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

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In Space, Yesterday's Coffee is Today's Coffee

Do you still wish you could be an astronaut after watching the lung-flattening launches and bone-crunching landings? Has the eyeball-oscillating gimbal failed to dampen your spirits? What if we told you that coffee, the most precious of nectars essential for civilized behaviour, will be brewed from your own pee?

Astronauts Eric Boe [back left], Michael Finke [front left], Donald Pettit [back right] and Chris Ferguson [front right] brandishing pouches of coffee aboard the space station in 2008. Image credit: NASA

When every gram lifted into orbit costs a fortune, “Reduce, reuse, and recycle” becomes more than just a trite saying. That covers everything, up to and including purifying liquid waste (ie, urine) into a more palatable beverage.

Or, to put it more bluntly: yesterday’s coffee is today’s coffee. Suddenly that coffee spot with the greatest view imaginable is looking a bit less appealing, even if the mechanics of making it happen is impressive engineering.

Ewww...

But recycling pee into water in space isn’t as easy as it is here on Earth. When the original Urine Processor Assembly went to the space station, it developed a “pee pancake,” a precipitate of that clogged up the system. The system needed to be modified to filter additional calcium ions: all that bone loss in microgravity resulted in astronauts peeing out double the normal concentration of calcium ions!

The Urine Processor Assembly during Earth-based lab tests. Image credit: NASA

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Bloodsucking Bastards is the Office Horror Comedy We've Been Waiting For

Between What We Do in the Shadows and Bloodsucking Bastards, it’s an excellent time to be a fan of deadpan vampire comedies. The latter, which features Game of Thrones’ Pedro Pascal as the bloodthirsty new sales manager at a corporate office, boasts a clever script, a hilarious cast, and rivers of gore. What else do you need?

Bastards, with a script originally penned by Ryan Mitts, hails from the hive mind of Los Angeles comedy troupe Dr. God; Brian James O’Connell has the directing credit, but it’s clear from the start that this film was a collaborative effort. And that’s part of its magic. The bones of the story are, admittedly, rather familiar if you’ve seen Office Space or Shaun of the Dead, but it feels like a knowing homage, not a rip-off. At any rate, the actors (mostly up-and-comers aside from Pascal and Joel Murray, who played Freddy Rumsen on Mad Men) all mesh perfectly; the relationships are believable because they’re all buddies in real life.

The entire movie takes place within a single office, where production values are low but interpersonal drama is high. Acting sales manager Evan (Fran Kranz of Dollhouse) is the only employee in a pool who actually gives a damn, but he’s distracted, having just been dumped by his girlfriend, head of HR Amanda (Emma Fitzpatrick). Everyone else, including Evan’s best friend, committed slacker Tim (Joey Kern), spends the entire day goofing off, playing video games, watching porn, and dodging boss Ted (Murray) and that one nerdy guy in the office who lives only to collect money for sports betting pools.

But those male-enhancement drugs aren’t going to sell themselves, so Ted unexpectedly brings in outside help: Max (Pascal), a slick, smarmy corporate type who says things like “Sales is seduction.” He’s also an old college rival of Evan’s. Once he’s installed in what used to be Evan’s office, things start getting mighty strange mighty fast: people start going missing; the formerly mousey receptionist morps into a femme fatale; a onetime scruffy ne’er-do-well is suddenly a slick-haired model employee. It’s all due to Max ... and it’s not a spoiler to say Max is, well, a vampire.

That’s pretty much the entire premise, and the characters are all familiar types. And, yes, the whole “being an office drone will drain the life out of you” is a rather obvious (if 100 percent accurate) metaphor. Bloodsucking Bastards could have been a fun-but-forgettable lark, but it’s got the huge advantage of having a cast with amazing chemistry. The dialogue is scripted, but the actors were also given the freedom to improvise when it felt right.

This leads to wonderfully weird non sequiturs, as when Tim and the office’s gung-ho security guard, Frank (Marshall Givens), pause their vampire-staking quest to reminisce about the Kelly Clarkson concert they attended the night before. Or when someone says they fear going into the building basement ever since someone found a “whimsical gimp mask” down there. The movie is full of rapid-fire jokes and asides, delivered with complete nonchalance, and the humor is wonderfully on-target and unforced.

But, yeah, it’s also a horror movie (though not scary at all, not for an instant). The Shaun of the Dead comparisons really come into play when Evan, motivated by heartbreak and the sudden realization that he’s actually hero material, busts into the vamp-infested office to rescue his beloved. But instead of zombies, the good guys (and gal) are taking on vampires, which enables Dr. God to make use of gallons and gallons of fake blood (seriously, it is GORY), the creative use of which makes up for the fact that there are relatively few other special effects.

If the fight scenes feel way more awkward than the comedy, who cares? These office workers aren’t Buffy or Blade; they’re desk-dwellers who looked up how to kill vampires on Wikipedia, fashioned some wooden stakes from whatever’s around, and hoped for the best. Fortunately for us, Bloodsucking Bastards emerges as one of the best horror comedies in recent memory.

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Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain: Review

There’s a cutscene, late in Metal Gear Solid V, that’s ostensibly serious but contains a musical interlude so awkward it sent me into giggle fits. A dozen missions later, there’s a harrowing sequence that ranks among the best video game scenes I’ve ever played. If you don’t know how to reconcile those two things, then, well, you probably haven’t played Metal Gear Solid.

Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain, a video game directed by popular Twitter influencer and film enthusiast Hideo Kojima, takes itself very seriously—more seriously than any Metal Gear before it. Gone are the shlocky routines that characterized previous games in Kojima’s longrunning series, which turned 28—28!—in July. The Phantom Pain is often grave, filled with men yelling at one another about revenge and how they’re all already demons.

It’s not just the tone that’s changed—Metal Gear’s musty mechanics and clunky tropes have also been massively overhauled. While it is still predominantly a game about sneaking into bases, knocking out guards, and occasionally fighting weird boss battles, The Phantom Pain feels modern, fresh, and resoundingly different than any of Kojima’s other games.

For all that’s changed, The Phantom Pain has one big thing in common with other Metal Gears: It is both profoundly stupid and incredibly provocative. As I watched the story unfold, I found myself constantly frustrated, yelling “no way” at my television every time I witnessed a preposterous plot twist (there are a couple) or listened to an inane conversation (there are many). Metal Gear is to dialogue as teenage goths are to poetry, and yet—yet!—there are moments in this game that sent shivers through my body, made all the more evocative by the fact that I was in control of the action. One particular late-game sequence is on par with the series’ greatest moments, like Metal Gear Solid IV’s microwave corridor. (If you haven’t played Metal Gear Solid IV, well, take my word for it. It’s a very dramatic microwave corridor.)

Metal Gear Solid V is the best Metal Gear yet, and has immediately become one of my favorite video games of the last few years. It’s an impeccable stealth-action game, clearly inspired in all the right ways by modern series like Far Cry, and it’s got a level of moment-to-moment joyfulness that kept me satisfied even when I was slogging through harder versions of levels I’d already beaten just to see the “true” ending. The pacing might be terrible, the dialogue incoherent, the character motivations incomprehensible, and the ending woefully unsatisfying, but Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain is, really, an excellent video game.

Too bad it’s not finished.

Metal Gear Solid V, which is set before Metal Gear Solids 1, 2, and 4 but after 3, stars a guy named Punished ‘Venom’ Snake, aka Big Boss, who’s just woken up from a nine-year coma after the events of Metal Gear Solid: Ground Zeroes. Things you should know about Venom Snake: He’s voiced by 24’s Jack Bauer, he doesn’t talk much, and there’s a horn sticking out of his forehead. After about an hour of breathless cinematic tutorials set in a flaming hospital, Snake joins up with longtime series star Ocelot and his old buddy Kaz Miller for a summer camp reunion. They help forge a mercenary group called Diamond Dogs, because apparently Boss is really into David Bowie. Diamond Dogs, as Miller explains, is a spiritual successor to Big Boss’s last mercenary group, Militaires Sans Frontières. This time, though, they’re angrier. They want revenge on the people who put Snake in a coma. And they don’t mind doing whatever it takes to get that revenge.

Once things get going, Phantom Pain’s core rhythms start to reveal themselves. Like always, Snake must go on a series of solo missions to infiltrate enemy bases, take out guards, rescue prisoners, and assassinate targets, accompanied only by his gear and one of four buddies—a horse, a robot, a dog, and a killer sniper named Quiet. (Quiet, a very good character who plays a pivotal role in the story, sports a sexy yet impractical outfit that’s given a rather unsatisfying explanation. Considering Kojima’s penchant for breaking the fourth wall, I almost wish they hadn’t bothered, instead having her just turn to the camera and say, “F**k it, we wanted to sell more copies.”)

Snake’s missions, as the savvy player will soon realize, all follow a certain pattern: First, you approach the enemy base, using your binoculars to scout and tag enemy soldiers. Then you decide how to execute. The appeal, and the thing that The Phantom Pain gets so right, is the freedom you’re given to approach every objective however you want.

One operation tasked me with assassinating three Soviet commanders in a big, open camp. I climbed on my horse, pulled out a sniper rifle, and circled around the outskirts, shooting and ducking and shooting and ducking as my horse neighed gleefully all the way. Some important fights required some crafty use of Snake’s most subtle weapon, the GROM rocket launcher. During other missions, I stuck to stealth, creeping behind enemy guards and interrogating them for tidbits of information. Other times I made liberal use of C-4 explosives, inflatable decoys, smoke grenades, cardboard boxes, and all of the other tools Snake has at his disposal.

......and sometimes I did stuff like this:

Usually I snuck around. The best stealth games are like big puzzles, designed to be dismantled and solved through careful reconnaissance and action. It’s there that Metal Gear Solid V is a resounding success. With the exception of a recurring group of irritating supersoldiers called the Skulls—Kojima’s worst creation—every encounter is designed meticulously. Missions are full of hidden passages and helpful tools, ready to reward the curious and experimental player. Use an item too much and enemies will react; as I played through missions in the Angola-Zaire border region of Africa, for example, I nailed a lot of headshots and threw a lot of smoke grenades, which inevitably led the guards to start wearing helmets and gas masks. So I started using sniper rifles and C-4. Believe it or not a gas mask doesn’t do very much to protect against a brick of C-4.

