the work involved in making them feel grounded and real. You should watch it, because I have a feeling this video game is going to be pretty spectacular.

Bonus Video of The Witcher 3

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The Rise Of Automated Cars Will Kill Thousands Of Jobs Beyond Driving

Perhaps the most important thing to understand about a future in which your car is fully autonomous is that it probably won’t be your car. Most people who have given serious thought to the optimal role of self-driving cars seem to agree that, at least in densely populated areas, they are likely to be a shared resource.

This has been Google’s intent from the start. As Google co-founder Sergey Brin explained to the New Yorker‘s Burkhard Bilger, “[L]ook outside, and walk through parking lots and past multilane roads: the transportation infrastructure dominates. It’s a huge tax on the land.”

Google hopes to smash the prevailing owner-operator model for the automobile. In the future, you’ll simply reach for your smart phone or other connected device and call for a self-driving car whenever you need it. Rather than spending 90 per cent or more of their time parked, cars will see much higher utilisation rates. That change alone would unleash a real-estate revolution in cities. Vast stretches of space now earmarked for parking would become available for other uses. To be sure, self-driving cars would still need to be stored somewhere when not in use, but there would be no need for random egress; the cars could be packed end-to-end. If you call for a car, and there isn’t already one on the road close to your location, you’ll simply get the next vehicle in line.

There are, of course, some reasons to be sceptical that urban cars will ultimately evolve into public resources. For one thing, it would be directly at odds with the goals of the automotive industry, which would like each household to own at least one car. For another, in order for this model to work, commuters would have to share the cars at peak times; otherwise they might be so scarce and expensive during busy periods that many people couldn’t afford a ride. A related problem is safety in a shared car. Even if the vehicle’s software is able to solve the logistics issues and provide efficient and timely service, a small car is, after all, a much more intimate space to share with complete strangers than a bus or train.

It’s easy to imagine solutions to this problem, however. For example, cars designed to be shared by solo travellers could simply be divided into compartments. You wouldn’t even need to see or be aware of others sharing your car. To avoid a feeling of being closed in, virtual windows could be mounted on the dividing walls; high resolution screens would display images captured by cameras mounted on the exterior of the car.

By the time self-driving cars are in routine operation, the hardware to accomplish all this will be remarkably inexpensive. The vehicle would stop, a green light would flash on one of the doors, and you would get in and ride to your destination just as if you were travelling alone. You’d be sharing the vehicle, but riding in your own virtual commuter pod. Other vehicles might be designed to carry groups (or more sociable solo travellers), or perhaps the barriers could slide away upon mutual consent.

A self-driving Mercedes-Benz F 015 concept car on display at CES

Then, again, the commuter pod might not need to be “virtual”. In May 2014, Google announced that the next phase of its research into self-driving cars would focus on the development of two passenger electric vehicles with a top speed of 25 miles per hour and specifically geared toward urban environments. Passengers would call for the car and set its destination with a smart phone app. Google engineers have come to the conclusion that returning the vehicle to the driver’s control in the event of an emergency is unfeasible, and the vehicles will be fully automated — with no steering wheel or brake pedal.

In an interview with John Markoff of the New York Times, Sergey Brin highlighted the company’s dramatic departure from the more “incremental” designs being pursued by the major auto manufacturers, saying “that stuff seems not entirely in keeping with our mission of being transformative.”

The market might also create other solutions geared toward sharing automated vehicles. Kevin Drum of Mother Jones, who thinks that “genuine self-driving cars will be available within a decade and that they will be big game changers”, has suggested that it might be possible to purchase a share in a car service, with guaranteed availability, for a fraction of what it would cost to buy a vehicle. In other words, you would share the car only with fellow subscribers to a service, rather than with the public at large.

If the sharing model does prevail, higher utilisation for each car would, of course, mean fewer vehicles relative to the population. Environmentalists and urban planners would likely be overjoyed; automobile manufacturers not so much. Beyond the prospect of fewer cars per capita, there could also be a significant threat to luxury automotive brands. If you don’t own the car and will use it for only a single trip, you have little reason to care what make or model it is. Cars could cease to be status items, and the automobile market might well become commoditised.

For these reasons, I think it’s a good bet that the auto manufacturers will cling pretty tightly to keeping someone in the driver’s seat — even if he or she rarely touches the controls. Automotive manufacturers could be poised to face the kind of dilemma that powerful companies often encounter when disruptive technologies come along. The company is forced to choose between protecting the business that provides revenue today and in the near future — or helping to propel an emerging technology that may ultimately devalue or even destroy that legacy business.

History shows that companies nearly always choose to protect their established revenue streams. If the kind of revolution that Brin envisions is to unfold, it may have to arise outside the automotive industry. And, of course, Brin may be in exactly the right place to make that happen.

If the individual-ownership model for cars ultimately falls, the impact on broad swathes of the economy and job market would be extraordinary. Think of all the car dealers, independent repair shops, and gas stations within a few miles of your home. Their existence is all tied directly to the fact that automobile ownership is widely distributed.

In the world that Google envisions, robotic cars will be concentrated into fleets. Maintenance, repair, insurance, and fuelling would likewise be centralised. Untold thousands of small businesses, and the jobs associated with them, would evaporate. To get a sense of just how many jobs might be at risk, consider that, in Los Angeles alone, about 10,000 people work in car washes.

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The FBI's Secret Air Force Is Watching Us

This might come as a shock: The FBI has a secret air force of sorts that’s recently been buzzing over Baltimore. Or maybe it’s not a shock at all. The FBI’s been using aircraft for decades. These new planes, however, use surveillance equipment designed for warfare and capable of tracking innocent citizens. That’s bad.

It’s unclear exactly how the FBI is deploying its secret surveillance air force, but that’s exactly the problem. Citizens reported several aircraft flying in unusual patterns above the area of West Baltimore, where protests over Freddie Grey’s murder in police custody had turned into riots.

