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The De-Extincting Science In Jurassic World Is Right Around The Corner

Twenty five years ago, Michael Crichton captured our imaginations with the crazy idea that scientists might one day resurrect dinosaurs. But on the eve of Jurassic World‘s release a quarter century later, the prospect of bringing back extinct creatures is looking a lot less science fictional.

We’ll probably never bring back Tyrannosaurus rex. (Mosquitos with perfectly preserved dino DNA in their guts are a bit like magical leprechauns, though scientists did recently discover what they believe is dinosaur blood in fossils). But for species we’ve driven extinct in recent history, from the passenger pigeon to the Chinese river dolphin to the gastric brooding frog and even the woolly mammoth, we may yet be able to reverse time, thanks to incredible advances in genomics and synthetic biology.

In tribute to our undying love for massive reptilian killing machines, and the impossible dream that they will one day rule the Earth again, let’s explore the science of de-extincting life.

Awakening the Dead

On a midsummer’s day in 2003, a group of Spanish and French scientists helped a goat bring a 4.5 pound kid into the world. Normally, a goat birth wouldn’t be worth noting in the history books, but Celia was no ordinary baby goat. In fact, she wasn’t a baby goat at all. She was a Pyrenean ibex, and her kind had gone extinct three years earlier.

Ten minutes after her birth, Celia died, and the Pyrenean ibex was pronounced extinct once more. A necropsy revealed the cause of death: There was an extra lobe in Celia’s lungs, and it was solid all the way through.

Celia’s time in the world was brief, but to the scientific community, the significance of her birth can’t be overstated. With Celia’s birth, the notion of de-extincting life was no longer a pipe dream — suddenly, it seemed very much within reach.

In somatic nuclear transfer, a donor nucleus is injected into an egg emptied of its genetic material.

In many ways, the Pyrenean ibex was a natural de-extinction guinea pig. Hunters had driven the large, mountain goat-like animal to its demise a mere decade earlier, and when the last wild individual (also named Celia) died, samples of her tissue were preserved frozen in laboratories. All scientists had to do was transfer the DNA contained within Celia Sr’s cells into goat eggs emptied of their own genetic material, implant the chimera eggs into a surrogate mum, and hope one would grow and come to term.

They tried over 400 times. Celia Jr’s 10-minute life was the furthest they got.

Halfway across the world, a group of Australian researchers who call themselves The Lazarus Project are now using similar methods to try and restore two other casualties of the human race: Rheobatrachus vitellinus and Rheobatrachus silus, the northern and southern gastric brooding frogs. First discovered in the 1970s, these two species of frogs inhabited tiny patches of pristine rainforest in eastern Australia. But by the early 1980s, both species had vanished, probably due to habitat loss and the introduction of a pathogenic fungus.

During our brief time studying them, scientists learned that gastric brooding frogs have a fascinating reproductive cycle. After her eggs are externally fertilised, the female gastric brooding frog will swallow her embryos whole. A hormone in the eggs triggers the mother to shut off stomach acid production, effectively turning her gut into a womb. After a few weeks of gestation, she regurgitates a slew of tadpoles. The disappearance of this unique mode of reproduction was a major loss to the scientific community — and to natural diversity.

That’s why the Lazarus crew, led by University of New South Wales professor Michael Archer, have spent the last six years trying to bring the frogs back. Similar to the earlier (and cruder) Pyrenean ibex de-extinction effort, Lazarus scientists are attempting somatic nuclear transfer, sucking the nuclei out of gastric brooding frog cells and transferring the genetic material into the live eggs of distantly related barred frogs. The work is slow going, as frog eggs lose their potency after a few hours and can’t be revived. And because of the barred frog reproductive cycle, the scientists effectively have a single week every year to make a real go of it.

In 2013, the Lazarus team announced that they had successfully grown embryos containing DNA of the extinct frogs. But so far, none of the embryos have developed properly. As the Sydney Morning Heraldrecently reported, Lazarus scientists are finding traces of the host frog’s DNA in embryos where it should have been removed. Archer suspects these two sets of genetic instructions are confusing the embryos and holding back development. Still, the fact that gastric brooding frog DNA is replicating at all inside host eggs is exciting progress, and the Lazarus team isn’t giving up.

Our attempts to bring back the Pyrenean ibex and gastric brooding frog highlight the enormous technical challenges of cloning and reviving lost organisms. And yet, both efforts have focused on a very recently extinct animal, and have been blessed with cryopreserved cells containing high-quality copies of the organism’s DNA.

But others are setting their sights further back in time, hoping now to revive animals that were lost hundreds or thousands of years ago. In these cases, before they can even attempt cloning, scientists face a radically different challenge: Stitching together the lost organism’s genome from ancient, decayed copies.

Passenger Pigeons and Woolly Mammoths

Much as an architect would need floor plans and renderings to rebuild a historic structure, a scientist wishing to revive an extinct organism needs genetic blueprints, in as much detail as possible.

But for creatures that disappeared hundreds or thousands of years ago, finding a perfectly preserved copy of the animal’s genome is nigh impossible. After death, DNA begins to decompose and degrade almost immediately. Even if an creature freezes shortly after dying — one could imagine, for instance, a mammoth in the Siberian permafrost — its DNA will, over time, crack and splinter. (A recent studypredicts that even at the ideal preservation temperature of -5C, every bond in a DNA molecule would effectively be destroyed after 6.8 million years, setting a firm upper limit on the ancient organisms we can hope to revive).

Inevitably, paleogeneticists are left with the onerous task of reconstructing the extinct creature’s entire genetic library from fragments, which is essentially analogous to piecing together a book from a copy that went through a paper shredder. How do we even begin to do so?

To find out, I spoke with Ben Novak, a paleogeneticist at Revive and Restore who is currently leading up the effort to de-extinct the passenger pigeon, a famous North American bird whose populations numbered in the billions before humans shot them all from the sky in the 19th century. As a first step, Novak and his colleagues have spent the last few years reconstructing the extinct bird’s genome. Since we don’t have any frozen specimens at all, scientists have had to rely on tissue samples from taxidermy animals housed in museums.

“Passenger pigeon DNA is really fragmented,” Novak told me. “The pieces we get are anywhere from 30 to 150 base pairs in size.” To give you an idea of what this means, a base pair represents a single letter in the DNA code. The entire passenger pigeon genome contains 1.3 billion of them.

“We don’t get anything big, and it’s very, very difficult to piece any of that together, because not only is it short, it’s riddled with false mutations from damage,” he added.

And yet, the speed and accuracy of our DNA sequencing technology has advanced to the point where we’re able to take the many reads needed to spit out all the sentence fragments in a broken genome. But to put the pieces back together, scientists need a reference genome — a very similar book that will serve as a guide. This past March, Novak and his team completed genomic sequencing for the band-tailed pigeon, a close living relative of the passenger pigeon that differs in roughly 3 per cent of its DNA. Using the band-tailed pigeon as a map, they have successfully reassembled several complete passenger pigeon genomes.

