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

[MIKA27]

Humans Have Killed Off One Less Species Than Originally Thought

As a species, humans are pretty awful for the rest of the things living on this planet. But as it turns out you can take one less creature off the extinction list: Allonautilus scrobiculatus isn’t all gone, just quite hard to find.

Lovingly known as the ‘fuzzy nautilus‘ by the scientist who discovered it, Peter Ward, it lives near reefs, on a small island off Papua New Guinea. Ward discovered the species in 1984. Nautili are some of the oldest animals still alive today, but their colourful shells make them attractive to hunters, who kill them to sell as souvenirs.

Since the original discovery, no-one had laid eyes on Allonautilus scrobiculatus, causing concern that the species had been over-fished to extinction. But on a series of trips back to the area, Ward and his team used high-speed underwater cameras, running day and night, to capture a glimpse of the fuzzy, slimy creatures.

Later, they managed to capture specimens and bring them to the surface for photographing and sampling — before returning them to the colder waters down below. The team also attached tracking devices, which let them monitor their movements, and build up a better picture of the nautili’s behaviour and habits.

Ward’s full write-up — along with beautiful photos — is over on National Geographic.

[MIKA27]

Taking One Of The World's Most Insane Drift Cars Into The Heart Of New York Is Certified Insanity

New York City offers some of the worst driving in the world. The roads suck, the traffic blows and there are pretty much no rules. So clearly the smartest thing to do is see if you can thread the vehicular needle with an insane, street-legal, 500-horsepower HP Scion FR-S around those tiny, lawless NYC streets.

Formula Drift driver, Ryan Tuerck teamed up with Jalopnik to see if his bonkers drift practice car could cut it on the tiny NYC roads.

The car has no windows, no air-con, runs the risk of overheating and screams like a banshee with a turbo-charger. It’s a stressful watch.

[MIKA27]

Land Rover Has Come Up With A Way To Make Trailers Invisible

Driving with a trailer in tow leaves with you a gigantic blind spot directly behind your vehicle. So to make it easier to keep an eye on traffic following you, Land Rover has come up with a way to make trailers appear to be transparent using strategically placed cameras.

The system augments a Land Rover’s existing rear-view backup camera, as well as the cameras on the side mirrors, with yet another wireless camera that can be mounted to the back of whatever a vehicle is towing; be it a horse trailer, a camper, or even a big U-Haul box.

The footage from all of these cameras is intelligently combined into a single feed that’s provided to drivers through an LCD rear-view mirror. Not only are they able to see vehicles and other traffic behind them, they also get a ghosted view of the trailer they’re towing so they can ensure the cargo is still safe.

The software developed for the new system also ensures that the images being fed to the driver aren’t warped or distorted, even though they’re all being captured at different angles and varying distances from the vehicles. This ensures the driver has an accurate picture of what’s going on around a vehicle, so making lane changes, or even backing up, is a lot safer with a trailer attached.

[MIKA27]

Mad Genius Creates A Crazy Drone Flying Machine Using 54 Propellers

Man can’t fly, but with the help of 54 drone propellers and an umbrella to protect the ol’ noggin, man can kind of fly. This mad genius made what he calls, The Swarm, which is essentially a lawn chair strapped to some metal bars and 54 counter-rotation propellers and six grouped control channels with Hobbyking stabilisation that can achieve flight.

It’s a manned super drone! And in these test flights it looks like a crazy-fun ride. Supposedly it can lift over 160kg into the air. I don’t know about that because it totally looks like it’s at the mercy of the wind.

[MIKA27]

Hideo Kojima Says Goodbye To Metal Gear Solid, And It's A Tear-Jerker

It starts slow, and feels a little self-indulgent. But this Metal Gear Solid V debriefing ends with as something of a genuine tear-jerker. Sorta like the games themselves.

It’s funny as I was watching this I felt a little frustrated. This 10 minute video was essentially a montage of people telling Hideo Kojima how great he was, interspersed with a few interesting quote from Kojima himself. But it ends with a visit to a family of a long-time Metal Gear Solid fan and suddenly you get a sense of real humility.

This is a great watch.

[MIKA27]

The Russian Town Where Startling Pollution Is a Way of Life

THE TREES AND hillsides surrounding the Russian town of Karabash are burned and lifeless. The river is dead, its water orange and slimy, and the lake has the reddish hue of too much copper and iron. Most ominous of all, a mountain of black slag more than a mile long splits the town, filling the air with suffocating dust when the wind blows.

Pierpaolo Mittica has spent four years photographing some of the planet’s most polluted locales, and even he was surprised by what he found in this town about 100 miles north of Kazakhstan. “I’ve never in my life seen a place like Karabash, where the pollution is so evident and visible all around you,” he says. “It looks like a post-apocalyptic movie.”

The town was first settled in 1822 by gold miners, and mining has been its primary industry ever since. Karabash Copper Smelting Works opened in 1910 and has in the century since filled the air, water and ground with toxins. “It’s one of the worst ecological disasters made by humans,” says Mittica.

Karabash resident Tatiana explains the impossibility to breathe when the Copper smelting plant is operating

He documented the town as part of Living Toxic, an ongoing project investigating environmental catastrophes. He’s photographed Fukushima; Mayak-57, the site of several nuclear disasters; and the Russian steel town ofMagnitogorsk. “I wanted to focus on Karabash because it’s a good example of how we can destroy the life of the ecosystem and of living beings inhabiting it,” he says.

Pollution has spawned horrific health problems among the town’s 13,000 inhabitants. In 1994, a health survey by the provincial government found that children were abnormally stunted and suffered three times as many birth defects as children elsewhere. Two years later, Russia’s Ministry for the Environment declared the town an ecological disaster zone. Mittica often experienced difficulty breathing and a burning sensation in his eyes, skin and throat when working near the smelting plant. “The cough was a constant company,” he says.

Chilsren play in the towns abandoned buildings

The plant shut down in the late 1980s, but was puffing away again by 1998 after pressure from unemployed townspeople. The Russia Copper Company bought the plant in the early 2000s and is said to have cleaned things up, but a recent report says the company has been fined for emissions.

Part of a nearby forest completely burned by chemical poisoning

It’s no surprise people didn’t want Mittica poking around. He’d been there three days before he and others with him were arrested, detained, and then told to leave town. That was the end of his trip, but to Mittica, the censorship makes it especially important that he highlight the plight of the region. “It’s not a well known story,” he says, “and it’s important to keep the attention of the public, NGOs and governments on those forgotten stories.”

The copper plant looms in the distance while toxic waste festers not far away

Forests, rivers and the soil all have an orange tint because of the residues from the processing of copper and iron

[MIKA27]

What Was This Massive, Eerie UFO Seen Over the North Pacific?

Among the various recollections of encounters with unexplained aerial phenomena (UAP) that have been presented over the years, perhaps some of the most compelling, and interesting, are those told by members of active or former members of military and other official agencies. Though a general air of “secrecy” is often appended to such circumstances within the UFO literature, often the witnesses to such events are as intrigued or confused by what they have seen, or perhaps as frightened by it as the average civilian.