Pete Cimbolic, a former ACLU employee and current aviation enthusiast, identified the planes using Flightradar24. One was a Cessna 182T Skylane registered to a shadowy Virginia-based company called NG Research. The other, a Cessna 560 Citation V jet, didn’t have a tail number at all, so it was a bit of ghost in terms of Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) records. Both were flying in circles directly over where the worst of the rioting happened.

A Cessna 182 flown by the Civil Air Patrol

After declining to comment, the FBI admitted this week to flying surveillance aircraft over Baltimore. (The Baltimore police requested airborne support.) The purpose was “providing aerial imagery of possible criminal activity”, though it’s important to realise that the equipment typically mounted on light aircraft like those two Cessnas are capable of monitoring several city blocks at once. They’re also able to stay airborne much longer than helicopters, and the advanced equipment likely affixed to the aircraft uses infrared and thermal imagery. So no one can escape this eye in the sky, not even on the darkest night.

“The fact that at any point the government or a contractor for the government could have a wide view or a large picture of what’s going on on block after block of the city is really concerning,” Cimbolic, the former ACLU employee, told The Washington Post. “It’s scary.”

Sure is! What’s especially worrisome is how opaque both federal and local law enforcement have been about the exact details of this domestic high-altitude surveillance. Sean Gallagher, an Ars Technica editor and former Navy officer, suspects that the FBI aircraft carried “stabilised forward looking infrared and electro-optical sensor systems.”

This kind of equipment is built by companies like Persistent Surveillance Systems and L3 WESCAM. As Gallagher points out, we know that in 2010 the FBI purchased WESCAM systems specifically designed to be mounted on Cessna aircraft. It’s unclear if the agency is using Stingrays to intercept data from people’s phones. That program’s secret too.

The image at the top of this post comes from WESCAMs multi-sensor, multi-spectral imaging system, the system that’s designed for light aircraft. This is what it looks like attached to a Cessna:

What’s even more worrisome is the fact that the Baltimore incident is hardly isolated. Two years ago, theBoston Globe reported similar low-flying Cessna aircraft over Quincy, Massachusetts. According to the paper, the local FBI office “clammed up when asked if its agents were at the controls.” It’s almost certain that they were flying the spy planes.

Speaking of spies, last year there were reports of a couple low-flying Cessnas doing loops around McLean and Langley, Virginia, home of the CIA. They looked almost identical to the planes seen over the Boston area:

So if all of these reports are true, the FBI’s secret surveillance air force is making regular flights over US cities under the guise of law enforcement. However, if the agency is using the equipment we know they own, they’re undeniably tracking the movements of countless citizens who aren’t suspected of committing a crime at all. And they don’t want to talk about it either.

Cimbolic is right. This is scary — and bad. It’s one thing for the NSA to be listening to all of our phone calls, a heinous overreach that is also probably illegal. It’s another thing to worry about undercover spy planes watching your every move. As such, the ACLU and other organisations are now working hard to find out exactly why this secretive FBI aerial surveillance program exists and exactly how the agency justifies the spying.

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Were It Not For A Bad Motivator, This Droid Could Have Been A Superstar

As one of the most popular characters in the Star Wars universe, R2-D2 owes at least some of his fame to a forgotten droid named R5-D4. If you remember, after being sold to Uncle Owen by the Jawas it broke down with a bad motivator, allowing Artoo to steal the spotlight. It’s a tragic tale with a happy ending now that Sideshow Collectibles is releasing this nine-inch tall tribute to R5-D4.

It’s impossible to know what fate befell poor R5-D4 once Uncle Owen chose R2-D2 instead. Maybe the Jawas fixed it up and found another buyer, or maybe they just turned it into scrap parts. Either way, its legacy lives on in this highly-detailed Sideshow Collectibles figure that includes a swivelling dome, articulated legs with a retractable foot, three secret body compartments, a restraining bolt, and of course a pop-up bad motivator.

At $US140 it’s light years more expensive than the figures you’ll find hanging on the shelves at Toys ‘R’ Us, but compared to other Sideshow Collectibles offerings it’s actually one of the company’s more affordable collectibles. [Sideshow Collectibles]

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NASA's Radar Found 4 Men Trapped In Rubble In Nepal By Their Heartbeats

A couple years ago, NASA and DHS unveiled a portable radar unit based on technology used to detect alien life on distant exoplanets. This radar unit, though, would be used closer to home — to find people burried under rubble. In the first real-world demonstration of its use, the device helped save four men trapped under earthquake rubble in Nepal.

After the earthquake hit, rescuers in the village of Chautara got two prototype units of the device called FINDER, or Finding Individuals for Disaster and Emergency Response. The core of the device is a system that bounces microwaves around to “see”. Crucially, it can discern faint heartbeats and breaths in people buried under several feet of rubble.

In this case, FINDER was apparently able to detect the heartbeats of two men each in two different collapsed buildings. The men had been trapped for days, under as much as 3m of rubble.

The details of the rescues are otherwise scant, so it’s hard to say exactly what would have happened without FINDER. Still, it shows the FINDER works out in the field and not just in controlled test situations. We hear about the potential in new technologies all the time — with FINDER, some of that potential just became reality. [NASA]

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An Obscure African Plant Tells Miners Where To Look For Diamonds

Diamonds you’re familiar with. Pandanus candelabrum, not so much. And until recently, botanists didn’t pay much attention to this rare, palm-like plant from West Africa either. But the discovery that P. candelabrum grows only over rock that may harbour diamonds has vaulted the plant out of obscurity.

Diamonds hunters are going to “jump on it like crazy,” one geologist told Science.

Formed by intense heat and pressure deep underground, diamonds are brought to the surface via the crust inside intrusions of kimberlite, a type of igneous rock. Where there is kimberlite, there may be diamonds.

That’s where P. candelabrum comes in. The plant seems to grow only in soil over kimberlite. Stephen Haggerty, a mineralogist at Florida International University in Miami and the chief exploration officer of Youssef Diamond Mining Company, describes his discovery in a Economic Geology paper. P. candelabrumcould make it much easier to find kimberlite pipes usually hidden under the thick African bush.