Getting the passenger pigeon’s genetic code written and pieced together was an enormous achievement, but still, it’s only the first step toward a much larger goal. To find out what parts of the genome encode for meaningful passenger pigeon traits, the team’s next goal will be to look at RNA — transcript copies of genes that cells use to make proteins. Once they have sequenced the band-tailed pigeon’s entire RNA library, or transcriptome, they can use to the information to identify important genes within the passenger pigeon genome.

“That’s when we start doing the fun preparations for trying to make a bird,” Novak told me.

Unlike the Pyrenean ibex or gastric brooding frog, scientists aren’t going to be able to stick the entire passenger pigeon genome inside a host egg. Bird eggs are enormous, not to mention that they’re enclosed in a hard outer shell. Novak compares removing the tiny, DNA-containing nucleus from a bird’s egg to finding a white marble in a vat of milk. And inserting a new nucleus containing other genetic information is another can of worms entirely.

Instead, the current plan is to use CRISPR gene-splicing technology to cut out pieces of band-tailed pigeon DNA from germ cells and hack in the corresponding passenger pigeon traits. In this manner, scientists can create hybrid cells containing all the important genes that distinguish the passenger pigeon from its close cousin. Hybrid cells cooked up in petri dishes will then be injected into the bloodstream of developing band-tailed pigeon embryos, where they will eventually migrate to the gonads. After the eggs hatch and the squabs mature, some of their eggs or sperm will contain the instructions for an animal that looks a lot like a passenger pigeon. Another generation of captive breeding, and a small number of passenger pigeon-like individuals could be born.

Nothing like this has ever been done before, and nobody’s quite sure how it will all go down. But the passenger pigeon isn’t the only animal we’re trying to hack back into existence one gene at a time.

Similar efforts to revive the wooly mammoth are moving full steam ahead. In April, a team of researchers at McMaster University’s Ancient DNA Center published the most complete wooly mammoth genomes to date representing two individuals whose remains were buried in the Siberian tundra 40,000 years apart. Meanwhile, Harvard geneticist George Church and his colleagues are busy using CRISPR to splice genes for mammoth ears, subcutaneous fat, hair length and colour into the DNA of elephant skin cells. These chimera cells, while a far cry from a bonafide mammoth, show that the dream of recreating the iconic Pleistocene elephant is very much alive and kicking.

We Can De-Extinct, But Should We?

Bringing back a single individual from an extinct species would be an incredible achievement. Our course, at least two animals are needed to breed, and in theory, we’d like to have many more, each contributing some amount of genetic diversity to the population. The fewer unique individuals we start with, the more likely we are to end up with a race of genetically-impoverished clones.

Scientists in the de-extinction game are not insensitive to this problem, but the amount of genetic diversity we can theoretically infuse depends on a number of factors, including how many unique versions of the extinct organism’s genome we have access to. For the passenger pigeon, several complete genomes have now been sequenced, which scientists can scour for genetic mutations. When creating hybrid germ cell lines, they can intentionally introduce different versions of genes where diversity exists. Novak is hopeful that Revive and Restore can create an initial breeding stock with enough diversity to eventually produce a healthy passenger pigeon population.

For other extinct creatures, a single clone, or a handful of very genetically similar individuals, might be all that’s in the cards. Which begs another question that every scientist involved with de-extinction efforts today has to grapple with: Is all of this effort really worth it?

Why bother to bring Celia’s clone back into the world, when she’ll never have a male Pyrenean ibex to breed with? Why go to pains to reconstruct a mammoth gene by gene, if the chimera population is doomed to be a shadow of its former self?

Critics of de-extinction often argue that reviving lost species takes money and intellectual resources away from efforts to save those we’ve still got. Fair point, especially given the depressing truth that human activity has driven the rate of species disappearance a thousand times above background, pushing us headlong into a sixth mass extinction.

But Novak and his peers counter that some of the methods they’re honing through de-extinction efforts, including cloning and infusing cell lines with gene diversity, might be co-opted to help restore genetically impoverished populations. Indeed, along with its efforts to bring back the passenger pigeon, Revive and Restore is researching black footed ferret genomes. In the future, the company hopes to use “genetic rescue” techniques to help fortify the black footed ferret with mutations that were lost when the population dwindled to a mere seven individuals.

What’s more, many of the species that have gone extinct in recent human history provided vital ecosystem services while they were living. Bringing them back might be an important step toward restoring human-altered ecosystems to something akin to their natural state.

“All of the biodiversity in forests of North America co-evolved with huge flocks of billions of passenger pigeons over thousands and thousands of years,” Novak said. “Getting these birds back into the forest is going to be a part of making productive, bioabundant ecosystems that are more adaptable to climate change. It will make the management and conservation of other species easier for human beings.”

More saliently to the Jurassic Park-loving public, the idea of de-extincting life inspires wonder and awe. We may never see live herds of brachiosaurus stampede across a tropical island, but the technology to reproduce a 40 thousand-year-old Pleistocene mammoth is now within reach.

I don’t know about you, but I think a herd of mammoths stamping across snowy northern Canada would be a pretty cool thing to see.

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SpaceX's New Hangar Is A Mammoth Gateway To The Stars

To send really big rockets into space, you need equally enormous buildings to construct them in. Enter SpaceX’s new hangar, under construction right next to the pad that used to send Apollo missions to the moon.

The new hangar — big enough to hold five Falcon 9 rockets, or house the upcoming Falcon Heavy vehicle — is being built next to launch pad 39A at the Kennedy Space Center. That real estate comes with some major pedigree — pad 39A was the starting point for all the Apollo missions, plus the first and last launch location of the Space Shuttle. In fact, the hangar sits on the gravel road that NASA’s giant crawler-transporters used taking Space Shuttles to the launchpad.

Work started on the new hangar just a few months ago in February, but it should be ready for the first scheduled test launch of the Falcon Heavy later this year.

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The dark side of nursery rhymes

Plague, medieval taxes, religious persecution, prostitution: these are not exactly the topics that you expect to be immersed in as a new parent. But probably right at this moment, mothers of small children around the world are mindlessly singing along to seemingly innocuous nursery rhymes that, if you dig a little deeper, reveal shockingly sinister backstories. Babies falling from trees? Heads being chopped off in central London? Animals being cooked alive? Since when were these topics deemed appropriate to peddle to toddlers?

Since the 14th Century, actually. That’s when the earliest nursery rhymes seem to date from, although the ‘golden age’ came later, in the 18th Century, when the canon of classics that we still hear today emerged and flourished. The first nursery rhyme collection to be printed was Tommy Thumb's Song Book, around 1744; a century later Edward Rimbault published a nursery rhymes collection, which was the first one printed to include notated music –although a minor-key version of Three Blind Mice can be found in Thomas Ravenscroft's folk-song compilation Deuteromelia, dating from 1609.

