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

[MIKA27]

AQUABOT WATER BOTTLE

Aquabot Water Bottle may very well be your thirst´s worse enemy, it´s a unique water bottle because it turns into a pressure one, making it possible to accumulate pressure within and manage the way water is supplied with a variable flow control trigger. You get three options: a mister, a shower gun or streamer. Perfect for hydrating, cleaning, or to have just pure water battle fun, because you can spray it for up to 25 feet! You can choose two different capacities and a wide array of color combos. It´s the perfect companion on your outdoor journeys, on the beach, hiking or just plain camping. Aquabot comes with 2 attachment points for lanyards, and works upside down for extra convenience.

[MIKA27]

James Spader's Ultron Motion-Capture Is As Goofy As It Is Awesome

No matter what you thought of Avengers: Age of Ultron, there’s no arguing the perfect casting of James Spader as Ultron. Even though he’s playing a 9-foot-tall robot, the character still had that perfect, Spader smugness to him and it worked incredibly well.

Marvel has now released a new behind the scenes featurette for Avengers: Age of Ultron and though the focus is supposed to be the Twins, played by Elizabeth Olsen and Aaron Taylor-Johnson, the real highlight is Spader. He’s in a full motion capture body suit with a several foot high light above his head for the actors to look at. And just like Olsen says in the video, no matter what light you’re supposed to look at, it’s hard to take your eyes of Spader. He looks completely and utterly ridiculous. But also, totally in control and cool. It’s a sight to see.

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Dead teenager 'wakes up in grave in Honduras' – only to then 'die in hospital'

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2BUDn-onhfE

A teenage girl in Honduras had mistakenly been buried alive and apparently woke up in her coffin, only to die before she was freed.

Footage shows frantic relatives smashing into the concrete tomb of recently buried Neysi Perez, 16, after they said they heard her screaming from inside. She had been buried the previous day.

When they opened the coffin, Perez was dead. But according to relatives, she was still warm and had bruises on her fingertips. The glass viewing pane on her coffin had been smashed.

"As I put my hand on her grave, I could hear noises inside," her husband, Rudy Gonzales told Primer Impacto TV news. "I heard banging, then I heard her voice. She was screaming for help."

Perez, 16, had been three months pregnant, and apparently fell unconscious when she heard a burst of gunfire near her home in La Entrada, western Honduras.

When she began foaming at the mouth, her parents – who thought she was possessed by an evil spirit – called a local priest who attempted to perform an exorcism.

Perez was rushed to hospital when she became lifeless and was soon pronounced dead by doctors three hours later. She was buried wearing her wedding dress.

Mr Gonzales was visiting his wife’s grave 24 hours after her funeral, when he says heard screaming coming from inside the tomb.

By the time relatives and cemetery workers were able to break through the concrete and transport Perez, still in her coffin, to the hospital, it was too late. Medics again pronounced her dead.

Doctors believe that Perez suffered a severe panic attack brought on by the gunfire, which temporarily stopped her heart. They said that it is also possible that she had a cataplexy attack, which is an abrupt loss of voluntary muscle function triggered by extreme stress.

Maria Gutierrez, Perez’s mother, believed her daughter was buried alive, and blamed doctors for being too quick in signing a death certificate. "She didn’t look like she had died," Ms Gutierrez said.

Perez was later reburied in her original grave.

[MIKA27]

NASA Just Sealed Six People In A Dome For A Year To Practice Mars

Life on Mars may sound glamorous, but in reality it’s going to mean a lot of time crammed in a small bubble with a few other humans. This could end very badly. So to practice, NASA has taken to sticking people in domes and keeping them isolated for months on end.

The latest isolation experiment started yesterday. Six willing humans — an astrobiologist, physicist, pilot, architect, journalist and a soil scientist — entered this lovely 10.97m by 6.1m dome, located near a barren volcano in Hawaii, at 3pm local time on Friday. They will remain in the dome for a year, eating powdered cheese, smelling each others’ BO, and slowly abandoning any sense of personal space. If we’re lucky, they will all emerge unscathed, perhaps even friends.

Not too shabby on the inside!

The happy crew

There’s good reason to be optimistic. The last time NASA tried this experiment, everyone seemed to get on just fine, with no attempted space-murders or breakouts. And let’s not forget the Mars 500 project, in which six-person crews were locked inside terrifying steel tubes for 18 months. Confinement may be uncomfortable, but when the ultimate goal is intergalactic domination, humans seem willing to endure a lot.

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Greenland's Ice Sheets Are Getting Cooked By Warm Ocean Currents

The retreat of Arctic sea ice has been so dramatic over the last few years that atlases are being changed. Now it turns out Greenland’s ice sheets are also melting faster than we thought — not on the visible surface, but due to currents deep below the ocean.

While the loss of polar sea ice is troubling, the hidden sublimation of Greenland’s ice is of greater concern. That’s because these continental ice sheets and glaciers hold up to 90 per cent of our fresh water on Earth. NASA put together a video today to highlight how their researchers discovered the meltdown.

As Greenland’s ice warms in the summer, it pushes its way down through fjords and towards the ocean, where some of it breaks off into the sea. This is, of course, happening at an accelerated rate, too — aniceberg the size of Manhattan calved off of Greenland last week. When the ice hits the ocean at sea level, it doesn’t melt that quickly — the water is literally ice-cold. But as NASA glaciologists looked deeper beneath the water, they saw that the thicker ice sheets were being carved away faster and more dramatically than they expected by warm currents pushing up from the tropics.

Yesterday we learned that the Earth’s sea levels are locked into an inevitable 0.91m rise even without any intervention. Losing all of Greenland’s ice would automatically raise the sea level another 7m. Oceans Melting Greenland (yep, OMG) s a new NASA initiative that will study the way that climate change is affecting Greenland’s ice — and how we can stop its devastation.

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A Double Black Hole Powers A Brilliant Galactic Star Factory

Six hundred million light years away, a pair of black holes spiral furiously about one another at the brilliant core of a starburst galaxy.

Black holes are usually lone wolves, devouring light and matter at centres of their galaxies. But when galaxies collide, two black holes can in theory become locked in a gravitational embrace, much like a binary star. This is the first confirmed instance of the phenomena.

The dynamic duo in question lives at the centre of Markarian 231, the nearest galaxy to host a bright star-forming core known as a quasar. Astronomers discovered the black hole pair using Hubble data on the quasar’s UV light spectra:

If only one black hole were present in the centre of the quasar, the whole accretion disk made of surrounding hot gas would glow in ultraviolet rays. Instead, the ultraviolet glow of the dusty disk abruptly drops off toward the centre. This provides observational evidence that the disk has a big doughnut hole encircling the central black hole.