One of the core reasons Metal Gear Solid V feels so good to play is that it’s exceptionally polished on a technical level. Not only does it look phenomenal—seriously, whoever modeled and animated Snake deserves many raises—it runs at a stable 60 frames-per-second on both PC and modern consoles, which makes everything feel extremely goddamned smooth. I love the way everything moves—sometimes I’ll spend minutes just zooming the camera around and climbing up ladders. If anyone ever tries to tell you that video-game framerates “don’t matter,” show them Metal Gear Solid V.

Most of The Phantom Pain’s missions are crafted to be played and replayed in as many ways as possible, which is great, because the second chunk of the game, cheekily called Chapter Two, asks you to repeat a dozen missions with harder difficulty settings like “extreme” or “stealth only.” That part is less great. It comes at a time when story events appear to be hitting an emotional crescendo, and it throws off the pacing, adding an unnecessary amount of padding to an already lengthy game. Granted, padding ain’t the worst thing in the world when you’re playing something as generally fun as Metal Gear Solid V, but the forced backtracking is disappointing nonetheless. At one point, even after I’d repeated a bunch of old missions, new story operations wouldn’t appear for me until I ground through more side-ops and made in-game “time” pass.

Even without those extra challenges, Metal Gear Solid V can be tough. Really tough. There are no difficulty settings, so you can’t just switch to easy when you’re stuck on a boss. Fortunately, there are some built-in semi-cheat buttons. When I found myself getting bored or didn’t feel like slamming my head against the wall over and over to get past a tough challenge, I just called in a helicopter to bombard enemy troops. Doing this will prevent the player from getting the highest possible mission rank, since it’s basically cheating, but if you’re feeling the effects of poor pacing and just want to get on with the story, blowing everything up isn’t a bad move.

Options for aerial bombardment notwithstanding, Metal Gear Solid V rewards the player most for keeping enemy soldiers alive. Tranquilize or knock out a soldier in the field and you can attach a Fulton balloon to him, which will whisk him off to your base, where he’ll be brainwashed into your private army. Through a clunky set of menus on Big Boss’s “iDroid” device, you can observe and manage the staff of Diamond Dogs, studying their strengths and weaknesses and assigning them to different areas like Intel or R&D. The better Snake’s staff, the easier it is to earn money, recruit new volunteers, and develop better gear. You can even swap out Snake for other soldiers in the field.

The staff-management part of The Phantom Pain is intricate, sometimes to a fault—your mercenaries can fight amongst one another, gain morale when you visit, get sick and have to recover in the hospital, and even build their very own zoo. Paying tons of attention to this whole system isn’t totally necessary, but it can get addictive, and as the game progresses, whatever emotional attachment you feel for Diamond Dogs is rewarded accordingly.

Assisting Snake on his quest for revenge against console exclusivity and 45-minute cutscenes are two familiar Metal Gear faces: the gruff, suddenly psychopathic Kaz Miller; and the inscrutable, always-been-psychopathic Revolver Ocelot, who has switched sides so many times over the course of the series it’d take an Excel file to figure out who he’s actually working for. The rest of the cast is great, too: there’s a spunky brat named Eli, a wise old gene expert called Code Talker, and a demonic villain with a cool voice but mediocre logical deduction skills. Other than Quiet, who wears a bikini and does not talk, the main cast features no women.

Codec conversations—those radio conversations that would pop up every once in a while in older Metal Gears—are gone, replaced by cassette tapes that you can play from anywhere. Most of these tapes are essential for catching up on Metal Gear history and supplementing the cutscenes, so it’s useful that you can listen to them while doing other stuff. Unfortunately, they also lead to one of The Phantom Pain’s most irritating quirks—if someone starts talking to Snake, the tape keeps playing.. If you’re on a mission and Ocelot or Miller starts chatting about objectives on your radio—which happens all the time—they’ll just talk over whatever cassette is on. It won’t pause. This might sound like a minor problem, but it’s actually a big pain in the ass, since there are hours of tapes to listen to, and you’ll want to play them while sneaking around enemy bases, not just sitting around in your chopper.

It’s a good thing those tapes exist. Not only do they offer color and clarification, they give you a healthy dose of Snake’s voice actor, Kiefer Sutherland, who is otherwise nearly silent to the point of awkwardness. His strange silence is particularly evident during some provocative late-game cutscenes, where his response to emotional events will often just be to look at people. One unintentionally hilarious scene involves a villain monologuing at Snake while he just stares, silent, for a solid ten minutes. He and Quiet make a good team.

Kiefer’s jarring muteness aside, Kojima’s style is all over this game, which is mostly a good thing. When the director’s camera isn’t creepily lingering over Quiet’s boobs, it’s zooming and whirling like a dervish, showing off grand spectacles in that flashy, stunning style that Kojima has perfected over the past few decades. Kojima’s film obsession drives just about every scene: One boss is straight out of Pacific Rim; other moments borrow from war and horror films, from the frantic handheld camerawork of Saving Private Ryan to the fog-shrouded terror of Silent Hill. (Not a surprise, considering.) None of the cutscenes are as long as they have been in previous games—the longest is probably 15 minutes or so—but they are plentiful, and they’re almost always great, even if they do take themselves a little too seriously.

Don’t worry, though: This ain’t Call of Duty. The Phantom Pain might aim for gravitas, but it’s still a Metal Gear game, which means that one moment you might rescue child soldiers from a life of imprisonment and the next moment you might slide down a hill on a cardboard box. It means that, in between long discussions on heavy subjects like torture and the power of language, you’ll stumble upon posters of anime girls making sexy poses.

It’s really too bad this game isn’t finished.

Metal Gear Solid V has two endings, both of which you can see in a single playthrough. Both are unsatisfying. The fates of major characters are left unresolved, the motivations of both villains and protagonists remain unclear, and there’s very little closure for the Diamond Dogs and their leaders. A handful of endgame cassette tapes help clear up a few character connections, but some of the twists and turns will inevitably leave the audience with more questions than answers. (The key is not to think about them too much.) After the second ending, you might not even realize the story is over.

Not long after Metal Gear Solid V launched, fans discovered an unfinished cutscene that would have made for a far more satisfying conclusion but is not in the actual game. It’s almost impossible to believe that they cut this; without it, an entire major plot thread is just left dangling there, unresolved in the most glaring fashion.

Right now, The Phantom Pain feels incomplete. It is incomplete. It’s a stellar stealth game and a triumphant work in many ways, but it’s also not the story it should have been, and that’s disconcerting. The “phantom pain” in the title refers to the literal and metaphorical pain Snake feels in his missing arm, but it could just as easily refer to the lingering sense that the game, too, is missing a piece. What is that missing limb? Where am I feeling that pain, and how could the game have remedied it?

When I finally completed Metal Gear Solid V—and I do mean finally, because it took me many dozens of hours to see it all—I wasn’t really sure how to feel. Here’s a game with such impressive design and so many evocative moments; why is the story so damn unfulfilling? Why does it feel like there’s so much missing? Why, even though I’d happily sing the praises of this excellent video game, am I stuck with the feeling that Kojima’s fifth (and perhaps final) major Metal Gear Solid wasn’t what it was meant to be?

Big Boss describes his mercenary group, Diamond Dogs, as an army without a nation. Metal Gear Solid V is a game without an ending. Yes, it’s a triumphant piece of work, a game that emotionally resonated with me as much as anything I played this year. But that resonance happened in the moment, and without a proper climax, I can’t shake the feeling that it didn’t amount to much.

By all means, join the Diamond Dogs. Go to Afghanistan; go to Zaire; meet interesting people and shoot them with tranquilizer darts. Enjoy the smart mechanics and dumb dialogue and melodramatic cutscenes. Laugh at the incredibly sharp contrast between the game’s best and worst moments. Spend dozens of hours creeping around enemy bases and enjoying the incredibly fun, fluid stealth-action in Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain. But know that Big Boss’s latest story is incomplete. It leaves a sour taste. Then you turn on a cassette tape and shoot up enemy guards with an assault rifle to the tunes of Europe’s ‘The Final Countdown’ and you remember that oh, OK, this video game is alright.

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After delays, SpaceX's massive Falcon Heavy rocket set to launch in spring 2016

SpaceX's super sized Falcon Heavy rocket has a new launch date: spring 2016. That's according to remarks given by Lee Rosen, SpaceX's vice president of mission and launch operations, at a conference in Pasadena this week. Space News reports the executive as saying, "It’s going to be a great day when we launch [the Falcon Heavy], some time in the late April – early May timeframe."

We've been hearing about the Falcon Heavy for some time, but it has seen its share of delays. It will be the world's most powerful operational rocket, capable of launching 115,000 pounds (53,000 kg) into low-Earth orbit. In history, it only comes short of the Saturn V rocket, which powered NASA's Apollo missions to the moon. SpaceX originally promised to launch the rocket for the first time in 2013. It was then pushed back to this year, but the project was put on ice following the failure of a Falcon 9 rocket on June 28th.

The Falcon Heavy is essentially comprised of three Falcon 9 rockets strapped together. SpaceX plans to recover the stage one rocket boosters by landing them back on Earth after launch — the process was spectacularly demonstrated in a video rendering earlier this year. The first launch in spring, if it actually happens on schedule, will merely be a demonstration. A second planned launch in September for the Air Force would bring some 37 satellites to space.

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Aussie Scientists Invent Robot To Save The Great Barrier Reef

If there’s any bigger threat to the Great Barrier Reef than our own environment-phobic Prime Minister, it can only be the crown-of-thorns starfish. Spiny, toxic and all around ugly, the crown-of-thorns preys on corals in the reef, decimating the ecosystem wherever outbreaks occur. While teams of divers delivering lethal injections have been managing outbreaks in recent years, roboticists from the Queensland University of Technology (QUT) have developed a robot that can search for up to eight hours at a time, day or night, in any weather conditions.

Meet the COTSbot.

Operating so close to the sea floor — one of the most difficult environments for autonomous robots to navigate — the COTSbot is equipped with some serious tech. With stereoscopic cameras for depth perception, five thrusters to maintain stability in all weather conditions, GPS and pitch-and-roll sensors and a pneumatic injection arm to deliver the fatal shot that previously divers would administer by hand — the COTSbot is one lean, mean starfish-killing machine.