The roots probably go back even further. There is no human culture that has not invented some form of rhyming ditties for its children. The distinctive sing-song metre, tonality and rhythm that characterises ‘motherese’ has a proven evolutionary value and is reflected in the very nature of nursery rhymes. According to child development experts Sue Palmer and Ros Bayley, nursery rhymes with music significantly aid a child's mental development and spatial reasoning. Seth Lerer, dean of arts and humanities at the University California – San Diego, has also emphasised the ability of nursery rhymes to foster emotional connections and cultivate language. “It is a way of completing the world through rhyme,” he said in an interview on the website of NBC’s Today show last year. “When we sing [them], we're participating in something that bonds parent and child.”

So when modern parents expose their kids to vintage nursery rhymes they’re engaging with a centuries-old tradition that, on the surface at least, is not only harmless, but potentially beneficial. But what about those twisted lyrics and dark back stories? To unpick the meanings behind the rhymes is to be thrust into a world not of sweet princesses and cute animals but of messy clerical politics, religious violence, sex, illness, murder, spies, traitors and the supernatural. A random sample of 10 popular nursery rhymes shows this.

The stuff of nightmares

Baa Baa Black Sheep is about the medieval wool tax, imposed in the 13th Century by King Edward I. Under the new rules, a third of the cost of a sack of wool went to him, another went to the church and the last to the farmer. (In the original version, nothing was therefore left for the little shepherd boy who lives down the lane). Black sheep were also considered bad luck because their fleeces, unable to be dyed, were less lucrative for the farmer.

Ring a Ring o Roses, or Ring Around the Rosie, may be about the 1665 Great Plague of London: the “rosie” being the malodorous rash that developed on the skin of bubonic plague sufferers, the stench of which then needed concealing with a “pocket full of posies”. The bubonic plague killed 15% of Britain’s population, hence “atishoo, atishoo, we all fall down (dead).”

Rock-a-bye Baby refers to events preceding the Glorious Revolution. The baby in question is supposed to be the son of King James II of England, but was widely believed to be another man’s child, smuggled into the birthing room to ensure a Roman Catholic heir. The rhyme is laced with connotation: the “wind” may be the Protestant forces blowing in from the Netherlands; the doomed “cradle” the royal House of Stuart. The earliest recorded version of the words in print contained the ominous footnote: “This may serve as a warning to the Proud and Ambitious, who climb so high that they generally fall at last”.

Mary, Mary Quite Contrary may be about Bloody Mary, daughter of King Henry VIII and concerns the torture and murder of Protestants. Queen Mary was a staunch Catholic and her “garden” here is an allusion to the graveyards which were filling with Protestant martyrs. The “silver bells” were thumbscrews; while “cockleshells” are believed to be instruments of torture which were attached to male genitals.

Goosey Goosey Gander is another tale of religious persecution but from the other side: it reflects a time when Catholic priests would have to say their forbidden Latin-based prayers in secret – even in the privacy of their own home.

Ladybird, Ladybird is also about 16th Century Catholics in Protestant England and the priests who were burned at the stake for their beliefs.

Lucy Locket is about a famous spat between two legendary 18th Century prostitutes.

Here We Go Round the Mulberry Bush originated, according to historian RS Duncan, at Wakefield Prison in England, where female inmates had to exercise around a mulberry tree in the prison yard.

Oranges and Lemons follows a condemned man en route to his execution – “Here comes a chopper / To chop off your head!” – past a slew of famous London churches: St Clemens, St Martins, Old Bailey, Bow, Stepney, and Shoreditch.

Oranges and Lemons has inspired a children’s game in which kids try to avoid being caught by the ‘executioner’s ax’ as ‘Chop! Chop! Chop!’ is shouted

Pop Goes The Weasel is an apparently nonsensical rhyme that, upon subsequent inspection, reveals itself to in fact be about poverty, pawnbroking, the minimum wage – and hitting the Eagle Tavern on London’s City Road.

Not safe for children?

In our own sanitised times, the idea of presenting these gritty themesspecifically to an infant audience seems bizarre. It outraged the Victorians, too, who founded the British Society for Nursery Rhyme Reform and took great pains to clean up the canon.

According to Random House’s Max Minckler, as late as 1941 the Society was condemning 100 of the most common nursery rhymes, including Humpty Dumpty and Three Blind Mice, for “harbouring unsavoury elements”. The long list of sins, he notes, included “referencing poverty, scorning prayer, and ridiculing the blind… It also included: 21 cases of death (notably choking, decapitation, hanging, devouring, shrivelling and squeezing); 12 cases of torment to animals; and 1 case each of consuming human flesh, body snatching, and ‘the desire to have one’s own limb severed’.”

“A lot of children's literature has a very dark origin,” explained Lerer to Today.com. “Nursery rhymes are part of long-standing traditions of parody and a popular political resistance to high culture and royalty.” Indeed, in a time when to caricature royalty or politicians was punishable by death, nursery rhymes proved a potent way to smuggle in coded or thinly veiled messages in the guise of children's entertainment. In largely illiterate societies, the catchy sing-song melodies helped people remember the stories and, crucially, pass them on to the next generation. Whatever else they may be, nursery rhymes are a triumph of the power of oral history. And the children merrily singing them to this day remain oblivious to the meanings contained within.

“The innocent tunes do draw attention away from what's going on in the rhyme; for example the drowned cat in Ding dong bell, or the grisly end of the frog and mouse in A frog he would a-wooing go”, music historian Jeremy Barlow, a specialist in early English popular music, tells me. “Some of the shorter rhymes, particularly those with nonsense or repetitive words, attract small children even without the tunes. They like the sound and rhythm of the words; of course the tune enhances that attraction, so that the words and the tune then become inseparable.” He adds, “The result can be more than the sum of the parts.”

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The Pure Presence of Christopher Lee

Christopher Lee doesn’t speak a word in Dracula: Prince of Darkness, the 1966 entry in the Hammer Horror series that helped launch him to fame. He occasionally hisses, but stated he otherwise rejected the dialogue written for him because it was terrible. And yet, it doesn’t matter: He commands the screen when he’s on it, and the film feels emptier when he’s not. Such was the case throughout his storied 68-year film career, which ended with his death June 7 at the age of 93 after he was hospitalized for respiratory problems and heart failure.

A legend of genre cinema, Lee was the definition of presence; no matter how creaky the material, he lent it instant legitimacy simply by showing up. The son of a career military officer and an Edwardian countess of Italian descent, Lee served in the Second World War as a military intelligence officer in the Royal Air Force, then returned to London and spent more than a decade trying to break into film acting before landing his first major role as the Creature in Hammer’s The Curse of Frankenstein (1957). It was another wordless role, and Lee was supposedly cast because he was tall (he stood 6’5”), but like Boris Karloff before him, he inhabited the role with ineffable style—when he tears off his bandages to attack his creator, Victor Frankenstein (Peter Cushing), the threat seems to be not in his strength, but in Lee’s wild eyes.

Lee and Cushing formed a celebrated partnership for Hammer Studios, a London-based outfit that became notorious in the 50s and 60s for its lurid updates on horror classics, many of them starring Lee (usually as the villain or monster) and Cushing (who would play the dark antihero). Lee’s most lucrative role was as Dracula, beginning with 1958’s Dracula and continuing for several more entries, each featuring Lee less and less as he grew tired of the role. No matter how shoddy the writing, whenever Lee appears in any of the sequels, the screen lights up—a kind of magic that persisted throughout his career.

