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

[MIKA27]

A Beached Great White Shark Is Still Scary As Hell

Even when we have home field advantage, a beached shark is still not something you want to see on a relaxing trip to the playa. Because, for one, the shark baring its teeth and whipping its tail is still scary as hell even though it shouldn’t be able to reach you. But, more importantly, because we’re humans with hearts and some semblance of a soul, we would want to rescue the shark which means we have to bring it to their territory — back to the ocean.

It’s all a ploy you see. Smart shark feeds on soft humans. This footage taken by Mike Bartel shows the beached shark flailing around until its saved by the harbour master and generous beach goers.

[MIKA27]

These Geothermal Homes Use Heat From The Mountainside They're Built Into

Japan is a country that’s 75 per cent mountains, which makes construction more than a little tricky. One architect’s solution? Build homes into the mountains — then rent them out. Tenants then score natural geothermal insulation in an abode that’s downright Seussian.

This cosy, seven-unit residential complex is nestled at (and into) the foot of Mineyama Mountain in Takamatsu, Kagawa prefecture, in southern Japan. The great thing about sticking buildings directly into mountains is that internal temps are controlled geothermally, since the building is almost completely surrounded by earth. While this yields a base temperature of around 15C, heating and cooling tubes are buried below. They feed fresh air from an air tower atop the slope and to the individual units, cooling and heating to optimal temperatures.

Real Estate Japan describes an additional “insulating layer of air between the inner wall, as well as the ceiling and floors, which prevents heat movement by convection, similar to the way a thermos bottle works” too.

The Shire-like complex, designed by architect Keita Nagata, is called Miyawaki Gurindo. It took two-and-a-half years to finish, and totals five storeys. Each unit’s roof serves as the garden for the unit the next floor up. Nagata cut construction costs by building into the slope and adapting to its natural shape, rather than levelling the site and tacking on a retaining wall.

You’re probably thinking: What about earthquakes? Well, Miyawaki Gurido’s made of steel-reinforced concrete. Real Estate Japan writes that it’s “generally considered the safest material for minimising earthquake damage.” Unit sizes range from around 30 square metres to around 74 square metres. Rent for the smaller units is 66,000 yen (around $730) and the bigger ones are going for 135,000 yen (about $1500).

[MIKA27]

It's A Drought Apocalypse In New Indie Flick The Last Survivors

What will happen to the lush and twee state of Oregon when the drought apocalypse hits? Whether you hate Portland hipsters, or merely lust for the end times, you’ll want to find out in forthcoming indie movie The Last Survivors. Here’s the first trailer for you to enjoy.

In this movie, teenage girls fight with guns, not bows and arrows. The action is good, cheesy fun and the plot is ripped straight from today’s headlines. Will megadrought bring us civilisational collapse and redneck warlords? Of course it will.

Here’s the official synopsis:

At the edge of an expansive barren valley, all that remains of The Wallace Farm for Wayward Youth is a few hollowed-out husks of buildings. Seventeen-year-old Kendal (Haley Lu Richardson) can barely recall when the Oregon valley was still lush. It’s been a decade since the last rainfall, and society at large has dried up and blown away. Kendal and the few others that remain barely scrape by while dreaming of escape. When a greedy water baron, Carson (Jon Gries, Napoleon Dynamite, Taken) lays claim to what little of the precious resource remains underground, Kendal must decide whether to run and hide or bravely fight for the few cherished people and things she has left.

You can watch it on VOD or order a DVD/Blu-ray on August 4. Learn more about the movie on the official website.

[MIKA27]

Seeing A Giant Stingray Eat A Crab Is Like Seeing A UFO Abduct A Person

And here I thought stingrays were jolly surfers of the ocean. Not to crabs! Watch as this giant stingray catch a spider crab and vacuum suck the poor crab right into the stingray’s mouth. It’s like one minute the crab is there, the next he’s been vaporised. Poor crab was too busy moulting to realise the UFO of the sea was about to abduct it.

[MIKA27]

Black Hawk Helicopter Explodes After Landing On Minefield, Four Killed

This is a graphic video showing a Colombian Army Blackhawk helicopter landing on a minefield. It explodes tragically, killing four and injuring six of the 15 people on board. The explosives in the minefield were supposedly detonated by the guerilla movement FARC. So sad. War sucks on both sides.

[MIKA27]

The skull of famed horror film director is stolen; ‘Satanists’ suspected

Olaf Ihlefeldt lives a life filled with mixed blessings. On one hand, he’s manager of one of Western Europe’s premier resting places — the idyllic Stahnsdorf South-Western Cemetery outside Berlin.

“Southwesterly Stahnsdorf belongs beside Venice Toteninsel San Michele, Vienna’s Central Cemetery and Père Lachaise in Paris [as] undoubtedly one of the grand hotels of international cemeteries,” the Web site of what’s known as the Südwestkirchhof Stahnsdort reads. “The Südwestkirchhof is a place of superlatives: the largest forest cemetery, the most important monuments of funeral art, the final resting place of outstanding personalities.”

But Ihlefeldt has a problem: He’s responsible for the body of acclaimed German director F.W. Murnau (1888-1931) — the mastermind behind the horror classic “Nosferatu” — and somebody keeps messing with it. Murnau’s tomb was first broken into in the 1970s, and his iron coffin damaged; in February, the grave was disturbed again by unknown parties.

