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

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The Key To Colonizing Mars Could Be These Tiny Green Microbes

Long ago, a clan of hardy microbes called cyanobacteria helped terraform the lifeless Earth into a vibrant biosphere. Today, the very same critters could be the key to colonizing Mars.

Plants are going to have a tough time on the Red Planet’s hostile surface, but cyanobacteria have coped with extreme environments for eons. A paper led by astrobiologist Cyprien Verseux of NASA’s Ames Research Institute argues that we can harness these tiny photosynthesis machines to produce many of the resources we’ll need to survive, from food and oxygen to metals and medicine. Here are all the ways cyanobacteria can help us build a Martian colony.

Extracting Elements

In science fiction, we find humans harvesting fields of wheat under terraformed Martian skies and growing rows of potatoes inside climate-controlled Habs. But in reality, growing any plants on Mars is going to be a challenge, because the Martian soil lacks some key ingredients.

First and foremost, there isn’t much nitrogen. Plants require lots of the stuff, and they need it in one of two chemical forms: ammonia, NH3, or nitrate, NO3. Most of the nitrogen on Mars is locked up as N2 gas in the atmosphere, but as far as we can tell the soil is pretty nitrogen poor. (The Curiosity rover got its first whiff of biologically-useful nitrogen on Mars this past March).

This also happens to be the situation on Earth, but we have a solution: Microbes. Cyanobacteria are among a diverse group of nitrogen-fixers, bugs that deploy specialised enzymes to pull N2 out of the air and convert it into ammonia. On Earth, nitrogen fixers live symbiotically within plant roots, feeding their hosts nutrients in exchange for sugar. Verseux and colleagues argue that we could likewise harness cyanobacteria to extract all the fertiliser we’ll need from the Martian atmosphere.

Beyond nitrogen, there’s a laundry list of other nutrients plants and humans need to stay healthy — phosphorus, magnesium, potassium, calcium, zinc, iron and so forth. Most of these elements can be found in the basaltic rocks that cover the Martian surface, and cyanobacteria can help us extract them. Certain species secrete enzymes that literally digest minerals, liberating the nutrients within. In fact, it was this metabolic capacity that probably helped ancient cyanobacteria colonize the barren surface of the Earth.

Cyanobacteria are proven nutrient miners, but it’s possible we can push them further than evolution already has. With a little genetic tinkering, we may be able to engineer cyanobacteria capable of extracting all sorts of useful metals from rocks. We already use microbes in copper and gold mining operations on Earth, and the asteroid mining company Deep Space Industries is busy engineering bugs that can chow through space rocks and poop out platinum.

The Great Martian Gold Rush won’t be led pioneers with pickaxes, but by scientists with genetically modified bacteria.

Filling Our Bellies

If Martian settlers have to bring all of their food from Earth, it will add a tremendous amount of weight, rocket fuel, and money to the cost of the trip. For a Martian colony to be sustainable, we’re going to need food that was grown on Mars. But it won’t necessarily be plants.

Mmm, bacteria

Sure, space lettuce is all the rage on the ISS this year, but on Mars, it makes a lot more sense for colonists to eat green microbes. Mars only receives about 44% of the sunlight that Earth does, so we’ll need our crops to be as energy-efficient as possible. Study after study has shown that cyanobacteria are better solar collectors than plants, converting a larger percentage of incoming photons into calories. What’s more, by culturing bacteria in environmentally-controlled bioreactors, we can optimise their growth to a degree simply not possible with leafy greens.

If eating microbes for lunch sounds slightly weird, keep in mind that cyanobacteria are already a popular food supplement on Earth. Ever heard of Spirulina? The blue-green powder that’s all the rage at health food stores and hipster juice bars is a cyanobacteria belonging to the genus Arthrospira. Arthrospira has a high protein content and is a nearly complete nutritional source, lacking only in vitamin C and certain essential oils. Again, with a little genetic modification, we might be able to perfect Arthrospira‘s nutrient profile — and its flavour. Pumpkin spice Spirulina bars might be just what our brave Martian colonists need to feel at home.

Giving Us Air to Breathe

The thin Martian atmosphere is virtually oxygen-free: 0.13% O2, compared with 21% on Earth. Obviously, this is less than ideal.

Artist’s rendering of a cyanobacteria-based biological life support system on Mars. Image Credit: Verseux et al. 2015

Photosynthesis — that amazing biochemical pathway that turns sunlight into sugar — also generates O2 as a waste product. And, guess what? By capturing and converting solar energy more efficiently than plants, cyanobacteria also end up producing more oxygen waste. “Cyanobacteria are very efficient O2 producers,” Verseux and his colleagues write. “Whereas trees release about 2.5 – 11 tons of O2 per hectare per year, industrial cultivation in open ponds of Arthrospira species in Southeastern California release about 16.8 tons of O2 per hectare per year.” The researchers note that in a bioreactor system optimised for temperature, nutrient flow rates, cell densities and illumination, O2 production could be dramatically increased.

Verseux and his colleagues envision collecting this O2 and channeling it into our life support systems, all the while scrubbing out the CO2 we exhale and feeding back to the bioreactor. On Mars, the circle of life will be driven by flow valves.

Fuelling Our Rovers

Even if you personally don’t want to eat bacteria bars for breakfast, lunch and dinner, you can feed ‘em to your rover. Remember those handy nitrogen fixing enzymes cyanboacteria use to turn atmosphere into fertiliser? When there isn’t enough nitrogen kicking around, the enzymes get confused and grab hydrogen instead, converting it into H2 — otherwise known as rocket fuel. It’s unclear whether cyanobacteria could be coaxed into producing useful amounts of the stuff, but it’s certainly a question ripe for exploration.

The Curiosity Rover

Rocket fuel aside, cyanobacteria produce a wide range of oils that can be collected and refined into biofuels. Indeed, algae-based biofuels are so efficient that the Department of Energy reckons algae could be running any machine that guzzles diesel today. Even if we don’t want to burn cyanobacteria directly, we can use them as feedstock for yeast, which produce another popular biofuel — ethanol. One way or another, it seems likely that the first expeditions into Valles Marineres and up Olympic Mons will run on bacteria.

Oh, and the best part about burning fuel on Mars? It’s so damn cold we don’t need to worry about greenhouse gases at all. Bring ‘em on.

Everything Else!

If we want to make it on Mars long-term, we’re going to need to think beyond basic life support. Eventually, human settlers will need all sorts of synthetic materials, supplements, and medicines. Could microbes be the answer? A quick glance at the biotech industry on Earth suggests they might be.

We already pack E.coli full of the genes needed to produce everything from cosmetic ingredients to antibiotics and cancer-fighting drugs. Likewise, some researchers think we can use cyanobacteria to generate all sorts useful products on Mars, including drugs, bioplastics and building materials. “The ability of cyanobacteria to produce organic material from Martian resources, coupled to our increasing abilities in metabolic engineering, make it possible to consider many other applications ranging from performing basic life support functions to generating comfort products,” Verseux and colleagues write. There researchers acknowledge that there’s still a lot of basic science to do on this front. But if one thing’s clear, it’s that our blue-green microbial friends have the potential to be much, much more than a smoothie supplement.