Lee’s other Hammer roles included the Mummy, Rasputin (The Mad Monk), and Henry Baskerville (in The Count of the Baskervilles). He played Fu Manchu (in terrible Chinese makeup) in a five-part series of films, and at the height of his career in the 60s and 70s would show up in four or five films a year. Audiences’ tastes changed, but Lee was always there to change along with them. For the actor, his crowning achievement was the role of Lord Summerisle in Robin Hardy’s 1973 horror masterpiece The Wicker Man, a film Lee helped develop alongside screenwriter Anthony Shaffer. A far subtler affair than the Hammer gore-fests, The Wicker Man sees a policeman search for a missing girl on a remote British island, where he encounters a cultish community led by Summerisle, whom Lee plays as charming and erudite. But once again, there’s danger lurking in his eyes, as revealed in one of horror cinema’s greatest endings.

Lee spent most of his career playing villains, but he always invested them with both menace and class, as seen when he played the James Bond nemesis Francisco Scaramanga in The Man with the Golden Gun or Rochefort in Richard Lester’s Three Musketeers series. Steven Spielberg recognized Lee’s gift for self-deprecation in a Saturday Night Live appearance and cast him in his madcap comedy 1941; the horror legend Joe Dante paid homage to Lee’s illustrious career with a role in the brilliant, meta-textual Gremlins 2: The New Batch. Lee’s work dwindled in the 80s and 90s as he grew older and less spry, a problem as genre films got more and more action-packed. His late-career resurgence started when Tim Burton cast him in a small role in 1999’s Sleepy Hollow; from there, he landed the role of the evil wizard Saruman in Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings trilogy and the Sith Lord Count Dooku in George Lucas’ Star Wars prequels.

Lee had long coveted the role of Gandalf, but knew he was too old to play it in Jackson’s films; Saruman proved a worthy consolation prize, allowing him to pit his wits against Ian McKellen on screen and turn J.R.R. Tolkien’s sub-Shakespearean dialogue into poetry. His lines in the Star Wars prequels are even more trite, but coming out of Lee’s mouth, they suddenly sound like spun gold. No matter the role, his age, or the genre trappings around him, Lee never lost his pure presence.

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Eating Human Brains Saved Tribe From Developing Dementia

Brains … it’s what’s for dinner. Or at least it used to be at funerals in Papua New Guinea where members of the remote Fore tribe consumed the brains of the deceased. While this grisly cannibalistic practice has largely disappeared (although not completely), the study of it hasn’t. Researchers have recently discovered that, while some tribe members contracted fatal brain diseases from eating the brains of the dead (ironically), others developed a resistance to the mad cow-like disease that killed them and to dementia and other brain conditions.

According to a report on the research in the journal Nature, before giving up funeral brain feasting in the 1950s, up to 2 percent of the Fore tribe members died annually from kuru prion disease. Prions are infectious proteins that can cause mad cow disease in cattle and the similar Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease in humans. These prions can also cause dementia.

Normal brain tissue compared to infected samples

Researchers found that the surviving members of the Fore tribe were free of dementia and Parkinson’s disease, another neurodegenerative disease, because they had developed a gene that resists the prions. This was a pretty impressive find, says scientist John Collinge of the Institute of Neurology’s prion unit at University College London.

This is a striking example of Darwinian evolution in humans, the epidemic of prion disease selecting a single genetic change that provided complete protection against an invariably fatal dementia.

There are 47.5 million people worldwide with some form of dementia and that number grows by 7.7 million each year. Will they – and anyone who wants to protect themselves from developing dementia – be forced to become cannibals?

Fortunately, the answer is probably not. Geneticists have used this research to develop mice that are completely resistant to kuru and Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease. Now they just need to figure out how to duplicate this safely in humans.

See, something good CAN come from eating brains.

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The Mysterious Remains of Russia’s Space Shuttle Program

There’s a lot of talk these days about how we’re going to get humans and equipment to Mars, but it’s just talk. In the meantime, we’re still looking for ways to replace the space shuttles which transported astronauts and supplies to the International Space Station for 30 years. While SpaceX has made a few trips with its Dragon, the workhorse continues to be the Russian Soyuz spacecraft which has been around since 1967 and the days of the Soviet Union. Whatever happened to Russia’s own space shuttle program?

Photographer Ralph Mirebs was given the unprecedented opportunity to visit a mysterious hangar near the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan where the remains of two prototype shuttles, as well as the remains of the Soviet space shuttle program itself, sit abandoned. The main Buran shuttle (OK-1K1) made one test flight in 1988 before it and the rest were scrapped. OK-1K1 was destroyed in a hangar collapse in 2002. The nearly-completed but never tested Burya and OK-MT are the ones Mirebs photographed.

The two abandoned Russian space shuttles

The shuttles, which look remarkably like the U.S. space shuttles (because of suspected stolen plans), are covered in dirt, dust and bird droppings. Mirebs was able to photograph inside the cockpits which still contained instruments and displays, as well as inside the cargo bays which were clean from being closed up.

The cargo bay still looks ready for a load of equipment

The hangar building itself is the largest at the Baikonur Cosmodrome complex and was built with reinforced steel to withstand possible explosions from both inside and out. As a result, the building fared better than the Buran program, as Mirebs saw when he took photographs from platforms high above the shuttles.

Outside of the shuttle building

So what killed the Soviet shuttle program? Money problems caused by the demise of the Soviet Union. Then Russian President Boris Yeltsin officially ended it on June 30, 1993. In addition to the two shuttles Mirebs saw and the one destroyed, five others were in some stage of production. Some were dismantled for parts and tests and one is on display in a museum.

The abandoned building and shuttles are a sad testimony to the so-called “space race.” With the state of space programs today, there were no true winners. In endeavors of this magnitude, cooperation – not competition – may be the key to successfully getting humans to Mars and beyond.

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BELL & ROSS WW2 REGULATOR OFFICER WATCH

The latest update in the military-inspired design from Bell & Ross, the Regulator Officer Watch, adds some luxury to an already esteemed line. Enhanced with a bicolor black and silver dial, and a satin-polished stainless steel case that measures 47mm in diameter. Under the hood lies an automatic movement that powers the regulator function and two subdials featuring an hour and seconds counter. Complete with black alligator strap, it's a timepiece fit for a high ranking official.

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Elon Musk: The Tech Maverick Making Tony Stark Look Dull

Elon Musk was born in 1971 in South Africa, just as the Space Race was drawing to a close. It seems as though he had missed the best bits – so perhaps that is what inspired by the man who would later spend his billions on doing his damndest to kickstart humanity back into the future that we had been promised. But we’re getting ahead of ourselves.