And now, someone has stolen Murnau’s head — or, more accurately, his skull. Reached by phone early Wednesday, Ihlefeldt was not pleased.

“I think I know what you mean,” he said when asked of rumors of Murnau’s skull-theft reported in Spiegel Online and other outlets. “Yes, it’s true.”

Ihlefeldt said he discovered the tomb had been broken into on Monday. A candle left at the scene led to speculation that Murnau’s corpse was part of a ceremony staged by “Satanists” or those practicing “black magic,” as Ihlefeldt put it.

“There was a candle,” Ihlefeldt said. “… A photo session or a celebration or whatever in the night. It really isn’t clear.”

Though Murnau rests among luminaries — sharing real estate with composer Engelbert Humperdinck (not to be confused with this Engelbert Humperdinck) and architect Walter Gropius of the Bauhaus school (not to be confused with the band Bauhaus) — Ihlefeldt said Murnau’s tomb and his legacy are something, well, superlative.

“It was a really special, special thing there,” he said. “It was really important for us.”

It’s not clear whether Murnau, who died after a car accident in California in 1931, was specifically targeted, and the whereabouts of his skull are unknown. What is known: Murnau’s legacy as a pioneering German expressionist only seems to have grown in the eight decades since his death. The past century has seen terrifying films such as “Night of the Living Dead,” “The Fly” and “The Ring” — to name but a few. Some were made with sophisticated special effects; some spawned franchises of films now numbering in the double-digits; some were uber-violent.

But none of them really has anything on a silent takeoff on Bram Stoker’s “Dracula” shot on film and released in 1922.

“Few characters in cinema have proved as indomitably influential as Max Schreck’s Count Orlok in F.W. Murnau’s Nosferatu,” John Oursler of Pop Matters wrote in 2013. “Even those who think they haven’t seen Murnau’s iconic horror ur-text actually have only secondarily. They have experienced it in homages and parodies, seen its influence on every successive horror film that has made use of the pioneering techniques of German Expressionism, been terrified by the image of a slinking shadow climbing across a wall.”

The similarity of Murnau’s tale to Stoker’s led to a lawsuit, and many prints of the film were destroyed. The movie’s legacy, however, lived on: The film influenced countless remakes of the “Dracula” tale; was remade by German icon Werner Herzog; and inspired the black comedy “The Shadow of the Vampire,” in which John Malkovich, as Murnau, casts Willem Dafoe as Orlok.

Given the lasting power of Murnau’s creation, it’s not hard to understand why an errant German Satanist would want to make off with his skull — which is little comfort to Ihlefeldt.

“It’s an absolute scandal here,” he said.

[MIKA27]

Marshall's Rock N' Roll Android Phone Actually Looks Awesome

Marshall Headphones, the splinter manufacturer that labels “lifestyle” electronics with the amplifier brand’s logo and styling, is making a new Android phone with music-centric features. To be sure, there’s a little gimmicky nostalgia here, but forgive me lords of rock n’ roll authenticity if I kind of love it.

The new Marshall London — yes, it’s called London — has all of the traditional Marshall trappings, like the grainy textured finish of the iconic amps. But the music-oriented theme goes deeper than aesthetics. You adjust volume with a wheel, just like you did on your old Walkman. And like the original Walkman way, way back in the ’80s, London has two headphone jacks so you can listen to tunes with a friend. The finishing touch is an “M” button, which takes you straight to the music.

Additionally, the hardware has an auxiliary Wolfson chipset under the hood. I hadn’t heard of the company before, but it was a British manufacturer of IC chips for music-specific applications. According to this pretty good post, the company had a rich IP portfolio and landed some high-profile contracts with monsters like Samsung — you know back when company’s like HTC were installing Beats-centric music features directly into hardware. Eventually, the business faltered and they were forced to sell out.

Regardless, no word on what that Wolfson chipset might actually do.

To be sure some of the audio-centric features are more superficial. This isn’t the first phone to feature dual speakers on the front of the device. And the built-in DJ software and EQ aren’t exactly groundbreaking.

Under the hood, the phone’s core specs are barely respectable compared to a top-of-the-line handset. It’s got a 4.7-inch 720p IPS display, which is going to feel pretty tiny and low-res compared to today’s 5-inch=plus QHD displays. It’s got 2GB of RAM, 16GB of on-board storage, plus a Micro-SD slot. It will run Android Lollipop at launch, which is great! But that Qualcomm Snapdragon 410 chipset is a few years old, and might drag compared to a new flagship. We don’t know much about the 8 megapixel camera, but it’s lower resolution than the most up-to-date phones. It’s a low-spec handset, to be sure, but that doesn’t mean bad.

Unlike other low-spec phones like the totally decent Moto E, the Marshall London won’t be cheap. For now the phone is available for pre-order in Europe for just shy of $US600.

Old man Marshall might be rolling in his grave if he saw a mobile phone with his name slapped on the side. Maybe! But I’d like to think he would recognise style when he saw it.

[MIKA27]

The ISS Astronauts Had To Shelter From Russian Space Junk Overnight

Overnight, a piece of an old Russian-built weather satellite sped by dangerously close to the International Space Station. It’s the fourth time that astronauts aboard the ISS have “sheltered” because of space junk.