Nonetheless, the knowledge of various aircraft and other official operations these individuals have may, at times, grant them certain potential advantages in their assessment of the circumstances, which the average civilian observer may be lacking. Thus, one of the most compelling descriptions of UAP to have been personally shared with me came to my attention in the Autumn of 2009, when a man named Steven told me a story that has truly stood out among other similar reports I’ve read.

Johnston Island

His story began in the summer of 1988, when he had been stationed on an atoll in the North Pacific called Johnston Island. This location had served previously in a variety of US Air Force operations, which included being the launch site for the first operational ballistic missile in the United States arsenal, the PGM-17 Thor. This had been one of three missiles the Air Force used to launch live nuclear weapons during tests conducted in the early 1960s.

“There was a small security force of military police out there, along with a lot of civilians,” Steven told me, noting that there had been approximately 1,000 people total on the island while he was stationed there, comprised of Army and Air Force military personnel.

“We did anywhere between 12 and 24 hour shifts out there, and I was a downrange Security Police Officer for the Army-Military Police Corps. We saw a lot of strange things out there.”

One morning in July of 1988, Steven and a small group of other officers were coming back from a 24-hour shift on the downrange area of the island, which at the time housed a maximum-security prison. As the party drove eastbound, at some point one of the officers noticed a small, metallic sphere-shaped object in the sky above them, which appeared to be drifting slightly to the north.

Anyone attempting to fly into the airspace above would easily be spotted on surface or air radar, and Steven and the others knew that anything appearing out-of-the-ordinary was to be reported to their superiors; if a situation ever became a matter of defense, they could rely on the support of both the Navy and the Air Force present on the island. Steven and his crew began communicating with others on the island via radio, and were told that radar operators were unable to spot the object.

“Alpha One jumped on the radio,” Steven told me, “and says he’s got a two-star sitting there. He told us we’d better find this thing because the two of them were looking at it also.” In other words, the Base Commander on duty had apparently been entertaining a two-star retired general that morning at his house on the island, and while breakfasting on the Commander’s outdoor deck, had also observed the object.

Steven and his crew watched as the object began to descend slowly, during which time no sounds appeared to be associated with the object.

In Steven’s own words:

“The object got bigger, and bigger, and bigger. The best way I can describe it to you is if you were standing underneath a piece of glass—a large piece of glass—and someone had a bottle of black ink, and they poured it slowly onto the glass you were standing underneath. That’s what this thing ended up looking like. As the light got brighter, this thing got blacker, and bigger. When you live on [an island] that’s two miles long, you really start to appreciate the size of things.”

Steven and the others were growing concerned that the massive object above them may have actually been attempting to land on the island. However, with the object being so large, this would have presented obvious problems for all of the personnel gathered below, which had grown from being Steven and his small group, to a number of individuals around the base. As the object loomed overhead, radio communications fell silent, and Steven described the eerie silence as he and the others stationed on the island watched the phantom aircraft above them in silence.

As the object filled the sky above them, Steven also said there was a nearly palpable scent that filled the air as the object descended. “You could almost taste it. The best thing I could use to describe it would be like if you were in your shower with salty, steamy water vapor that was ionized; I could smell the ozone like when you electrocute something, or when something burns and shorts out.”

As Steven and the others described watching this enormous object, the unthinkable then occurred, just as the sun rose over the horizon in the distance:

“Then, if this wasn’t weird enough already, the moment the sun cracked the horizon, this thing vanished. And I don’t mean it flew away; I don’t mean it went left or right. This thing just wasn’t there anymore!” Steven said that according to the Coast Guard Station who provided weather for the island, the cloud deck was at 10,000 feet that morning. “We could see the cloud deck behind it where we couldn’t see anything before. The shadow that had been over the island was no longer there, either. This thing didn’t fly anywhere else. It just went… it disappeared.”

Steven was adamant that the object he observed had not been any apparent mirage or trick of light, and that all who observed it felt that a real, tangible craft of some kind had been descending over the island that morning.

He concluded that the object, apparently some variety of aircraft capable of advanced cloaking technology, may have experienced a malfunction that allowed he and the others to see it:

“The thing I really want to say about this is that I think all technology—no matter how advanced—that is built by any being, entity, or anything with some degree of intelligence, has its limitations and the potential for failure. And I think that whatever this thing was—whatever “they” are—I think we witnessed a malfunction. I think something went wrong with this thing’s technology for a moment, and it was at the wrong time at the wrong place for itself, and the right time and the right place for us. It’s a wild assumption—as wild as the story itself—but I think we actually witnessed a malfunction of something’s technology, and if you think about it, even if they’re a million years ahead of us, at some point things break, or mistakes are made, so I really think we were at the right place and the right time to see this. They are out there, and they’re huge. Some of these things are enormous.”

What was the aircraft Steven and the others observed, and had its presence that morning in July of 1988 indicated an interest it, or perhaps its occupants, had with regard to the location of Johnston Atoll? Or, had the strange appearance, and subsequent vanishing act, merely been a case of “right place at the right time”?

[MIKA27]

No, Idris Elba Is Not Too ‘Street’ for James Bond

The author of an upcoming James Bond book thinks Elba is too “street” (read: black) to play the legendary superspy. Here’s why he’s wrong.

Today in What Kind of F**kery Is This, the author of an upcoming James Bond book, Anthony Horowitz, came under fire for shooting down the possibility of fan favorite Idris Elba as Bond, saying Elba was “too street” to play the superspy. Horowitz has since apologized, saying “street” was on his mind because of Elba’s portrayal of the title character in Luther.

But even if it’s only Luther and not Idris Elba who is “street” in Horowitz’s eyes, that criticism is a particularly strange choice for Horowitz, given Bond’s origins, the success of the current Bond as played by Daniel Craig, and Elba’s popularity among Bond fans of all stripes—including actress Jessica Chastain, who tweeted today to show her support.

James Bond is one of the most malleable characters in Western pop culture—that you can even call Anthony Horowitz a “James Bond author” is a sign of how much the character bends to the prevailing wind.

Bond was created by Ian Fleming in 1953; following Fleming’s death in 1964, the series was continued by a chain of writers, each hoping to make their mark on the Bond mythos. Just as there has been turnover from Bond actor to Bond actor, there has been turnover from Bond author to Bond author. Bond is not an enigma so much as he’s an amoeba, ready to change form according to the needs of his environment. Any man could be Bond—that’s the key to his appeal and that’s why the series has survived for over half a century. The few concrete and unchangeable pillars of his personality—he’s an orphan and he went to Britain’s prestigious boy’s school, Eton—present a wealth of possibilities. If Horowitz can’t picture Bond as someone who is “street,” it only shows his own lack of imagination…and maybe a lack of experience with boarding schools.

Imagination is at the heart of this issue because Bond is a fantasy of masculinity and so his shape shifts depending whose fantasy he is representing. Sean Connery, who played Bond in films throughout most of the ‘60s, was the man’s man. With his Scottish brogue and his rakish manner, he could have been described as “street.” Roger Moore was an aristocratic fantasy—which is probably why he hasn’t lingered in the hearts of the public. Craig is in many ways a return to Connery’s fight-dirty smooth talker, but he plays Bond with some emotional baggage and is a bit more sexually ambiguous than previous iterations, more verse top than piggish stud.

