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

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Simply Putting Fins On Tires Could Improve A Vehicle's Fuel Efficiency

Slapping a giant fin on the back of your hand-me-down Corolla isn’t going to make it go any faster. But researchers at Yokohama have found that adding a series of angled fins to a tire can actually help improve a vehicle’s aerodynamics, which in turn means better fuel efficiency and fewer stops at the pumps.

Back in 2012, the company’s research team found that adding small fins on the inner sidewalls of a tire in a radial pattern helped reduce aerodynamic drag within a car’s wheel wells. The less resistance there is to a wheel spinning, the less a car’s engine has to work, and the less fuel is burned.

But continuing that research using supercomputer aerodynamics simulations, and working with a team from the Institute of Fluid Science at Tohoku University, Yokohama has found that adding a series of subtle fins around a tire’s shoulder leads to other improvements.

With the fins added, the upper part of the tire helps further reduce aerodynamic drag on the side of the vehicle while it’s spinning, while the lower part of the tire helps reduce lift under a car which can result in a loss of traction.

For now we just have CG renders of what the fin-augmented tires will look like, but at the upcoming Tokyo Motor Show, Yokohama will officially reveal what its new aerodynamic tires will look like, and hopefully, when they will actually be available to upgrade your ride.

[MIKA27]

We're One Step Closer To Creating Artificial Skin With A Sense Of Touch

Cutting-edge prosthesis are amazing, but they lack one very important feature: a sense of touch. Now a research team from Stanford University has developed artificial skin that can sense force exerted by objects — and then transmit those sensory signals to brain cells.

Inadequate sensory feedback is a serious limitation of current prosthetic limbs, whether they be artificial hands, arms, or legs. Users need to be able to sense how an object is responding to their touch in order to have optimal motor control. Otherwise, it’s difficult to know how much force is being exerted on an object, or sense things like temperature and texture. What’s more, the sense of touch — or even the illusion of it — can alleviate phantom limb pain, which affects some 80% of amputees.

We’re still a long ways off from being able to create artificial skin that feels and reacts the same way that natural skin does, but the Stanford team, led by electrical engineer Benjamin Tee, recently performed a proof-of-concept experiment that takes us a considerable step closer.

Stretchable skin with flexible artificial mechanoreceptors

By using flexible organic circuits and an innovative new pressure sensor, Tee’s team developed a kind of artificial skin that can sense the force of static objects. What’s more, this sensory data was then transmitted to cultured, i.e. in vitro, brain cells of mice using optogenetic technology. They have published the results of their work in the journal Science.

Tiny Pyramids of Touch

The system, called DiTact (Digital Tactile System), is based on a low-power, flexible organic transistor circuit that transforms the feeling of pressure into the same kind of signals generated naturally by natural skin’s mechanoreceptors. These signals were in turn converted to a series of voltage pulses.

The DiTact System (Credit: Tee et al., 2015/Science)

To get the sensors to record the wide dynamic range of pressure, the researchers used carbon nanotubes moulded into pyramidal structures.

“Our sensor was made of tiny pyramids of rubber with carbon nanotubes distributed in it,” noted study co-author Alex Chortos in an email to Gizmodo. “This structure was very useful because it allowed us to easily change a few things, like the distance between the pyramids, the size of the pyramids, and the concentration of carbon nanotubes in order to get the ideal pressure sensing characteristics in the right range.”

These microstructures allowed to researchers to maximise the sensitivity of the sensors in a way that closely approximates the sensitivity of natural skin’s cutaneous receptors.

Transferring Signals

On their own, these signals do nothing. In order for them to be experienced as sensory feedback, they have to be transmitted to a brain. To that end, the researchers took these signals, which ranged between 0 to 200 hertz, and transmitted them via optical fibres to the cortical neurons of mice. DiTact is still in an early phase of development, so the researchers transmitted the signals to cultured cells in vitro, rather into the brains of live mice.

This technique, referred to as optogenetics, could eventually be used on live subjects. Through this process, neurons are stimulated to fire or stop firing by genetically-engineering neurons that respond to light. A transgene from algae makes neurons fire when they’re exposed to blue light, and a bacterial transgene causes them to respond to yellow light.

But for this experiment, the researchers had to use an alternative optogenetic solution to account for the rapid rate at which sensory information is processed by neurons.

“Biological mechanoreceptors are able to produce signals as fast as several hundred electrical pulses per second,” says Chortos. “Previous optogenetic technologies were only capable of stimulating brain cells much slower than we need to mimic real mechanoreceptors.”

Chortos points to the work of Andre Berndt and Karl Deisseroth who developed a new type of optogenetic treatment that allows brain cells to be stimulated very rapidly so that they’re compatible with the speed of real mechanoreceptors.

Tee’s research team shows that the new optogenetic proteins were able to accommodate longer intervals of stimulation, which is a strong indication that the system might be compatible with other fast-spiking neurons — including peripheral nerves. In other words, DiTact will likely work in live mice, and possibly humans. And indeed, the researchers told Gizmodo that the next step in their research will be to use their sensor to stimulate the nerve of live mice.

From Science Fiction to Reality

Given that the signals were transmitted to clumps of cells in a petri dish and not a live animal, how could they be sure their signals were of the right nature and intensity?

“We could validate that our sensor is conveying the correct information to [a live] animal by using behavioural cues, i.e. how the animal behaves in response to pressure,” said Chortos. “The ultimate test will be to attach the sensor to a human and ask them what they feel. In order to get truly natural touch sensing, we may need to modify and tweak our design.”

Indeed, the ultimate goal is to imbue human prosthetics with touch-sensitive artificial skin.

“We envision our artificial mechanoreceptors making the greatest impact via integration for sensory feedback with prosthetic systems in development by other groups,” noted co-author Amanda Nguyen. “As our sensor would be mounted alongside artificial limb systems, the primary safety concerns are centered around nerve stimulation patterns and interface.”

Nguyen says that early work involving sensory feedback with neuroprosthetics in humans has been promising, but there is a need for larger and more involved human studies to understand how to effectively and safely stimulate nerves to provide sensory feedback.

“As a greater understanding of stimulation parameters is gained, the output of our artificial mechanoreceptor will be tuned to follow these stimulation paradigms,” she said. “With demonstrated efficacy and safety, the potential for improving the quality of life for individuals with tactile impairments can be balanced with the ethical concerns raised by neuroprosthetics. Accessibility of this type of technology in humans will grow as both our understanding of neuroscience grows and prosthetic technology advances to provide nuanced sensory perceptions.”