As NASA explained this morning in a short blog post about the move, the crew aboard the ISS were asked to take shelter in the Russian Soyuz vehicle currently docked on the station. NASA called the move “a precaution due to an anticipated close approach of a piece of space debris to the orbiting complex”, since these vehicles are the safest place to be in the event that the ISS is damaged.

Normally, the spacecraft would simply move out of the way of the debris if it had been spotted soon enough — though sheltering has taken place four times before, including in 2012 and 2011, but manoeuvring around debris is more common. Thankfully, the crew was given the all-clear minutes after the debris passed. But it’s another reminder that space junk is becoming more of a problem every year.

Explaining why we don’t yet have a system for clean up isn’t easy — it’s a mixture of complex technological and geopolitical issues. Last year, io9’s Mark Strauss talked to Theresa Hitchens, who directs the UN Institute for Disarmament Research, about the growing problem with space debris. Hitchens gave us a glimpse into the incredibly complicated world of space junk removal — which involves not only massive resource investment, but delicate political issues, sticky space laws, and the possibility that a space debris removal system could have a dual-use as a satellite-destroying weapon:

In a future era where everyone is armed to the teeth with anti-satellite capabilities, the likelihood of a debris strike being mistaken as a deliberate strike by an enemy skyrockets. It would be a very unstable situation, prone to miscalculation and crisis escalation. In my humble opinion, this is why the development and deployment of overt anti-satellite weapons systems would be a mistake.

In fact, earlier this month we got an update from the Swiss École polytechnique fédérale de Lausanne’s Center for Space Engineering, which is developing a satellite specifically to remove an existing Swiss satellite currently in orbit.

Called CleanSpace One, the hoover-sat is designed to use a net to capture the existing satellite and bring it down into the Earth’s atmosphere to destroy it. CleanSpace One is an ongoing project — the center estimates a 2018 launch — and there’s no guarantee it will work.

The danger from the debris passed earlier this morning, and everyone on the ISS is safe. But the efforts by Switzerland and national space agencies illustrate how difficult the task of cleaning up after yourself in space can be just as expensive and complex as getting there — and proof that the space debris problem isn’t going away anytime soon.

[coblos]

For Fuzz: There's Already A Special Edition Of That New Devastator For Comic-Con

First revealed at Toy Fair earlier this year, you unfortunately can’t actually buy Hasbro’s gigantic new Transformers Constructicons set yet. But there’s already a special edition version being teased for the 2015 San Diego Comic-Con.

So what makes the special edition so special? It looks like the Constructicons have been given a shiny chrome finish courtesy of a vacuum metallising pass. It will no doubt look amazing, but it also means you’ll have to be extra careful playing with Devastator as metal on plastic finishes often chip and flake very easily. And since this set will no doubt not come cheap, you might want to skip the chrome version if you have a few battles planned for these new Constructicons toys.

Just ordered Devastator for my sons birthday. He's an encyclopedia for all things transformers. He's going to love it. Thanks for the tip Mika. Have been keeping an eye out for confirmed release dates since you posted this. It will be arriving just in time.

[MIKA27]

Just ordered Devastator for my sons birthday. He's an encyclopedia for all things transformers. He's going to love it. Thanks for the tip Mika. Have been keeping an eye out for confirmed release dates since you posted this. It will be arriving just in time.

Thats great, your sons going to love it, what a brilliant present!

[Fuzz]

Just ordered Devastator for my sons birthday. He's an encyclopedia for all things transformers. He's going to love it. Thanks for the tip Mika. Have been keeping an eye out for confirmed release dates since you posted this. It will be arriving just in time.

Thats great, your sons going to love it, what a brilliant present!

Agreed. bloody awesome.

Wish I could get the SDCC version.

[brschoppe]

LONDON CHURCH CONVERSION

Viewed from the outside, it still looks like a house of worship. Step inside this London Church Conversion, however, and you'll find that while it retains some of its original detail, it is very much a home. Expertly converted, it uses the full-height sanctuary for the main living/eating/cooking area, complete with heated parquet floors and marble details.

There's a single bedroom on this floor and three more on the floors above, all with en suites, while a separate stairway takes you to the mezzanine and reading area that overlooks the living room. Other notable features include a private patio with waterfall, original stained glass windows, and a gym.

That reminds me of the Church Works Brewery in Pittsburgh. http://www.churchbrew.com/ It is amazing what people have done with former churches.

[MIKA27]

Aussie Surfing Champ Mick Fanning Attacked By Shark

This is terrifying. Chilling, even. Aussie-born surfing world champ was attacked by a shark at the Jeffreys Bay (J-Bay) Open, and the video is too real.

The attack starts straight away in the video. The shark almost creeps up on Fanning, before pouncing on the champ.

Fanning said in his post-attack interview that the shark had been caught in the surfing champ’s leg rope at the start of the incident. The shark thrashed and bit its way out of the rope, leaving Fanning to escape the incident onto the back of a support jet-ski that raced in to save the surfer.

Fanning adds that he got a few punches in during the fray.

Shark alarms sounded on the beach where the heats were being held, and other surfers were also pulled out of the water by support boats.

[MIKA27]

Climate Change Is Literally Setting The World On Fire

What happens when you mix record-smashing heat and exceptional drought? Fire! Lots of fire! But climate change isn’t just bringing more fires to our doorstep, although it’s accomplishing that quite handily. It’s making fire seasons longer.