Just like the human divers of the COTS eradication program, the COTSbot has undergone extensive training to prepare it for the task. The software that allows it to detect crown-of-thorns invaders among the diverse ecosystem of the Barrier Reef was trained over six months, using thousands of images of COTS taken by human divers. Dr Feras Dayoub, who is responsible for developing the software, claims that this is not the end to COTSbot’s training, however. “Its computer system is backed by some serious computational power, so COTSbot can think for itself in the water,” says Dr Dayoub.

While Facebook’s facial recognition software will sometimes identifies your elbow as a face, the COTSbot will err on the side of caution, making sure only to inject a starfish if it is undoubtedly a crown-of-thorns. For those that it cannot definitively identify, it will take photos for later reference. These images can then be verified by a human, allowing the bot’s detection systems to become increasingly advanced with each new search. The video below demonstrates how the COTSbot targets crown-of-thorns starfish, even in murky conditions.

COTSbot isn’t quite ready to hit the reef yet, but initial tests look promising. The next step to pitch it against living starfish is a highly supervised search-and-destroy, where a human will verify each and every COTS identification the robot makes before it delivers the injection. Beyond these final tests, COTSbot’s creator Dr Matthew Dunbabin sees a bright future for both his creation and the reef, imagining fleets of 10, or even up to 100 COTSbots working together to eradicate the threat of the crown-of-thorns starfish.

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7 Of America's Most Eerily Beautiful Lava Tubes

For most hikes, the destination -- whether it be the top of a dramatic cliff or the foot of a tall waterfall -- is the reward.

But then there are lava tube hikes, where passing through and exploring the mysterious and alluring caves is the reward.

Lava tubes are cavernous tunnels that formed long ago when the outermost layer of a lava stream crusted, enclosing the fiery flow beneath. When the lava flow eventually drained by oozing through natural openings or rupturing through the surface, it left behind dark passageways with twists, turns and eerie formations.

From the lava fields of Hawaii to the lava river beds of Arizona, America has a variety of these fascinating grottos, each one unique in its own way.

Some lava tubes, like the Nāhuku tube on Hawaii's Big Island, are short, easy to access and surrounded by lush forests. Others, like the tubes beneath Lava Beds National Monument in California, are caves deep in the Earth, just waiting to be explored.

Just be careful, some lava tube hikes require a flashlight, hard hat, climbing gear or knee pads -- always come prepared and always exercise caution.

Below are seven lava tubes you can hike through, each one as eerie as it is beautiful.

1. Ka'eleku Caverns, Maui

These caves are a worthy detour off the island's scenic and remote Road to Hana.

2. Lava Beds National Monument, California

This remote park near the Oregon border holds the largest concentration of lava tubes in the United States.

3. Lava River Cave in Newberry National Volcanic Monument, Oregon

It takes 90 minutes to explore this mile-long cave south of Bend. Beware of bats!

4. Nāhuku (aka Thurston Lava Tube), Hawaii Island

A short and sweet walk in a lush forest takes you to one of the country's younger lava tubes.

5. Ape Cave, Washington

At 13,042 feet long, Ape Cave is the third longest lava tube in North America. It's just south of Mount St. Helens.

6. Coconino National Forest's Lava River Cave, Arizona

This 700,000-year-old lava tube near Flagstaff still has ripples frozen into the floor from the lava that flowed there long ago.

7. Kazumura Cave, Hawaii's Big Island

One of the longest and most intricate lava tubes in the world, Kazumura Cave has 40 miles of pure exploration bliss.

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How Cannibals Might Cure Degenerative Brain Diseases

Prion diseases are terrifying. A rare, yet aggressive and mostly fatal class of neurodegenerative maladies popularized by bovine spongiform encephalopathy (mad cow disease), but includingCreutzfeldt-Jakob disease (CJD), scrapie, and wasting diseases in elk and mink, these illnesses eat away at our brains, causing dementia, motion disorders, and eventually a slow, horrid death.

Perhaps more terrifying than the symptoms is the fact that prion diseases aren't caused by your standard viral or bacterial infection. Instead, they're spread by the abnormal folding of naturally occurring and normal prion proteins in our brains. Once a misfolded prion hits a normal prion, it transforms that healthy entity into an agent of its infection. It's basically a zombie pathogen.

Fortunately, these diseases are rare in humans. They're only sometimes caused by random mutations within us. More often they stem from the consumption of the spinal tissue of creatures afflicted with a prion disorder. And that's something that we've gotten quite good at avoiding—despite paranoid claims to the contrary—since the mad cow scares of the late 80s and early 90s.

Yet there has been one major outbreak of prion disease in humans in recent history. For ages, this outbreak has served as a curiosity and a cautionary, even moralistic, tale. But some researchers have long looked at this exceptional epidemic as a means to better understand prion diseases and how to fend against them in the future. Recently, a team of British academics made a big discovery in the genetic code of the survivors of the disease: a whole new type of genetic resistance not just against the peculiar strain of illness that hit them, but potentially against every form of prion disease imaginable. Yet the means by which this resistance developed, it turns out, are unexpected and a little ghastly. Just how we can use this isolated genetic quirk to similarly protect the wider world against similar maladies remains a bit fuzzy.

The outbreak in question was kuru. In the tongue of Papua New Guinea's southern Fore people, whom it struck, kuru means "the shaking death," a reference to its symptoms. During the 50s and 60s, a massive kuru epidemic hit the Fore, at its height killing two percent of the population every year. Although initially regional investigators thought it was some kind of mass psychosomatic illness or genetic disorder, eventually they linked it to prion disease. And when they did, they discovered that the origins of kuru weren't infected cattle, sheep, or even mink.

Kuru spread through the Fore thanks to ritual cannibalism. The Fore's recently deceased were consumed, mainly by women and small children. Researchers suspect that sometime in the 1950s, a member of a Fore community contracted CJD or some variant, maybe thanks to a random mutation. Then his consumption spread the disease to others, who were themselves consumed, even after colonial officials tried to outlaw the practice.

"[An old expert] told me that... everyone who sat down to a mortuary feast where the person had died of kuru would ultimately succumb to kuru," Professor John Collinge, head of the University College London Institute of Neurology team behind the new discovery, told VICE.

Because of the compositions of the feasts, the epidemic's victims were overwhelmingly women and children. And for a time, some feared that the disease would basically wipe out all Fore of child-bearing age and capabilities, leaving the entire culture to slowly, brutally die off.

But that didn't happen. The Fore survived, for the most part presumably because the practice of cannibalism dropped off. The disease, on the other hand, faded into the realm of historical medical curiosities—and, of course, cautionary tales about the evils of cannibalism.

But a few people, like Collinge, kept boots on the ground with the Fore into the modern era. Prion diseases, it turns out, have an insane potential for dormancy, surviving for years or decades before kicking into gear and ravaging our bodies. So every now and then a new case would pop up amongst the Fore, ready for study. And even just examining the histories and remaining populations of the disease's survivors, it was thought, could teach us about how to handle another prion outbreak in the wider world if one ever were to arise.

It was while collecting such medical reference data that Collinge and his team started to realize that the old assumption about everyone who ate kuru flesh eventually dying of kuru wasn't true. In fact, they found hundreds of survivors of the epidemic who'd been exposed to kuru-tainted flesh and had not manifested any signs of the disease whatsoever. That's when Collinge realized that he might have found a population with some natural resistance to the disease worth exploring.

"We knew from some studies originally published in Nature back in 1991 that there was a common variation in the human [genetic code for the] prion protein at position 129 [that could lead to resistance to CJD]," says Collinge. This variation occurs worldwide, dating back 500,000 years ago, probably to an era when widespread cannibalism amongst early humans caused a number of kuru-like epidemics, selecting for those with this genetic booster to their defenses. So when he first examined the DNA of kuru-resistant Fore, that's what he expected to see.

But when his team looked at the results, they realized that while many of the survivors did have the protective mutation at position 129, they also displayed a totally distinct genetic anomaly at position 127 on the prion gene, unlike anything they'd seen in 20 years of research on populations all over the world. And it was most densely distributed at the very center of the kuru epidemic, where the disease had otherwise done the most damage and probably began.

"Our initial thought was that maybe... it might cause the disease," says Collinge. After all, he adds, the mutation showed up on a bit of DNA that hadn't changed for millions of years, suggesting that it served some important function. Maybe that was tamping down rogue prions.

Yet when Collinge's assistants went to collect medical histories from the families of those with this mutation, instead of finding infirmity, they found them to be in unexpectedly good shape.

"In fact," says Collinge, "there wasn't much history of kuru. Indeed, in about a dozen families that they looked at, I think there was only one person in one family that had died of kuru. In the other families, everyone had relatives that had died of kuru—multiple people."

This mutation didn't cause kuru, the team realized. It was preventing it. After a little jiggering around in genetically modified mice, they realized that while one copy of the gene offered resistance to kuru and limited resistance to mad cow disease, two copies of the gene offered total resistance against any form of prion horror the team could throw at their long-suffering vermin.

And given the distribution of the mutation, it seemed that the resistance wasn't just some complete fluke of nature. It spread through the population because of the cannibalistic outbreak.

That's not to say that kuru caused its own resistance. The mutation appears to be about ten generations (or a couple hundred years) old, whereas the oldest oral historical records of kuru only go back to the early 20th century. But under the pressure of kuru, this mutation, which elsewhere might have faded away, was favored to an insane degree, until, Collinge estimates, about 12 percent of the region at the heart of the epidemic was carrying one variant gene copy.

"If cannibalism hadn't stopped at the end of the 1950s," enthuses Collinge, "that population may have regenerated from the survivors and created an entirely [prion disease]-resistant population. It's an amazing example of human evolution—probably the most powerful example that's ever been demonstrated of resistance to lethal infection."

Yet while this genetic discovery is eye-popping for suggesting that humanity may have genetically benefitted from cannibalism, Collinge and his colleagues are still working out how to weaponize it in the fight against prion disease. (And the fight is real: While kuru has faded and mad cow is contained, the number of people exposed to prion contamination over the years, who may now be dormant carriers, suggests we're headed down a road of pain and confusion in the future for which we have few medical tools.)

