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

[MIKA27]

The Fastest Spaceships in the Universe

Source: Jerocco via FatWallet

For Star Wars fans and sci-fi enthusiasts in general, FatWallet has created an intriguing infographic highlighting the fastest sci-fi ships and even NASA spaceships in the universe. You may be wondering just how these guys constructed such a list, well, they utilized math, of course. Their formulate takes distance and speed into consideration, amongst other factors.

Ships from various notable science fiction favorites like Star Wars, Doctor Who, Stargate SG-1, Battlestar Galactica, Red Dwarf, Firefly andTransformers are featured on the list, again while NASA editions ranging from the Voyager 1 to the Space Shuttle Discovery are also noted. Coming in at the number one spot is the Heart of Gold from The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.

[MIKA27]

This Ranch For Sale Is Bigger Than NYC And LA Combined

You know what they say about Texas: They make really good queso. And Texas is also home to the biggest ranch in the US — over half a million acres. It’s currently for sale, and for just $US725 million this Little Empire on the Prairie can be yours.

Bloomberg has the insane inside story of the Waggoner Ranch, the country’s largest ranch by acreage that’s contained by single fence, and the broker Bernard Uechtritz, who’s trying to unload it:

Uechtritz (YOO-tridge) is one of two brokers entrusted with the singular task of selling the Waggoner ranch and everything attached to it, from the 29 tractors, to the cut-rock polo barn, to the emptied bottles of Old Taylor bourbon in an abandoned hunting lodge. At 510,527 acres (207,000 hectares), or 800 square miles (2,072 square kilometers), the Waggoner sprawls over six counties and is bigger than Los Angeles and New York City combined. At almost three-quarters of a billion dollars, the asking price is more than quadruple the biggest publicly known sum fetched by a U.S. ranch, $US175 million for a Colorado spread in 2007. The Waggoner is one of the 20 largest cattle ranches in the U.S. and is known worldwide for its quarter horses.

Only 280km from Dallas, the property is so large that there are entire properties WITHIN the property. There are also four lakes and an oil field.

Wait! An oil field! According to the Waggoner family legend, when the original ranchers attempted to dig wells in early 1900s to water their cattle, they kept striking oil, gosh darnit. The family members (who don’t get along, hence the sale of the ranch) still get to keep 25 per cent of all future mineral rights, but here’s the crazy part:

Only about a tenth of the ranch’s total acreage has been explored for oil even as some 40 operators lease plots where they pump crude from more than 1,000 wells. “The ranch was run really conservatively,” Uechtritz says. “The oil made everybody comfortable. There wasn’t a drive to do anything more than what was necessary to live well.”

So think of that $US725 million as just an initial investment.

[MIKA27]

Why Solving Murders Is Going To Get A Lot Harder

Carbon emissions aren’t just changing the climate — they’re making it harder to solve crimes. As our atmosphere fills with fossil carbon, scientists will have a tougher time using radiocarbon dating, a standard forensic technique, to analyse human remains and wildlife tissues.

Radiocarbon dating is best known for its use in paleontology and archaeology, but it also helps forensic scientists to determine the precise age of modern tissue samples. But that application may soon be a thing of the past, according to research published this week in the Proceedings of the National Academies of Sciences. By 2050, humans and animals may have the same C-14 “age” as their ancestors from a thousand years ago.

In the atmosphere, cosmic rays convert nitrogen-14 into carbon-14 at a fairly constant rate. Plants take up trace amounts of this C-14 during photosynthesis, and from there, it enters the food chain. But C-14 is a radioactive isotope, meaning that it decays naturally over time, leaving behind stable carbon atoms. Comparing the number of stable to radioactive carbon atoms can help scientists to determine a sample’s age.

But there’s a rub: The fossil fuels humans are dredging out of the ground and pouring into the atmosphere are so old that they have got no C-14 left in them. Every year, this ‘C-14 dead’ carbon is making the atmosphere ‘older’ — and that’s making new organic tissues look older, as well.

To find out whether this is going to become a serious issue for radiocarbon dating, physicist Heather Graven of Imperial College, London modelled how atmospheric C-14 will change over the 21st century, by examining several different fossil fuel emissions scenarios. If humanity aggressively reduces its carbon emissions by 2020, Graven finds that atmospheric C-14 will decline to pre-industrial concentrations and remain flat over the 21st century (C-14 concentrations in the atmosphere are currently higher than they were in pre-industrial times, because of Cold War-era nuclear testing.)

But if fossil fuel emissions continue to rise until mid or late-century, the C-14 content of the atmosphere is going to fall well below pre-industrial levels, which means Earth’s life forms are going to start looking much older. By the end of the century, everything from our crops to our bodies might appear to be quite ancient according to radiocarbon analysis. Graven writes:

Given current emissions trends, fossil fuel emission-driven artificial “ageing“ of the atmosphere is likely to occur much faster and with a larger magnitude than previously expected. This finding has strong and as yet unrecognised implications for many applications of radiocarbon in various fields, and it implies that radiocarbon dating may no longer provide definitive ages for samples up to 2,000 y old.

