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

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THESE MASSIVE STAR WARS STEINS MAKE YOUR BEER MORE EPIC

Looking for a new drinking buddy? Now you can recruit a Star Wars character. Boba Fett, Darth Vader, Chewie, and R2-D2 are all up for the job!

Think of these massive steins as a classic Pez for adults. Just flip back the head and enjoy your treat! The ceramic beer mugs stand 9 inches tall and hold up to 22 oz. of your favorite frosty beverage.

Whether you’ve got a cantina that rivals Mos Eisley’s or just a fridge in the back of your ship, these Star Wars Collectible Ceramic Steins will help you relax in serious style. Pop the top on a cold one and then pop the top on your stein to fill it with up with your favorite beverage. Choose Boba Fett, Chewbacca, Darth Vader, or R2-D2 to be your drinking buddy.

[MIKA27]

Siberian Sinkhole Growing Wider and Deeper Every Day

Will the world end by getting sucked down a black hole in Siberia? We’re a long way from that but getting closer every day, according to people living … or formerly living … near a sinkhole in Solikamsk, Russia, that has quadrupled in width in just nine months with no sign of stopping, closing up or taking a break to belch. Where is Solikamsk disappearing to?

The sinkhole in Solikamsk when it first opened on November 2014

On November 18, 2014, Uralkali – the largest potash fertilizer producer in Russia – evacuated thousands of workers from its Solikamsk-2 mine in Solikamsk, a seasonal cottage community about 1,000 miles northeast of Moscow that is built entirely over the Solikamsk-2 and Solikamsk-1 potash mines. Flooding caused a sinkhole to open near the mine measuring about 30 meters (100 feet) across. No one was injured but local residents were nervous as the company told workers to stay away until things settled down.

Which they haven’t. The flooding continued and by February 2015, the sinkhole had grown to 87 meters (285 feet) across and 75 meters (250 feet) deep and was swallowing cottage homes like a hungry kid eating gingerbread houses. The company said the mine was “stable” but mining operations stayed halted while crews continued to pump brine out from one side to fill up the other, shore up walls and salvage equipment.

The Solikamsk sinkhole continues to eat homes at an alarming rate

That didn’t help. By August 24, 2015, the sinkhole had become a gaping chasm measuring 125 meters across and filling steadily with abandoned cottages. Nothing new has been done so it’s expected that the sinkhole will continue to grow.

It’s estimated that the mines still contain 150 million tons of potash, making it one of the largest reserves in the world. It’s a safe bet that Solikamsk-2 will have to eat a lot more of Siberia before Uralkali abandons the mine and all of that potential fertilizer.

What good will all of that fertilizer do if the sinkhole swallows everyone who would have eaten the food?

[MIKA27]

STAR WARS BB-8 DROID BY SPHERO

With Star Wars: The Force Awakens set to hit big screen in December, you can expect Disney to sell a whole lot of toys for the holiday season. And while there’s a ton to choose from already, the new BB8-Droid is sure to be among the most coveted.

Developed by the Colorado-based team at Sphero, this droid is packed full of character and plenty of technology as well. The Bluetooth gadget features a 60-minute battery life, and uses inductive charging to refuel. It’s controlled through an app on your mobile device, and boasts an impressive 30 meter range. Using gyroscopic propulsion, the tiny robot can roll and balance all by itself, and does a stellar job mimicking the BB8 droid from the movie trailer. At $150, it’s on the more expensive end for toys, but the video below certainly has us sold. This could be one of the coolest Star Wars toys ever created. [Purchase]

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LYONHEART K

Lyonheart K is a mind-blowing E-Type homage, hand-built in a limited series. Developed, engineered and hand-built in Coventry, England, by Lyonheart Cars, the beautiful 21st-century E-Type features carbon fibre panels, an aluminium chassis, and weighs less than 1600 kg. Powering this beauty is an impressive 550hp 5.0-liter supercharged V8 engine, capable of reaching 62mph(100km/h) in under 4 seconds, and reaching a top speed of 186mph(300km/h. Restricted to a production run of just 250 units, the Lyonheart K is available for order in either Coupé or Convertible.

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MOMENT CASE

When it comes to iPhone lenses, nothing compares to Moment Lenses, now the creative team at Moment are taking mobile photography a step further with the Moment Case, making it even easier to take better pictures with your iPhone. The sleek case brings the best features of a traditional camera back to your phone, equipping it with an incredibly responsive electronic shutter button(enables half press and full press features, just like a DSLR camera), lens, and strap attachment.

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ASTON MARTIN DB9 GT BOND EDITION

007's love of Aston Martins is well known. The Aston Martin DB9 GT Bond Edition celebrates the storied secret agent's choice of ride with a number of subtle-yet-classy enhancements befitting of the world's most famous spy.

The exterior is finished in an exclusive Spectre Silver livery, with sterling silver Aston Martin logos and edition-specific badging, while inside, there are numbered sill plaques, gun barrel embroidery, and a special start-up screen. Performance-wise, the car is identical to the standard GT, with a 6.0-litre V12 engine pumping out nearly 540 hp, a Touchtronic II six-speed transmission, a 0-62 mph time of just 4.5 seconds, and a baddie-evading top speed of 183 mph. Limited to just 150 examples, it arrives with a limited edition Omega Seamaster James Bond watch with an Aston Martin strap, and a matching 21" Globe-Trotter case.

[MIKA27]

Onkyo's New Wireless Earbuds Look Hilariously Huge

Onkyo is best known for its strong tradition of audiophile-grade home theatre gear. But the legendary Japanese hi-fi company is branching out, and just unveiled a massive-looking set of completely wireless earbuds at IFA in Berlin. They probably sound great, but like home theatre components, you probably couldn’t go jogging with them.