Indeed, this avenue of research will become safer and less ethically dubious over time. In order for optogenetics to work properly and safely in humans, for example, researchers will have to figure out a way to get optogenetics to work without resorting to invasive fibre optic wires and the viral delivery of transgenes to patients.

According to Polina Anikeeva, a professor of Materials Science and Engineering at MIT, it may soon become possible to use stem cells from the patient and enable their sensitivity to a particular wavelength of light through genetic manipulation outside the body. She told Gizmodo that these cells can then be potentially reintroduced into the peripheral nerve of the patient allowing the latter to be optically stimulated. No wires, no ethically dubious trans-genes. Anikeeva says it may also be possible to use neural stimulation to enhance the ability of the nerve to regenerate themselves or even form intimate interfaces with synthetic sensors.

Suffice to say, we won’t see these sorts of technologies for years, if not decades. But thanks to the work of Tee and his team at Stanford, the path to reaching this goal is getting increasingly clearer.

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It's Official: The Hulk Is Teaming Up With Thor For Ragnarok

It’s been rumored and discussed, but now it’s official. Deadline has now confirmed that Mark Ruffalo is about to close a deal to reprise his role as the Hulk in Thor: Ragnarok, which will be out July 28, 2017.

Director Taika Waititi will director from a script by Christopher Yost. And by all accounts, this will be the darkest Marvel movie yet. It may involve the Valkyries, the Enchantress, and Valkyrie herself, among others. Read more about it here.

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Two Sated Warthogs Light Up The Sky In Spectacular Fashion

Aerial refuelling photos are always awesome. But this one, taken right after two of America’s best ground attack jets were topped up, easily beats all the similar photos I’ve ever seen.

Two U.S. Air Force A-10 Warthogs, assigned to the 163rd Expeditionary Fighter Squadron, release flares after receiving fuel from a KC-135 Stratotanker, 340th Expeditionary Aerial Refuelling Squadron, over Southwest Asia, Oct. 13, 2015. Coalition forces fly daily missions in support of Operation Inherent Resolve.

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Experts Warn UN Panel About The Dangers Of Artificial Superintelligence

During a recent United Nations meeting about emerging global risks, political representatives from around the world were warned about the threats posed by artificial intelligence and other future technologies.

The event, organised by Georgia’s UN representatives and the UN Interregional Crime and Justice Research Institute (UNICRI), was set up to foster discussion about the national and international security risks posed by new technologies, including chemical, biological, radiological, and nuclear (CBRN) materials.

The panel was also treated to a special discussion on the potential threats raised by artificial superintelligence — that is, AI whose capabilities greatly exceed those of humans. The purpose of the meeting, held on October 14, was to discuss the implications of emerging technologies, and how to proactively mitigate the risks.

The meeting featured two prominent experts on the matter, Max Tegmark, a physicist at MIT, and Nick Bostrom, the founder of Oxford’s Future of Humanity Institute and author of the book Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies. Both agreed that AI has the potential to transform human society in profoundly positive ways, but they also raised questions about how the technology could quickly get out of control and turn against us.

Last year, Tegmark, along with physicist Stephen Hawking, computer science professor Stuart Russell, and physicist Frank Wilczek, warned about the current culture of complacency regarding superintelligent machines.

“One can imagine such technology outsmarting financial markets, out-inventing human researchers, out-manipulating human leaders, and developing weapons we cannot even understand,” the authors wrote. “Whereas the short-term impact of AI depends on who controls it, the long-term impact depends on whether it can be controlled at all.”

Nick Bostrom

Indeed, as Bostrom explained to those in attendance, superintelligence raises unique technical and foundational challenges, and the “control problem” is the most critical.

“There are plausible scenarios in which superintelligent systems become very powerful,” he told the meeting, “And there are these superficially plausible ways of solving the control problem — ideas that immediately spring to people’s minds that, on closer examination, turn out to fail. So there is this currently open, unsolved problem of how to develop better control mechanisms.”

That will prove to be difficult, says Bostrom, because we’ll need to actually have these control mechanisms before we build these intelligent systems.

Bostrom closed his portion of the meeting by recommending that a field of inquiry be established to advance foundational and technical work on the control problem, while working to attract top maths and computer science experts into this field.

He called for strong research collaboration between the AI safety community and AI development community, and for all stakeholders involved to embed the Common Good Principle in all long range AI projects. This is a unique technology, he said, one that should be developed for the common good of humanity, and not just individuals or private corporations.

As Bostrom explained to the UN delegates, superintelligence represents an existential risk to humanity, which he defined as “a risk that threatens the premature extinction of Earth-originating intelligent life or the permanent and drastic destruction of its potential for desirable future development.” Human activity, warned Bostrom, poses a far bigger threat to humanity’s future over the next 100 years than natural disasters.

“All the really big existential risks are in the anthropogenic category,” he said. “Humans have survived earthquakes, plagues, asteroid strikes, but in this century we will introduce entirely new phenomena and factors into the world. Most of the plausible threats have to do with anticipated future technologies.”

It may be decades before we see the kinds of superintelligence described at this UN meeting, but given that we’re talking about a potential existential risk, it’s never to early to start. Kudos to all those involved.

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Lamar Odom's 'Natural' Erection Supplement Probably Contained Actual Viagra

Lamar Odom came off life support and regained consciousness today after collapsing while visiting a brothel in Nevada. The apparent culprit(s), according to the Nye County sheriff: cocaine combined with 10 tabs of natural “sexual performance enhancer supplements” — a.k.a. “herbal Viagra.” But it’s possible those supplements secretly contained the real deal. And it nearly cost Odom his life.

Normally, erectile dysfunction drugs like Viagra and Cialis are only available by prescription, and there’s a good reason for that: the active ingredients can have some serious side effects when combined with other drugs. And when you have no idea you’re taking them, it’s hard to plan around potential drug interactions.

That’s the trouble with so many of these “natural” herbal products: they may contain things that aren’t on the label, because they’re not subject to same set of rigorous protocols and regulations as prescription drugs. In fact, FDA tests have found that a lot of these companies touting alternative herbal remedies for erectile dysfunction are spiking their herbal erection enhancers with actual Viagra.

Odom purportedly used a brand of supplement called Reload, which triggered an FDA warning in 2013 after it turned out to be just regular Viagra. And it’s not the only shady “herbal Viagra” supplement out there. This year alone, FDA tests found prescription ED drugs in the following herbal erectile enhancement products.