Personally, Elba is my favorite of the many names being tossed into the ring as contenders for the next Bond because he brings richness to the screen. He doesn’t speak with the kind of British boarding school accent that actors like Eddie Redmayne have ridden to success in the States. The British film industry is increasingly dominated by the upper class—a fact most notably pointed out by actor James McAvoy, who called for Britain to do more to support the arts for children of lower class backgrounds. Amid a sea of trust fund legacies like Benedict Cumberbatch, Elba represents a more egalitarian presence.

But the reason that people have latched onto Elba—and not necessarily onto David Oyelowo, another well-respected black actor who was just announced as the voice of Bond in a new audiobook—is that Elba’s bearing is regal. He’s my favorite possibility for the new Bond, but if you were going to talk me out of it, you’d be better off calling him too mature for Bond than you would be calling him too “street.” Elba might not read as part of the entitled class, but the way that he reads onscreen could hardly be described as common man. Physically, he’d be the first Bond to match Sean Connery for sheer size, but it’s his presence—the deep voice he almost never raises, his direct gaze, his walk—that seals the deal.

When you look at Idris Elba, what you see is power. That’s sexy, that’s cinematic, and that’s what would be new about an Elba Bond.

But let’s not pretend that anyone who shoots down Idris Elba as James Bond has considered anything past his skin color. We’ve heard it all before—thug, savage, street, they’re all the same, just euphemisms for saying black will get you in trouble. Anthony Horowitz might claim he was thinking of Luther, but I don’t remember anyone complaining about Daniel Craig being too street when he was cast as Bond, despite his history of playing hustlers in movies like Layer Cake.

Just once I wish these criticisms would come honestly—“I don’t see Bond as black”—so we don’t have to do this dumb dance, pretending to argue about things like accents when what we’re really talking about is white content creators’ inability to push their imaginations beyond a man’s race to see his character. The problem’s not Idris, and it’s not Bond either. It’s you.

[MIKA27]

GROVEMADE KEY RING

Portland-based workshop Grovemade have added a new item to their EDC collection, the sleekGrovemade Key Ring. Available in a choice of stainless steel or classic brass, the rugged key rings are nearly indestructible and stand up to the harshest wear and tear. Designed to hook quickly and firmly onto your belt loop, each ring features a inner loop that works as a handy bottle opener. Available in a choice of three colors, and includes a stainless steel braided cable.

[MIKA27]

Matt Damon says Bourne 5 is set in “post-Snowden world”

Matt Damon is soon to return to the Bourne franchise, having sat out the Jeremy Renner-starring Legacy, and according to the star, the fifth film in the series will be inspired by recent real-world happenings. As Damon explained to BuzzFeed, the Edward Snowden affair proved to be the inspiration he and director Paul Greengrass were looking for, with the events of 2013 having a significant influence on the plot of the new film.

“Without giving too much of it away, it’s Bourne through an austerity-riddled Europe and in a post-Snowden world,” explains Damon. “It seems like enough has changed, you know? There are all these kinds of arguments about spying and civil liberties and the nature of democracy.”

As is traditional with the Bourne movies, this latest outing will span various global locations, with even the choice of setting having a political context. “We’re starting in Greece, you know, the beginning of democracy,” explains Damon. “And the movie ends in Las Vegas, the most grotesque incarnation…” Bourne 5 will open in the UK and US on June 29, 2016.

[MIKA27]

Can You Solve This Classic Riddle About Crossing A Bridge?

Riddles can be fun, but they can also be really stressful when you start to feel your decently wrinkled brain shrivel into a prune. But hey! Tease the brain and the satisfaction of solving it outweighs the unnecessary stress added to your life, right? Right! Here’s the classic bridge riddle in animated form from Ted-Ed. How can you get a group of people across a bridge in a certain amount of time?

The set up is this: There are four people who need to get to the other side of the bridge, each with their own time needed to get across said bridge. Even worse, the bridge can only support two of them for each trip (and the person with the longer time is counted when travelling in the pair). Oh and it’s like dark and there is only one torch, so a person who has crossed the bridge has to come back for a return trip in order to lead another person across once again. See? Riddles are “fun”.

Person A can get across in one minute, Person B does it in two minutes, Person C crosses in five, and slowpoke sloth human needs 10 minutes. You need to get everybody to the other side in under 17 minutes. How do you do it? Watch the video to find out. Or search your quickly pruning brain for memories on how to do this when it was like a VCE question or something.

[MIKA27]

Moto 360 (2015): Smarter, Sleeker And More Compelling Than Ever

You wanted more Moto 360, and Motorola definitely listened. Instead of releasing a single update to the iconic, round Android Wear smartwatch, Moto has released three, and they’re all amazing.

The new Moto 360 comes in 46mm and 42mm, a separate women’s collection (pictured above), and the Moto Sport collection (which we’ve already heard so much about.)

It features a 1.2GHz Qualcomm Snapdragon 400 processor, 512MB of RAM, 4GB of internal storage and a 300mAh battery. The screen is a 1.37-inch LCD with a resolution of 360×325. It’s pretty slim at just 11.4mm, and features everything from wireless charging through to a Gyroscope, accelerometer, optical heart rate monitor, haptics engine, and ambient light sensor. The whole thing is also IP67 water- and dust-resistant.

The Sport model is a little different. It features a GPS tracking capabilities and has a screen configured for outdoor readability.

Unfortunately for some, the 360 still comes with the so-called “flat tyre”: a flat panel of glass at the bottom of the bezel which many took objection to with the last model.

The watches come in mens and womens sizes: men get two sizes of Moto 360 to choose from, between the 42mm and 46mm cases with a choice between 20mm and 22mm bands respectively. Women, however, only get the one choice of watch with a 42mm case and 16mm band. For what it’s worth, that 46mm mens case is $US50 more expensive than the standard 42mm sizing. The 46mm also comes with a 400mAh batter as opposed to the 300mAh.

Motorola is pushing the new 360 smartwatch as a heavily customisable affair, which of course is dependent on the Moto Maker suite. Moto Maker is a product picker that allows you to change everything from the band, through to the case size you want, right down to whether or not you want chamfered edges on your bezel.

The real kicker here is that the new Moto 360 isn’t just for Android users anymore. Thanks to an announcement by Google earlier on this week, iPhone users will be able to take advantage of what is now a cross-platform Android smartwatch. Look out, Apple Watch.

Moto Maker isn’t available in Australia yet, but we’re told (pretty consistently) that it’s coming Down Under eventually.

The new Moto 360 starts at $US299.99. We’ll keep you posted with Australian prices and release dates.

[MIKA27]

A Hidden Figure In A Famous Rembrandt Has Been Uncovered Using X-Rays

Rembrandt’s An Old Man in Military Costume is a 380-year-old masterpiece with a secret. Beneath the famous figure in the feathered cap hides a much younger man, one that researchers are uncovering in colour using advanced x-ray technology.