Don’t get me wrong, the new W800BT headphones seem pretty impressive. Without a single wire, the two earbuds communicate with each other and a smartphone (or tablet or whatever) completely wirelessly. The right one even includes a microphone, so you can do hands-free calling. Meanwhile, passive noise isolation is supposed help provide top notch sound, and you can can top up the 12-hour battery life on the go with a charger case. This is all assuming, of course, that the dang things stay in your ears. The handsome disc-shaped design certainly borrows from the knobs on Onkyo’s hi-fi equipment, but based on early press shots, the earbuds look like they’re roughly the size of a short stack of poker chips.

In a way, it’s a fitting analogy. High quality audio equipment and miniature-sized parts often don’t go hand-in-hand. Making premium sound wireless is also not an easy task. The intersection of these two challenges is where a number of headphone companies have been converging in the past couple of years, however — since wireless is convenient, and consumers will pay a premium for quality. Onkyo is just the latest company to bet heavy on Bluetooth audio, and it’s pretty ballsy for it to come out with some wireless earbuds right off the bat.

These are not necessarily the first truly wireless earbuds to pop up, though they might be the first you can buy in a store. (Onkyo will start selling them in Europe this November for a cool €300 — that’s about $US330.)

So what to do if you want your audiophile-friendly future to happen right now? Well, you can buy over-the-ear or on-ear Bluetooth headphones, otherwise, you can sit tight and wait for dreams to come true. It’s possible that Onkyo’s cracked the code and figured out how to win the wireless earbud game, but damn, those things look hilariously huge. At the end of the day that might be a good thing, as long as they stay in your ears — wireless earbuds seem stupid easy to lose.

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Mark Ruffalo Says The Hulk Was Cut From Captain America: Civil War

Given how many characters from the Marvel Cinematic Universe show up in Captain America: Civil War, it’s perhaps not that surprising there was little room left for one of the biggest. According to Mark Ruffalo himself, the Hulk will not be appearing in the film.

Out promoting journo drama Spotlight at the Venice Film Festival, Ruffalo told Badtaste.it (the site is Italian, but the translation is at Collider) that Bruce Banner’s hulking alter ego, last seen soaring into the sky in a Quinjet at the end of Avengers: Age Of Ultron, is not scheduled to grace our screens again just yet. “The reason is too great to be revealed in this movie. I was in the script but then they removed my character. They don’t want to reveal where is he and why. I don’t even know if Hulk will be back soon.”

Of course, there’s always the chance we might see him pop up in some post-credits scene to tease future Bruce time, but for now it looks like we’ll have to make do with (deep breath) Iron Man (Robert Downey Jr.), Captain America (Chris Evans), Vision (Paul Bettany), Hawkeye (Jeremy Renner), Black Widow (Scarlett Johansson), Falcon (Anthony Mackie), Scarlet Witch (Elizabeth Olsen), James “War Machine” Rhodes (Don Cheadle), Ant-Man (Paul Rudd), Bucky Barnes (Sebastian Stan), Crossbones (Frank Grillo), Black Panther (Chadwick Boseman), Sharon Carter (Emily VanCamp), General Thaddeus “Thunderbolt” Ross (William Hurt), Spider-Man (Tom Holland), Baron Zemo, (Daniel Brühl) and a mysterious character played by Martin Freeman. They’re all in service to a story that finds our heroes falling out over how much regulation the government should apply to powered types, especially after a mission by Cap and his current Avengers leads to the usual collateral damage.

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Tom Brady Wins Lawsuit, 4-Game Deflategate Suspension Overturned

A judge ruled in favor of New England Patriots quarterback Tom Brady​ in his lawsuit against the NFL on Thursday, overturning the four-game suspension the league imposed on him after it determined that he had ordered footballs used in the AFC Championship game be deflated.

The ruling, from U.S. District Judge Richard M. Berman, represents the culmination of what has become known as the "Deflategate" scandal and a major defeat for NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell. The decision is subject to appeal.

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Inside California's Crystal Ice Cave

One of the most unique environments on earth exists in a seldom-visited corner of northern California. Lava Beds National Monument is home to over 700 caves, some of which are full of rare ice formations or play home to solitary biomes like this fern cave. They also allowed a tribe of Indians to make one of the last stands against the American government. Here’s how you can visit.

There’s two main caves that draw intrepid adventurers: Crystal and Fern Caves.

Crystal Cave is open for a single tour of six people on Saturdays running from January to March. Tours can only be booked up to three weeks in advance and reservations are, “very competitive.” To make one, you’ll need to call the visitor center at 8:30am, the day reservations become available.

And, you’ll need to be fit and provide your own spelunking equipment which hasn’t been used in a cave east of the Rockies. Visitors, “must use upper body strength to ascend a sheer, 50-foot long sloped ice floor on a rope, must be able to crawl through a tight hole, and have enough fitness and coordination to negotiate loose, boulder-strewn floors and icy patches safely,” says the National Park Service.

Sound like a lot of hassle? Ice formations like these are unique to this cave, alone.

Fern Cave is similarly restricted to one tour per day for size people, but only open June through September. It was formed 25,000 years ago by a lava flow. At some point, an 8x10-foot hole in its roof collapsed, allowing air and light in and making possible its unique environment. While outside temperatures can range from -40 to 100 degrees (F), the cave remains a constant 45-55 degrees year round and its air remains moist. This is what enables the ferns that give it its name to grow.

Inside, you’ll find mortar and pestals, petroglyphs and other signs of the native americans who used to live inside.