"One possible thing you could do is conceive of some sort of gene therapy where you deliberately express the mutant protein in individuals as an inhibitor of prions," muses Collinge. "[but] I don't think that's a realistic approach to take. Gene therapy for brain diseases, I don't think is close to possible [at the moment]."

At the moment, when it comes to treatments, Collinge and his compatriots are focusing on an unrelated antibody, which basically sticks to healthy prions and prevents zombie monster prions from infecting and refolding them. They've even had some success in curing mice of existing disease and are on their way to developing a trial for human patients.

But even if it can't immediately translate into the premiere knock-out blow against prion disease, the kuru-bred resistance will help us in our understanding of the disease.

"I think understanding what the [mutation] does is going to be absolutely fascinating in terms of the molecular understanding of these diseases," says Collinge. "[And] these diseases are incredibly aggressive, invariably fatal. In reality it's probably going to take more than one drug working in combination to actually cure them. So although we have high hopes for our antibody, that doesn't mean that we're not looking for other things as well to knock them out."

Some of those other things could stem from the discoveries gifted to us by Fore cannibalism and the disease it triggered. But even if we don't get anything tangible out of the position 127 mutation, it's still a profound message about the speed, power, and efficiency of evolution, and the potential for human survival even against zombies. Zombie pathogens, that is.

[MIKA27]

A Meteor Exploded Over Bangkok On Monday Morning

Citizens of the Thai capital Bangkok witnessed a huge fireball descending on the horizon yesterday, and thanks to the dashcams in their cars, we can admire the celestial visitor from several different angles.

The meteor entered Earth’s atmosphere around 8.45am local time, and burnt up in a huge fireball after striking down from the sky. The meteor was big and bright, but definitely smaller than the infamous Chelyabinsk meteor which exploded over Russia in 2013, damaging 7,200 buildings in six cities in the southern Ural region. There are no reports of any damage from Bangkok so far.

We put together a short video about the Bangkok shooting star, for you viewing pleasure:

[MIKA27]

Even Spaceflight Will Be Impacted By Sea Level Rise

Sea level rise isn’t just a problem for coastal cities, it’s a problem for NASA. Two thirds of the space agency’s infrastructure, including the Kennedy Space Center, the Ames Research Center, and the Johnson Space Center stand between 5 and 40 feet (2 to 12 metres) above mean sea level. By the end of the century, billions of dollars of NASA assets could be underwater.

Global mean sea level has risen 8 inches since 1870, and the rate of rise has doubled over the past few decades. A few weeks back, a team of climate scientists announced that the Earth is probably locked into ‘at least’ three feet of sea level rise due to melting icecaps and thermal expansion of ocean water as our planet heats up. NASA, which happens to be conducting much of this important sea level rise research in-house, is naturally quite curious (and worried) about how these trends will impact spaceflight and its scientific laboratories.

The maps below, released along with a detailed NASA feature article, show the regions around NASA space centres (in red) that would be inundated by 12 inches (30 cm) of sea level rise. According to NASA,all of its coastal centres (shown on the map of the continental US below) are projected to experience at least five inches of sea level rise between now and 2050.

Projected amounts of sea level rise around coastal NASA facilities

NASA facilities across the United States

There’s a good reason that NASA built so much of its infrastructure along coastlines: It’s the safest place to launch rockets from. The US government decided long ago that it would much rather have a rocket fail over the ocean than over a densely populated metropolitan region. Seems wise.

But that well-intentioned decision has created some stark realities in the era of rapid climate change. For one, the only facility in the country that can launch crewed flights — NASA’s famed Kennedy Space Center in Florida — has found itself directly in the line of fire. Historical records and aerial photos indicate that the beach in front of Kennedy has thinned and moved inland by approximately 200 feet (60 metres) since the facility opened in 1961. Other launch centres, including the Wallops Flight Facility in coastal Virginia, have spent the last few years watching their beaches erode into the ocean in the wake of several large hurricanes.

Aerial view of the Kennedy Space Center and adjacent launch facilities using Landsat data from the U.S. Geological Survey

Of course, NASA doesn’t just plan to sit by as precious and one-of-a-kind facilities go underwater. The space agency’s Climate Adaptation Science Investigators Working Group is busy translating international climate reports, such as those published by the IPCC, into regional-scale projections and advice for individual NASA facilities. Moving forward, NASA scientists and managers will redouble their efforts to work with city and state officials to fortify coastlines. In some places, the answer will be smarter buildings, in others, retrofitting and hardening old infrastructure. Launch facilities that must remain shoreside will need to start accounting for costly beach replenishment and seawall repair as part of their routine maintenance.

But if the worst-case sea level rise scenarios come to pass, NASA scientists — like many other coastal populations — may simply have to accept the inevitable, pack their bags and move inland.

[MIKA27]

Aussie Zombie Movie Wyrmwood Is Getting Its Own Real-World Horror Maze

Wyrmwood was a cult hit when it was released last year, with its unique blend of Aussie scenery, ocker humour and zombie blood-and-guts drawing a lot of attention online. Unfortunately, a lot of that online attention was from pirates and illegitimate downloaders; it got to the point that Wyrmwood‘s creators were pleading with pirates to stop sharing the movie. After a significant groundswell of community support and crowd-sourced cinema showings through FanForce, Wyrmwood made its mark — and now it’s being turned into a horror maze.

As part of Fright Nights at Warner Bros Movie World up on Queensland’s Gold Coast, the Wyrmwood-themed maze is the second of four to be announced; the first is a Friday The 13th Part XII one. Tickets to Fright Night start at $32, and the event runs across Friday and Saturday nights during October. As well as the mazes, there are a bunch of different horror precincts, panic rooms that force you to escape in 20 minutes or less, and a Halloween short film festival.

It’s a relatively small part of a minor event at an Australian theme park, but it’s nonetheless genuinely gratifying to see Wyrmwood get the success and recognition that it deserves. It’s one of the more interesting filmmaking stories to come out of Australia in the last couple of years, alongside other crowd-funded and crowd-supported films like The Tunnel — so congratulations to everyone behind it. Here’s hoping that it continues to enjoy a bit more time in the spotlight and that we get some more great homegrown horror flicks.

[MIKA27]

The New Bentley Bentayga Is A 301km/h SUV

Every car manufacturer and his dog wants a luxury SUV in their line-up: Lamborghini, Audi, Tesla. Oh, and Bentley. The brand new Bentayga packs a twin-turbocharged 6-litre 12-cylinder engine, and will hit 100km/h in 4.1 seconds, then steam on all the way to a top speed of over 300km/h. This thing is ridiculous.

At a kerb weight of nearly 2500kg, the Bentley Bentayga isn’t exactly a spritely Mazda MX-5; in fact, it isn’t even two MX-5s welded together in some ungodly abomination. But despite that heft, the fact that its reworked version of Bentley’s oft-used twin-turbo W12 (basically two V6s very neatly combined under the hood) develops 447kW up at 5250rpm and 900Nm from 1250rpm means that it’s no slouch at getting up to highway cruising speeds.

And if you want to go faster, it will. The Bentayga’s rated top speed is 301km/h, a few clicks faster than the previous reigning champion, Porsche’s Cayenne Turbo S. Perhaps more fascinating than the fact that it’s so fast or so weighty is the fact that its 8-speed auto and a host of smarts like cylinder deactivation and stop-start are responsible for a combined fuel consumption rating of just 12.8L/100km. (Although perhaps not if you’re putting your foot down around the city…)

If you’re a tech geek looking for a massive hulking super-luxury super-sports four wheel drive, then look no further. The Bentayga has an optional 10.2-inch, 4G-capable Android tablet for both rear-seat passengers, a similar front and rear birds-eye camera system to a $750,000 Rolls Royce and an in-dash 8-inch touchscreen controlling the 1950 Watt 18-speaker sound system.

[MIKA27]

Packed Like Sardines In A Can

rom this point of view it seems that one cannot fit a knife between two planes in the crammed hangar bay of the Nimitz-class aircraft carrier USS Ronald Reagan, where sailors perform maintenance on F/A-18 Super Hornets. Let’s play! How many aircraft can you count in this photo?

[MIKA27]

Replacing Subway Lines With High-Speed Moving Footpaths Sounds Terrifying

London has the oldest subway system in the world: great for tourism, but sometimes not-so-great for commuters. There’s all sorts of sensible plans to upgrade the city’s public transport, but here’s one particularly outside-the-box solution: a 24kph moving footpath, looping 27 kilometres under London. What could go wrong!

Architecture firm NBBJ has come up with the plan, which involves replacing the Circle Line, a loop that runs underneath most of central London, with a set of moving footpaths. There would be three footpaths side-by-side: the slowest ‘feeder’ lanes on the outside, with the 24kph superhighways in the middle.

There’s some logic in the madness: you’d never have to wait for a train, and the maximum capacity of the line would increase to the point where it could maybe handle rush hour.

On the other hand, you’d kill every person with a stroller, large backpack, or wearing high heels; the other subway lines that share track with the Circle line would have some issues; and just imagine how bad the tourists would be on it.

[MIKA27]

A Year in Cuba

Source: The Atlantic

Reuters photographer Alexandre Meneghini has spent the past year documenting the lives of Cubans. He has captured images of students, athletes, farmers, performers, and workers in the Caribbean nation during a time of transition. Starting in 2013, Cuban officials began having secret talks with the United States, and this summer, the two nations resumed formal relations. The U.S. embassy in Havana reopened in August for the first time in half a century.

Pre-university students pose for a photo during the first day of class for the 2015-2016 course in downtown Havana on September 1, 2015. Universal free education is one of the pillars of the socialist society built in Cuba since Fidel Castro’s 1959 revolution.

Cowboy Raul Albeja, 60, stands as he listens to the national anthem during the International Livestock Fair Show in Havana on March 16, 2015.

Cuban soldiers hold torches during a march in celebration of the 162nd birth anniversary of Cuba's independence hero Jose Marti, in Havana on January 27, 2015. Thousands of members from the Cuban Communist Youth Union (UJC) and student organizations participated in the march.