This is the first known plant to indicate kimberlite, but miners have long used plants to hunt for clues into what lies beneath. This best known example may be copper, which can be found by looking for the California poppy in the US or the flowering shrub Haumaniastrum katangense in central Africa. There’s also prince’s plume for selenium, juniper for uranium, horsetail for gold, and so on. In some cases, the plants have adapted to metal-rich soil, and in others, they’re especially good at concentrating a certain metal in their tissues.

In the case of P. candelabrum, it may have adapted to the magnesium, potassium and phosphorus-rich kimberlite soils. It just so happens that areas tend to be diamond rich too.

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Aston Martin’s Best Bet for Survival? Build Some SUVs

ASTON MARTIN IS 102 years old. For a carmaker, this is remarkable. Only a few badges have outlived the British firm, and most are household names. Rolls-Royce dates to 1906. The Ford Motor Company, 1903. And the grandaddy, Mercedes-Benz, has roots in a company founded in 1883.

Unlike those companies, however, Aston is on loose ground. Last week, the struggling brand announced it’s getting $307 million from investors to fuel a new line of cars, including an all-new plug-in hybrid crossover. Combined with other recent cash influxes, the new funds give the company around $1.5 billion to play with. There’s also a new British CEO, Andy Palmer, arrived from Nissan to lead the charge.

The company is a small-volume player, and small doesn’t work in the modern car industry. So it’s going bigger. It’s not ideal, but it’s better than death.

This is a massive change for Aston Martin, which has always focused on niche performance machinery. It is necessary, because Aston’s internally derivative line of performance cars has grown stale. The company’s four models are spread across sixteen variations; each is based on the same basic platform, the roots of which are over ten years old. Sales are in the toilet.

And finally, it echoes what happened to Porsche over a decade ago, when the legendary German firm moved from near-insolvency and building only sports cars to a more mass-market lineup, including two SUVs.

Porsche 911 Carrera 4 GTS

People continue to decry Porsche’s choices (and not without merit), but the brand has never been larger or more financially successful, or more focused on motorsport, its ostensible reason for being. Its machines are some of the best in the world, and the best of them—–the low-margin 918 Spyder and 911 GT3 RS—–could not exist without the profit generated by the brand’s more attainable models. Aston’s management undoubtedly hopes to follow in some of the German company’s footsteps, leveraging history to broaden appeal. And survive.

This is a slippery slope, but it reflects a truism of the modern car industry: Save a few glorious, inexplicable anachronisms, small car companies no longer exist. Building automobiles to meet regulatory and mass-market demand has become so expensive, carmakers either become huge in order to properly fund the process, or they die. Aston Martin, too small to get by on the old ways, is at that fork in the road. And unlike most other small brands, it isn’t part of a larger manufacturer. It cannot lean on the development resources and cost structures of a larger firm.

Why should you care? If you’ve never driven an Aston, trust me: The brand is worth saving. Like Rolls-Royce, Astons sell on exclusivity: They are costly and uncommon, and they ooze class. Unlike Rollers, however, Astons aren’t the most obviously expensive or appealing thing on the market, so there’s no obvious reason for new-money twits and rock stars to buy one. You only buy one if you—for lack of a better term—get it.

The cheapest Aston Martin, for example, is the V8 Vantage. It costs $123,695. That money gets you a heartbreakingly beautiful shape and a quietly classy interior, but you may lose a few stoplight drags to a guy in a new Porsche 911. For $123,695, you could havebought a new 911. The difference is in the Vantage’s details: a leather interior that looks like it was sewn by magic elves, a crystal starter button, a level of finish that oozes the handiwork of humans, not robots. An engine that sounds like a cross between a crackling fire and a battery of machine guns. Instruments that make fine watches look like flea-market garbage. Pick up a new Rolls Ghost or a 911, you could be landed gentry or any old gauche jerk with money. Buy an Aston, you probably have taste.

Aston Martin V8 Vantage.

Still, with luxury cars, subtlety is a niche. Aston moved just 4,000 sports cars and sedans worldwide in 2014. For perspective, Ferrari (no giant) sells 7,000 of its hyper-focused exotics annually and has long voluntarily capped sales. Ferrari has managed its growth for years in order to maintain brand health in the long term. Contrast this with Porsche, where SUVs now account for more than half of the firm’s 189,000-vehicle global volume. The German company’s sports cars have never moved in greater numbers. Twenty years ago, before Porsche diversified its offerings and rethought its production methods, its sales werebelow where Aston Martin sits now.

Aston, by contrast, has spent the past century managing a kind of manic depression, jumping from success to failure and back in an agonizing sine wave. (The two brands admittedly have vastly different histories and emotional resonance, but you get the point.) This is not an exaggeration. The marque’s history, if you can stomach the back-and-forth Wiki entry, reads like a soap opera: multiple owners (five since World War II), last-minute economic heart attacks, and private money repeatedly swooping in to save the day. The only constant is the enthusiasm of the swoopers. The likes of David Brown,Victor Gauntlett, David Richards, and even the Ford company have believed in Aston Martin so much, they staked millions to keep it afloat when others would’ve pulled the plug. In a way, each failed because they kept Aston inside its comfort zone.

In many ways, Aston’s continued survival is more shocking than its near-death moments. The past century is littered with dead car companies, from recognizable names like DeLorean to also-rans like White and Vector. James Bond has long favored Astons, and the marque has a storied history at the 24 Hours of Le Mans endurance race, but neither is enough to keep a company afloat.

Palmer has promised a turnaround. I hope he’ll get one. I’ve driven vintage Astons, and I’ve driven modern ones. The guts and heart on display in the finest of both rattle around in my head to this day. I’ve also talked to Palmer, when he worked at Nissan, about what makes for good engineering. He is what this industry calls a “product guy,” the rare engineer who gets how companies work. He spent his time at Nissan pushing to make that brand’s cars drive better than they had to. He was partly responsible for the continual improvement of the firm’s epic GTR, but he also had his hands in a host of other things. He understands what it takes to make good cars that sell.

