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

[MIKA27]

A Remake Of 20,000 Leagues Under The Sea Is Coming From the Director Of X-Men

Rumors of a 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea remake have been around for years. David Fincher had been attached since 2010 but could never get his vision off the ground. Now, another A-list director has taken control of the Nautilus: Bryan Singer.

The director of four X-Men movies announced via his Instagram that 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea will be his next film. Rick Sordelet and Dan Studney (Jack the Giant Slayer) wrote the screenplay with a story by them and Singer. It’s, of course, based on the novel by Jules Verne.

It's my 50th birthday (ouch), and I just put the finishing touches on the script for my next film. A story I've wanted to retell since childhood. I promise this will be an epic and emotional adventure for all ages! An adventure very dear to my heart. Not abandoning the #xmen universe. Very excited about #xmenapocalypse and beyond. #julesverne #20000leaguesunderthesea #nemo

In case that image doesn’t work for you, here’s what Singer said:

It’s my 50th birthday (ouch), and I just put the finishing touches on the script for my next film. A story I’ve wanted to retell since childhood. I promise this will be an epic and emotional adventure for all ages! An adventure very dear to my heart. Not abandoning the X-Men Universe. Very excited about X-Men Apocalypse and beyond.

With Singer directing this basically means he’ll finish X-Men Apocalypse (which is now in post-production and set for release May 27, 2016) and then make this. And he’ll likely stick to the X-Men films as a producer, maybe more.

One interesting note: Variety reports this project is currently without a studio.

Singer has a great sense of scope and adventure so he seems like a good fit for 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. Now the question is - who is Captain Nemo?

[Shrody234]

The Mysterious Real Superhero of WWII

It seems that in this day and age, in an unstable and often violent world, there is a powerful attraction to the idea of a hero battling oppression in the face of seemingly insurmountable odds. Indeed this has always been an attractive notion for humankind. The image of the lone savior rising up and valiantly fighting against those who would subjugate them is an immensely potent one that seems to be deeply and firmly rooted in the human imagination. Who hasn’t ever imagined having the power to stand up to and fight back against a bully, crime, violence, or even something as simple as the person who cut you off on your way to work or a horrible boss? Who hasn’t at some point daydreamed about being some sort of superhero themselves, empowered with the courage and the means to exert themselves against the things which would bring them down? It is undeniably a firmly entrenched human desire, a part of the very fiber of our being hand a notable feature upon the terrain of our psyche. This desire would have been certainly present in war-torn Czechoslovakia during the days of World War II, when the Germans had descended upon them and subjected them to cruel oppression, and from the battle scarred streets of wartime Prague comes an interesting, amazing tale of one lone hero with apparent super powers who allegedly appeared from seemingly nowhere to lock into battle with diabolical Nazi forces. It is a tale that would grow into legend, and which captivates and stirs that part of our soul that needs heroes.

The bloody fighting that was taking place all over the European continent during World War II inevitably came lumbering to Czechoslovakia’s doorstep. The Nazis relentlessly and brutally moved in to occupy the country between the years of 1938 to 1945, and the horrible conditions this meant for the people were everything you might expect from Hitler’s ruthless invading forces. The occupation of Czechoslovakia was seen as a great military advantage for Germany because at the time it was a major producer of tanks, guns, and artillery, and the oppressed and conquered Czechoslovakian people were forced into hard labor to keep this manufacture of instruments of death moving along at a steady pace. These captured Czech factories and their enslaved workers would eventually manufacture an immense amount of weaponry, including 2.175 field canons, 469 tanks, 500 anti-aircraft artillery pieces, 43.000 machine guns, 1.090.000 military rifles, 114.000 pistols, about a billion rounds of ammunition and three millions of anti-aircraft grenades for the German forces, and indeed these Czech produced arms would prove to be instrumental in the subsequent German conquest of Poland and France.

Nazis in Prague

All through this, the Czech people were subjected to numerous, countless cruelties, offenses, and human rights abuses, and the occupying Nazi forces in Czechoslovakia were quick to deal out death to those who would dare to oppose them. A man by the name of Edvard Beneš had managed to keep a functioning government-in-exile for the country, and a resistance movement loyal to Beneš took hold against the Nazis, often engaging in guerilla maneuvers against the enemy. Although the resistance movement was a constant thorn in the Nazis’ side, things would come to a head with the orchestration of what was known as Operation Anthropoid in Prague on 27 May 1942, in which SS leader Heinrich Himmler’s deputy and Protector of Bohemia and Moravia, Reinhard Heydrich, was assassinated and which subsequently provoked one of the most vicious and brutal reprisals of the entire war. Originally the furious Hitler ordered the random bloody execution of 10,000 Czech citizens but later he decided to just settle on the total destruction of the villages of Lidice and Ležáky, which were razed to the ground after every single male living there over the age of 16 was mercilessly killed and the rest of the citizens sent to concentration camps. In total, the repercussions of Operation Anthropoid amounted to 1,300 ruthlessly murdered and 10,000 arrested and sentenced to rot in camps without trial.

These were dark times for the Czech people.

It was somewhere around this time, when the people of Czechoslovakia were lost in despair, without hope, and with their villages in ruins, that a curious, enigmatic stranger began to make his presence known. Reports began to circulate of a shadowy figure lurking in the shadows, darkened alleyways and rooftops of Prague, usually depicted as a somewhat spectral man dressed all in black and wearing a strange mask with shiny red eyes. Most notably, this stranger was said to have the astounding ability to make superhuman leaps of extraordinary magnitude, with witnesses describing the way he could bound across rooftops, over speeding trains, high gates, and even buildings with ease. In at least one report the black-clad figure was said to be able to leap completely over the Vitava River at its widest point, during which he was said to fly effortlessly through the air “like a shuttlecock” and to unleash an ear shattering, unearthly whistling sound. This power to leap great distances with ease led the stranger being called Pérák, or literally “Springer” or “Spring Man,” with the name deriving from the Czech word péro, meaning “spring.” Adding to this impressive leaping ability was Pérák’s alleged phenomenal speed, stamina and agility, all of which were said to make him impossible to follow or capture.

At first, Pérák was seen by the populace as a menacing, almost demonic figure to be feared. Early versions of the story have the mysterious apparition scaring or chasing innocent people, terrorizing the citizens, and even killing or raping citizens, and people began to avoid going out at night or refusing to go to work night shifts at the weapons factories to the extent that it even had a negative impact on the Nazi arms production output. However, this image as a sinister and diabolical boogieman quickly changed. Word began to spread that Pérák was starting to turn his attention on the German occupying forces, sabotaging their equipment and even leaping from the shadows to slit their throats before bounding away. It was rumored that during these encounters he seemed to be impervious to bullets when fired upon by the Nazis, with some accounts even describing German bullets ricocheting off of him to hit other soldiers, and he was always able to use his amazing jumping abilities to easily evade pursuit.

Additionally, Pérák was said to sometimes come to the aid of Czech citizens who were being attacked or harassed by the Nazis and either fend off or outright slaughter the oppressors before bounding away into the night, often emitting an ear piercing wail or whistle as he did so. Although he is mostly portrayed as preferring to remain stealthy and unseen, Pérák was known to be very adept at hand to hand combat and knife fighting. He also showed great skill with explosives and pyrotechnics, being credited with blowing up German supply lines, vehicles, and even destroying a tank in Grébovka Park. In a few stories he was seen to use some sort of fireworks as a weapon, spewing flames from his wrists at the enemy. He was also known to allegedly steal secret Nazi documents, such as the plans to an unspecified German secret weapon from the ČKD factory in Vysočany. There were even those who went so far as to claim that it had in fact been Pérák who had assassinated Reinhard Heydrich rather than the agents of Operation Anthropoid. Throughout all of this one-man struggle against the juggernaut German war machine, Pérák was said to leave bold, taunting anti-Nazi graffiti on walls or gates in normally inaccessible places, further strengthening his legend.

This growing image of him as a sort of superhero for the Czech people led to Pérák evolving to be a potent symbol of resistance against the Nazi regime, a savior for the people, and the stories quickly fanned out across the countryside to embed themselves firmly within the collective consciousness of the oppressed populace. Pérák seemed to be everywhere. It got to the point where nearly every problem, mishap, accident, or death the Germans suffered was attributed to the Spring Man of Prague, and he was widely seen as a hero and a ray of hope piercing through the gloom and death of the Nazi occupation. The legend of Pérák steadily gained momentum until the end of the war, when he seemed to vanish as suddenly and mysteriously as he had appeared.