72HP: contains sildenafil, the active ingredient of Viagra, as an undeclared ingredient.

African Superman: contains sildenafil, the active ingredient of Viagra, as an undeclared ingredient.

Baolong: contains sildenafil, the active ingredient of Viagra, as an undeclared ingredient.

Bigger Longer More Time More Sperms: contains sildenafil, the active ingredient of Viagra, as an undeclared ingredient.

Black Ant King: contains sildenafil, the active ingredient of Viagra, as an undeclared ingredient.

Black Diamond: contains desmethyl carbodenafil, a chemical similar to sildenafil, as an undeclared ingredient

Black King Kong: contains sildenafil, the active ingredient of Viagra, as an undeclared ingredient.

Black Mamba Premium: contains sildenafil, the active ingredient of Viagra, as an undeclared ingredient.

Black Panther: contains sildenafil, the active ingredient of Viagra, as an undeclared ingredient.

FX 3000: contains sildenafil, the active ingredient of Viagra, as an undeclared ingredient.

Germany Niubian: contains sildenafil, the active ingredient of Viagra, as an undeclared ingredient.

Happy Passengers: contains sildenafil, the active ingredient of Viagra, as an undeclared ingredient.

Hard Wang: contains sildenafil, the active ingredient of Viagra, as an undeclared ingredient.

Herb Viagra: contains sildenafil, the active ingredient of Viagra, as an undeclared ingredient.

King of Romance: contains sildenafil, the active ingredient of Viagra, as an undeclared ingredient.

La Papa Negra: contains sildenafil, the active ingredient of Viagra, as an undeclared ingredient.

Libigrow XXX Treme: contains sildenafil, the active ingredient of Viagra, as an undeclared ingredient.

Liu Bian Li: contains sildenafil, the active ingredient of Viagra, as an undeclared ingredient.

MME Maxman: contains sildenafil, the active ingredient of Viagra, as an undeclared ingredient.

Male Silkworm Moth Nourishing Oral Liquid: contains vardenafil, the active ingredient in Levitra, as an undeclared ingredient.

Night Man: contains sildenafil, the active ingredient of Viagra, as an undeclared ingredient.

Plant Vigra: contains sildenafil, the active ingredient of Viagra, as an undeclared ingredient.

Rhino Blitz: contains sildenafil, the active ingredient of Viagra, as an undeclared ingredient.

Santi Scalper: contains sildenafil, the active ingredient of Viagra, as an undeclared ingredient.

Sex Men: contains sildenafil, the active ingredient of Viagra, as an undeclared ingredient.

Stiff Nights: contains sildenafil, the active ingredient of Viagra, as an undeclared ingredient.

Super Hard: contains sildenafil, the active ingredient of Viagra, as an undeclared ingredient.

Tibet Babao: contains sildenafil, the active ingredient of Viagra, as an undeclared ingredient.

Viagra 007: contains sildenafil, the active ingredient of Viagra, as an undeclared ingredient.

Vigour 300: contains sildenafil, the active ingredient of Viagra, as an undeclared ingredient.

Vigra: contains sildenafil, the active ingredient of Viagra, as an undeclared ingredient.

Vim 25: contains sildenafil, the active ingredient of Viagra, as an undeclared ingredient.

This is just a fraction of the herbal erection products on the FDA’s Health Fraud page. But remember, they can’t possibly test everything that’s out there. If you decide to swallow one of these herbal supplements, you may well be getting more than is listed on its label.

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This Video Explains The Most Disturbing Fashion Trend In Human History

17th century Icelanders were a cold, hungry, light-deprived lot. And it’s under these miserable conditions that imaginations dreamt up the most disturbing wearable ever: Leggings, made of the skin of your dead friend.

They’re called necropants, and today, their macabre history is preserved at the Museum of Icelandic Sorcery and Witchcraft. Here’s how the skinny pants worked. First, you had to get permission from your friend to wear his, um, legs, before he died. Then, following his completely natural death that you didn’t have anything to do with, you’d go out to his grave, dig up his body, flay the skin off his corpse from the waist down, and put it on.

According to the witchcraft museum, here’s what happens next:

As soon as you step into the pants they will stick to your own skin. A coin must be stolen from a poor widow and placed in the scrotum along with the magical sign, nábrókarstafur, written on a piece of paper. Consequently the coin will draw money into the scrotum so it will never be empty, as long as the original coin is not removed. To ensure salvation the owner has to convince someone else to overtake the pants and step into each leg as soon as he gets out of it. The necropants will thus keep the money-gathering nature for generations.

There you have it, folks: Pre-industrial Iceland was such a craphole human beings actually convinced themselves that skinning their dead loved ones would bring about better times. Watch the Atlas Obscura video above to learn more about necropants, check out the modern Blackmilk version on io9 if you’re feeling especially morbid, or attempt to purge this post from your memory with some adorable baby ducklings:

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Scientists Say Lab-Grown Burgers Will Be Available To The Public In Five Years

When a team of Dutch scientists unveiled the world’s first stem cell beef burger in 2013, it carried a $US300,000 price tag. Worse, it was dry and tasteless. But since the initial lacklustre reviews, Mark Post and his colleagues have been hard at work. Now, they say they hope to have a commercially saleable cow-less patty on the market in five years.

Until very recently, lab-grown beef sounded like science fiction. But rapid advances in molecular biology and stem cell technology have placed the futuristic concept within reach. And the arguments for removing animals from the meat equation are practically endless: The meat industry as it exists today swallows an enormous fraction of our land and natural resources, produces vast quantities of greenhouse gases, has contributed to the rise of antibiotic resistant infections, and in many cases, is downright cruel. If test tube burgers can eliminate or diminish even a fraction of these problems, then this seems like one crazy idea worth pursuing.

And pursue it scientists have. In addition to Mark Post’s stem cell burger effort, a team of Israeli researchers under the banner Future Meat are now trying to grow whole chicken breasts in the lab. Meanwhile, efforts to culture fish protein have cropped up intermittently over the years.

Still, five years until we’re slapping tomato sauce and pickles on artificial meat seems like an awfully fast turnaround for a technology that was at best very nascent two years ago. But Post, who recently founded the company Mosa Meat with the objective of fast-tracking his niche product to mass production, now feels that a five year goal is achievable. As Post told the BBC, the burgers would likely be available as an exclusive, “order on demand” product at first, but “would be on supermarket shelves once a demand had been established and the price comes down.”