And I know analysts who are worried about Aston Martin’s health. Some of them think Porsche made the right choice over a decade ago. Some don’t, citing everything from lesser build quality and the terrible resale of a used Cayenne to a dumbing-down of the brand’s sports cars. Many would rather see Aston go down the drain swinging and small instead of alive, large, and diluted.

Personally, I believe that a solvent Porsche is better than a bankrupt and nonexistent one. With Aston, I’m not going to say I have faith—not yet—but the signs aren’t terrible. Growth, like a company, isn’t inherently good or bad. It’s the choices you make in the process that matter.

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FEUERHAND HURRICANE LANTERN

The Feuerhand Hurricane Lantern has been produced by the same factory in Hohenlockstedt, Germany for over 100 years. Before the advent of the electric handheld light, lanterns like this were broadly used – especially during storms and high winds.

With a burning time of 20 hours, this hurricane lantern makes a great addition to the camping equipment, it’s also a useful thing to have around during power cuts and zombie attacks.

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ASTOUNDING ROLLERSKATING DUO LEAVE THE AUDIENCE STUNNED

It's hard not to fear the worst when you hear the phrase "We're a brother and sister variety act", for some unknown reason it conjures up awkward images of siblings being cheered by their parents whilst the world watches on in horror.

But thankfully roller skating duo Billy and Emily are defying convention with their eye-opening double dance act that left the judges of Britain's Got Talent show, with their jaws firmly on the floor. Equally the crowd didn't know whether to cheer or recoil in shock at the daredevil feats they were watching unfold before their very eyes.

They've been skating since the ages of 5 and 8 respectively, so you could say they've had plenty of practice.

There's no sob story, no rags to riches tale here, just years of trial and error and trying to perfect their routine. It all adds up to an awesome display of skill and some of the coolest choreographed moves you've ever seen using a pair of roller-skates.

And once the action was all over, the duo didn't even look they broke a sweat. How's that for being supremely fit and talented as hell??

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New Photos From The Door To Hell Are Really Hot

The “Door to Hell” is the appropriate description of a huge crater in Turkmenistan that has been burning uncontrollably since 1971 and whose floor is covered with flames and boiling mud reaching temperatures of up to 1000 degrees Celsius (1832 degrees Fahrenheit). When he heard that Turkmenistan might try and close the door (which seems odd since it’s a great tourist attraction for both humans and demons), explorerGeorge Kourounis became the first person to walk on the bottom of the crater when he rappelled across and down in 2013 for a television special broadcast in 2014. Now he’s decided to release more of the unbelievable photographs of his expedition.

George Kourounis dropping down through the Door to Hell

Officially called the Darvaza Crater because it is located in Darvaza (also spelled Derweze or Darvaze), Turkmenistan, it’s believed to have been first lit by Soviet petroleum engineers as a way to burn off natural gas which was too expensive to extract. Unlike most wells, the gas fire never burned itself out and is still flaming today.

The crater has a diameter of 70 meters (230 feet) and a depth of up to 30 meters (100 feet). Kourounis traveled on a wire over the crater before dropping to the floor in a heat-reflective suit equipped with a self-contained breathing apparatus and connected to a Kevlar harness.

Kourounis spent 15 minutes in the crater, taking measurements and collecting samples that were later found to contain microbial life accustomed to the harsh environment. He described the experience as “an overwhelming feeling.”

I was in spot where no human had ever been. It was like stepping onto an alien planet – more people have been on the moon.

George Kourounis collecting samples from the floor of the Door to Hell

Turkmenistan’s president Gurbanguly Berdimuhamedow still wants the Door to Hell shut, but it’s open as of this writing.

Why did he wait to release this new set of photographs? Kourounis doesn’t say. Is he looking for publicity to raise funds for a new expedition? Souvenir sales down? Trying to get an endorsement from a barbecue grill maker? Worried about disturbing the residents behind the door to hell? Whatever the reason, they’re worth the wait.

George Kourounis holding an Explorers’ Club flag in front of the Door to Hell

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HEADBONES

Damson have released the revolutionary Headbones, a device that creates sound by sending vibrations through the temporal bone straight to the inner ear. The innovative Bone Conduction Headphones provide the ability to safely, listen to music when carrying out activities where having your ears closed off is not recommended, such as, cycling, skiing, snowboarding, skateboarding, running or simply crossing the road. The wireless Headbones deliver top-quality audio to the inner ear without blocking the ear canals, so you can hear what is going on around you, yet also allow you to shut off background noise when you need.

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XERIC HALOGRAPH WATCH

Sure, it has two hands that move around the dial in a circular fashion. But the Xeric Halograph Watch is far from your average analog timepiece. Instead of placing markers around the circle, it uses a series of arc to indicate the hours and minutes, with the hands sporting two indicators a piece for the inner and outer bands. The watch is powered by a PTS S-01 automatic Chinese-made movement visible through openings in the dial and caseback, the face is covered by a domed crystal, and the case measures in at a sizable 46mm. Available in a variety of colors with matching straps.

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Check Out This Crazy Video Of A Stunt Plane Almost Hitting A Fishing Boat In Argentina

The insane flyby in question is part of a famous fishing festival in Argentina. As hundreds of eager fishermen race to stake out a spot, they are buzzed by low flying stunt planes. Because why not?

A little lower and he might have lost his selfie stick, and/or head.

The action was also caught from another angle.

It all looks insane. But also a whole lot of fun.

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NYC Produces Twice As Much Garbage As Any Other Large City On Earth

New York City is great at a lot of things. Walking! Skyscrapers! Pizza! And according to a new study on the world’s megacities, NYC can add one more thing to its list of things it excels at: Trash!

Over at Motherboard, Brian Merchant has declared New York the world’s most wasteful city. This is based on a huge research project on megacities (metropolitan areas with over 10 million people) that was published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science. In almost every case, New York won as the most energy-gobbling, trash-generating, resource-sucking city on the planet. (The distant runner-up is Moscow.)