This will create obvious problems for forensic scientists, who might really like to know if human remains buried in the woods are a couple of decades old or a few centuries. It could also make it harder to track illegal poaching activity — learning that a crate full of tusks was ripped off its elephants sometime in the last 2000 years isn’t particularly useful.

Fortunately, forensic scientists have a several other ageing techniques at their disposal, including good ol’ fashion morphological analysis and amino acid racemization. So dating remains isn’t going to become impossible. Still, it’s fascinating — and slightly disturbing — to think that the bones of a murder victim in the 22nd century might bear resemblance to a citizen of the Roman Empire.

[MIKA27]

US Authorities Are Investigating A Teen Who Weaponised A Quadcopter

Earlier this month, a 14-second video entitled “Flying Gun” was posted on YouTube. It shows a flying quadcopter outfitted with a handgun firing four shots. Now, it’s become a Federal Aviation Administration investigation.

The July 10 video, which currently has around two million views, shows a hovering robot in the woods with a semiautomatic handgun attached to it. The flying-and-shooting multirotor was built by an 18-year-old Connecticut mechanical engineering student, Agence France-Presse reports.

DIY inventors and tinkerers produce impressive, albeit dangerous, gadgets and experiments on YouTube all the time.

So, what makes this different, assuming everything was built and tested in a safe environment? Well, that’s what the FAA is trying to figure out: If this particular case of weaponising an unmanned aerial vehicle is illegal. According to local reports, Connecticut police say no state laws were broken here.

Like any emerging technology, drones and other UAVs can be used for good or for potentially illegal purposes. And in these early days, we’ll see both. We need to aggressively nail down rules and regulations — but we shouldn’t slip into dystopian panic yet, either. As for the crafty teen who built this quadcopter? The FAA says it’s still looking into the UAV — but you can be sure that no matter the outcome, this won’t be its last investigation of a souped-up quadcopter.

[MIKA27]

Hackers Have The Power To Remotely Hijack Half A Million Chrysler Cars

An ongoing investigation into the security of Chrysler vehicles bears some pretty startling conclusions. In a couple of weeks, security researchers will reveal the details of a zero-day exploit that affects some 471,000 cars. Put bluntly: Hackers can take complete control of the cars from thousands of kilometres away.

Long-time car hackers Charlie Miller and Chris Valasek recently demonstrated the dangerous possibilities of the Chrysler exploit to Wired‘s Andy Greenberg. The journalist actually took a Jeep Cherokee onto the highway outside St Louis, while the hackers took over control of the car. Using the Jeep’s Uconnect system, which plugs into a cellular network, the security researchers were able to gain control of the car’s entertainment system and then rewrite the firmware to send commands to critical systems like the brakes, steering and transmission. Greenberg describes the experience:

As the two hackers remotely toyed with the air-conditioning, radio, and windshield wipers, I mentally congratulated myself on my courage under pressure. That’s when they cut the transmission.

Immediately my accelerator stopped working. As I frantically pressed the pedal and watched the RPMs climb, the Jeep lost half its speed, then slowed to a crawl. This occurred just as I reached a long overpass, with no shoulder to offer an escape. The experiment had ceased to be fun.

What’s especially worrisome about this situation is that Chrysler knows about the vulnerability and doesn’t seem to be taking it too seriously. The company recently released a patch to the Uconnect software that addresses the issue, but it needs to be installed via USB drive or by a dealer. (Visit this link to download the software update that will fix the exploit.)

Meanwhile, Chrysler sort of scolded the researchers for sharing information about the exploit publicly. “Under no circumstances does [Fiat Chrysler Automotive] condone or believe it’s appropriate to disclose ‘how-to information’ that would potentially encourage, or help enable hackers to gain unauthorised and unlawful access to vehicle systems,” the company said in a statement.

Although this is not the first time that security researchers have discovered and shared details of a car hack, it’s starting to get pretty real. When there are almost half a million cars that could be commandeered or bricked with just a few key strokes, it’s time for auto companies to take notice, and embrace the community of researchers and politicians trying to make sure our cars are safe.

[MIKA27]

Stephen Hawking Backs $US100 Million Search For Aliens

The Breakthrough Listen project is our latest attempt to see if any other civilisations have made it through the Great Filter without destroying themselves in radioactive fires, investing $US100 million in the never-ending hunt for aliens clever enough to have invented telly and satellites.

The mission will use two of the largest radio telescopes on earth — the Green Bank Observatory and the Parkes Observatory — to focus on planets wobbling around stars in our galaxy and neighbouring stars, using thousands of hours of dish time on looking for telltale radio signals that could give us our first listen to alien pop music.