While the exact cost of the burgers isn’t yet certain, it’s likely to be competitive. Earlier this year, Post’s team announced that his team had been able to slash the price tag to just a little over $US11 per burger, or $US36 per pound of cow-less beef. Which is totally comparable to what Western foodies are willing to dish out for a gourmet grass-fed patty at a gastropub these days.

But most importantly of all: Will Post’s future burger taste like juicy, delicious beef, or a sad, bloodless wannabe? There’s reason to be hopeful, because, as Post told me this summer, his team is currently in the process of incorporating the key ingredient that was missing from the 2013 burger demo: Fat. That’s right, stem cell burger 1.0 was pure, unadulterated muscle fibres. To human taste buds, this is pretty bland. The researchers are also trying to figure out how to up the iron content of the muscle fibres — another factor that makes a big contribution to flavour.

I’ve still got my doubts that I’ll be able to order Post’s crazy burger on Amazon in five years, but you can sure as hell bet that whenever it is available for less than $US50 bucks, I’m gonna give it a try.

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Watch A Base Jump From Start To Finish

I’m not scared of heights, but when this guy steps up to the absolute tallest point on this already-tall mountain, I feel anxious for him. Someone has to, since he clearly doesn’t for himself.

He just sort of calmly goes “3…2…1… Bye.” I will never do this.

This one comes in from the GoPro channel. I guess base jumping is fast by design, but man, what an intense few minutes.

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A Region On Mars Called Silica Valley Could Help Us Build Fibreglass Space Habitats

NASA has spent the past few years asking architects, engineers, and designers outside of the space industry to think about habitat-building on the Red Planet — in part through competitions like the 3D-Printed Habitat Challenge.

The competition, which wrapped up this fall, asked designers to imagine how found materials on the surface of Mars could be used to create structures with large-scale 3D printing. Ultimately, a design that used the freezing temperatures of the planet’s atmosphere won out. But there were dozens of finalists worth looking at, and this week MIT’s architecture school published a closer look at their own finalist entry.

Their proposal, called Ouroboros, isn’t remarkable for the design of the habitat itself: Their inflatable toroid-shaped dwelling is similar to ideas NASA has been kicking around for years. What’s really interesting about their proposal is how they proposed building it — and from what materials. The team of architects, along with engineering students, came up with the idea of weaving a super-strong fabric that could be inflated using what they could find on Mars’ surface and atmosphere.

They focused in on a region of Mars called Silica Valley — where the Spirit Rover detected that the soil was as much as 60 per cent silica. Back in 2007, when NASA announced the discovery of the area, it speculated that the “patch of bright-toned soil” was “so rich in silica that scientists propose water must have been involved in concentrating it,” a hypothesis that has sounds a lot more plausible in light of NASA’s recent announcement about water on Mars.

Silica-rich soil shot by Spirit.

Silica, of course, is one of the raw materials needed to make glass, which could be extruded in its molten form, creating threads of fibreglass to be “woven” using a project-specific loom. That fibreglass would make a strong, light exoskeleton for the dwelling, though the team also knew they would need some form of air-tight plastic to ensure a pressurization.

“We noticed that the atmospheric and soil composition contained the necessary compounds to make thermoplastics,” says Caitlin Meuller, an assistant professor of building technology, in a video about the project. A group of engineering students came up with the idea of creating plastics using those compounds by “synthesizing the polypropylene needed to make the thermoplastic composite form hydrogen and carbon dioxide in the Martian atmosphere.” That thermoplastic would be woven with the fibreglass and together, heated until they created a bonded structure.

he project ended up not being chosen as a winner, but it’s a great example of the kind of thinking about Mars that NASA is hoping to see more of — in fact, when this competition wrapped up this month, the agency launched a second challenge focused specifically on using Martian soil and rocks for construction.

In an odd way, this approach to colonizing Mars borrows a lot from current ideas on Earth about building with local materials. While we think of Mars as a homogenous red iron-scape, it actually has a diverse composition that can be used to settlers’ advantage — just like Earth.

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You Probably Don't Have Enough Patience To Build This Kinetic Hummingbird

Derek Hugger is a sculptor, but instead of working in an inanimate medium like clay or marble, his creations are marvels of kinetic engineering made from gears, cams, and a complex assortment of moving parts.

Hugger’s latest creation, Colibri, is a wooden hummingbird hovering and drinking at a flower that perfectly recreates the intricate flapping motions of the real thing. Every part of the bird, from its wings, to its tail, to its head, are all linked together so that turning just a single crank brings the sculpture to life.

Here in lies the rub, though, if you want one of these sculptures for your desk at work, you’re not only going to have to self-assemble it, you’re also going to need to supply your own wood and make every last gear by yourself.

Hugger doesn’t appear to sell completed sculptures through his site, only the plans and blueprints for $US99. Turning all of those parts into the animated masterpiece you see above is all on your shoulders, so good luck!

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You Can Pick Up These Snails With A Magnet

The “scaly-foot gastropod” is a type of snail that thrives in the hydrothermal vents found deep in the Indian Ocean. And it has a unique property: a magnetic outer shell.

These snails were first discovered during a 2001 survey. It took researchers a while to find the snails because they (the snails) were at the bottom of the ocean, next to hydrothermal vents. It’s those vents that gave the snails their special outer shells.

The core of the scaly-foot gastropod looks like the core of any other snail — disgusting and slimy. Go out one layer and it still looks like a common snail, with a calcium carbonate layer around the central goo. In fact, it looks just like a regular snail until you get to the outermost layer.

This layer consists of Fe3S4 and FeS2. The first is a substance called greigite, the other is the well-known pyrite, or “fool’s gold.” Both of them contain iron, which means that if you wanted to pick this snail up, all you’d have to do is wave a sufficiently strong magnet over it. No other gastropod on Earth has managed to make a shell out of these materials.

The key to the snail’s shell is probably the sulphur. It lives near hydrothermal vents, which give off a great deal of hydrogen sulfide. The snails have used this element to make a stronger outer layer to their shells. Until a predator learns to manipulate magnetic fields, they’re safe.

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How An Australian Supercomputer Helps Fight Flies That Ravage Crops For 700 Million People

Ever hear of whiteflies? They’re the colour of snowflakes and practically as tiny, but they’re global plant-killers. One of their favourite snacks is the cassava, a root that’s a crucial staple food for 700 million people worldwide. But one computational biologist and her team are on a mission to save the cassava from this virus-carrying menace.