Musk got his first computer, a Commodore Vic-20 when he was 10, and two years later had already sold his first game, written in BASIC, for $500. The show-off. All was not brilliant though, as he experienced bullying at school. He later said “They got my best [expletive] friend to lure me out of hiding so they could beat me up. And that [expletive] hurt. For some reason they decided that I was it, and they were going to go after me nonstop. That’s what made growing up difficult. For a number of years there was no respite. You get chased around by gangs at school who tried to beat the [expletive] out of me, and then I’d come home, and it would just be awful there as well.”

I’m guessing he had the last laugh though as in 1995 and he picked up a PhD in Applied Physics from the prestigious Stanford University in the US.

Even at college it seems he was already thinking big. The daughter of one of his advisers recalled meeting him for the first time at a college party: “I believe the second sentence out of his mouth was, ‘I think a lot about electric cars.’ And then he turned to me and said, ‘Do you think about electric cars?’ “

Later that year Musk founded his first company, Zip2, an online publishing company that helped get old media on to this new-fangled World-Wide-Web. Clearly Musk could see which way the wind was blowing as four years later it was bought by Compaq and Alta Vista (!), and Musk walked away with a cool $22m.

The PayPal Years

His next venture was as one of the co-founders of a company that would later become PayPal. Back in the day, when the internet was scary and new, eBay was something of a phenomenon – a new market place that hooked up buyers and sellers around the world. But there was just one problem: How could we trust the person at the other end? If we send them an envelope full of cash, will they really send us the Beanie Babies (or whatever it is we bought in the 90s) they promised?

The genius in PayPal was that it did away with sharing bank details or cash, and instead had users send money to PayPal, acting as an intermediary, using email addresses to specify who ultimately gets the cash. As we know, it was hugely successful too and was later bought by eBay for $1.5bn in stock – giving Musk’s 11.7 per cent shareholding $165m. Not bad.

No doubt Musk was successful because he was hugely talented, but he doesn’t sound like he was particularly fun to work with. His mum recalled “He goes into his brain, and then you just see he is in another world. He still does that. Now I just leave him be because I know he is designing a new rocket or something.”

He also worked hard, allegedly once saying “If there was a way that I could not eat, so I could work more, I would not eat. I wish there was a way to get nutrients without sitting down for a meal.”

Apparently when employees would complain about the long hours he wanted them to work, he would tell them that they can see their families when the company goes bankrupt. Yikes.

Elon Takes Off

So having founded two fairly successful internet ventures, what to do next? Rather than play it safe by coming up with another website or service, in (appropriately enough) 2001, Musk made the maverick decision and decided that he’d much rather play with rockets – and founded Space Exploration Technologies, which would later become known as SpaceX.

SpaceX has proved hugely successful too — not only was Musk one of the first movers in the private space sector, but he’s done a damn good job. But he eschewed the Richard Branson route and going for the glamorous zero-gravity tourism stuff, Musk has instead focused attention on the more fundamental problems about getting into space by making rockets more affordable. Musk didn’t want the easy win of having humans float about in low Earth Orbit — he wants a revolution.

In just five years, SpaceX was already winning big contracts from NASA to build new launch vehicles, and as of 2015 is regularly launching unmanned resupply missions to the International Space Station using its Dragon rockets, having become the first commercial company to dock with the ISS in 2012.

The company has also unveiled plans for new rockets capable of transporting astronauts and at the time of writing, has most recently been attempting to manoeuvre controlled landings for its Falcon launch vehicles – so that they may become reusable (and thus cheaper) in the future.

Musk has apparently said that his goal is to create a “true spacefaring civilisation”. Hyperbole like that would sound ridiculous coming from basically anyone else.

Astonishingly, this isn’t where Musk’s story ends. In 2003 Musk also co-founded Tesla Motors, and has since made electric cars cool. For millions of motorists, it is no longer a great big engine roaring they want – it is an ultra-sleek Tesla Roadster. Whilst the Tesla Model S is still only a vehicle for the richest in society, Musk has recently said his goal is to build an electric car that can retail for less than $30,000, putting it within reach of many more.

Perhaps his most maverick move at Tesla though, apart from getting involved in electric vehicles in the first place, has been the move to open source his patents. Whilst the company still technically holds patents for various technologies, it won’t be calling the lawyers if rival companies copy.

This is brilliant because not only does it help create common standards for electric vehicles, but it should help tackle the chicken-and-egg problem of not having enough charging points until there are enough electric cars, and not having enough electric cars until there are enough charging points. Perhaps Tesla is helping create the conditions that will make a move away from fossil fuels viable — so maybe humanity might actually stand a small chance of tackling climate change?

Today Elon Musk is apparently worth around $13bn and is at the helm of two companies that could potentially change the world. Clearly for Musk and especially SpaceX, not even the sky is the limit.

[MIKA27]

The Map That Led Columbus To America Is Finally Being Deciphered

The primary way we share ideas today is the internet. In the 15th century, it was cartography. And now, researchers at Yale are giving us a glimpse of one of the most influential maps in history — which, up until now, had been too faded and aged to read.

Henricus Martellus isn’t a name you’d recognise unless you’re interested in map history, but he played a role in some of the most important events of the early modern world, thanks to a map he drew in 1491. It showed the world as Europe understood it, and scholars have long theorised that it gave Columbus the information he needed to find the New World (it also may have famously misinformed him about the location of Japan, today known as the Bahamas).

That a map could survive 500 years — 524 years, to be exact — is pretty amazing. But much of the text on the 6-foot-wide map has been lost to history thanks to wear and tear. Since the map came to Yale in the 1960s, researchers have tried to decipher hundreds of words and shapes that were too faded to read:

It’s only within the past year that they have succeeded — thanks to improvements in multispectral imaging. Today in Yale News, Michael Cummings explains how the technology has revealed hundreds of new words that seemed lost forever. In his story, he explains how a team at Yale is using multispectral imaging to see through the ancient haze: The process captures images of the map at 12 different light frequencies which, when processed using imaging algorithms, reveal words and figures where our eyes see nothing.

Cummings was kind enough to send along higher-res versions of the maps’ new details, a few of which you’ll find below. Read the full story here.

“Animals Different From Ours”

As Cummings explains, a lot of the text passages on the map describe not only local populations, but also the local wildlife of regions throughout the world — sometimes lifted from The Travels of Marco Polo. For example, the passage below is warning of a monstrous creature today known as an Orca, which Yale says Martellus described as “a sea monster that is like the sun when it shines, whose form can hardly be described, except that its skin is soft and its body huge.”

Another warns of “large wildernesses in which there are lions, large leopards, and many other animals different from ours:”

Ethiopian Sources

Another cool detail revealed by the multispectral analysis? That the way Martellus depicted Africa was actually based on African sources. According to Cummings, the way Africa is drawn on the map actually came from Ethiopian sources — specifically, “three Ethiopian delegates to the Council of Florence in 1441.” The council was called by the Pope — who invited the Ethiopian delegates, providing insight into how the African continent was shaped.

A Map’s Lineage

Again, cartography was a hugely important tool during the Age of Discovery. Martellus’s map was based on others before it, and his map went on to influence how several other cartographers depicted the new world. The multispectral images created by Yale give us a look at that heritage — the newly-uncovered words include some shared with a later map, by Martin Waldseemüller in 1507, suggesting Waldseemüller may have used this map to draw his own.