Take this chart from the research, which is weirdly incomplete but explained below:

New York is the unequivocal world capital of garbage, says Merchant:

New York City creates 33 million tons of waste a year. The next closest offender is Mexico City (the label is missing from the graph above), which generates a comparatively quaint 12 million tons of trash, followed by Tokyo, which, again, has a full dozen million more potentially garbage-generating citizens. The average New Yorker uses two dozen times more energy than someone in Kolkata, and creates 15 times as much solid waste. I’ll say it again: New York is one dirty megacity.

Guzzling the most fossil fuels is another way that New York City wins:

“The New York metropolis has 12 million fewer people than Tokyo, yet it uses more energy in total: the equivalent of one oil supertanker every 1.5 days,” study author Chris Kennedy.

Studies on megacities are very important as there are now 26 of them on the planet, and about half of the world’s population lives in one. But as this study shows, if those megacities were 26 New Yorks, we’d all be dead.

[MIKA27]

Shooting A Laser At A Planet, But Not To Blow It Up

This breathtaking photo shows the intense orange beam of a new 22W laser pointed at the planet Saturn. Wait, isn’t this like the shocking scene in Star Wars where the Death Star’s superlaser completely annihilated planet Alderaan?

Thankfully humankind has not evolved (yet) to the level where we can destroy entire planets with the help of laser turrets. This laser beam is emitting from the Unit Telescope 4 at European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope at Paranal, Chile. It’s the first of four so-called “laser guide star units” of the future 4 Laser Guide Star Facility (4LGSF), which will help astronomers to get much sharper images of deep space objects.

Today’s ESO announcement explains how and why:

The Adaptive Optics Facility uses sensors to analyse the atmospheric turbulence and a deformable mirror integrated in the telescope to correct for the image distortions caused by the atmosphere. But several bright point-like stars needs to be at hand in order to correct for the effects of turbulence, and these need to be very close to the science target in the sky.

Finding multiple natural stars for this role is unlikely. So, to make correcting for the atmospheric turbulence possible everywhere in the sky, for all possible science targets, powerful laser beams are projected into the sky. When the beams interact with the sodium layer high in the atmosphere they create artificial stars. By measuring the atmospherically induced motions and distortions of these artificial stars, and making minute adjustments to the deformable secondary mirror, the telescope can produce images with much greater sharpness than is possible without adaptive optics.

When completed in 2016, the Adaptive Optics Facility will see the UT4 telescope become a fully adaptive telescope providing turbulence-corrected images for all its instruments, without the addition of adaptive modules and supplementary optics.

You can witness the illumination of the first laser unit in the amazing photoset below, and maybe hear the Imperial March tune playing softly in the distance.

MIKA: Awesome pictures! I was actually there at the same Observatory back in 2010 when I visited Chile. I was fortunate that my wifes cousin has business there so we had a personal tour, one I will never forget.

[MIKA27]

Colt's Original Gun Factory And Its Quirky Utopian Village Are Rotting

At one point in time, Samuel Colt firearms company held the largest private armoury in the world. Colt’s original factory and the utopian village that flanked it (aka Coltsville) was like the Google campus of the 1800s. Now, itsits in ruin — because guns.

It’s a shame. Atlas Obscura’s Luke Spencer recently visited Coltsville, where rotting buildings rest under an onion-shaped, Prussian blue dome and the custom-built railway sits unused. When it was built in the mid-19th century, the factory was cutting edge and made use of assembly line techniques long before Henry Ford took credit for popularising it. Funded by the booming success of the iconic Colt Single Action Army model — or Colt .45 — those assembly lines churned out 150 guns a day.

But that’s hardly the most interesting thing about Colt’s Patent Fire Arms Plant. Coltsville is nothing short of fascinating.

To persuade skilled workers to emigrate from the German-speaking lands, Colt built a replica Alpine village complete with Swiss chalets, and named it Potsdam, after the Prussian royal city outside of Berlin.

His remarkable attention to detail saw the cottages designed with low-pitched roofs, and elaborate overhanging eaves with diamond-shaped wooden balconies. He even built a traditional beer hall, or Bierpalast, called Germania.

Although Colt died in 1862, just few years after the factory opened, his wife Elizabeth Jarvis Colt continued to operate it until 1901. In Spencer’s words, she’d become regarded as “one of the most prominent female industrialists in America.”

Women workers inspecting Colt .45 parts circa 1914

In a sense, Coltsville was a rare success amongst the many failed utopian factory villages that would follow. George Pullman had his capitalist utopia, the town of Pullman, where conditions were so awful that one of America’s most famous strikes spelled the end of the experiment. Henry Ford had Fordlandia, a rubber plantation in Brazil where native workers eventually rebelled. (This was after he fake-invented the assembly line.) Even Frank Lloyd Wright tried his hand at designing a utopian suburb, though it remains unbuilt.

Now, Coltsville is in pretty rough shape. After the Colt company moved its factory to the outskirts of Hartford, a years-long battle to turn the factory and village into a national park consistently stalled due to controversy over celebrating a place where so many guns were manufactured. US Congress finally gave approval in December 2014 and part of the factory is undergoing renovations. It will become a museum and visitor’s centre.

It’s unclear what will happen to the rest of the village, including the Alpine village and original foundry. For now, the utopia just makes for a good story

[MIKA27]

The Architect Bringing Cheap, Super-Light Disaster Shelters To Nepal

In the immediate aftermath of a disaster, the goal is to treat survivors and distribute medicine, food and tents. But what happens when the aftermath is over? The long, slow process of finding permanent shelter is often a difficult challenge all its own.

Japanese architect Shigeru Ban has brought aid to nearly ever major earthquake in the past 20 years. But Ban, who won the Pritzker Prize last year, is distributing a unique and overlooked necessity in a disaster: shelter and privacy. And now he’s heading to Nepal.

