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

[MIKA27]

BOWERS & WILKINS P5 WIRELESS HEADPHONES

The Bowers & Wilkins P5 headphones, with their removable ear pads, soft sheep leather, and aluminum construction, already felt luxurious, and now their getting a bit of a tech upgrade to boot. Now the fine headphones come with wireless Bluetooth instead of a messy cable. The upgraded P5 Series 2—now just the P5 Wireless—packs 40mm drivers, a three-button earpiece operation system, and a couple of built-in mics for taking calls. They also include a battery with a 17-hour lifespan and a cable for when that’s not enough. Same killer cans, but with less tangles.

[MIKA27]

TL3 RACING SIMULATOR - I CAN ONLY DREAM!

Motion Simulation´s TL3 Racing Simulator is a state of the art simulator that came to life after more than 5 years of intensive research and development in collaboration with a world championship Formula 1 team. Quite different from your Playstation and Xbox experience, the TL3 Simulator includes a wide number of world´s first technology such as a variable driving position, and the 200º spherical projector with 6 million pixels, that literally wraps around you to put you right at the centre of the action, enriching your visual experience. It was specially designed for powerful PC´s that support the demanding software that the TL3 Simulator uses, it features a pod made from composite materials, CNC machined with laser precision and comes with cooling fans, plus real hydraulic systems, such as the real feel pedals and the Force Feedback steering wheel. Available in 5 different colors TL3 delivers an unrivalled, immersive, and most realistic simulation experience available.

[MIKA27]

FEEDING THE FIRE

You might not be looking to open up a barbecue joint, but still need some help taking your grilling game to the next level. Feeding The Fire comes from Joe Carroll, owner of Fette Sau and St. Anselm restaurants in Brooklyn, New York, and is just what you need to take that next step. Carroll keeps things simple, showing that fancy equipment isn't necessary to make great grilled meats. He doesn't have a magic wand, but does provide tips, lessons, and 75 recipes to help make your next grill out memorable. A former home cook himself, Carroll will help you make better steak, brisket, pulled pork, grilled vegetables, and more, without spending a fortune or earning a culinary degree.

[MIKA27]

The Perfect Groot Costume Starts With This Rocket Raccoon Backpack

Headed to San Diego Comic-Con this week but still haven’t decided on a costume to wear? With ThinkGeek’s exclusive Rocket Raccoon backpack, you’re about 25 per cent of the way to an impressive Groot getup.

To keep the scale mostly accurate, Rocket unfortunately isn’t able to hold anything larger than an iPad or a couple of Infinity Gems. So you can forget about cramming a day’s worth of high school textbooks in there, or even a gauntlet. But his plush head, fluffy tail, and adorable arms that appear to be hanging onto your shoulders, more than make up for those limitations.

For $US40 you’re not paying for a useful way to carry stuff, you’re paying to have Rocket Raccoon as your constant companion — and that’s perfectly OK [ThinkGeek]

[NCPANTHERZFAN]

Dropped by the U.S. Military, Colt Goes Bankrupt

After decades arming American soldiers, first with the Vietnam era M16 and later the modern M4 rifles carried in Iraq and Afghanistan, famed gun manufacturer Colt lost its contract with the military in 2013. It never recovered. Last Sunday Colt Defense LLC filed for bankruptcy after 179 years in business.

Colt’s chapter 11 filing comes after earlier, failed attempts to restructure its $350 million debt were rejected by the company’s bondholders. Last November, The Wall Street Journal reports, Colt borrowed $70 million from Morgan Stanley in a bailout loan to allow the company to pay down interest on its debts. Under an article of the bankruptcy code, Colt is now headed to auction, where it’s hoping for a quick sale. The company lists its sponsor Capital Management LLC, as its “stalking horse bidder,” meaning that Sciens, which which owns close to 90% of the company, has agreed to buy out Colt’s assets and secured liabilities.

The downturn for Colt seems to have started after the company, which had relied on sales to the government, lost a multimillion-dollar bid to arm the military.

Following a drawn-out and contentious bidding war, Colt lost its contract to provide the Pentagon with M4 rifles in 2013. The $77 million contract went instead to a Belgian company, F.N. Herstal.

A source familiar with Colt’s financial situation characterized the 2013 loss of the contract to provide the military with M4s as “tough to quantify” but called it “definitely the main contributing factor to the business being where it is.”

Problems had plagued Colt’s version of the M4 for years before it lost the bid.

Among soldiers who relied on it, the rifle was often criticized as being unreliable—good in sterile conditions but prone to malfunctioning once it got dirty, as it often did in Iraq and Afghanistan.

In 2007, Colt’s M4 finished last in an “extreme dust test” that pitted the rifle against models made by rival manufacturers. Despite the poor showing, Army leaders said they were still confident in Colt’s design.

The Colt M4 was good enough for the conventional military but special operations units with more money and latitude began ditching the weapon years before the Pentagon abandoned it. “The Army’s Delta Force replaced its M4s with the H&K 416 in 2004 after tests revealed that the piston operating system significantly reduces malfunctions while increasing the life of parts,” Army Times reported in 2007.

Losing the Pentagon’s business in 2013 may have been the worst blow to Colt, but the company faced other challenges.

Foreign Policy’s David Francis points out that it’s not just the military that has turned away from Colt. “Law enforcement officers are increasingly turning to Glock pistols as a sidearm,” Francis writes, “as opposed to Colt’s 1911 gun.” He attributes the shift to officers’ believing “the Glock to be a more reliable pistol,” and describes “a long record of complaints about the Colt gun jamming.”

On top of losing business from the military and police Colt’s corporate structure prevented the company from capitalizing on a boom in gun sales after the election of President Obama. Because the company had created separate entities for its military and private gun owner business, “the severed halves of Colt somehow missed the post-2008 “Obama surge” as much as other U.S. gun manufacturers,” Paul M. Barrett wrote last year in Bloomberg Business in an article warning about Colt’s financial decline.

On Colt’s missed opportunity to cash in on the post-Obama gun frenzy, Barrett wrote:

“Whipped up by NRA warnings that the Democratic president intended to toughen gun control, consumers cleared gun store shelves of ammunition and weapons. Better-prepared manufacturers such as Glock saw sales rise sharply. Under the terms of the Colt split, however, Colt Defense could reach the booming civilian market only by first selling its rifles to Colt’s Manufacturing, a debilitated company with sclerotic lines of distribution.”