That’s according to a study published this week in Nature Communications, which shows that fire weather seasons have, on average, grown 18.7 per cent longer across the Earth’s surface since 1979. What’s more, the global burnable area affected by fire seasons has doubled, meaning areas that didn’t used to be fire prone are starting to look rather combustible. The reason? Hotter, drier conditions across vast swaths of our planet’s vegetated surface.

Literally, climate change is setting the world on fire.

Too Many Hot Days

Wildfires play a key role in fire-adapted ecosystems, creating open patches in forests and grasslands that promote biodiversity. Certain fire-adapted plants require a burn in order for their seeds to germinate. But the recent surge in extremely destructive fires, such as those we’ve seen raging across Alaskan and Canadian boreal forests this summer, is pushing many ecosystems beyond their disaster tolerance. Needless to say, it’s also causing substantial property damage and placing additional human lives in danger.

In their study, the researchers collected fire weather data — things like maximum annual temperature, number of rain-free days, and maximum windspeed — in three global meteorological datasets, from 1979 to 2013. They used the data to calculate several different fire danger indices and to estimate global fire weather season lengths.

Globally, fire season length has increased nearly 20 per cent since 1979, and the global vegetated area affected by longer fire seasons has doubled from 10 to 20 per cent. Both of these metrics (shown in panels a and b below) are strongly correlated with a global increase in the number of rain-free days ©:

To put these numbers in a bit more context, the researchers plotted their fire weather season findings on a map of the Earth. The figure below shows us areas where fire season length has been changing since 1979, with red indicating longer fire seasons and blue indicating shorter ones:

So, it’s nobody’s imagination that fire season is getting worse out West. Things have also been heating up across a large portion of the Amazon, East Africa and the Middle East.

Longer fire seasons have another implication aside from the obvious one of more stuff burning like crazy: Extra global carbon emissions. The more forests and grasslands burn, the more carbon dioxide enters our atmosphere, and the less vegetation we have to mop up all that CO2 after the fact. The researchers point out that 1997, a series of brutal blazes in Indonesia released the carbon equivalent of 13 to 40 per cent of the world’s annual fossil fuel emissions. Fiercer fire seasons could represent a major climate feedback, triggering even more global warming, despite the fact that fires sometimes cool our planet in unexpected ways.

Let’s just hope Amazon starts rolling emergency fire blanket kits into Prime Day sale next year. Something tells me those are gonna be a teensy bit more useful than lighters that are also pocket knives.

[MIKA27]

Japan Just Cancelled Its Outrageously Expensive Olympic Stadium Design

And in doing so, made itself a poster child for rethinking the insane costs of major sporting events like the Olympics, explaining that it would start over with a new design. Could the tide be turning against the idea that cities have to spend billions to host the Games?

Early this morning, the Guardian reported that the Japanese government had reached a decision about the fate of its New National Stadium after two years of protests, redesigns, and cost-reductions. “We have decided to go back to the start on the Tokyo Olympics-Paralympics stadium plan, and start over from zero,” said prime minister Shinzo Abe, according to The Guardian.

The new stadium will have to be designed and built in less than five years — and the World Cup of rugby, which was supposed to take place in the stadium in 2019, will have to find some other venue (the rugby execs, as you might expect, are pissed).

So, how on Earth does a building that was designed three years ago, on a necessarily razor-sharp schedule, for a sporting event that will take place in a handful of years, get cancelled outright? Let’s review.

The stadium was designed by high-profile UK/Iraqi architect Zaha Hadid, and was originally projected to cost around $US3.1 billion — as we pointed out at the time, that’s $US2.6 billion more than Hadid’s Olympic venue in London.

As soon as the building was announced, the problems began. A coalition of famous Japanese architects, including Pritzker Prize winner Fumihiko Maki, Sou Fujimoto, and many others, threw an incredible amount of shade — at least for the architecture world — at the design of their colleague. A few choice insults included calling it “a disgrace,” “just ridiculous,” “a gigantic white elephant,” and “like a turtle waiting for Japan to sink so that it can swim away.” BOOYAH.

But Hadid responded with her own zingers. “They don’t want a foreigner to build in Tokyo for a national stadium,” she said last December. “The fact that they lost is their problem, they lost the competition.” Critics shot back that the building was massively over-sized for the site and that it would ultimately become an albatross around the neck of a city — and country — that’s already under immense financial burden.

Over the past two years, public protests drew thousands of people in Tokyo, and last summer, the Japanese government said it would reconsider the design and cut the costs by a whopping $US1.3 billion. Today, it looks like that wasn’t enough. Japan says it will scrap the design completely and figure out a way to build a stadium within the next five years that can host the Olympics without costing billions and overwhelming the neighbourhood.

As contentious as this whole debacle has been, this is great news for more cities than Tokyo. The absurd cost of hosting the Olympics is more than just a crap deal for host cities. It’s potentially a crap deal for whole countries and even international economic zones. The Athens Olympics, in 2004, has widely been blamed for helping trigger the economic collapse in Greece that’s currently threatening the stability of the entire Eurozone. In the decade since, potential host cities have cut and run, with the International Olympic Committee struggling to find potential hosts beyond countries like Kazakhstan, Russia, and China.