Ban is famous for building with paper and cardboard — most often in the form of tubes which end up being surprisingly sturdy columns and beams:

His complex, super-light structures are almost instantly recognisable, and he’s used them in everything from permanent houses to museums, like the Centre Pompidou-Metz:

But through his firm, a major part of his work is bringing shelter to areas where it is needed most, ranging from earthquake-ravaged citizens of Kobe and Christchurch, New Zealand, to refugees in Rwanda.

Ban is bringing more than just tents (though he brings those, too). One major problem with post-disaster recovery are the weeks — months — of homelessness that survivors must endure. It can take a huge mental toll well after the disaster: No privacy, no real shelter, and no security. Ban’s paper structures are quick to assemble, safe in aftershocks, and can often be built with local materials for not much money.

Here’s Ban with a version of his Paper Log House, which he’s brought to at least three earthquake zones to house survivors using cardboard tubes as structure:

After the 2011 earthquake and tsunami in Japan, Ban and his team got started by helping some survivors set up privacy screens in the gyms where they had taken refuge:

Eventually, the firm designed semi-permanent housing developments using shipping containers and paper tubes to give people long-term housing as the region rebuilds:

Ban doesn’t just focus on immediate shelter — he focuses on longer-term rebuilding. After New Zealand was hit by an earthquake in 2011, he got to work planning a semi-permanent replacement for the church that had been destroyed in Christchurch. It opened in 2013:

Now, Ban and the Voluntary Architects’ Network are heading to Nepal, according to Architectural Recordand the architect’s website. The group is already working with Nepalese people who are living in Japan to understand what kind of design details would make sense in their shelter designs.

Like the Japan effort, it’s going to happen in phases. In the immediate “emergency” phase, the group will bring tents, medical stations, and plastic tarps that are so desperately needed by the thousands of people who are sleeping outdoors in Nepal. Then a “transition phase”, where they will work with local architects and design students to build semi-permanent shelters out of local materials. Finally, the team will draw on its experience building permanent houses.

The whole process will take months — but that’s the whole point. Once the initial emergency relief efforts are finished, the process of rebuilding and recovering is really only beginning.

[MIKA27]

X-Ray Photos Reveal Child Being Smuggled Was Hidden Inside A Suitcase

This is crazy. An eight-year-old boy from the Ivory Coast was being smuggled into Spain while being hidden inside a suitcase. Apparently, the boy’s father had paid a 19-year-old girl to carry the boy in the luggage from Morocco to neighbouring Ceuta, a Spanish city in Africa. This was a bad plan that could have ended horribly for everyone.

X-ray photos clearly (and shockingly) reveal the outline of a human body in the luggage, which prompted officials to conduct a search. The boy was described to be in “a terrible state” when officials opened up the luggage. Which, well, yeah. Being stuck in a luggage will do that to you.

The father of the boy wanted to re-unite with his son in the Canary Islands, where he currently lives but has been arrested. The girl carrying the boy in bag wasn’t related to them. Just sad all around.

Spain regularly deals with illegal immigration attempts from Africa to the Spanish territories of Ceuta and Melilla, both which are located in northern Africa.

[MIKA27]

See The First Female F-35 Pilot Begin Her Training

Lt Col Christine Mau, 33rd Operations Group deputy commander, just completed a training flight as the first female F-35 pilot in the US. Here are photos of her in an F-35A, a fifth-generation single-seat fighter.

Mau, who previously flew F-15E Strike Eagles, made history as the first female F-35 pilot in the program, when after 14 virtual training missions she finally took off on her own from Eglin Air Force Base on May 5, 2015. This is what she said after her first flight:

It felt great to get airborne. The jet flies like a dream, and seeing the systems interact is impressive. Flying with the Helmet Mounted Display takes some adjusting, but it’s an easy adjustment.

Mau’s gender has no effect on her performance as a fighter pilot. Only two things needed to he changed: The size of her G-suit and facemask (her equipment is extra-small). As she emphasises:

Flying is a great equaliser. The plane doesn’t know or care about your gender as a pilot, nor do the ground troops who need your support. You just have to perform. That’s all anyone cares about when you’re up there — that you can do your job, and that you do it exceptionally well.

These awesome photos let you peek into Lt. Col. Christine Mau’s first flight in the cockpit of a F-35A. Just look at the last photo below where she reacts to the sight of her friends. Pure happiness.

[MIKA27]

Is Batman Still Batman If He's Not Really Batman Yet?

Three years ago, DC Comics gave Batman an all-new origin story that he really didn’t need. This week, the next chapter of that saga came out. Is it worth reading? Depends.

Batman: Earth One – Volume Two ostensibly exists for three different kinds of reader. The first is someone who got the preceding volume and wants to see what happens. That person can pick up the new hardcover by Geoff Johns and Gary Frank with no real issue.

The story presented here picks up months after the end of the preceding volume, giving us a Batman who’s become a scary myth to Gotham City’s underworld. This Bruce Wayne’s competent at stopping street crimes with his combat skills but hasn’t had much progress in tackling the deep-rooted systemic corruption crippling his hometown. Meanwhile, a mysterious killer calling himself the riddler is committing high-profile mass murders with no apparent rhyme or reason. In the midst of all this, Bruce’s childhood love-turned-mayor Jessica Dent and her district attorney brother Harvey come asking for the billionaire to become a symbol for Gothamites to look up to and he has to think about how he’s balancing his double life and how each of his identities can help in turning Gotham around.

It’s the other two hypothetical reader types that present Volume Two with its biggest problems. Let’s say that Reader Type 2 is somebody who doesn’t know or care about the ins and outs of 75+ years of Batman history. They just want to know the how and why of this Bruce Wayne’s evolution into a fearsome crimefighter.

That curiosity aligns with some of Reader Type 3’s interests. This reader is like me, someone who’s familiar with the evolutions of Batman’s origin story, mythos and relationships with other characters. As I kept turning the 160 pages in Volume Two, I kept asking myself, “Why am I reading this?” The answer was that I wanted to see what changes are made to characters I and elements that I already know, in the hopes that those shifts illuminate a new or clever understanding of the character.