Those missteps aside, Colt may be changing hands but the gun-making business does not appear to be threatened by the bankruptcy proceedings.

In an official statement, restructuring Officer Keith Maib said, “Colt remains open for business.” That’s thanks to a pending $20 million loan to keep its Connecticut-based manufacturing operations going. Colt’s future will depend on what happens next now that it’s up for sale.

That has to be one of the UGLIEST 1911's I have ever seen! I don't care how expensive it is! Give a Springfield, sig, or Kimber over that any day!

[Fuzz]

The Perfect Groot Costume Starts With This Rocket Raccoon Backpack

Massive fail. Where's Rocket's gun?

[MIKA27]

Did An Australian University Just Say Wi-Fi Can Give You And Your Kids Cancer?

Despite the fact that both Australian nuclear advisory bodies and the World Health Organisation have downplayed the link between brain cancer and the radiation emitted by devices like Wi-Fi routers and mobile phones, Monash University yesterday issued a press release that might give parents second thoughts about having Wi-Fi and other wireless gadgets in the home. What gives?

The press release, titled “Policies on children’s tech exposure confusing” details a study conducted by Monash University’s Department of Epidemiology and Preventive Medicine. The study looked at 34 different countries and the advice they all gave parents surrounding a child’s exposure to radio frequency electromagnetic fields, also known as RF-EMF.

The study is actually quite good: it found that there are loads of different guidelines for parents on how RF-EMF exposure should be handled in young children. Author of the review, Dr Mary Redmayne, wrote that these different guidelines can actually confuse parents rather than inform them. But Dr Redmayne didn’t stop there.

What she implied in the release is that chronic exposure to RF-EMF from devices like Wi-Fi routers could be potentially harmful for young children over the long term.

The release didn’t outright say that exposure to RF-EMF leads to cancer, but it did imply that exposure at a young age could lead to “a variety of health effects”.

Dr Redmayne writes that parents should look to minimise their child’s exposure to RF-EMF in the home due to “an increased risk of some brain tumours in heavy and long-term phone users” and “increased production of free radicals in the body”. She adds that these are not in themselves “health effects”, if the body could repair damage caused by exposure overnight while asleep:

“Where RF-EMF is responsible for this imbalance, then the chance to repair is most likely to come with periods of minimal RF-EMF exposure such as at night time, when WiFi can be turned off and devices can be put in flight mode or switched off. Such steps to minimise children’s exposure are recommended in many countries.”

Dr Redmayne worries that the adoption of tablets and smartphones by the younger generation could lead to these “health effects” in the long term, saying that “increasingly younger children are using these devices, and we know they are more vulnerable to environmental harm than adults…however safety regulations and guidelines in most parts of the world only consider short-term heat and shock effects, and have not traditionally considered chronic or very low exposure.”

She adds that the Australian Radiation Protection and Nuclear Safety Agency suggests minimising a child’s exposure to RF-EMF, but a fact sheet on the safety agency’s website says in big letters: “There is no established scientific evidence that the use of mobile phones causes any health effects. However, some studies have shown a weak association between heavy mobile phone use and brain cancer,” while recommending a cautionary approach to exposure.

That’s the advice from the International Agency for Research on Cancer (a division of the World Health Organisation) too. The IARC and WHO published a release [PDF] back in 2011 saying that there’s no substantial link between mobile phones and an increased risk of cancer,

At the time, the WHO classified the radiation emitted from devices such as mobile phones high enough to be placed in “Group 2B”.

Basically, that means it’s potentially carcinogenic to humans. But don’t panic:also included in that group is an acid commonly found in coffee, and chemical compounds found in bitumen. The WHO recommends caution, but raises no immediate alarm bells over exposure.

Caution is actually a good thing. You’re always better being safe than sorry, which means that Dr Redmayne’s recommendation that parents turn off their Wi-Fi routers at night and put devices into flight mode when charging them in the wee hours is fairly sound advice. However, it’s certainly not going to be universally followed. Apartments and homes are flooded with signals coming from their neighbours’ homes 24 hours a day.

There’s nothing wrong with a cautionary approach to things like RF-EMF this, but we certainly need to be careful of implications that may potentially panic parents with kids who use tablets and phones over Wi-Fi at school and at home.

[MIKA27]

This Humble Cactus Could Help Fuel Our Drought-Stricken World

As drought strikes broad regions of the world, farmers are focusing on the crops that can feed people — not the crops that can power their cars. But what if there was an energy crop that could grow where traditional crops can’t? Even in a drought? Enter the cactus.

Climate change and drought aren’t just affecting agriculture. They’re also affecting making it more difficult to cultivate some forms of renewable energy, as a group of Oxford scientists explain in a Energy & Environmental Science paper led by the Department of Engineering Science’s Michael Mason. “Coal and oil are energy dense fuels, the result of millions of years of accumulation and concentration of solar energy,” the authors write, “renewables, on the other hand, rely on converting solar radiation to useful energy on a year by year basis, making them exceptionally space hungry compared to an oil field or coal mine.”

For example, biogas — or gas that’s made from the break-down of organic matter — has the potential to replace a big chunk of our gas usage, but requires huge amounts of farmland and water to grow that organic matter. Those resources are more and more hard to come by as the drought eats up arable land. But Mason and his colleagues suggest a different way in their paper, The potential of CAM crops as a globally significant bioenergy resource.

What Makes the Prickly Pear So Powerful?

The prickly pear cactus is one of the more common cacti in our world (it’s even on Mexico’s coat of arms!). It’s also a member of a unique group of plants that use an unusual photosynthesis pathway that evolved due to extreme growing conditions, in arid climates with long, hot, dry days and cool nights. This is called crassulacean acid metabolism, and all sorts of common plants use it — as much as 6% of the entire plant population, according to some scientists.

From the succulents growing on your deck to the pineapple at the grocery store, CAM plants have a special way of going about the business of photosynthesis: They only absorb carbon dioxide when it’s cool out, which means they don’t lose as much moisture as they would during the sunny, hot daylight hours. Then, when the sun comes up, they close their stomata — their pores. The story goes that CAM was first noticed by the Romans, who “who noted that certain succulent plants taste more bitter in the morning than in the evening,” as John Cushman explains in Plant Physiology.