Scientists first caught whiff of the hidden figure when scanning the painting with x-rays in 1968. But at the time, our most sophisticated imaging technologies couldn’t see past the painting’s upper coats, and we only had the sketchiest idea of what that mystery person looked like. Over the past few years, a team of researchers at the Getty Conservation Institute has revisited the iconic Rembrandt, which lives at the Getty Museum, using a newer tool known as macro-x-ray fluorescence (macro-XRF). With macro-XRF, scientists can scan a painting’s chemical composition at higher resolutions than ever before, matching specific elements to paint colours. Lead, for instance, indicates the presence of white, copper is associated with blues and greens, and mercury means red.

X-ray scans of An Old Man in Military Costume. Image on the right is inverted to highlight the hidden figure

Best of all, the entire analysis can be done on site without moving (and potentially damaging) a fragile piece of work.

The image up top, published today in Applied Physics A, is the best reconstruction to date of the young man who lurks in the background of Rembrandt’s famous painting. He’s got brownish hair, a collar and an olive cloak, and he’s oriented 180 degrees from the old man in military attire. According to The Getty Iris,museum curator Anne Woollet suspects this figure is an earlier character study by Rembrandt, a painter who was known to frequently reuse his canvases and wood panels.

As scientists continue to study the work, they hope to reconstruct the mystery figure’s clothing in more detail and explore how the colours in the final painting have changed over time. Me, I’m just waiting for x-ray goggles to become a thing so I can buy a pair and take a trip Met. There could be an entire world of hidden art to explore!

[MIKA27]

YAMAHA XJ900R SECA BY HAGEMAN MC

The Yamaha XJ900R Seca is a bit of a unicorn in the USA, it was only imported by Yamaha for one year in 1983, before its relatively low sales numbers forced the Japanese manufacturer to pull it from the market. There were a few reasons for the dismal sales, Yamaha was competing directly with the Kawasaki GPz1100, the Suzuki GS1100E, and the Honda CB1100F – all larger capacity motorcycles and all chain driven as opposed to the shaft used on the XJ900.

Despite the unpopularity of the shaft drive used on the Yamaha, it has been praised by many motorcycle journalists and owners over the years since its introduction. It offers almost entirely maintenance free riding and eliminates the chance of the chain snapping and leaving the rider stranded. It also eliminates the chance of the chain popping off the rear sprocket and jamming against the hub, which is something I never would have even considered a possibility until it happened to me in Hong Kong a couple of years ago.

Power was rated as 97 hp and amateur drag racers were putting in consistent 11 second quarter mile times on their unmodified XJ900Rs without too much difficulty.

The Seca you see here is a modern custom that combines a couple of factors that essentially guaranteed it a feature here on Silodrome – it was built by Greg Hageman, and it was photographed by Erick Runyon. Greg’s work has been featured here on numerous occasions, most recently with his Yamaha XV750 Scrambler, and Erick’s photography has been featured on top tier sites like Bike EXIF, Pipeburn and The Return of the Cafe Racers.

The project to rebuild the bike came at the behest of custom motorcycle collector Mike Martens, he’s the owner of one of the first Hageman XV920 Viragos and has become firm friends with Greg in the intervening years.

With the project to build a Yamaha XJ900R Seca cafe racer the two men settled on using the fuel tank and seat cowl from an XJ550 and the forks from an FZR1000. Greg created a new wiring loom for the bike and tucked the gubbins up under the seat, this also helped to clear out the rear frame section.

Due to a busy schedule the engine/transmission was shipped to Eric Bess from Flying Tiger Motorcycles for a rebuild and detailing and the fuel tank and rear cowl were sent off to Moe Colors for prep and paint.

The completed bike is a fantastic example of a balanced custom with equal attention paid to function and form, without compromising either. If you’d like to see more of Greg’s work you can click here to visit his website.

[MIKA27]

OVAL SHANK POKER PIPE BY FAT BASTARD PIPES

Albert Einstein once said “I believe that pipe smoking contributes to a somewhat calm and objective judgement in all human affairs.”, I wouldn’t want to argue with the smartest man to come along since that guy who invented beer. Smoking everyday may not be advisable but the occasional chuff on a pipe will do less harm than one day in NYC, once you have the pipe and the tobacco all you really need is a verandah, a dog, some slippers and a nice glass of single malt.

The pipe pictured here was handmade by Alex, he’s an American pipe-maker living in Denmark, he makes pipes to order and if you’d like one, you can click here to visit the ordering page on Fat Bastard Pipes.

[MIKA27]

FOBO TIRE PRESSURE SENSOR

Fobo Tire Pressure Sensor is a new Tire Pressure Monitoring System (TPMS) with Bluetooth pairing that transmits tire info to your IOS or Android device. It comes with 4 units to place on your tires, and a car unit that receives and processes your tire´s info. You can manage up to 19 different cars with the app that comes with it and share the info with up to 100 users. Featuring built-in interchangeable batteries, with a life of up to 5 years, this gadget will help you be greener, because you´ll be saving fuel, save the tires themselves, and always provide safer driving.

[MIKA27]

Family Claims Lives Ruined From Living Next to Area 51

Why would anyone want to live next door to Area 51 – the top-secret Air Force base, testing facility, UFO repository and who knows what else? A good reason might be that you were there first. The Sheahan family that has owned the Groom Mine adjacent to Area 51 for 130 years says the Air Force has ruined their lives and now wants to buy the mine and get rid of them.

The mine was originally part of the Conception Mines – low-grade silver and lead ore mines located in the southern part of what is now the Groom Range. The name comes from the “Groome Lead Mines Limited” financing company. J.B. Osborne acquired the mines in 1876 and leased them to other operators, one of which was the Sheahan family, which worked their mine until the 1950s.

The Sheahans say the Air Force is responsible for them having to close the mine and subsequently ruining their lives. They claim that atomic bomb tests forced them to suspend operations a number of times. After the Groom Lake test facility was opened in 1955, buildings on their property have been strafed and bombed by military planes and a bomb may have destroyed their mill, closing the mine for good.

The Air Force denied responsibility but the Sheahans say it also chased away prospective buyers, forcing their grandparents into debt. The government then closed land around their mine to the public, requiring the family to go through checkpoints and submit to frequent searches. They’re not a security threat, says Groom Mine co-owner Barbara Sheahan-Manning.

The truth is you can get more of a view of what’s going on on that base through Google Earth and pictures that are out there all over the Internet.

What will it take to relieve this family’s pain and suffering from living next to Area 51? The Air Force has offered a $5.2 million buyout for the 400 acres in their possession. If they don’t accept by September 10, 2015, the property will be condemned and taken through eminent domain.

This is unsatisfactory to the Sheahan family. Co-owner Joe Sheahan puts it this way:

Is it okay to bomb your citizens, hold ‘em at gunpoint and then — just to add insult to injury — just steal their property? Either give us our property, leave us alone, or pay us what you owe us. What the American people have got to realize is if they can do this to us, they can do it to each and every one of them

Can they? I suppose they could if we all lived next door to Area 51. Do the Sheahans have a right to stay on their family land? Should they take the money and run? Should they be offered more for their pain and suffering? How much more? Why is this 400 acres so important to the Air Force?

Is there something more specific the government want's that's "In" the mine?

[MIKA27]

POLAROID SNAP INSTANT CAMERA

In another case of what’s old is new again, Polaroid takes us down memory lane with the release of their vintage inspired Polaroid Snap Instant Camera.