The whitefly is an extremely tricky pest. They’re found all over the world, transmit plant viruses, and can become insecticide-resistant. With all the 600 plant types they feast on, they cause billions of dollars in damage a year, since it renders farmers’ wares inedible and unsellable.

Meanwhile, the cassava plant is lifeblood for people living on multiple continents, from South America to Asia to Africa. The starchy root is the third most important calorie source in the tropics, after rice and maize. It’s even used to make tapioca, and the bubbles in bubble tea. Well, unfortunately, the whitefly loves the stuff, too. Not only do they eat cassava plants and its roots, but the whiteflies transmit plant viruses that ravage it, as well. These viruses are transmitted in the same way mosquitoes can transmit malarial parasites to humans when they bite us. By the time whiteflies get done with cassava plants, it puts many, many people not only out of food, but also out of income, since they can’t sell their cassavas.

Luckily, Laura Boykin, a computational biologist and TED fellow at the University of Western Australia, has made it her mission to neutralise that cassava-destroying threat. She and her colleagues used a supercomputer to generate a phylogenetic tree, or a kind of family tree, of the whitefly. It showed the team that there are actually a whopping 34 species of whitefly globally. Previously, scientists believed there was only one. (Goes to show how little about this insect was known previously, since funding was scarce.) All their data is publicly available.

The Magnus supercomputer

The supercomputer used, by the way, is Magnus — the fastest supercomputer in the Southern Hemisphere, also used in radio astronomy. Magnus, a petascale Cray XC40 supercomputer at Australia’s Pawsey Supercomputer Centre in Perth is crucial in the process. (Pawsey says that, with a dataset of only 500 whiteflies, the possible relationships between these flies reach the octillions — that’s a one with 27 zeroes. You can see why a supercomputer is key here.) Magnus helps Boykin and her team figure out which whitefly species are similar, and what kind of flies live where.

What can we do with this data? We can figure out which species of whitefly is eating cassava in a given region, and can more easily combat them. The plants can be bred to resist the right species. There’s also now greater expectations from the chemical companies, who need to test their products on not just one species, but all 34. It’s all more work — but it’s a problem that can’t be ignored anymore.

Boykin and her team were chosen as one of the 14 innovators by the United Nations to address the body’s 17 Sustainable Development Goals. Boykin presented alongside the other winners, who were chosen out of over 800 entries worldwide, at UN Headquarters in New York last month.

Cassava is something that over a half billion humans depend on to survive. This research team’s efforts are making sure that cassava remains as dependable as possible.

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A Huge Gash Just Appeared On The Sun

The coronal hole was imaged on October 10, 2015. The image above was taken in wavelengths of 193 angstroms, which falls outside the bounds of human vision

A rather massive coronal hole was recently spotted on the Sun by NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory. The region — the size of 50 Earths — is spewing material into space at tremendous speeds. It may look terrifying, but astronomers say it’s nothing to worry about.

NASA says that these holes are magnetically exposed areas that generate high-speed solar winds. These dark, low density regions of the corona — the sun’s outermost atmosphere — contain little solar material, have lower temperatures, and thus appear much darker than their surroundings. Coronal holes are normal, appearing at different places and with more frequency at different times during the Sun’s activity cycle.

In light of the phenomenon, the NOAA Space Weather Prediction Center forecast a G1-Minor storm from the 14th to 16th of October. This space storm is relatively harmless, though it could disrupt satellites communications and high-altitude radio transmissions. The coronal hole produced a geomagnetic storm near Earth that resulted in several nights of aurora.

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Seeing And Hearing Incense Burn From Up Close Feels Like Soothing Rain

It’s a little brain jiggling to watch this macro footage of incense burning because you’re seeing fire disintegrate the burning light but hear a pitter patter that resembles rain fall. And what the most backwards thing is that the strongest sense of incense — the smell, duh — can’t be felt. The juggling of senses is fun, seeing things you don’t typically see, hearing things you can’t hear and not smelling things you can smell.

[MIKA27]

More American Cities Are Blocking The App That Helps You Fight Parking Tickets

Parking tickets suck. Sometimes, you break the law and you deserve it. But other times, signs are missing or incorrect, so you end up with a fine for nothing. That’s why Fixed released an app last year that helped Americans fight the tickets in court. Some city governments aren’t having it.

Fixed is now blocked in three of its top cities: San Francisco, Oakland, and Los Angeles. The cities blame Xerox, the company that they use for backend support on their ticketing operations, for no longer supporting the app. However, Fixed has produced documents showing San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency (SFMTA) explicitly discussing the app with Xerox. Furthermore, the SFMTA has tried to sabotage the apps in the past.

The thing is, Fixed isn’t doing anything illegal. In fact, the app just makes it easier for American citizens to contest tickets that they believe were wrongly issued. Parking tickets make cities a lot of money, though. San Francisco has the most expensive parking tickets in the country at $US74 a pop. That eventually adds up to around $US130 million a year in revenue for the city. No wonder the SFMTA doesn’t want sneaky technology to help people exercise their legal right to fight the tickets.

Ahead of the block, the SFMTA tried to sabotage the Fixed app in a hilarious fashion. TechCrunch reports:

Of course, the cities haven’t been welcoming to an app that was aimed at helping locals not pay their tickets by automating the process of jumping through legal loopholes. When Fixed began faxing its submissions to SFMTA last year, the agency emailed the startup to stop using their fax machine. When Fixed pointed out that it was legal to do so, the agency simply shut off their fax.

The old shutting-off-the-fax-machine trick! But that’s not nearly as effective as some behind the scenes work with third party services like Xerox. Fixed says it’s suspended the parking ticket services in San Francisco, Oakland, and LA due to the trouble. The company will still help Americans fight their traffic tickets. Or at least it will until more bureaucrats find a way to screw it up.

[MIKA27]

Watch A Part Of An Aeroplane Wing Horrifyingly Fall Off During Take Off

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fCFKs0ugUMY

No matter how many times you’ve flown or how many years you’ve lived, it’s always fun to peer out the window of an aeroplane and watch it take off. It’s flying, man. However, the worst thing is if you look out and see parts of the plane falling off. Like in this video from Chile. The aeroplane’s cowling just rips straight off as the plane takes off. Maybe it’s best to never look out an aeroplane window.