However, although he may have disappeared from the shadows of Prague’s streets he did not disappear from the hearts of the Czech people. In May of 1945, practically as the smoke and dust was clearing in the trail of departing German forces, Czech cartoonists Jiří Brdečka and Jiří Trnka created a 14-minute animated film entitled Pérák a SS (“Springman and the SS”), which depicted the titular hero as a man who maintained a secret identity as a chimney sweep and dressed all in black, attached springs to his shoes, and ventured forth into the night to do battle with the Nazis. This same creative team would go on to publish a popular series of comic strips depicting Pérák, called Pérákovi další osudy (“The Other Fates of Pérák”), and the hero became an icon in popular culture. It was a trend that would continue on even when these representations of Pérák came to be discouraged by the new communist regime that came into power after the war, and indeed he is still a very popular character that inspires artists, writers, TV, movies, theater, and comics to this day.

The question that looms over all of this is just who or what Pérák was. Over the years it has been oft suggested that this valiant figure was merely an urban legend circulated by the weary, suffering people to give them hope in the face of the Nazi scourge, a savior in a time when these subjugated people needed one most desperately. This theory is given weight by the fact that the archetype for a spring-footed, or “leaping ghost” tradition was found to already predate World War II in the Czechoslovakian region. Ethnographer Dr. Miloš Pulec conducted an investigation into the lore of Pérák in the 1960s and found that the tradition of these leaping specters in the region went as far back as the 1920s and perhaps even beyond. It was also discovered that in the face of increasing atheism amongst the people, vergers of the Roman Catholic Church in northwestern Bohemia had once attached springs to their feet and dressed up in scary costumes to become “jumping devils” in order to scare everyone into piety.

While it seems the idea has caught on that this is all mere urban legend, there are others who disagree and believe that Pérák actually really existed in some form and to some extent, although it is unclear just who exactly he could have been. One idea is that he was a disgruntled citizen, an American secret agent, or a British paratrooper who had taken matters into his own hands, and that his various powers and agility could be explained by the vigilante being an acrobat or gymnast and having developed a variety of gadgetry to explain his amazing powers, such as real spring loaded boots, pyrotechnic weapons, and perhaps even some sort of body armor, sort of like a WWII era Batman. It has even been suggested that the whistling or wailing sound often attributed to Pérák could have been from some sort of spring-loaded machinery or even a weapon in itself for the purpose of startling, frightening, or disorienting enemies. These attributes could have subsequently been possibly exaggerated over retellings as the tales took off in the peoples’ imagination. More fringe beliefs say that Pérák was an actual ghost, demon, or even an alien. Interestingly, although citizens often spoke of Pérák and his deeds, the official police stance was that he did not exist. George Zenaty, an authority on the policing of Prague during World War II, has stated:

… in 1940-1942 none of our police precincts in Prague informed us in their daily reports of the existence of a ‘Spring Man’. This does not mean that such rumours might not have circulated; however, it would have been impossible to include [them] in the reports without tangible proof.

This does not necessarily equate to Pérák not existing. The police of the time in this occupied land would have been the very Germans who were being attacked by the enigmatic hero, and it would have not been wise of them to encourage the citizens by acknowledging his existence. They would have wanted to keep the people docile and obedient, not give them hope, seed potential unrest, or even inspire copycats by officially talking about this vigilante savior of the people. It makes sense that if Pérák did ever exist at all, then the police of the time would have gone through some degree of effort to discourage rumors and initiate a cover-up. Even if it was indeed all mere urban legends and rumors it seems that it would have been in the best interest of the authorities to keep a lid on it and squash such rumors as much as possible so as to quell the concepts of hope and rebellion. It should not be too surprising at all that the police would want to ignore or deny the stories.

It is certainly worth mentioning the clear parallels between the stories of Pérák and yet another legend in the form of the notorious Spring-heeled Jack of the United Kingdom. Beginning in 1837, the industrial suburbs of London, Sheffield, and Liverpool, as well as the Midlands and even as far away as Scotland became the stomping grounds for a mysterious figure with the remarkable ability to make enormous leaps via springs attached to his feet, who persistently terrorized residents and was known to make his escape by swiftly bounding away. This specter quickly became known as Spring-heeled Jack, and was depicted as having a frightening appearance, with metal claws attached to his hands and in some accounts glowing red eyes and the ability to shoot blue and white flames from his mouth. Spring-heeled Jack was far from a noble hero, and was mostly seen as a decidedly malevolent force which sowed mayhem and misery wherever he went, but it was a very widespread tale all the way up to the early 1900s and word of this scary entity spread throughout Europe, including the region of Bohemia. Considering this, it seems plausible that considering the similarities in the use of apparent use of pyrotechnics, or jumping to attack or evade capture, the stories of Spring-heeled Jack may very well have influenced those of Pérák. After all, even Pérák started off as a menacing, demonic figure, and the striking similarities between the two are obvious.

Spring-heeled Jack

Is there any grain of truth to the fantastic story of Pérák the Spring Man? Is so, who or what was he? It certainly seems like an alluring, even romantic notion, this idea that in the midst of war torn Prague a brave superhero rose up and struck back in the dark of night with amazing powers at his disposal. Whether he really existed or not, it is undoubtedly a powerful image that resonates with people, and it is easy to see why it became so entrenched in the public consciousness here. We as a species certainly have a strong, universal attraction to, and almost a need for, the archetype of a hero rising up against his or her oppressors, which seems to transcend borders. It is an inclination that can be seen all around us in art, fiction, the movies, and comics, with the popularity of superheroes and notably the ones that involve someone we can relate to, a regular person earning his powers through physical effort, mental discipline, and ingenuity, such as Iron Man or Batman. These are the ones that truly reverberate within us. Although the origins and whether he ever existed or not remain murky, the very idea of Pérák was probably just as effective in holding the oppressed people of the occupation together through the dark days of the war. In the end, there is much that remains mysterious about Pérák. We don’t know if there was ever a real Czechoslovakian superhero during World War II. We don’t know if he ever really existed. But I for one sure do rather like to think that he did.

Very interesting read, I enjoyed it a lot. The romance of a normal citizen rising up against the opposition is alluring, but poses the question raised in the article: is Perak created by a hopeless nation or is it an actual citizen tired of mistreatment and willing to act out? The latter is what we hope for and aspire to be if ever in that situation. God forbid this situation ever happen again, rise up. There are many like you.

[MIKA27]

Very interesting read, I enjoyed it a lot. The romance of a normal citizen rising up against the opposition is alluring, but poses the question raised in the article: is Perak created by a hopeless nation or is it an actual citizen tired of mistreatment and willing to act out? The latter is what we hope for and aspire to be if ever in that situation. God forbid this situation ever happen again, rise up. There are many like you.

Weather Perak was real or not, I guess he gave hope where there was none in the eyes of those oppressed.

Sometimes all there is, is hope and if there was none, people would have given up?

Then again, what "if" he was real? I think when one is cornered with very little hope, people may take such risks considering they may die anyway so why not risk it all and cause mayhem and protect those who still live..

[MIKA27]

How That Ice Ball In Your Cocktail Inspired A Cool Physics Experiment

Any decent bartender knows that ice can dilute your drink as it melts. That’s why they use as much ice as possible: it keeps the drink colder, longer. An even better way to achieve the same effect is to use giant ice balls. Now this snazzy bartender’s trick has led to a discovery in physics.

Physicists at King Abdullah University of Science and Technology in Saudi Arabia to design an experiment that helped explain why some icy objects generate less drag as they move through water.

The Saudi physicists couldn’t use pure ice balls, like the ones in your cocktail, since they’d just float. Instead, the team created shells of dyed ice around steel, tungsten carbide, and steel/aluminium balls, giving each a core of different density. Then they dropped the balls into a nearly 2.4 meter tank of water, recording how quickly each ball fell through the liquid with high-speed video cameras. As the balls fell, they left an inky red trail in their wake as the ice layer began to melt, the better to visualise the drag effect.

The upshot: ice-coated balls with denser cores fell faster, with less drag and a narrower wake, than ice balls with less dense cores.