Using the brand’s Zero Ink printing technology, this little shooteri s able to spit out 2″x3″ prints in a matter of seconds, letting you share your photos with friends and family in real life. It has seen some nice updates for the modern age, including a 32GB SD card that lets you save the photos, allowing you to upload them to your computer at a later time. The 10 megapixel camera offers up some different options including the ability to take pictures in full color, black and white, and a vintage polaroid filtered. There’s even a “photo booth” option, which snaps six quick images in just ten seconds, replicating the experience of a photo booth. The camera will be available in four different colorways when it releases in the coming months, and will retail for $100. [Purchase]

[MIKA27]

This Accident-Recording Dash Cam Will Now Prevent Crashes Too

If the endless supply of crazy Russian dash cam videos haven’t convinced you to get one for your car, maybe Garmin’s new Dash Cam 35 will. In addition to documenting accidents, it now has Forward Collision Warnings to remind drivers when they’re following too close to another vehicle, risking a crash.

As soon as the car is turned on, Garmin’s new Dash Cams start recording. Hi-def video is captured to an included microSD card and footage is recorded in a continuous loop so the card never actually gets full. But when a built-in sensor on the dash cam detects an impact, it saves the footage before and after the incident so that it can be used as evidence.

The new $US200 Garmin Dash Cam 35 includes a three-inch LCD display, the aforementioned Forward Collision Warnings to help keep the car at a safe following distance in traffic, and GPS so that the exact date, time, latitude, longitude and speed of the vehicle are documented after an accident. It also includes a database of red light and speed cameras giving drivers an advanced heads up so that they can adjust their driving accordingly, and slow down.

Garmin also has a cheaper $US170 version called the Dash Cam 30 which lacks the built-in GPS and driver alerts, but also takes up less space on your windshield with a smaller footprint and a compact 1.4-inch LCD display. If all you’re after is proof that you weren’t at fault in your next fender bender, the smaller version might actually be the better way to go, especially since it’s less of a distraction while you’re trying to focus on the road.

[MIKA27]

Daniel Craig on Spectre fears, James Bond future

Source: Esquire

Daniel Craig would like a beer.

A cigarette, too. Not, he says, that he’s back on the fags full-time, but a man can cut himself some slack now and then. It’s a Wednesday afternoon in July. Craig filmed his last scene for Spectre, the new James Bond film, the previous Saturday, on a lake in Bray, in Berkshire. (“A bit of an anti-climax,” he concedes.)

Since then he’s been knuckling down to his publicity duties. He went straight from the wrap party into three days of PR: posing for the movie poster, mugging for promotional photos that will be packaged and sent out to the global media, divvied up between rival broadcasters and papers and websites and magazines less fortunate than our own. Tomorrow he sits for an all-day junket at a central London hotel: round-table interviews and brief one-on-ones (some as long as 10 whole minutes) with reporters from around the world.

No one who has worked with Craig before – me included – would mistake him for someone who revels in the marketing of movies. He does it with good grace but it remains a necessary evil, something to be endured rather than embraced. So now, unwinding from a day of it, he figures he’s earned a lager and a smoke.

We are sitting, he and I, on plastic chairs at a wooden table on an otherwise empty roof terrace in East London. Beneath us, the trendy loft apartment hired for the afternoon as the location for the Esquire shoot. As luck – by which I really mean cunning, my own cunning – would have it, there are cold beers in the fridge, and Craig’s publicist has a pack of Marlboro Lights she’s happy for us to pilfer.

So I flip the lids from two bottles of Peroni, he offers me his lighter – encased in a spent bullet shell from the set of a 007 gunfight – and we ash in a bucket. It’s warm out but the sky is glowering, threatening rain. When it comes, almost as light as air, we sit through it, neither of us acknowledging it’s falling. Soon we call down for more beers and more beers are brought, fags are lit, and Craig leans back in his chair and talks.

I don’t think I’ve known him this relaxed before. Not in an interview, certainly.

I’ve met Craig on a number of previous occasions. And this is the third time he’s talked to me for an Esquire cover story, in four years. (Beat that, The Economist.) He’s always courteous and cooperative and professional. He’s always thoughtful and considered and drily funny. But he has a stern countenance and there is a steeliness to him that discourages flippancy. Though not, happily, caustic wit: my favourite Craig line from an interview I did with him came in 2011, when he was promoting a film called Cowboys & Aliens and I’d had the temerity to ask him what it was about: “It’s about cowboys and f**king aliens, what do you think it’s about?” OK, fair enough; stupid f**king question. But did I mention that he’s drily funny?

It’s 10 years since Daniel Craig was announced as the sixth official screen incarnation of Britain’s least secret agent, following, as every schoolboy knows, Connery, Lazenby, Moore, Dalton and Brosnan. It’s fair to say the news of his casting did not occasion impromptu street parties up and down the nation, or thousands of British parents naming their first-born sons Daniel (or, indeed, Craig) in his honour.

By almost universal consent, Craig was too young, too blond (too blond!) and not nearly suave – or, perhaps, glib – enough. The man himself seemed somewhat discomfited, too. He had spent the previous two decades building a career for himself as an actor of ferocious intensity, a specialist in wounded masculinity on stage and screen, in the kind of plays – A Number – and films – Sylvia (2003), The Mother (2003), Enduring Love (2004) – that most fans of big budget stunts-and-shunts movies hadn’t necessarily seen, lacking both opportunity and inclination, and perhaps imagination.

Even Sam Mendes, Bond aficionado and director of Skyfall and Spectre, recently admitted he originally felt the casting of Craig could have been a mistake. Crazily, in retrospect, the feeling was he was too serious an actor, too searching, too saturnine. Our expectations of Bond, after decades of increasingly preposterous hijinks and larky one-liners, were hardly stratospheric. The franchise, once seen as cool, even sophisticated – though never, until recently, cerebral – had become a corny joke.

“Austin Powers f**ked it,” was Craig’s typically bald appraisal of the situation pre-2006, when I talked to him about it last time. In other words, the films had gone beyond parody. “By the time we did Casino Royale, [Mike Myers] had blown every joke apart. We were in a situation where you couldn’t send things up. It had gone so far post-modern it wasn’t funny any more.”

Craig changed all that. His Bond is hard but not cold. He’s haunted by a traumatic childhood. He is not inured to violence; cut Craig’s 007 and he bleeds. And he loves and loses, in spectacular fashion.

First in Casino Royale (2006), which was as much tragic romance as action thriller, and in which Bond – Ian Fleming’s “blunt instrument” – was revealed as painfully vulnerable, physically and emotionally.

“I would ask you if you could remain emotionally detached, but I don’t think that’s your problem, is it, Bond?” Judi Dench’s M asks him in that film. It turns out to be precisely his problem. He falls in love with a woman who is his equal in every way, including the tormented past. “I have no armour left,” he tells her, “you’ve stripped it from me.” But he can’t save her. That story continues in Quantum of Solace (2008), a revenge drama-cum-chase movie, albeit one hobbled by a Hollywood writers’ strike. Craig played Bond as grief-stricken and fuelled by righteous anger.