Lava Beds National Monument was once home to the Modoc people. Theirs is a more complicated story than can be told here, but a band of 52 warriors managed to use their knowledge of the caves and surrounding area to hold the US Army at bay for nearly a year, spanning 1872 and ‘73. Battlegrounds from the Modoc War are preserved throughout the monument.

Those can be visited year-round, as can most of the remaining 700+ caves.

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Warning over 'unusual' great white activity off WA coast

An unusually high number of great white sharks off the coast of Perth has prompted a warning to water users.

Six great white sharks have been tagged off Perth in the past two weeks by the Department of Fisheries.

Department scientist Dr Brett Molony said unusual activity was being caused by the annual migration of schools of salmon.

"The salmon typically migrate into metropolitan waters every year, but they are doing it in bigger numbers and staying around a lot more, a lot longer," he said.

"A lot of the recreational fishers are reporting big numbers at places like Woodman's Point and throughout the metropolitan area.

"There's good catches of them by the recs, but they're also bringing the predators, including the sharks that feed off them."

He said the great whites were tagged about 10 kilometres offshore on Mewstone and the Straggler Reefs, but as the animals travelled widely, the department considered there was a heightened risk in metropolitan waters.

The tagged sharks were two metres and larger, he said.

"I don't think size is that important, it's just knowing that they're there, and when they're there there may be other sharks as well," Dr Molony said.

He advised beachgoers to be cautious if there were schools of fish in the area, and check signage near surf lifesavers for warnings.

The department said in a statement it did not know how long the shark activity would continue.

The Government's SharkSmart website is updated with sightings and detected sharks.

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How Australian Defence Scientists Are Building The Future Of Warfare

If there’s a single constant to be found across thousands of years of human history, it’s that we really, really like fighting each other. The only thing that’s changed as we evolved into higher beings is that we’ve come up with better and better ways of fighting each other.

For a couple of centuries, soldiers encased themselves in plate metal and hammered each other with a variety of inventive weapons — until gunpowder came along and quickly made that all obsolete. Armour was in vogue again after a mere five hundred years thanks to modern body armour, which thankfully was a little better than its predecessors at stopping bullets. In today’s world, technology rules the battlefield, but we still can’t help but wonder what is next for soldiers on the ground in warzones around the world. At a presentation in Canberra recently, the Defence Science and Technology Organisation revealed some of the projects they’ve been working on that may give an insight into the warfare of the future.

If there’s a single constant to be found across thousands of years of human history, it’s that we really, really like fighting each other. The only thing that’s changed as we evolved into higher beings is that we’ve come up with better and better ways of fighting each other.

For a couple of centuries, soldiers encased themselves in plate metal and hammered each other with a variety of inventive weapons — until gunpowder came along and quickly made that all obsolete. Armour was in vogue again after a mere five hundred years thanks to modern body armour, which thankfully was a little better than its predecessors at stopping bullets. In today’s world, technology rules the battlefield, but we still can’t help but wonder what is next for soldiers on the ground in warzones around the world. At a presentation in Canberra recently, the Defence Science and Technology Organisation revealed some of the projects they’ve been working on that may give an insight into the warfare of the future.

Vibration Energy Harvester

Energy cannot be created or destroyed, only converted into a different form — even I know that basic scientific principle, and I slept through most of my high school science classes. It’s no surprise then that many scientists are experimenting with devices that harness different forms of energy and turn them into useable energy. This one from DSTO takes the mechanical energy created from a vehicle’s structural vibrations, and uses it to run low-power devices — no batteries required. It apparently has an unlimited lifespan, meaning this prototype is already better than most smartphones. Plus as soon as you call something an “energy harvester”, it automatically sounds pretty cool.

Black Canary

“What if someone had dosed this room with something you couldn’t smell, couldn’t see, and you were breathing it in like air?” asks Dr Nick Fitzgerald, leaving most of the people in the room just a little uncomfortable and strongly hoping this wasn’t a practical demonstration of his toxic vapour detecting device. Yes, far from being a screaming superheroine in black leather, DSTO’s Black Canary is a rather nondescript black box with a ring of 8 small nodes on its front, which fits snugly in Dr Fitzgerald’s inside jacket pocket. Where, as he informs us, it discreetly notified him of the toxic threat over thirty seconds earlier, along with wirelessly transmitting this information to the devices of other Defence personnel. He then proceeds to grab a gas mask from a nearby table. This is a theoretical demonstration, right?

Digital Video Guard

Despite the Australian government’s painful history with matters of so-called ‘cyber security,’ the DVG actually seems like a really cool concept. It’s a small black box that connects a host computer to a video display, decrypting the display so you can ensure that whatever sensitive data you are viewing is safe from both software and hardware Trojans. The device is designed for applications like working from remote locations, or bring-your-own-device work environment, and can either be plugged in externally or fitted directly into a computer. Be aware that you might sacrifice some processing power for this one, however, as it has to decrypt video pixels ‘on the fly.’

JDAM-ER

Sometimes simple ideas go the furthest — in this case, literally three times as far. The JDAM-ER, that is, Joint Direct Attack Munition Extended Range for those not up to scratch with their military acronyms, is in essence a pair of folding wings that attach to the top of a bomb, unfolding during flight to allow the bomb to glide up to three times further than its regular flight path. Simple, yet effective — although the JDAM kit already has an internal GPS navigation system that enables it to land within 13m of its target so perhaps ‘simple’ isn’t quite the right word.

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Astronomers Want To Watch Comets Slam Into Distant Planets

If a massive comet struck the Earth, the oceans would boil and the air would catch fire (don’t worry, this isn’t about to happen). But to alien astronomers studying our planet from afar, humanity’s brutal demise would look like nothing more than a faint flicker of light. If we could detect such impacts on distant worlds, we might learn a lot about their star systems.