The Saudi team said this has shed light on what’s known as the “drag crisis”: a transition point where an object moving through a fluid (air or water) reaches a threshold speed that results in less turbulence in its wake, and hence less drag. Adding dimples to golf balls, for instance reduces drag.

It’s also known that an icy surface can have a lubricating effect: a hockey puck slides smoothly along the ice because that surface has a thin layer of water on top, the result of melting. The Saudi experiment showed a similar connection between melting and this drag crisis threshold. The physicists hope their results could be useful for modelling the drifting of icebergs in warming oceans, or the motion of ships with frozen hulls travelling through icy waters.

So ice balls are good for physics, not just your cocktail. Handy weekend tip: You can also slow down that melting process by creating your own perfect ice cubes. Raise your glasses to the science of awesome ice balls!

[MIKA27]

Riding A Bike On A Slackline In The Mountains Is Psycho Madness

It’s already hard enough to just go mountain biking where there are no trails. It’s already hard enough to just walk on a slackline suspended in the air. So naturally, it makes perfect sense to go mountain biking on a slackline. Wait. What? That’s what Kenny Belaey did. He rode his bike on a slackline over a 367-foot drop in the French Alps.

The whole video is worth watching, just to see the crazy stuff it takes to get to the point where he can do something even crazier.

[MIKA27]

Add Celestial Lighting To Your Home With These Beautiful Moon Lamps

If levitating disc lamps aren’t your bag, how about a giant, luminescent moon-shaped one instead? It can go pretty much anywhere — hanging from your roof, off the edge of a hill or even down a manhole. It’s just that versatile. It also illuminates stuff while looking rather sweet.

The lamps, part of an already-funded Indiegogo campaign, are built from fibreglass and latex. Instead of going for the one size, the Luna caters for all tastes, with seven models available of varying circumferences.

The tiniest comes in at 8.13cm, while the largest is a mighty 59.94cm. The prices between sizes differ, of course, with the former coming in at $US75 (minus shipping) and the latter a staggering $US875.

So yes, not cheap. That said, if you’ve already invested in other solar system-styled lighting paraphernalia and are in desperate need of a spherical, crater-scarred accompaniment to complete your vision, here’s your opportunity.

[MIKA27]

What It's Like To Get Attacked By A Crocodile And Then See Inside Its Mouth

Man. These crocs come out of nowhere and attack with such a quickness that you don’t even know what’s happening until you’re already clamped down inside the terrifying and unrelenting jaws of the crocodile. National Geographic made some flotation devices that held cameras to capture exactly what it’s like to get attacked and be inside a crocodile’s mouth.

[MIKA27]

These Photos Of F-22 Arctic Raptors In Alaska Are So Striking They Look Unreal

Taken by photographer John Dibbs for Lockheed Martin’s Code One magazine, these two F-22 Raptors are flying against the snowy picturesque backdrop of Alaska and they look absolutely stunning. So stunning and pristine and impressive that the pictures almost look fake.

Code One writes:

In addition, Alaska’s strategic location allows the Arctic Raptors to deploy rapidly anywhere in the world. They are nine hours or less flight time to almost any location in the northern hemisphere. Further, with the renewed Russian bomber activity over the last several years, the F-22s at Elmendorf are on alert twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week.

[MIKA27]

One Of The Most Beautiful Airport Terminals Ever Built Is Being Reborn As A Hotel

The 1960s were a tumultuous decade — but by most accounts, they were a golden age for air travel. The TWA Terminal at JFK, opened in 1962, is a perfect example of that bygone era, but the midcentury masterpiece has sat empty and abandoned for 15 years. Now, it’s being reborn.

After almost two decades of disuse, today Crain’s New York reports that the Port Authority, which controls the building, has finally officially chosen a proposal from Jet Blue to turn the building into a hotel. Their proposal was given support this summer by Governor Cuomo, and now looks as though it’s being given the final OK by Port Authority.

Right now, design details are thin, but we already know hotel will have 505 rooms as well as 12,192 metres of meeting space and as many as eight restaurants inside the 1962 building. Crowning it will be a 3,048 metre observation deck overlooking the runway.

Architects, historians, and New Yorkers in general have fought for years to protect the building and make certain that its future use doesn’t ruin the original architecture. It’s hard to imagine being sincerely excited by an airport these days, but the TWA Terminal, designed by the Finnish-born architect Eero Saarinen, was one of those buildings. It was a wonder of technology — from its architecture to its systems.

First there was the roof, a groundbreaking structure itself, composed of four counterbalanced shells made of thin concrete, each poured over the course of several 30 hour sessions. It looked like a bird taking flight, and it was absolutely radical for its time. The critic Ada Louise Huxtable called it “a definitive and awesome statement of the almost anarchic release of architecture from familiar forms and techniques” in an obituary of Saarinen The New York Times, published a year before the building opened.

Then there was the technology that made it run, much of which was being used for the first time.

The Landmarks Preservation Commission lists a few: There were the baggage carousels, then a new-fangled technology. Doors were electronically rigged to open automatically. It was one of the first terminals to use jetways to usher passengers from plane to terminal, rather than a walk on the tarmac. A huge sign displayed departure times with automatically-changing numbers thanks to the Swiss timepiece maker Solari.

So what happened? Well, for one thing, the planes outgrew the terminal. It became cramped and outmoded — and as the economics of air travel changed, it became less and less useful to airlines. It officially stopped operating in 2001, and a few year later was saved from conversion or demolition by the National Trust for Historic Preservation. Yet since then, it’s been unclear what would happen to the terminal.

One popular idea has been to turn it into a hotel, and for the past three years developers (including, at one point, Donald Trump) have been competing for the rights to do it. With today’s news, the deal is finally done — you’ll be able to stay in a Jet Blue-built hotel room at the terminal. But beyond the fact that the hotel project now has rights to go ahead, we don’t know much more about the project. For example, it’s unclear exactly what kinds of structures will be built around the building, one of the sticking points for past proposals.

For now, we’ve got a date for construction (groundbreaking in 2016) and a target for completion (2018) — plus a promise that the new project will “celebrate and preserve Eero Saarinen’s masterpiece.”

[MIKA27]

This Plane Will Soar To The Edge Of Space On Giant Air Currents

A glider designed to float to the edge of space on air currents will attempt its first flight on Wednesday. Next year, the Perlan Mission II will launch to soaring altitudes of 90,000 feet, where it will harvest invaluable data on Earth’s atmosphere and climate.

Sponsored by commercial aeroplane manufacturer Airbus Group, the Perlan Project is on a quest to soar to record heights using its Perlan Mission II glider. The first Perlan Project set the the existing manned glider altitude record of 50,722 feet in 2006, by taking advantage of air currents known as “stratospheric mountain waves” — basically, the ocean waves of the sky.

From 1992-98, Perlan’s founder and NASA test pilot Einar Enevoldson collected evidence on a weather phenomenon that no one at the time even knew existed: stratospheric mountain waves. Like huge ocean waves, these waves of air are kicked off by strong winds blowing over the tops of high mountain ranges like the Andes. These waves of air then shoot straight up towards space. As a pilot, Einar quickly figured out that you can use a glider to ride those waves all the way up to near space. And he set out to prove it.

The Perlan Mission II, which began in 2014, intends to best its own record by a wide margin, gliding well into the stratosphere after launching from a gusty mountain ridge in the Andes. The team will be trekking down to Argentina next year in search of a launch site close to the southern polar vortex, an air current that drives mountain waves into the stratosphere.

Gliding to the edge of space will give scientists a chance to study interactions between different layers of the atmosphere, which could pave a path toward high-altitude commercial flight. It will also afford researchers the opportunity to study Earth’s climate from a dizzying new perspective:

“Currently climate change models are based on a theoretical understanding of how different layers of the atmosphere interact with each other,” James Darcy, a spokesperson for Airbus, told Climate Central. “Models are perhaps more simple than they should be. The scientific aim of Perlan will be to better understand the weather in the upper reaches of the atmosphere and build a more accurate model of what’s happening. That will drive more accurate predictability with respect to climate change.”

But first things first, the little glider needs practice. Next week — weather permitting — a small jet will tow the Perlan 2 to an altitude of 5,000 feet, where it will be released to fly around for about 45 minutes before landing. We’re keeping our fingers crossed!