In the US, as four cities competed to be considered by the IOC for the 2024 Olympics, the competition was overshadowed by protests in each city against the Olympics entirely. Boston, which eventually won the right to compete for the Games, is itself in the midst of turmoil with citizens rallying against the honour.

Japan’s choice to start from scratch might have been motivated by national sentiment, by budget issues, or by any number of other factors. And it still must build another stadium. Still, it’s still good news for other cities under immense pressure to deliver on a timeline for the IOC, which, as a matter of fact, told the Guardian that it has been “reassured that the review would not affect the delivery of the stadium in time for the Games.” While some host countries might have caved to the pressure to go through with the existing design, Japan has instead set an important precedent for the Olympics: It said no thanks.

[MIKA27]

Bear Breaks Into Pie Shop And Devours 38 Pies, Skips The Rhubarb

It was a great day to be this Colorado bear yesterday. After breaking into a local pie shop, Sir Bear helped himself to some pie. Matter of fact, he helped himself to all the pie, except for the strawberry rhubarb.

“Just devoured pies, sugar, cocoa and left a mess behind,” Colorado Cherry Company owner Kristi Lehnert told KDVR.

According to Lehnert, the bear broke into her store through a window and proceeded to gobble down 24 cherry pies and 14 apple pies. But here’s where the bear and I have ideological differences: He didn’t touch a single strawberry rhubarb pie. Not a one. What gives, bear?

I’m not sure, but I think we all learned an important lesson about the best type of pie to take camping. After all, bears seem pretty good at breaking into every bear-proof container we invent. Maybe technology wasn’t the answer. Maybe it was rhubarb.

[MIKA27]

This Downhill Bike Race On A Glacier Is So Insane That Everyone Crashes

You know you’re in some deep sludge of brown goo when a bike race starts and pretty much everyone around you immediately loses control and crashes. That’s what happens when you ride a bike downhill on a glacier. That’s what happens when you ride the Megavalanche race.

It’s so ridiculous to see everyone crash that it actually becomes pretty freaking hilarious.

[MIKA27]

Firefighters Can't Save People Burning In Cars Because Of A Stupid Drone

A giant wildfire currently spreading through Southern California’s Cajon Pass is burning cars on a freeway in what the San Bernardino County Fire Department is calling a “mass casualty incident.” But the firefighters also issued a report that due to a drone seen flying in the area, they couldn’t get their helicopters to the scene right away.

What’s being called the North Fire has burned about 500 acres near the 15 freeway, which heads northeast to Vegas. Firefighters had closed the freeway traffic in both directions when suddenly the grass fire jumped into the freeway and set several cars aflame. Firefighters began mobilising their aircraft, but due to a drone seen in the air, they were forced to ground their helicopters which were starting to drop water on the burning cars.

It isn’t the first time that drones have prevented firefighters from flying their aircraft — it seems to be a frighteningly regular thing. This is the third time in a month that this has happened just in this county. During the nearby Lake Fire in June, a DC-10 with flame-retardant was grounded after a drone was spotted in the air.

San Bernardino’s fire department tweeted out a poster from the US Forest Service reminding drone operators not to fly near firefighting operations.

If you have a drone — and I think I can stay this with some certainty — stay the f**k away from wildfires.

[MIKA27]

The Controversial, Mad Science Strategy To Save Earth's Rhinos

Rhino horn is more precious than gold on the black market, and people’s insatiable demand for the stuff has driven rhinos to the brink of extinction. Now a Seattle-based startup has a radical plan to save these incredible animals: Using synthetic biology to manufacture rhino horns in the lab.

The biotech company Pembient says it can 3D-print a synthetic rhino horn that’s biologically indistinguishable from the natural product (and perhaps even better). Prominent conservation groups, however, question the very premise of the idea, arguing that artificial horn will add legitimacy to an illegal and misguided trade and ultimately increase consumer demand.

How did we even get to this point? To answer that question, we need to take a quick trip to South Africa, home of the world’s largest rhino populations, and the scene of a horrific poaching crisis.

The Crisis

Our fascination with rhino horn traces back centuries, to traditional medicine systems in China, Malaysia, South Korea, and India. In ancient Chinese medicine, rhino horn is used to treat a wide range of ailments, including fever, rheumatism, gout, snakebites, headaches and (personal fav, if I had to pick one) “devil possession”. In recent years, powdered rhino horn has been popularised as a hangover remedy, an aphrodisiac and even a cancer cure.

It’s none of these things: All of these claims are a load of unscientific Tomfoolery. Rhino horns are made of keratin — the same harmless and medicinally useless substance found in your fingernails and hair. Yet many people still believe the horns possess magical healing powers. Worse still, in recent years rhino horn has become an status symbol — and that’s why the animals are now being slaughtered en masse.

South Africa is home to the world’s largest population of rhinos — nearly 80 per cent of Africa’s remaining 25,000 — including the vast majority of southern white rhinos. The trouble started in 2008, when 83 rhinos were killed in South Africa for their horns — a notable uptick over the 10-13 animals killed in the years prior. In 2009, the death toll climbed to 122. Then 333 in 2010. It’s been growing steadily ever since.

Last year, a record breaking 1215 rhinos were killed in South Africa alone — on average, a rhino every 8 hours. As of this April, South Africa was on track to meet, if not exceed, that number.