It’s an advanced survival tactic, and it makes CAM plants extremely efficient at thriving on very little. These plants, including prickly pear cacti, grow where other plants can’t. They use less water and make better use of sunlight. They’re easy to farm, and require comparatively little attention. As the authors of the Energy & Environmental Science study explain, all of that makes them — and another CAM plant, a shrub called Euphorbia tirucalli — a possible match for making bioenergy, especially in a time of drought.

It Could Be Cheap, Efficient Food For Gas

Though there’s plenty of research to be done on how these plants would do as bioenergy fuel, Mason and his co-authors suggest that prickly pear could help make biogas — or gas which is made when organic matter is broken down without oxygen — along with other forms of bioenergy like bioethanol. There are lots of different ways to make biogas; some use animal waste, like pig and cow manure, reducing methane and creating energy for farms — like this one in the Netherlands, which uses biogas made in these digesters from manure to actually cover the power output of operations:

Another method being tested by Los Angeles and several other cities right now collects organic matter from around the city — think rotten leftovers from grocery stores and restaurants — and mixes it into sewage, which is then digested to create biogas. Biogas isn’t particularly new. As Penn State explains in a short history, it’s been around for centuries in various forms:

The first digestion plant was built at a leper colony in Bombay, India in 1859. AD reached England in 1895 when biogas was recovered from a “carefully designed” sewage treatment facility and used to fuel street lamps in Exeter. The development of microbiology as a science led to research by Buswell and others in the 1930s to identify anaerobic bacteria and the conditions that promote methane production.

But shifting the massive infrastructure around fossil fuels towards a newer, and more expensive, form of fuel is no small task. Still, the potential for biogas is surprising. The National Renewable Energy Laboratory added up the amount of organic waste in the US — including manure, farm waste, commercial waste, and agricultural waste — and estimated that it could displace up to 56% of natural gas used by the transportation sector, and 5% of electric power.

What makes prickly pear so interesting as a fuel for making biogas or other forms of biofuel is that it can be grown in places where traditional energy crops can’t. Imagine vast fields of cacti in remote, arid areas of the country, where normal crops can’t grow. It wouldn’t suck up the resources or space needed to feed people, as current bioenergy crops are criticised as doing.

And It Could Help Other Crops Grow, Too

But here’s the real kicker, the authors explain: Growing prickly pear at that scale might actually help produce more food in drought-stricken lands, because converting organic waste into biogas creates its own waste.

A farmer walks along one of his fields in California this year

CAM plants like prickly pear absorb a ton of water, and after digestion happens and the biogas is made, liquid and solid fertiliser will be leftover. That, in turn, could be used to better cultivate crops in areas that normally couldn’t support them, as the authors explain:

The semi-arid areas where CAM plants could be grown as energy crops will benefit from year round sunlight, and if the biogas is used to generate electricity, exhaust gases with elevated CO2 will also be available. These, coupled with nutrient-rich liquid available, offer the ideal ingredients for the development of highly productive agriculture using hydroponics or drip irrigation.

Of course, as they also point out, they’re merely pointing out that initial research into CAM plants shows that they could be hugely helpful for creating biogas. More research needs to be done. And there are downsides to prickly pear, too — it’s considered an invasive species in some areas, so introducing it on a huge scale to any region would take careful study and control.

Still, who knew that this tough, hard-working little plant could end up being a match for cultivating energy crops in drought-stricken or semi-arid regions? Whether or not cacti will end up powering our world one day, it’s a fascinating example of how agriculture and energy production could adapt to the drought.

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Blaine Gibson, Designer Of Lifelike Robots At Disney Parks, Dies At 97

Blaine Gibson, a designer of countless sculptures and audio-animatronic figures at Disney Parks, has died. He was 97.

The average visitor to Disneyland or Walt Disney World may not know Gibson by name, but they’re surrounded by his art. He worked on robotic figures for the Pirates of the Caribbean and the Haunted Mansion, and designed the iconic “Partners” statue of Walt Disney and Mickey Mouse that can be found in all Disney Parks.

Gibson also designed the famous audio-animatronic Abe Lincoln that was featured at the 1964 New York World’s Fair. The robotics were so impressive and lifelike that some newspaper accounts from the time even described Lincoln as getting up and walking around the auditorium — a feat made impossible by the fact that the robo-Lincoln’s feet were bolted to the stage.

“Blaine Gibson was one of the most important storytellers among all the great talents on Walt Disney’s team of Imagineers,” Marty Sklar, an Imagineer who worked with Gibson, told the Orange Country Register. “He showed all of us how to make our Disney park show characters so realistic you never had to guess the role of any three-dimensional figure in our attractions.”

Gibson started at the Disney company back in 1939 as an assistant animator, working on such iconic films as Fantasia and Peter Pan. In 1954 he joined Disney’s team of Imagineers who were tasked with making Disneyland park a reality. By 1961 he was made head of that team’s sculpture department.

Gibson retired in 1983, but he came out of retirement periodically to work on the audio-animatronic figures for the Hall of Presidents. He designed every robo-president in the attraction up through President George W. Bush, seen in the photo above.

Sculpting started as merely a hobby for Gibson until Disney took notice. At first Gibson seemed to consider it almost a distraction from his animation work.

“I didn’t think it was that important, but then I was told Walt was expecting me to work on these projects. So I said to myself, ‘what the heck’ and went [to Walt Disney Imagineering],” Gibson said in 1995. “I was never sorry after that.”

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The US Army Built A Robot To Help Soldiers Shoot Guns Better

The US Army’s latest supersolider innovation is inspired by the movie Aliens. And yes, the mechatronic arm exoskeleton is about as apocalyptic as it sounds. The arm-mounted device is literally a robot that lets soldiers shoot guns better.

Scifi references aside, the exoskeleton seems to make good sense. Using a combination of carbon fibre, mounted motors, cables and algorithms, the so-called MAXFAS works a bit like a puppeteer and helps stabilise a shooter’s arm. Especially when new to pointing guns at targets, many soldiers experience a slight tremor that wrecks their accuracy. The exoskeleton smooths that out like a Steadicam for firearms.