Skyfall (2012), described by Craig and Mendes as a return to “classic Bond”, reintroduced many of the gags and much of the glamour familiar from earlier films, as well as beloved characters – Q, Moneypenny – previously conspicuous by their absence from Craig-era Bond. But it also developed the theme of Bond in extremis: shot, presumed drowned, then ragged and cynical, and entangled in a weird Oedipal psychodrama with Javier Bardem’s cyber-terrorist and Dench’s mummy figure, M.

The cartoonish elements – the exotic locations, the evil megalomaniacs, the fast women, the suicidal driving, the techno gadgetry – were back, but Craig’s moody intensity was very much present and correct. He doesn’t do a lot of sunny romcoms. His characters, Bond included, tend to be somewhat wracked. “You meet somebody who is at the best part of their life when they’re really happy and everything’s great, I’m not sure how interesting that is cinematically,” he says. The essence of drama is conflict, and Craig’s Bond is nothing if not conflicted. Apart from anything else, he keeps trying to resign his commission.

When he was first sent the script for Casino Royale, in 2005, Craig tells me now, “I had been prepared to read a Bond script and I didn’t. They’d stripped everything back and I went, [approvingly] ‘Oh, ****!’ It felt to me they were offering me a blueprint, and saying: ‘Form it around that.’ And

I went, ‘OK, I can do that.’

“I’m a huge Bond fan,” he says. “I love James Bond movies, and I love all the old gags and everything that goes along with that. No disrespect to what happened before but this is completely different. It’s got weight and meaning. Because I don’t know another way to do it. However big and grand it is, however boisterous the script is, you look for the truth in it, and you stick to that, and then you can mess around with it. And if you have that and you have the car chases and the explosions as well, then you’re quids in. But there have to be consequences. He has to be affected by what happens to him. It’s not just that he has to kill the bad guy, there has to be a reason for it.”

The last time Craig and I talked matters Bond was in the summer of 2012, and the topic at hand was the imminent release of Skyfall. I wrote then that everyone involved I spoke to exuded a sense of quiet confidence. This is not always discernible in the nervy run-up to a big budget release.

Still, even the most gung-ho 007 cheerleader could not have predicted that the film would be quite as successful as it became. Released that October, it made $1.1bn worldwide – nearly twice the amount of Casino Royale or Quantum of Solace, both of which did extremely well. At the time of writing it’s the 12th highest-grossing film of all time. In the UK in particular, it did phenomenal and quite unexpected business. It is the highest grossing film released here and the only movie ever to take more than £100m at the British box office.

Craig’s summary of the feeling among the film-makers as they began to discuss a follow-up to Skyfall: “What the f**k are we going to do?”

“I think everyone was just daunted, understandably,” he says. “Like, it’s ‘the biggest British movie of all time’. What does it f**king mean? Where do we go from there? How do you process that? It could have been an albatross around everyone’s necks. It turned out not to be, but there was a massive amount of pressure at the beginning.”

Skyfall’s success he puts down to simple things. “Someone who has just made a six-and-a-half-million dollar movie and is struggling to get it distributed will probably argue that if you’ve got 200 million dollars you can sell anything, but that’s not actually true. There’s lots of flops out there. I just think [skyfall] had a tight story, great action. I genuinely think it’s a good movie.”

He also pays tribute to the skill of Mendes, the London stage sensation turned classy Hollywood auteur: (American Beauty (1999), Revolutionary Road (2008). It was Craig, who worked with Mendes on his gangster film Road to Perdition (2002), who first approached the director to do Skyfall, and he had to use his powers of persuasion again for Spectre.

On Skyfall, Craig tells me, “I felt like [Mendes and I] got into a real groove with it. I felt like we’d started something on that movie and I was so keen to finish it.” At first the director was resistant – he had other work on – but Craig and the Bond producers waited, and again got their man.

“We did have the conversation: it’s got to be bigger and better,” Craig says. “The stunts, the action, every department.” He holds out his palm, flat. It’s shaking. “I’m all jangly at the moment because it’s over. Sam has to lock the picture off for 7 September, so he’s got f**k-all time, basically. That’s it. Can’t go back and do it again. Tough s**t.”

He doesn’t want to jinx it but, “I feel like we’ve all done our absolute f**king best and that’s a good feeling. Whether that makes a better movie we’ll see.”

Spectre benefits not only from the return of the star and director of Skyfall but also from the work of veteran Bond producers Barbara Broccoli and Michael G Wilson, and writers Neal Purvis, Robert Wade and John Logan. Ralph Fiennes returns as Mallory, the new M; Ben Whishaw as Q; and Naomie Harris as Moneypenny. Replacing director of photography Roger Deakins is the terrific Dutch cinematographer Hoyte van Hoytema, the man responsible for the look of Christopher Nolan’s Interstellar and Spike Jonze’s Her.

Is the “classic Bond” ethos still in place, I wonder? “Times 10!” Craig almost shouts, momentarily revelling in his role as hype man. He repeats it when I laugh, holding his beer in the air. “It’s Skyfall times 10!”

And that is a point he is keen to make. For all the soul searching, he says, Spectre is “a celebration of all that’s Bond”. There is a new supercar, the Aston Martin DB10. There are beautiful women, played by the va-va-voom Italian bombshell Monica Bellucci and the kittenish Léa Seydoux. There are signature set pieces: a thrilling opening in Mexico City; a car chase through Rome; action sequences in the Austrian Alps, in Tangier and in London. There’s a thuggish henchman (the first of Craig-era Bond) played by the former wrestler Dave Bautista. And there’s an evil megalomaniac, played by the great Christoph Waltz, devilish star of Quentin Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds and Django Unchained.

There has been chatter that Waltz plays Bond’s most notorious adversary, Ernst Stavro Blofeld, the comical, cat-stroking, Connery-era menace and boss of the shadowy criminal enterprise Spectre.

Actually, Waltz plays Franz Oberhauser. For Fleming fans, that name will ring a distant bell. Franz is the son of Hannes Oberhauser, an Austrian climbing and ski instructor, and friend of Bond’s father, who briefly became the young Bond’s guardian after the tragic death of his parents – in an Alpine climbing accident, no less.

“A wonderful man,” Bond describes him in the Fleming story, Octopussy. “He was something of a father to me at a time when I happened to need one.”

Hannes Oberhauser was later shot dead by the dastardly Major Dexter Smythe; his frozen corpse was discovered in a melting glacier. Bond took it upon himself to track down his former guardian’s killer. So, Waltz’s Franz Oberhauser is Bond’s foster brother. It seems from the trailer he is a senior operative at Spectre – conceivably still under the control of Blofeld – and possibly was connected to Quantum, another nefarious outfit hellbent on world domination (crumbs!), represented here again by Mr White, familiar to fans of Casino Royale and Quantum of Solace.

In other words, Craig’s initial reluctance to let Bond’s backstory bleed into Spectre – and to cut back on the angst in favour of, as he puts it to me, “more Moore”, invoking the jollity of Roger Moore-era Bond – didn’t survive much past the first script meeting. “I think I’d just got it into my head that flamboyance was the way forward and f**k it, nothing touched him. But as we got into the story and rooted out the connections, they were too good to leave alone.”