The best explanation for the doughnut hole in the disk, based on dynamical models, is that the centre of the disk is carved out by the action of two black holes orbiting each other. The second, smaller black hole orbits in the inner edge of the accretion disk, and has its own mini-disk with an ultraviolet glow.

The binary system seems to have formed when a small galaxy bumped into Mk 231, adding a black hole of four million solar masses to a system whose resident black hole weighs 150 million Suns. As the swirling binary swallows nearby gases, it releases tremendous outflows of energy, amping up star formation in the surrounding region of space.

Eventually, the two black holes are going spiral into one another in an epic cosmic collision that will certainly spell doom for any Cylons foolish enough to have set up base on the event horizon. But for astronomer, the distant demise of this system is no great tragedy: After all, there could be plenty of other double-hearted quasars out there waiting to be discovered.

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Boeing's New Compact Laser Cannon Is Designed To Shoot Down Drones

Boeing announced this week that it has successfully developed a new compact laser weapon system. And watch your back drones — because this one has been made with you in mind.

The last few months have seen an explosion in the number of incidents where drones have interfered with emergency crews doing their jobs. Most notably, drone hobbyists have been hindering firefighting efforts in California by jerks flying their quadcopters too close to the flames.

Laser weapons have been used by US forces in both Afghanistan and Iraq, primarily for detonating IEDs from a safe distance. But those laser weapons are mounted on large trucks, while this new system is compact enough to be transported more easily.

Wired described Boeing’s demonstration of the new system in New Mexico this week:

In the demo, Boeing used the laser to burn holes in a stationary, composite UAV shell, to show how quickly it can compromise an aircraft. Two seconds at full power and the target was aflame. Other than numerous safety warnings to ensure no one was blinded by the two-kilowatt infrared laser, there was no fanfare. No explosions, no visible beam. It’s more like burning ants with a really, really expensive magnifying glass than obliterating Alderaan.

One of the appeals of laser weapons systems is their relative low cost. Once the system is built, all you’re paying for is the electricity to run it. And with a world of ubiquitous drones (military or otherwise) just around the corner, being able to deploy drone-killing tech on the cheap is vital.

“This represents a low-cost way to deal with the threat,” David DeYoung, the director of Boeing Laser & Electro-Optical Systems told Wired. There are currently no plans to utilise the weapon on US soil, and it’s still a couple of years from seeing the battlefield. But if there’s anything we can count on seeing more of in the next decade it’s drones and lasers. And they will likely not be the best of friends.

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Mysterious Glowing Pike Caught in Canadian Lake

It’s always questionable to believe any stories told by fishermen, especially when they don’t bring back the actual fish they’re bragging about. At least a couple of Canadian anglers took some pictures of the world’s first – and so far only – glow-in-the-dark pike.

Randy Straker and Craig Thomas were fishing on August 23rd in the North Arm of Great Slave Lake, the second-largest lake in Canada’s Northwest Territories, the deepest lake in North America at 614 meters (2014 ft) and a lake both had fished many times before. On this day they were looking for pike (Esox lucius), also called a jackfish or northern pike. What Straker caught was a pike like no other pike or fish they’d ever seen.

The whole top of the fish had a different green. If you look at the mouth, it looked like green lipstick. It was so bright … And you could see right down its throat, and it was very fluorescent green.

The pike had glowing green lips

That’s right, two fishermen claim they caught a 40-inch, 14-pound pike that glowed a bright neon green. Fortunately, they brought along a camera and took some pictures.

Believe it or not, after photographing the unusual jackfish, they released it back into the lake! Why? They had already caught 30 fish each and decided to leave some for other anglers, including the glowing pike, which was like none of the thousands of other pikes they’ve seen.

We’ve seen kind of the albino look, where you might get a 50/50 split, where half the fish is lacking pigment, or we’ve seen some irregular spots, but this fish was totally, head to tail, like nothing we’d ever seen.

What gave Randy’s fish its fluorescent glow? Since they don’t have the body (habeas fishus?), biologists were unable to help. It could have been contaminated from the nearby abandoned Pine Point Mine, which closed in 1988 after years of producing lead and zinc ores. It could have been something the fish ate. Even worse, it could be something the fish’s mother mated with – like the genetically modified fluorescent GloFish sold at pet stores.

Whatever it is, Strake, Thomas and hundreds of other anglers are already back on the lake trolling for the glowing pike.

[MIKA27]

SMARTHALO

SmartHalo is a new device that turns your bike into a smart one, it´s a device that you place on your handlebar, and has loads of features. You obviously must get that app to pair it with your smartphone to gain access to a bunch of features like: choosing a destination, tuck your phone away, and Smart Halo will guide you on your way, signaling, with its lights, where to turn till you get there. It also records all of your activity on your bike, so it can help you keep track of burnt calories, distance, average speed, elevations and maps and you can also go social with it. You also get a warning on its screen every time your phone rings. Smart Halo also includes a smart light that automatically turns on when day light is no longer bright enough to see or be seen. It´s tamper proof and also includes an alarm system, if someone fiddles too much on your bike while it´s parked and will trigger the alarm system. It also reminds you where you parked. With a futuristic look and loads of features Smart Halo might become your bike´s greatest update

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RIP Wes Craven, Iconic Director of Nightmare on Elm Street and Scream

He wrote and directed the first 'Nightmare on Elm Street' film, helmed the first four 'Scream' movies and guided Meryl Steep to an Oscar nom in 'Music of the Heart.'

Wes Craven, the famed maestro of horror known for the Nightmare on Elm Street and Scream franchises, died Sunday after a battle with brain cancer. He was 76.

Craven, whose iconic Freddy Krueger character horrified viewers for years, died at his home in Los Angeles, his family announced. Survivors include his wife, producer and former Disney Studios vice president Iya Labunka.

Craven was a longtime summer resident of Martha’s Vineyard, where he moved permanently three years ago before returning to L.A. for work and health reasons.

Craven claimed to have gotten the idea for Elm Street from living next to a cemetery on a street of that name in the suburbs of Cleveland. The five Nightmare on Elm Street films were released from 1984-89 and drew big crowds.

Similarly, Craven's Scream series was a box-office sensation. In those scare-'em-ups, he spoofed the teen horror genre and frequently referenced other horror movies.

Craven’s first feature film was The Last House on the Left, which he wrote, directed and edited in 1972. A rape-revenge movie, it appalled some viewers but generated big box office. Next came another film he wrote and helmed, The Hills Have Eyes (1977).

Craven re-invented the youth horror genre in 1984 with the classic A Nightmare on Elm Street, which he wrote and directed.

He conceived and co-wrote Elm Street III as well, and then after not being involved with other sequels, deconstructed the genre a decade after the original, writing and directing Wes Craven’s New Nightmare, which was nominated for best feature at the 1995 Spirit Awards.

His own Nightmare players, Robert Englund, Heather Langenkamp and John Saxon, played themselves in that film.