“Soldiers need to be able to aim and shoot accurately and quickly in the chaos of the battlefield,” Dan Baechle, the mechanical engineer that helped build the device, said in a release. “Training with MAXFAS could improve Soldiers’ accuracy, and reduce current time and ammunition requirements in basic training.”

It’s not just for training either. Baechle added, “My vision is that one day, a more mature version of MAXFAS could be used to improve aim on the battlefield despite any adverse conditions.”

Sure, better training is good. But what happens when the robot gets a mind of its own on the battlefield? What if its algorithms get crossed, and the mechanised exoskeleton forgets which side is the enemy? Has the Army even seen the first Alien? Did it forget about the part where the android betrays the crew and tries to kill Ripley?

Quite frankly, semi-autonomous robots like Atlas (and pretty much anything related to artificial intelligence) are much scarier than an exoskeleton. But on the bright side, this technology could have terrific applications in medicine. After all, that’s its original purpose.

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Watch This: The Heartwarming Tale Of Australia's Biggest Star Wars Fan And His Family

This is the story of Adam Harris: arguably Australia’s biggest Star Wars fan. The Feed produced an amazing look at Adam’s life and family. He discovered he had an inoperable brain tumour, which saw him want to spend more time with his kids and introduce them to Star Wars. It’s a heartwarming tale that saw Adam’s bond with his son grow as he crowdfunded a documentary about the bond between father and son through Star Wars. It’s also the tale of how his fandom is helping him be a better man, and recover from a difficult upbringing. It’s a must-watch.

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The Last Of The Vulcans Retires After 55 Years Of Service

On July 1, 1960, Avro pilot Tony Blackman climbed into the cockpit of a Hawker Siddeley Vulcan delta wing strategic bomber in order to deliver her from the aircraft manufacturer (A.V. Roe and Company, Avro) for Royal Air Force service. The British four-jet aircraft dressed in antiflash white — military serial XH558 — was the 59th of the 136 Avro Vulcan medium range heavy bombers ever built. And this summer XH558,The Spirit of Great Britain, the last of her type is going to bid farewell to the skies.

The Vulcans’ sophisticated silhouette was so remarkable among the Cold War-era bombers, that one could easily forget that they carried the United Kingdom’s first nuclear weapon, the Blue Danube atomic bomb. Thankfully, those weapons of mass destruction were never dropped, and the Vulcans went into real action only once, when they dropped conventional bombs to the runway at Port Stanley in the Falklands War in 1982, setting the record of the world’s longest distance bombing raids at that time.

Owned and operated by the Vulcan To The Sky Trust, the XH558 has been the only flying example of the Vulcans since 2007, when she was restored to flying condition following a public fundraising campaign that helped raise more than £7 million. Sadly, VTTS has announced that the lack of further technical support is going to bring an inevitable end to this story. Now, as one of the most iconic example of British aerospace engineering, XH558 is on her last — Farewell to Flight 2015 — tour. She will star at several air shows, including the world’s largest military air show, the Royal International Air Tattoo — before grounded forever in September.

The following set of images is a humble tribute to this legendary aircraft.

VX770, an Avro Vulcan prototype, on the 16th September, 1952

Avro Vulcan B.1, the initial production aircraft, with straight leading edge

Three Avro Vulcan bomber planes of the British Royal Air Force fly over Waddington, England, Sept. 18, 1957.

XA903, delivered in 1957, in the air at the Farnborough Air Show, carrying one of Britain’s guided bombs, known as a ‘stand-off bomb’

XH501 of the 617 Squadron taking off from the airfield in London, England. Circa 1958.

Vulcan XH558 on a test flight in 1960, painted in antiflash white that was designed to help protect the crew from the thermal radiation emitted by a nuclear explosion beneath

Royal Air Force excercise over Kenya, 1960

Mid-air refuelling from a Valiant bomber, 1961

XA903 on the cover of a Hungarian weekly scientific magazine, called Delta, 1967

XH558 flying over during a flight display at the Farnborough aerospace show, in Farnborough, England, Wednesday July 16, 2008

XH588 undergoes its final compass swing test at RAF Coningsby in Lincolnshire on May 7, 2008, Boston, England

Pilot Ian Young, stands beside the XH558 at Bruntingthorpe airfield May 9, 2008 in England

Crowds gather around the restored Vulcan bomber at the annual RNAS Yeovilton Air Day on July 9, 2011 in Yeovil, England

The last Avro Vulcan putting on an air display during the Goodwood Festival of Speed at Goodwood House on June 28, 2014 in Chichester, England

The restored XH558 takes to the skies at the annual RNAS Yeovilton Air Day on July 9, 2011 in Yeovil, England

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The Plan To Feed The World By Hacking Photosynthesis

With the world population projected to soar past the 11 billion mark by 2100, we’re going to need to find some creative new ways of putting food on the table. The latest science-powered plan to feed the world? Hacking photosynthesis.

Imagine if we could grow 30 to 60 per cent more wheat in a field, using the same amount of space, water, fertiliser and sunlight. That’s what scientists are now hoping to do, by redesigning the process plants use to turn sunlight into chemical energy. The idea of upgrading photosynthesis isn’t new, but it’s been gaining momentum in step with our ability to manipulate life on a molecular scale. This week, a paper published in the Proceedings of the National Academies of Sciences lays out the scientific roadmap that will make it happen.

Here’s why scientists want to improve nature’s solar-powered sugar factory — and how they might actually do it.

Imperfect By Nature

Some 3.4 billion years ago, a puddle of green slime kickstarted a process that would terraform an inhospitable Earth into a planet with oxygen and ecosystems. Ancient cyanobacteria had stumbled onto something incredible: using photons of light to split water, and channeling the resultant burst of energy to turn carbon from the air into sugar.

Today, that process — photosynthesis — is the basis of nearly ever food web and ecosystem on our planet. It’s also been responsible for recycling the atmosphere these last few eons, by drawing down CO² and releasing oxygen as a waste product. If plants stopped spinning sunlight into sugar tomorrow, every animal on Earth would soon starve and asphyxiate.