We’ll Still Bring Plants!

I know what you’re thinking at this point. Algae bars? For the rest of my life? Weren’t those poor suckers on the Battlestar Galactica miserable?

Screenshot of the space garden in the movie Sunshine.

Yes, but remember, those humans were also being chased across the Galaxy by bloodthirsty Cylons. More to the point: Getting the bulk of our nutrition and life support from cyanobacteria doesn’t mean we’re going to leave plants behind. Time and again, science has proclaimed the psychological benefits of growing leafy greens, and for that reason alone, it’s important we bring plants to Mars. Plants will probably make a small caloric contribution to life on Mars, but if they keep our brave settlers from going batshit, they’re worth it.

Putting the first humans on Mars will be a major milestone, but keeping them alive could be one of the greatest technological challenges we’ve ever faced. Throughout their billions of years on Earth, cyanobacteria have proven themselves expert resource extractors, terraformers, and most importantly, survivors. Perhaps it’s time we offer them a challenge worthy of their skill.

[MIKA27]

SHINOLA RUNWELL SPORT CHRONO

Shinola was founded in 2011 with the goal of bringing watchmaking back to the USA. Over the past few years they produced a series of distinctive watches, one of the more recent additions to the range is the Runwell Sport Chrono.

Each Runwell Sport Chrono uses an Argonite 5050 quartz movement, hand-assembled from 103 Swiss-made components in Detroit, Michigan. The Quartz movement offers accuracy, reliability and affordability – although watch snobs will likely turn their noses up at it. From a design perspective Shinola invariably hits it out of the park, and it’s excellent to see successful companies setting up in Detroit to provide much needed jobs to those formally employed in the automotive manufacturing sector. [Purchase]

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Siberia May Be Sliding Into More Mysterious Craters

Will Siberia one day be a place that parents describe to their children in bedtime stories about the poor shivering Siberians who got sucked down mysterious holes that opened all across their frozen land? It’s not that far from the truth as Russian scientists studying the massive craters that have already formed in northern Siberia are predicting new ones and warning they will be even wider and deeper with no signs of stopping.

While the mysterious Siberian craters have been attributed by various experts and fearful Siberians to anything from meteorites to missiles to giant worms to UFOs or underground aliens, the most scientific cause seems to be explosions triggered by the release of methane gas trapped under giant frozen plugs of earth called pingos that are melting due to climate change. That’s what a recent expedition team from the Trofimuk Institute of Petroleum Geology and Geophysics says they’ve confirmed along with the discovery of larger and more dangerous pingos.

Before and after satellite images of a pingo which became the Siberian crater known as B2.

“Pingos” sounds like a party snack but the only thing they have in common with junk food is bad gas. Pre-explosion pingos can reach up to 230 feet high and 2,000 feet in diameter before erupting to form ground-swallowing craters like the famous B1 on the Yamal Peninsula that is over 200 feet deep. Senior researcher Dr. Vladimir Olenchenko says the expedition found a pingo bigger than this that may erupt at any moment. The secret location will be monitored via satellite.

Dr. Igor Yeltsov, deputy director of the institute, has compared the end result of exploding pingos to the theory that methane blasts from the ocean floor are what knock down and swallow planes and ships in the Bermuda Triangle. What’s worse, the Siberian pingos and their craters are near major methane fields that are near major cities which makes them a catastrophic and possibly apocalyptic chain reaction waiting to happen.

Will this be the end of Siberia?

Will Siberia end up looking like a snow-covered lunar landscape or a frozen black hole between Russia and the Arctic Ocean? Only time will tell.

[MIKA27]

Samsung's New Gear VR Only Costs $US100

Samsung has been an early adopter of virtual reality, creating headsets that use its massive smartphone screens as VR displays.

Now, the company has announced its third iteration of Gear VR, compatible with the S6, S6 Edge, S6 Edge+, and the Note 5, for only $US100.

For the most part, it looks just like the first two Gear VR headsets though Samsung says it made this unit a good 22 per cent lighter and the touchpad has been improved. But the real headline is that price. For $US100, you can take your first step into VR (if you happen to be slinging one of those four new Samsung smartphones.)

With rumours that other VR headsets like PlayStation VR and HTC Vive will cost somewhere in the several hundred dollar range, this is wonderfully cheap entry point for people who want to dip their toe into a new virtual world.

*Smartphone not included*

[MIKA27]

Totally Spectacular Flyover Through The Veil Nebula

The Hubble Space Telescope took a new image of the Veil Nebula, a supernova remnant from a star that exploded 8,000 years ago, and made this truly spectacular flyover visualisation of the beautiful ripple in space that you can see below. In the 3D visualisation, red is sulphur, green is hydrogen and blue is oxygen.

The Hubble writes:

“Not long before the dawn of recorded human history, our distant ancestors would have witnessed what appeared to be a bright new star briefly blazing in the northern sky, rivaling the glow of our moon. In fact, it was the titanic detonation of a bloated star much more massive than our sun. Now, thousands of years later, the expanding remnant of that blast can be seen as the Cygnus Loop, a doughnut-shaped nebula that is six times the apparent diameter of the full moon. The Hubble Space Telescope was used to zoom into a small portion of that remnant, called the Veil Nebula. Hubble resolves tangled rope-like filaments of glowing gases. They have been shocked and heated by colliding with cooler, denser interstellar gas. Supernovae enrich space with heavier elements used in the formation of future stars and planets — and possibly life.”

[MIKA27]

Enormous Time Capsule Will Be Opened In Michigan Today, Will Probably Suck

A gigantic time capsule from 1965 is going to be opened today in Bay City, Michigan. And locals have been speculating about what could be inside. Will it be filled with old movie cameras and classic records? Priceless gems and bars of gold? Probably not.

Frankly, the contents of most time capsules are pretty disappointing. But even if this capsule, known as the John F. Kennedy Peace Capsule, is filled with amazing things, there’s a bigger fear: Whatever’s inside has probably been ravaged by rain and snow and whatever else happens to things that are buried for half a century. Many time capsules simply turn out to be a soggy, unrecoverable mess once they’re unearthed

Stephen Kent, president of the Bay County Historical Society, summed up every time capsule nerd’s worst fears when he told the local news: “I just hope it’s not soup.”

It’s probably soup. And not the Campbell’s kind. But we’ll see! Time capsule nerds are nothing if not cockeyed optimists! (But it’s probably soup.)

[MIKA27]

This Photo Of An Aeroplane Flying Over The Bahamas Was Shot From The ISS

Earlier this week, NASA’s Earth Observatory shared a beautiful photo of the Bahamas. While the landscape is majestic and all, PetaPixel points out that the coolest thing about the photo wasn’t immediately evident.