[MIKA27]

THE WING MAN – ROBIN HERD

The Wing Man is a short film from McLaren that was created to commemorate the 50th anniversary of Robin Herd joining Bruce McLaren’s racing team. Herd was hired directly from the Concorde project despite his lack of formal training in race car engineering.

The influence that Robin had on McLaren in its formative years was significant, he was experimenting with wings on Formula 1 cars 3 years before anyone else and he developed one of the most dominant Can Am cars of the era – the McLaren M7A.

The film has a running time of just under 10 minutes, so its a quick watch, and it offers a unique first hand look back at the beginning of one of Formula 1’s most important teams.

Click to read more via McLaren.

[MIKA27]

HARLEY-DAVIDSON XA MILITARY MOTORCYCLE

The Harley-Davidson XA was a motorcycle developed for use by the US military during WWII. If it looks a little familiar to you, that’s because you’ve probably seen it a few times before, but with a different badge on the fuel tank. Harley based the design of the XA (which stands for Experimental Army) on the venerable BMW R71 – a motorcycle that would also become the platform for the IMZ-Ural, the KMZ-Dnepr M72, and the Chiang Jiang CJ750.

Harley chose the R71 for a couple of reasons – the Army had specifically requested a shaft drive motorcycle due to the improved reliability and reduced maintenance requirements. The secondary reason was the orientation of the engine – the boxer twin had far better cooling characteristics than the transversely-mounted V-twin used in the Harley-Davidson WLA, in fact the boxer engine ran approximately 56 C° cooler in varied conditions.

The shaft drive and cooler running engine had made the BMW R71 unbeatable in the deserts of North Africa, and the US Military quickly realised they needed a similarly capable vehicle in their arsenal. Harley began production in 1942 and ended it in 1943 after 1000 units had been made – the military brass had realised in the meantime that the Jeep was a better all-rounder, and so no additional Harley XAs were made.

The engineers at Harley continued to experiment with the boxer twin over the coming years, the engine was used as tank generators, and in sidecar motorcycles, a prototype Servi-Car, snowmobiles, and a mini version of the Jeep dubbed the Peep.

Surviving, original examples of the Harley-Davidson XA are in huge demand and they typically fetch far more at auction than the more commonplace Harley-Davidson WLA. Of course there are some Harley purists who don’t consider the XA to be a “real Harley”, but I think the model highlights a fascinating time in the history of the Milwaukee-based company, and the overwhelming majority of motorcycle collectors tend to agree.

The XA you see here comes with its original paint and accessories, and it has an estimated value of between £14,000 and £18,000 – making it a reasonably affordable bike considering its history and rarity. If you’d like to read more about it or register to bid you can click here to visit Bonhams.

[MIKA27]

Beware of the Killer Pine Cones and Man-Eating Trees

They’re cute as Christmas decorations but a man in California is suing a national park for $5 million because a giant pine cone fell on his head and nearly killed him. Why would a tree drop such a huge seed on an unsuspecting human? Could it possibly be trying to catch him for dinner?

Sean Mace claims he was sitting under a Bunya pine tree (Araucaria bidwillii) in the San Francisco Maritime National Historical Park in October 2015, when the tree suddenly tree dropped a 16-pound pine cone on his head, knocking him unconscious.

A Bunya tree and an unsuspecting victim

Mace was rushed to San Francisco General Hospital where he was treated for a brain hemorrhage, which involved removing part of his skull. He now suffers from permanent brain damage and other physical problems, has hundreds of thousands of dollars in medical bills and needs more surgery. He’s suing the park service, the Federal government and anyone else his lawyer can think of for failing to warn park visitors about pine cones the size of bowling balls. What kind of tree grows these killer cones with huge spikes?

Are the killer Bunya pine cones hunting for humans in packs?

Bunya pines or false monkey puzzle trees are native to Australia where the pine cones, which can weigh up to 10 kg (22 pounds), are a popular food source and where people have sense enough not to sit under them. They were brought to the San Francisco park decades ago and have become well established there. What did this particular Bunya pine plan to do with poor unconscious Sean? Eat him?

The man-eating Ya-te-veo tree from Central and South America

That’s not as far-fetched as it sounds. There are tales of a Nubian tree from Egypt that used its huge fruit to lure animals and the occasional human into its grasping branches and blood-sucking leaves. An 1874 article in the South Australian Register tells of the Mkodo tribe of Madagascar that gave human sacrifices to a local man-eating tree. A legend from Nicaragua tells of the “devil’s snare” or vampire vine that wrapped itself around its prey to strangle it and suck its blood.

Are the Bunya pines of California evolving into man-eating killers? If so, the park will need a better sign.

[MIKA27]

The Great Mull Air Mystery

The skies have always beckoned to us. We wish to fly up within the clouds and the clear blue yonder, to untie the tethers that bind us to land. It is a primal desire, this wish to rise up into the vast skies above our heads and to soar to wherever the wind may take us. Yet this is not always a friendly domain for us. Aviation and mankind’s reach into the stratosphere are home to some of the greatest mysteries and sinister disappearances history has to offer. Here among the clouds are tales of intrigue, mystery, and unexplained vanishings that have managed to perplex us to no end. Certainly one of the most baffling enigmas of modern aviation concerns a flight undertaken under strange circumstances, and which would become one of the most oft discussed and puzzling unexplained disappearances of our time. It would come to be known as the Great Mull Air Mystery, and it is a tale that surely proves that sometimes the skies are not friendly, and that tragedy that may never be fully explained can strike at any time, leaving us to ponder just what has happened and indeed our place in the grand scheme of things.

The mystery in question revolves around a man by the name of Peter Gibbs, who had served in World War II from January 1944 to March 1945 in the 41 Squadron of the Royal Air Force. Gibbs had a rather unmemorable military career and was best known for his post RAF music career, when he became a member of the Philharmonia Orchestra in 1954 and went on to join the prestigious London Symphony Orchestra. Even then, his musical career was rather unassuming except for his infamous public verbal attack on the world famous conductor, Herbert von Karajan, who was rather notorious for leaving the stage after shows without waiting for applause or ever taking requests for an encore, a slight which annoyed Gibbs to no end. One night Von Karajan did this again and the next evening Gibbs gave him a dressing down in front of everyone, fuming “I did not spend four years of my life fighting bastards like you to be insulted before our own Allies as you did last evening.” It was a shocking statement that would ruin his career in music and at the same time become what he was most known for up to that point. Sadly, what Gibbs would ultimately become most famous for was the mysterious circumstances surrounding his death.