South African wildlife veterinarian Peter Rodgers, who treats injured rhinos outside of Kruger National Park, told me last fall the situation has gotten so bad that we may soon reach a tipping point at which rhino deaths outpace births. The conservation group Save the Rhino International puts things even more bluntly on its website: “rhino poaching has reached a crisis point, and if killings continue at this rate….rhinos could go extinct in the very near future.”

(It’s worth noting that the poaching crisis is by no means limited to South Africa, but poaching reports from other countries aren’t very consistent. Still, two of the three Asian rhino species are classified as critically endangered, with populations numbering less than 100 animals each.)

Why the recent surge in poaching? In a word, money. There’s a growing upper class in both Vietnam and China, and that demographic seems willing to pay top-dollar for the luxury item. Combine this with theexpansion of trafficking routes via the dark web, and we’ve got ourselves a recipe for a burgeoning illegal trade. Today, a kilo of rhino horn can fetch as much as 100 thousand dollars on the black market,according to The Guardian.

South African wildlife veterinarian William Fowlds with a rhino whose face was hacked off by poachers

If a rising consumer demand wasn’t enough, there’s another problem: The shifting demographic of the poachers themselves. Lone hunters looking to score a single, big payoff are no longer the issue. They have been replaced by large, shadowy networks of organised criminals; groups that are accustomed to trafficking everything from narcotics to women and children. Unfortunately, these poachers are smarter: Instead of killing with noisy guns, South African wildlife vets are now seeing poachers quietly darting rhinos with powerful anaesthetics. Unsurprisingly, this is making their atrocities harder than ever to catch.

To sum up, the situation is really, really bad. That’s why groups around the world have been floating all sorts of crazy ideas, from lacing rhino horns with poison to dehorning rhinos humanely to literallyfarming the animals for their horn. But few ideas have stirred as much excitement and controversy as the possibility of synthetically concocting a substance that’s chemically indistinguishable from the real deal.

Synthetic Horn

Rhino horn is principally composed of keratin, the same proteinaceous compound found in your fingernails. But creating a foolproof faux-rhino horn is a tad more complicated than collecting a bunch of human fingernails and grinding them up. Keratin, like all other proteins, is composed of a precise sequence of amino acids — and that sequence changes from animal to animal, from horn to nails to hair. Relatively simple spectroscopic analyses could be used to distinguish rhino keratin from a fake.

Powdered rhino horn can pass as many other substances — but laboratory analyses can spot a fake.

Which is why Pembient, the biotech company launched by Matthew Markus and George Bonaci in January, is hoping to produce something as close to the real thing as possible using synthetic biology. (So far, the company has been using wool keratin to produce synthetic prototype horns.) This entails inserting the genes that encode rhino keratin proteins into yeast cells, and turning those microbes into miniature rhino keratin factories. Plugging new genes into yeast to express useful products is standard fare in the biotech world these days — it’s how we make a antibiotics, pharmaceuticals and enzymes.

For Pembient, the challenge right now is honing in on the specific genes that actually produce rhino horn keratin. To do so, the company is currently mining the genome of the southern white rhino, The Guardian reported recently. Once the gene or genes are successfully identified and inserted into yeast, there’s the additional challenge of getting the bugs to express the protein, and purifying industrially scalable amounts of it. Pembient has spent the last few months bunked up at the San Francisco biotech incubator Indie Bio, which is providing seed funding and lab space to foster this initial R&D.

Beyond keratin, rhino horn contains a number of additional trace elements, including sulphur, calcium and potassium. If these chemicals aren’t included as well, simple elemental analyses could root out a fake substance. And lastly, since we’re talking about a biological product, there’s the matter of DNA. For a few hundred bucks, someone could submit a sample of rhino horn to a lab for DNA sequencing and determine tell whether the material bears the telltale signatures of a rhino. To fool the most thorough and scientific of wildlife product traders, Pembient might copy and amplify fragments of DNA from actual rhinos, or synthesise rhino DNA de novo in the lab.

Once all the components — keratin, trace elements, and DNA — are ready, Pembient says it will mix the ingredients into a powder. The powder could be sold as is (that’s how most rhino horn consumers purchase the stuff, anyway), or it could be fed as “ink” into a 3D printer. Pembient has already played around with this idea, making some prototype 3D printed horns using wool keratin, and the company believes it could print entire horns out of its synthetic rhino concoction.

If all goes according to plan, Pembient could soon have itself a product that’s practically indistinguishable from real rhino horn. The one difference, in the company’s mind, would be contamination. Natural horn contains trace amounts of industrial pollutants, pesticides, even radioactive compounds that make their way into the environment following nuclear tests. Lab-grown horn, by comparison, would be clean — which might even make it a more favourable alternative to some.

But the question remains of whether we should really be doing this at all.

If We Can Make Synthetic Horn, Should We?

By producing a substitute horn that’s very similar to the biological product at a fraction of black market coasts, Pembient hopes that buyers and traders will switch. In that sense, co-founder Markus has likened the introduction of faux-rhino horn to that of faux-fur, which did go some way toward reducing consumer demand for real fur. “If people like the product they should be able to enjoy it without harming any animals,” Markus told The Guardian. “There is room for better, bio-identical substitutes.”

Is synthetic rhino horn the next faux fur?