The Bahamas’ Great Exuma is a series of cays, and if you look closely at one of the turquoise-green channels between one of the larger cays on the upper right-hand side of the photo, you’ll see a thin string of white. Zoom in on the large photo and you’ll see it: an aircraft, given away by its condensation trails.

Why is this remarkable? Consider that the ISS is moving 17,150 miles-per-hour above the surface of the Earth, while the plane below was probably moving at around 200 miles per hour or faster. Then consider that this photo was taken with a hand-held Nikon D4 digital camera by an astronaut floating 250 miles above the cays in the photo. Catching an object as small as a moving plane, clearly enough to identify it from almost 250 miles above.

[MIKA27]

Americans Have 115% More Garbage Than We Thought

The amount of municipal waste being disposed of in the US is more than double — 262 million tonnes (metric tons) versus 122 million tonnes in 2012 — previous estimates, our new study shows. We also found that the US has plenty of space to put it all — more than 70 years’ worth of space, actually.

Landfills are large sources of methane, comprising about 18% of human-made methane emissions sources in the US, because of the decomposition of waste materials that occurs over long time spans inside of landfills.

With so much waste going to landfills, and our findings that landfilling will continue to be a major way that we manage waste in the future, identifying approaches to reduce greenhouse gas emissions in the waste sector is critical.

Our recent work examined the performance of more than 800 landfills that have active gas collection systems, and we uncovered significant opportunities for emission reductions. In fact, the biggest determinant of highly efficient gas collection systems was whether or not the landfill was closed and no longer receiving new waste. We found that closed sites collected gas about 17 percentage points more efficiently than sites that are open and actively receiving new waste.

Meeting new methane targets

Pursuing emission reductions at landfills aligns with newly proposed regulations by the US EPA. The proposed modifications to the municipal landfill rules under the Clean Air Act seek to lower the emissions threshold, at which point a landfill must design and construct an active gas collection system.

Moving toward improved waste management approaches, including enhancing the performance of existing sites that will be operating for many years, is not only being reflected in current US regulations. The pope’s recent Encyclical called for the abatement of “…the pollution produced by residue, including…waste present in different areas” and the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals for 2030 contain multiple goals that intersect with the way waste materials are managed in the US and globally.

Our work clearly demonstrates that landfilling in the US will likely be the predominant waste management method for the foreseeable future.

In contrast to concerns in the 1980s and 1990s, when there were widespread worries over depleting disposal space, our new study quantified the amount of available disposal capacity in the US.

We found the total amount of disposal capacity has increased in recent years — in fact, about 2.7 years of new capacity was available annually from 2010 through 2013 based on our analysis. The US, in other words, can generate trash at its current rate and still find room to landfill it for decades to come.

Better data, better landfill disposal estimate

The bulk of the data we used in our study was derived from a newly available data set published by the US EPA as part of its Greenhouse Gas Reporting Program (GHGRP) law.

Passed in 2009, the GHGRP requires facilities in certain sectors, including municipal solid waste landfills, to systematically collect and electronically report a host of data that are used to calculate the total CO2 emissions at the facility. We were able to leverage a large amount of data and metadata from all landfills subject to the rule — more than 1,200 data sets in all — across four years in our analysis from 2010 through 2013.

One key finding was our estimate that the amount of waste disposed in the US ranged from about 264 million tonnes in 2010 to 266 million tonnes in 2013.

So why are our estimates so much greater than the frequently reported municipal waste management data which are also published by the US EPA? The simple answer lies in the methodology.

Before the GHGRP data were available, the best approach to estimate municipal waste management in the US was to examine material flows within the US economy, which ultimately led to an estimate of how much waste was disposed of, combusted and recycled. By contrast, the GHGRP data set, upon which our estimate was based, reflected measured, quality-assured data from every reporting facility.

Standard practice at landfills involves weighing every incoming truckload upon arrival and departure, with the difference reflecting the amount of waste that was placed in the landfill.

Aggregate the weight delivered in each truckload in an entire year and you have the data reported by each landfill. We aggregated each facility’s reported data to develop our estimate. There are landfills that are not large enough to be subject to the GHGRP and there are waste materials that are not strictly municipal waste that are disposed of at municipal landfills, such as construction waste. However, we calculated that these amounts are small relative to our total calculated disposal amount.

Environmental informatics

Another key conclusion, backed by measured and estimated data from hundreds of operating landfills, suggests that emission-reduction efforts must focus on open landfills that are actively accepting waste.

This is not a trivial exercise as open areas at landfills make gas collection through traditional means difficult, and ill-performing gas collection systems can lead to problems. Typically, gas is collected from landfills through a series of perforated pipes that are installed vertically or horizontally within the waste once enough waste is in place to accommodate the wells. Issues from underperforming gas collection systems, such as high-temperature conditions within the waste, can make effective gas collection difficult and can even create conditions leading to pyrolysis or fires.

We suggest a focus on innovative gas collection approaches that capture gas very soon after waste is initially placed in a landfill, among other approaches. At many sites, early gas collection may have benefits other than methane emission reductions. Several hundred sites across the US beneficially use the energy content of collected landfill gas to create electricity or produce fuels.

It is our hope that this work will be one of many analyses that leverage large, quality-assured data sets in the waste and materials management domain. These can help inform current performance and key in on targets for near-term and long-term improvement, ushering in an era of enhanced environmental informatics.

We expect that future studies will use our data-mining methodology to unearth additional relationships and insights about how disposal facilities are actually operating, helping to inform policymakers, improve analytical tools such as life-cycle assessment, and bring to bear a more sustainable materials management future.

[MIKA27]

How Does 45 Layers Of Bulletproof Glass Stand Up Against A Firing RPG?

Can 45 layers of bulletproof glass — 45 layers that combine to make a 40 centimetre thick bullet stopping wall, mind you — survive against a RPG-7 rocket launcher? The idea is to find out if it’s possible to use bulletproof glass to armour a tank against anti-tank weapons such as a RPG.

Crash Zone did the test and though the bulletproof glass held up admirably (I mean, a rocket is being fired at it), it didn’t quite work. Even using armour that was spaced out from each other couldn’t survive against an RPG. Still, it’s fun seeing a rocket get shot at glass and cause a cool explosion burst.

[MIKA27]

Physicists Smash Quantum Teleportation Record With 102 Kilometre Fibre Jump

A team of researchers from the National Institute of Standards and Technology has broken the distance record for quantum teleportation down optical fibre, showing they’re able to transfer quantum information over 102 kilometres.

The researchers have shown that they can perform quantum communication, often performed in free space, over standard fibre-optic lines. It means they have been able to move the information down fibre four times farther than the previous record, which is an attractive proposition for those aiming to create a quantum internet.