[MIKA27]

The History Of The Great Wall Of China And What Makes It So Great

Ted-Ed takes a look at the history of the Great Wall of China, telling the story of its origins and how it relates to what was happening in China at the time. Megan Campisi and Pen-Pen Chen tell the fascinating story of the 13,000-mile ‘dragon’ wall in this animated short.

[MIKA27]

How Close Are We to a Fully ‘Bionic Body’?

The year is 2015 and our bodies are very, very different. The loss of a limb no longer means living in a world of restricted movement: We are now in an age of highly developed exoskeletons, glow-in-the-dark prosthetic appendages, and motorized members.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xynE-43trQg

The distinction between man and machine has never been less, well, distinct.

In the last few months alone, reams of cutting edge technology able to revolutionize the human body have been released, opening up new possibilities for the way we live. This week saw the introduction of the first prosthetic hand that can successfully enable its user to feel following electrodes being inserted into the motor and sensory cortexes.

The recipient, a 28-year-old man who had been paralyzed for more than a decade, was able to sense when the fingers of the hand were touched, as well as to control it using his mind. The recipient was able to identify—when blindfolded—which finger was being touched at any one time with almost 100 percent accuracy and, when two fingers were pressed without his knowledge, the man “responded in jest asking whether somebody was trying to play a trick on him,” according to Justin Sanchez, program manager of the U.S. military’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). “That is when we knew that the feelings he was perceiving through the robotic hand were near-natural.”

This progression in hand prosthetics isn’t only limited to those requiring invasive surgeries. Open Bionics, winners of the 2015 Tech4Good Awards, are behind a new wave of affordable hand replacements created using 3D printing. The company seeks to provide a low cost alternative to the industry’s pricier models—a bionic hand can set you back some $100,000, compared to their $3,000 charge. “All of the advanced technology is so expensive that no one can really afford to use it,” explains COO Samantha Payne. “Bionic technology is really life changing—it enables people to have far greater independence and quality of life, and also affects their psychology. Amputees tell us that when they have a bionic hand, it helps them feel whole again.”

Where Open Bionics is really taking things in a new direction, though, is in its designs, Payne says. “We think the future is celebrating individuality—if you weren’t born with a hand, why pretend you have one? We can make you a hand in your favorite color, or have pictures of your family on it, and make it do extra things that normal hands can’t like glow at night and play music. You wouldn’t wear the same t-shirt seven days in a row—you pick out clothes that reflect your personality: It seems obvious to me that amputees want the same choice with their prosthetics.”

That sense of personalization will undoubtedly prove popular as other bionic body parts become increasingly prevalent.

Mohammed Abad, 43, from Edinburgh, Scotland made headlines last month after receiving an 8-inch bionic penis following a horrific childhood accident in which he was dragged 600 feet under a car, resulting in his appendage being torn off. After 100 operations, Abad now has two tubes along its length, which can be inflated and filled with liquid from his stomach when he presses a button located on his testicle—a procedure that began some three years ago. Created using skin from his forearm, the new addition isn’t without its glitches—Abad revealed he had an erection for two weeks following the surgery—the easily deflatable prosthetic has given him a sense of sexual confidence until then unknown. “I didn’t want to speak to anybody, I just wanted to get myself away from everybody,” he said of life before the 11-hour final operation. “But now I’ve been through it, I’m comfortable with it. It’s totally changed my life,” he told daytime TV show This Morning on Monday.

Abad’s surgery is a more preliminary version of osseointegration, a procedure being billed as the biggest bionic frontier. The process involves structures being surgically implanted into the area in which the prosthesis is needed, growing around the bone and tissue to create a more organic, integrated limb. Though it is currently not widely used for loss of limb replacement, as relatively few doctors are able to carry it out, its ability to employ prosthetics from the inside has become popular, particularly among soldiers who have gone through post-combat amputations.

It’s evident that these technologies are aimed at those who have suffered the devastating loss of a limb, but these innovative treatments pose an ethical quandary: Might people opt for voluntary removal of a hand, or leg, if it could be replaced with an even more functional bionic one? It remains to be seen, but with the field progressing at a rapid rate, such an eventuality may not be too far off the horizon.

The field of prosthetics may no longer be faced with the question of whether it can fill the corporeal gaps caused by amputations or birth defects, but whether creating a bionic body is the best option of all.

[MIKA27]

The WWII-Era Plane Giving the F-35 a Run for Its Money

On December 5, 2001, an American B-52 flying tens of thousands of feet above the ground mistakenly dropped a 2,000-pound satellite-guided bomb on an Army Special Forces team in Afghanistan. The aircrew had been fed the wrong coordinates, but had the plane been flying as low and slow as older generations of attack planes did, the crew might’ve realized their error simply by looking down at the ground.

It was not long after the Twin Towers fell, and American soldiers were killed in Afghanistan by an American bomb dropped by an American plane. That this mistake happened illustrates just how poorly the air campaign in the United States’ longest war was executed, and how efforts ultimately failed to make things better by going after high-tech solutions that aren’t what they’re cracked up to be compared to the old tried and true technology.

That bomber was on a 30-plus hour round trip flight from the remote island of Diego Garcia, 900 miles south of India. The plane those Green Berets really needed, the low-and-slow flying A-10 Warthog, wasn’t available yet in Afghanistan. Famously rugged and even more famously lethal, the Warthog was the first American jet to actually land at the decrepit Bagram Airfield. Soon after the runway was repaired, many dozens of F-15, F-16, and F/A-18 fighter jets—wholly different creatures—came streaming in.

According to former Defense Department official Pierre Sprey, the US Air Force could have left those other jets out, had they sent three full squadrons of A-10s—72 planes total—to Afghanistan instead. But Sprey says the Air Force “never had more than 12 Warthogs in-country at any given time during the entire war.”

“The A-10 is the best ‘close attack’ plane ever made, period,” Sprey tells me. “But the Air Force hates that mission. They’ll do anything they can to kill that plane.” He says retiring the iconic A-10, a twin-engine attack jet with 30-mm cannons that hit with 14 times the kinetic energy of the 20-mm guns mounted on America’s current fleet of supersonic fighters, became an article of faith among high ranking Air Force officers, generations of whom had been raised to believe in the redemptive power of technological innovation.

That mentality drove production of the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter, the world’s first $1 trillion weapons system. Development of the F-35 was going on in the background throughout the Afghan War despite mountains of evidence that the stealthy jet would never be able to attack ground targets like the A-10 could. Far away from the fighting, the generals in Washington, DC supported the F-35 because they believed “more technology is always better.”

This same thinking drove the push for armed drones over Afghanistan too. But no matter their technological wizardry, remote-piloted hunter-killer aircraft like the Predator and Reaper were arguably even worse at helping ground troops than even the highest-tech manned jets.

So if the A-10 was never going to be around in enough numbers, what could be done? Only one group had enough distance from the Air Force and enough independent money to consider a viable alternative: buying a cheap, lightweight attack plane on their own. That was the Navy SEALs. A group of them met with the Secretary of the Navy in 2006 to tell him about the problems they faced with getting good enough air support.

Like other American combat troops in Afghanistan, the SEALs sometimes found that high-tech gear couldn’t reliably get the job done, or that cheaper, lower-tech solutions worked better. This is how the US military almost adopted the A-29 Super Tucano, a $4 million turboprop airplane reminiscent of WWII-era designs that troops wanted, commanders said was “urgently needed,” but Congress refused to buy.

RISE OF THE SUPER TUCANO

The Super Tucano was a throwback to a bygone era of aerial combat—a time when pilots looked through the blur of a propeller and pointed their nose at the enemy before pulling the trigger. A time before auto-pilot, guided missiles, and infrared gun “pods.” The A-29 was fast enough to get to a fight quickly and light enough to stay there in a low, slow orbit overhead the battle.

Philosophically, the Super Tucano occupies a sort of middle ground between the United States’ two main gunships. As a plane, the A-29 could reach altitudes over the Hindu Kush higher than the AH-64 Apache helicopter, and remain overhead for hours before refueling like the legendary AC-130 Spectre gunships.