A dancer from the Cuban National Ballet practices during a rehearsal before the 24th International Ballet Festival in Havana on October 22, 2014.

Cristian Daguada (left), 11, plays futbolito, or “little soccer” in Spanish, with his neighbor Brian Meson, 11, in Havana on March 12, 2015

Pedro Sili, 51, picks tobacco leaves at a farm in Cuba’s western province of Pinar del Rio on February 16, 2015.

Dancer Cristian Perez (right), 20, and informatics student Ariana Dexido, 17, dance near the sea in Havana on July 12, 2015.

The neighborhood of El Vedado is seen from a tall building in Havana on July 1, 2015.

Revelers get ready to perform at a carnival parade in Havana on August 7, 2015.

A dancer from the Deep Roots Dance Company performs during a training session in an old theater in downtown Havana on October 14, 2014.

Retiree Madeline Barcelo swims at the beach with her granddaughter in Varadero, Cuba, on August 26, 2015. Cubans are flocking to the beach in record numbers before a possible end to the U.S. travel ban that would open the gates to American tourists and bump up prices.

Jonatan Leliebre (left), 10, and Oscar Torres, 9, exercise before a wrestling practice session at an old Basque ball gymnasium in downtown Havana on October 30, 2014

Cub’'s Capitol, or El Capitolio as it is called by Cubans, is seen in Havana on July 9, 2015. Cubans are once again touring their Capitol, an imposing structure previously shunned as a symbol of U.S. imperialism but now undergoing renovation and set to reopen as the new home of the Communist government’s National Assembly.

A tourist takes pictures at Cuba’s Capitol, or El Capitolio, on July 9, 2015.

Victor Capote, a 46-year-old rancher, works on a horseshoe on his mare, Muneca, or “doll” in Spanish, on his ranch near San Antonio de los Banos village in Artemisa province, Cuba, on August 6, 2014.

Circus performer Olga Morales, 18, takes part in a training session in Havana on September 25, 2014.

Actress Aimee Perez, 19, poses for a photo as she has her body painted to perform as part of the creation “Mutacion Forzada,” or “Forced Mutation,” by Cuban artist Alberto Lescay during the 12th Havana Biennial in Havana on May 31, 2015

Kevin Lachaise, 8, watches a recorded TV show on the screen of a computer in the living room of his home in Havana on February 10, 2015. Netflix, Inc. had just launched its movie and TV streaming service in Cuba, joining the list of U.S. companies looking to take advantage of thawing diplomatic relations between the United States and the communist-ruled island country

U.S. singer Pacman (left), 20, sings hip-hop with tattoo shop owner Felipe Suni, 23, in Havana on March 18, 2015.

Ballet dancer Laura Quesada, 23, warms up before performing for journalists in Camaguey, Cuba, on June 20, 2015.

Street vendor Alain Rivera, 37, holds his 10-month-old nephew in a barber shop in downtown Havana on July 14, 2015.

Civil engineering Ph.D. students Arazai Garcia (left), 28, and Maidelin Pacheco, 21, chat during lunchtime at the University of Camaguey in Camaguey, Cuba, on June 19, 2015.

Cigar enthusiasts smoke as they compete for the longest ash during the XVII Habanos Festival in Havana on February 26, 2015.

Children practice during a fencing class at the “Martyrs of Barbados” gymnasium in downtown Havana on December 3, 2014. About 100 students train at the gymnasium, which was named after 73 Cuban fencers, known as the “Martyrs of Barbados,” who were killed in a 1976 attack when a bomb blew up a Cubana airliner in Barbados.

Pre-university students hold a Cuban flag as they walk in downtown Havana to mark the first day of class for the 2015-2016 course on September 1, 2015.

Mechanic Carlos Rodriguez, 29, calls to relatives to turn on the water for his high-pressure cleaner as he washes the bottom of a Russian-made Moscovich car in downtown Havana on February 19, 2015

A baby Cuban crocodile (Crocodylus rhombifer) that just arrived from Havana National Zoo is placed in an enclosure at Zapata Swamp National Park on June 4, 2015. Ten baby crocodiles were delivered to a Cuban hatchery in hopes of strengthening the species and extending the bloodlines of a pair of Cuban crocodiles that former President Fidel Castro had given to a Soviet cosmonaut as a gift in the 1970s.

A boy plays on a street in downtown Havana on December 5, 2014. (GREAT PICTURE! )

Cowboy Ariel Peralta, 25, watches a rodeo at the International Livestock Fair in Havana on March 22, 2015.

Cuban tourists sail in a rented sailboat at the beach in Varadero, Cuba, on August 26, 2015. Cubans are flocking to the beach in record numbers before a possible end to the U.S. travel ban that would open the gates to American tourists and bump up prices.

People take pictures of waves breaking on Havana’s seafront boulevard, El Malecon, on January 25, 2015.

Boys practice wrestling in downtown Havana on October 30, 2014.

Odelia Pedroso, 59, hangs clothes in the courtyard of her home in downtown Havana on July 30, 2015.

Medical student Electo Rossel, 20, wearing a shirt with a picture of U.S. President Barack Obama, listens to music at the Malecon seafront outside the U.S. embassy in Havana on August 14, 2015.

Ivan Pineda, 17, waits backstage of the Bertolt Brecht Theatre to perform during the VI International Pantomime Festival Havana 2015, in Havana on June 14, 2015

Dancers for TV shows (from left) Yasel Rodriguez, 26, Yudisvani Rabi, 32, and Maykel Puentes, 30, dance during a contemporary dance training session as part of “Proyecto Divino,” or “Divine Project” in Spanish, in downtown Havana on February 4, 2015.

[MIKA27]

The Tiny Town Where Almost No One Owns a Car and Everyone Takes Taxis

BETHEL, Alaska—Cheri Boisvert and Matt Janz are moving apartments on foot in the biggest town in Alaska’s Yukon Kuskokwim Delta.

“Bethel’s a strange place,” Boisvert said, when I expressed surprise that she would attempt a move by walking her possessions across the dusty blocks between her two homes. But like just about everybody else in this city of 6,000, they don’t have a car, so Boisvert, a librarian, walks with a trash can.

One of the strangest things about Bethel is that though it’s the government and transit hub for about 56 villages, there are almost no affordable transit options for its residents. The town has two shuttle buses, part of a public transportation system it launched five years ago. But ask just about anyone in town if they’ve ever taken the bus, and they laugh in your face.

No roads lead in or out of Bethel, so it’s prohibitively expensive to bring in cars or other vehicles. Cars cost about double what they would on the mainland. Janz referred me to the town’s unofficial used-car lot, where people park used old cars they want to sell. It’s essentially a dusty ditch by the side of the road. When I was there, the price for a 2003 Ford Focus, which the Kelley Blue Book says would sell for $1,833 in “good” condition, was listed for $3,500. A 2003 Toyota RAV-4 with 160,000 miles costs $6,000 in Bethel, while the Kelley Blue Book says it’s worth $3,900.

Cars, even used ones, are out of the price range of many people living in Bethel, and even if you buy one, gas currently costs $6 a gallon.

Instead, just about everyone in town depends on taxis or their own two feet to get around. There are about 70 taxi drivers in Bethel, one for every 85 people, making it the city in America with the most taxis per capita.

“In one sense, our cabs are our public transit,” Leif Albertson, the vice-mayor, told me.

Taxis wait outside the main grocery store in Bethel.

But a surfeit of taxis does not mean that transportation is affordable, either. A ride in town costs $5 per person, no matter how short the trip. A ride to the airport, or to the suburbs, costs $7. A stop en-route costs $1, plus $1 per minute after three minutes. That starts to add up in a town where 23 percent of the population is below the poverty line.

Dozens of people walk in the ditches alongside Bethel’s one paved road, dragging their feet in the dust. But the town isn’t particularly walkable either. Bethel’s newspaper is constantly posting stories of people who have been hit by cars. Janz told me he tries to walk to his job as a lawyer year-round, which means wearing cleats in the winter ice, and dealing with dusty pants in the summer.

I talked to one man in his mid-fifties named Nelson who was in town for medical treatment. He carried a cane, and said he walks everywhere to save money, even though he has a bad hip. He regularly walks the four miles out to a region called Tundra Ridge. He said that even the bus in Bethel, which costs $3 a ride, was too expensive for him (seniors pay only $1).

“Once I get going, it doesn’t hurt,” he told me, about his hip.

According to Census data, 1,500 people commute to work in Bethel by driving alone in a car, truck, or van. Five people take public transit, 740 carpool, and 3,615 commute by another travel mode. For Bethel residents that means walking or cabs.

Frances Reichs, who hosts a weekly radio call-in show in Bethel and is an unofficial town historian, moved here in 1975. Most people were relegated to walking then, he told me, because there were only three cabs. Then two brothers moved to town from Nome, and, taking notice growing number of jobs in the town’s government sector and the affluent residents that came with them, they decided to start a cab company. It’s now called Kusko Cab (many government jobs come with a hefty cost-of-living adjustment that doubles as hazard pay because Bethel is such an isolated place).

The cab companies also diversified Bethel. Looking for employees who had clean driving records and the capital to lease a taxi, companies started to recruit family and friends from overseas. Kusko is now known around town as the “Albanian” cab company because it employs mostly drivers from Albania and Macedonia. The other three cab companies employ mostly Koreans.

About 1.63 percent of Bethel’s population is Korean, meaning it has the highest proportion of Koreans in the state, according to data. Many of the businesses in town, including the video rental store, are owned by Koreans. Walk around and you’ll see Korean flags hanging in the windows of apartments. The diversity has created some tensions.

“There is a very noticeable native Alaskan prejudice against foreign folks,” Reichs told me. In 2012, a 54-year-old female Korean cab driver, Young Suk Chong, was stabbed to death, her body left in her taxi in the winter cold near a dump. A 21-year-old local man was convicted of murdering her in 2013. And in 2006, a Korean cabbie named Ju Young Joung was killed by a single gunshot wound to the head after people on idling snowmobiles approached his cab in a parking lot. Some locals worried that the attack was racially motivated, and no one was ever charged with the crime.