Quantum teleportation isn’t quite the matter-shifting technique of Star Trek, but instead the process of transferring — in fact scientists say ‘remotely reconstructing’ — information that’s held in the quantum state of one chunk of matter or light to another, some distance away. The NIST scientists have shown that they can transfer the quantum state from one photon, down 102 kilometers of spooled optical fibre in the lab, to another photon. The experiment is reported in Optica, and the infographic below does a nice job of describing how the team achieved the result.

It may sound like a logical step to send quantum information down fibre optic cable — after all, it’s how much of the world’s data is now sent. But it was only made possible at such distances by a new type of single-photon detector developed at NIST. “Only about 1 per cent of photons make it all the way through 100 km of fibre,” explains Marty Stevens, a NIST researcher, in a press release. “We never could have done this experiment without these new detectors, which can measure this incredibly weak signal.”

Quantum teleportation is thought to be a promising route to developing quantum encryption — theoretically an unbreakable system where quantum states are used to hide data. But there’s a little work to be done before this technique can be used to achieve such a goal: the researchers can only achieve teleportation in 25 per cent of transmissions at best, and 102 kilometres may be a long way but it’s dwarfed by the scale of fibre optic cables used to transmit data across the Internet. Still, it’s good to have targets, right?

[MIKA27]

Here's A New Trailer For The Sixth Season Of The Walking Dead

There’s a new trailer for the new season of The Walking Dead, showing every horrible thing that has happened so far to the bloodied, battered survivors of the apocalypse. Here it is.

Here’s what season six holds, courtesy of FX TV on Foxtel:

Season Five saw our group being formed into consummate survivors by the world around them, nearly making some of them into villains. To make it as far as they have – to have persevered through all of their heartbreaking challenges – they have evolved into incredibly powerful people. But who have they become?

The last five episodes of Season Five answered that question with Rick accepting an approach of unapologetic brutality in murdering Pete, a fellow Alexandrian.

Season Six starts with Alexandria’s safety shattered by multiple threats. To make it, the people of Alexandria will need to catch up with our survivors’ hardness while many of Rick’s people will need to take a step back from the violence and pragmatism they’ve needed to embrace. These reversals won’t happen easily, or without conflict.

But now Rick’s group is fighting for something more than survival…They’re fighting for their home, and they will defend that at any cost, against any threat, even if that threat comes from within.

The Walking Dead premieres on Foxtel on October 12, fast-tracked from the US — it’ll be out at 1:30PM on that day if you’re keen on watching it as quickly as possible, or again at 8:30PM if you’re a normal human with normal working hours.

[MIKA27]

The Northern Hemisphere Just Survived The Hottest Summer In Recorded History

Four months ago in New Delhi, the streets melted and the power grid flickered as temperatures soared well beyond 43 degrees Celcius. India was in the midst of the fifth deadliest heat wave in its history, and summer hadn’t even begun.

Today, on the autumn equinox, America bid good riddance to the hottest summer in recorded history. It was a summer marked by scorching temperatures, mega-fires and drought, a summer where millions saw the present and future of climate change on their doorstep. Let’s have a quick look back over the summer we just survived.

Hot, Dry and Fiery

When summer officially commenced on June 21st, the entire west coast of North America was already in the midst of the worst fire season in recent memory, possibly the worst in recorded history. Fires ripped through boreal and tundra ecosystems of northern Alaska that hadn’t blazed in millennia. And it wasn’t just the vegetation that burned: The flames crept deep into the ground, sending centuries-old soil carbon up in smoke.

By July 1st, there were 297 fires actively burning across the state of Alaska. Plumes of particulates wafted thousands of miles south into the midwest, where they were visible from space. Meanwhile, hundreds of other fires raged across massive swaths of Alberta and Saskatchewan. A smog-like haze hung in the air.

Ozone found in fire smoke trailed across the United States on June 29th and was captured by NASA’s Aqua satellite.

Around the same time, something even weirder was happening 3,200 kilometres south. Olympic National Forest, one of the wettest ecosystems in North America, was also engulfed by flames. The Paradise Fire, which covered over 1,200 acres when we reported it on July 9th, became the largest blaze in the park’s history. All told, the wildfires that raged in eastern Oregon and Washington State this summer devoured a region the size of Delaware.

The mega-fires that marked the summer of 2015 were fuelled by exceptionally dry conditions on the ground, following a warm winter and a spring of record-low precipitation. In Olympic, the snowpack that should replenish waterways and keep the soil moist through August was gone before summer began. As a result, major rivers in Washington State flowed at less than a third their normal volume.

Paradise Fire in Queets Valley, June 16.

Of course, the fires (still) raging out west and the brutal heat wave in India weren’t just terrible coincidences: They’re both symptoms of Earth’s rapidly changing climate, the inevitable consequence of the rising concentration of greenhouse gases in our atmosphere. Earth’s atmosphere is one of humanity’s global commons, and this summer it looked like the beginning of a global tragedy.

In mid-July, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) confirmed that June 2015 was the hottest June in recorded history.

High temperatures persisted through the month of July as fires continued to rage out west and California struggled through the fourth year in a row of exceptional drought. A warm blob of ocean water across the northern Pacific blossomed a toxic algal bloom from Alaska to California, which forced fisheries to shut down. Algae blooms in Lake Erie and the Baltic sea also swelled voraciously this summer, encouraged by the mild weather. Such blooms may look pretty from satellite images, but as we’ve learned time and again, they strip the water of oxygen, choke out all other life forms and lead to massive dead zones.

Algae bloom across the west coast this summer

As July drew to a close, a horrific heat dome descended over the Middle East. On July 31st, the Iranian city of of Bandar Mahshahr felt a heat index of 74 degrees Celcius — the second highest temperature ever recorded on Earth. Temperatures in the Iraqi city of Basra hovered around 50 degrees for a full week as the hot, high-pressure air mass caused widespread power and transportation outages from Dubai to Beruit.

On August 20th, NOAA once again made the announcement: July 2015 was officially the hottest month in recorded history.

We recently learned that August 2015 was also the hottest August on record, making it the sixth month in 2015 to break its monthly temperature record and putting us well on our way toward the hottest year on record. With the entire summer’s worth of data now in, we can make insane graphs of this year’s temperature anomalies, like this one, which depicts the average global temperature departures in 2015 (in green) compared with other years. The red lines are the six warmest years on record: 2014, 2010, 2013, 2005, 2009, 1998.

You don’t need a statistics degree to see the writing on the wall. The Earth is getting hot.

Verified by Science

As we sweated through the hottest summer on record, new scientific papers offered additional context, underscoring that the “exceptional” weather we’ve been feeling is actually more of a window into the future. A study published in Nature Communications showed that fire seasons have grown 18.7 per cent longer across Earth’s surface since 1979, and that the “global burnable area” affected by fire season has doubled. A study published in Geophysical Research Letters concluded that climate change has amplified the already-extreme California drought, making it 15 to 20 per cent worse than it would have been in the absence of humans. We were hardly surprised by the time a Nature Climate Change study proclaimed that the present California drought is the worst the state has seen in at least 500 years.