In 1996, Craven reached a new level of success with the release of Scream. The film grossed more than $100 million domestically, as did Scream 2 (1997).

Between Scream 2 and Scream 3, Craven, offered the opportunity to direct a non-genre film for Miramax, helmed Music of the Heart (1999), a film that earned Meryl Streep an Academy Award nomination for best actress in the inspirational drama about a teacher in Harlem.

“We had a very difficult time getting an audience into a theater on my name,” he said in an interview with writer-director Mick Garris in October. “In fact, we moved toward downplaying my name a lot on Music of the Heart. The more famous you are for making kinds of outrageous scary films, the crossover audience will say, ‘I don't think so.’”

Also in 1999, in the midst of directing, he completed his first novel, The Fountain Society, published by Simon & Shuster.

Craven again pushed the genre boundaries with the 2005 psychological thriller Red Eye, starring Rachel McAdams, Cillian Murphy and Brian Cox. And in 2006, he wrote and directed a romantic comedy homage to Oscar Wilde featuring Emily Mortimer and Rufus Sewell as a segment in the French ensemble production Paris Je T’aime.

Craven then produced remakes of The Hills Have Eyes (2006) and The Last House on the Left (2009).

His most recent written and directed film, My Soul to Take (2010), marked his first collaboration with Labunka, who also produced Scream 4.

Craven directed several other thrillers and horror movies during his career, including Swamp Thing (1982), Deadly Friend (1986) and The People Under the Stairs (1991).

Craven had recently signed an overall television deal with Universal Cable Productions and had a number of projects in development, including The People Under the Stairs with Syfy Networks, Disciples with UCP, We Are All Completely Fine with Syfy/UCP, and Sleepers with Federation Entertainment.

He also was executive producing the new Scream series for MTV. The season finale of the series will pay tribute to the writer/director, an MTV spokesperson told The Hollywood Reporter.

Craven had recently written and was to direct the Thou Shalt Not Kill segment for The Weinstein Co.'s Ten Commandments miniseries for WGN America. And he is listed as an executive producer of The Girl in the Photographs, a horror thriller directed by his protege, Nick Simon, that will premiere at the Toronto Film Festival next month.

Wesley Earl Craven was born Aug. 2, 1939, in Cleveland. His father died when he was 5. Raised in a strict Baptist household, he graduated from Wheaton College with degrees in English and psychology, then earned a masters in philosophy and writing from Johns Hopkins.

He briefly taught English at Westminster College and was a humanities professor at Clarkson College, where he served as a disc jockey for the campus radio station.

Craven had an eye for discovering talent. While casting A Nightmare on Elm Street, he discovered Johnny Depp. He cast Sharon Stone in her first starring role, for Deadly Blessing, and he gave Bruce Willis his first featured role in an episode of the 1980s version of The Twilight Zone.

He wed Labunka in 2004, his third marriage. Survivors also include his sister Carol, son Jonathan, daughter Jessica, grandchildren Miles, Max and Myra-Jean and stepdaughter Nina.

Craven was a nature lover and committed bird conservationist, serving as a longtime member of the Audubon California Board of Directors. He penned a monthly column, “Wes Craven’s The Birds,” for Martha’s Vineyard Magazine.

“I come from a blue-collar family, and I’m just glad for the work,” Craven said in his chat with Garris. “I think it is an extraordinary opportunity and gift to be able to make films in general, and to have done it for almost 40 years now is remarkable.

“If I have to do the rest of the films in the [horror] genre, no problem. If I’m going to be a caged bird, I’ll sing the best song I can.

“I can see that I give my audience something. I can see it in their eyes, and they say thank you a lot. You realize you are doing something that means something to people. So shut up and get back to work.”

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Samsung's Gear S2 Smartwatch Is Coming To Australia

Samsung’s round, slim Gear S2 smartwatch — an update to the definitely-less-than-conventional Gear S — has just been formally announced ahead of this week’s IFA gadget expo in Berlin. If you like your watches round, your activity tracked, and your heart rate monitored, and your operating systems Tizen, well this is the smartwatch for you.

The Gear S2 is built around a 1.2-inch, circular Super AMOLED display with a resolution of 360x360ppi — making it (at least for the time being, until the possible unveiling of the Huawei Watch, new Moto 360 and new LG smartwatch) the equal most pixel-dense smartwatch on the market alongside the Apple Watch. There are two versions available — the regular metal S2 and the darker S2 Classic.

The new dual-core 1GHz Samsung watch’s operating system is Tizen rather than Android Wear, which means it’ll likely work best with a companion Samsung smartphone like the Galaxy Note 5 or S6 Edge+. That said, it looks like it’ll sync with the Nike+ Running app which is available on the general Google Play Store. The watch is IP68 waterproof, too, and has an internal heart rate monitor.

It’s definitely coming to Australia — we just don’t know exactly when, and how much it’ll cost. Here’s the official line from Samsung Australia:

“We are very excited to confirm that the Samsung Gear S2 smartwatch will arrive in Australia soon — the Gear S2 will provide our customers with a truly amazing smartwatch experience. We look forward to providing more details regarding local pricing and availability closer to the Australian launch.”

We’ll have an extensive hands-on with the Gear S2 and Samsung’s other high-end personal and home entertainment gear in just a couple of days, direct from the show floor at IFA 2015, so stay tuned.

[MIKA27]

The Flu Vaccine That Lasts A Lifetime Is Coming

The flu vaccine: a tedious annual chore, but necessary unless you want to spend a week bed-ridden and barfy. Still, wouldn’t it be great if one jab could protect you for life? A lifetime flu vaccine isn’t impossible, and we’re making progress toward one, but we’ve still got a ways to go.

As New Scientist explains, the flu virus carries big, globular “decoy” proteins on its surface to grab our immune system’s attention. It’s these decoys that we put in our vaccines to prime our immune systems for the flu. But true to their name, decoy proteins are shapeshifting little bastards, and after a couple years, our immune systems don’t recognise them anymore. That’s why we spend hundreds of millions of dollars predicting what the next flu outbreak will look like and developing new vaccines in advance of it.

Beneath the decoys, however, lie the “stalk” proteins involved in replicating the virus and infecting us. These proteins happen to be much more structurally stable. If we could somehow convince our immune systems to recognise them, our bodies wouldn’t “forget” the flu from year to year. But according to New Scientist, stalk proteins have proven devilishly hard to reproduce in the lab.

After years of tinkering, two research groups announced this week that they have manufactured stable versions of an H1N1 stalk protein in an injectable solution. But so far, both vaccines have met mixed results in animal trials. Says New Scientist:

One group, at the Crucell Vaccine Institute in Leiden, the Netherlands, and the Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla, California, succeeded in making an array of three of these stalk proteins that matches the kind that forms naturally in the virus. It protected mice from otherwise lethal doses of the H1N1 flu — and from the very different H5N1 bird flu. Less promisingly, however, in monkeys the vaccine only reduced the fever caused by low, non-lethal doses of H1N1 viruses, even though vaccinated monkeys produced antibodies to several flu types.