Conservation groups don’t agree. The World Wildlife Fund monitoring network TRAFFIC recently told Motherboard that increasing supply would only exacerbate the problem by opening up the market even further. This is a legitimate concern. If, as Pembient hopes, synthetic horn can be produced and sold for a fraction the cost of real rhino horn, it would make the commodity accessible to a larger swath of potential consumers, while legitimising the idea of the product.

What’s more, having a fake alternative out there could elevate the status of real horn in the minds of the wealthiest buyers. TRAFFIC research has shown that alternative products — most notably water buffalo horn — already dominate the market, but that the richest consumers are nevertheless searching, and finding, bonafide rhino horn.

Save the Rhino International and the International Rhino Foundation seem to be on the same page as TRAFFIC. In a joint statement, the two organisations say that they are opposed to the development, marketing and sale of synthetic horn, on the grounds that “Selling synthetic horn does not reduce the demand for rhino horn or dispel the myths around rhino horn and could indeed lead to more poaching because it increases demand for “the real thing.”

Executive director of the International Rhino Foundation Susie Ellis also points out that synthetic horn “would create additional work for international customs agents, who would have to distinguish between the legal and illegal rhino keratin.” (Conservation organisations have, in the past, used similar arguments to rebuff the idea of a legalized, regulated international market, claiming that a such a market would further obfuscate illegal poaching activity.)

Markus disagrees with these arguments on the basis of market research conducted in Vietnam earlier this year: Of 500 survey respondents who use rhino horn for medicinal purposes, 45% said they would use manufactured horn as a substitute. What’s more, Markus told Motherboard last winter that his team will be monitoring the market closely and is willing to cut off production if it seems the synthetic product is doing more harm than good.

Ultimately, the question of whether synthetic horn will mean fewer rhino killings and a chance for stressed populations to recover seems to boil down to economics. As Dr. William Fowlds, a South African wildlife veterinarian and conservationist told me last fall, “If a trade model is going to work, the price of the product [rhino horn] has to be brought down to well below the risk factor for poachers. If we put a trade mechanism in place and the value of rhino horn remains high, illegal poaching will continue.”

Many conservationists, Fowlds included, believe that educational campaigns and demand reduction are the only long-term solution to the poaching crisis. But as Pembient sees it, these sorts of ‘long-term’ efforts are exactly what haven’t been working — at least, not in a timeframe that’s compatible with saving the very last rhinos from extinction.

The reason we’re even discussing synthetic rhino horn? Because something has to be done, and fast. At the end of the day, that might be the most important argument of all.

[MIKA27]

Backing Up CDs Is Once Again Illegal In The UK For Some Reason

In a useless new ruling that will change nothing, you can no longer legally rip CDs and DVDs for personal use in the UK. Ladies and gents, welcome back to 2002.

Yep, you heard that correctly: Yesterday, a high court in the UK ruled that making digital backups of lawfully purchased, copyrighted music is illegal, quashing a (very very long overdue) 2014 “personal use exemption” rule that permitted folks to backup media as long as they weren’t distributing it to others. (In the US and many other countries, it’s totally fine to copy CDs for your own personal use and has been for a long time.)

The drama started in November, when major music industry players including UK Music and the British Academy of Songwriters challenged the personal use exemption ruling, claiming that it would cost the record industry millions and demanding that a “compensation scheme” be introduced. Basically, they’re asking to get paid extra when you purchase a physical CD because of the terrible hardship they suffer when you back said CD up to your music library.

A UK high court judged ruled in the record industry’s favour last month, saying that the practice of backing up CDs was “potentially harmful” to music rights holders. Yesterday, it officially became illegal, again.

Of course, no one’s going pay any attention to this ruling, seeing as how we all backed up our physical CDs long ago and pretty much never buy them anymore except as a token gesture when we want to support a friends’ band. Once again, the record industry proves that it’s run by dinosaurs who’d like to bury themselves even further by focusing their time and energy on unenforceable and largely irrelevant litigation.

[MIKA27]

Velociraptor's Feathered Cousin Is The Stuff Of Drug-Infused Nightmares

Indominus might’ve grabbed our eyeballs and our cash this movie season, but genetically modified raptor-rexes with an insatiable lust for human blood aren’t the only badass new dinos on the block. In fact,Zhenyuanlong suni, a Velociraptor cousin that looks like a tortured peacock on steroids, is arguably even cooler, because it actually existed.

“This new dinosaur is one of the closest cousins of Velociraptor, but it looks just like a bird,” said palaeontologist Steve Brusatte University of Edinburgh, who co-authored a scientific paper describing the new feathered monster. “It’s a dinosaur with huge wings made up of quill pen feathers, just like an eagle or a vulture. The movies have it wrong – this is what Velociraptor would have looked like too.”

Dredged out of the ground by palaeontologists working in the western part of the famously dino-ridden Liaoning Province in China, Z. suni is the largest feathered dino yet to have a well-preserved set of bird-like wings. But even more fascinating than its wings are the long, quill-like feathers that decorated the creature’s body. Normally, when palaeontologists talk about feathered dinosaurs, you’d be better off imagining an animal that’s had the misfortune of sprouting pubic hair all over its body. Feathers simply weren’t up to snuff 125 million years ago.