Here’s what Miami and New York City would look like if sea levels rose by 6 metres. Image Credit: Climate Central

But the impacts of a changing climate reach far beyond fire and drought. This summer, NASA’s Sea Level Change team announced that the planet is probably locked into at least 90 centimetres of sea level rise.Although the timescales on which we’ll witness that sea level rise remain uncertain, there’s no doubt that a swell of this magnitude poses a serious threat to coastal cities worldwide. And three feet might actually be a conservative estimate — according to a study published this July in Science, a global temperature uptick of 2 degrees Celsius (the internationally agreed upon warming target as decided by the IPCC) could result in sea level rise of at least six meters, displacing hundreds of millions of people and swallowing cities like Miami and New Orleans.

Chart showing how Antarctic ice would be affected by different emissions scenarios. (GtC = gigatons of carbon)

Capping us out at 2 to 3 degrees of global warming assumes we’ll massively curtail our fossil fuel consumption by the end of this century. If we don’t, the planet could be in for something far more dramatic. As a modelling paper published this month in Science Advances points out, if we burned all of our fossil fuels, we’d melt Antarctica and global sea levels would rise by as much as 60 metres over the next few millennia. It’s an extreme scenario, but one that serves to highlight just how profoundly the planet could be altered if humanity fails to temper its appetite for fossil carbon.

Sept. 27, 2013 image showing thousands of walruses hauling out on a barrier island near Point Lay, Alaska. Image Credit: AP/NOAA Fisheries, Stan Churches

The symptoms of climate change we felt this summer aren’t just affecting humans. In late August, the retreat of Arctic sea ice caused thousands of walruses to scramble onto a small patch of Alaskan shoreline. It was the seventh summer in recent history that walruses had been forced to “haul out” onto a coastline in Russia or Alaska due to habitat loss. This time, the mass migration came almost a month earlier than it had in the past. Meanwhile, warmer waters are driving multitudes of marine species toward the poles, scrambling the natural balance of communities that have evolved over the course of millennia. According to a massive biodiversity analysis published earlier this month in Nature Climate Change, the continued shuffling of marine species due to global warming could cause the world’s oceans to look completely different by the end of the century. Species that occupy a narrow ecological niche or geographic region are at risk of disappearing entirely.

Looking Forward

The summer of 2015 was a summer where global climate change became real and visceral for millions of people worldwide. But we’re only just beginning to explore the world we’ve created — a world that’s hotter, drier, more combustible and less predictable than the world which gave rise to human civilisation. And as we enter the future, we’re saying goodbye to a large portion of Earth’s biodiversity. As scientists confirmed this summer, we are undeniably in early stages of a sixth mass extinction event. That event will surely become one of the hallmarks of the Anthropocene.

But despite all the gloom and doom, it’s not too late for humans to act and prevent some of the worst climate scenarios from unfolding. This summer was also marked by real signs of political movement on climate change internationally. In August, the Obama administration unveiled its Clean Power Plan, the capstone of the first major response to climate change in US history. The plan, which calls on the United States to cut carbon emissions (now officially carbon pollution) by a third by 2030, will require each state to double down on its investment in renewable energy sources like wind and solar power. China, now the largest carbon emitter on the planet, continued to make massive investments in green energy this summer, and remains on track to increase its solar capacity by 18 gigawatts this year, according to New York Magazine. If a still-industrialising country of 1.3 billion can produce more energy with less carbon, so can the rest of the world.

A proposal to switch all energy in the US to renewable sources by 2050 is by Mark Z. Jacobson, a civil and environmental engineer who heads up Stanford’s Atmosphere and Energy Program

All of this sets the stage for COP-21, the international climate conference set to take place in Paris this December. Here, world leaders will attempt to negotiate a path toward massive global carbon emissions reductions that could avert catastrophic climate change. In advance of that conference, the European Union has already pledged to cut its emissions by 40 per cent from 1990s levels. Brazil, meanwhile, is promising to ramp up its investment in renewable energy production while curtailing its destruction of the Amazon, one of the largest carbon sinks on Earth. COP-21 is also an opportunity for the US to finally position itself as a leader and a part of the solution to climate change. If President Obama’s recent trip to Alaska is any indication, it’s an opportunity he doesn’t plan on passing up.

We’ve got a long, hard road ahead of us, but my hope is that we’ll end up looking back on the summer of 2015 as a turning point in history. Let’s not forget that in addition to a deadly heatwave, this summer also opened with the release of Pope Francis’s landmark encyclical, which argued that swift, aggressive action on climate change is now our moral imperative as a species. “It is no longer enough,” Pope Francis writes, “to state that we should be concerned for future generations. We need to see that what is at stake is our own dignity.”

[MIKA27]

Exploding African Lake May Be Getting Ready to Erupt Again

In Africa, there are three lakes known for exploding and releasing carbon dioxide – Lake Nyos and Lake Monoun in Cameroon and Lake Kivu on the border between Rwanda and the Democratic Republic of the Congo. The two million people living in the vicinity of Lake Kivu have heard rumblings that it’s about to explode again after a long dry spell. The government says a degassing plant has finally passed tests and will begin removing and releasing the carbon dioxide harmlessly so there’s nothing to worry about. Really?

Lakes Nyos, Monoun and Kivu are the only three lakes in the world to have limnic eruptions where the water is loaded with dissolved carbon dioxide from the lake bottom that can explode and release enough gas to kill humans and animals living nearby. In 1984, Lake Monoun erupted, killing 37 people. At the time, the cause was unknown and many believed the explosion and gas release to be a terror attack. In 1986, Lake Nyos erupted, releasing anywhere from 300,000 to possibly 16 million tons of carbon dioxide. The gas cloud covered a valley and suffocated at least 1700 people.

A degassing jet of water on Lake Nyos

To prevent disasters like this in the future, engineers set up degassing pipes in both lakes that lift the water out, release the carbon dioxide and return the safe water back to the lake. They also found that Rwanda’s Lake Kivu, 2,000 times larger than Lake Nyos, was full of carbon dioxide and methane and hadn’t erupted in at least a thousand years. Uh-oh.

The Rwandan government started the Kivu Gas Project seven years ago and announcedin mid-September 2015 that the Kivu-Watt Methane Gas plant had finally successfully released carbon dioxide from the water and captured the methane to be used for electric power generation. Will the degassing relieve the fears of the 2 million people living near Lake Kivu?

Lava flowing into Lake Kivu in January 2002 from the Nyiragongo volcano eruption

An explosion can be triggered by a landslide, an earthquake or a volcanic eruption. Lake Kivu is near Mt. Nyiragongo which last erupted in January 2002. News of eruptions and earthquakes around the world trigger fears in of an exploding lake. Will the plant become fully operational in time and degas enough water to prevent a disaster? No one knows for sure.