With that in mind, here’s an excellent video that illustrates exactly how plants eat light:

It’s certainly one of the most astounding bits of biochemistry that ever evolved, but photosynthesis isn’t perfect. Like anything else in biology, this process was shaped by natural selection — a slow and meandering path of trial and error, addition and subtraction. We don’t see brand new limbs cropping up in the fossil record overnight, and by the same token, biochemistry like this doesn’t rewrite itself easily. To some extent, plants have been stuck with what their slimy ancestors evolved billions of years ago, when the world was a very different place.

“Evolution is incremental. It can only build on what it has by itty bitty steps,” plant biologist Donald Ort and lead author of the new PNAS paper told me over the phone. “And what was adaptive for plants was not necessarily what we want for food and bioenergy production.”

That fact has become increasingly clear to plant scientists over the past decade. In the 1940s, agronomists began boosting crop yields tremendously, using a combination of fertilisers, pesticides, selective breeding, and new management techniques. For better or worse, the Green Revolution changed our planet, growing the human population by an estimated four billion. But the tricks that allowed farmers to squeeze more calories out of the land for decades are running their course. In many of the world’s most important growing areas, productivity is now on the the decline due to drought, climate change, soil erosion, and poor land management.

But just as our conventional yield-boosting tools are hitting their limits, our ability to manipulate genes and proteins has skyrocketed. We can now zero in on specific inefficiencies in the photosynthetic pathway, swap out old parts for new ones, and engineer designer crops that grow faster, bigger, and more efficiently. We can build ourselves better solar machines.

Tap That Sun

The first aspect of photosynthesis Ort and his colleagues focus on is solar efficiency. Plants actually aren’t very good at using light. Most only turn a few per cent of the photons they absorb into biomass, whereas photovoltaic cells can convert roughly 10 per cent of incoming sunlight into fuel. Theoretical studiessuggest we can boost the conversion efficiency of sun into sugar up to 12 per cent or higher. So, how do we go about doing so?

Inserting different versions of chlorophyll into plants could increase the amount of light they use — and change their colour!

Somewhat counter-intuitively, one option might be to decrease the number of light-absorbing chlorophyll molecules in a given photosystem. (Chlorophyll is the pigment plants rely on to absorb solar energy, and a bunch of chlorophyll molecules together makes a photosystem, kinda like a solar array). Since plants already absorb more sunlight than they can use, having fewer solar panels won’t slow photosynthesis down. But it would free up resources that can be used for growth.

“Plants have a variety of mechanisms for safely diverting excess absorbed energy, principally as thermal dissipation, but they represent a significant loss inefficiency,” Ort and his colleagues write. “If plants had fewer light-harvesting pigments per photosystem and fewer photosystems in their uppermost leaves, light might be absorbed more judiciously, and a greater proportion of absorbed photons converted to biomass.”

Engineers trying to design more light-efficient algae for biofuel production have seen some success with this strategy, but it hasn’t yet been tested in higher plants. But Ort’s optimistic that we can give it a try.

“There’s a biosynthetic pathway for chlorophyll, which has about eight different enzymes,” Ort told me. “Affecting any one of those enzymes can affect chlorophyll. That’s a fairly easy engineering problem, to go in and make one enzyme work more slowly.”

(As an aside, scientists aren’t totally sure why plants evolved to produce more chlorophyll than they can use, but Ort suspects it has to do with competition. Robbing your neighbour of sunlight, even if you have no use for it, can help you stake out your turf. A perfect example of what may be an adaptive trait for wild plants, but isn’t so great for food production).

Absorption spectra for two of the most common chlorophyll molecules in plants.

Another popular idea is to hack different types of chlorophyll into plants. The chlorophyll-based photosystems that colour plants green absorb mostly in the red (620-700nm) and blue (450-490nm) parts of the visible spectrum, while ignoring vast swaths of potentially useful light. But certain photosynthetic bacteria carry versions of chlorophyll with different light sensitivities. If we were to express bacteriochlorophyll-b – which is optimised to use near-infrared light up to 1075nm — in tandem with the red and blue-loving chlorophylls, we might dramatically increase the plant’s light use efficiency.

“Taking a photosystem from higher plants that operates in visible and coupling with one from bacteria that operates in infrared is a speculative idea,” Ort said. “But that’s how engineers have designed two-stage solar cells.”

Or perhaps, we could build new, designer chlorophylls that tap any part of the solar spectrum we like. Chemists are already doing that in the lab, so don’t be too surprised if you see blue or orange lettuce cropping up at the supermarket soon.

Carbon Capture

Solar efficiency is a major aspect of photosynthesis that stands to be optimised. But catching sunlight is really just the first step. The endgame for plants is to convert that solar energy into chemical energy, otherwise known as sugar. But to build sugar, plants need a source of carbon. Fortunately, there’s plenty of that floating around in the air as carbon dioxide.

Plants quite literally grow from the air. To do so, they employ a little CO2-nabbing enzyme called Ribulose,1-5-bisphosphate carboxylase. To save breath, everyone calls it Rubisco.

“Rubisco is most abundant enzyme on Earth, but it’s really not a very good enzyme from the efficiency standpoint,” Ort told me. “When it evolved, there was no oxygen in the atmosphere.”

Once plants began filling the air with oxygen, however, Rubisco discovered it wasn’t actually very good at telling the difference between O² and CO².

“About every fourth to fifth catalytic event fixes an oxygen instead of CO2,” Ort said. “And that’s incredibly energetically wasteful.”

When Rubisco messes up and grabs oxygen, it sets off a reaction pathway called photorespiration, which ends up burning energy and creating toxic waste products. To mitigate this problem, so-called C4 plants evolved ways of concentrating CO2 in the parts of the cell where Rubisco operates, making it harder for the enzyme to accidentally grab an O2. Algae and photosynthetic bacteria have developed other CO²-concentrating mechanisms.

“One way to improve the efficiency of Rubisco is to concentrate CO² around it,” Ort said. “Bacteria do this, the C4 plants do it. But the vast majority [of plants] don’t. One thing we’re wondering is: Can we take CO2 concentrating mechanisms in bacteria and put them into plants?”

A coordinated international effort is already underway to install C4 photosynthesis into rice, and scientists have made significant progress identifying the relevant genes. The team behind this project claims that C4 rice could produce up to 50 per cent more grain with less water and nutrients. Many experts agree giving our veggies a C4 upgrade is a promising direction: “Although significant hurdles remain, success will open the door to dramatically improving the efficiency and yield of many of the world‘s most important staple crops,” Ort and his colleagues write.