The other group, based at the National Institutes of Health, tied several stalk proteins together with a bacterial protein into a spiky protein bundle, and stuck that in solution. This version also elicited an immune response, but it wasn’t powerful enough to prevent infection:

Sure enough, this elicited antibodies that recognised the stalk proteins in viruses from the H1, H2, H5 and H9 families, and even against the less similar H3 and H7. Once again, though, antibodies were one thing, surviving a real infection was another. All the vaccinated mice survived an otherwise lethal dose of H5N1 flu, but only four of six ferrets did — and ferrets’ response to flu is thought to be a much better model for the human response to the virus.

The silver bullet here would be a flu protein that doesn’t change over time, that we can deliver as a vaccine, and that will fire up our immune systems enough to prevent us from catching the flu in the first place. So far, we seem be hitting the first two criteria, but the vaccine — in animals, at least — remains too weak to prevent illness.

Experts in the field, however, say the recent progress is very promising, and that a future of universal flu vaccines may be on the horizon. “This is a leap forward compared to anything done recently,” flu expert Jon Oxford of the University of London told the BBC. “They have good animal data, not just in mice but in ferrets and monkeys too. And they have done it with the bird flu virus H5N1. It’s a very good stepping stone.”

Meanwhile, do us all a favour and keep getting your damn flu vaccine.

[MIKA27]

The Army Wants Its Missing Missile Back

A 45kg training missile fell off an Army helicopter in northern New York on Friday, and the Army still hasn’t found it.

The nonexplosive, non-motorised dummy missile fell from an AH-64 Apache on its way from Fort Drum to the New York Air Show on Friday. The 45kg, 1.6m-long dummy missile is meant to simulate the weight and appearance of a Hellfire missile for training. It has “U.S. Army” painted on the side in big block letters, which is a lesson to all of us: write your name on your things if you’re likely to lose them.

So if you live in New York and you’ve seen a missile with “U.S. Army” painted on the side, call Fort Drum’s 10th Mountain Division Operations Center. They would really like it back. [Ars Technica]

[MIKA27]

The Air Force Tees Up a Battle of the Fighter Jets

If you’re the Pentagon, how do you choose between an aging, but dependable, fighter jet and a brand new aircraft that you’re not quite sure is up to the job? You have them fight it out, naturally.

That’s essentially what the Air Force said it would do when it announced that starting in 2018, it would pit the A-10 “Warthog” against the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter in a series of tests to see if the new F-35s can adequately replace the A-10s, which the military wants to retire. A 40-year-old platform, the A-10 has been described by Martin Dempsey, the joint chiefs chairman, as “the ugliest, most beautiful aircraft on the planet.”

It may be old, but as a certain Irish actor would say, it has a very particular set of skills: The A-10 excels at providing what’s known as “close-air support,” flying low and slow to provide ideal cover protection for U.S. troops fighting in ground combat. That capability is prized not only by the military, but also by a pair of key Republican lawmakers who oversee its budget, Senators John McCain and Kelly Ayotte.

The $400 billion F-35 program has been maligned for its production delays and unprecedented expense, and while the snazzy (and stealthy) new joint strike fighters are expected to be able to do many things well once they’re fully ready around 2021, there’s concern that they won’t be able to match the A-10’s close-air support capability. McCain, who heads the Senate Armed Services Committee, and Ayotte have been campaigning to get the Defense Department to drop its plans to retire the A-10 by 2019 to save money, in large part because of those worries. As a result, the Pentagon is setting up a “comparison evaluation” to see if the F-35 can measure up. “You can’t guess at what the capability gaps are,” J. Michael Gilmore, head of the Pentagon’s testing operation, told reporters at the Pentagon. “It’s really not wise to guess. You have to go out and get data and do a thorough and rigorous evaluation.”

The House and Senate both insisted on fully funding the A-10 as part of the annual defense authorization bill this year, and Ayotte reacted skeptically to news that the Pentagon would test the two aircraft. “I will not support the divestment of the A-10 until an equally or more capable close air support aircraft achieves full operational capability,” she said in a statement.

If the Air Force’s position is that the F-35A will ultimately replace the A-10’s close air support mission, it is entirely appropriate and necessary to conduct realistic and rigorous comparison testing to determine whether the F-35A delivers on all facets of the CAS mission before divesting the A-10.

On the other hand, if the Air Force’s position is that the F-35A will not cover some parts of the A-10’s CAS mission, the onus is on the Air Force to tell Congress and our ground troops what platform will meet those close air support requirements.

McCain spokesman Dustin Walker echoed those concerns. “Comparison tests on the close-air support mission will be an important step in assessing the capability of the F-35,” he said. “However, serious concerns remain about the Air Force’s capacity to perform the close-air support mission with the oldest and smallest fleet in its history, and when less than half of its fighter squadrons are completely combat ready.”

The F-35 is not going away, of course. As James Fallows wrote in his cover feature last year, the program is “a triumph of political engineering.” McCain and Ayotte have supported it publicly. Unlike other disputes between Congress and the Pentagon over a major defense program, their support for the A-10 doesn’t appear tied to parochial concerns, like the loss of a base or jobs in their state; they aren’t advocating for producing new planes, just to keep the current ones in service.

An added concern for lawmakers is timing. The Pentagon has said that it plans to finish phasing out the A-10 by 2019, but the F-35s won’t be completely ready until 2021. McCain and Ayotte say they haven’t received adequate answers on what the military will do if the U.S. is engaged in ground combat overseas within that gap. (Both Republicans, incidentally, have said that a more aggressive and prolonged U.S. military campaign against ISIS is needed.) Gilmore told reporters that other aircraft could be included in the close-air support testing as well. Given the political loyalty to the aging A-10, the Pentagon’s battle of the fighter jets could be aimed at proving the F-35’s capability to Congress—as much as to itself.

MIKA: I personally think the A-10 is still brilliant, it was ahead of it's time and can still provide the support required.

[MIKA27]

No, Michael Shannon Won’t Have Flipper Hands In ‘Batman v Superman’

Sorry, Internet: Michael Shannon is ready to set the record straight on his involvement in Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice and the flippers-for-hands rumor that’s had comic book fans scratching their heads for weeks.

“I was in my costume, and I couldn’t use my fingers because in the sequel I have flippers instead of hands,” he told Vulture earlier this month, spawning wild speculation and mass confusion over Zod’s physiological fate.

General Zod has flippers for hands?! cried the Internet, which connected some zany dots to conclude that flipper hands must have something to do with the Doomsday storyline that may or may not play a role in Batman v Superman and the future of the Warner Bros.-DC extended movie universe.