Lake Kivu is also known as the place where many victims of the Rwandan genocide were dumped. Let’s hope the lake does not take revenge but instead helps improve the lives of the survivors.

[MIKA27]

MARBEL ELECTRIC SKATEBOARD

A new niche that´s hot on novelty products is the electric skateboards one. And the Marbel Electric Skateboard, is the new hot item on the scene. Featuring carbon fiber composite on its deck, they claim it´s the lightest, fastest and most advanced electric skateboard in the world. Weighing just 10lbs it uses a 2000W brushless electric motor that enables it to reach speeds of up to 25 MPH, and has an estimated range that can go up to 16MPH. With strong regenerative breaking you can also fully charge the Lithium ION battery in only 80-90 mins. You also get the mandatory app that goes with it, enabling you to set the ride style of your choice, and a wireless handheld remote control to command your electric skateboard. State of the art tech on an old school item, what else can one want?

[Habana Mike]

Awesome View Of A Sunset Through The Nose Of An Old B-25 Bomber

What. A. View. The nose of the B-25 bomber offers up such a fantastic view that it’s probably the perfect place to be for a sunset because not only do you get to see the entire world in a clear bubble, you get to see the old rickety steering wheel of a plane used since 1941 and all the gear that comes with it. So cool.

Great stuff this except that's not a steering wheel, it's the gun handles. The steering wheel (yoke) is in the cockpit.....

[MIKA27]

Paraplegic Man Walks Using Own Legs With Brain Signals Re-Routed To Knees

A team of scientists has successfully re-routed the signals from a paraplegic man’s brain to his knees, allowing him to walk using his own legs for the first time in five years.

The Guardian reports that researchers from the University of California at Irvine have developed a system that captures brain waves using an electroencephalogram (EEG) electrode cap, sending them wirelessly to a computer. There, a series of algorithms process the data to work out if the wearer wishes to stand still or walk, before beaming commands to micro-controllers which sends impulses to nerves that then move muscles in the legs.

The system has been tested on a 26-year-old man who has been wheelchair-bound since an accident left him paralysed from the waist down five years ago when his spinal cord was severed. He underwent 20 weeks of training during the build-up to the experiments, improving muscle tone in his legs as well as learning how to create the right brain signals to reliably trigger the device.

But it worked: using a walking frame and harness to stop himself from falling over, the man was able to use his own legs to walk a 3.5-meter course. The experiment demonstrates that it’s possible to take brain signals and re-route them around an area of damage using just electronics. The research is published today in the Journal of NeuroEngineering and Rehabilitation.

The researchers do point out, though, that they have only tested the technique in one patient and that many more trials will be required in order to assess whether it can be used successfully by a wider number of people. While the patient managed to walk the 3.5-meter course, the computer occasionally faltered: the researchers claim that the brain signals required to aid balance can become confused with those which stimulate the walking motion.

And if it’s to be used to help people walk freely, then the team must also overcome the fact that an external computer is currently required. But the researchers write in their reports that “the cumbersome nature of the current noninvasive system… can potentially be addressed by a fully implantable brain-computer interface system, which can be envisioned to employ invasively recorded neural signals.”

We’re still some way off restoring full walking abilities to the paraplegic, then — but today, researchers just took a step closer to making it happen.

[MIKA27]

California's Drought Is Now Threatening Its Millennia-Old Sequoias

The drought crippling the American West is the worst it has seen in 500 years — and maybe even in 1000 years. It’s so bad that it’s taking a toll on the region’s oldest and largest residents: California’s stately sequoia trees.

According to an Associated Press story, scientists gathering data in Sequoia National Park are seeing unprecedented signs of stress in the trees, some of which are 3,000 years old. Ecologists from the National Park Service and biologists from UC Berkeley have been climbing the 90-metre trees to install sensors which track humidity and temperature. As they gather foliage to test for moisture levels, they’re finding many more dead and dry branches than usual this summer.

Besides living extremely long and growing extremely tall, sequoias are also unique among other trees in that they require very specific habitats — they only grow natively in a very narrow elevation range, clustered in about 75 very dense groves on the western slope of the Sierra Nevadas. This is also, tragically, where the drought is the worst, thanks to extremely high temperatures, scant precipitation, and an essentially nonexistent snowpack. Which is why many other types of trees in this area, including evergreens, are dying in frightening numbers.

Sequoias are pretty damn tough — most sport fire-scarred trunks as proof of their badass survival skills — and the scientists are not seeing signs of a mass extinction yet. But clearly their habitats are being transformed by a changing climate. Now add what’s possibly the worst drought almost every sequoia on Earth has ever seen. It made me wonder — could we lose the sequoias forever?

This was certainly something that occurred to Rachel Sussman, the photographer who has documented the most ancient living organisms on the planet in her book The Oldest Living Things In the World. As part of her work she’s also been able to see firsthand how some of the oldest living things on Earth have been threatened in the last few years due to climate change (for this reason she’s been very involved in the Climate Reality Project).

“On reading about the stress the record drought is currently causing the Giant Sequoias I immediately thought of the death of the Senator tree in Florida; particularly the realisation that being old is not the same as being immortal,” she says. “I can only hope that seeing some of our most sturdy and stalwart living beings strain under the changing climate, people will realise that not a single living organism on the planet is immune from the effects of the climate crisis.”

[MIKA27]

Watch NASA Announce The Answer To One Of Mars' Greatest Mysteries

In the early hours of Tuesday morning, NASA says it will broadcast a special live event to answer to a major Mars mystery. Just what this mystery is, however, is all a part of the mystery, as NASA is not yet breathing a word of what this discovery may be about.

The event will begin at 1:30am AEST on Tuesday and it’s highly likely it will be worth missing your usual bedtime for. The last time NASA announced something like this, it was regarding the discovery of Kepler 452-b, the most Earth-like planet discovered to date. When the stream goes live, you can watch it right here thanks to NASA TV and even join in with your own questions on Twitter, using the hashtag #AskNASA.

There’s no way to know what the US space agency might be announcing until the event kicks off, but we can always speculate! So to recap, what are some of Mars’ biggest mysteries? Let’s count a few popular questions when it comes to the tantalising red planet: Is there life on Mars? Is there liquid water on Mars? Did Mars once have oceans? What is the source of methane on Mars? Where's Matt Damon? The answers to any of these questions could easily constitute a major scientific breakthrough — though there’s also the possibility that it could be something else entirely.

[MIKA27]

Everyone Thinks Sam Smith's New Bond Tune Is Rubbish

We’re just weeks away from the release of the latest James Bond epic Spectre, and now we know what the theme music will be. This time around the film-makers have opted to commission Sam Smith (the singer, not the beer as everyone knows that Bond drinks Martinis), and he’s come up with a track titled “Writing’s On The Wall”.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FjuuXgWhD3E

The song premiered on the radio this morning and is currently available for listening on Spotify. There’s just one problem though: it is slightly more than a Quantum of Rubbish. Sam Smith admitted that the track only took 20 minutes to pen — maybe a little more time spent on the drawing board would have been welcome?