Like Batman: Earth One – Volume One, this story isn’t shy about changing familiar elements of Dark Knight lore. Part of my problem with DC’s Earth One books so far is that re-inventions are all so similar that they already feel shallow and rote:

• One character gets turned into two. Lex Luthor gets turned into married couple Alexander and Alexandra Luthor in the three-volume Superman re-imagining. Harvey Dent gets a sibling in that book’s newest Batman counterpart.
• Characters who were once strangers-turned-enemies become closer in proximity to the hero. InSuperman: Earth One – Volume 3, General Zod is presented as Superman’s uncle, where he’d previously been an non-familial nemesis. The Dents here aren’t just politicians looking to clean up Gotham, they’re childhood friends of Bruce Wayne.
• Some form of symbology gets re-invented or subverted for the sake of visual impact or modernisation. In Superman: Earth One – Volume 3, Lois Lane rigs up a Super-signal to shine Kal-El’s S-shield into the sky to call for help. The Batsignal moves the opposite way as far as ostentatiousness goes and becomes a cell phone.

Parental figures are conspicuously updated, often presented as saltier or edgier. Clark Kent’s parents talk to him about the-birds-and-the-bees and girlfriends in the Earth One books. The Alfred Pennyworth in this Batman universe is a grizzled combat vet who hassles and insults Bruce while helping him fight crime.

This manipulation of expectations can give a momentary tingle of entertainment for people who already know Bat-lore but nothing really makes these changes feel like they’re blazing new trails. In other beginner-Batman stories, we see a spark of what will make him fearsome. But there’s not enough of that here.

This Batman is not good at stealth. He gets seen and people sneak up on him.

He’s a bad detective and needs mentorship in figuring out how to piece clues together:

This book’s version of freakshow-strongman bad guy Killer Croc hands Batman his arse so, yeah, he’s not a superhumanly skilled fighter here either. Tougher than the average street thug, yes, but not an adept.

Let’s go back to those last two hypothetical Reader Types and what they might be looking for in this particular hardcover. If you don’t know much about Batman, is there enough here to make you interested in him and his psychological make-up? Is he more than just another action character? I don’t think there is. He’s brave, determined and resilient but Volume Two doesn’t present that special mix of brooding gothic obsessiveness that’s made Batman so hypnotic to so many.

In Volume One, Johns made Bruce Wayne’s mother a member of the Arkham bloodline, linking Batman to the tragic lineage that’s best known for creating the asylum where Batman’s most disturbed enemies get locked up. Tying into the longtime speculation that maybe Batman himself is crazy, that particular plot beat felt a little too on-the-nose. Johns doubles down on it here, using it as a reason that Harvey Dent tried to keep his sister away from Bruce Wayne when they were all kids.

But this Batman doesn’t feel close to the edge of personal darkness. One of the best interpretations of Batman in the modern era casts him as someone who’s channeled his trauma to create a greater good. He just presents as distant, behind-the-curve and, worst of all, a little too self-obsessed.

The closest we get to an inkling of any transcendent personality trait is a recurring beat of empathy when Batman has to reckon with other characters’ deaths and the loss that any survivors or loved ones will have to deal with. But even that is presented in a growly fashion that doesn’t communicate much in the way of compassion.

The most interesting thing about Volume Two is how it treats the story’s villains. Killer Croc isn’t a vicious feral murderer here; instead, he’s a misunderstood guy with a weird skin condition demonised by a sensationalist press. And the Riddler doesn’t play fair when compared to his mainline counterpart; he still kills innocents when his conundrums get answered correctly. He’s an arsehole, just one with bigger pretensions and schemes. One other major Bat-villain makes a cameo here, in a beat that sets up things for a future volume.

And if you’re a Reader Type 3, can you justify picking up Batman: Earth One – Volume Two for its take on an evolving Batman? Gary Frank’s art might be the main draw, returning again with sharply rendered lines that tautly delineate the tensions and angst for everyone involved. But Johns’ new take on Batman — who doesn’t know how to plan and doesn’t do much more than react — lacks the aspirational aspect present in the best iterations of the character. He may be a sophomore superhero at this point of his journey, but at this rate, it will be a slog to watch him rise above his inexperience to become a Dark Knight who can inspire. It’s been fun to watch Bruce Wayne grow into being Batman in the past, but this Earth One take on the Caped Crusader isn’t one of those stories.

[Fuzz]

Shooting A Laser At A Planet, But Not To Blow It Up

So we're shooting a giant laser pointer up into the sky? Man, we are going to get sued by all those aliens that get dazzled or blinded as they fly by.

See The First Female F-35 Pilot Begin Her Training

This just proves all those conspiracy theories that the F-35 doesn't actually fly! Where are the action pics? All the pics are on the ground. All the other in-flight pics are photoshopped... the US just uses people better versed in Photoshop than the North Koreans!

[polarbear]

Is Batman Still Batman If He's Not Really Batman Yet?

Three years ago, DC Comics gave Batman an all-new origin story that he really didn’t need. This week, the next chapter of that saga came out. Is it worth reading? Depends.

Batman: Earth One – Volume Two ostensibly exists for three different kinds of reader. The first is someone who got the preceding volume and wants to see what happens. That person can pick up the new hardcover by Geoff Johns and Gary Frank with no real issue.

The story presented here picks up months after the end of the preceding volume, giving us a Batman who’s become a scary myth to Gotham City’s underworld. This Bruce Wayne’s competent at stopping street crimes with his combat skills but hasn’t had much progress in tackling the deep-rooted systemic corruption crippling his hometown. Meanwhile, a mysterious killer calling himself the riddler is committing high-profile mass murders with no apparent rhyme or reason. In the midst of all this, Bruce’s childhood love-turned-mayor Jessica Dent and her district attorney brother Harvey come asking for the billionaire to become a symbol for Gothamites to look up to and he has to think about how he’s balancing his double life and how each of his identities can help in turning Gotham around.