As New Scientist reports this week, a team of astronomers is trying to figure out what it’d take for us spot a comet collision on a faraway planet. In a new paper, the researchers looked at comet Shoemaker-Levy 9, which smashed into Jupiter in 1994. According to their analysis, if a person watched that cometary collision from outside our solar system, he might observe a small uptick in Jupiter’s visible light output in the months following the crash. But at near-infrared wavelengths, Jupiter would appear much brighter, because cometary dust debris would block out thick clouds of atmospheric methane (which typically absorb starlight).

Armed with this knowledge and the next generation of telescopes, astronomers may soon be able to spot cometary strikes on Jupiter-sized worlds outside our solar system. (Watching a comet strike an Earth-sized planet would take an even more powerful telescope, because our planet is so much smaller and fainter in the sky). Studying comet collisions, the researchers say, could shed light on a planet’s rotation rate, atmospheric composition, and stellar neighbourhood:

How often a planet is impacted by planetesimals is intimately related to the architecture of the planetary system because the small body populations and planets evolve together. Generally speaking, planets interior to massive planetesimal belts, planets close to their stars, and planets with larger gravitational cross sections are more likely to be impacted.

And it’s a long shot, but who knows — we might inadvertently bear witness to somebody else’s apocalypse.

[MIKA27]

You Can Snuggle With A Sith Lord Thanks To Star Wars Pendleton Blankets

I know! You didn’t buy anything for Force Friday because you’re practical: You were holding out for something really useful when it came to Star Wars merch.

Just like Pendleton’s other products these blankets use patterns to tell stories, except these are stories that only nerds will truly understand. The blankets include designs for each film in the original trilogy, plus a fourth for The Force Awakens. They’re $US249 each (about the cost of a regular Pendleton blanket) or all four for $US1200. But look! When you put them all together…

That might seems pricey but when will you ever have the chance go full Sith on your bedroom decor. One for each season! You could also pair these with Pottery Barn’s reissue of the vintage Star Wars sheets for a bed you are pretty much guaranteed to never get laid in.

And yes, these are limited-edition blankets; only 1977 of each design are being made (if you don’t know why 1977 is significant you’re not a real fan).

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The Syrian Refugee Crisis Is Our Children Of Men Moment

We often use old sci-fi movies as reference points for our own hopes and fears about our present reality. That computer interface is so Minority Report, we might say. That food is something out of Soylent Green. That building is so Jetsons. It’s imperfect, but it’s a shorthand to talk about the way that the world is changing, for better and for worse.

And given the humanitarian crisis in Syria, it seems our most popular point of reference in the spring of 2015 is the 2006 film Children of Men.

Based on P.D. James’s 1992 novel, the film version of Children of Men takes place in the dystopian world of Britain in 2027. Inexplicably, everyone in the world has become infertile and the planet has descended into chaos. The UK still has a functioning government, but London is a brutal police state where everyone is miserable, yet they’re still trying to live some kind of normal existence. Desperate refugees from around the world flock to Britain, but they’re caged and processed like cattle.

Why then are people in 2015 making comparisons to this movie that’s nearly a decade old? Because it’s hard to tell the difference between the screenshots of Children of Men and photos of Syrians seeking refugee status in countries around the world.

Migrants and Hungarian police officers in Roszke

Syrians are fleeing to Austria, to Germany, to Sweden, to the UK — they’re going anywhere to search for a better life. Above, we see a photo of a “reception centre” in Budapest, Hungary where roughly 300 people escaped today. About 3000 Syrian refugees were on a train bound for Sopron near the border with Austria before the train was stopped by Hungarian police.

“In the interests of rail travel security the company has decided that until further notice, direct train services from Budapest to western Europe will not be in service,” Hungarian Railways said in a statement.

The fighting in Syria has been going on for four years now. But there’s no end in sight. And as people flee, the scenes of refugees become more and more surreal. Governments set up blockades, police give orders, and fences are set up to keep people in line.

After the attacks of 11 September, 2001, countless people described that day as if they were watching a movie. Because in so many ways, they’d seen those scenes before — terrorists doing the unthinkable; other human beings causing chaos and destruction and death on such a large scale that the brain can hardly process it as anything but fiction. But it was real. And even writing about this current humanitarian crisis with mere comparisons to a movie still feels like trivializing what’s really going on.

I contemplated not writing this post, out of fear that I would make light of the suffering currently being endured by thousands. But that’s what we’ve always done to process the world around us.

There’s no easy solution to the current humanitarian crisis. But the first step toward alleviating some of this suffering might lie in encouraging wealthier nations to make their refugee policies less like dystopian fiction. Until then, we’ll continue to lament the fact that so much of our world really does look like Children of Men.

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It Turns Out That Pottery Barn Millennium Falcon Bed Costs $US4000

Working under the assumption that Star Wars fans have an unlimited supply of nostalgia and funds,Pottery Barn has priced its new Millennium Falcon bed at $US4000. So have fun explaining to your kids why they will have to choose between a fancy bed or a car.

The bed is hand-painted, though, and made from real hardwood instead of the particle-based stuff that IKEA uses. So kids will be able to hand it down to younger siblings as they grow too large to sleep in it. Although you can probably expect their overnight slumbers to get really, really cramped before they’re willing to give it up.

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New Pavement Made From Tyres Will Save Old Faithful's Groundwater

Labour Day Weekend is one of the busiest times at Yellowstone National Park, and its famous geyser, Old Faithful, reels in 90 per cent of the park’s 3.6 million annual visitors. To keep that geyser reliably spewing steam and water 43m into the air every hour or two well into the future, the park is surrounding the thing with pavement made from tyres.

Here’s the problem: To accommodate all those tourists, asphalt trails had to be built. As you can probably guess, asphalt isn’t a super sustainable material. So, the park created a new, 595sqm “Flexi-Pave” pathway made out of 900 Michelin recycled tires that were ground up as part of a pavement mix. This mix was used to restore the old, existing trails. The tire-made material is way more porous than asphalt, which helps preserve and retain the groundwater Old Faithful needs. According to a press release, Flexi-Pave allows 11,356 litres of water to pass through the material per square foot.

How do geysers work? They erupt when groundwater beneath the surface becomes so superheated, that steam and water jet their way out of the ground. The new trail allows water to more easily return back down to Old Faithful’s aquifer, a body of permeable, porous rock that allows the passage of water into the ground.

Yellowstone houses 60 per cent of all active geysers on the planet. Meanwhile, the tires themselves came from service vehicles in Yellowstone. So of course, Yellowstone has plans on using the tire walkway model elsewhere in the park, too.

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A New Version Of Star Wars Monopoly Swaps Tophat Tokens For Jedis

It certainly isn’t the first Star Wars-themed version of Monopoly, but Hasbro’s latest edition is the first to ditch that classic square board. In its place is a round-shaped board that has players trying to build bases on a variety of different planets instead of buying up fancy properties.

In the original version of Monopoly players build houses and hotels on hotspots like Boardwalk and Park Place in an attempt to bankrupt their fellow players who have to keep paying rent depending on where they land on the board. But in Monopoly: Star Wars Edition players are instead trying to establish a base on as many planets in the tiny galaxy as possible.

The classic Monopoly tokens have been replaced with characters from the original Star Wars movies as well as The Force Awakens, but the game’s not a complete overhaul of Monopoly as we know it. Jail, Free Parking and Go are all represented on the round board, and you still get to play with fake money.

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THIS WEIRD THING HAPPENS WITH ANTS WHEN YOU PHONE RINGS

According to ViralVideoLab, this is what happens when you experiment with ants and electromagnetic waves emitted from smartphones. No, the ants aren't panicking to answer the call.

Apparently they're just freaking out because their antennas are picking up the on the electromagnetic waves coming from the ringing phone.

So what's the science here? The theory seems a little thin, but according to ViralVideoLab, it would appear that the ants are following the pattern created by the electromagnetic waves.

I'm not sure if this is a solid theory and they only have a few Wikipedia articles to back it up, but the video is still fascinating. Where's Bill Nye when you need him?

Personally, I can't help but wonder if someone just lifted up a big rock that was covering the ant home and then dropped a ringing phone into the midst of the chaos.

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Large Shark Caught Before it Reaches Washington

No, not Donald Trump. A large shark was caught in the Potomac River, the third such incident it three years. Have the enemies of the U.S. trained sharks to swim up the Potomac to the heart of American government and attack the Pentagon, Congress or even the White House?

Shark caught swimming up the Potomac River towards Washington DC

The 8-foot-long bull shark was caught on September 3rd by commercial fisherman Robert T. Brown in the Potomac River in St. Mary’s County, Maryland, just 80 miles from Washington D.C. Brown and his son, fishing boat co-owner Robbie Brown, found the shark when they hauled in their nets. They say they’ve worked the Potomac and Chesapeake Bay for decades and have never seen a shark, according to Murphy Brown, Robbie’s daughter, who also works the boat when she’s not at her job at a defense contractor. Hmm. Does she know something more about this incident that she’s not revealing for security reasons?

This is actually the third time sharks have been caught swimming up the Potomac in three years, according to a report on the capture of two bull sharks in June 2015.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1RVUGovd7vo

Is it time for the Pentagon to begin stocking the Potomac with trained military dolphins to protect the president and the rest of the U.S. government from enemy shark attacks?

If the military or the Secret Service can’t protect the president from sharks, maybe he needs to do the job himself by replacing his pet dogs with trained animals having a little more bite. Theodore Roosevelt had a badger, pound-for-pound one of the fiercest animals around. Calvin Coolidge had a pygmy hippo, although a full-sized hippo hiding in the Reflecting Pool might be a better shark deterrent. The Founders had some good ideas on this type of security. Thomas Jefferson had grizzly bear cubs and John Quincy Adams owned a pair of alligators given to him by Marquis de Lafayette, the French general who knew something about protection, having fought with the colonies during the Revolution.

If an alligator was good enough for John Quincy Adams …

The Maryland Department of Natural Resources claims it gets bull shark reports in the Potomac annually in the fall when its salinity is high. It had no comment on why there have been so many in the past three years.

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Bears are Rising Up Against Humans Around the World

On the list of “Animals You Don’t Want To Tick Off,” bears should be right up at the top. They’re big, they’re strong, they’re fast, they’ve got sharp teeth and they live just about everywhere. So the news from Russia that dozens of black bears have overrun a town and a gang of polar bears are terrorizing an Arctic weather station isn’t good. You could blame this on the Russians but the number of grizzly and brown bear attacks in the U.S. are also on the increase in quantity and severity. Are the bears of the world rising up against humans?

Bear taking over the streets of Luchegorsk

The situation in Luchegorsk, Russia, is an example of where we may be heading. For over a month, the 20,000 residents of this eastern town on the border with China have been getting attacked by at least 36 Asian black bears. One woman compared it to a furry military siege, complete with loudspeakers on trucks blaring warnings.

There are crowds of these bears, like army units. We are scared to walk outside. All doors are shut in kindergartens, there are written warnings everywhere that walking with kids is allowed only in certain areas.

The fire department is fighting the bears off with hoses and the police are gunning them down in the streets. So far there’s been no aid coming from the central Russian government to help this far eastern town stop the bear uprising.

Meanwhile, three men at a remote weather station have been trapped for a week by five polar bears. The two meteorologists and their mechanic can’t leave their little building at the Fyodorov weather station on Vaygach Island in the Arctic Circle because the bears are outside waiting for them and their only weapon is a flare gun. Help is supposedly on its way but they don’t call it a remote station for nothing.

Polar bears have workers trapped in remote arctic weather station

In the U.S. in the month of August, a grizzly bear was killed after killing a hiker in Yellowstone Park. A jogger in Alaska was injured by a grizzly. A black bear attacked a man in West Virginia.

There’s undoubtedly more incidents that haven’t been reported. Are the bears really rising up against humans? If so, why? Climate change has melted the polar ice and forced polar bears to new locations. Harsh winters have made food supplies smaller for black bears in Russia, forcing them to raid towns and fight with humans for sustenance. Education systems in the U.S. have taken the science and nature out of science and nature classes, creating fools who mess with bears who are hungry, pushed out of their natural habitat or protecting their young.

[MIKA27]

London, 75 Years After Destruction

The unofficial motto of the citizens of London during the Blitz was “business as usual.” The times, however, were anything but. Britain was locked in a conflict, as Prime Minister Winston Churchill memorably put it, “against a monstrous tyranny, never surpassed in the dark, lamentable catalogue of human crime.”

The specter of foreign invasion of the British Isles loomed for the first time in a millennium. Hitler’s triumphs up to that point in the year-long war were as astonishing as they were unprecedented. The Nazis effectively controlled the entire continent of Europe east of the Soviet Union, having conquered more real estate in a year than Napoleon had in a decade. The British expeditionary force had just been evacuated from Dunkirk on the coast of France, escaping annihilation by the narrowest of margins.

The Blitz—the British name for the sustained bombing campaign conducted by the Germans against their cities, especially London—began seventy-five years ago today. The campaign, which ran continuously for eight months, was initially conceived as a new phase of the Battle of Britain, Hitler’s effort to gain mastery of the skies over Britain, thereby clearing the way for an amphibious invasion of England. As such, the Germans shifted the focus of their aerial attack from RAF fighter airfields and the fighters themselves to the cities, with the primary intention of destroying aircraft factories and war production facilities, as well as the cities’ infrastructure and communications network.

On the fifth of September, Hitler ordered the Luftwaffe to commence “disruptive attacks on the [british] population and air defenses of the major cities, including London, day and night.” Two days later, 480 bombers and 600 fighters attacked the capital of the British Empire in three waves. Their target was the East End docks, but the lack of precision bombing meant that residential areas of the city also took a terrible pasting: 430 civilians died in those first attacks; another 1600 were seriously wounded. Especially hard hit that night, and for the duration, were the working classes, whose poorly constructed dwellings collapsed en masse in the bombardments.

London was bombed every night save one for the next 56 days. Although the population was greatly heartened by the torrent of antiaircraft fire thrown up at the raiders, the guns’ primitive radar control system and the lack of effective night fighters meant that it was rare indeed for a bomber to be hit, let alone shot down.

By the 17th of September, Hitler had shelved Operation Sea Lion, the invasion of England. The Battle of Britain was over, and the Brits had prevailed. Yet the Blitz went on, serving now as an extended campaign of terror, designed to break the morale of the British people to carry on the fight. Once morale collapsed, the thinking went in Berlin, Churchill would be forced to sue for peace, and Germany would have a free hand to concentrate on invading the Soviet Union.

By mid-November, when the bombers shifted their main effort to such provincial cities such as Birmingham, Coventry, Bristol, and Liverpool, London had been the target of more than 13,000 tons of high explosive bombs and a million incendiaries. On the clear moonlit night of October 15th alone, German Heinkels, Junkers and Dorniers attacked the city continuously from 10:40 pm to 4:40 a.m., knocking out a slew of railway terminals, three large water mains, the Battersea Power Station, and starting more than 900 fires.

Far from sinking into a sloth of despondency under this deluge of death and destruction, the citizenry of London responded with steely defiance and sangfroid. Said American newsman Eric Sevareid of the Londoners, who covered the Blitz for CBS from central London, “They were steady. They didn’t panic, didn’t get emotional.”

The Stiff Upper Lip was a far more important weapon in waging the battle against the Blitz than the anti-aircraft batteries. So was a distinctly clipped brand of British humor. “Thank God Jack’s safe in the Army,” said a middle-aged housewife of her son, as she inspected the ruins of her local shopping district the morning after a raid. Owners of half-bombed-out shops, of which there were soon hundreds in every borough, hung out signs, “MORE OPEN THAN USUAL.”

Before the advent of the war, government officials and public intellectuals warned of disaster in the event of mass bombings of the capital city. A 1938 report presented to the Ministry of Health by a group of psychiatrists forecast that huge numbers would be afflicted by neurosis and panic. The philosopher Bertrand Russell predicted that “London will be one vast raving bedlam, the hospitals will be stormed, traffic will cease, the homeless will shriek for help, the city will be a pandemonium.” War production, it was feared, might well come to a complete halt.

Nothing of this sort ever even began to happen.

Much to the surprise of the psychiatrists, civilians did not suffer nervous breakdowns in significant numbers, and the network of clinics opened to receive mental casualties closed due to a lack of demand. Everyone pulled together, seemingly energized by collective adversity and the daily challenges the bombardments posed to simply getting on with things. People referred to the raids as though they were weather. A heavy night of bombing was “very blitzy,” and excited crowds gathered at unexploded bomb sights to watch the UXB teams carry out their nerve-wracking, perilous work.

Part of the explanation for the high level of morale throughout the long ordeal surely lay in high level of civilian participation in the city’s many emergency defense and rescue services, including the Home Guard, the Women’s Voluntary Services for Civilian Defense, the Air Raid Precautions Service, and the Pioneer Corps, charged with salvage and cleanup. Suddenly almost every citizen except the very young and very old was thrust into the war effort. As J.B. Priestly told his listeners on BBC radio, “We’re not really civilians any longer but a mixed lot of soldiers—machine-minding soldiers, milkmen and postmen soldiers, housewife and mother soldiers.”

The government provided a large number of home shelters, but nowhere near enough for the entire populace. Some families sought out refuge in reinforced commercial basements in the West End; others looked to makeshift shelters in church crypts, factory basements, and underground warehouses.

By late September, close to 170,000 Londoners a night were using the Underground stations as their sleeping quarters. Before long stoves, toilets, and bunks were provided, and canteen trains served up tea and hot food. “Londoners clung together,” writes A.N Wilson, “a return to the shared beds of childhood, or even to the mysterious darkness of the womb itself.” And in the morning, after the all clear sirens, they resurfaced, cleaned up, and went on with their work, and their lives, only to do it all again the next day.

The great sculptor Henry Moore first attained notoriety as a war artist who produced strikingly evocative black and white drawings of nurturing mothers and their children, of row upon row of reclining people trying to sleep, of strangers forming into intimate cliques in the close, dank confines of the Tube tunnels and platforms. “What I was trying to portray,” Moore wrote later, “was the profound depth of this place where people were talking and sleeping, the distance they were from the war that was raging above their heads, but also of the awareness of [the war] in their faces, in their attitudes, in the stale air around them. . . . They were a bit like the chorus in a Greek drama telling us about the violence we don’t actually witness.”

The battered capital soon became a symbol of pride to inhabitants who’d long taken it for granted, as well for the British people as a whole. “Dear London! So vast, so ugly and so strong!” confided the noted diplomat and politician Harold Nicholson in his diary on February 14, 1941:

You have been bruised and battered and all your clothes are tattered and disarray. Yet we, who never knew we loved you (who regarded you in fact like some old family servant, ministering to our comforts and amenities, yet slightly incongruous and absurd), have suddenly felt the twinge of some fibre of identity, respect and love. We know what is come to you. And our eyes slip along your old untidy limbs, knowing that the leg may be gone tomorrow, and that tomorrow the arm may be severed. Yet through all this regret and dread pierces a slim clean note of pride. “London can take it.”

The spirit of London’s defiance, her indefatigable will, was perhaps best captured in Herbert Mason’s iconic photo of St. Paul’s Cathedral amid the swirling winds and flames of “the Second Great Fire of London” on the night of December 29, 1940. Flames engulfed most of the buildings around the great cathedral, which sits atop Ludgate Hill, the highest point in the city.

Fire brigades were pushed beyond the limits of endurance attempting to tackle 1,500 separate fires. Glass melted and iron gates twisted, and an eerie, reddish, apocalyptic light seemed to glow everywhere.

On a roof in Fleet Street, photographer Mann captured the magnificent site of the cathedral’s great dome rising up above the smoke and devastation. It happened that Ernie Pyle, the American war correspondent, was in the vicinity. He filed this dispatch:

The greatest of all the fires was directly in front of us. Flames seemed to whip hundreds of feet into the air. Pinkish-white smoke ballooned upward in a great cloud, and out of this cloud there gradually took shape--so faintly at first that we weren't sure we saw correctly--the gigantic dome of St. Paul's Cathedral. St. Paul's was surrounded by fire . . . It stood there in its enormous proportions - growing slowly clearer and clearer, the way objects take shape at dawn. It was like a picture of some miraculous figure that appears before peace-hungry soldiers on a battlefield.

Churchill ordered St. Paul’s saved at all costs.

And so it was, thanks to Herculean efforts by firefighters manning something like 1,700 water pumps, the prayers of thousands of anxious onlookers, and more than a bit of luck. It had been a close run thing, as the Thames feeding the pumps was at a low ebb tide, and many of the hoses clogged up with mud.

One fireman understood the gravity of his mission just as well as his embattled Prime Minister: “If St. Paul’s goes down,” he said to his mates in the early morning hours, “then we all go down.”

By the morning of the 30th of December, the flames and the bombs together had consumed more real estate than the Great London Fire of 1661. Nineteen churches were destroyed. Paternoster Row, center of London’s publishing trade, was entirely destroyed. Five million books went up in smoke in one night.

All told, 43,000 civilians died in the Blitz, and 139,000 were wounded. In the capital city alone, 28,556 people perished, and 1.4 million Londoners—one in six—lost their homes.

Many military historians believe Hitler’s decision to launch an air assault on Britain’s cities was wrongheaded from the start. For one thing, the Luftwaffe’s medium weight bombers lacked adequate payloads to seriously curtail aircraft production, let alone to bring a modern industrialized society to its knees. The ordeal strengthened the resolve of the British people to carry on with the fight, and earned them the admiration and support of millions all over the world, especially in the United States.

[MIKA27]

China's New Video About Kicking America's Ass Is More Than Meets the Eye

Last Friday, China held a parade commemorating the 70th anniversary of World War II, and swore high and low that it wasn't flexing its military muscles in the process. Zhang Ming, vice minister of China's Ministry of Foreign Affairs, told a press conference last month that "if someone says this is flexing anything, it is a flexing of the spirit of peace by the Chinese people."

These sentiments made the recent release of a fairly polished CG video, almost six minutes in length and produced by an unidentified entity, showing how totally and comprehensively they'd kick US ass in a shooting war, seem a bit puzzling. Popular perception of the video outside of China is of a full-blown Sino-Smackdown, but there's actually more to it than meets the eye.

But first, a round of applause for another demonstration of the Chinese Communist Party's supreme knack for snappy nomenclature on the parade, which has been officially dubbed "The Commemoration of the 70th Anniversary of the Victory of the Chinese People's War of Resistance Against Japanese Aggressions and the World Anti-Fascist War." If you're curious, that title does, in fact, overshoot the Twitter character limit.

Part of what makes the parade, and by extension the video, a bit of a surprise to the general public in the US is the fact that the parade itself was largely seen as a chance to watch the Chinese march around with a whole lot of military gear, including the occasional nuclear missile, to mark the end to a theater of conflict bookended — at least for Americans — by the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor at the start and the nuclear bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki at the finish.

But that actually provides a useful point of departure for the video, which starts off the narrative with a devastating surprise attack against a number of Chinese bases, according to Dean Cheng, senior research fellow with the Asian Studies Center at the Heritage Foundation, who noted that the bases are specifically described defense bases located along the coast.

"This leads to a firm decision to retaliate," Cheng told VICE News. "This is consistent with the (popular version) of 'Active Defense,' which is the official Chinese 'strategy,' where China would retain the operational/tactical initiative, but would never strike first."

Don't confuse the fact that China is flexing its big sexy peace muscles with the idea that they won't utterly kick your ass if you try a Pearl Harbor sucker punch. In essence, it's a deterrence message.

And the Pearl Harbor warning is an interesting one, because at least according to some in the China-watching community, the island that the Chinese attack and invade in the video isn't Taiwan, but rather Okinawa — a Japanese island home to a large US military presence.

The video itself never specifies a particular enemy, referring only to "a certain foreign alliance," according to Cheng. But it does show F-22 fighters getting pummeled by rockets on the runway. The US is the only country that operates those jets. And then it shows a variety of weapons blowing up Nimitz-class aircraft carriers and Arleigh Burke-class destroyers. Again, very much US gear.

Fair enough. You size for the biggest likely opponent and work from there, and it's no surprise to anyone that the US and Chinese militaries are the biggest fish in that Pacific pond. It's not super weird or odd that the Chinese might plan to hold their own against their biggest potential opponent.

Beyond the broad messaging, there are some smaller signs that China isn't wildly different from the US in its thinking on conflict. "It would seem that the new national highway system in China, like our own, is intended to allow for the rapid deployment of military forces," Cheng told VICE News. It does raise the question of the extent to which military requirements — like how much weight a bridge can carry — have been folded into China's big infrastructure boom over the last several decades.

The similarities go beyond the concrete, and in some ways stretch to the stylistic. The opening scene of the video has been cribbed from the opening of the video game Call of Duty. And the close-formation flying and spitting-distance submarine combat adheres to the same stylistic conventions that are canon in Hollywood war flicks like Top Gun and The Hunt for Red October.

In general, the broader point of the video is that China can not only go toe-to-toe with the current title champion, the US, but that it can win and win decisively.

"But it is interesting and striking that China is presumed to rule all domains of warfare, from underwater to the ground to the air. But notice no mention of space combat?" Cheng explained. The hesitation to throw that into the mix may have been a sharp political call, since space warfare is a touchy topic in general, and especially for the Chinese, since their 2007 anti-satellite weapons test created an enormous cloud of deadly space debris and an even larger flurry of international condemnation.

But beneath the message that China isn't going to take crap from anyone, and can hold its own against any likely opponent, is an even deeper and more interesting message. While the parade (and therefore this video) is being discussed as relevant to the 70th anniversary of the end of World War II, it's the 120th anniversary of the end of the first Sino-Japanese war. And the Chinese got their asses handed to them that time around.

"There is an implicit message in this video, the parade, and all the other Chinese actions, of: 'We will never allow ourselves to be so humiliated again,'" Cheng said. And that's not just a matter of technological parity. In the First Sino-Japanese War, "the Northern Fleet (Beiyang fleet) at the time was actually technologically comparable to the Japanese navy — but its training, recruitment, and equipping/logistical support were horrendous."

So, the underlying message to the US might be along the lines that they won't throw the first punch, but they'll sure as hell make sure they throw the last punch. But the message within China might be tied to the idea that the Chinese military will never be so foolish as to fall into the trap of imagining that having equivalent weapons technology alone, by itself, is enough to guarantee there will never be another complete and abject humiliation.

[MIKA27]

FABER-CASTELL E-MOTION PURE BLACK

Winner of the prestigious Red Dot Design award, the E-motion Pure Black line of pens by Faber-Castell is a striking eye-catcher to adorn any desk. The stealth collection includes a Twist pencil, a Ballpoint pen, a Rollerball pen, and a Fountain pen, all with an aluminium barrel with a guilloche pattern that has a pleasantly cool feel and rests comfortably in the hand, whilst the high quality PVD-coated nib promises supreme writing comfort.

[MIKA27]

HUDSON MAPLE CASK RYE WHISKEY

Just in time for the fall season, Hudson Maple Cask Rye Whiskey will add a unique element to classic cocktails. Hudson partnered with a maple syrup producer in Vermont who aged their syrup in Hudson barrels, before the barrels returned home to house Rye Whiskey before bottling. The syrup flavors mingle with the whiskey to create a light maple, caramel flavor that promises to be a great way to experiment behind your bar with cocktails like the Old Fashioned.