Imagine the world’s most generic man writing a slightly off-key song that is supposed to sound like a Bond theme tune while not breaking any copyright rules, and you’ll end up with what we are presented with today.

The writing IS on the wall

MIKA: Pretty lame compared to previous movies which are always epic IMHO

[MIKA27]

NASA Is Sending Bacteria To The Edge Of Space To See If They Can Hitchhike To Mars

Discovering life on another planet, only to contaminate that world with our own pesky microbes, is one of NASA’s nightmare scenarios. To find out whether single-celled Earthlings can hitchhike to Mars and survive on the Red Planet’s surface, NASA is going to see how they like it 36.57km up.

Today, weather permitting, a helium balloon carrying a very special scientific experiment will launch to the edge of space from NASA’s Columbia Scientific Balloon Facility in Fort Sumner, New Mexico. Its passengers — a collection of bacteria — are loaded into containers that will shield them from the elements during their ascent into Earth’s stratosphere. Once the balloon reaches its target altitude, the sample chambers will pop open, exposing their hapless test subjects for a pre-determined period of time: 6, 12, 18, or 24 hours. At the end of the experiment, the balloon will explode and its microbial payload will parachute back to Earth.

Earth’s upper stratosphere is a pretty hellish environment: It’s well below freezing, bone dry, practically a vacuum, and awash in ultraviolet radiation. Sorta like the surface of Mars. It’s hard to imagine anything surviving up there, and yet, previous studies have shown that some fearless bugs do make a living in the stratosphere after being blown skyward by dust storms or hurricanes.

Even more impressive, recent work on the ISS shows that dormant bacteria, fungal spores, and even plant seeds can survive strapped to the outside of a spacecraft — if they’re shielded from the intense UV radiation.

Given life’s tenacity, the possibility of contaminating an alien environment is one that deserves to be studied and understood. Beyond Mars, there’s NASA’s recently announced Europa mission, and further down the line, we might even send a space probe to Saturn’s ice moon Enceladus. Both of these missions, if and when they happen, will be on the hunt for alien life. It sure would be a bummer to mistake a stowaway for the biggest scientific discovery of all time.

[Fuzz]

Everyone Thinks Sam Smith's New Bond Tune Is Rubbish

MIKA: Pretty lame compared to previous movies which are always epic IMHO

It sure ain't no "Goldfinger", "Man With The Golden Gun" or "Thunderball". Hell, even Madonna's "Die Another Day" is way better than this piece of rubbish.

[MIKA27]

Inside The Engineering Of The World's First 1600KM/H Car

Yesterday, a team of British engineers unveiled Bloodhound SSC: the world’s most powerful car, intended to reach speeds of over 1600km/h. Standing beside what looks like a rocket-on-wheels, it’s obvious what a marvel of engineering it is. We spoke to the team’s Lead Mechanical Engineer to find out how the vehicle was built.

Measuring 13.5m in length and weighing 7.5 tonnes, the car’s dual rocket and jet engines will produce the equivalent of 135,000bhp of thrust — making it the most powerful land vehicle ever built. While its predecessor, Thrust SSC, hit just 1227km/h the team behind Bloodhound intend to push it beyond 1600km/h.

As you can imagine, that kind of target created some major design considerations. Fortunately, a team of Formula 1 and aerospace experts were assembled to design the vehicle from scratch, and along the way they have sought help from the British Army’s Royal Electrical and Mechanical Engineers as well as the RAF’s 71 Squadron.

In central London, I met Bloodhound’s Engineering Lead for Mechanical Design, Mark Elvin, to discuss the technology that’s been poured into the car. He certainly knows his stuff: He’s worked at Westland Helicopters and Williams F1 as a design engineer before joining the Bloodhound team.

Got Wheels?

I ask him what the biggest design challenge was, and the answer’s not quite what I expect. “The wheels were quite difficult,” he says. “They spin at 10,500rpm, which means that the radial G on the rim is 50,000 times the force of gravity. So a one kilo weight put on the rim weighs 50,000kg — 50 tonnes — at maximum running speed.”

To build something strong enough to withstand those forces, the team has forged the wheels from a long, thin cylinder of aluminium which is squashed flat into a pancake. “That crystallizes the grain structure in a really fantastic way,” explains Elvin. “We then machine it and balance the wheel, by removing microns of material. Then they’re shot peened to increase the fatigue life.”

Fortunately, they have also been thoroughly tested. “Rolls Royce spun one up to 10,000rpm for us and we used a laser to measure their expansion and compare it to out stress analysis.” The good news: the wheel survived, and its expansion, of around 0.2mm, matches the team’s calculations perfectly.

In fact when the car attempts to reach 1600km/h in the Hakskeen Pan desert of South Africa next year, its wheels will look unlike those of most cars — because they won’t have any rubber on the outside. They’re just bare metal. Close up, the wheels have a 90-degree V-shape to their profile. “It’s like a boat,” explains Elvin. “It works on the principle that at about 400mph (640km/h) the car will rise up out of the desert floor, like a speedboat. They will be skimming across the surface of the desert, with a patch just 3mm in width in contact with ground.”

You might expect a vehicle with such little footprint to squirm at speed — but you’d be wrong. “The fin at the back is huge, and that’s what defines its stability,” explains Elvin.

Go With the flow

If you throw a dart towards a board the wrong way round — so the point faces backward and the flights are moving forwards — it flips round in mid-air. That’s because what’s known as the centre of pressure lies in front of the center of gravity. Throw it the right way round, though, and its sails forward with grace. That’s because of the large flights at the back that provide stability, and you can think of Bloodhound’s huge tail fin performing much the same task. “If it were small, the car would have been unstable,” explains Elvin, comparing to “So we’ve ended up with something very large indeed.”

Elvin points out that it’s about the same size as the tail fins fitted to the back of a Hawk advanced trainer aircraft. Problem is, those planes travel at around 1126km/h at 30,000 feet; Bloodhound, by comparison, will be travelling at 1600km/h at ground level. “We’re trying to push that fin through treacle by comparison, because the air down here is so much thicker,” explains Elvin. As a result, the team admit that it’s over-engineered, but the entire assembly still weights less than 100kg.

The fin isn’t the only aerodynamic challenge the team has faced. When they evaluated their first design, they discovered that the vehicle generated in the region of seven tonnes of lift. Given the car weighs just 7.5 tonnes, that could have been enough to cause it to take off. With a redesigned nose section — crafted from carbon fibre, naturally — that’s flatter, they have been able to reduce that to just 1 ton of lift, which is spread evenly along the length of the car at all speeds.

A 3D-printed model of the airflow around Bloodhound SSC, used to predict lift and drag forces.