Peter Gibbs

After the incident with Von Karajan, Gibbs faded into relative obscurity until one Christmas Eve in 1975, when he was having dinner with his girlfriend, Felicity Granger, at the Glen Forsa hotel on the Isle of Mull, in Scotland, after returning from inspecting property on the nearby Isle of Skye. At the time Gibbs was the managing director of a property-development company called Gibbs and Rae, and he had been looking to invest in buying a hotel there. After dinner, Gibbs suddenly announced that he wanted to go out flying a plane for rent, a red-and-white Cessna F150H, that was kept at the adjacent airfield. The desire to go flying was not strange in and of itself, as Gibbs had been flying privately ever since leaving the RAF after the war, and he even owned his own plane, but it was a little strange that he should want to suddenly go out flying alone in the black of night on a whim after having a dinner date with his girlfriend. The hotel staff was not in agreement with Gibbs’ plan, especially since the airfield did not allow night flights and was not even equipped with landing lights. On top of that, it was a rather dark and moonless night at the time, and the staff implored him not to go. Nevertheless, Gibbs was adamant about going out flying, and reportedly told the staff “I am not asking permission, I just thought it was courtesy to let you know. I don’t want a fuss.”

With his girlfriend in tow, Gibbs headed to the airfield at around 9:30 PM and told Granger to light up the end of the runway by hand with bright torches, which considering the clear skies he was confident would be adequate to light his way and give him a frame of reference with which to safely take off. This would later pose its own mystery, as several witnesses would later claim that there had been two sets of torches moving independently, suggesting more than one person guiding the plane, but Granger would always claim it had been only her out on the runway. Before taking off, Gibbs informed Granger that he would return shortly, after which he roared off into the night sky. One witness to the takeoff, a David Howitt, who watched from the nearby hotel with binoculars, would later say that it had been flawless, with no signs of any engine trouble or difficulty as the plane shot off into the night. Gibbs would never be seen alive again.

Glen Forsa airfield

When 10PM came and went with no sign of the plane returning, a concerned Granger went back to the hotel to inform staff that Gibbs was missing. By this time, the weather had taken a turn for the worse and it was sleeting heavily outside, but the staff called police, who went out to inspect the airfield for any signs of trouble, of which they found none. The projected flight path was also inspected, but there were no signs of anything amiss. The following day, on Christmas, Gibbs still had not returned, and a major search of the area was launched involving many RAF and Naval Air Service helicopters, sonar equipment to look for wreckage on the seafloor, and hundreds of volunteers. The massive search effort scoured the countryside of the small island and large swaths of the surrounding sea, yet not a single trace of Gibbs or the Cessna he had been flying could be found. He had seemingly just vanished off the face of the earth.

That seems like it would be the last anyone would hear of Gibbs, but the real mystery was only just beginning. In April 1975, a full 4 months after the disappearance, a local shepherd by the name of Donald MacKinnon made a shocking discovery on a hillside a mere mile from the hotel and airfield. There, sprawled out in full view upon the ground, about 400 feet up the hill, was the body of the missing Gibbs, wearing boots and fully clothed. Authorities were puzzled by the find, as the body was discovered in an area that had been totally searched in the wake of Gibbs’ disappearance, and no local farmers or shepherds in the area had seen anything out of the ordinary there in the proceeding months despite frequenting the area regularly.

At first it was thought that Gibbs had simply crashed into the sea and somehow managed to swim to shore and go on to die of exposure, but there was no evidence of seawater or any marine organisms found on the body or the clothes or boots. Additionally, the position of the body on the hillside would have meant that Gibbs would have had to have crawled from the sea, clamber up a steep cliff wall, cross the road leading to the hotel, and then climb 400 feet up the hillside on his own. Why would he do that if he had just crashed and was dying? It was also suggested that he may have somehow fallen out of the plane or parachuted out with a malfunctioning parachute, but the body also showed no serious signs of injury, with only a minor cut on the leg and certainly none that would be consistent with a high speed, life threatening impact. There was additionally no sign of a parachute at the scene or anywhere in the vicinity. In fact, the body was in remarkably good condition for having apparently lain on the hillside out in the elements for 4 months, showing little decomposition and being relatively free of damage from scavengers, although it was ascertained by an in-depth autopsy that Gibbs had indeed been dead for 4 months. A toxicological test further revealed no traces of alcohol, drugs or poisons in the body. The stumped pathologists would ultimately decide that the cause of death had been exposure, suggesting that he had exited the plane somehow and died on land, but there was still no sign of the aircraft or even any wreckage from it anywhere, and the body itself posed more questions than it answered.

Adding further layers to the shadows embracing the mystery was that there was absolutely no sign of the aircraft Gibbs had been flying, which would have been a major piece of the puzzle. Considering that the body had been found on land and showed absolutely no evidence of having been in the sea at any point, it was thought that the plane had to be somewhere nearby, yet there was no trace of it anywhere. The mystery of the missing plane would hang over the case for 11 years, until September 1986, when two clam fishermen from Mull by the names of Richard and John Grieve discovered a red and white aircraft on the seabed in 100 feet of water around half a kilometer off the coast of Oban. The two divers claimed that the plane was a Cessna and that it bore the registration G-AVTN, the very same that Gibbs’ aircraft had had. The divers reported that they had examined the plane and could find no human remains in the plane. It was also reported that the plane exhibited signs of a massive impact, with both of its wings and one of its landing wheels torn completely off and strewn about the seafloor, as well as a gaping hole in the windshield. The aircraft’s engine had also apparently been dislodged by the impact and thrown a significant distance away from the plane itself. An odd little detail is that it was claimed that both doors of the plane had been locked from the inside, meaning anyone who had been in the plane when it had crashed would have had to have exited through the hole in the windshield.

Unfortunately, although the report by the divers was considered credible, the wreckage itself was never recovered, nor could it even be relocated, and all that remained as evidence were some pictures of the wreck that were too blurry to confirm or deny the divers’ accounts. It could also not be ascertained from the photos whether the crash could have been survivable, although some experts claimed that anyone in the plane would have been at the very least severely injured, which is not consistent with the relatively uninjured state of Gibbs’ corpse. In the end, the discovery of this wreckage only served to deepen the mystery of the case, and it was and still is uncertain whether this was even really Peter Gibbs’ plane at all.