People walking on Bethel’s dusty roads

Driving a cab in Bethel used to be a lucrative endeavor. Less so now. When I asked Joe Yoon, a Korean taxi driver, about a rumor that cab drivers in Bethel make $100,000 or more, he scoffed.

“Not even close,” he told me. Yoon estimates that he carries about 80 people a day around Bethel. Insurance costs $7,000 a year, and he has to pay the cab company $250 a week, he told me, as well as pay for fuel and maintenance costs for his cab. The roads in Bethel, which are all dirt save one, are notoriously dusty in the summer and icy in the winter, with enough bumps and holes to make most rides uncomfortable. As Bethel has become less snowy and cold in the last few years, more residents have decided to walk rather than take a cab, making his job tougher.

There’s also not that many places for people in Bethel to go. The town has just one movie theater. It does not have clothing or book stores, bars, or anywhere that (officially) sells liquor. The only way to go away for a romantic weekend away is to take a pricey plane trip or ride a snowmobile on the frozen river in the winter.

To earn some extra cash, some cab drivers have become involved in Bethel’snotorious bootlegging industry, a development the local government is trying to quash. The town voted to become “wet” in 2009, but the City Council hasn’t recommend that any store be granted a liquor license (the state approves the liquor licenses, but looks to the local government for guidance). Alcohol fuels violence and addiction in the Alaskan bush, and many of the nearby villages have banned it. As the law stands, you can bring alcohol into Bethel, but you can’t buy or sell it there.

But get into many cabs in Bethel, and ask for alcohol, and the driver will take you to a bootlegger. Other drivers charge a specific amount to drive people around while they drink, Mark Springer, a city councilman, told me. Springer recently introduced a bill that would revoke the license of drivers who are found to be selling alcohol from their cabs.

Still, for all its oddities, Bethel’s new residents are committed to their town. It gives them the opportunity to pursue the American Dream without the hassles found in the nation’s big cities.

Yoon, the taxi driver, moved to Anchorage after hearing about an opportunity to work at a restaurant there. He’s been in Bethel for 15 years now, and both he and his wife drive a cab for Quyana Cab.

He raised a daughter in Bethel, and says he plans to stay there for the rest of his life.

“This is my hometown, I don’t care what people think, I love it here,” he told me, as he idled in the line in front Bethel’s big supermarket, where there’s almost always a line of cabs waiting.

Joe Yoon helps carry a client’s groceries.

It’s not unusual for a husband and wife to drive a taxi in Bethel. Even a husband and wife-to-be.

Albert Chupi lived in Albania when he met the woman of his dreams. They’d known each other a long time ago, and started getting reacquainted on Facebook. To see if the relationship could work, though, she wanted him to move to town where her father ran a cab company. Chupi was up for the adventure. He’s been in Bethel for a year now, working for Kusko Cab.

“It’s okay here, but there’s no place for fun,” he told me, as he drove his cab around potholes in one of Bethel’s many dirt roads.

The happy couple is getting married next summer in Albania, and plan to return to Bethel after a honeymoon abroad.

[MIKA27]

ORIGINAL 1969 STEVE MCQUEEN “BULLITT” POSTER

American film critic and professor Emanuel Levy was quoted in 2003 as saying “Bullitt contains one of the most exciting car chases in film history, a sequence that revolutionized Hollywood’s standards”. At almost 11 minutes long the car chase is surprisingly long, and it dominates the viewer’s memory of the film so much that people sometimes forget that it’s an excellent film on either side of the car chase. It was nominated for two Academy Awards and won one, and for any car guy (or girl) it’s an essential member of the film collection.

This is an original Bullitt film poster used to promote the movie when it was released, it’s being auctioned to raise funds for the BBC Children In Need Fund and if you’d like to register to bid you can click here.

[MIKA27]

Arizona is Breaking Apart and There Are Many Reasons Why

When you see a road sign that reads “Caution, Falling Rocks,” what size rocks do you expect to see? Pebbles? Softballs? Bowling balls? Five-story buildings? If you answered the last, you must live in Arizona where a 50-foot tall, 30-foot wide, 500,000-pound slab is breaking away from a canyon wall and threatening to fall onto the power and water facilities for the Glen Canyon Dam. Oh, and on a road too. I wonder what that sign says. What’s worse, the rest of Arizona is breaking apart too and there are many reasons why.

The canyon wall is made of Navajo sandstone and is prone to cracking, but the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation says this is the biggest crack in years. It sent rappelers to scale the wall and drill bolts 6 to 8 feet into the sandstone. Unfortunately, pieces are breaking off despite the bolts. The only other alternative is to evacuate and hope it doesn’t damage the dam.

A piece of rock has already fallen near the dam

This is just the latest mysterious crack in Arizona. In March 2013, a fissure in Luepp became so big that it had to be fenced off. At the time the crack measured 900 feet long and 500 feet deep. The US Geological Service had no explanation for the crack and no predictions on how big or deep it could get.

There are many possible causes for the cracks and fissures breaking up Arizona. One is the removal of groundwater to support cities and towns. Giant fissures began occurring shortly after the state’s population began growing in the 1920s and leaving empty underground crevices where water once was.

This crack appeared in Apache Junction in 2008

Another possibility is mining and drilling. Abandoned mines can cause cracks and sinkholes, as seen recently in Russia. New oil and gas wells, especially those using fracking, can cause earthquakes and those are on the rise in Arizona. Then there’s climate change. Arizona has variations in elevation unlike any other state, so fluctuations in the climate are amplified here, causing both heat cracks and ice fissures. Many fissures, many possible causes, no one solution.

The Navajo Nation resides partially in Arizona and is the location of many of the cracks but even these ancient people can’t explain why so many are breaking apart the state.

[MIKA27]

The Man Who Wasn’t There

On a Saturday morning on June 4, 2011, 50-year-old David Prideaux left his wife and two kids at home in Melbourne's west and headed up the Hume. It was an average, shitty Melbourne sort of day, but David was feeling good. He'd packed his Landcruiser with camping gear, some bottles of shiraz, and supplies for an antipasto to spend a weekend hunting with his brother-in-law.

Rob Dale is married to David's eldest sister, Janine, and the two men regularly bonded over the outdoors. They drove from opposite sides of the state to meet in Mansfield, where Rob put his stuff in David's Landcruiser, before they headed out with pies from the bakery.

By 1:30 PM they were in Mansfield State Forest, a somewhat mutilated chunk of forest on the southern end of the Victorian Alps. The park is far enough from the city to feel wild, but close enough to fill up with weekend dirt bikers. Swaths of trees were clear-felled in 2002 so the regrowth is dense, scabby, and probably in need of a back-burn. The men made their way through to Tomahawk Hut, a small log cabin deep in the hills. There they joked about David's fancy gear and ate dinner, before going to bed early. It was a very normal night.

They were up at six the next morning. David shifted all his stuff into the back of the Landcruiser, insisting dirt bikers would pinch anything left out. Rob, who worked in equipment distribution and didn't manage a maximum-security prison, left his belongings in the hut. Then they left at 7:45 AM to scout for hunting spots.

About 100 metres from the hut the road hits a fork. To the right, a muddy track scales a hill and disappears over a saddle. To the left the road passes a gate and winds gently along an escarpment. To prevent any chance of accidentally shooting one another, Rob went over the saddle and David took the escarpment. They were wearing camouflage thermal gear, carrying rifles and backpacks—each pack stocked with energy bars, a thermos of coffee, ammunition, and a UHF radio. David also carried a GPS. The last thing Rob recalls David saying was how comfortable he was in his new thermals. "I'm warm as toast," he said. "I might even get hot."

David Prideaux at work. Photo courtesy of Joanne Prideaux

Those who knew him tell me David was a slick operator. When Carl Williams, Melbourne's gangland ringleader, was beaten to death with the seat-stem of an exercise bike, David was one of the first on the scene despite being on secondment at the time. He initiated emergency procedures, cordoned off the crime scene, and ensured all staff were isolated for questioning. And although a guy named Nicholas Selisky had become general manager in his absence, David resumed control in the wake of the murder. As a colleague said of David at his memorial service a year later, "Every member of the group saw him be the one whom others turned to in difficult times."

And this is exactly the reason two of David's brothers, Paul and Stephen, believe that whatever happened next on the mountain, David didn't get lost. "He was the most capable person I've known," Steve says over the phone. "The story doesn't fit, and especially not with the Carl Williams stuff."

What is known is that after David and Rob parted at the fork, David was never seen again. Rob recalls scaling the hill, only for the wind to blow his scent down the gully and foil his hunt. So instead of wasting energy, he decided to sit and see if his smell would flush out any deer. This is why he was quiet enough to hear two dirt bikes heading towards the hut around mid-morning. Realising David would never shut up if they stole anything, Rob stayed quiet and listened. The bikes paused at the turn-off before the hut, and then buzzed away up the ridge. Rob says there was no other sound that afternoon.

At around 11:30 AM Rob was back at Tomahawk, relieved to see nothing was pinched. He ate lunch, considered going out again, and instead decided to cut firewood while he waited for his hunting partner to come back. That's when he realised the chainsaw was in David's 4WD, and David had the keys. Feeling a little apprehensive, Rob began collecting fallen wood. He figured David had cornered a deer and was closing in. "A good hunter can spend hours moving just a few yards," Rob would later say. It's like chess, all strategy and slow moves. Blasting the UHF was a bad idea. So rather than ruin David's hunt, Rob figured he'd light a fire and wait.

At 4:30pm Rob got out the radio and set it to "scan." They'd agreed to set their channels to eight, but there was only static. Another channel picked up some distant, incomprehensible chatter—likely some background noise from Mansfield. With the whole mountain silent, Rob headed up the road, calling for his friend. He checked his phone but there wasn't a signal, and it was getting dark. When he finally couldn't see he headed back to grab the torch and fresh batteries for the UHF.

Tomahawk Hut

When the clock hit 6 PM, Rob started to panic. He left the hut again and went back up the hill, calling and flashing his torch. Finally, about three kilometres up the track, he got a bar of reception on his phone and called David. No one picked up and the call went to message. Rob told the prompt he was "******* worried" and that he was giving David two minutes before he called triple zero. Neither the call or the warning would make any difference; David's phone was eventually found locked in the Landcruiser.