I’ve written about Waldseemüller’s map before, actually: It was the first known cartographic rendering of America as a continent. Of course, his 16th century America looks very different from our own. Instead, “America” is a long, thin peninsula that seems to stretch from Nova Scotia down to Florida. Beyond that, neither Waldseemüller or Martellus could know.

It would far longer to find out what existed in the blank patch of map — and even longer for us to figure out what they thought might exist there.

[MIKA27]

Glorious Night Sky Captured With Nikon's New Astrophotography DSLR

If you’ve never seen the night sky shimmer and glow like this one does, don’t feel bad: your human eyes simply aren’t good enough. But with technology, skilled astrophotographers are able to pull back the veil and reveal the unseen glory of the cosmos.

The starry sky above was captured by Adam Woodworth late last month at Monument Cove in Acadia National Park, Maine. It’s a blend of ten different ten second exposures, each taken at ISO 12800 (in laymen’s terms, insanely high light sensitivity) and stacked using Starry Landscape Stacker for Mac.

The nebula’s greenish hue is the result of airglow, the emission of faint green or magenta light by particles in the upper atmosphere when they’re struck by cosmic rays. While this optical phenomena is a bit of a nuisance for astronomers using ground-based telescopes, for the rest of us, it’s an beautiful and exotic sight to behold.

[MIKA27]

Re-enact Epic Star Wars Battles In Your Bedroom With These Tiny RC Toys

The same company responsible for those incredibly tiny RC pico helicopter toys, Bandai Namco’s CCP, has created a line of Star Wars-themed flying toys that are small enough to recreate the films’ most epic space battles in your bedroom.

Available August 1st for just shy of $US50 each, the remote control X-Wing, TIE Fighter, and Millennium Falcon all include wireless controllers that double as charging bases. You can expect to get about four minutes of flight time with just a three-minute charge, and each craft has a wireless range of about 5m. So if one manages to get away from you, it won’t get very far before running out of power.

[MIKA27]

You Can Buy The First The Force Awakens Figure At Comic-Con

Can’t wait until September to get your hands on some new Star Wars toys? If you’re headed to the San Diego Comic-Con in July, you won’t have to wait because Hasbro will happily sell you this SDCC-exclusive Stormtrooper figure featuring the new helmet design seen in The Force Awakens teasers.

Entertainment Weekly managed to get the first image of the 6-inch figure that will be part of Hasbro’s Black Series line and will come in San Diego Comic-Con exclusive packaging. Only a limited number will be made available for sale at the convention for $US25, and even fewer will be available afterwards atHasbroToyShop.com for those who can’t make it to the con. But don’t be too upset if you miss out, come September stores shelves will be flooded with The Force Awakens toys, so you don’t have that long to wait.

[MIKA27]

This Incredible Wheelchair Can Climb Stairs Like A Tank

Technology has been making wheelchairs more convenient and easier to use, but this crazy amazing model that actually scales staircases is a metaphorical mic drop.

This prototype, called the Scalevo, has rubber, tank-like treads mounted to the bottom of the chair. The user approaches a set of steps backwards with his or her back facing the steps. The treads sprout out, lifting the chair up at an angle, allowing it to crawl up the steps. The user is kept level at all times. The headlight-and-taillight-equipped chair has two extra sets of wheels that pop out at the last step to provide smoother transition back to flat ground.

It began as a student project last summer, and now ten electrical engineering and industrial design students from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology and the Zurich University of the Arts are working on it. They say the Segway was an inspiration. I guess there’s a first time for everything.

The team wants it ready by next year’s Cybathlon, a race for people with physical disabilities that use assisting robotic tech, like exoskeletons and electrically stimulated muscles.

[MIKA27]

Tiny Electric Backup Engine For Planes Kicks In When All Else Fails

A commercial airliner with multiple engines can limp to a runway if one of them fails. But a small plane, driven by just a single propeller, is in more serious trouble when its engine stops. So researchers have created a tiny electric backup that kicks in during an emergency, ensuring the craft can safely get to the ground.

Jointly developed by researchers at the Universidad Carlos III de Madrid and AXTER Aerospace, the tiny electric motor can be installed as an aftermarket upgrade because it’s designed to sit just behind the plane’s propeller. It’s also wired into its own dedicated backup battery that’s kept small for weight reasons. Since the system is specifically designed for small planes maxing out at around 750kg, keeping weight to a minimum matters.

With such a small battery powering the electric motor, though, the emergency backup system isn’t designed to get a plane to its original destination should the primary engine fail. Instead, it gives a craft an additional range of just 20km to find a safe place to land in an emergency. In other words, it’s really only there to prevent a deadly crash.

However, since the electric motor’s backup battery is constantly being charged by the main engine, it can actually be used outside of emergency situations as a sort of hybrid powertrain. Pilots can turn it on for an extra 40 horsepower for takeoffs, or to improve fuel efficiency during a long flight. But only as long as the plane’s main engine is running, to ensure the electric motor’s backup battery remains fully charged.

[MIKA27]

THE FASCINATING STORY BEHIND THE CINEMA AT THE END OF THE WORLD

Hidden amongst the remote sand dunes of the Egyptian coast of Sharm El Sheikh lies a rather intriguing find. It's long lost Egyptian city, haunted tomb or an ancient relic, it's an abandoned outdoor cinema which was built somewhere around the beginning of this millennium.

Award-winning Estonian photographer Kaupo Kikkas made the discovery of "the cinema at the end of the world' after hearing the following story.

Whilst the details are somewhat sketchy, in truth little else is know about the site. Kikkas recollection of the story is likely to be as close as anyone will get to the true origins of the cinema.

Firstly (and somewhat surprising based on its location) it wasn't created or designed Egyptians. It was in fact the idea of Dynn Eadel an eccentric Frenchman who had a passion for smoking more than a little bit of cannabis.

Nobody knows why he was there, but during a trip to the Sinai desert he had a moment of inspiration - deciding then and there that a cinema needed to be built on the very spot he was standing. His own personal cinema, in one of the most remote places on the planet.

A man of means, he was more than capable of making his vision a reality and promptly headed back to Paris to draw up his plans.

Several months later, everything had been built and was now in place - the giant projector, the huge screen, meticulously crafted wood seats and one of the best views you could imagine all ready to go.

Just how he imagined it.

On the grand opening, which featured all manner of VIPs, special guest, esteemed members of Egyptian society and even the governor of Sinai himself - things took a turn for the worst.

Mere minutes before the first ever screening was to take place, the electric generator was "sabotaged" killing all the power in the area, plunging everyone into total darkness and rendering the event a complete failure.

No big unveiling, no glitzy lights - just hundreds of wooden chairs in the darkness of the desert.

It's fairly certain that it wasn't an accident or freak mechanical failure - the generator had been deliberately decommissioned, by whom though remains a mystery to this day.

An angry local, a jaded lover or just someone with a grudge to bear perhaps? Either way Eadel was never able to fulfill his dream of watching movies and dazzling guests with his own personal cinema in the desert.