But the Spectre only flew at night. By day, Super Tucano’s tight turning radius and low stall speed meant pilots could maintain constant visual contact with ground forces and instantly shift from surveillance and reconnaissance to attack. And after dark, an A-29 could use night vision and thermal sensors as sophisticated as those on any fighter jet.

“It’s a great plane,” says recently retired Air Force Lt. Col. Shamsher Mann, an F-16 pilot who has flown A-29s. “Pilots love it. It handles beautifully, sips gas, and can go anywhere. If you want to get into the fight and mix it up with the guys on the ground, the Super T is a great platform.”

Another former fighter pilot tells me that the Super Tucano provided the “low-end” air-to-ground attack capability the United States simply never had in Afghanistan—a capability the Pentagon’s F-35 could never hope to replicate.

Soon after 9/11, the pilot said, Army Special Forces famously rode horses into the Hindu Kush, but carried laptop computers and sophisticated targeting and communications gear with them as well. “Super Tucano is almost a mirror image of that in the air,” he said. “The low-tech combined with the high-tech.”

Now, five years after Congress killed the A-29 program, with the US Air Force considering a lower-tech replacement for the Warthog, the sad story of the Super Tucano feels more relevant than ever.

When former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld famously said of the Iraq invasion that “you go to war with the army you have” he also described how the United States started its fight in Afghanistan too.

Supersonic fighters, strategic bombers, and heavy attack helicopters developed to fight the Soviets succeeded in displacing the Taliban and knocking out Saddam Hussein, but proved incredibly cost-ineffective in the insurgencies that followed. Rather than take a step back to evaluate what was best suited for war in Iraq and Afghanistan, the Pentagon doubled down on big-ticket procurement items more suitable for large conventional wars than fighting insurgencies.

In America’s post-9/11 wars, however, the main combat role for tactical aircraft was something called “close air support,” where planes and helicopters are called in to wipe out enemy troops actively shooting at American ground forces. This enemy didn’t have tanks, planes, or helicopters. Sometimes it had motorcycles and pickup trucks. More often it was just people on foot, hiding in houses, in caves, or behind rocks or trees.

In Afghanistan, US troops didn't need airplanes that could evade detection from enemy radar; they needed planes that flew low enough for pilots to see the enemy eye-to-eye. They needed bombs dropped close enough to hurt them, bullets shot from the sky landing just out of arm's reach and into the enemy. They needed the Taliban dead.

When US troops were under fire, they needed aircraft that could stay through the fight, be accurate, and be deadly. Often times, troops needed ordnance “danger close”—generally inside of 500 meters from their own positions—and they’d rather have a pilot down low walk those shots in by eye than risk getting killed by an errant bomb dropped from a high-tech jet from 30,000 feet up, where a pilot can’t even see the target.

But for decades the arrow of progress had firmly pointed toward building and buying higher-tech planes. This would be an uphill battle pitting the worst-case scenario conventional war we might have to fight in the future against the insurgent war we were actually in now.

The Air Force insisted it would have to retire the Warthog fleet to pay for the world’s most expensive plane, the F-35. A plane which, incidentally, can’t fly or fight very well, so much so that the Air Force watered the fighter jet program down to save face. And the Air Force Chief of Staff recently begged off a comparison between the F-35 and A-10 as a “silly exercise,” probably because he knows just how badly the Joint Strike Fighter would fare head-to-head.

Political infighting like this led to poor air support in Afghanistan. And by 2006, a group of SEALs in Afghanistan were fed up with it. They asked the Secretary of the Navy personally for his help in getting a better plane overhead.

Not long after the SEALs’ request, the Secretary put together a small team and charged them with finding a better aircraft for this kind of war. Consensus quickly grew around a lightweight turboprop-driven plane. The team took possession of a couple old Vietnam-era OV-10 Broncos that last saw combat in Desert Storm, and started flying them. But they wanted something with more punch. More lethality. They soon found a plane built for exactly this purpose.

The classified Imminent Fury project was born.

In response to the SEALs’ request, the Navy committed Pentagon heresy by going backwards in airplane technology. Instead of jet engines, they found a propellor-driven plane worked better.

Years before, a Brazilian company called Embraer had built a plane specially made for the close-in aerial fighting that the dirty wars South American and African insurgencies required. The Navy immediately leased one of them for testing. (A later phase would have raised the number to four.) This is how Embraer’s EMB-314 Tucano became reborn as the A-29B Super Tucano.

The plane was refitted at the Navy’s test facility in Patuxent River, Maryland, and flown to an out-of-the-way airbase in Nevada so it could be seen how well this “Super T” could fight.

Around this time, someone decided to paint an iconic logo on the plane: a horse in solid black silhouette. It was a respectful nod to a legendary fighting unit in naval history. Back in Vietnam, the Navy’s VAL-4 squadron, the “Black Ponies,” saw heavy combat flying the turboprop OV-10 Bronco. It was a clear sign that these pilots saw their role as close combat with the enemy. And although it was an unofficial designation for the new A-29s, the Black Ponies were reborn.

Navy and Air Force pilots jumped at the chance to volunteer. Upon selection, pilots simply disappeared from their regular units. They started working with SEALs trained to call in airstrikes. This was a special operations mission, and this was a specops plane. On paper, they now worked for the Navy’s Irregular Warfare Office on Imminent Fury.

In Nevada, they shot 50-caliber machine guns mounted in the A-29’s wings. They dropped small laser-guided and GPS-guided bombs. They fired thousands of 2.75-inch rockets, some of which had laser-guidance upgrades. These were the types of weapons best suited to the war in Afghanistan. And for self-defense, the A-29 could even fire the same Sidewinder air-to-air missile used in their previous lives as jet pilots.

Multiple Imminent Fury test pilots, including Lt. Col. Mann, tell me that the plane was perfect for fighting guerrillas in Afghanistan. The commander in Afghanistan, Gen. Stanley McChrystal, wanted four of them flying in his skies immediately. But would the Pentagon really fight for this plane? Especially one that, technologically, ran in the complete opposite direction of its stealthy F-35?

CLOSER

In a way, the fight over the Super Tucano mirrored a little-known epoch from the Vietnam War. Back then, the Pentagon was busy purging the last of the Korean War-era planes from its fleet and investing heavily on Mach 2 fighters like the F-4 Phantom II, which it felt was needed for war with the Soviet Union.

But in 1971, while the Pentagon dithered over possible future wars with the Soviets, young Air Force pilots like Byron “Hook” Hukee were busy fighting a low, slow, dirty war in Southeast Asia. And to Hukee, “close air support” in war is simple.

“Close is 100 meters, not 1,000 meters,” he says.

Hukee flew the Korean War-era A-1 Skyraider, providing cover for helicopters trying to rescue downed American pilots in North Vietnam. And he says without equivocation that today’s bombs are just too big for supporting troops on the ground.

He often dropped the 250-pound Mark 81 bomb, nicknamed the Lady Finger for its slim shape and small size, within 100 meters of downed Americans fighting off North Vietnamese attackers. But in Afghanistan, the smallest bomb readily available was the 500-pound Mark 82, which can’t be safely used inside of nearly 600 meters from friendly ground troops.

Hukee also had a complement of even smaller weapons, such as the 100-pound M47 white phosphorous bomb that dated back to WWII, and he could also release small groups of a half-dozen cluster bombs on the enemy. Today, the smallest cluster bombs used in Afghanistan weigh about a 1,000 pounds and are loaded with more than 200 bomblets.

Hukee often had to fire rockets or shoot his four 20-mm cannons on a target, and because of his A-1’s slow speed he could adjust his point of aim and fire again before zooming overhead and turning around for another pass.

That’s impossible to do in a jet aircraft. Hukee says the F-4 jet pilots’ motto in Vietnam was “One Pass, Haul Ass,” meaning they’d typically drop 500-pound or larger bombs only once and then zoom off. But for Skyraiders, they’d come in low, slow, and pound the target—sometimes making a dozen or more passes before having to refuel.

More than four decades later, the tests at Naval Air Station Fallon, in western Nevada, showed that the Super T was the closest thing yet to the Skyraider’s capabilities. The A-29 was capable of flying and fighting from less than 1,000 feet above the ground. An armed Tucano has a loiter time of up to four hours, far better than fuel-hungry fighter jets which would usually stay overhead for as little as 20 minutes at a time before needing to refuel.