By the time the Mansfield Police arrived at 9:45 PM the weather had soured. Bursts of wind hammered rain through the trees and snow was forecast down to 800 metres. When the single police unit wound its way up the Buckland Spur Track with lights flashing, it found Rob setting up torches around the hut. After asking why he hadn't called earlier—"What would I say? He didn't come back for lunch?"—the police decided Rob should fire his rifle to attract attention.

This was the first in a series of procedural errors that would continually mar the investigation. Rob told the police that he hadn't yet fired his gun that day and asked them to check it, so as to avoid any suspicion. Instead of checking, the officers said they believed him. So Rob went ahead, firing into the night. Meanwhile, down in Melbourne, David's family were being notified of his disappearance. A full search would begin at first light.

Local search teams were on the mountain by 8:15 the next morning, followed by member of the Search and Rescue Squad from Melbourne. The Police Air Wing combed the trees from above, while volunteers from the State Emergency Service and Bush Search and Rescue Victoria pitched in from the surrounding areas. By mid-afternoon, Tomahawk Hut had become a command-centre, with maps, a stockpile of GPS trackers, and UHF radios. Volunteers set up tents and swags around the camp as the temperature dropped. By the middle of the week volunteers would be searching in knee-deep snow.

The search was called off five days later. Canine teams from both Corrections Victoria and Victoria Police had found nothing. Between hundreds of volunteers and professional rescue teams, the only shreds of possible evidence found were a new price tag for $59.95, seemingly from a camping store, and a boot mark the same size and make as David's. Another search was launched later in June, then again in September, October, and November. Sporadic searches have continued in the years since, including one after a bushfire in 2013 that cleared the underbrush. Nothing conclusive has ever been found.

David's family organised this plaque the spring following his disappearance

It's now four years later. I've come to the story after an extensive investigation by the Mansfield Police, followed by a peer-review orchestrated by the homicide squad in Melbourne. Finally, in July 2014, a coronial inquest found "Mr Prideaux is deceased, with the cause of death unknown." It seems that if anything were to be learnt about David, it would have come out by now. But I'm captivated, which is why I travel to Tomahawk Hut on the fourth anniversary of David's disappearance with Stephen and Paul Prideaux.

The Prideaux family once consisted of nine siblings. As the second youngest, Stephen is baby-faced, affable, and has the aura of a man who's making a lot of money. Paul is the second oldest. He's so tall you'd notice him in the street; a little bit nuts, he used to rob banks in the 1980s. They're an odd pair but they've formed a sort of DIY media unit since David vanished, much to the chagrin of everyone else in the family. It seems the Prideauxs have always had their problems, but David's disappearance cleaved them into two distinct groups. The Stephen/Paul faction believes their brother was murdered and wants the world to know. The rest thinks David had an accident and wants to be left alone.

There is one part of the narrative on which they all agree, and that's David. As we slosh up the mountain in a pair of 4WDs, Stephen tells me over and over how David, or "Hubble," was the smartest guy he knew. "Nothing got past him. I don't think I've ever seen a photo where he faced the camera. He was always watching the people next to him or behind. He was always observing."

David was born into the family as the sixth child on October 7, 1960. At that time the family lived in an L-shaped weatherboard in Melbourne's east. His father worked for Toyota and his mother did night shifts at various factories. Peter, David's older brother, was a warden at Pentridge Prison's H Division—the equivalent of today's supermax. At the age of 25 David was working as a locksmith, and Peter got him a job maintaining Corrections locks.

Stephen (left) and Paul Prideaux on the fourth anniversary of their brother's disappearance

Up on the mountain, as we sit around the fire, David drifts in and out of the conversation as though he's alive and still their slightly annoying brother. Paul describes how he'd always light giant campfires—"didn't matter how hot it was, he always had a bonfire." Both men describe him with words like shrewd, ambitious, single-minded, and vigilant. They laugh at how over-prepared he always was, and how he never took risks. And that naturally drifts back to how if he'd fallen or got lost, there wasn't anyone more prepared.

Victoria Police, the State Coroner, Corrections Victoria, and the majority of the Prideaux Family believe there was nothing untoward about David's disappearance. As Peter Prideaux told me in a somewhat terse conversation, "I know in my heart that David's body is still up there on that mountain. He had a heart attack or something, so just let him rest there."

This is, of course, the most reasonable explanation, and it's also not without precedent. In 2010 two hikers in Banff, Canada, found the body of an American man who had been missing since 1989. He'd been covered by snow and ice for 21 years, which explained why he hadn't been found. Then there was a similar case in 2014 when the body of a French mountain climber was found on the Mont Blanc massif. In this instance the man had been missing since 1982. People do disappear on mountains, just not so often in Victoria's comparatively innocuous Alps.

When the Search and Rescue Squad arranged the initial search, a matrix was laid over a topographic map of the mountains, and searchers with GPS trackers ticked off every coordinate for a radius of nearly five kilometres. On top of that, a lattice of roads and 4WD tracks traverse the mountains, making it pretty hard to get lost. Every dirt biker and hunter I spoke to agreed that the area's accessibility was one of its selling points. Then there was the fact that it was all scoured by canine teams. "He's not there," said a member of the dog squad who didn't want to be named. "If the scent was there, the dogs would have found it."

And then finally there was the bushfire that swept through the area a few years back, revealing any holes or cliffs searchers might have missed. Unlike Banff, Mansfield State Forest has no glacial ravines to hide bodies in, nor the high-altitude seclusion of the Graian Alps. It just doesn't seem like the sort of place you could hide a body through a search, and especially not a four-year one.

A theory that's put to me several times is that David's hunting partner and brother-in-law, Rob Dale, accidentally shot him and dumped the body before raising the alarm. Rob could have grabbed the keys from David's pocket, driven his body off the mountain, and returned to Tomahawk, all in a few hours. David's 4WD was never analysed for blood. During the first day of the search, the Mansfield Police broke into the car to search for clues, and the vehicle was then used to ferry searchers up and down the mountain over the following week. This was another error in the investigation, and one that could have hypothetically been Rob's saving grace. As Rob had never made a public comment, I figured I'd put the theory to him myself.

Rob lives in the north of the state, about three hours further up the Hume. I drive slowly, thinking of polite ways to accuse a man of murder, and wondering if I'd even find the house. I've got a rough description but not a street name or number. It's hard to think of him enjoying a nice Saturday on the farm, oblivious that I'm closing in to rub accusations in his face.

When I get to town I'm surprised how easy it is to get an address. I head for the house, which sits a few kilometres out, under a hill. Parking in the driveway, I wait; Rob appears half an hour later. He's aged since he was in the newspapers, but in many ways he still looks like a big kid. He's small and nuggety, with dark eyes, an open face, and large, comical gumboots. I explain the situation and try to look harmless. Rob paces around the driveway before reluctantly inviting me in.

"I looked up to Hubble," Rob says in the kitchen. "He once told me I had more common sense than anyone else, and it was about the nicest thing anyone's ever said." Rob describes how they met through Janine—David's eldest sister and Rob's wife—and how they became friends over a love of the outdoors. He describes their trips four-wheel driving, hunting, camping, exploring Australia's interior, planning future trips, and how he could talk to David in a way he couldn't with others. And he describes how David's career took it out of him. "In the last few years he was always busy and I know he was fed up. A few months before the trip he said to me, 'I just want to go hunting again.' So we did."

When I ask him if he had something to do with David's death, he doesn't hesitate to answer. It was like he was expecting the question, and glad we'd finally got to it. "No," he says curtly. "And the police asked me the exact same thing. I told them that if I'd shot Hubble I'd have been the first in Mansfield turning myself in." I ask him why I should believe him and he tells me it's because he's honest. "I took my wife from another man," he says. "And I told that man what had happened to his face. Just because you need to be honest."

The peer review organised by Victoria Police confirmed that Rob Dale was an unlikely suspect. Phone records match the account Rob provided, and he didn't call or receive calls from anyone else that day. Most compellingly, senior police members told me Rob never altered or complicated his story. In years of dealing with guys trying to lie their way out of trouble, they all agree Rob was telling the truth.

The fork where David was last seen alive. Rob scaled the hill on the right, David took the road to the left

So if David didn't get lost or have some kind of accident, and if Rob didn't shoot him and dispose of the body before calling the police, what happened to him? One of the remaining theories is that David Prideaux fell afoul of the Carl Williams murder, and subsequently disappeared.

Williams, who was Melbourne's infamous gangland kingpin of the 2000s, headed the country's largest drugs cartel and defended it with semi-regular shootings. This secured him life in prison in 2007, at which point he became a police informant to lessen his sentence. And this is why, when he started snitching on associates of a fellow inmate, he was murdered.

On April 19, 2010, Johnson attacked Williams while he sat with his back turned at a table. After the killing, Johnson waited 27 minutes before telling prison staff, "Carl's hit his head." The immediate question is how this could happen in a prison filled with closed circuit cameras, while Carl Williams was under informant protection. Stephen and Paul Prideaux believe Williams was allowed to be murdered, and David—whether complicit or innocent—became a potential leak worth containing.

The most compelling parts of this theory are an unlikely series of oversights leading up to the Williams murder. These were chronicled in the 2012 Ombudsman's report, which found the trail went back as far as 2009, beginning with a single email. Rod Wise, who was then Corrections Victoria acting commissioner, sent Department of Justice secretary Penny Armytage an email warning of the potential threat Matthew Johnson posed to Williams. According to Rod Wise, everyone in the prison knew Carl Williams was informing for police, which would make him a target for the people he was incriminating. The email was dismissed, which is one of several reasons why Penny Armytage resigned her position two months after the release of the Ombudsman's report.

The other major oversight was the ineffectiveness of the prison's CCTV camera. There were 37 cameras in the section of prison where Williams was being held, monitored around the clock by prison staff. However, as the Ombudsman's report later detailed, it was far from a perfect system. According to the report, one junior officer was responsible for watching three live monitors screening vision from 37 cameras around the unit, each on a four-second rotation. At the time of Williams's murder, this officer was watching another prisoner being escorted to and from a phone call. It's standard practice to observe staff when they're with prisoners, and this is why no one noticed Williams lying in his own blood for nearly half an hour. The vision would have been on an unwatched screen for four seconds, before disappearing for the next 40. As the Ombudsman's report noted, "It's difficult if not impossible to monitor the first and second monitors and take in all the information they display." While this system sounds inadequate, it doesn't seem deliberately so.