After that rather fateful night, the entire project seemed to become abandoned with Eadel heading back to Paris never to be heard of again. A man crushed and disappointed by the actions of others.

But what has become of the site since Kikkas visited? Are you able to take tours there? Is it a restricted area? Has it be been blown away by the sands of time? Noha Zayed who lives nearby opted to investigate the site for himself.

This is what he found....

Only cluttered broken fragments of the chairs remain, seemingly destroyed and levelled by vandals, modern day relics of a failed enterprise. An enterprise that was sparked by a wealthy Frenchman only to be instantly extinguished by the mischievous hand of the unknown.

[MIKA27]

ABANDONED VILLAGE RECLAIMED BY THE BEAUTY OF MOTHER NATURE

Whilst over 1 billion individuals call China home, the Shengsi islands located near the start of the Yangtze River are completely unpopulated. That wasn't always the case, the archipelago of just under 400 islands was a popular fishing village due to its location. But as the years rolled by locals and townsfolk moved closer to cities in search of better pay, as a result the community itself slowly dwindled away.

In the year since, Mother Nature has stepped in and began to reclaim the abandoned village as her own. Cobblestone laneways and brick homes have become overrun by vibrant leafy greens and lush vegetation. The animals have returned too, with different specifies of bird, odd bugs and healthy fish reestablishing their breeding grounds free from the chaos and pollution of industry.

Intrepid traveller Tang Yuhong decided to take the time to explore Shengsi unaccompanied, photographing it's new found beauty and wonder free from human intervention.

This is his remarkable photographic tale.

[MIKA27]

Mushroom Cloud Over Russian Town Sparks World War III Rumors

Residents of Tyumen in south central Russia went into an end-of–the-world panic when they saw a mushroom-shaped rising over their city. Pictures were immediately posted on the Internet and the rest of the world started googling “Armageddon.” “World War III” and “where to find radiation-proof toilet paper.” Did someone press the wrong button?

Cars drive by the mushroom cloud in Tyumen

Tyumen was the first Russian settlement in Siberia back in 1586 and today is a major oil-and-gas center, so a nuclear attack on the city as a way to cripple Russia’s energy industry makes sense. Is that what Tymuen residents were thinking? Here’s a tweet from Oleg Alexeeva:

Oh, God save us. What have they done?!!!

Here’s another apocalyptic tweet:

Crazy b******s!!! This is the end.

Of course, some took a deep breath (even though that’s dangerous during a possible nuclear attack) before tweeting:

I think someone would have said something if we suddenly found ourselves under nuclear attack.

Good point. No one heard any explosions either, which eliminates a nuclear device as well as a conventional bomb or missile attack. Volcanoes can emit mushroom clouds but there are no volcanoes nearby. And there were no reports of meteors.

No one seems to be in a panic

There are plenty of oil and gas facilities and storage depots in Tyumen where an explosion could cause a mushroom cloud, but nothing like that was reported by the media or local authorities. A large forest or brush fire could cause a mushroom cloud, but no occurrences of either were seen in the area.

If you’re an end-of-the-world type or a conspiracy fan, this is all pretty disappointing … unless you live in Tyumen. So, what exactly was this mushroom cloud they saw?

According to meteorologists, it was most likely an anvil or cumulonimbus incus cloud which had reached a stratospheric level that caused it to flatten out on the top. They can become supercells causing tornadoes or severe thunderstorms but the one over Tyumen didn’t look too threatening and there were no reports of storms.

Weather control test? You never know in Russia. Nuclear attack? Nope. But to be on the safe side, Tyumenites may want to stock up on lead umbrellas.

The appropriate cloud for tweeting: “Crazy b******s!!! This is the end.”

[MIKA27]

Alligators of the Sewers – Real Ones!

One of the most persistent legends concerning the New York City sewer-system is that it is home to a largely hidden population of marauding alligators. Just about everyone knows, and enjoys, the engaging stories. But, most people are content to write off such tales as simply friend of a friend yarns and modern day folklore. Maybe they shouldn’t.

Despite claims that the whole thing is one big urban legend and nothing more, that’s not exactly the case. It would seem, at least. Sifting fact from fiction, rumor from hearsay, and claims from evidence, is no easy task. But, as is so often the case when it comes to folklore and urban legends, there is at least a nugget of truth to the stories of New York’s alligators, if nothing else.

Back in February 1935, none other than the New York Times reported on the astonishingdiscovery of an alligator in the sewers of the city. The article was titled “Alligator Found in Uptown Sewer: Youths Shoveling Snow See the Animal Churning in Icy Water.”

According to the story, one Salvatore Condoluci was the ringleader. He and his teenage gang snared and killed the beast, which was found below an open manhole cover located near the Harlem River, on 123rd Street.

Or, rather, we’re told that is how it went down. Certainly, no-one from the Times ever saw the body of the animal, and so the idea that it was all a prank on the part of Condoluci and his buddies can’t be entirely ruled out – something which has the potential to confuse the true picture even more.

Teddy May

Moving on, it’s time to turn our attentions to a man named Teddy May. For more than three decades, May held the position of Commissioner of Sewers in New York. May heard all the stories of numerous, fearsome alligators roaming the lower levels of New York, but dismissed them. Or, more correctly, he dismissed them at first.

One rogue case – the Condoluci affair – was plausible. But dozens of beasts, terrorizing New York like the animal equivalent of a 1950s-era street-gang from the Bronx? It was way too good to be true, right? No, it was not; not completely. As time went on, more and more reports reached May and his staff, to the point where a decision was taken to try and get to the bottom of the controversy and answer two significant questions: Was New York infested by alligators? Maybe even by man-eaters?

Well, “infested” might have been too strong a word to use. But, being proactive and feeling a need to offer an answer to the stories that were floating around the Big Apple, May decided to take a trip into the city’s watery underworld for himself. Amazingly, he claimed to have seen several such creatures prowling around the sewers – no doubt in search of a tasty rat or several.

It should be stressed that we’re definitely not talking about giant, vicious monsters of the type that one might see in one of those terrible movies on the SyFy Channel. No, the alligators that Teddy May said he saw were just a few feet in length. Of course, that didn’t take away the fact that, over time, they might have expanded to a point where they became capable of taking on a person. And winning, too. Reportedly, all the animals were either gunned or poisoned to death. Just maybe, however, they didn’t all die.

Remember that, if you ever feel the need to check out New York’s subterranean domain for yourself. You may go from eating lunch to becoming lunch.

[MIKA27]

Wild Rains Free Wild Animals in Tbilisi

A freak storm and flash floods cause a rising death toll, while tigers, lions, wolves bears and a groggy hippo wander the streets.

TBILISI, Georgia—A massive flood hit the Georgian capital of Tbilisi after heavy rains Saturday night, unleashing scenes reminiscent of disaster movie—or a biblical epic—as wild animals escaped from the city zoo and roamed the streets. Many are still at large.

The devastation began when a small, barely noticeable stream called the Vere River erupted suddenly as a raging torrent. Nearby a new highway system connected to a main hub in the middle of the city was completely demolished. So far 12 people have been reported dead with the numbers expected to rise. At least 24 are missing and more than 35 are injured. The right bank of the Mtkvari River, which runs through the heart of the ancient city, cannot be reached form the left bank and cars there with residents trapped inside may remain in the river.

Electricity and gas lines have been cut off to one nearby village, which remains completely isolated due to blocked roads. Another was devastated after a massive landslide. More than 40 families have been left homeless and 22,000 people have been left without electricity. The Georgian government is allocating $4.5 million to Tbilisi City Hall to cover damages and ongoing search and rescue operations. The city has sustained an estimated $18 million in damages and July 15 has been declared a “day of sorrow” for small south Caucasus country.

The Tbilisi zoo was right in the path of the flood. Walls were knocked down and cages broken. Three zoo workers rushed to the zoo to try to rescue the animals, but were drowned as they struggled to save and contain the beasts. With cars floating down streets in the lower parts of the city, some 30 large and potentially dangerous wild animals—lions, tigers, bears wolves and even a hippopotamus—escaped from their enclosures. Many other animals, including an albino tiger, lions and several bears, were shot by police or drowned in the flood. Others still remain at large in densely populated areas of the city with reports of sightings throughout.

Two bears were caught as far out as the city’s suburbs. One rogue crocodile reportedly remains inside the zoo making part of the grounds unsafe for recue workers. The government has not issued an official green light to kill the animals but many are being hunted down because some people are convinced that tranquilizer darts are not effective enough. A lion cub reportedly was found shot in the head near the zoo grounds. So far three lion, four tigers and a bunch of wolved have been killed.

Last night the escaped hippopotamus made its way to what was once one the main interstate hub of the city, known as Hero’s Square. The waters have rendered the entire highway system unusable. After taking several tranquilizer darts, the hippopotamus continued to walk lethargically around the area, even eating leaves from a tree with the darts still in its neck. It was then escorted back to the zoo.

Because of the escaped zoo animals and other dangers from the flood, residents are being warned not to go outdoors or drive in various areas of the city. Many residential streets and roads have been cut off. Last night as people returned home from nightclubs at least one group was met with frantic police officers telling them to run because a lion was approaching.

Giving the situation an even more morbid feel, hillside graveyards reportedly have been unearthed and local residents are searching through the tombstones to check on the state of loved ones long deceased.

An event that already seemed to be of biblical proportions found even further absurdity, when Ilia II, the Patriarch of the Georgian Orthodox Church, declared that the Tbilisi Zoo was “founded on sin” and that this is the reason for these events. The Georgian Pope claimed that Georgian churches were robbed of valuables during Communist times and that this funding was used to build the zoo. He is demanding the official closure of the zoo and the opening of a new zoo “not founded on sin.”

Further rainfall is expected tonight and even more tomorrow, which could then result in dangerous landslides. The government of this small country plans to seed and shell rain clouds if necessary, but the Georgian Minister of Environment has warned that the flood could soon be repeated.

If this keeps up, someone may start building an ark.

[MIKA27]

CIGAR PUNCH CUFFLINKS

Maybe you want to smoke a celebratory cigar at a wedding. Maybe you’re dressed up and someone offers you a stogie. Whatever the case, you’ll be glad you’re wearing these Cigar Punch Cufflinks. The cufflinks, which make a great gift for dad or any cigar lover, unscrew to reveal a hidden, usable cigar punch. No more trying to get a hole in the back of your cigar like you’re MacGyver; just pop a cufflink off and let it do the work. [Purchase]

[MIKA27]

CRESCENT FLIP & GRIP WRENCH MULTI-TOOL

Six commonly used tools in one round out the Flip & Grip Wrench Multi-Tool from Crescent. The spring loaded ratcheting wrench with an adjustable jaw that fits over 40 fasteners might be the highlight, but you also get a Phillips screwdriver, a slotted screwdriver, a knife, and a combo can opener, bottle opener, and V-groove wire stripper. All of the dimensions were designed proportionally to keep it strong and at a minimum weight, making this pocket sized tool incredibly efficient to have at arm's length in the car, shed, or to carry everyday.

[MIKA27]

OLD FORESTOR 1897 BOURBON

One of the most historic bourbon brands around is getting nostalgic with their newest release, Old Forestor 1897 Bottled In Bond Bourbon. Crafted to honor the U.S. Bottled-in-Bond act of 1897, which was legislation enacted in reaction to the underhanded practice of blending additives and who knows what else into spirits and passing it off as bourbon. Bottled in Bond bourbon must have been the product of one distillation season, one distiller, and from one distillery. It's also aged in a federally bonded warehouse for at least four years and bottled at 100 proof. You get all that and more with 1897, a lightly filtered small batch expression that celebrates the past in a proper, great tasting fashion.

[MIKA27]

SIMPLISM HIBIKI ACOUSTIC IPHONE CASE

You want the best sound quality out of your phone. You use good headphones, and maybe you even carry around a collection of lossless audio, ripped straight from vinyl. But nothing can stop the degradation of sound by the radio waves your phone emits.

Except maybe this.

Handmade in a 70-year-old factory by skilled Japanese craftsmen, the Simplism Hibiki Acoustic iPhone Case uses a combination of high-tech materials and North American white ash to limit the effect those waves have on your audio, giving you the best performance possible while also protecting your phone and looking damn good while doing it.

[MIKA27]

Fallout Shelter: A Fallout Game For iOS [update: Now With Link To Game!]

Holy crap. While demonstrating Fallout 4 at E3 2015, Bethesda announced an iPhone game you can download today.

It’s called Fallout Shelter, and in it you are the Overseer in charge of your very own vault.

You bring people into the Vault, assign them tasks, level up their specs, send them out on missions and grow the community.

The best part is that it’s completely free, and features almost no in-app purchases. The only in-app purchases you can go for give you more loot drops according to Bethesda.

Clearly Fallout Shelter is designed to keep us all occupied until Fallout 4 lands on consoles and PC in November. I’m already sold.

You can download the game for iOS right here.

Check out some screens below:

[MIKA27]

Bethesda Is Making A Real-Life Pip Boy 3000 With Fallout 4

Collector’s editions are often so full of crappy little trinkets that I wonder why anyone ever buys them. Bethesda probably wondered that too, and decided to step the collector’s edition up a notch and give you a real-life Pip Boy 3000 with purchase.

A Pip Boy 3000 is an in-game gadget that your character is given at his or her coming of age in the world of the Vault. It signifies you’re ready to take on the tasks of an adult, and serves as your in-game inventory and development companion in the Fallout-universe.

People have been making replicas for years, but in 2015’s world of smartwatches, Bethesda has decided to give you a real-life Pip Boy 3000 with Fallout 4.

The collector’s edition of the game will come with a replica Pip Boy 3000 wrist cuff that fits phones of all sizes, and an app for your smart device that lets you simulate the wasteland gadget.

Shut up and take my bottle caps!

Fallout 4 comes out in November.