Hawking, who’s previously suggested we might be best off living in isolation, said of this latest effort: “It’s time to commit to finding the answer, to search for life beyond Earth. Mankind has a deep need to explore, to learn, to know. We also happen to be sociable creatures. It is important for us to know if we are alone in the dark.”

The listening approach is safer than beaming out messages to any potential Vorlons out there, with Hawking adding: “A civilisation reading one of our messages could be billions of years ahead of us. If so they will be vastly more powerful and may not see us as any more valuable than we see bacteria,” hence he’s also asking for the Voyager probes to be turned around.

The money for the latest alien hunt is coming from Russian businessman Yuri Milner, who’s stumping up the entire £100m himself.

[MIKA27]

Marines Blowup Concrete Walls Protected Only By A Blanket, Steel Balls

Watch US Marines with the 3rd Marine Logistics Group, 9th Engineer Support Battalion show how they get into buildings. The most amazing part is when they blow a concrete wall while they all stand there in line, just protected by a ballistic blanket. These guys are nuts.

[MIKA27]

Hot Toys Is Making A Sixth-Scale Millennium Falcon 5.5m Long

If you thought the sixth-scale Millennium Falcon cockpit diorama that Hot Toys showed off at Comic-Con was impressive, the company is apparently planning to reveal an 5.5m long, 3.7m wide model of the entire ship at the upcoming Ani-Com and Games convention in Hong Kong.

Revealed on Hot Toys’ Facebook page, it’s not entirely clear if the impossibly massive Millennium Falcon model is just a gimmick to draw attendees to its booth, or an actual toy the company intends to sell to anyone willing to pay the undoubtedly obscene shipping charges.

Recently Hot Toys has showcased an impressive 1/6th scale Millennium Falcon cockpit at San Diego Comic-Con which has already fascinated many Star Wars fans! But we are not stopping there yet, as a complete and highly detail 1/6th scale Millennium Falcon measuring close to 18 feet (5.5 meters) long by 12 feet (3.7 meters) wide will actually be making an appearance at ACGHK! Its sheer astonishing presence will surely captured any fans’ attention!

If it is real, you die-hard Star Wars collectors are going to have to give up an entire room in your homes to display it, or just buy it its own apartment.

[MIKA27]

British Man Now Sees Through World’s First Bionic Eye

For those of us who want to see science fiction innovations become realities in our lifetime, that day is here for a big one. A British man has become the first person in the world to be fitted with a bionic eye and he can now see after years of partial blindness due to macular degeneration.

Ray Flynn suffers from age-related macular degeneration (AMD), an increasingly common disease that robs a person of their central vision so that they see a black hole or blob in the middle of their field of vision. For Flynn, as for many sufferers, it means he can’t see faces, use an ATM, watch TV, drive or perform any activity that requires central vision. Fortunately, most people afflicted with AMD, including Flynn, still retain some of their peripheral vision.

How the world looks to someone with macular degeneration

That’s where the bionic eye comes in. It’s called the Argus II and it’s actually a multi-part device manufactured by Second Sight Medical Products in Sylmar, California. It starts with special eyeglasses fitted with a miniature camera. Images from the glasses become digital impulses that are transmitted wirelessly to electrodes inside an implant attached in the back of the eye to the retina. The electrodes stimulate the remaining operational retina cells, causing vision signals to be sent to the brain.

Ray Flynn’s bionic eye was implanted by doctors at the Manchester Royal Eye Hospital. Although it had been previously used for an extremely rare form of blindness, this was the first time the operation was performed on a patient with macular degeneration – the biggest cause of sight loss in Great Britain and a condition that affects at least 15 million Americans.

Does it work? Within two weeks, Flynn was able to identify horizontal, vertical and diagonal lines. Although he cannot see the exact image that is in the hole in his vision, he can identify the outlines of people and objects – even with his eyes shut. This information, combined with his peripheral vision, helps his brain compose what he’s seeing. Over time, his doctors believe his brain will be able to recreate exactly what Flynn has his eyeglass camera pointed at.

While it may sound rudimentary, for those who are affected by macular degeneration or are watching loved ones struggle with it, this bionic eye is the true definition of a miracle.

[MIKA27]

D.C.’s New Push: Use Saddam’s Men to Fight Obama’s ISIS War

An ex-Senator, a former CIA officer, and an Iraqi mogul lobby Congress for a private army, led by Saddam’s officers, to take on the terrorists that have trampled America’s proxies.

The magnificent Chartwell House, a 10,000-square foot mansion surrounded by lush, manicured grounds about 18 miles from central London, might seem an odd place to start a war. But that’s where Mudhar Shawkat, a wealthy Iraqi businessman who has a long history with U.S. intelligence, is making his stand against the self-proclaimed Islamic State.

Shawkat, a Sunni who made his money in the telecom business and running a private security firm called Babylon Eagles, says he’s fielding an autonomous, Sunni army to go toe-to-toe with ISIS and liberate the huge swaths of Iraq that the militants have conquered. And his men are ready to fight without the help of the central government in Baghdad, he says.

Shawkat gave his London address on disclosure forms filed with the U.S. Senate last week, when he hired a band of Washington, DC, lobbyists to help him open a second front in his campaign. The firm is run by former Idaho senator Steve Symms and two ex-senior congressional aides. Their mission: To arrange meetings for Shawkat with U.S. lawmakers and power brokers who might bless his grand vision and help it gain support in Washington.

“Give me a chance to have a Sunni fight against ISIS,” Shawkat told The Daily Beast in an interview, as he was shuttling between Lebanon and Erbil, in the Kurdish-controlled northern portion of Iraq. Shawkat insists that because ISIS itself is composed of Sunnis, only warriors from its own sect are prepared to slay it. That, and there’s no way in hell he wants Iranian-backed Shiite militias to do the job. That would only give Tehran more sway over the Shiite-dominated government in Baghdad.

So far, Iranian-backed Shiite militias have been running a ground fight against ISIS forces, supported by U.S.-led airstrikes. But in the long-term, leaving the terror group’s destruction to Shiites courts disaster, Shawkat said. President Obama has said he’s committed to wiping out ISIS, but his plan seems to require Iran’s help to do that. And now, after the recent nuclear deal with Iran, Shawkat and some of his Sunni compatriots in exile are questioning the administration’s commitment to backing them up.

“We want to form an army that will be led by former Iraqi officers,” said Shawkat, who speaks in a smooth baritone and has near-perfect English. Those men, of course, served under Iraq’s former (Sunni) dictator, Saddam Hussein. That’s only the first controversial element of Shawkat’s private war plan. Those officers were thrown out when the U.S. occupation force disbanded the Iraqi military in 2003, but he wants to put them back in uniform. They will lead a force of some 10,000 men who Shawkat says are ready to march once they’re armed.

Shawkat was in Washington last week and said he met with more than a dozen senators and congressmen, from both parties, including the respective chairs of the Senate and House armed services committees, John McCain and Ed Royce. He’s confident that one or both committees will hold a hearing this year on Sunni efforts to rid Iraq of ISIS. Spokesmen for both lawmakers didn’t respond to requests for comment.

Those 10,000 men, Shawkat said, consist of “conscripts” from in and around Mosul, where ISIS took over in a blazing assault last June, as well as members of the so-called Sunni Awakening that fought the Islamist militants during the U.S-led war that ousted Hussein. Current and former U.S. military officers and intelligence officials have credited their efforts with helping to turn the tide of the war in 2007 and 2008. And now, the Obama administration is encouraging more Sunnis to join in the fight, particularly through efforts by the central Iraqi government to train fighters in concert with Sunni tribal leaders in Anbar province, which has been overrun by ISIS.

But Shawkat wants a separate army, cleaved off from Baghdad, and that makes his plan more radical than other would-be Sunni standard bearers who’ve said they’re willing to try to work with Iraq’s Shiite prime minister, Haider al-Abadi.

“I will not work under him, because I will lose my base,” Shawkat said, which he claims comes from a one-million strong movement that he leads called the National Salvation Front, established in 2014. Shawkat insists he doesn’t want to see Iraq broken into separate countries along sectarian lines. But he’s also pushing for a new autonomous “Sunni regional government,” which he said would be temporary. Once ISIS is defeated, he said the final boundary lines of three provinces—one Kurdish, one Sunni, and one Shiite—-can be drawn.

Shawkat is eyeing his friends in Washington warily these days. “He’s very concerned that the U.S. sees the Iranians as an ally to get rid of ISIS. That would be a major mistake,” Shawkat’s spokesperson, Whitley Bruner, told The Daily Beast. “This is a Sunni on Sunni fight.”

Bruner, a former CIA operations officer and long-time Middle East hand, said that the commitments from the 1,700 officers and 10,000 soldiers to fight ISIS were real, and that Shawkat has also been looking for support among “regional powers,” whom he declined to name. Shawkat himself said that Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates were two countries that could be helpful in acquiring weapons for the new militia, and indicated that U.S. approval of such a transaction would help to speed it along.

Shawkat is not an unknown entity in Washington. He was a senior leader in the Iraqi National Congress, a Hussein-opposition group that had bipartisan backing in the U.S. Congress and received funding from the CIA, the State Department, and the Pentagon. Shawkat insisted he was never a “deputy” to the INC’s notorious leader, Ahmed Chalabi, as has been widely reported. Shawkat was already running a Hussein opposition group of his own in 2002 when and was brought together with Chalabi, he said, “under heavy persuasion of Department of State and Pentagon.” They split in 2004, but remain on good terms, Shawkat said. “Dr. Chalabi remains a personal friend, but we differ on political matters and methodologies.”

David Mack, a former deputy assistant secretary of state who was once in charge of the U.S. government’s interactions with Iraqi opposition forces, described Shawkat as a politically “flexible” man whose business acumen mirrored his political skills.

Mack said he met Shawkat in the spring of 1999, when he was living in exile in Vancouver. He’d come to a large conference for Iraqi opposition groups in New York, and stood out as someone who “had a good sense of the role the Iraqi private sector could play” in efforts to prepare for a post-Hussein nation, Mack told The Daily Beast. “He’s a entrepreneurial personality. Sometimes that makes for good politicians.”

That also may have been what drew him to Chalabi. “He realized that one of the things he needed in the INC was a prominent Iraqi Sunni figure, and he eventually settled on Mudhar for that role,” Mack said.

Bruner, Shawkat’s current spokesman, was the man who first recruited Chalabi to work for the CIA, in 1991. That led to the formation of the INC, which later provided provided U.S. intelligence with information about Hussein’s supposed weapons of mass destruction program—intelligence that was later discredited. “Without Chalabi there would have been no war,” journalist Aram Roston wrote in his book on the notorious Iraqi, The Man Who Pushed America to War.

Shawkat’s connections to Chalabi may be the least of his challenges in persuading Washington that he’s the right man to fight ISIS. That’s because there are several Iraqi Sunnis making that claim, including at least three other individuals and groups who have hired lobbyists of their own in the past year, according to disclosure records. (There’s also an effort underway to bankroll Iraq’s Kurdish fighters, by Republican mega-donor Foster Friess.)

One of the Sunni players, Sheikh Abdalrazzaq Hatem al-Suleiman, a prominent tribal leader, met with members of Congress during a week-long visit in May. He also sat down with Royce, the House Armed Services Committee Chair, with whom Shawkat met. At the State Department, Abdalrazzaq spoke with Brett McGurk, president Obama’s special envoy to the international coalition to conquer ISIS.

The sheikh, who fled Iraq after ISIS destroyed his home in Anbar province and now lives in Jordan, leads a tribe of some 300,000 who are also prepared to fight the militants, Jonathan Greenhill, his representative in Washington, told The Daily Beast.

“The sheikh is ready to produce his tribesmen now,” said Greenhill, a former senior operations officer with the CIA.

After his visit to Washington, Abdalrazzaq obtained a proclamation from the Al-Anbar Provincial Council in Iraq, supporting his plan to pull together Kurds and Shiites—not backed by Iran—and train them to fight ISIS, along with Iraqi Sunni fighters. Unlike Shawkat, the council is willing to work with the central government in Baghdad to train the fighters. The council’s training plan also has the backing of the Obama administration.

What’s shaping up in Washington now may be a fight to see which of the various Sunni players has the best plan, or at least can undermine the others. Among the groups is another coalition of Sunni tribal chiefs, as well as prominent figures from Iraq’s Nineveh province. If anything united them, it’s their their varying degrees of mistrust of Baghdad and its Iranian allies.

“Over the past 12 years, by far more Sunnis have been killed by these Iranian-backed Shiite militias than by al Qaeda or ISIS combined, while the Iraqi central government turns a blind eye,” Mark Alsalih, a prominent Sunni lobbyist in Washington and the president of the Iraq Stability and Security Program, composed of citizens and tribal sheikhs, told The Daily Beast.

The various groups want to strengthen their own hands while the Obama administration backs Abadi and leans on the central government to solve Iraq’s problems and defeat ISIS—hence the furious lobbying efforts of late by so many Sunnis. But all their work may reveal more about their various plans’ weaknesses than their strengths, experts said.

“The seemingly endless parade of Sunni leaders coming to Washington seeking arms and other support to equip bands of fighters speaks to two critical, reinforcing problems in Iraq today,” Kenneth Pollack, a former CIA analyst who worked on Iran and Iraq military issues and is now a senior fellow at the Center for Middle East Policy at the Brookings Institution, told The Daily Beast.

“First, the Sunni leadership is fragmented and lacks a unified command structure that could organize a fight against Da’ish or conduct meaningful negotiations with Abadi,” Pollack said, using an Arabic acronym for ISIS. “Second is the persistent sluggishness of the Iraqi government (and its U.S. allies) in arming and training willing Sunni fighters on their own.”

A kind of stalemate has ensued, Pollack said, with the Shiite-dominated government in Baghdad arguing that it needs to take things slow, because the Sunnis that want arms are being led by “freelance leaders who se allegiance is unknown,” and the Sunnis in terms demanding arms to “circumvent a government they believe is either unwilling or unable to lead the fight against Da’ish in the Sunni heartland.”

In the days when the U.S. forces were fighting and dying in Iraq against ISIS predecessor, U.S. officials may have been more willing to roll the dice on some of these freelance leaders.

“There are lots of tribal leaders and municipal leaders who have clout. And in the Bush era they all would have been taken rather seriously,” Jonathan Schanzer, a former terrorism analyst with the Treasury Department and now the vice president for research at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, told The Daily Beast.

“Right now, my sense is that they are being viewed by the Obama White House as people who could drag America back into conflict or waste more of our treasure on a hopeless cause,” he said. “I’m sympathetic to them. But I think they need to somehow organize internally better before approaching this Congress and this White House.”

In the meantime, Shawkat said he is planning to come back to Washington in the fall, hopefully as a witness at one, maybe two congressional hearings. There, he might have his best chance yet to pitch his war plan.

[MIKA27]

The Philippines' Cemetery Slums

Like many of its Asian neighbors, the Philippines has been site of rapid economic growth over the past two decades. Following a period of martial law and strict control over rural provinces, peasants and farmers began moving to the nation's capital, Manila, in the 1980s looking for better lives. However, many of these people remained on the margins of both society and the city itself. As the population boomed, slums began cropping up.

VICE Japan traveled to Manila in order to investigate conditions in one such slum inside Navotas Cemetery, where 6,000 men, women, and children currently live amid the graves and excavated human bones.

[MIKA27]

GERBER GDC ZIP LIGHT+

There are two things that should be integrated into every single EDC kit out there and that includes a light and a bottle opener. Why not kill two birds with one stone with the Gerber GDC Zip Light+?

The bright white LED light will get the job done, providing some nice visibility in a very small, portable package. The tool features an integrated solid stainless steel bottle opener, runs on replaceable lithium batteries (comes with two of them), and thanks to the zipper loop attachment, it easily attaches to the zipper of both your jacket pocket or your pack. The tool measures in at just 1.8 inches, and the 8-lumen LED light runs for 3.5 hours. The multi-tool retails for under $10. [Purchase]

[MIKA27]

DELL’S LATITUDE 12 RUGGED TABLET IS BUILT FOR THE OUTDOORS

Modern technology and the unpredictability of the great outdoors go together like the Starks and sharp things. Just pulling out your iPhone when it’s drizzling is enough to fire up some anxiety. The latest tablet from Dell, however, likes to run toward the flames. The first tablet in the company’s Rugged series, the Latitude 12 is designed to handle bad weather, mud and dust, extreme temps, and even significant drops. While the aim here is assisting military and industrial workers, clearly this is the tablet ideal for the outdoorsman. The Latitude 12 Rugged Tablet is packed with a 11.6-inch screen that’s visible in sunlight, 512GB of storage, and it runs Windows. While it’s not cheap, we wouldn’t recommend an iPad for your next epic excursion.

[MIKA27]

OLYMPUS AIR

Olympus Air is the new device that will make all smartphone photo buffs rejoice. It´s a mirrorless camera that you can pair up with your smartphone and take the most awesome photos, with DSLR reflex quality. Plus you get the Olympus quality badge. Featuring a high speed sensor 4/3 live MOS, with 16 MP resolution, wi-fi remote control, 10 frames per second burst shooting and a silent 1/16000s shutter, this is really almost pro interchangeable lens style. The A01 also has a memory card slot, to make sure you´re not cramping your smartphone´s storage room. You can even ditch your phone and pair it with your Apple watch! using it as the live view display and control the camera interface.

[MIKA27]

DAVONE RAY-S SPEAKERS

The Eames Lounge Chair is a near-perfect place to relax and listen to your favorite records. Unfortunately, most speakers don't match up well with the seat's carefully considered curves. The Davone Ray-S Speakers do. Inspired by the aforementioned chair, these speakers are crafted using curved, laminated pieces of beech wood veneer with a walnut finish, black steel stands, and black leather baffles. And since speakers are about far more than looks, they employ a three-way system, with an 8-inch woofer, dedicated midrange, and 1-inch tweeter for outstanding audio quality.

[MIKA27]

Inhabitants Of This Isolated, Remote Island Kill All Visitors On Sight

One might think that with the vast reach of the Western world, there no longer remains any people unaware of the conveniences of modern society. We needn't look further than the Andaman Islands in the Bay of Bengal to disprove this notion; this is where the Sentinelese live, and they're one of the last uncontacted people on Earth.

Estimates on their population vary greatly, in large part due to the hostility expressed by the islanders. Counts range from as low as forty, to as high as 500. Contact efforts have been made by Indian officials many times in the last century, and none of them have ended well. All recent observations of the island have been made from a great distance, and as such, getting an accurate headcount remains difficult.

The Sentinelese people are hunter-gatherers, and are thought to have "directly descended from the first human populations to emerge from Africa, and have probably lived in the Andaman Islands for up to 60,000 years," according to Survival International, a human rights organization founded to protect the rights of indigenous peoples.

As hunter-gatherers, it goes without saying that this group doesn't have any agricultural capabilities. More interestingly, there's no evidence that the Sentinelese have controlled fire. They're about as primitive a people as one might hope to find in 2015.

A film expedition flew over the island a few years back, and ended up with some of the best footage ever taken of the islanders.

the Sentinelese hold javelins as they see outsiders approaching.

Photo taken by the Indian Coastguard after a member of the Sentinelese tribe fired an arrow at their helicopter – sent to the island on a tsunami relief effort in 2004.

Satellite photo of the island – which is the size of Manhattan.

The island is located within the Bay of Bengal.

North Sentinel Island is part of the Andaman Islands – but their exclusion zone prohibits people from visiting.

This photo from Google Maps shows a shipwreck which resulted in many deaths when the sailors clashed with the tribespeople.

[MIKA27]

You Might Be Paying GST On Any Online Purchase Over $20 Real Soon

Ready to pay the GST on pretty much all of your online purchases? You may not have a choice: state Treasurers will be meeting with their Federal counterparts soon to vote on lowering the GST-free threshold on online purchases down from $1000 to $20.

According to a report in The Age, the Government will ask state Treasurers to vote on lowering the threshold on which GST is charged to online purchases from $1000 to $20, with a majority of them expected to vote yes.

The issue of lowering the GST-free threshold for online purchases has raged for years. Retailers like Gerry Harvey are always complaining about the “unfair advantage” overseas retailers have, given that their customers aren’t slugged the extra 10 per cent on products under $1000.

A report by the Productivity Commission back in 2009 examined reducing the GST-free threshold on packages imported from overseas retailers and found that the move would actually cost more to enforce than it would actually collect in tax revenue. Today’s report says that the Federal Treasurer Joe Hockey has identified a range of new technology that would make enforcing the GST-free threshold much cheaper (lol data retention).

The move to tax purchases over $20 and not $1000 would compliment the Government’s strategy to tax digital purchases like apps, music, movies and international subscription services.

State Treasurers, along with Federal Treasurer Joe Hockey, will vote on the move on 21 August.

[Fuzz]

The Fastest Spaceships in the Universe

Not to get into a Star Trek vs Star Wars fight, but you really can't compare ship speeds between the two franchises. The speeds represented in SW are more fantasy than ST's more reasonable representations.

Just take the Millennium Falcon for example. Han states that it will make 0.5 past lightspeed (1.5 times lightspeed?), yet a trip between Tatooine and Alderaan is like a short trip to the shops. If they are that close, I'd hate to be living on Tatooine when Alderaan blew up. Stats in SW (ship speed/size, weapons power, etc) are all overpowered.

Stargate & Babylon 5 had more believable ship speeds than SW.

[Fuzz]

This Ranch For Sale Is Bigger Than NYC And LA Combined

Every thing is bigger in Texas? Hardly. Anna Creek cattle station in South Australia is 6,000,000 acres, which is bigger than Israel!

[polarbear]

You Might Be Paying GST On Any Online Purchase Over $20 Real Soon

Ready to pay the GST on pretty much all of your online purchases? You may not have a choice: state Treasurers will be meeting with their Federal counterparts soon to vote on lowering the GST-free threshold on online purchases down from $1000 to $20.

According to a report in The Age, the Government will ask state Treasurers to vote on lowering the threshold on which GST is charged to online purchases from $1000 to $20, with a majority of them expected to vote yes.

The issue of lowering the GST-free threshold for online purchases has raged for years. Retailers like Gerry Harvey are always complaining about the “unfair advantage” overseas retailers have, given that their customers aren’t slugged the extra 10 per cent on products under $1000.

A report by the Productivity Commission back in 2009 examined reducing the GST-free threshold on packages imported from overseas retailers and found that the move would actually cost more to enforce than it would actually collect in tax revenue. Today’s report says that the Federal Treasurer Joe Hockey has identified a range of new technology that would make enforcing the GST-free threshold much cheaper (lol data retention).

The move to tax purchases over $20 and not $1000 would compliment the Government’s strategy to tax digital purchases like apps, music, movies and international subscription services.

State Treasurers, along with Federal Treasurer Joe Hockey, will vote on the move on 21 August.

That's really going to speed up postage times...

[MIKA27]

Not to get into a Star Trek vs Star Wars fight, but you really can't compare ship speeds between the two franchises. The speeds represented in SW are more fantasy than ST's more reasonable representations.

Just take the Millennium Falcon for example. Han states that it will make 0.5 past lightspeed (1.5 times lightspeed?), yet a trip between Tatooine and Alderaan is like a short trip to the shops. If they are that close, I'd hate to be living on Tatooine when Alderaan blew up. Stats in SW (ship speed/size, weapons power, etc) are all overpowered.

Stargate & Babylon 5 had more believable ship speeds than SW.

[MIKA27]

This Tiny iPhone Charger Has 128GB Of Extra Storage Built Right In

Leaving home without your smartphone’s charging cable is as disastrous as forgetting the device itself. That’s why ultra-compact charging cables are suddenly so popular, and with 128GB of extra storage onboard, PhotoFast’s new MemoriesCable might be the only one iPhone users will want to consider.

The iPhone and iPad are notorious for their lack of expandable storage; there’s no microSD card slot, and no support for USB OTG allowing you to natively access media from a connected flash drive. But recent versions of iOS do allow third party apps to read and write media to portable drives connected to either device’s Lightning port, which is how PhotoFast’s new MemoriesCable can give your iPad or iPhone an extra 128GB of capacity.

The one big catch is that you have to rely on the aforementioned third-party app to watch movies, listen to music or backup photos. And while PhotoFast offers that requisite app as a free download, it might not be quite as polished as the rest of iOS. But if you can live with a few UI quirks, the occasional random crash, and listening to music outside of iTunes, the MemoriesCable seems like a great choice because it also doubles as an emergency charging and sync cable.

You can use the MemoriesCable just like the USB cable that came with your iPhone or iPad, except that it’s only five inches long, which might mean a few limitations of where you can plug in. But when your phone is down to five per cent battery, any source of power, no matter how inconvenient, is a lifesaver. Pricing details haven’t been revealed just yet, but the PhotoFast MemoriesCable will also be available in a cheaper 64GB version, in addition to the 128GB option.

[MIKA27]

Welcome To Mcity: The Fake Town Built For Testing Driverless Cars

It’s been a tough road for driverless cars: We recently learned, for example, that all of the crashes involving Google’s test-phase autonomous vehicles have been caused by humans. Which is one of the reasons experts have just opened up a testing center in Michigan that’s trying to recreate the chaos of the human-built street in a controlled environment.

It’s called Mcity: A $US10 million, 32-acre simulation of city streets, suburban roadways and everything in-between, designed by a group of researchers, government agencies and car companies in Ann Arbor, Michigan. Its moveable facades make it possible for researchers to rearrange any kind of conditions imaginable, from blind corners to odd intersections, all in the service of developing smarter autonomous vehicles. Gravel roads? Mcity has them. Paving brick? No problem. Freeway signs, graffiti, HOV lanes — it’s all recreated here, so that engineers and researchers can figure out how autonomous vehicles will react.

Mcity is the first major project of a part-governmental/part-academic/part-commercial partnership called the University of Michigan Mobility Transformation Center. With million-dollar investments from companies like Nissan, Toyota, Ford, GM, Honda, State Farm, Verizon, and Xerox, it’s trying to build the testing infrastructure that will make varying levels of automation across cars more feasible.

That includes driverless cars, sure, but it also including testing systems we already knew UM was working on, like vehicle-to-vehicle connectivity that allows cars to “talk” to each other and adjust accordingly.

Teaching a driverless or connected vehicle about the world is surprisingly difficult because the world is unpredictable, and computers don’t deal well with surprises. “Even seemingly minor details a vehicle might encounter in urban and suburban settings have been incorporated into Mcity, such as road signs defaced by graffiti and faded lane markings,” the University explains in a release today.

It’s actually these environmental eccentricities that are really challenging for driverless car tech. Sure, you can teach an autonomous vehicle to understand the way the road should look, 95 per cent of the time. What about when something unexpected happens?

UM isn’t the only research centre trying to figure out how to teach a machine to react safely to unpredicted weirdness. At Google I/O this spring, Google X’s “Head of Moonshots” Astro Teller, described some of the bizarre ways in which the company is testing its self driving cars, including throwing beachballs at it, buying fake birds and having them swoop down towards it, and perhaps most hilariously, having someone hide in a canvas bag in the middle of the street and jump out. Even when you work for the moonshot team at the most powerful technology company in the world, sometimes you just have to shut up and zip yourself into a bag.

Now that Mcity is open, odds are good we’ll be hearing more about autonomous testing soon. Whether UMich will be using Google’s patented bag-surprise technique remains to be seen.

[MIKA27]

SPECTRE: Here's The First Full Trailer

Here’s the first official trailer for the new James Bond 007 movie, SPECTRE.

Bond is back, so here’s some back-story:

A new trailer for SPECTRE, the 24th James Bond adventure, has been released today. A cryptic message from the past sends James Bond on a rogue mission to Mexico City and eventually Rome, where he meets Lucia Sciarra (Monica Bellucci), the beautiful and forbidden widow of an infamous criminal. Bond infiltrates a secret meeting and uncovers the existence of the sinister organisation known as SPECTRE.

Meanwhile back in London, Max Denbigh (Andrew Scott), the new head of the Centre for National Security, questions Bond’s actions and challenges the relevance of MI6, led by M (Ralph Fiennes). Bond covertly enlists Moneypenny (Naomie Harris) and Q (Ben Whishaw) to help him seek out Madeleine Swann (Léa Seydoux), the daughter of his old nemesis Mr White (Jesper Christensen), who may hold the clue to untangling the web of SPECTRE. As the daughter of an assassin, she understands Bond in a way most others cannot.

As Bond ventures towards the heart of SPECTRE, he learns of a chilling connection between himself and the enemy he seeks, played by Christoph Waltz.

[avaldes]

Looking forward to that!!