More speculatively, some have proposed tossing Rubisco out and replacing it with a new carbon fixing pathway, one that’s completely insensitive to oxygen. That would amount to a much more significant biochemical rewiring job, meaning years of additional research money and time. But in the end, we might build ourselves a corn plant that can soak up carbon many times faster than its ancestors — and that could be a good thing for the future of food and Earth’s climate.

Smarter Canopies

While the bioengineers are busy imagining how we can rewire enzymes and photosystems, others are asking how all of this is going to play out in the real world. Remember, natural selection is based on survival of the fittest. In the plant world, a “fit” individual is one that can outcompete its neighbours for light, soil, and water. But for farmers interested in boosting yields, these types of resource hogs are a liability. We’d rather have plants that can cooperate and share real estate.

Because every new idea sounds sexier with a “smart” tacked on, enter the smart canopy: “The smart canopy concept envisions an assemblage of plants that interact cooperatively (rather than competitively) at the canopy level to maximise the potential for light harvesting and biomass production per unit land area,” Ort and colleagues write.

Environmental changes throughout the canopy affect photosynthesis. Relative humidity (RH) tends to increase from top to bottom, the ratio of red to far-infrared (R/FR) light decreases, and CO² is variable

How could a crop plant be engineered to optimise the productivity of the land, instead of the individual? For one, breeders could select for certain physical traits that maximise the amount of light penetration and airflow throughout the canopy. Crops that produce more vertically-oriented leaves at the top of the canopy, for instance, will allow more sunlight to shine through to the bottom, improving the overall light availability of the system. Breeders could also select for plants that produce flowers and other non-photosynthetic structures in low-light areas, to avoid wasting the sunniest real estate.

What’s more, in scaling from molecules to fields, biologists need to consider where plants ought to be using their new photosynthesis machinery. For instance, there tends to be more red light available at the top of the canopy, compared with more infrared at the bottom. If we’re thinking about inserting different light-sensitive chlorophylls into plants, we should also be considering how to express these systems in the areas where they will actually be useful.

The smart canopy approach — of imagining how our engineering and breeding schemes will play out on the field scale, and eventually, how they will translate into higher yields — is going to become more and more important as scientists start test driving some of these ideas outside the lab. We can boost the efficiently of Rubisco and tune chlorophyll light sensitivities all we want, but if the resultant super-crop doesn’t play well with its neighbours, all of our science might be for nothing.

Plant Hacking: Not a Silver Bullet

Most of the photosynthesis upgrades being proposed wouldn’t be conceivable without the tremendous molecular biology advances of the past decade. Still, manipulating life in the ways I’ve described here amounts to far more than simply cutting and pasting genes from one organism into another. It will involve getting those genes expressed in the right place and under the right conditions, without screwing anything else up in the process. Then scientists will have to determine how these molecular tweaks scale to entire plants and fields. All of this is much easier said than done.

Even if we’re able to boost yields immensely by upgrading photosynthesis, this isn’t going to be a silver bullet that ends any global food crisis, present or future. It’s important to bear in mind that the hunger problem facing our world today is largely a problem of distribution, not supply. As the world population continues to grow, that may change. But any attempts to improve our crops are going to have to be coupled with policies ensuring that those extra calories are being distributed to the people who need them.

And if we don’t get population growth under control, all of our efforts to squeeze more calories out of the land won’t feed the world.

We’ve also got to face our changing climate. As the Earth warms and regional climactic patterns shift, many of our planet’s fertile agricultural lands are drying up, while historically parched regions are becoming wetter. We can upgrade the heck out of photosynthesis, but if we don’t have the water to grow our crops, it won’t make a drop of difference. Predicting and adapting to changing water resources is critical for our survival as a species.

Eventually, the only long-term survival solution will be for humanity to move beyond Earth. Plants are going to be an essential part of our cosmic migration, and in all likelihood, we’ll have to engineer them even further for off-world living. Upgrading photosynthesis may be a short term step toward continuing to feed humans on planet Earth, but the tools we invent along the way will help us as we venture beyond this pale blue dot.

[MIKA27]

How To Build A Snow Shelter

Want something fun and productive to do during this whole giant blizzard thing? Why not learn how to build a snow shelter? It could save your life one day but, more importantly, they’re just a ton of fun to make. Here’s how.

Why Build A Snow Shelter?

Do it right and your snow shelter will maintain a constant 32 degrees Fahrenheit (0 degrees Celsius) temperature inside, no matter what conditions are like outside. Lighting a tea candle can take that up to 40 degrees Fahrenheit (4 degrees Celsius). That’s because snow is mostly composed of trapped air and trapped air is what insulates.

So that’s not only a better result than your tent, potentially allowing you to survive with inadequate clothing or sleeping materials for the weather, but a snow shelter can be built with minimal equipment and only basic knowledge. The effect to preparation ratio is just too high to be ignored.

Step One: Identify Risks

Don’t build a snow shelter some place that’s going to be wiped out by a landslide, avalanche, falling rocks, falling trees or similar.

Hiding in a snow cave can prevent search and rescue teams from finding you. It’s also easy to lose the location of your snow shelter if you leave it at night or during a storm, in which it could become buried. Making it with a flag of brightly coloured clothing or similar in such a way that it won’t be buried by the snow or torn away by the wind is therefore a great idea. That can also keep you or your friends from walking over the top, which may collapse the shelter.

Snow shelters can also trap carbon monoxide/dioxide, particularly if you’re lighting a candle inside. Poke a breathing hole in the roof that’s a couple inches in diameter, then leave the stick in the hole. Shake that stick occasionally to keep that hole clear.

Building one also gets you covered in snow and is hard work, so you’ll build up a sweat. Strip out of your insulating layers, then put back on your waterproof shells to stay dry. You’ll want gloves to keep your hands from freezing.

Step Two: Find A Location

Keep the above dangers in mind and don’t try and sleep some place that’s going to get you killed.

You obviously need large amounts of snow to build a snow shelter. You can just build one on any level ground. But, why not make the terrain work for you and try to find the lee side of a hill or rock or similar where snow has naturally gathered? A natural depression can also save you some of the mound-building effort; just pitch snow down it then tunnel into it from one end.