Not everything stays consistent with speed, though. Above 640km/h, the wheels — which are the only means of steering the car — begin to lift off the ground slightly and lose grip. That may sound disastrous, but at that point they begin to act like front-mounted air rudders, according to Elvin. “There’s 10 degrees of movement in the wheels, lock-to-lock,” he explains. “It won’t be very sensitive, but he’ll have steering feel. Will he need it? We don’t think so. We think the car’s going to be very stable and should track straight.”

Mirror, Signal, Break the Sound Barrier

Inside the cockpit, the driver, Andy Green, will be surrounded by a suite of digital instruments, save for two dials provided by Rolex which will help him know what the car’s doing in the event of a system failure. Once he’s strapped in, he’ll be pushed along by two major sources of thrust: a Rolls Royce EJ200 jet engine, like those used in the Typhoon fighter jet, as well as a Nammo hybrid rocket engine. There’s also a supercharged Jaguar V8 engine aboard, which is used to pump the oxidizer required for the rocket to burn.

The engines — particularly the jet engine — don’t like breathing the supersonic air that will be passing by the car when it breaks the speed of sound, so the team has designed the leading edge of cockpit to generate a huge shockwave, which will slow the air down to sub-sonic speeds. That helps the engine to work, but all the energy has to go somewhere and, sadly for Green, it turns up as noise. “There will be sound deadening around the cockpit, and he’ll be wearing noise-cancelling headphones,” explains Elvin. “But it’s going to be loud. Very loud.”

Each run will start off slowly: Even with full power on the jet engine, the acceleration of the car to 240km/h is actually slower than a normal family car, because of its weight. When it reaches 640km/h the rocket will begin to burn, providing consistent 2G of acceleration to take the vehicle to 1600km/h — hopefully in just 55 seconds. At top speed, it will be covering a kilometre in just 2.23 seconds.

At which point, it’s time to stop — and quickly, because the track in the desert is just 19.3km long.

“Braking is very difficult,” admits Elvin. The vehicle has been designed to slow from 1600km/h to standstill in 65 second, a process which creates forces of 3G in the cockpit. “If you drive a family car into a wall at 48km/h, that’s what 3G feels like,” he explains. “It’s what most people call a crash.”

Green will experience that force for the duration of the deceleration, meaning that he endures a typical car crash for over a minute. Green’s an experienced acrobatic pilot, though, so he won’t be using a G-suit during the runs.

In terms of how it slows down, the first 320km/h is scrubbed off using drag alone: when the engines are turned off, the car will experience 3G of wind resistance. When the speed drops below 1286km/h, two air brakes — one on each side — will pop out of the car, angled at about 60 degrees. They will provide the bulk of the deceleration for the vehicle, and only when the speed dips below 400km/h will the wheel brakes be applied — any sooner, and they could burst into flames. If for some reason any of these braking systems fail, there are also two parachutes on board, either one of which could slow the car to a stop safely.

The Bodywork

Just in case things don’t go to plan, though, Green will be wrapped in a carbon fibre monocoque which the team thinks is “probably the strongest safety-cell ever fitted to a racing car.” Elsewhere, the body work is actually all fairly traditional — at least in design terms, if not material choice.

“The upper chassis looks like someone passed a bandsaw horizontally through a Douglas DC-3,” says Elvin. “But instead of using aluminium, we’ve used titanium. We’ve taken traditional construction methods and made them work for us.” It’s beautiful, traditional engineering, with a very modern twist.

The housing for the Rolls Royce EJ200 jet engine uses traditional manufacturing techniques — but exotic materials like titanium.

The car’s panels of pre-stressed titanium are also covered in sensors — 500 in total — including pressure and strain gauges across the entire surface. The first enable the team to measure the air-flow around the car during the runs, while the latter will allow them to check that none of the components is being subjected to more force than it should be. Also dotted about its body are 12 cameras, including two in the cockpit, which enable the team to keep a watchful eye on Andy Green, the driver. All the data will be beamed back to the team via mobile data, with three temporary phone masts set up at the record-attempt site. “We get better 4G reception in the middle of the desert than we do in central London!” quips Elvin.

In fact, reliably keeping track of all that data is, perhaps, the most important part of the entire process. When the time comes to attempt the record-breaking speed runs, the team will carefully increase the speed, making sure that all of the measurements tally with their calculations.

“We start running at low speeds, increasing in 80km/h increments, and at each stage we analyse the data from the car, cross reference it with all our modelling, then increase the speed by another 80km/h and do the same thing,” explains Elvin. “At every stage, we check every sensor to make sure it matches what we’re expecting to see. It’s simple: If we can’t ensure it’s safe, we come home.”

[MIKA27]

It sure ain't no "Goldfinger", "Man With The Golden Gun" or "Thunderball". Hell, even Madonna's "Die Another Day" is way better than this piece of rubbish.

There's a bunch of brilliant tunes for Bond. Some of my recent favourites are these from Craigs Bond flicks;

"You Know My Name" by Chris Cornell

Skyfall - Adele

Also love - Tomorrow Never Dies Theme by Sheryl Crow

[MIKA27]

Costa Rica: Stay Away From Our Sea Turtles, You Terrible Humans

Last week, we learned that thousands of selfie-snapping garbage humans drove hundreds of thousands of olive ridley sea turtles away from their nesting grounds in Costa Rica. But the turtles are back and this time, the Costa Rican government isn’t messing around.

Two weeks ago, the guides on duty at Ostional Beach were overwhelmed by the deluge of purported adults who wanted to gawk at, pick up, and ride threatened wild animals during their sensitive breeding period. The turtles were naturally frightened by these giant flesh monsters, and left the beach in droves without laying their eggs. The disaster sparked international outrage and a swift response from the Costa Rican government, which has since dispatched additional law enforcement to the region.

On Tuesday, officials closed down four of the beach’s six entrances. Only small guided tour groups are allowed to enter now, according to The New York Times. Visitors cannot touch the turtles or use flash photography, and they have to keep a safe distance from nesting females.

The new security measures came just in time. The sea turtles weren’t expected to attempt another mass nesting, called an arribada, until early October. But arribadas are unpredictable, and this week, more than 100,000 sea turtles returned to the beach.

It’s heartening to see the Costa Rican government making a clear statement that protecting wild animals is a priority. It’s a bit less inspiring to realise that the average human being needs to be treated like a toddler.

[MIKA27]

This Totally Crazy Wingsuit Video Made Me Stop Breathing

OK, which guy is crazier!? Graham Dickinson, the guy we see in the video above who’s so impossibly close the ground and the trees and the mountain face and basically centimetres away from crashing the entire time during this wingsuit video. Or the camera man, Dario, who is seeing all the ridiculous things Dickinson is doing and still has to keep track of him and react fast enough to capture the footage.

I think the answer is simple: they’re both nuts. They both flew over 177km/h.

And the rear-view footage from Graham Dickinson’s helmet cam: