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

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STONEWARE GROWLER BY ORANGE VESSEL

Stoneware is ideal for cooking many things — just take a look at any Pampered Chef catalog and you’ll see pages of the stuff. What you won’t find in one of those catalogs is this Stoneware Growler by Orange Vessel.

The Stoneware Growler is inspired by old juicejugs and features a ring-style handle that flows nicely right into the jug. It sports a modern hinged closer that will keep your beer fresher for longer over traditional screw-top varieties. Since it’s stoneware, these growlers are impenetrable by light, which means UV light won’t have any effect on your beer. It will retain your beer’s quality as long as it is contained within the jug. Each Stoneware Growler will cost $59, and is available in orange, gloss black, white, slate, and matte black. [Purchase]

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NERF RIVAL ZEUS MXV 1200

Nothing beats a good Nerf battle, and we frequently use our Nerf Zombie Strike FlipFury Blasters to engage in safe battle. But what happens when Nerf creates a toy gun that is too powerful?

Introducing the Nerf Rival Zeus MXV 1200, a high-powered Nerf gun that shoots its foam projectiles at 70mph. Sounds a little intimidating, does it not? Hasbro knows this, which is why the new toy gun is only recommended for ages 14 and up. The Rival Zeus MXV 1200 also utilizes an ambidextrous loading system and includes a safety switch so that children don’t shoot themselves in the eye with it when they find it lying around. What’s more, this toy gun includes sights that can be folded up for increased accuracy. It’ll be available in both red and blue when it launches in late August for just $50. [Purchase]

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This Year’s Goose Island Bourbon County Stout Variants

The reason beer fans get up early on Black Friday has nothing to do with saving a few bucks on some pint glasses at Walmart. The early morning excitement is due to the release of Goose Island’s Bourbon County Brand Stout and all the wonderful variants of it. This year, not only are the bottles different in size (all 16.9-ouncers) and appearance, but some interesting variants are on the way, too. No Vanilla Rye (we’ll wait for you to compose yourself), but Rare makes a return for the first time since 2010, and Regal Rye, a blend aged in rye whiskey barrels with cherries, blackberries, and sea salt, should be enough to get you to set your alarm early on Black Friday. And, if you happen to be in Chicago, this year’s Proprietors sounds spectacular, brewed with maple, toasted pecans, and guaillopeppers.

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SVELIO GARDEN ROCKER

Volo is a new rocking lounge chair for two, designed by the Sveglio team. The name derives directly from the Italian word for "flight” and its design is beyond reproach, letting you rock, with company and in style. You can choose from a wide range of combinations for the fabric with inspiring names such as Sailcloth Shadow or Canvas Iris, for the metallic geometric structure that bears it, you can also choose from antique bronze, white or silver. Built in California, in the Big Sur, the land that has inspired Henry Miller is now the home of these master welders and designers that created this beautiful rocker for two.

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How We Will Find Out If The Discovered Plane Wreckage Is Part Of MH370

It’s been nearly a year and a half since Malaysian Airlines Flight 370 disappeared and investigators finally have their first big lead for finding the lost plane. A piece of an aircraft’s wing — a flaperon, to be specific — washed up on Réunion Island, 193 kilometres off the coast of Madagascar, 4,828km away from where investigators were looking. But we’re still a long way from many of the answers we need.

So far, there are some encouraging signs which indicate that the this might be actual wreckage from the plane. Specifically, the flaperon, which is a movable part of the wing, appears to come from the right kind of plane: A Boeing 777. No other 777 has ever crashed in the ocean before so it couldn’t be from any other plane — in theory anyway.

Investigators are being very cautious in analysing the flaperon. It’s been in the ocean a long time, and frankly, it’s just so improbable that it could’ve ended up there that they need to be sure. A report today from the Wall Street Journal says investigators are under intense pressure to confirm that the debris is from MH370, and that’s not surprising. Mourning families want closure for the loss of their loved ones, and airline officials and safety experts want to make sure this never happens again. But the journey to identify the part has just begun, and it will take a lot of time to confirm if it actually is. Investigators don’t want to make a mistake.

Could the flaperon have possibly travelled that far?

Réunion Island is about as remote as an island can be. The tiny French outpost is 700km off the southeast coast of Madagascar — pretty much on the opposite end of the Indian Ocean from where investigators were officially searching. So assuming this the flaperon really is part of MH370, why was discovered so far from where investigators were looking?

Let’s back up for a second here. Last year, Australia and the US’s transportation safety boards outsourced the official search to Fugro, an oil and gas exploration company from the Netherlands. The company’s effort was plagued by delays, owing to the technical difficulty of searching for a plane-shaped needle in a deep ocean haystack. The company had to purchase a new deep-sea sonar to help it scan the bottom of the three-mile-deep ocean. Additional ships added a sonar device called a towfish that’s towed at depth of 100 meters above the seafloor, and a self-propelled autonomous underwater vehicle (AUV) which can travel even deeper. The search has been heavily criticised for being mismanaged, and for the most part, we haven’t heard many updates. The physical search hasn’t turned anything up.

As the quiet physical search floundered, public entities used maths and science to try to sort out the possibilities themselves. An excellent story about the search by Christine Negroni pinpoints the efforts of a British satellite company Inmarsat at the center of the crazy crowdsourced search. We’d previously reported on some of the findings that Inmarsat had released, which looked at the location of the last “ping” their satellites were able to pick up from the moving plane. As Negroni’s story notes, their clever analysis took the Doppler effect into consideration, which would have changed the frequency and therefore the locations of the pings, explained Inmarsat’s senior VP Chris McLaughlin. “That’s never been done before; our engineers came up with it as a unique contribution.” Inmarsat’s theory was that the plane tracked much further west over the Southern Indian Ocean than investigators originally thought.

While the physical search was private in most of its findings, Inmarsat has made details of their own data-driven search public, effectively encouraging an ongoing crowdsourced effort to consider more places where the plane’s parts might make landfall. So at least according to the crowdsourced effort of lots and lots of nerds, many of them using something called Bayes’ Rule, a probability theorem that allows new data to change the outcomes of statistics, this flaperon could be real.

How will they know it’s from MH370?

After all that searching, the fact that a part has washed up on an island seems like dumb luck. The next part of the mystery seems even more outrageously simplified, as there’s really only one question investigators need to answer: Is this a part from a Boeing 777? That’s because there’s never been a 777 lost over the ocean before: MH370.

There are already some encouraging signs that the part is from a 777. The 777 flaperon, which is a moveable part from the back of the wing, has a particular shape that’s unique to all Boeing’s other flaperons, so a simple comparison of the dimensions could easily prove that it’s from a 777.

But remember that the part has been tossed in the ocean for a year and a half. There were some other details seen in photos that made aircraft safety expert David Soucie think it was from a 777, as he told CNN:

There also is a seal on the top of the part that “is consistent with what I would see on an inside flap on a triple 7,” he said, and the barnacles on the part are consistent with the “parasitic activity” that would take place from being underwater so long.

However, the part appears to be coated in white paint, which would run counter to Soucie’s other observations in that the 777’s parts would be coated in zinc chromate, not paint. Soucie acknowledged, however, that the part could be coated in something from the ocean.

Aircraft parts also have serial numbers inscribed into them, and this could be another way to confirm not only which type of plane the flaperon is from but also the exact aircraft it was made for. But again, ocean oxidation could prevent such a number from being found. Wired reported that another aircraft security expert, Xavier Tytelman, claimed to make an undeniable match based on the shape and he also says he found what he thinks is part of a serial number: “BB670.”

If, for some reason, the shape or serial number of the part is not conclusive, there are other ways to determine if the flaperon is from MH370. In fact, how the piece’s materials broke down over the 500 days in the ocean might be a big clue, especially when determining when the part separated from the plane, which metallurgists would be able to see with an electron microscope, according to the Wall Street Journal:

“Immersion in the sea and the temperature of the water definitely can have some impact” on the condition of debris, according to Robert MacIntosh, the former top international official at the U.S. National Transportation Safety Board. Oxidation or corrosion can occur depending on the type of aluminium alloy, he said, though metallurgists would know how to deal with such conditions.

What happens next?

The Malaysian government dispatched a team to Réunion Island to examine the flaperon as well as other debris found in the area. The piece is now being sent to an aeronautical technology center in Toulouse, France that handles other aircraft crash investigations. It was flown out this morning.

Of course there’s a twist: There was also a report of suitcase that was found near where the flaperon washed up on shore. It has also not been confirmed to be associated with MH370, but it does offer another encouraging — if immensely improbable — sign that might shift more investigation efforts towards this tiny island, where more parts might perhaps be discovered.

And even if this plane is determined to be MH370, there’s still so much we need to know. Why did the plane go down? What happened to the 239 people on board? Let’s hope this tiny clue begins a large-scale recovery effort that might start to reveal the story, piece by piece.

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How To Survive A Cascadia-Sized Tsunami

“Thirteen thousand people will die in the Cascadia earthquake and tsunami,” reads Kathryn Schulz’s now-infamous New Yorker article. “Everything west of Interstate 5 will be toast.” Turns out a very similar event occurred in Chile 55 years ago. What wisdom can its survivors share with residents of the Northwest?

Chile’s Big One

On the evening of May 22, 1960, a magnitude 9.5 earthquake struck 100 miles off the coast of Chile. It would be the strongest earthquake ever recorded.

The resulting tsunami waves were so strong that they reached as far as Japan, where they killed 138 people.

Their affect was obviously stronger in Chile. By the time the flood waters had receded, authorities counted over 2,000 bodies.

The closest town to the epicentre was Lumaco, which even today is home to just 11,000 people.

A Chilean Model For Cascadia?

The similarities between Chile’s 1960 quake and the future one along the Cascadia Subduction Zone are striking. As noted by the USGS, “Recently, it has been discovered that the Cascadia Subduction Zone, like the subduction zone off Chile, has a history of producing earthquakes that triggered tsunamis. The most recent of these earthquakes, in 1700, set off a tsunami that struck Japan with waves about as big as those of the 1960 Chilean tsunami in Japan.”

“Both the 1960 Chile earthquake and the 1700 Cascadia earthquake were caused by sudden ruptures of long segments of subduction zones,” continues the USGS.

Back in the 1990s, the US Geological Survey identified the similarities between these two subduction zones and realised Chile’s experience could provide valuable lessons for residents of the Pacific Northwest. So, it set about collecting first hand accounts of the quake, tsunami and their aftermath from survivors. This article is drawn from that material.

Will You Survive The Earthquake?

“All the people in and near the town of Maullín, Chile, survived the biggest earthquake ever measured. The deaths in the area came later, during the tsunami that followed the quake,” describes the USGS. 122 people in the town were subsequently killed by floodwaters.

Earthquakes happen. Floors or entire buildings collapse, the earth opens up and swallows you whole, gas lines break and start fires. They’re awful, but they’re also a known quantity. Buildings are built to withstand them (at least in the western world), children are trained in what to do and, at least in comparison, plenty of people survive them.

That is not the case with tsunamis. As demonstrated by the 2004 Indonesian tsunami, an unstoppable wall of water moves inland, driving boats and trucks and trees and other deadly debris before it, obliterating nearly anything in its path. That one killed 228,000 people.

Shulz, the author of the New Yorker piece, feels safe enough to continue spending her summers in the northwest, the area that will be affected by the earthquake. In her follow up bit about survival advice, she strongly suggests that readers avoid spending even one night in the tsunami inundation zone.

“Of the almost thirteen thousand people expected to die in the Cascadia event, one thousand will perish in the earthquake,” Schulz writes. “The others will be killed by the tsunami — and they amount to nearly one in five people who are in the zone when the water arrives. That’s a grim enough figure that it changed my own beach-going behaviour in the Northwest. Go to the coast by day, for sure. But if you’re staying overnight, book a vacation rental, hotel room, or campsite outside the inundation zone.”

How The Tsunami Will Happen

With the subduction fault in question, the western plate is descending under the eastern plate pushing against it. Pressure is currently building up and, when the leading edge of the top plate breaks free and “springs” out to sea it will lift up above the epicentre, while back behind on land, the “bulge” that’s built up because of the pressure will collapse, lowering the elevation of the coast. That uplift creates the tsunami waves, the collapse back on shore worsens their affects.

The earthquake will not create just a single tsunami wave, but many. As described by this graph of the 1960 earthquake’s impact on Hawaii.

And this one of its impact on Japan.

A tsunami waves will not appear like Katsushika Hokusai’s “Great Wave,” rather, they appear as a general swelling of sea levels. The sea just moves inland, at speeds of up to 500mph, with inexorable force.

Tsunami Warning Signs

A tsunami wave may be presaged by a drastic fall in sea levels. This may not always be the case. In Cascade or elsewhere, if you feel an earthquake and you’re by the sea, flee to high ground immediately. And stay there.

The USGS relates the experience of a Chilean family in 1960:

“Vitalia Llanquimán lived outside the village of Mehuín. Soon after the earthquake shaking stopped, a man on horseback told her that the sea had receded from shore. At first, Mrs. Llanquimán was not alarmed by this news, but her husband took it as a warning that the sea, when it came back, might surge inland. Carrying their two youngest children, the couple hurried up a nearby hill, where they safely remained during the tsunami.”

Meanwhile, in Hawaii, authorities sounded coastal sirens to warn citizens. In Hilo Bay, there was a three hour gap between those first sirens and an initial, small wave. The USGS tells the story of locals who thought that signalled the danger had passed.

“Carol was at her family’s house on low ground in Hilo when the warning sirens sounded. Carol’s parents took valuables to a relative’s house in Papa’ikou, a few miles northwest of Hilo, while Carol and her brother Ernest checked on a niece who was babysitting outside of town.

“Later, Carol and Ernest returned to Hilo after hearing on the radio that tsunami waves had already come into town and were only 7 feet high. On the way back, they met a police officer who told them that the danger had passed. Carol and Ernest went to a sister’s house in a low part of town. Around 1:00 a.m., they began to hear a low rumbling noise that soon became louder and was accompanied by sounds of crashing and crunching. Moments later, a wall of water hit the house, floating it off its foundation. When the house came to rest, Hilo was dark because the powerplant had been knocked out by the same wave.

“Carol and her family survived the 1960 Chilean tsunami without serious injury. However, 61 other people in Hilo died and another 282 were badly hurt. These losses occurred, in part, because the warning sirens in Hilo on the evening of May 22, 1960, were interpreted differently by different people. Although nearly everyone heard the sirens, only about a third of them thought it was a signal to evacuate without further notice. Most thought it was only a preliminary warning to be followed later by an evacuation signal. Others in Hilo were unsure of how seriously to take the warnings, because several previous alerts had been followed by tsunamis that did little damage.”

Fleeing the inundation zone is the most effective survival technique. And, once you have fled, stay there for hours, until it is assured the threat has passed.

Schwarz is also clear about this, saying, “The coastline of the Pacific Northwest is beautiful, and I definitely do not discourage visiting it — so long as you choose places with accessible high ground and figure out in advance how to reach it. You’ll be doing so on foot (the earthquake will leave roads impassable), so be realistic about how far you and your companions can walk or run.”

Surviving The Flood Waters

Again, let’s be clear, you do not want to find yourself here. If you are caught by surprise due to limited time between the quake and tsunami or are somehow rendered unable to flee, there may be some hope left. Let’s look at how people caught in similar situations survived the 1960 tsunami, as related by the USGS.

Ditch Your Stuff:

“Mr. Atala entered this warehouse between the first and second waves of the tsunami that struck Maullín. Mr. Atala was probably trapped in the warehouse when the second wave of the tsunami washed the building away. His son, Eduardo, said that afterward his father was among the missing and that his body was never found. Some residents of the town say that Mr. Atala was briefly restrained outside the warehouse by his wife, who grabbed his hair before he finally broke away. Many in the town, spinning a cautionary tale about a wealthy man, say he entered the warehouse to rescue money. Even as Mr. Atala was being carried off by the second wave, his barn outside of Maullín was providing a refuge for some 20 people, saving their lives from the tsunami.”

Don’t Rely On Roads:

“Minutes after the 1960 Chile earthquake, René Maldonado rode his horse on the road from Maullín, Chile. During the ride, Mr. Maldonado’s horse had to jump newly formed cracks in the road. The weakened road was soon severed by the waves of the tsunami that followed the earthquake, leaving channels too wide even for a horse to jump. Not all people in the area fleeing the earthquake and the tsunami were as lucky as Mr. Maldonado. Some had their routes of escape severed by tsunami waves. Shaking from the 1960 earthquake not only damaged roads but also caused landslides. In addition to blocking roads, landslides caused by the quake dammed the Río San Pedro in the foothills of the Andes about 40 miles east of the city of Valdivia, Chile. Later failure of this landslide dam unleashed a flood that covered parts of the city.”

Climb Structures:

“The second wave reached the barn just as Mr. Navarro joined his family there. Along with 14 others, the Navarro family spent the night in the loft of Ramón Atala’s barn, safe above the tsunami waters that ran beneath them.”

Or A Tree:

“At least a dozen people near Maullín, Chile, survived the 1960 Chilean tsunami by climbing trees. However, others perished when the trees they climbed were toppled by the tsunami. Ramón Ramírez, 15 years old at the time of the tsunami, survived by climbing into the branches of a cypress tree (photo at right) on a plain west of Maullín. While Mr. Ramírez stayed safely in the cypress, the waters of the tsunami swirled about the tree. The water crested at 15 feet above sea level, reaching several feet above the tree’s base. In nearby Quenuir, at the mouth of the Río Maullín, Estalino Hernández climbed an arrayán tree to escape the tsunami’s waves. While he clung to the tree, the waters of the tsunami rose to his waist. Not far away, the onrushing water covered land 30 feet above sea level. Although Mr. Hernández survived the tsunami, he lost his 13-year-old son to the waves. Quenuir had 104 other victims, most of whom took to boats just after the earthquake and were caught by the first wave of the tsunami.”

Cling To Floating Debris:

“Nelly Gallardo survived the tsunami that followed the 1960 Chile earthquake by clinging to a log. The earthquake struck while she was digging for clams on the shore more than 4 miles west of Maullín, Chile. Soon after the shaking from the quake stopped, she walked about 100 yards inland to a house that was more than half a mile from the nearest high ground. The next thing Ms. Gallardo recalls is floating on a tree trunk. She clung to this trunk until the next morning. For a time she heard a man’s voice crying for help-his body was found later. At daybreak she was more than a mile from where the tsunami had swept her up. The tsunami included many waves, but Ms. Gallardo recalls only the one that set her adrift.”

Advice For Boaters:

The NOAA states: “If you are on a boat or ship and there is time, move your vessel to deeper water (at least 100 fathoms). If it is the case that there is concurrent severe weather, it may may safer to leave the boat at the pier and physically move to higher ground.”

“Damaging wave activity and unpredictable currents can effect harbour conditions for a period of time after the tsunami’s initial impact. Be sure conditions are safe before you return your boat or ship to the harbour.”

If you’re lucky enough to survive unscathed, help others: Shulz states that in addition to the predicted fatalities, the number of injured and displaced will be far higher. “Another twenty-seven thousand will be injured, and the agency expects that it will need to provide shelter for a million displaced people, and food and water for another two and a half million.”

There is now way FEMA or the military will be able to provide immediate aid to that many people, across such a devastated area. Survivors will need to rely on each other for that aid, perhaps for up to a month or longer. Such was the case in Chile:

“In the first weeks after the 1960 Chile earthquake and tsunami, Yolanda Montealegre provided shelter for 40 families in Casa Grande, her large home on the outskirts of Maullín, Chile. Ms. Montealegre left her house minutes after the earthquake and reached high ground in time to watch the arrival of the second wave of the tsunami that followed the quake. The next morning, she found Casa Grande in good shape, its ground floor dry. The families she soon took in were among the estimated 1 million Chileans left temporarily homeless by the earthquake and tsunami.”

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Aussie Motorcross Champ Goes Big Wave Surfing With A Motorbike In 4K. Your Life Is Meaningless

What did you do this weekend? Make an amazing burrito? Go to an amazing party? It doesn’t matter. Short of curing cancer, nothing you’ve done in your whole life can compare to what Robbie Maddison’s been up to. He went surfing on a wave in Tahiti on a goddamn motorcycle and absolutely nailed it.