The final conspiratorial allegation is that David Prideaux came into possession of a CD-ROM containing statements made to police by Carl Williams. Getting this CD would have supposedly created a motive for underworld figures to kill David, as insinuated by early media coverage of his disappearance. But David's wife, Joanne, rubbishes any notion the CD ever existed, as does every police member I spoke to.

The view looking up the mountain from where David was last seen

But what kills the conspiracy theory for me is the Alps. For a murder site, they are far from convenient. Sure, Melbourne's gangland thugs dealt in slayings, but their methods were crude and lazy. Cars and houses were sprayed with bullets, and no one ever tried to intersect an armed hunter three hours from the city. Also, the chances of missing David on the track, or getting lost or bogged, are so much greater in a state park. Mansfield police also recorded no scuffle marks on the track on June 5, and nor was there any blood. It seemed like David was neither murdered there nor taken away.

Which brings us to the final theory: David manufactured his own disappearance. This seemed to hold some water in 2012 when it was reported one of his former colleagues saw him in line for an ATM in Broome, WA. Unfortunately the bank was an outpost operation with no CCTV cameras, and Peter Prideaux insists a family member made the claim, simply to reignite interest in a cooling case.

Regardless, the coronial inquest dismissed "manufactured disappearance" as fiction. As the report discussed, David hadn't touched his bank account, Medicare card, his email account, or any casino or Tabcorp accounts, nor had his licence or passport been used at any airports. If David faked his own disappearance, he did it masterfully.

The bulk of the Prideaux family didn't want this story to be written. I was told it'd only stir up trouble and lend fuel to conspiracy nuts. But Paul and Stephen say they'll keep looking. It seems to give them purpose, but even they admit they're doing it less and less. "I've started to hate this place," says Stephen, gesturing to the trees around the dying campfire. "I'll never understand why they came to Tomahawk at all. If someone had drawn up an old map of this place, over the area David disappeared, they'd have written, 'here be dragons.'"

[MIKA27]

OURA SLEEP MONITORING RING

There’s one sure-fire key to being successful in life and that is getting enough sleep. If you aren’t rested, you’re never going to be at your best, and that means losing the worm, missing the brass ring, and forever being a silver medalist. OURA is a sleep ring and app that is meant to make sure that never happens by keeping you rested and ready for action.

OURA measures your heartrate, temperature, movement, and breathing to ascertain how well you are resting. It then makes suggestions about your lifestyle to let you know how much activity to schedule on any given day so you don’t get overtired, over-stressed, and over-strained. By helping you keep work, life, and sleep balanced for maximum efficacy, the OURA helps keep you on point, on the ball, and in the zone. [Purchase]

[MIKA27]

BESV PS1 ELECTRIC BIKE

Besv Panther PS1 is a new e-bike, a segment that´s becoming hotter and hotter, and to get in this market, you must have real differentiating factors. Besv Panther PS1 has just a few features that will enable it to stand out form the crowd…a special carbon frame, with more than 10 layers in order to offer a stiff structure that weighs only 16.9kg, making it the lightest commuter electric-bike available. With a minimalist design and an understated look it has a Sony built battery, a nice brand to link your name to, to make sure it´s dependable and with a reasonable range (80 km of power-assistance on a full five hour charge). Plus they have developed a special algorithm that calculates the amount of power you need while you´re using the bike, whether you´re on a hill, or need an acceleration boost, its central management unit will decide and provide the right amount of juice you need. It also features a leading gear motor, lighter, and built-in the wheel using 20 percent less power in the process. Hand made and constructed in one piece, with some design rewards in its pocket, the PS1 is the perfect choice for urban riders.

[MIKA27]

RAINMAN DECANTER

Rainman Decanter is a carefully and purposefully designed decanter, its main purpose is to provide aeration to your wine, it does so with the obvious decanting process, but also when you´re pouring it. It serves your beverage through eight smaller holes on its side, producing something of a shower effect, and allowing the wine to breathe more, attaining its full potential more easily. It´s made from hand-blown glass, so it´s really exclusive and well finished, with that special craftsmanship touch. With the usual understated Nordic look, this Swedish design decanter could really bring something new to your wine tasting paraphernalia.

[MIKA27]

B&O BEOPLAY A6 SPEAKER

Get surround-like sound anywhere you please with the B&O Beoplay A6 Speaker. This highly portable speaker uses an array of four front-facing speakers and one rear-facing driver to create an ambient sound experience in nearly any space. A switch on the side will optimize the sound when placing the speaker near a wall, in a corner, or in an open area, simple touch-based controls make it easy to use, and WiFi, AirPlay, DLNA or Bluetooth 4.0 ensure that you can access your favorite music no matter what the format. It arrives in a handsome light gray fabric developed in collaboration with Kvadrat, and interchangeable covers in three other colors let you customize it to match your tastes.

[MIKA27]

LAND ROVER RANGE ROVER SENTINEL

Built by hand at the company's Oxford Road facility in the UK, the Land Rover Range Rover Sentinel offers tank-like protection mixed with unmatched luxury. Based on the flagship Autobiography, it's certified to the VR8 standard against ballistic threats, meaning that it can withstand direct hits from armor-piercing bullets, as well as blasts from grenade explosions. Making this possible is an armored passenger shell crafted from high-strength steel and optical-quality armored privacy glass, joined by a host of other safety-focused features like a self-sealing fuel tank, anti-smash protective glass in the load space, an emergency escape system behind the rear seats, and special wheels with inserts that let you drive the car even if the tires are deflated. You can also add fire suppression systems, sirens, emergency lighting, and an external speaker system to talk with the people outside, all without losing the comfort, performance, and off road capabilities you'd expect from a Rover.

[MIKA27]

The Largest Air Purifier Ever Built Sucks Up Smog And Turns It Into Gem Stones

What’s 7 metres tall, eats smog, and makes jewellery for fun?

In Rotterdam this week, the designer Daan Roosegaarde is showing off the result of three years of research and development: The largest air purifier ever built. It’s a tower that scrubs the pollution from more than 30,000 cubic metres of air per hour — and then condenses those fine particles of smog into tiny “gem stones” that can be embedded in rings, cufflinks, and more.

Each stone is roughly equivalent to cleaning 1,000 cubic metres of air — so you’re literally wearing the pollution that once hung in the air around Roosegaarde’s so-called Smog Free Tower. In the designer’s words, buying a ring means “you donate a thousand cubic metres of clean air to the city where the Smog Free Tower is.”

The project has been in the offing for a long time. Roosegaarde and his team have spent the past few years developing the first prototype in Rotterdam, where it was unveiled this month. “It’s really weird that we accept [pollution] as something normal, and take it for granted,” Roosegaarde explains.

The white, oblong tower — slatted with louvres protecting its electronic innards — will still eventually make its way to Beijing, which of course is notorious for its smog. It will also make stops in Mumbai and Paris, and possibly other cities (you can suggest your own using the project’s hashtag on Twitter).

To fund the travel, the studio launched a Kickstarter campaign where you can buy jewellery and cufflinks made with its tiny smog gems — which, theoretically, would eventually become diamonds if they were compressed with much more extreme pressure.

But for now, the tower sits on a patch of grass next to Roosegaarde’s studio in Rotterdam, whose mayor and local government supported the project with grant money.

The process taking place inside its walls is powered by 1,400 watts of sustainable energy, which is comparable to a water boiler, and the studio says it hopes to one day integrate solar PVs into the design to power the process — which works not so differently than some ionic air purifiers. Roosegaarde explains:

By charging the Smog Free Tower with a small positive current, an electrode will send positive ions into the air. These ions will attach themselves to fine dust particles. A negatively charged surface -the counter electrode- will then draw the positive ions in, together with the fine dust particles. The fine dust that would normally harm us, is collected together with the ions and stored inside of the tower. This technology manages to capture ultra-fine smog particles which regular filter systems fail to do.

Now that the working prototype is up and running, the next step is figuring out how to bring it to other cities — including the city that started it all, Beijing. The team’s Kickstarter, where the studio is raising funds for another eight days, is closing in on doubling its goal — you can get your own smog gems by donating here.

That cash will go directly to transporting the tower, publicizing the design in cities around the world. Eventually, that attention could lead to copycats and spin-off designs — one day, these ungainly white tower might be fixtures in our parks and playgrounds.

That we need super-sized air purifiers to live in super-polluted cities is certainly a pretty grim prospect. But at least someone is thinking hard about not only how to clean the air, but how to get people excited about funding that process.

[MIKA27]

Scientists Discover A Massive 30-Year-Old Funnel Web Spider In NSW

Can you imagine walking through a serene, lush national park on a hike and finding a five centimetre long funnel web spider hanging out above your face? On a search through the Booderee National Park on the south coast of New South Wales, that’s (probably) what happened to a bunch of scientists from ANU. This particularly massive and particularly venomous funnel web lives in a tree rather than on the ground, and it might be a new species.

According to the SMH, at Jervis Bay on the NSW south coast, scientists discovered the unnaturally large example of the Hadronyche genus living inside a rotted log in Booderee. Her silk-spun nest was up to two metres long, significantly larger than the burrows that most ground-dwelling Atrax robustus — the Sydney funnel web that we all know and hate. Dr Thomas Wallenius, one of the scientists from the Australian National University that found the new example, said that the spider was both a “beautiful specimen” and “quite dangerous”.

The estimated age of this recently discovered spider is between 25 and 30 years old, according to ANU scientists, making it one of the longer-lived examples on record. It’s likely that long lifespan contributes to its large size, but the new funnel web female is also notable for the fact that it lives in natural burrows in tree space rather than underground burrows. Hopefully this new discovery will contribute to further research on funnel web spider antivenene, which was first researched in the early 1980s but has only been developed for common species.

Funnel web spiders have killed upwards of a dozen people in Australia in recorded history — one of the first deaths was near Jervis Bay — and that’s just the piddling 15-35mm variety. This 50mm giant is (likely) every bit as venomous.