Step Three: Easy Shelter Types

Most of the instructions here are going to be for a quinzee shelter; a hollowed out mound. Those take a good four to five hours or more to make. If you have less time, consider just digging a trench in the snow. Make it big enough to fit your body, then cover it with a tarp, rainfly, jacket, pine boughs or similar to keep the snow off. That won’t be as warm inside, but it will protect you from the wind and snow. Or, you can dig something similar to fit your tent. Which is best for you depends on your equipment, the weather conditions and how much time you have to work with.

Step Four: Pile Snow

You’ll want to create a mound (or fill a depression or dig into an existing snow pile) that’s at least five feet tall and seven to eight feet across, assuming you’re building this shelter for one or two people. You can build larger shelters for more people or a more luxurious interior, just scale appropriately.

Once you have your mound, pack it down by walking over it with snow shoes or patting it down with your shovel. Then, allow 90 minutes to two hours for it to set. The compressed snow will bind together during this time, making your structure much stronger.

Step Five: Hollow It Out

Gather a bunch of sticks that are 18 inches to two feet long, depending on how thick you want your roof. Poke those in the mound, all over. You’ll use them to measure thickness as you dig.

Then identify a good place to put your entrance. If you’re just building this for fun, just put a big hole in the side. If you’re building it to sleep in, you’ll want to find the downhill side (if any) and tunnel in at ground level. Pointing this tunnel upwards, into your shelter will help cold air (which falls downwards) flow out of your shelter at night. Facing your entrance away from the wind is also probably a good idea.

Dig in, then start excavating your cave from the top, down. This is going to take a while and you’re probably going to start with your hands, maybe progressing to your shovel depending on how large a shelter you’re building. Obviously stop when you hit your measuring sticks.

Step Six: Build A Sleeping Platform

You can do this one of two ways. Either leave a foot or so of snow on the floor as you’re excavating, then dig a trench down to the ground, leading out through your door. This will help cold air leave the shelter as you warm it up with your body heat.

Or, you can excavate the entire floor of the shelter, then build a raised bed. Do so about a foot tall to achieve the same effect.

Don’t forget your air hole!

Step Seven: Pimp It Out

If you can find some big icicles, poking them in through the roof can create natural light tubes. The snow will naturally allow a little light in, but icicles can really help.

If you have a candle and something to put it in (like a glass jar or lantern), dig a little shelf into one wall for it.

You’ll want some insulation between you and the snow when you sleep. An insulated sleeping pad will work best, but in a pinch just use what you can have or can find. Spread out your pack and spare clothing and other supplies or gather pine boughs or similar and pile them up inside.

An empty water bottle makes a great pee receptacle. Leaving your shelter at night is a hassle.

If you plan to habitate your shelter for some time, you can “anchor” an outdoor living area to it in order to block the wind. Just start a wall from one side of it, looping it around far enough to cancel whatever wind conditions you’re facing. Or dig a pit outside that accomplishes the same. Build your fire either on the ground or on a little platform made from logs to keep it off the melting snow.

Want to melt snow for drinking water? Put it in a pot that already has a little warm water in the bottom, then heat it. That will prevent your water from tasting “scorched” and will melt snow with much less energy.

[MIKA27]

The Best Fireworks In The Galaxy Are Coming To Earth In 2018

Mark your calendars for fireworks, Earthlings. Astronomers have wised up to a much more epic light show that’s going down 5000 light years away. And in three years, it’s coming to a telescope near you.

In early 2018, the pulsar known as J2032+4127 is going to swing around MT91 213, a binary companion star fifteen times the mass of our sun and 10,000 times brighter. When the two stellar bodies get close, the city-sized pulsar will plunge through a disk of gas and dust, triggering a Michael Bay-approved cosmic light show.

J2032 is the crushed core of a massive star that exploded long ago. Weighing almost twice as much as our sun and spinning seven times a second, the pulsar produces a stream of high energy gamma rays, which astronomers first detected in 2009 using Fermi’s Large Area Telescope.

Pulsars are relatively common on the cosmic landscape, but J2032 is rather special, being locked in a gravitational embrace with one of the largest and brightest stars in our galaxy. The pulsar swings around closest to its partner once ever 25 years, and the next such pass is going to be visible in 2018. The high-energy explosions that take place will help astronomers measure MT91 213’s gravity, magnetic field, and stellar wind.

Best of all, from 5,000 light years away, we’ll all be able to watch the astronomical fireworks, as telescopes around the world stream back everything from radio waves to high-energy gamma rays. To drum up public interest, NASA released a teaser trailer explaining exactly what we’re in store for. OK, it’s maybe a little cheesy, but props to NASA for hitting a lot of major movie trailer tropes while explaining some seriously wonky science.

Personally, I love my fireworks with a healthy dose of astrophysics, so to this high-energy pulsar I say, welcome to Earth.

[MIKA27]

A Jaws-Themed Deck Of Cards Is Surprisingly More Beautiful Than Gory

You’d probably expect a deck of Jaws-themed playing cards to be chocked full of gory imagery and only available in the back pages of Fangoria magazine. But the artwork on this deck is downright beautiful, to the point where you’ll almost want to frame an image of a swimmer being attacked by a great white shark — almost.

The catch is that Crooked Kings Cards is only making these decks available through Kickstarter, and with just 9 days left in its campaign it still has to raise just over $US6,600 to be successful. Early bird pledge options are still available, letting you pre-order a deck for $US13. But when those sell out you’re looking at a donation of $US15, or $US18 if you want the fancy die-cut packaging featuring a shark bite in one corner — and of course you do. [Kickstarter]

[MIKA27]

The Only Way To Describe This 3D-Printed Mechanised Toy Tank Is Amazing

If there’s one thing a plastic resin 3D printer is good at, it’s making custom toys. And Michael Sng’s Machination Studio has created the ultimate example of what 3D-printed toys can be with the HMC Boudicca; a 20-inch tall walking mechanised tank with more detailed animated features than even R2-D2 has.