That’s right: in full motorcross gear, the world-record holder for longest jump on a motorbike strapped giant flappy tires to his bike, and two small boards to the bottom to turn it into the world’s most badass hydrofoil before taking on a truly massive wave.

It’s insane how seamlessly the motorboard (or is it surfbike?) goes between jungle and water.

Tahiti is famous for its big wave surfing, and now it’s famous for the big brass ones on Robbie Maddison.

It’s all a promo for DC Shoes, apparently, but I couldn’t care less. Bump it up to 4K and enjoy your morning’s brain implosion.

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A Rare Glimpse Of The Ancient Infrastructure That Controls NYC's Subway

New York City’s subway system is a wonder of engineering — but sadly, that engineering is so old that it’s not even manufactured anymore, causing huge problems for the people who run it and anyone trying to use it. That means the MTA has built a whole shop up around trying to maintain its ageing technology, and now they’re giving us a look at this underground industry.

The MTA is currently trying to update its 100-year-old system with something called Communications-Based Train Control, which would pull it out of its current, quite dated process of controlling trains. To demonstrate just how bad it is, a video takes us deep into the systems as they stand now. At the West 4th street tower, we see all the original electromechanical equipment that’s used to control the system — including mechanical levers, a light-up control board, and ton of cloth cabling.

Wonder why there are so many signal problems on your train line, which according to WNYC cause up to a third of the delays? As Wynton Habersham, the VP and Chief Officer of Service Delivery, explains, the equipment used at the West 4th street tower — where operators route trains — is no longer even made by the industry. “We are fully self-sufficient and self-sustaining; we have a signal shop that can replace the parts and rebuild these relays,” he says. “And when any modernization goes on, we make sure we scavenge to retain the parts so we can provide replacements for those that remain in service.”

And how about fires? It turns out that the cabling here is all original, cloth-covered cable. “It works, but it’s an antiquated way to run a subway, ” Habersham concludes. Check out the video below for more about the modernisation project above.

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Taser Profits Jumped 57 Per Cent Thanks To Sales Of Police Body Cameras

Taser International, the company best known for its namesake product, announced last week that its profits were up 57 per cent over the previous quarter. But it’s not because tasers are flying off the shelves. That huge bump in profits is coming from sales of body cameras to America’s police departments.

As the Wall Street Journal reports, Taser’s Axon brand accounted for the huge jump in profits during the second quarter. Axon includes not only the body cameras that the company produces, but the video management software that stores and processes footage.

This spring, the company reported that sales of body cameras were up by 288 per cent. But don’t forget about their “less than lethal” weapons division. Revenues for their Taser stun guns were up as well at $US37.8 million. From the WSJ:

Overall, for the period ended June 30, Taser posted a profit of $US6.1 million, or 11 cents a share, up from $US3.9 million, or 7 cents a share a year ago.

Long story short: It’s a profitable time to be in the business of maintaining America’s police state.

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There Are Other Things In Chernobyl Apart From Radiation

Chernobyl is obviously well-known for one particular thing, but as it turns out, the town is hiding things other than two-headed squirrels.

YouTuber Tom Scott has been documenting his trip around Chernobyl with a great series of videos, but this one is particularly fascinating. It tells the tale of the ‘Russian Woodpecker’, a gigantic Duga-3 radar array left over from the Cold War.

In an era before ubiquitous satellite coverage, tracking missile launches from over the horizon presented a unique challenge, with a unique solution: an over-the-horizon radar, which bounced a signal off the ionosphere to track stuff far away. To achieve this required a ton of power, and a radar array 300 feet tall, and 2,500 feet wide.

The Cold War ended (and a nuclear reactor exploded!), but the arrays were left in place, ready for intrepid YouTubers bearing drones to come explore.

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Why Did NASA End The Space Shuttle Program?

At the time the space shuttle program ended, the three remaining shuttles had flown 25, 33, and 39 times respectively. They were designed for a lifetime of 100 flights each.

Though troubled with parts obsolescence throughout the program, it would have been possible to continue to adapt and fly the vehicles for many more years, out to their design lifetime. Though two shuttles failed with loss of life, the failure rate was comparable to all other launch vehicles. There is an inherent risk in space travel, and with each failure the reliability of subsequent flights improved. So it is a fair question to ask why the program did not continue.

The bottom line answer is that it was too expensive. Way too expensive. The shuttle never met its promise for low cost access to space by virtue of the system’s reusability. Had the system even gotten part of the way to those original claims of a very low recurring cost of launch, I bet that the shuttles would still be flying today, and we’d be building a few more of them with upgrades to improve their reliability and lower the cost further.

The shuttle and the space station completely dominated NASA’s budget for human space flight, to the point that no significant new developments were possible. It has been made abundantly clear that NASA’s budget will remain flat for the foreseeable future. Therefore to do anything beyond shuttle and station, at least one of them had to go. Station was just beginning to live up to its promise for research, so it was the older shuttle system that went.

Now, new developments of a large launch vehicle and a crew capsule are proceeding with the budget wedge that was opened up. However there is still not enough money in the flat NASA budget to get people back to the Moon or to the Mars system in less than four or five decades. So for the very same reason, the space station will have to be retired as well. Dates for that retirement in the next decade are already being talked about.

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THE REAL ICEMAN

Not Kimi Raikkonen but Wim Hof first caught the attention of scientists when he proved he was able to stay submerged in ice for one hour and 53 minutes without his core body temperature changing. Since then, he's climbed Mount Everest in his shorts, resisted altitude sickness, completed a marathon in the Namibian Desert with no water, and proven—under a laboratory setting—that he's able to influence his autonomic nervous system and immune system at will.

Almost everything Wim has done was previously thought to be impossible, but he's not a freak of nature; he's a master of meditation.

To demonstrate that any human can learn his methods, Wim offered to teach VICE hosts Matt Shea and Daisy-May Hudson how to climb a freezing cold mountain in their shorts without getting cold. But when Matt and Daisy signed up for the training, they had no idea that the so-called Iceman was planning to lead them on a psychedelic journey across Europe that circled the chasm between science and spirituality.

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Suntory Is Sending Its Whisky Into Space

With the goal of studying the effects zero gravity and stable temps have on the mellowing process of its whisky, Suntory is embarking on a mission to send six samples of its booze to the International Space Station’s Japanese Experiment Module. Included are a 21-year-old single malt and a freshly distilled sample of Suntory’s prized hooch. Some will return to Earth in a year’s time to see what some of the planet’s finest whisky tastes like after the time away. Perhaps some space spirits are on the way.

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WILD TURKEY MASTER'S KEEP

When a legendary distiller like Jimmy Russell steps down, it's wise to keep the master distiller role in the family. Wild Turkey Master's Keep is an homage from Jimmy's son Eddie, the new master distiller, to his father — who may be stepping aside, but still remains active at the distillery, and even with this bourbon. Master's Keep is a 17 year old whiskey that was aged in both stone warehouses of another distillery that Wild Turkey used when they were low on space, as well as the wooden warehouses that helped make Turkey famous. It's a smooth, unique sip that weighs in at a very approachable 86.8 proof.