When I interviewed Craig for Skyfall, I tried him on some supposed plot points and he laughed me almost out of the room. This time he concedes I’m doing better.

But according to him I’m still miles off. I’d read that Spectre was the first part of two films. “I don’t think so,” says Craig. (Then again: never trust a spy.) In fact, he says, if it has any relation to other Bond films, it’s as the denouement to the story that began with Casino: Bond’s determination to confront his past and figure out his place in the world, and MI6’s place in the world, and whether he might be able to fashion a life away from all that. “I think we can safely say we’ve squared all those circles,” Craig says.

There has been much speculation that Spectre will be Craig’s last film as Bond. I thought he’d signed on for two more after Skyfall, meaning there would be at least one more after Spectre.

“I don’t know,” he says. He really doesn’t know? “I really don’t know. Honestly. I’m not trying to be coy. At the moment I can’t even conceive it.”

Would he at least like to do another one? “At this moment, no. I have a life and I’ve got to get on with it a bit. But we’ll see.”

Unless there’s something he hasn’t been telling us, Daniel Craig is an actor, not a spy. He is married, to another actor, Rachel Weisz, and he has a grown-up daughter from an earlier relationship. He is 47 years old. He lives quietly, and as privately as you can when you are an A-list movie star and so is your wife. He is often to be found with his head in a book. He likes a few beers now and then. He looks good in a suit but is more often to be found wearing jeans and a T-shirt. He does not carry a gun. If he did, he’d have to put on his glasses to fire it accurately.

“I’m not James Bond,” he says, not for the first time. “I’m not particularly brave, I’m not particularly cool-headed. I have the fantasy that I would be good in a certain type of situation, like all of us, and I put those hopes into [playing] him.” But Craig also likes to think that his own non-Bondness adds something to his interpretation of 007. “There are bits when he doesn’t know what the f**k he’s doing, and I like that.”

One touchstone for his work on Bond is Harrison Ford as Indiana Jones, especially in Raiders of the Lost Ark. “The brilliance of that performance is that he’s so fallible, to the point of comedy. You know at any time he might f**k up, and that adds to the danger and the excitement and the joy of it.”

It’s harder to do that with Bond, he says. No one in the audience really believes 007 won’t, ultimately, cheat death, defeat the baddie, save the world. But he hopes to borrow at least some of Ford’s haplessness. And worse things have happened to Craig’s Commander Bond than to Ford’s Professor Jones. The love of his life drowned in front of him. His mentor and substitute mother died in his arms. “[bond] failed,” he says, of Judi Dench’s character’s death at the end of Skyfall. “That was a big decision.”

Does he like James Bond, I wonder? “I don’t know if I’d like to spend too much time with him,” he says. “Maybe an evening but it would have to be early doors. What goes on after hours, I’m not so sure about. But I don’t judge him. It’s not the job of an actor to judge your character.”

Nor does he think it is his job, specifically, to rescue Bond from the critics who see him as a throwback to an earlier, less politically correct era. When I interviewed Craig in 2011, we spent quite a lot of time on what Bond represents as a figure in the culture. What does it say about men – British men especially, but men all over the world, too – that our most potent symbol of masculinity is a lonely, socially maladjusted killer with no family or friends, unable to maintain a loving relationship with a woman and with apparently no life whatsoever outside his work?

“He’s very f**king lonely,” Craig says now. “There’s a great sadness. He’s f**king these beautiful women but then they leave and it’s… sad. And as a man gets older it’s not a good look. It might be a nice fantasy – that’s debatable – but the reality, after a couple of months…”

What does it say, too, that Bond is a fantasy figure for a Britain that no longer exists, an Imperial warrior who satisfies the rest of our vicarious appetites – no longer as easily fulfilled as they once were – to travel to exotic locations, execute the natives and then have sex with their women?

“Hopefully,” he says, “my Bond is not as sexist and misogynistic as [earlier incarnations]. The world has changed. I am certainly not that person. But he is, and so what does that mean? It means you cast great actresses and make the parts as good as you can for the women in the movies.”

It’s a difficult line to walk, I imagine, to keep the essence of brand Bond, but to update it so he doesn’t seem like a dinosaur. “There’s a delicate balance to it,” he says.

Bond, of course, represents something different to Craig than to anyone else. “For me,” he says, “it’s an opportunity as an actor to take part in movies that are thin on the ground: where you have a producer, in Barbara Broccoli, who’s dedicated her life to this; where you get together a team of people and push them as far as you can; where I can push myself as far as I can. When it boils down to it, if you’re going to make these kind of movies you want to be in that atmosphere. It’s all you can ask for.”

It’s been three years since we’ve seen Daniel Craig in a new movie.

In 2013, he acted in a play, on Broadway, with his wife – a very well received revival of Harold Pinter’s Betrayal, directed by the late Mike Nichols – but between Skyfall and Spectre, he has done no screen acting.

For a time, he says, especially at the beginning of his Bond career, he felt pressure to prove he was more than a blockbuster hunk.

“I worked a lot before [Casino Royale]. I did lots of things, I worked with amazing directors. I was very relaxed about what I did. I knew I could act.” Then Bond happened. “There’s kind of a rigidity to it. You’re playing this very specific character and everybody starts looking at you in that way, and you’re like, ‘I’m not that.’

“I did feel like, ‘I’ve got to look like I’m doing other stuff.’ But then it was, ‘Who for?’ So the public think, ‘Ooh, isn’t he versatile?’”

More recently, he’s decided to stop worrying about all that. On Spectre, he says, “I relaxed. It was like, ‘F**k it. I’m James Bond, for f**k’s sake. So I’ll do James Bond.’ The fact of it is, it’s not a bad position to be in. I used to get asked all the time, ‘Don’t you worry that you’re going to get typecast?’ ‘And?’ I mean, talk about a high-class problem.”

In any case, he says, his break from the screen “wasn’t because I couldn’t get the gigs”. He does an impression of a desperate luvvie: “It was just terrible, agent wouldn’t answer the phone…”

So, where has he been all this time? “We’ve got a place in the country, in New York,” he says. “There’s a lot to do there. I read, I photograph things really badly.” I’d noticed him doing just that earlier in the day. “Maybe one-in-a-thousand comes out. I’m working that ratio down.”

He has an office in the house. “I try to get there once a day, surf the internet for half an hour.” He laughs. “Phew! Knackering.” He’s being self-deprecating. In reality, he’s been working on Spectre, on and off, for two years, and he’s been at it every day for the past six months at least.

There’s a chance he won’t play Bond again but no chance he’ll stop acting. “I don’t know what I’d do with myself if I didn’t act,” he says. He tells me he’s made a pledge to himself to be a bit more proactive about work. Watching films over the past year or so he’s occasionally thought to himself, “‘God, I’d love to meet that director.’ And then it’s like, ‘Oh! I can!’ That realisation is weird. Like, maybe if I phone them up they might go for lunch with me…”

All that said, he has no plans. “Nothing at all. But I’m not worried. Not yet.”

In 2012, he told me that his transition from jobbing actor to A-list star had not been an easy one. “It threw me for a loop. It really shook me up and made me look at the world in a very different way. It confused the hell out of me. Fame and fortune, for want of a better expression, is f**king scary. I couldn’t find a lot of fun in it.”