Fossil remains of Zhenyuanlong suni

That is, until now. This remarkably well-preserved lizard-bird sported a dense and extravagant plumage on its wings and tail. At 5 feet long, palaeontologists don’t think Z. suni could’ve actually taken to the sky — at least, not using the same muscle-driven flight as modern birds. We really don’t yet know what its oversized wings and fancy feathers were about. Perhaps it used them to attract mates, or scare the living bejeezus out of all the other creatures in the forest.

But one way or another, this is an actual dinosaur that actually existed, and it’s showing us just how many Cretaceous mysteries are still buried in the ground.

“The western part of Liaoning Province in China is one of the most famous places in the world for finding dinosaurs,” said Junchang Lü, a palaeontologist at the Chinese Academy of Geological Sciences. “The first feathered dinosaurs were found here and now our discovery of Zhenyuanlong indicates that there is an even higher diversity of feathered dinosaurs than we thought. It’s amazing that new feathered dinosaurs are still being found.”

If I had to guess, I’d say trainable, pack-hunting feathered killing machines are going to be featuring prominently in the next Jurassic movie. How could Hollywood miss the opportunity to cash in on this? I certainly wouldn’t.

You can read the full, open-access scientific paper here.

[MIKA27]

Back To The Future Will Be Released In Cinemas For Its 30th Anniversary

Back to the Future is one of the greatest movies of all time. And with the 30th anniversary of the film’s release, all three BTTF movies are getting a re-release on DVD and Blu-Ray. But want to hear something even more exciting? The original film is getting released in theatres as well.

There’s nothing quite like seeing your favourite movies on the big screen with other like-minded weirdos.

We don’t have details yet about just how many theatres around the US will be showing BTTF. Universal is urging people to “check their local listings” but we’ll definitely keep you posted as we learn more.

As for the home release (on October 21, of course)? It sounds like it has some pretty neat extras. They will include:

• All New Original Shorts: Including Doc Brown Saves the World!, starring Christopher Lloyd.
• OUTATIME: Restoring the DeLorean: An inside look at the 2012 restoration of the most iconic car in film history.
• Looking Back to the Future: A 9-part retrospective documentary from 2009 on the trilogy’s legacy.
• Back to the Future: The Animated Series: 2 episodes (“Brothers” and “Mac the Black”) from the 1991 series featuring live action segments with Christopher Lloyd as Doc Brown.
• Tales from the Future 6-Part Documentary

Please excuse my nerd excitement.

[MIKA27]

Details Of Earliest Human Dentistry Make Me Want To Cry

Dentists are scary. Even in the most modern medical scenario, it is undeniably horrifying for someone to stick sharp objects in your mouth. Imagine what it was like 14,000 years ago. Actually, you don’t have to because a team of scientists just found the earliest example of dentistry, and it’s horrifying.

A new study published in Scientific Reports details “the oldest known evidence of dental caries intervention” in the remains of a 25-year-old man who died in northern Italy some 14,000 years ago during the Upper Paleolithic Period. This is the later stage of the Stone Age and a time when cave painting and rock art where all the rage. The study reveals that it’s also a period when dental hygiene shifted from the somewhat invasive use of toothpicks to the very invasive (and painful-sounding!) practice of combating cavities with “pointed flint tools”. The study specifies that these sharp rocks were used for “scratching and leveraging activities” aimed at eradicating the infect.

Just look at the photo of the tooth in question and tell me you don’t want to cry. That said, the science behind the discovery is undeniably fascinating. The researchers used Scanning Electron Microscopy (SEM) to take close up photos — see below — of the tooth’s enamel and then tested various types of materials like wood and bone before determining that the earliest known dentist’s torture tool was indeed a piece of sharp flint.

Now, just imagine the feeling of rock scraping the inside of your molar, and don’t ever complain about the teeny prick of Novocaine shot ever again.

[MIKA27]

Missiles Are Literally Falling Off Britain's Crumbling Jets

While Britain waits (and waits, and waits) for the F-35 to stop breaking, the mainstay of its ground-attack aircraft remains the Panavia Tornado, a ’70s airframe that is not ageing gracefully. Exhibit A: the two Brimstone missiles that accidentally ‘became detached’ during a landing in Cyprus last Friday.

Britain’s Akorotiri airbase on Cyprus is being used to fly Tornados against Islamic State militants in Iraq. According to Reuters, two Brimstone missiles “fell off” a Tornado during landing this morning, causing the airbase to be shut down while the pride and joy of the Royal Air Force speedily **** their pants. The missiles didn’t explode, but the runway was closed afterwards.

The Panavia Tornado first flew in 1974, and have been a mainstay of the Royal Air Force’s air-to-ground fleet ever since. The jets have been upgraded multiple times in the last 40 years, but despite the maintenance, have seen a series of problems during their service in Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, and most recently against IS. They were meant to have been replaced by the F-35A Joint Strike Fighter by this point, but that’s probably not going to happen anytime soon.

[MIKA27]

Here's The First Subtitled Attack On Titan Movie Trailer

We’ve seen a lot of these clips from the upcoming Attack on Titan live-action movie, but now we can understand them too.

Courtesy of IGN, the latest, subtitled trailer features a lot of the same Titan clips and the same crazy Hange squeals of delight and terror. Strung together, and with words I can read and comprehend, the movie is shaping up to be quite the frightful adventure it was always meant to be, but on the big screen. Sure, there are a few questionable production moments (like the scene with all the Titans standing in a shadowy exposition) but I have a feeling I won’t mind so much in lieu of a season 2.