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The World's First Firmware Worm For Mac Is Here, And It Sounds Scary

“Oh don’t worry,” your uncle said when you were shopping for a new computer. “Macs are virtually virus-proof.” Your uncle was wrong.

A team of white hat hackers just announced the development of the world’s first firmware worm that’s vicious enough to break through Apple’s legendary security. The so-called Thunderstrike 2 attack can be delivered through a phishing email or a peripheral device like a USB stick or even an ethernet adaptor. The worm then targets a machine’s option ROM or lives in the option ROM of peripherals so that even computers not connected to a network can be infected. It also can’t be removed from the firmware unless you open up the box and manually re-flash the chip. Oh, and the worm can’t be detected by any existing security software, so good luck with that.

“Let’s say you’re running a uranium refining centrifuge plant and you don’t have it connected to any networks, but people bring laptops into it and perhaps they share Ethernet adapters or external SSDs to bring data in and out,” Xeno Kovah, one of the firmware security consultants that developed the worm, told Wired. “Those SSDs have option ROMs that could potentially carry this sort of infection. Perhaps because it’s a secure environment they don’t use Wi-Fi, so they have Ethernet adapters. Those adapters also have option ROMs that can carry this malicious firm.”

If you’re running a uranium centrifuge plant, you definitely don’t want any type of worm in your computer system, especially one that could spread without being detected and destroy without fear of destruction. Kovah likened Thunderstrike 2 to the infamous Stuxnet worm that infected Iran’s uranium enrichment facilities a few years ago.

Don’t freak out just yet, though. Thunderstrike 2 is very apparently named after the original Thunderstrike virus, which was shown off at the Chaos Computer Congress in Germany earlier this year. Much like the sequel, Thunderstrike targeted Mac firmware and could not be detected. However, the original virusrequired physical access to the machine via Thunderbolt peripherals, while Thunderstike 2 can also be delivered remotely. Apple acknowledged Thunderstrike over six months ago and addressed the vulnerabilities, so there’s much hope that it will patch the new vulnerabilities that Thunderstrike 2 targets, too.

All that said, the really scary thing isn’t imagining how your computer might fall victim to a vicious undetectable worm called Thunderstrike. That’s a known threat now, one that will almost definitely be addressed. The horrifying thing is imagining what other kinds of worms governments are developing — the naughty bastard offspring of Stuxnet that stand to end the world with a single keystroke. We know that the NSA is working hard on firmware hacking, and you can be sure that China’s army of hackers is interested.

They’re probably not going to present their findings at Black Hat and Def Con, like the creators of Thunderstrike 2 are.

[MIKA27]

Enjoy This Gorgeous Image Of The Lagoon Nebula

At this very instant, five thousand light years from Earth, near the center of our galaxy, new stars are forming in a region of interstellar gas and dust called the Lagoon Nebula.

Bright, hot young stars blaze amid dark clouds of dust and bright streaks of glowing gas. Remember that some of those stars are several times larger than the Sun, yet they’re dwarfed by these streaks of gas and dust. For a more precise sense of scale, the whole image is about 40 light years across.

Eventually, that gas will form new stars, which will capture more gas and dust around themselves to form their own solar systems.

The 32-inch Schulman Telescope at the University of Arizona’s Mt. Lemmon SkyCenter captured this dramatic image of the nebula. If you have your own telescope, look for the Lagoon Nebula in the constellation Sagittarius.

[MIKA27]

A New Deadpool Teaser Gives Us Mirth Before The Merc

Deadpool faithful, thy time draws near. Weeks after what might have been Comic Con’s most talked-about footage—and talked-about bootleg—it seems that we’re a mere day away from getting a look Fox’s next Marvel joint (we know, we get confused too). The pre-trailer teaser might not be a marketing phenomenon we love, but we’d be lying if we said we didn’t enjoy an amuse-bouche before the big chimichanga. Come for the Ryan Reynolds, stay for the hyper-pompous voiceover and rich mahogany!

Deadpool hits theaters February 2016.

[MIKA27]

Winners of the 2015 National Geographic Traveler Photo Contest

The winners of the 27th annual National Geographic Traveler Photo Contest have just been announced. Winning first prize, Anuar Patjane Floriuk of Tehuacán, Mexico, will receive an eight-day photo expedition for two to Costa Rica and the Panama Canal for a photograph of divers swimming near a humpback whale off the western coast of Mexico. Here, National Geographic has shared all of this year’s winners, gathered from four categories: Travel Portraits, Outdoor Scenes, Sense of Place, and Spontaneous Moments. Captions by the photographers.

Diving with a humpback whale and her new born calf while they cruise around Roca Partida Island, in Revillagigedo, Mexico

A gravel crushing workplace remains full of dust and sand. Three gravel workmen are looking through the window glass.

Camel Ardah, as it called in Oman, is one of the traditional styles of camel racing between two camels controlled by expert riders. The faster camel is the loser, so they must be running at the same speed level in the same track.

The night before returning to Windhoek, we spent several hours at Deadveli in Namibia. The moon was bright enough to illuminate the sand dunes in the distance, but the skies were still dark enough to clearly see the milky way and magellanic clouds. Deadveli means "dead marsh." The camelthorn trees are believed to be about 900 years old, but have not decomposed because the environment is so dry.

Two boys are trying to catch a duck near a waterfall.

Kushti is the traditional form of Indian wrestling. Wearing only a well-adjusted loincloth (´langotª), wrestlers or “Pelwhansª enter a pit made of clay, often mixed with salt, lemon and ghee (clarified butter). At the end of a workout, wrestlers rest against the walls of the arena covering their heads and bodies with earth to soak up any perspiration and avoid catching cold. This relaxation ceremony is completed with massages to soothe tired muscles and demonstrate mutual respect.

The night before this photo, we tried all day to get a good photo of the endangered white rhino. Skulking through the grass carefully trying to stay 30 feet away to be safe, didn't provide me the photo I was hoping for. In the morning however, I woke up to all three rhinos grazing in front of me.

A sauna at 2,800 meters high, in the heart of Dolomites. Monte Lagazuoi, Cortina, eastern Italian Alps.

Traditional haymaking in Poland. Many people continue to use the scythe and pitchfork to cut and sort the hay.

White frost over Pestera village in Romania.

[MIKA27]

Pablo Escobar’s Favorite Hitman Is on Facebook and Spilling Dirt

Popeye Vásquez admitted to killing about 300 people as a righthand man to Pablo Escobar. Now he’s out of prison, on Facebook and Univisión, and taking questions.

Tracking down the man who served as the top assassin of Pablo Escobar’s infamous Medellín Cartel sounds like an equal parts terrifying and hopeless task.

Terrifying because Jhon Jairo Velásquez “Popeye” Vásquez has confessed to killing about 300 people and ordering the deaths of some 3,000 more. Hopeless because, upon his release from Colombian prison last year, Vásquez announced plans to go into hiding. He believes he’s a marked man among his former comrades in the Medellín Cartel, past members of the inactive vigilante death squad Los Pepes, and La Oficina de Envigado, the cartel that inherited Escobar’s empire. At the time of his release, Vásquez pegged his own odds of being assassinated at 80 percent.

But it turns out that not even one of history’s most prolific hitmen can resist the allure of social media.

“Popeye” is on Facebook and he’s using his platform to spill dirt and seek redemption from the same public he terrorized all through the second half of the Medellín Cartel’s bloody reign. He’s confirmed his ownership of the page through videos and in Spanish-language media outlets.

At its peak, the Medellín Cartel supplied 80 percent of the worldwide cocaine market and generated at least $420 million in weekly revenue. The Cartel’s tactics are best summed up by Escobar’s concise business strategy: plata o plomo—silver or lead, which colloquially translates to “take this bribe or end up dead.” During the ’80s and early ’90s, Vásquez was the man Escobar would call on to dish out plomo for refusing plata.

Informants, businessmen, and rivals were all routine targets for Vásquez, but his greatest notoriety is owed to a string of attacks on high-profile members of the Colombian government. He kidnapped and tortured a future Colombian president and vice president, killed an attorney general, and helped plot the assassination of Colombian presidential candidate Luis Carlos Galán—the only murder out of thousands for which he was convicted.

The end of Vásquez’s run with the Medellín Cartel came in 1992, when he surrendered to authorities amid a string of assassinations carried out against the cartel by vigilantes, paramilitary groups, and the Colombian government itself. At the time, Vásquez told a reporter, “I don’t owe anything to anybody. I haven’t done anything wrong.”

However, in a series of jailhouse confessions prompted by attempts on his life by fellow inmates, Vásquez ultimately confessed to his 3,000-plus body count and, in doing so, provided information that helped secure the conviction of several Medellín Cartel members.

As for Vásquez himself, he was sentenced to a 30-year prison sentence and granted an early release in 2014 for good behavior after serving 22 years. His release came with a 52-month parole period during which he may not leave Colombia and must check in with authorities on a regular basis. Vásquez has taken the terms a step further by checking in with all of Colombia to inform them of his salvation.

Predictably, or perhaps not, “Popeye” now calls himself a man of God. His Facebook page makes him out to be much more complicated than that.

Dubbing himself “the historical memory of the Medellín Cartel”—Vásquez did not respond to requests for comment and all material from Vásquez’s Facebook page has been translated from Spanish—he doesn’t so much spread the gospel as answer the questions of a public that regards him with either cautious curiosity or outright disgust.

In response to a drawing of himself with the phrase “A real man isn’t the one who never fails, but the one who corrects his path,” one Facebook user pointedly asked, “And what about the people who couldn’t correct their path because they were assassinated?” The grim laconicism of a professional killer shines through in Vásquez’s response, “They died in the war.”

When asked what it feels like to murder someone, Vásquez simply replies “Buddy, the circumstances make the man.” Another user, betraying some morbid fascination with Vásquez’s past exploits, even went so far as to ask if the once fearsome “Popeye” had camped out on Facebook because he was too scared to resume his past profession.

It’s those questions, ones rooted in admiration for the Medellín Cartel’s ruthlessness, that reveal the retired hitman’s philosophical side: “Buddy, for better or worse, I’m the only survivor of the most tragic era of our history. I invite you to disarm your heart because I once lived with hatred like you do.”

As for those who believe he should still be in prison, Vásquez’s stock response is this: “Thanks for your opinion. It’s respectable.”

This is just a sampling of Vásquez’s Facebook interactions as his page has swelled to 28,000 likes in less than two months’ time—hardly surprising given the thirst for answers on the Medellín Cartel’s inner workings and Vásquez’s former status as a trusted member of Escobar’s inner circle. Really, it’s not like any society ever gets the chance to interrogate one of its most infamous members.

Vásquez’s Facebook page is, more than anything, an opportunity for himself and Colombia to experience something resembling a shared catharsis. However, it’s also become a vehicle for “Popeye” to rebrand himself as something other than Escobar’s favorite hitman.

Following the daring escape of Sinaloa Cartel kingpin Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman from Mexican prison in July, Univisión interviewed Vásquez to get his insight. He promptly snatched headlines by estimating Guzman’s escape cost the drug lord something around $50 million.

Whether Vásquez can become a fixture in Spanish language media remains a question that may be decided by just how willing the public is to accept the possibility that Vásquez is a changed man.

“Popeye” has convinced at least one person: Juan Manuel Galán, a Colombian senator and the son of Luis Carlos Galán. When Vásquez was released for his father’s murder, Galán said “He gave us the truth and asked for forgiveness. In my case, I forgive him.”

[MIKA27]

2017 AUDI GRAND PRIX UNION REBORN

Russian designer Burov has crossed our desks in the past, and as we mentioned before, it probably wouldn’t be the last time we’d see him. Today the talented artist is making the rounds again, this time with the Audi Grand Prix Union Reborn.

The vehicle is a solid blend of futuristic and classic, paying homage to the beloved 1930s Silver Arrows. Instead of equipping the race car with a V16 or V12 engine though, Burov opted for a modern electric power train to power this beast. Both the front vented nose and rear grated area bear the classic Audi 4-ring logo, while carbon fiber accents throughout and a set of super spoked rims round out the look. It may be titled 2017, but we don’t know if this thing will ever find its way to the assembly line.

[MIKA27]

AMOK DRAUMR HAMMOCK

Amok Equipment have announced the third generation of their award winning Amok Draumr Hammock, an innovative side-roped hammock that sleeps you flat and lets you sit up. The hammock comes packed in a small stuff sack and is quickly setup via a system of stowaway suspension straps and carabiners. The versatile Amok Draumr is designed for use with an inflatable sleeping pad, to create a flat surface for snoozing, and features an innovative adjustment system, simply pull the suspension straps from inside to raise the bed from a full flat position up to various levels of recline and finally to a comfortable sitting position, perfect for reading, fishing, drinking your coffee, or to simply enjoy a beer.

[MIKA27]

HANDMADE CAMERA AXE BAGS

Hillstreet Leatherworks was created with the simple notion that quality should trump quantity every time. Working out of his one room studio, Bobby Durham has undoubtedly created some of the nicest leather goods available. Each good Bobby creates is made beginning to end, from scratch, by Bobby himself. Without the use of ANY machinery, each product is hand cut and hand stitched one at a time in Tampa, FL, allowing no two bags to be alike. Recently, Bobby collaborated with Visual Ambition, a photography studio in Tampa, and has created a line of Camera Bags that are arguably the best pack available for photographers. Each of the bags in the line comes with an axe made from the best American wood and steel and eliminates any excuse a photographer may have to not get the shot. Classic design paired with premium materials (all sourced in the US) and great manufacturing creates covetable tools that get the job done.

[MIKA27]

OLD LIMESTONE MIXING WATER

While you can make bourbon anywhere in the United States, Kentucky still produces nearly 95% of what is on store shelves, in large part due to the natural water resources within the state. Old Limestone Mixing Water comes from Kentucky, the natural home of limestone-filtered water that is free of iron deposits — making it perfect for making whiskey, and in this case, adding to your whiskey.

A splash will bring new flavors out of any glass of bourbon, and this heavy, flint glass bottle will also fit in nicely at the bar next to your ever expanding bourbon collection.

MIKA: WTF!? Is this serious!?

[MIKA27]

The Future Will Be Full Of Lab-Grown Meat



In 2013, the world’s first lab-grown burger was unveiled to the world. It carried a $US330,000 price tag, and apparently, it wasn’t all that tasty. But the scientists behind the idea have been hard at work, and artificial meat that’s both cost-effective and palatable may arrive sooner than we think.

It’s not just cow-free beef burgers on the future menu — several groups around the world are attempting to clone chicken breasts and fish fillets, as well. Why do scientists want to grow meat in vats instead of on animals, and how close are we to actually accomplishing it?

The Big Resource Hog

The arguments for growing so-called ‘cultured’ meat are as wide-ranging as the reasons people decide to become vegetarian or vegan. If you’re not vegetarian or vegan, you’ve probably received a mouthful on this subject from a friend or family member before, so I’m going to keep it brief and focus on the argument cultured meat proponents seem to embrace the most: Sustainability.



The meat industry is a huge contributor to humanity’s environmental footprint, accounting for some 18%of our total greenhouse gas emissions. And that number’s deceptively low, because it includes roughly 40% of methane and 65% of nitrous oxide emissions, which are respectively 23 and nearly 300 times more potent climate warming agents than carbon dioxide. What’s more, the environmental footprint of livestock production is growing fast. By 2050, global meat production is projected to double from its 1999 levels, according to the FAO. At that time, the FAO writes, “The environmental impact per unit livestock must be cut by half, just to avoid increasing the level of damage beyond its present level.”

If climate arguments aren’t your MO, try this one on for size: Animal agriculture is soaking up an enormous portion of our arable land, drinkable water, edible food and combustible fossil fuel resources. According to a study published in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, livestock in the US consume more than 7 times as much grain as the American population — enough grain to feed about 840 million people. The same study finds that roughly 25 kilocalories of fossil fuel energy are consumed for every 1 kilocalorie of meat protein produced, compared with a 2.2:1 ratio for corn. And producing 1 kg of animal protein requires 100 times more water than 1 kg of grain protein, in part because we have to take the water used to grow the animals’ food into account. You can read the full report for additional statistics, but you’ll find that on nearly every measure, raising livestock takes a lot more resources per calorie out than growing edible plants does.

Since we don’t have industrial, meat-producing labs yet, it’s hard to say how the environmental impact and resource cost of cultured meat will measure up. But there’s reason to be optimistic. Here’s what a life-cycle assessment study, published in Environmental Science and Technology in 2011 found:

The results showed that production of 1000 kg cultured meat requires 26 — 33 GJ energy, 367 — 521 m3 water, 190 — 230 m2 land, and emits 1900 — 2240 kg CO2-eq GHG emissions. In comparison to conventionally produced European meat, cultured meat involves approximately 7 — 45% lower energy use (only poultry has lower energy use), 78 — 96% lower GHG emissions, 99% lower land use, and 82 — 96% lower water use depending on the product compared. Despite high uncertainty, it is concluded that the overall environmental impacts of cultured meat production are substantially lower than those of conventionally produced meat.

“This actually makes a lot of sense,” Shier Friedman, co-founder of the pro-cultured meat Modern Agriculture Foundation told me over the phone. “When we’re raising animals, a very large amount is being discarded: The bones, fur, eyeballs, organs. What we’re doing is wasting resources to produce stuff that we don’t get back. With cultured meat, you grow exactly what you want, and you barely throw anything away.”

That all sounds promising, but in reality, cultured meat will only save us resources and reduce the meat industry’s environmental footprint if we can produce the stuff at economies of scale. The meat growers of the future are dreaming big, but the scientific and engineering challenges ahead are also enormous.

The Quarter Pounder with Stem Cells



Two years ago, physiologist Mark Post of the University of Maastrich unveiled the world’s first cultured beef burger, assembled in his lab from thousands of individual strands of muscle tissue. It precipitated an international media blitz: Hundreds of news articles, radio podcasts, and prime-time TV minutes were devoted to Unveiling of The Burger. But as for the flavour? A bit lacklustre, according to food scientistHanni Rützler and journalist Josh Schonwald, the two chosen tasters. As NPR reported at the time:


“The texture, the mouthfeel has a feel like meat,” Schonwald put it. “The absence is … fat. It’s a leanness. But the bite feels like a conventional hamburger. It’s kind of an unnatural experience [without condiments].”
Rützler agreed the burger was edible, but not delectable. “It has quite some intense taste, it’s close to meat,” she said. “I thought it would be softer.”

Still, one can argue the demonstration was less about the meat’s flavour and more about what scientists had managed to accomplish. Over the course of three months, Post’s lab turned a handful of stem cells extracted from a cow’s shoulder into a patty consisting of 20,000 individual muscle fibres. Keeping those cells healthy, well-fed and contamination-free during their growth was no small feat — in fact, it’s something biomedical engineers in the artificial tissue business have been struggling to do for over a decade.

But with a $US300,000 price tag and a mediocre review, Post knew he had to do better. He’s spent the last two years refining the process, and I caught up with him over the phone to hear how it’s been going.

One of the big takeaways from the 2013 cultured burger demo was that meat just ain’t right without fat. So, Post’s lab is now culturing fatty tissue in addition to muscle fibres. Working out that process has taken some time. Until now, there hasn’t been a whole lot of scientific interest in culturing fat cells, and methods that did exist used chemicals we don’t really want to be eating.

“The original methodology to make fat cells from stem cells requires steroids, which are not wanted in food applications,” Post told me. “We had to redesign that and work with the biochemistry of the cell to figure out which stimuli we should use. We now have a bunch of natural components of fat that actually stimulate fat production.”

Right now, Post’s lab is culturing beef fat and muscle tissue separately, and mixing the two after the fact. In the future, Post imagines combining the two cell types in a co-culture. But first, there are a couple other burger basics the team is trying to improve on.

For one, Post would like to eliminate the use of animal products (stem cells aside, obviously) from the culturing process. In laboratories, cells are often grown using a foetal bovine serum extracted from unborn calves. But from a sustainability point of view, juicing a baby cow to grow a burger is less than ideal. It also doesn’t do much for cultured beef’s image as a cruelty-free product. And, while it may be an unlikely scenario, a disease-contaminated batch of foetal bovine serum could spell disaster. Better off, Post says, if we could work out an animal-free culture serum — one based on photosynthetic algae or cyanobacteria, perhaps.


Mark Post and The Burger.


Another technical issue Post’s team is trying to sort out how to boost cultured beef’s iron content. In muscle tissue, iron is found primarily inside an iron and oxygen-binding protein known as myoglobin. But because lab-grown meat lacks a circulatory system, it’s kept in a very high-oxygen environment, which has the unintended consequence of reducing cellular myoglobin expression. Less myoglobin means less iron, poorer nutritional content and a weaker flavour.

Once Post is satisfied with cultured beef version 2.0 — a fattier, more iron-rich and animal-free substance than its predecessor — he’ll start thinking about scaling up. Going from petri dishes to factories raises a host of new issues. For one, there’s that oxygen problem again: Without a circulatory system and blood vessels to shuttle O2 around, we can really only ever hope to grow thin sheets of meat. Post wouldn’t get into specifics about the technologies involved in scaling this process up, other than hinting that 3D printers and new types of scaffolding materials might be involved.

In the cultured meat facilities of the future, impeccable cleanliness will be another top priority. Keeping everything sterile will no doubt up the maintenance costs, but Post sees it as a worthy challenge. That’s because, if we can ensure truly sterile production conditions, we might be able remove antibiotics from the equation.

“Currently, we only use antibiotics in the first stage of the process where we harvest cells from the animals,” Post said. “That’s not 100% sterile. But if you get rid of the serum, it’s much easier to get rid of the antibiotics. We’re using very stringent doses now, but I think in the future antibiotics can be eliminated entirely.”

Today, most of the antibiotics produced in America are guzzled down by livestock living in filthy, overcrowded conditions. Reducing our dependency on antibiotics in animal agriculture will slow the spread of antibiotic resistant bacteria and ensure that our medicines last for future generations of humans.


As for the public’s reaction to encountering lab-grown beef in the grocery stores? That’s something Post spends a lot of time thinking about.

“You do hear people making references to GMOs, playing God, and ‘frankenfoods’ — that sort of thing,” Post told me. (Despite public perception, cultured beef is not a genetically modified food, nor are genetically modified foods evil.) “It’s hard because these are emotional reactions — there’s usually no rationale behind them.”

“But,” he continued, “We find that when we do surveys and explain what it is that we’re doing, the reactions tend to be more positive.”

In Post’s mind, a more legitimate concern than ‘frankenfood’ is the possibility of small farmers losing control of the meat production system entirely (to be fair, they have already been largely hedged out in the United States.)

“That’s something we have to address,” Post said. “Can you design ways of implement culturing beef on a small scale so that it becomes a community thing? Can you design a home meat maker?”

But Post reckons we’re still ten or twenty years away from producing cultured beef en masse. Right now, growing a burger that’s just as mouth-wateringly juicy and flavourful as a natural beef patty — and figuring out how to scale up — is keeping the our cultured beef-makers plenty busy.

Fish and Chicken



An affordable, scaleable cultured beef industry would go a long way toward reducing humanity’s environmental footprint. But Post isn’t the only scientist trying to cook up meat in the lab. In fact, way back in 2002, a NASA-funded team demonstrated it was possible to grow fish filets outside of a fish. Admittedly, this early effort was a bit grisly: The team cut chunks of muscle tissue from freshly slaughtered goldfish and dunked them in a culture fluid for a week. The tissue chunks grew by over 14 per cent, which lead scientist Morris Benjaminson attributed to partially differentiated myoblast cellsdividing to make more of themselves.





Goldfish filets never caught on, but Post tells me that a few other research teams have recently begun investigating cultured seafood again, presumably using more modern techniques. Meanwhile, the Modern Agriculture Foundation has taken up the lab-grown chicken challenge. In some ways, that effort is even more ambitious than Post’s stem cell burger. Rather than growing a handful of individual cell types, Friedman’s foundation is hoping to clone entire chicken breasts — complex, 3-dimensional organs.

“We wanted to do something big, something that is needed, something that is important and could literally change the food culture in the world,” Frieman told me. “We knew a group was already doing beef, so we decided to go with another of the most popular food animals in the world.”

So far, Future Meat — the MAF’s cultured chicken research program — has only conducted feasibility studies, looking at the costs, time and ingredients associated with growing whole chicken breasts in vats. There are some parallels to the burger meat effort: For instance, Future Meat’s lead researcher Amit Gefen told in an email that his team is very interested in coming up with a veggie-based culture medium that would eliminate animal serum from the production process.

But in many ways, Future Meat’s goal is very different from that of the Post lab. Engineering 3D-organs means thinking about how different cell types will interact, and how to coax tissues into taking on a certain size and shape. It also means worrying a lot about oxygen and nutrient availability. While some tissue engineers are trying to develop synthetic capillary networks for artificial organs, Gefen is hoping Future Meat can avoid that additional complexity with a cleverly designed bioreactor.


“I expect that developing a capillary network to feed the construct would be too complicated and expensive for the purpose of creating a food product, and so other approaches should be adopted,” Gefen told me. “The most feasible one appears to be developing a special bioreactor that will circulate nutrients in the scaffolds (with seeded cells) efficiently so that cells will be able to proliferate and grow on the scaffolds.”

Gefen envisions his bioreactors will have the ability to stimulate growing muscle tissue, either mechanically or electrically, to facilitate proper development. Again, this is all very conceptual right now, but with more PhD student labour and grant funding, Future Meat is hoping to make headway on bioreactor prototypes within the next several years.

The Road Ahead

Cultured meat still has a long way to go, but it’s exciting to see groups of scientists around the world taking up the challenge. And in a very short amount of time, we’ve seen major progress. This past April, Post announced that his team has managed to cut the cost of cultured beef to just $US80 per kilogram, or roughly $US11 per burger. That’s a pretty stunning price drop, considering two years ago one of his burgers could’ve financed a med student’s education.

Hey, one can dream

As public awareness of cultured meat grows, proponents like Friedman and Post seem hopeful that their products will, one day, become just as acceptable as meat grown on animals — perhaps even more so.

“We’re trying to find a realistic way to produce the same type of food we love to eat,” Friedman said. “Eventually cultured meat will be cheaper and more sustainable. And we’ll have so many people on the planet that there just won’t be another option. The human race is progressing, technology is progressing, and eventually, people are going to get used to this idea.”

Personally, I’m looking forward to the day when I can order a cultured salmon roll without wondering if my fish was sustainably harvested, or a McDonald’s quarter pounder without imagining the sorry life of the animal it came from. Bring it on, science.

[Fuzz]

HANDMADE CAMERA AXE BAGS

Seriously? What kind of photography are you doing that requires that you carry around an axe?!