The news came as a surprise that almost made sense. Shannon’s militant Kryptonian villain Zod, who died by way of a brutal Superman neck snap in 2013’s Man Of Steel, is glimpsed as a corpse in the trailer for the superhero face-off Batman v Superman, and Shannon was spotted cavorting with Henry Cavill on the Chicago set of the March 25, 2016 film last fall. Those tidbits fueled speculation that Batman v Superman will see Lex Luthor obtain and experiment on Zod’s body, triggering the introduction of supervillain Doomsday in the process.

But as Shannon told The Daily Beast during a recent chat about his acclaimed earthbound drama 99 Homes, even he was surprised to learn that he appears in the trailer for Batman v Superman—because he’s not really in the movie.

“I wasn’t there,” he said. “It’s a really awkward situation—I’m in the trailer for a movie that I didn’t work on.”

Shannon says he still hasn’t seen the trailer featuring Zod’s brief appearance. But he explained that Dead Zod popping up in Batman v Superman is akin to how Russell Crowe’s Jor-El lived on in Man of Steel after being killed in the obliteration of Krypton.

In Man of Steel, years after being sent to Earth during his home planet’s destruction, Superman activates Jor-El’s preserved consciousness, which counsels him in hologram form. Later, Zod encounters Jor-El and deletes his AI-enabled “ghost.”

“The thing about the whole Krypton universe, apparently, is that even when you destroy them, there are ghosts,” Shannon said. “The first [film], Jor-El is there even though he’s been dead for lord knows how long.”

Shannon says he did go in to do some voice-over work for Batman v. Superman, but didn’t suit up in costume—let alone flipper hands—to shoot scenes for the superhero sequel. “I went over and did some voice-over stuff because it’s like that ghost thing. But I don’t know if I’m supposed to say that. I get very nervous,” he said.

So what about Zod and that story about getting locked in a Porta-Potty on set?

“Somebody was asking me about this in New York and I made up some ridiculous bullshit answer about how my character Zod has flippers, and this went viral on the Internet or something and people have been asking me about that,” Shannon said with a baffled smile. “That is so obviously a complete bullshit story, right? But people took it seriously.”

Should Zack Snyder & Co. decide to bring Zod back with certain new appendages, however, Shannon could be down to don the flippers.

“Maybe they should add it, I don’t know! Maybe in Part 3, Doomsday will have flipper hands. I mean, look—nothing would make me happier than to work with Zack [snyder] again, he’s hysterical and he’s a lot of fun to work with.”

[MIKA27]

Tracing a Father’s Escape From Auschwitz

Two new books attempt to re-create the horrors of the Holocaust and to capture the generation who witnessed the camps firsthand.

In January, HBO broadcast the shattering documentary Night Will Fall, the story of a groundbreaking British government documentary from 1945 which featured exclusive footage of the liberation of Nazi concentration camps. The scenes witnessed and recorded at the time were unprecedentedly shocking—so much so that some of the veterans and retired filmmakers who shared their recollections seven decades on could not finish their accounts without breaking down. One Soviet cameraman who filmed the grim findings at Auschwitz said that “The memory of it has stayed with me all my life.”

So overwhelming were the horrors of the camps that it took years for many survivors to open up and discuss their suffering. Survivors still speak today but time isn’t on their side. Perhaps as a result, the theme for Holocaust Memorial Day in the UK this year was “Keep the Memory Alive.” Films like Night Will Fall and the grueling masterpiece Shoah will do just that. So too will Holocaust literature.

And yet there are skeptics who doubt the efficacy of the written word to faithfully represent what went on in the camps. Descriptive sentences merely fuel the imagination; better are stark visuals that instantly sear our consciousness. And once the survivors have gone, will we even trust a new generation of writers that went to Auschwitz, Treblinka and Bergen-Belsen only as visitors, not prisoners?

A recent crop of books on the Holocaust by writers who never had to endure it work hard to earn our trust. On the fiction front, Peter Matthiessen’s In Paradise and Martin Amis’s The Zone of Interest wear their considerable research astoundingly well. Similarly, two factual accounts of Nazi hunters Nazi-hunting—Thomas Harding’s Hanns and Rudolf and Nicholas Kulish and Souad Mekhennet’s The Eternal Nazi—come capped with lengthy bibliographies and acknowledgements. Documentary images might linger longer, but the impressions we form from a passage in a book can still wound and affect. If the criterion for a convincing literary re-creation of the reckless savagery of the Holocaust is prose powerful enough to jolt readers and force them to close the book at intervals to exhale, pour a stiff drink or check on their sleeping children, then the aforementioned writers triumphantly meet that requirement. In short, these books should be read.

Two new books, one fact, one fiction, continue this winning trend. Göran Rosenberg’s A Brief Stop on the Road from Auschwitz and Monika Held’s This Place Holds No Fear are born from deep, immersive study. Rosenberg has sifted books and documents to plot his father’s journey to freedom; Held has interviewed Auschwitz survivors to craft what she terms “fiction out of reality.” Both books are expertly translated—Rosenberg’s by Sarah Death, Held’s by Anne Posten—and both make for sobering but deeply rewarding reading.

Rosenberg opens by tracking an unnamed man on the last leg of his train journey to the small Swedish town of Södertälje. It is August, 1947. He is 24 years old, “yet he has already lived through so much.” He alights from the train with his two battered suitcases and checks into a guesthouse. Over a short space of time he swaps his temporary lodgings for a permanent abode and secures a job at a truck factory. Now all he needs is for his beloved Halinka to join him—a woman he was separated from on the selection ramp at Auschwitz-Birkenau.

The pair are reunited and go on to have a son, Göran, our author, and today one of Sweden’s most renowned journalists. He tells us he was to be called Gershon after his paternal grandfather but “a foreign name stands out and becomes a handicap.” So is the family’s Jewishness subtly introduced. He goes on to mention how the local bakery stocks a loaf called the SS loaf, named after the shop, “but that’s a loaf we never buy.” One winter’s day some children throw snowballs at their kitchen window and yell “Jews!” His mother’s face turns ashen—“Utterly white and utterly silent.” He is unsure of the meaning of the word, but “knows it has something to do with the shadows.”

A Brief Stop on the Road from Auschwitz touches upon Rosenberg’s childhood and blossoming self-awareness in postwar Sweden, but essentially it is his telling of his father’s story, one that chronicles the struggle to survive the Holocaust and then the struggle to live with the aftershock. The key word in the book’s title—other than its ugly last one—is “from.” For Rosenberg’s father, David, belonged to that rare minority that didn’t only go “to” Auschwitz; miraculously for him, the camp was a transit point, not a final destination. He lived to tell his tale—except he didn’t, not openly, and certainly not to his son. And so drawing on the letters between his parents during their years of separation, along with trawling records and tracing routes, Rosenberg charts his father’s journey from his native Poland to his adoptive Sweden. The road to Auschwitz, he explains, is “a collective hell shared by each and every one.” The less-traveled road from Auschwitz, he discovers, “follows the most shifting routes, veers off to the most unpredictable destinations, and comes through the most unexpected places.”