It’s the other two hypothetical reader types that present Volume Two with its biggest problems. Let’s say that Reader Type 2 is somebody who doesn’t know or care about the ins and outs of 75+ years of Batman history. They just want to know the how and why of this Bruce Wayne’s evolution into a fearsome crimefighter.

That curiosity aligns with some of Reader Type 3’s interests. This reader is like me, someone who’s familiar with the evolutions of Batman’s origin story, mythos and relationships with other characters. As I kept turning the 160 pages in Volume Two, I kept asking myself, “Why am I reading this?” The answer was that I wanted to see what changes are made to characters I and elements that I already know, in the hopes that those shifts illuminate a new or clever understanding of the character.

Like Batman: Earth One – Volume One, this story isn’t shy about changing familiar elements of Dark Knight lore. Part of my problem with DC’s Earth One books so far is that re-inventions are all so similar that they already feel shallow and rote:

• One character gets turned into two. Lex Luthor gets turned into married couple Alexander and Alexandra Luthor in the three-volume Superman re-imagining. Harvey Dent gets a sibling in that book’s newest Batman counterpart.
• Characters who were once strangers-turned-enemies become closer in proximity to the hero. InSuperman: Earth One – Volume 3, General Zod is presented as Superman’s uncle, where he’d previously been an non-familial nemesis. The Dents here aren’t just politicians looking to clean up Gotham, they’re childhood friends of Bruce Wayne.
• Some form of symbology gets re-invented or subverted for the sake of visual impact or modernisation. In Superman: Earth One – Volume 3, Lois Lane rigs up a Super-signal to shine Kal-El’s S-shield into the sky to call for help. The Batsignal moves the opposite way as far as ostentatiousness goes and becomes a cell phone.

Parental figures are conspicuously updated, often presented as saltier or edgier. Clark Kent’s parents talk to him about the-birds-and-the-bees and girlfriends in the Earth One books. The Alfred Pennyworth in this Batman universe is a grizzled combat vet who hassles and insults Bruce while helping him fight crime.

This manipulation of expectations can give a momentary tingle of entertainment for people who already know Bat-lore but nothing really makes these changes feel like they’re blazing new trails. In other beginner-Batman stories, we see a spark of what will make him fearsome. But there’s not enough of that here.

This Batman is not good at stealth. He gets seen and people sneak up on him.

He’s a bad detective and needs mentorship in figuring out how to piece clues together:

This book’s version of freakshow-strongman bad guy Killer Croc hands Batman his arse so, yeah, he’s not a superhumanly skilled fighter here either. Tougher than the average street thug, yes, but not an adept.

Let’s go back to those last two hypothetical Reader Types and what they might be looking for in this particular hardcover. If you don’t know much about Batman, is there enough here to make you interested in him and his psychological make-up? Is he more than just another action character? I don’t think there is. He’s brave, determined and resilient but Volume Two doesn’t present that special mix of brooding gothic obsessiveness that’s made Batman so hypnotic to so many.

In Volume One, Johns made Bruce Wayne’s mother a member of the Arkham bloodline, linking Batman to the tragic lineage that’s best known for creating the asylum where Batman’s most disturbed enemies get locked up. Tying into the longtime speculation that maybe Batman himself is crazy, that particular plot beat felt a little too on-the-nose. Johns doubles down on it here, using it as a reason that Harvey Dent tried to keep his sister away from Bruce Wayne when they were all kids.

But this Batman doesn’t feel close to the edge of personal darkness. One of the best interpretations of Batman in the modern era casts him as someone who’s channeled his trauma to create a greater good. He just presents as distant, behind-the-curve and, worst of all, a little too self-obsessed.

The closest we get to an inkling of any transcendent personality trait is a recurring beat of empathy when Batman has to reckon with other characters’ deaths and the loss that any survivors or loved ones will have to deal with. But even that is presented in a growly fashion that doesn’t communicate much in the way of compassion.

The most interesting thing about Volume Two is how it treats the story’s villains. Killer Croc isn’t a vicious feral murderer here; instead, he’s a misunderstood guy with a weird skin condition demonised by a sensationalist press. And the Riddler doesn’t play fair when compared to his mainline counterpart; he still kills innocents when his conundrums get answered correctly. He’s an arsehole, just one with bigger pretensions and schemes. One other major Bat-villain makes a cameo here, in a beat that sets up things for a future volume.

And if you’re a Reader Type 3, can you justify picking up Batman: Earth One – Volume Two for its take on an evolving Batman? Gary Frank’s art might be the main draw, returning again with sharply rendered lines that tautly delineate the tensions and angst for everyone involved. But Johns’ new take on Batman — who doesn’t know how to plan and doesn’t do much more than react — lacks the aspirational aspect present in the best iterations of the character. He may be a sophomore superhero at this point of his journey, but at this rate, it will be a slog to watch him rise above his inexperience to become a Dark Knight who can inspire. It’s been fun to watch Bruce Wayne grow into being Batman in the past, but this Earth One take on the Caped Crusader isn’t one of those stories.

*Spoilers*

This is an interesting release and question considering the regular Batman monthly just killed Bruce Wayne at the Conclusion of Endgame and made Commissioner Gordon the new Batman

[MIKA27]

Aussie Actor John Noble Will Voice The Scarecrow In Batman: Arkham Knight

It’s always nice when a developer goes out of its way to hire great talent to voice the characters in their games and Rocksteady / Warner Bros. are no exception. Along with Breaking Bad‘s Jonathan Banks and Twilight‘s Ashley Greene, South Australian John Noble will be lending his excellent vocals to the role of the Scarecrow in Batman: Arkham Knight.

The six-minute clip contains interviews with some of the cast of the game, including Noble, as they describe what’s involved in playing their roles. Noble seems to relish the opportunity and he certainly has the “evil” chops to give Scarecrow the right amount of menace and instability, having played Denethor in The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers and Return of the King.

If you just want to catch Noble’s interview, it starts at the 1:43 mark. Oh and before you worry, Kevin Conroy is returning to play Batman while the prolific Nolan North voices the Penguin.