Typical fighter jets could only fly loose, three- or four-mile radius circles around a fight, but the Super T could remain as close as 500 meters to the target area. Perfect for responsive air strikes.

A-29 Super Tucano, rear cockpit.

There was another technology battle as fundamental as the propeller-versus-jet-engine controversy, and that was about something the pilots call “pods.”

Short for “targeting pods,” these are removable electro-optical devices attached to the underside of an airplane that contain cameras and lasers to help with airstrikes. Looking at a plane like an F-16, one could easily mistake the pod for just another bomb. These pods allow pilots to more accurately drop bombs from high altitude, but the zoomed-in view of the ground the pilot sees is most often compared to looking at the horizon through a drinking straw.

The simple fact is that A-10 pilots didn’t need to rely on their pods in Afghanistan during daytime. They were flying low enough to verify friendly and enemy positions by just looking out their canopies—something pilots still jokingly refer to as “using the Mark-1 Mod 0 Eyeball.”

A-29 would have augmented the A-10 in this low-altitude daytime role, and it had a targeting pod for nighttime use to boot. This pod had an additional advantage of giving pilots confronted by heavy ground fire the possibility to engage from further away, if necessary.

But whenever possible, the A-29 would, like a true airborne killer, fly low and slow—able to support soldiers on the ground, as well as providing the type of backup checks that could prevent friendly fire accidents. This quality flies right in the face of the Air Force’s rationale behind using “fast mover” jets like the F-16 or the Navy’s F/A-18, which depend on what’s known as “the 8-minute rule.”

From the US Air Force and Navy’s perspective, it shouldn’t take a pilot more than eight minutes to reach troops fighting enemy combatants. It was a well-intentioned policy, but made a number of assumptions, chief of which was that responding to enemy attacks as fast as possible was the single best way to support troops. The Taliban quickly learned that US air power could arrive at a fight quickly, but taking advantage of that speed often ended up limiting the time those planes could spend overhead.

Jets could race to a fight on afterburners, but be so low on gas by the time they arrived that they’d immediately have to refuel from an airborne tanker.

“Whenever air showed up, the Taliban would hunker down for a half hour or an hour, and after the aircraft left, they’d come right back and start shooting again,” says former US Army infantry captain Justin Quisenberry.

Quisenberry spent more than 30 months in Afghanistan during three combat tours, leading soldiers in numerous firefights. For him, air power was an indispensable component of Americans emerging on top from firefights with the Taliban, and to him loiter time was the decisive factor, not reaction speed.

The Super Tucano’s turboprop engine enabled it to fly as much as 12 times longer than jets like the F-16, which could’ve given Quisenberry almost non-stop air cover during his patrols. By 2006 that air power Quisenberry could draw from mainly came from just three airbases—at Kandahar, Bagram, and Camp Bastion—each with asphalt runways over 10,000 feet long.

Unlike the fast movers at those major bases, A-29s needed less than 4,000 feet of runway, which could be flattened dirt, gravel, or grass. This meant that Super Ts could be securely based at dozens of pre-existing small airfields all over Afghanistan—making up for their relatively slower top speed by being closer to where the troops needed them for greater stretches of time.

This would have been a revolutionary change, especially considering how the air war ran in the early days. Because Congress kept the defense money flowing after 9/11, the Air Force and Navy were never forced to consider how incredibly expensive their war plans were.

Moving B-52s and fuel tankers to the Middle East was about the only change made to save any time and money. Instead of flying 30-plus hour round trips (like it did right after 9/11) from Diego Garcia, the Air Force saved some time by flying out of Al Udeid Airbase in Qatar instead.

At first, the Air Force rotated all of their fighter jet squadrons in and out of Afghanistan every 90 days—that often included flying in and out all necessary tools and spare parts by cargo plane. Eventually those deployments stretched to four and even six months. But the flying service never had a dedicated lower-maintenance attack airplane like the Super Tucano, which it could just keep in the country until the war was over.

Similarly, the Navy rotated its Nimitz-class aircraft carrier in the northern Arabian Sea off Pakistan approximately every six months, though it could’ve just land-based squadrons of F/A-18s in Afghanistan like the Marines did.

Cruising up to 100 nautical miles from the port town of Karachi, the Navy’s carriers routinely launched F/A-18 Hornets (the Navy’s primary strike airplane) on 7-hour patrols over Pakistani airspace and into Afghanistan. Their typical profile: Enter Afghan airspace; refuel; spend 20 minutes “on station,” available in case ground troops needed them; refuel a second time; spend another 20 minutes on-station; refuel a third time before entering Pakistani airspace; and then fly back over that country and land on the carrier steaming offshore.

A few years after 9/11, those F/A-18s were going into Afghanistan loaded with just one laser-guided 500-pound bomb, one GPS-guided 500-pound bomb, and one AIM-9 air-to-air missile for self-defense. All of which a Super T can likewise carry on long-duration missions. The only difference is the Hornet’s internal 20-mm cannon, which is significantly larger than a Super T’s wing-mounted .50-cal machine guns. But an add-on 20-mm gun pod can be mounted underneath the A-29 fuselage, essentially matching the F/A-18’s typical weapons load and lethal capabilities.

Most of the time, those Hornets landed back on the carrier with all bombs still attached and guns unfired. The Hornet’s cost per flight hour? $25,000 to $30,000, according to official Navy figures. It’s estimated the F-35 costs anywhere between$31,900 to $38,400 per hour to fly. As for the Super T? $600 per hour, according to the Sierra Nevada Corporation, manufacturer of the A-29.

An A-29 Super Tucano flying (although not part of Imminent Fury).

A look at a recent Navy aircraft carrier deployment provides some insight into the cost of doing business. When the USS Harry S. Truman returned to its homeport of Norfolk, Virginia, in 2014, the ship’s air wing had flown 2,902 combat sorties totaling 16,450 hours of flight time over Afghanistan. Low-balling the cost per flight hour of the Hornet flights at $25,000 per hour, this comes to roughly $411 million in taxpayer dollars spent on flight operations alone for the Truman’s deployment.

That amount of money could have bought more than enough of the $4 million Super Ts to cover all the “low-end” air support needs across Afghanistan. An Imminent Fury pilot who asked to remain anonymous adds that this would’ve lessened the wear and and tear on higher-end aircraft like the F-16s and F/A-18s, which had much of their services lives used up flying close-air support in Afghanistan.

And that was just one carrier deployment. Since 9/11, there have been dozens to the Pakistani coast.

When asked to quantify just how much taxpayer money has been spent on fuel and maintenance for even one carrier-based airplane over a decade of war, no government official will hazard even a qualified guess.

WHAT YOU DO WHEN YOU GET THERE

In testimony before Congress, admirals and generals continued to stress that speed was the most important factor in deciding which planes should be used in Afghanistan. But the “8-minute rule” standard breaks down when you talk to veteran pilots and air controllers.

“Getting there in 8 minutes sounds accurate, but what you do then is a completely ******* different thing,” says an active-duty Army Special Forces air controller who also wished to not be named. “It might take 10 minutes to dial-in the fast mover,” the controller, who’s completed multiple combat tours, says, noting the time required to orient a jet pilot to the situation on the ground upon arrival.

He says dealing with unmanned aerial systems like the vaunted Predator and Reaper drones is even worse, taking twice as long to get dialed-in as the jets do. The reason is that drone pilots are only looking through their sensors and targeting pods.

“They can’t look out the canopy and see me, and then see the enemy,” the soldier explains. The pod, he says, “just doesn’t show you much of the ground, and so it can take a long time to make sure the pilot knows where I am, where the enemy is, and to make sure we’re both talking about the same thing. I won’t let him fire until I’m sure of both.”

“A lot depends on both the skill of the [air controller] and the skill of the pilot,” he adds. “It ain’t how fast you can get to the fight, it’s what you do when you get there that counts.”

Sadly, on June 9, 2014, more Americans died in a friendly fire incident that might not have happened with an A-29 overhead. A bomb dropped by a supersonic-capable B-1 Lancer bomber (built to pierce 1980s-era Soviet air defenses) flying high overhead killed five Americans and one Afghan. The soldiers who called in the airstrike thought the aircrew above could see the infrared strobes at the friendly position, but it turns out that kind of light can’t be detected at the altitude and ranges the B-1 was at. Not seeing the friendly strobes, the B-1 crew dropped a bomb on what it mistakenly thought were Taliban fighters.