Scaled to human sizes the HMC Boudicca would be hundreds of feet tall, serving as a mobile military platform full of cannons, machine guns, searchlights, and missile launchers. But even at just 20 inches it’s an amazingly detailed creation that’s assembled using over 400 3D-printed, hand-painted plastic parts, and filled with servos, electronics, and everything else needed to bring it to life.

The best part of Sng’s HMC Boudicca is that you don’t have to just stare at photos and videos of it in action, it’s actually available for sale through the Machination Studio website. The only catch is that specific pricing hasn’t been finalised just yet, so you’ll need to set aside a blank cheque for this one.

And to help cover inflation, reward early supporters, and ensure their investment keeps its value, every HMC Boudicca that Sng builds will actually cost two per cent more than the previous one did. So if you areinterested in adding this to your collection, you better get your pre-order in sooner rather than later.

[MIKA27]

The Death Star Crashing Through Your Wall Makes For A Great Night Light

3DlightFX has a new series of Star Wars-themed 3D Deco Lights enroute including this tiny glowing version of the Death Star that appears to be smashing its way through your wall thanks to an included decal surrounding its mount.

Other new versions of the lights include R2-D2, C-3PO and Vader’s hand holding a red glowing lightsaber that’s designed to complement the Vader’s helmet version released earlier this year. Since the new versions aren’t listed on 3DlightFX’s website yet, there are no official pricing details. But you can probably expect them to go for around $US30 like the versions already on sale. [3DlightFX via Toy People]

[MIKA27]

Glowing Eyes And Tiny Cloaks Make These Detailed Jawa Figures Perfect

They may not have muttered a single word we can understand, but with a spirited “ootini!” the Jawas inStar Wars instantly endeared themselves to audiences. And since they’re so tiny, barely taller than R2-D2,Sideshow Collectibles is actually including a pair of them in this new sixth-scale set.

Like with past collectibles from Sideshow, the Jawa duo isn’t cheap at $US220 for set. But you’re paying for an attention to detail that’s almost unmatched with sixth-scale figures like this.

Just look at the tiny pockets on the Jawa’s bandolier and you’ll realise why you’re not going to find these on the shelf at Toys’R’Us for $US20. The pair, which are available for pre-order starting today, also include multiple layers of fabric cloaks, light-up eyes, a small collection of accessories (including a vital restraining bolt), and of course a host of swappable hands for striking the perfect pose.

The Jawas might not seem like vital characters in the Star Wars universe, but without them, R2-D2 would never have met up with Luke Skywalker and Obi-Wan Kenobi. So it’s about time they got some recognition.

[MIKA27]

FUNNY ADS FOR HIGHLY ILLEGAL DRUGS THAT USED TO BE MEDICINE

Don't you just miss the "good old days" when you could treat your baby's gum pain with morphine syrup? Or how about those golden years when you could run down to the drug store for "Cocaine Toothache Drops" for just 15 cents? Medicine used to be so much more exciting.

These cheerful vintage ads for illegal drugs are completely hilarious. I love the combination of wholesome, positive imagery with words like cocaine, cannabis, heroin, and morphine. How were these medicines ever considered healthy options?

I can't help but wonder what we'll look back on and shake our heads over in one hundred years. Which current medicines do you think will be illegal drugs in the next century?

[MIKA27]

Han Solo to Get Standalone Film

Disney announced Tuesday that The Lego Movie directors Christopher Miller and Phil Lord will helm a Han Solo-focused Star Wars spinoff film. The film, slated for release on May 25, 2018, will focus on Han Solo’s early years and how he became an intergalactic smuggler. In a statement, Miller and Lord said, “This is the first film we’ve worked on that seems like a good idea to begin with. We promise to take risks, to give the audience a fresh experience, and we pledge ourselves to be faithful stewards of these characters who mean so much to us.” Lawrence Kasdan and Jon Kasdan will co-write the film and Kathleen Kennedy will produce.

[MIKA27]

Beyoncé-inspired skyscraper to grace melbourne

Beyoncé's curves are set to be immortalised in a 226-meter-tall sky scraper in Melbourne. Australian architecture firm Elenberg Fraser just got the go-ahead on their 38-story building, inspired by Yoncé's 'Ghost' music video. Officially named Premier Tower, the Skyscraper will be built at 134 Spencer Street in the west of Melbourne's CBD. Once built, Premier Tower will house a hotel, a retail space, and 600 apartments.

[MIKA27]

GOPRO HERO 4 SESSION CAMERA

GoPro is subscribing to the notion that “smaller is better,” at least when it comes to their successful line of action cameras. The smallest and lightest offering in the stable, GoPro’s Hero 4 Session Camera is sure to be a hit among adventure enthusiasts.

Forgoing the standard rear LCD, GoPro was able to develop a tiny little action that’s also fully capable. It features a simple one button control that lets users capture 8MP photos and 1080p60, 720p100 or 1440p30 video with ease, while the accompanying GoPro app gives you complete control over your entire shooting experience. It might be smaller in size, but the brand has built the new camera to be compatible with existing GoPro mounts on the market. It’s even waterproof up to 33 feet below the surface, all without any additional housing, which results in improved audio capture. The camera also comes with built-in Wi-Fi and Bluetooth for simple sharing with friends and family. The GoPro Hero 4 Session will be released on July 12th with a $400 price tag [Purchase]

[MIKA27]

GLOBECRUISER MOTOR HOME

Action Mobil are specialists in building expedition vehicles, their highlight is the spectacular Globecruiser, a 4x4 top-class world touring vehicle, and the recently released Global XRS 7200, an extreme all-terrain expedition vehicle powered by a mind blowing 720-hp engine cranking its six wheels. The ultra-rugged motor homes bring comfort and style to your adventures, they feature an unique layout that provides separate areas for lounging and sleeping, and offer an exclusive, homely atmosphere, with Hi-Tech interiors.

[MIKA27]

BISON MADE HORSEHIDE RAZOR STROP

Using a straight razor is a great way to get a close shave — but only if you keep it sharp. Help keep yours in great shape with this Bison Made Horsehide Razor Strop.

Made by hand in the USA using Russet horsehide from Horween in Chicago, it also uses screws sourced from the windy city to allow for quick and easy disassembly when it's time to replace the hide or the cotton-linen canvas lining that works to remove moisture post-shave.

BONUS:

Good to read up on our very own shaving thread