Thus Rosenberg rewinds from Södertälje in 1947 to the Łódź ghetto in 1942. His descriptions of its daily traumas make for harrowing but necessary reading. The sledgehammer-blow comes when its inhabitants are requested by their Nazi jailers to surrender the sick, the old and children under 10—20,000 “sacrifices” in eight days, after which, they are assured, “all will remain calm.” The implication behind this grotesque Aktion is clear: These people are being delivered up in order to be killed. Here and elsewhere Rosenberg weighs up the magnitude of the crime and reaches out to address his father directly: “Only misunderstanding and lack of imagination—this is how I see it—can keep your world together after September 1942.”

The ghetto is liquidated two years later and his parents are sent on transports to Auschwitz. His father avoids the gas chamber but goes on to experience hell. Later, he is sent to a slave labor camp—the lesser of two evils, and his first stop on the road from Auschwitz. But when Allied bombs fall the camp is evacuated and “hell reasserts itself.”

Rosenberg follows his father’s tortuous trajectory, visiting camps, a psychiatric hospital and many memorial sites that house mass graves. Guiding him is the fruit of his sleuth-work, years of scouring diaries, journals, archives, photographs, testimonies, “every fragment that can possibly be procured, so I don’t lose sight of you”; lighting his way are those letters from one parent to another, letters that alternate between joy and desperation.

In one letter, Rosenberg notes how his father described concentration camp survivors as “shipwrecked.” It turns out that David Rosenberg was describing himself. His journey’s end was not quite the Promised Land he envisaged and he battled to stay afloat. It is not only his private memories that grind him down. Postwar Sweden, particularly its provincial backwaters, views the incoming stateless survivors with suspicion. “We are not used to dealing with people so alien to Swedish attitudes and standards,” the local newspaper declares. Astonishingly, the authorities categorize them as “former concentration camp clients.” That suspicion sours into downright distrust when, in the 1950s, David Rosenberg is examined by a German doctor with a view to claiming compensation for Nazi persecution. He is told that he is ill because he wants reparations, not because he has survived Auschwitz. His claim is rejected and he receives nothing.

Cumulatively, these hard knocks take their toll. The finishing touches Rosenberg makes to the portrait of his father are the darkest of dabs. The result is a chiaroscuro composed of more shade than light but one that manages to be all the more revealing because of it. Rosenberg floors us with a shock conclusion and provides us with a wealth of insight on the way to it. I thought my German Wortschatz was pretty ample but one terrible word that Rosenberg cites and one that is mercifully absent from modern dictionaries and common parlance is Entjudung—“dejudification.” One of the book’s enduring images is of the residents of the town of Ludwigslust ordered by American troops to witness the atrocities committed at the nearby camp of Wöbbelin. We get this visually and on a larger scale in Night Will Fall after the liberation of Dachau: American soldiers bringing in Germans from neighboring Weimar who had been willing to make use of the cheap labor of the camp—“as long as they were beyond smelling range of it.” Rosenberg’s account of Wöbbelin feels like a thumbnail sketch in comparison, but it comes clad with rich detail and accompanied by righteous ire: “the blatant lie” of “we knew nothing and could do nothing.” Both film and book show how flimsy these pleas of mitigation were and the measures the Allies took to refocus blind eyes, impose culpability and ensure that certain images once seen would never be forgotten.

At the height of the killing, when one overloaded transport after another hurtled towards the camps and the crematoria and fire pits were continually aflame—when the annihilation was relentless—the Nazis left scant possibility for victims to become testifying survivors. Even in 1945, while on the brink of defeat, Himmler instructed camp commandants to dismantle each Lager, wipe out all traces of mass murder and make sure that no prisoner fell into enemy hands alive. But Rosenberg tells us that those who do survive “don’t know what to say to be believed.” His father was struck dumb by what he suffered. How to begin to speak out about the unspeakable?

Heiner, the “survivor of the madness” at the center of German-born Monika Held’s This Place Holds No Fear, goes from being as silent and withdrawn as David Rosenberg to an unapologetically garrulous Ancient Mariner eager to talk about his ordeal. (Primo Levi also identified with the Ancient Mariner and used a quote from Coleridge’s poem—“…till my ghastly tale is told”—for the epitaph of his final collection of essays, The Drowned and the Saved.) Arrested by the Gestapo for Communist agitation and propaganda, Heiner is interrogated and tortured and then sent on to Auschwitz, that “playground of murder in Poland.” Like David Rosenberg he escapes selection for the gas chamber but is put to work and turned into “a striped skeleton.” However, instead of physical, back-breaking toil he has the mentally arduous duty of typing up death notices all day. He buckles under the psychological strain of watching and recording wholesale murder, but steels himself and utilizes his function by memorizing each crime on the off-chance that he can survive and be called upon as a reliable witness.

Survive he does, but when he is summoned in 1964 from Vienna to testify against 20 suspected war criminals in Frankfurt, the prospect of reliving a nightmare causes him to crumple and clam up. Two men in particular make him quake: Kaduk, who beat prisoners with a club, and Klehr, who injected “patients” with a phenol-filled syringe. Lena, the court translator, encourages him to be strong in words that evoke “shipwrecked” David Rosenberg: “Do you know what a wreck is?” she asks him. “A wreck is a ‘drifting object’ that has become unusable due to decay or damage. Decay certainly doesn’t apply to you.”

As if to prove it, Lena falls for Heiner, and the pair settle down together and see to what degree love can heal trauma. To begin with it seems as if their 10-year age gap will be the biggest stumbling block, but Lena comes to realize that Heiner is constantly haunted by his demons. This is a man who keeps a mustard jar full of ground bones from victims at Birkenau. For him it is no worse than living with yellowed photos of dead relatives: “Both are mementoes of people that don’t exist anymore.” And yet slowly she learns to understand his foibles, accommodate his pain and let him rant and wail whenever an innocuous occurrence triggers an appalling memory.

Held impresses with a segment that sees Heiner and Lena visiting Poland in the 1980s. The country is under martial law and Heiner’s old Polish Resistance friends are still fighting for democratic change but this time as supporters of Solidarity. The crux of the trip is a return to Auschwitz, “the world’s biggest graveyard,” where Heiner can confront his past and test the limits of Lena’s comprehension. Held intercalates Heiner’s pilgrimage and the flashbacks to his early years with snapshots of the consequences of his time in the camp: sleepless nights, ruined relationships, and an unassuaged urge to lose himself in Holocaust studies and impress on anyone within earshot anecdotes, images and tales. A fellow survivor asks Lena what it is like living with “one of us.” “What do you think it’s like?” she answers. “It’s like living with a singer who can’t stop singing the song of his life. He sings it in the morning, he sings it at noon and in the afternoon, evening, and night. It has many verses. You have to like the song, or you’ll go crazy.”

Held serves up many horrors, including a three-page day-by-day breakdown of the steady deterioration of a group of men thrown into a starvation cell. Censuring Held for a display of gratuitous violence would be pointless: to render any portrayal of the Holocaust authentic requires amplifying horror, not muffling it. However, Held judiciously tempers the gloom by rotating perspectives and flitting backwards and forwards through time. There is relief in one riveting scene in which a Nazi Section Leader confides to Heiner that he can’t send 360,000 Hungarian Jews to the gas chamber—and then sets a pistol on the table and asks Heiner to shoot him.

Held’s court case against Heiner’s tormentors is equally gripping, with each former SS-man’s pleas (“We’re the victims—we did what had to be done. We were soldiers under orders”) stunning us with their simultaneous hollow ring and audacious clang. This, together with the quick excuses spouted by the good burghers around Dachau and Wöbbelin, reminds us that productive Holocaust study not only highlights wrongdoing, it exposes wrongdoers.

Both Rosenberg and Held have delved into the past so as to exhibit human depravity and propagate facts, stories and memories. Their accounts may not feel as authentic as those of Primo Levi, Elie Wiesel, or Imre Kertész, but surely it is better to have them than not at all. As Held’s Lena is told, “One day the singer will forget the song of his life, and then he’ll stop singing.” Like all worthy Holocaust literature, these fine books should, with luck, further awareness and stymie amnesia, indifference and denial. “What is done cannot be undone,” wrote Anne Frank in one of the most influential of all Holocaust books, “but one can prevent it happening again.”

[MIKA27]

BMW M4 GTS COUPE CONCEPT

The typical BMW coupe doesn’t have a spectacular design, and mostly feels expected, ordinary. But the company’s M division has stepped their game up with a new concept car, the BMW M4 GTS coupe.

Immediately noticeable about the M4 GTS concept is its injection of color, sporting a cool metallic Dark Gray with Acid Orange details like rims and trim. Despite its aggressive look, which includes a manually adjustable front splitter and a rear wing, the M4 GTS is still entirely road-legal. It uses a carbon fiber-reinforced hood that lowers the car’s weight and center of gravity. Although the changes in its design are relatively small, they give the typical BMW coupe an entirely new aura. It features a water injection system which offers an output advantage of an added 10 percent in gains over its predecessor. The M4 GTS is more race-ready than the high-performance coupe it launched last year.

[MIKA27]

HANDHELD NINTENDO EMULATOR SYSTEM BY LOVE HULTEN

You won’t find a system with a better catalog of games than the original Nintendo Entertainment System. While the scope of games pales in comparison to today’s games, the sheer number of titles that the NES had has still gone unmatched by today’s consoles. Now, you can bring those titles with you on the go with the PE358 NES Handheld Emulator System by Love Hulten.

This pocket sized portable system takes its inspiration from the Game Boy Advance. It folds in half like a 3DS, and measures just 8 x 8 x 4cm. It’s built on Raspberry Pi A+, with software that allows you to play an unlimited number of NES roms. Its shell is made from American walnut. The tension of the hinge can be adjusted with a small screwdriver. There’s no word on whether or not this gem will ever go on sale, but we’d imagine there’d be some sort of legal battle over the inclusion of so many roms.

[MIKA27]

KeySmart – A Better Way to Carry Your Keys

When your keys announce your entrance minutes before you walk in the room, you have a mess on your hands. Ditch the jangling keychain that feels so uncomfortable in your pocket and get KeySmart. The slim key organizer is similar in design to a Swiss Army knife, with the keys tucked away in the handle when not in use. Each comes with one expander to allow KeySmart to hold up to 10 of your keys (9 if you use the included loop for a car key fob). Each is handmade in the USA. [Purchase]

[MIKA27]

CONNECTABLE POD TENTS

POD Tents is a revolutionary camping system that allows you to build a social community of tents using interconnected walkways! Choose from two tent sizes, the 8-person Maxi, or the 4-person Mini, and add to it as you need to, with many possible configurations. The system is designed to be completely modular, enabling you to create a self-contained tent village connected by zip-together tunnels.

[MIKA27]

SAVER EMERGENCY BREATH SYSTEM

Extinguishers are the first thing you want if a fire breaks out. The Saver Emergency Breath System is the second. This home safety device is designed to keep you safe from smoke inhalation in the event of a fire, using a triple filter system to remove smoke, dust, and toxic gases from the air while turning carbon monoxide into breathable carbon dioxide. Saver comes in a 2-person portable set or 4-person wall-mounted set, and also includes a flashlight and built-in alarm to help alert first

[MIKA27]

WHISTLEPIG OLD WORLD RYE WHISKEY

If there's one thing we know about WhistlePig, it's that they select some of the best rye whiskey barrels around. It turns out they have a knack for experimentation as well, as evidenced in their award winning Old World Rye Whiskey. The 12-year-old expression is a blend of ryes finished in French Sauternes, Madeira and Port casks, creating a smooth, flavorful experience that is truly unique. It took home the Double Gold Award for best rye at the 2015 San Francisco World Spirits Competition and is a must for all rye whiskey fans.

[MIKA27]

ION USB TURNTABLE & CASSETTE PLAYER

There are better cassette players, and there are better turntables. But none of them can match the versatility of the Ion Duo Deck USB Turntable & Cassette Player. This highly portable rig can playback your mixtapes and the vinyl your dad used to make them, with built-in speakers making it an all-in-one affair. Of course there's a output jack if you want to crank it up with external speakers or listen privately through headphones, and thanks to the included software, you can hook it up to your computer and rip both formats straight to your digital library.

[MIKA27]

Thirty Years Ago, the Night Stalker Was Captured By An Angry Mob

His name was Richard Ramirez, but at the time of his August 1985 capture, most knew him only as the “Night Stalker,” the rapist and murderer who’d been terrorizing California for two years. When a fingerprint outed his identity, his photograph was widely circulated—and his days of killing became perilously numbered.

He was caught on Hubbard Street in East Los Angeles, which turned out to be exactly the wrong place for him to try and steal a car. That desperate act, according to a report in Ramirez’s hometown paper, the El Paso Times, was a direct result of his mug shot’s sudden publicity push; he’d literally glimpsed his own face on the cover of a newspaper at a corner store. His instinct was to flee, by any means necessary, but the crowd in pursuit had other ideas.

“It seemed like alert citizens were reporting the suspect every step of the way,” Police Cmdr. William Booth said.

At one point, Ramirez ran through back yards, where at least one man struck him with barbecue utensils, Booth said.

As Ramirez ran, neighbors emerged from their homes and joined in the fight, police said.

As the crowd beat Ramirez, witnesses said, he shouted, in Spanish: “It’s me! It’s me! It’s me! I’m lucky the cops caught me.”

Deputy Sam Jones of the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department said Ramirez was not hurt badly, although he did suffer head wounds and was treated by a fire department paramedic at the scene.

In 2013, when Ramirez died of cancer after spending years on death row, the Los Angeles Times published a look back at the neighborhood that tapped into a sort of Wild West sense of justice to nab one of America’s most feared criminals.

The residents were alerted to trouble by the screams of a woman whom Ramirez was attempting to carjack; once they realized who the would-be thief was, anger turned to fury:

“I ran to defend her and he told me, ‘Don’t get closer or I’ll shoot you.’ I didn’t see a gun so I opened the door and pulled him out of the car,” [Jose Burgoin] recalled. Manuel De La Torre, showed up with a steel rod to defend his wife; he smashed Ramirez on the head, sending him running. Burgoin yelled for his two sons, who had come out of the home after hearing the commotion, to not let him escape.

Julio Burgoin, 45, said he remembered chasing Ramirez and with his brother bringing him down and making him sit on the curb. The neighbors made sure Ramirez didn’t get up, though he begged them to let him go, claiming that some “guys” were chasing him.

“He was saying, ‘Hey, let me go, c’mon, let me go,’” Julio Burgoin said. “I said, ‘No, you’re not going anywhere.’”

It was only moments later that they realized who they had captured. “People started coming out and saying that’s the killer, but in Spanish. ‘El maton, el maton!’”

Ramirez survived that major beatdown (ironically, he was rescued by police officers) to stand trial, where he was sentenced to death after being convicted of a string of brutal offenses, including 13 murders. As the New York Times reported in his June 2013 obituary:

Most of the killings were committed before dawn during residential burglaries in Los Angeles County, and all were markedly coldblooded, involving savage beatings, mutilations and sexual assaults.

His weapons included guns, knives and hammers, and his victims were both men and women, ranging from a 6-year-old to octogenarians.

During his trial, he famously flashed a pentagram he’d drawn on his palm, echoing the Satanic symbols he’d scrawled at some of his crime scenes and only adding to his notoriety. According to the Los Angeles Times, Hubbard Street’s longtime residents who’d witnessed (or participated in) his capture decades prior greeted the news of his death with mixed feelings:

“I shouldn’t say I’m happy, which would be bad. But he caused a lot of harm to a lot of people, and he was not tried for all the murders he committed,” [Reyna Pinon] said. “To me, he had a better death than all those people whose lives he took.”

[MIKA27]

Soviet Bombers And Scythian Mummies: The Archaeology Uncovered By Climate Change

In Poland, severe drought has revealed the remains of a Soviet fighter plane that went down in 1945. It’s far from the first (or last) archaeological site that climate change is revealing, in some cases for the first time in millennia.

Melting glaciers, thawing permafrost, and historic droughts are all playing a part in some of the most remarkable archaeological discoveries of the last few years. It’s a bittersweet phenomenon — that, as our planet changes, new pieces of our past will be revealed while other will decay.

In an AP story this week, we learn of two finds that have surfaced after a drought reduced Poland’s Vistula River and its tributaries to the lowest waterline since measurements were first recorded. In Warsaw, the drought has revealed shards of Jewish tombstones in the Vistula that were removed — by the hundreds of thousands — and used to “reinforce its banks” during the 19th century:

Jonny Daniels, who runs a foundation called “From the Depths”, holds a tombstone found in the Vistula

Meanwhile, one of the river’s tributaries has revealed a Soviet war plane that crashed there in 1945, as the AP explains:

The head of the museum, Zdzislaw Leszczynski, told The Associated Press that parts of Soviet uniforms, a parachute, a sheepskin coat collar, parts of boots, a pilot’s TT pistol and radio equipment were found, along with a lot of heavy ammunition. The inscriptions on the control panel and the radio equipment are in Cyrillic.

Leszczynski said, according to witnesses, the plane was hit while flying low in January 1945 and crashed through the thick ice into the river. At the time, the German army was retreating toward Berlin before the Red Army’s advance.

While remarkable, these are far from the first archaeological finds that have been revealed by climate change and extreme weather.

A Warmer Planet With Less Ice…

Take the slow but steady heating up of our planet, which has contributed to a number of high-profile finds from mummies to Stone Age tools. For example, over the past two decades climate change has dramatically reduced the amount of ice cover in traditionally frozen parts of North America — in many cases, opening up sites that have been literally frozen in time. Archaeologists in the Yukon have uncovered dozens of tools, weapons, and even clothing amongst the remains of ice patches that have stayed frozen year-around for as long as 5000 years, as MacLean’s reported last year.

Now that those patches are melting, the relics of this ancient way of life are slowly being revealed: According to one study, more than 200 artefacts have been uncovered from 43 melting patches in the past 20 years. Among the finds are bows and many, many arrows — as the Yukon Ice Patch Project explains, the uncovered evidence has helped further our knowledge of when bow-and-arrow technology become widely used in North America.

Likewise, in Siberia, where permafrost normally preserves organic material, unprecedented warmth is thawing burial mounts from a lost nomadic civilisation — the Scythians. An archaeologist named Hermann Parzinger has had to work quickly to excavate their burial mounds, revealing the remarkably preserved bodies thanks to the ice. Now, it’s a race against the climate, as Discover Magazine explained a few years ago:

As the permafrost thaws, the ice that has preserved the Scythian mummies for so many centuries will thaw too. In the Olon-Kurin-Gol grave, the ice that once crushed the mummy against the roof of the burial chamber had receded nine inches by the time the chamber was opened. Within a few decades, the ice lenses may be completely gone. “Right now we’re facing a rescue archaeology situation,” Parzinger says. “It’s hard to say how much longer these graves will be there.”

A Scythian mummy in the Martin Gropius Bau Museum in Berlin.

… And More Drought

But not every instance of extreme weather has archaeologists worried — some have rejoiced at the opportunity to study formerly inaccessible sites. In Iraq, an area that had been flooded to create a man-made reservoir was dried up for the first time in decades during a severe drought in 2009. NPR reported:

They ran the gamut of civilizations — from 3,000 B.C. to the Sumerian and Roman periods. Ancient Jewish settlements were also submerged in the area. But because of the receding waters, Ratib has been able to access some sites for the first time — including, for instance, a cliff with a series of pre-Christian tombs carved into its face.

Still, more often than not, our changing climate poses a huge hurdle for the people trying to study our past. After all, we’re living in the Anthropocene: No longer just scattering evidence of our existence on the Earth, but changing the very Earth itself.