Another high-altitude bomber dropping “precision” munitions on a target they couldn’t even see. Twelve-and-a-half years after the first high-profile friendly-fire bombing, American troops were still dying for lack of a better attack plane.

Even though Congress couldn’t see the value in having Americans flying the A-29 in Afghanistan, the Pentagon started to realize it might be a key part of their effort to turn the war back over to Afghan government forces.

While American units were fighting Taliban in 2010, America was leaving Iraq, and searching for opportunities to leave Afghanistan. Different procurement priorities and outright hostility from the Navy and Air Force left the A-29 vulnerable to political fights. Imminent Fury died in a Congressional committee in 2010.

Furthermore, one of the most vocal proponents of Imminent Fury, Gen. Stanley McChrystal, was forced to retire for his comments in a Rolling Stone interview about a week after Congress killed the A-29 program, thus removing the one advocate with enough political horsepower to possibly resurrect it. In the turmoil following McChrystal’s firing, Imminent Fury fell through the cracks and was largely forgotten about.

When that happened, the services didn’t put up a fight. One former Imminent Fury pilot jokes about how the Air Force didn’t want the Super T because “it couldn’t carry AMRAAM [missiles] or nukes, and the Navy didn’t want it because it didn’t have folding wings or a tailhook.”

Dominican Republic air force pilot and maintenance airman inspect an A-29 Super Tucano before a nighttime flight

Even with the demise of Imminent Fury, however, the Super T would not stay grounded for long, as Pentagon planners realized that it just might be the right plane for the Iraqis and Afghans to fly themselves.

The Pentagon decided the fledgling Afghan Air Force needed a “light support aircraft” to support their own ground troops after the Americans left. The Super Tucano had flown active combat missions against the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, and proven itself off the test range. But Congress couldn’t decide whether to procure the A-29 or a competitor aircraft, a weaponized version of Beechcraft’s trainer airplane the company calls the AT-6B.

Even though the Air Force was cold about the idea of Americans buying and flying the A-29 in Afghanistan themselves, when it came to providing the Afghan Air Force with the same plane, the US Air Force was positively effusive, describing it as “indispensable to the operational and strategic success” of Afghanistan.

“The ‘cost’ of delay is more than a calculation of dollars and cents,” reads an Air Forcememo in 2013. “In this case, further delay with resulting capability gaps could easily mean the loss of military and civilian lives.”

When asked if the Super Tucano could’ve helped American ground forces by filling the gap left by not having nearly enough A-10s, Pierre Sprey, the former DoD official, says, “Oh, beyond a shadow of a doubt.”

“At least the A-29 can get close enough to see where the friendlies are, and not bomb them. Close support is all about a constantly changing minute-to-minute firefight,” he tells me. “And if you’re not close enough to see where the puffs of smoke are from the enemy machine guns, you’re going to kill friendlies.”

The low-and-slow Super Tucano, manufactured in Brazil and completed in Florida, began arriving at a US Air Force base in September 2014, so that American pilots could train Afghans to fly them. Across the battlefields of Afghanistan, friendly Afghan forces are waiting for their promised air support, ready to begin learning to fly the planes themselves, and hoping to stave off a military catastrophe like the one that has struck Iraq.

Sierra Nevada is currently preparing to deliver even more Super Tucanos. The planes won’t be helping American soldiers, but they’ll likely play a role helping Afghans fight the Taliban. Meanwhile, the AT-6B has gone into production, too—to help the Iraqi Air Force’s fight against ISIS.

[MIKA27]

Cops Discovered More Than 3,500 Knives and a 'Satanic' Altar in a Florida Woman's Home

On Tuesday night last week, at around 10 PM, parole officers set out to serve Nickcole Dykema warrants for violating probation. When the 47-year-old Florida woman saw the cops outside her Brooksville home, she told them to leave, prompting a radio call for reinforcements.

The extra help proved necessary. After Sergeant Chris Calderon of the Hernando County Sheriff's Office forced his way inside, Dykema tried to stab him in the head, only missing by inches, according to his account. Cops later found her hiding behind a blanket with her feet sticking out as she waved a long, shiny sword, according to a local CBS station.

After shooting her with a beanbag to no effect—twice—the cops eventually took Dykema down with a Taser. Throughout the ordeal, they were given a tour of a house that sounds and looks like the set of a Rob Zombie movie.

In total, 3,714 bladed weapons were removed from the residence during a police inventory. Deputies also found pentagrams, an altar, and some mysterious bones. It's believed that the house and the surrounding yard was "booby trapped," according to a press release from the Sheriff's office.

"I think most people would look at that and would come to the realization that it does appear to be at least mimicking satanic worship," Hernando County Sheriff Al Nienhuis told CBS.

As you might imagine, Dykema was also not the best neighbor.

"My family has been through hell for two years with this woman," Paula Deford, the woman's neighbor, told the station. "It's just been torment, torment."

The CBS station released footage that appears to show Dykema wearing all black and attacking Deford's home with a knife.

According to Hernando County court records, Dykema had previously been arrested on two separate occasions for three charges: carrying a concealed weapon, giving a false name to police, and resisting arrest. In December 2014, she was suspected of stealing knives from a Dollar Tree store, a local ABC affiliate reports.

Now she's charged with violating probation, property damage, resisting an officer, criminal mischief and battery of a cop. She's currently being held without bond.

"I'm lucky to be alive is how I feel," Deford, her neighbor, told CBS. "That's exactly how I feel."

[MIKA27]

FLYING HUNTSMAN BY KAHN DESIGN

Flying Huntsman is a spectacular new range of vehicles by UK´s leading automotive fashion house - Kahn Design. No other tuner has a better track record than Kahn Design when it comes to styling and refining the classic icon of British motoring that is the Land Rover Defender. Now Kahn takes it a step further with the Huntsman marque, creating Defenders with an aggressive aesthetic coupled with all terrain performance - a vehicle which can take you literally anywhere, such as the monstrous 6x6 double cab pickup ($125.000).

[MIKA27]

NIKE AEROLOFT GOLF JACKET

Nike´s new Aeroloft Golf Jacket is the only jacket you´ll need on the course this winter. The fitted jacket uses Nike´s revolutionary Aeroloft technology that produces excellent insulation with minimal weight, keeping you warm and not getting in the way of your golf swing. An ergonomic construction and stretchy fabric offers range of motion, while the innovative laser-cut perforated ventilation system is designed to retain just enough heat while allowing excess heat and moisture to escape, helping you regulate your temperature, in the optimal performance zone.

[MIKA27]

MR. BLACK COLD PRESS COFFEE LIQUEUR

A rich, smooth coffee liqueur that tastes more like coffee than dessert, Mr. Black Cold Press Coffee Liqueur intends to change the way you think about flavored liqueurs. Made in Australia, the blend took nine months and hundreds of iterations using their cold-drip method before the perfect balance was struck. Ideal in a cocktail but also great straight up, its taste is only matched by the appeal of the bottle, which displays artwork on the back after each pour.

[MIKA27]

Saint Étienne's urban doodler with a sense of humour

The street artist known as Oak Oak uses the urban elements of his home town of Saint-Étienne, an old industrial town in France, to create humorous, site-specific art. “What I like about street art is that you can find somewhere to draw anywhere and it is a surprise for the people who find it,” he says. “Any wall can be a canvas.” Playing with the look of concrete city elements, he combines his unique style of graffiti and doodles with pop culture references (The Simpsons is an influence), humanising inanimate objects.

[MIKA27]

DC Will Finally Credit Bill Finger As Co-Creator Of Batman

For decades, DC Comics has resisted crediting Bill Finger as one of the co-creators of Batman in screen adaptations. Following an agreement between the writer’s estate and the company, Finger’s name will appear in the credits of projects such as Gotham and Batman v. Superman.

Finger was the writer who worked alongside artist Bob Kane in 1939 to create the character of Batman, and the pair wrote Detective Comics #27, in which Batman first appeared. Finger was instrumental in helping to shape the final character from Kane’s initial work, and they worked on a number of followup comics, introducing characters such as The Joker. Finger died in 1974, and his family has been fighting for recognition.