That is another aspect of his life he’s learned to be more philosophical about. Of the attention and the hoopla and the press commitments, he says, “You just have to go, ‘Isn’t this great?’ As opposed to, ‘Isn’t this f**king awful?’ But believe me, after the fifth interview of the day, sometimes you’re like, ‘Get me out of here.’ I used to get a bit pissed off about things, and if somebody else gets dodgy with me in an interview now – and it still happens – I’m less likely to say, ‘Go f**k yourself.’ Now I just laugh, and go, ‘Really? Of all the things that are going on in the world at the moment, this matters most?’ It really doesn’t.”

Our attitude to Bond, and to Hollywood movies in general, he thinks, should be, “Let’s celebrate this. It’s good fun. And of all the industries that make lots of money in the world, yes, the movie industry is a bit crooked and there are some sharks and not very nice people, but it’s a fairly open book: you come and see it, we make money. It’s not, ‘Come and see it and we’ll fleece you somehow and sell your house.’ We’re not bankers. It’s entertainment. I think there are worse professions to be involved with.”

Will he miss James Bond, when it’s another actor carrying the Walther PPK, at the wheel of the Aston Martin?

“Yeah, of course I will.”

What will he miss most? “Doing the films; just that. You know, it sounds awful but I’ve been left a wealthy man by doing this. I can afford to live very comfortably. Things are taken care of. Family and kids are taken care of and that’s a massive relief in anybody’s life. I’m incredibly fortunate. But the other stuff that goes along with it…” He trails off for a moment. “The day I can walk into a pub and someone goes, ‘Oh, there’s Daniel Craig’ and then just leaves me alone, that’ll be great.”

For now, at least, were he to walk into a pub, people would see James Bond first, Daniel Craig second. And they would not leave him alone. He’s made his peace with it, for as long as it lasts.

If it were to be the case that he’s shot his last scene as James Bond, would he feel satisfied with what he’s achieved? “Immensely,” he says. “I’ve done my best.”

And with that we drain our beers, stub out our fags, and head off back to work.

Spectre is released in the UK and Ireland on 26 October and in the rest of the world on 6 November

[MIKA27]

Bourne 5 adds Vincent Cassel as villain

Matt Damon's Jason Bourne is set to be chased down by Vincent Cassel in Bourne 5...

Production is shortly to officially begin on the next Jason Bourne movie adventure, that sees Matt Damon returning to play the role for the fourth time. Also returning for the thus-far unnamed Bourne 5 is director Paul Greengrass, who to date has helmed The Bourne Supremacy and The Bourne Ultimatum in the series.

Joining Damon in the cast? We already know that Julia Stiles is back for this one, and Alicia Vikander and Tommy Lee Jones have both signed up for duty too. Now Variety reports that Vincent Kassel (Black Swan) has joined the cast too. His exact role isn't yet known, short of the fact that he's going to be play an assassin who's trying to take Jason Bourne out.

Bourne 5 is set to shoot in Greece and America, and it's due in cinemas on July 29th 2016.

[MIKA27]

The Truly Spectacular Process Of How The Best Chef's Knife In The World Is Made

Made of stacked melted meteorite that looks more like Thor’s hammer and armed with the encyclopaedic knowledge of knives and stunning skill from bladesmith Bob Kramer, these chef Kramer knives are among the finest in the world. This video of him, by Anthony Bourdain’s Raw Craft, features his process and it might be the most impressive knife making video I’ve ever seen.

And I’ve seen a lot! Kramer is one of only 122 certified master bladesmiths in the US and the only one who specialises in kitchen knives. This really is the best it gets.

[MIKA27]

A Container Ship Travelling Around The Ocean At Night Is One Of The Most Beautiful Things

I literally gasped in disbelief when I first saw this timelapse by Toby Smith of the Gunhilde Maersk at sea. It goes from Ho Chi Minh City in Vietnam to Ningbo, China and the night scenes are unbelievable. The skies are salted with glittery stars and the lights of the port cities paint the horizon in a sort of ethereal fire and the container ship shines through the sea in an illustrious green and it’s all the most amazing thing to see.

Shooting stars zip through, clouds pass by and when the Sun comes out, my God it’s just all so pretty. And to be honest the colour combination of it all doesn’t even seem like it’s from our planet.

[MIKA27]

Yesterday's AtlasV Launch Was Nothing Short Of Stellar

Special atmospheric conditions created amazing views for today’s United Launch Alliance launch as an Atlas V rocket carrying MUOS-4, the fourth Mobile User Objective System satellite for the US Navy was successfully launched from Cape Canaveral at 6.18am EDT (8.18pm AEST), just before sunrise.

What you can see above is the atmospheric smoke trail the rocket left behind as usual, but for now it became visible from the ground too because the sun lit it at a special angle, from under the horizon, creating a multicoloured glowing plume.

[MIKA27]

Humans Have Eliminated Half The World's Trees

Human beings are having an overwhelming impact on Earth’s ecosystems, whether we’re pouring plastic into the ocean or filling the skies with carbon. But it’s not just modern society that’s to blame — our environmental legacy stretches way back into history. Since dawn of civilisation, we’ve caused nearly half of the world’s trees to disappear.

That’s the depressing conclusion of a massive ecological study published today in the journal Nature, which offers the very first data-driven global tree census. According to the study, there approximately 3.04 trillion trees planet Earth today — roughly 422 per person. The good news is, that’s nearly seven times more trees than we reckoned in our previous global estimate. The bad news? The number of trees has declined 46 per cent since humans started tilling the land.

To arrive at these numbers, the researchers collated 429,775 ground-sourced measurements of tree density from every continent on Earth except Antarctica. Combining these field measurements with satellite data on climate, topography, and human land use, they constructed a series of models that predict tree density worldwide at the resolution of a single square kilometre.

By combining tree density predictions with the spatial maps of forest cover loss, the study’s authors estimate that humans are currently removing some 15.3 billion trees from the planet every year. Rates of forest loss are highest in the tropics, which also happen hold the lion’s share of the planet’s trees, roughly 1.39 trillion. The net loss is closer 10 billion trees per year, thanks to forest regrowth in some of the world’s temperate regions.

Global map of tree density at the square-kilometre pixel scale

“I didn’t expect human activity to come out as the strongest control on tree density across all of the biomes [habitat types], lead study author Thomas Crowther told The Guardian. “It was one of the dominant regulators of the number of trees in almost all of the world. It really highlights how big an impact humans are having on the Earth at a global scale.”

Should that impact worry us? Absolutely. Trees offer critical ecosystem services, whether they’re cleaning our water, building fertile soils, or providing us with food and raw materials. Trees also buffer us from the effects of climate change, by soaking up a tremendous share of human carbon emissions every year. As forests disappear, so does the planet’s natural ability to sequester carbon and maintain a stable climate.

Simply put, a future with fewer trees is a future less secure for humans.

“We’ve nearly halved the number of trees on the planet, and we’ve seen the impacts on climate and human health as a result,” lead study author Thomas Crowther said. “This study highlights how much more effort is needed if we are to restore healthy forests worldwide.”

Read the full scientific paper at Nature via The Guardian.