Writing for The Hollywood Reporter, Graeme McMillan noted that Finger was shut out of credit from the start:

Although Kane received sole official credit for the character as part of the original deal signed in 1939, the artist talked in later life about Finger being an important influence on the development of the series. In his 1989 autobiography Batman and Me, Kane described Finger as “a contributing force” on the series, noting “I must admit that Bill never received the fame and recognition he deserved.”

With an agreement in place, Finger’s name will be attached to the credits of upcoming productions such as the second season of Gotham and of Batman v. Superman: Dawn of Justice.

[MIKA27]

Online Purchases May Only Require Voluntary GST Payments

Most of those who do a decent amount of online shopping are well accustomed to receiving dodgy-looking packages from Hong Kong, labelled unconvincingly as a ‘gift’ — so when Joe Hockey announced last month that GST would soon apply to all online purchases, the majority of the online community only scoffed, asking how exactly he planned to enforce this. Commissioner of Taxation, Chris Jordan agrees, admitting last week that the system would be essentially voluntary — though Joe Hockey still has faith that it will at least catch the largest online sellers.

The change in the GST-free threshold comes as an effort to ‘even the playing field’ between local and international sellers, requiring GST to be paid on all purchases rather than just those over $1000, as currently applies. Most responses to the announcement have only pointed out how impossible it would be to get every international retailer in line with the policy, however. The reality is that it won’t, but the largest players in the online marketplace — like Amazon — will comply with Australian GST requirements if international examples are anything to go by, claims Joe Hockey:

There are companies like Amazon and Facebook and others that are prepared to work with countries wherever they may be located to apply consumption taxes, should that country request it. That is because they don’t pay the tax themselves, it’s their customers that pay the tax. So I am absolutely confident…those sorts of companies will work with the tax office to apply GST to their sales in Australia, because they’re doing it other countries around the world. And that is because they want to be good global corporate citizens.

Although the rest may be true, Hockey missed the mark with his claim that online retailers won’t be affected as ‘it’s their customers that pay the tax,’ completely failing to take into account the businesses’ ability, or lack of, to offer competitive pricing. Commissioner Jordan points out that the majority of Australia’s online sales currently come from the large companies, but when these companies are compelled to comply with our GST laws because they “wish to be seen to be complying with local laws,” it’s possible that smaller suppliers could be getting a larger share of the market — given the ability to offer 10% more competitive pricing. Jordan isn’t too worried about the small fries, however, saying: “Let’s wait and see how that turns out, wait and see the size of that and work out if there are some other measures that might be feasibly introduced to pick up on more of those.”

With Malcolm Turnbull’s cabinet reshuffle, it’s definitely worth noting that Joe Hockey is no longer the Treasurer as of yesterday. His replacement, Scott Morrison, has not yet made any comment on this issue, but political forecasters generally expect him to continue with tough tax reforms. Turnbull has said that every policy and commitment made by Tony Abbott and Joe Hockey will be up for review by his new government, so the future of online GST payments is no longer set in stone.

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Watch The ISS Zoom Over The US East Coast

Halfway through a year in space, astronaut Scott Kelly woke up to this amazing view.

You’re looking at the east coast of the United States, viewed just before dawn on a clear morning from 249 miles above Earth’s surface. That’s Florida sticking out toward the lower right. In the foreground, you can see the International Space Station’s Canadarm robotic manipulator.

“Began the second half of my year in space with this incredible clear-sky fly over America, speeding over Earth 17,500 mph from Mexico up the East Coast of USA,” Commander Kelly wrote to caption a You Tube video of the flyover.

Kelly and Russian cosmonaut Mikhail Kornienko are spending a year on the International Space Station to help scientists study how long-term space flight affects the human body. It’s just one of the studies that’s necessary to pave the way for eventual manned mission to Mars, during which the crew would spend at least 500 days in space. The “Year in Space” crew marked their mission’s halfway point last week.

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We Can All Learn Something From This Young Minecraft Fan

The Syrian refugee crisis has become a political flashpoint throughout Europe. Some people are being arseholes about it. Then you’ve got this kid, spotted at the “Solidarity with Refugees” march in London.

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Brilliant stop-motion ad tells the history of Honda with paper and hands

Honda's latest ad is worth watching simply because it's fantastic animated art. The spot doesn't show off some shiny new car — instead, it takes two minutes to celebrate the history of the company and the vast array of products it produces.

The ad is constructed from thousands of paper illustrations stitched together with stop-motion filming. It was shot on large table — acting almost like a physical map of the company's history — and the pages are flipped and swapped out by hand in thousands of separate shots. The focus on paper and illustration is a clever way to make us appreciate what engineers and manufacturers do: bring ideas on paper to life.

Like Honda's products, the ad centers around the engine. It flits from vehicle to vehicle over the decades, and transforms from the trusty internal combustion motor all the way to the jet engine. There are plenty of wonderful little details in the ad, including the background. As the vehicles themselves travel through history, they carve their path along landscapes draped with the company's engineering diagrams.

After you've had enough of the ad, check out a brief making-of video (above) for a behind-the-scenes look.

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Taken is being turned into a TV series on NBC, sans Liam Neeson

Is it possible that anyone wants more Taken after three separate entries in the action franchise? NBC thinks so. The network has ordered a Taken TV show, and it's going direct to series, according to both Deadline and Variety. It's being executive produced by Luc Besson, who co-wrote the films.

The show will explore just how Liam Neeson's character Bryan Mills acquired that "very particular set of skills" that make him such a badass in the movies. Don't expect Liam Neeson to reprise his role in this prequel series, however — someone younger is going to have to take up the mantle of the CIA agent who can beat up the bad guys. The show takes place before Mills got married or had kids, and will instead presumably focus on his time at the agency. That does raise the question, however: if Mills is a lonely bachelor, who are the baddies going to take away from him this time?

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You Can 3D Print Your Own Homo Naledi Specimens

If you’re excited about last week’s announcement of a new human-like species discovered in South Africa, you can get your hands on the specimens — sort of. You can print your own 3D replicas of Homo naledi and several other important hominin finds.

Anthropologist Lee Berger and his colleagues found 91 specimens, which they say represent a newly discovered species named Homo naledi, in a South African cave system. They published their findings in the open access journal E-Life, but they also scanned the fossils and uploaded the digital copies to Morphosource, where you can download them and print your own hominid skull fragments on a standard desktop 3D printer.

You can print your own 3D models of specimens from several other hominin finds, and anthropologist Kristina Killgrove provided a handy list of links on her Forbes contributor page. Most are in .stl or .ply formats. If you don’t have your own 3D printer, you can search 3DHubs for access to one in your area.

“The Rising Star Expedition’s opening up of information so soon after discovery is unprecedented and very, very welcome. In the past, fellow researchers and teachers would have to wait multiple years — and pay hundreds of dollars — to get a cast of the new fossil. And wait many more years for all the data to be opened up,” wrote Killgrove. That’s still the case for most of the hominin fossils in museum research collections around the world, but as 3D printing becomes more widespread — and as the push for open access to scientific data gains more ground — it could become more common.

For students and educators, that means hands-on work in the classroom with the latest discoveries. “I spent much of the day of the announcement printing, which meant I was able to bring the fragments in to my Human Osteology course almost immediately after the to talk to the students about what had been discovered,” wrote Killgrove. “While not all of them were interested in the find, the ones that geeked out with me made my frenzied printing of them worthwhile.”

And for researchers, it’s a new tool for scientific debate.

The Homo naledi find stirred up some controversy among paleoanthopologists, because not everyone is convinced that Homo naledi is a new species. Anthropologist Jeffrey Schwarz wrote an editorial forNewsweek pointing out that the Homo naledi specimens looked more like another genus of hominids,Austalopithecus, than any member of the genus Homo. Another anthropologist, Tim White, contended that Homo naledi actually looked more like a “primitive, small” version of Homo erectus — the first early human ancestors to have body proportions similar to ours and probably the creator of the first stone handaxes.

Researcher John Hawks, part of the team that found Homo naledi, rebutted those critiques in a recent blog post, and the whole debate is a great example of science in action. Hawks presented his data and his conclusions. Other scientists questioned his conclusions and presented their own ideas. Hawks responded by explaining his conclusions and providing access to the data so that anyone who wanted to question it could look for themselves — and that’s the nuts and bolts of how scientific arguments are supposed to work.