The plane that Peter Gibbs flew

So many questions orbit this case which have never been satisfactorily been answered. Why did Gibbs decide to go out flying that fateful evening even in such unfavorable night conditions? Was there only one person guiding him with torches, as Granger claimed, or were there more, as claimed by other witnesses? If there had been another third party on the runway, then who were they and why were they there? Why is it that Gibbs’ body was found 4 months later on a nearby hillside in an area that had already been heavily searched and which was frequently passed by farmers and shepherds? How did he get there and how did he die? How had Gibbs become separated from his aircraft? Indeed, what exactly happened after the plane took off?

With so many unanswered questions and disparate pieces of weird evidence, as well as the odd condition of the body and uncertain details about the plane, it is only natural that speculation has swirled around the case for years, ranging from the somewhat plausible to the absurd. The seemingly most obvious solution, at least on the surface, which is that Gibbs had either crashed his plane into the sea or bailed out before impact, doesn’t seem to fit considering factors such as the condition of the body and the lack of any seawater or other marine evidence upon it. Also, the area is so hilly that it would have been very unlikely for him to have maneuvered there at a low enough altitude to jump out without considerable injury and without crashing, and if he had managed to parachute from the plane successfully, then where did the parachute go? Also, how could he have exited the plane, only for it to continue barreling along on its own without a pilot to crash into the sea some distance away and then somehow during that time lock its own doors? There is also the fact that even if Gibbs had indeed really crashed into the sea and improbably crawled from the twisted wreckage to swim half a kilometer in freezing water to safety, why would he willingly cross and pass the road leading to the hotel where he could be rescued only to continue 400 feet up a hillside to die? Indeed, how could he have survived such a catastrophic crash in the first place and where was the seawater and injuries one would expect if this were the case? Very little of this theory seems to make sense.

Another theory is that Gibbs had been killed in cold blood and his body dumped on the hillside, possibly due to some sort of criminal activity or a business transaction gone wrong. There have been claims that Gibbs had been involved in gun running and even a diamond heist in Oban, as well as rumors that he may have perhaps been involved in some shady business practices, so it seems as though there could have theoretically been a motive to do such a thing. However, there are many things wrong with this idea as well. Since the plane was a one-seater, it seems unlikely that anyone could have been aboard the plane with Gibbs at the time to kill him and then take control of the aircraft, and even if they could have pulled that off, they would have had to have somehow killed him in such a way as to leave no serious injuries on the body and make it look like had had died of exposure as per the coroner’s report. The murder theory is somewhat supported in a sense by an odd detail given by a witness that said that the plane on the night in question had taken an unusually long time to warm up on the runway, suggesting that Gibbs was perhaps either distracted or talking to someone before takeoff, who would not have been Granger standing with the torches far down the runway. It was also claimed that the lane lights on the plane flashed more times than usual before the plane took off, suggesting a struggle, an unfamiliarity with the plane, or that at least things weren’t going according to plan.

A permutation of the murder theory is that it wasn’t even Gibbs who had been at the controls of the plane, nor was he even on it, and that someone could have planted a decoy on the plane and then killed him on the ground. This idea seems to be bolstered by the claims of two sets of torches being used on the runway on the night of the disappearance, which could mean someone else was there to participate in the crime. However, if that was the case, then why would the plane end up crashed and destroyed at sea? Why would they destroy the plane, and if it was an unintentional crash then where is the body of the decoy? Someone could have feasibly intentionally crashed the plane to make it look like it had been an accident, but how did they pull it off? If it was intentional, why were both doors locked from the inside? Did they intentionally go down with it in a harrowing crash and crawl out the hole in the windshield? It doesn’t make sense. And then the body again. We are still left with the question of why Gibbs’ body would appear on a hillside 4 months after the disappearance. If someone could successfully hide the body for 4 months, then why suddenly dump it out on the hill for everyone to see after authorities had resigned themselves to the fact that Gibbs had simply vanished into thin air? There seems to be little to be gained from doing such a thing. A murderer would have also still had to have killed Gibbs in such a way as to not damage the body and make it seem as though he had died of exposure.

Still other theories abound, most of them facing the same problems, and few of them making much sense. One is that Gibbs was involved in a smuggling operation and wasn’t on the plane but rather waiting on the hillside for the package to arrive when he had died of exposure. In another, Gibbs himself orchestrated the crash in order to fake his own death and escape some debt or business dealing, but that he was finally tracked down and killed, with his body dumped on the hill to serve as a warning to his business partners. Still others say that Granger had arranged for Gibbs to be murdered, that he was shot from the sky by terrorists, that he was an MI5 spy on a mission to Northern Ireland and was killed and dumped as a warning, or that he was even abducted by aliens, because when a case is this weird why not? The relatively pristine condition of the body certainly lends itself to the idea that it had not sat out in the elements for the entire time between the disappearance and its discovery, implying it might have been dumped there at a later time. Yet in all of these scenarios, since the body was found upon examination to have in fact been physically been dead for those 4 months, anyone who killed him had to have waited all of that time with a corpse before dumping the body. Why would they do that?

For all of these theories and all of this rampant speculation, the question of what happened to Peter Gibbs remains just as unsolved and mysterious as it ever was. If the wreck of the plane could be recovered from the sea and closely examined we might be able to shed more light on the case, but so far it remains missing, with only the photos and accounts from the divers who claimed to have found it to go on. In 2013, Royal Navy warships found wreckage of a mystery aircraft believed to be a Cessna lying in 30 meters of water during a coastal mapping operation off Oban, in the same general area where the divers had claimed to have found the plane previously. However, the Navy images show that the mystery wreck in this case still had one wing intact rather than missing both, a discrepancy that casts doubt on whether it is the same plane and further making it unclear if they are the same wreck, two different wrecks, or whether it or they are even Gibbs’ plane in the first place.

The Great Mull Air Mystery has become one of aviation’s most puzzling conundrums, baffling both experts and conspiracy theorists alike. It has inspired curiosity, discussion, debate, and much theorizing. Yet in the absence of any good further evidence, it seems unlikely we will ever truly know the answers to any of the case’s confounding array of questions. What happened to Peter Gibbs on that fateful night? Do the answers lie out there at the bottom of the ocean somewhere, scattered across the island, or are they lost to time and forever out of our reach? The mystery remains.

[MIKA27]

She Kills People From 7,850 Miles Away

Her name is ‘Sparkle.’ She operates a drone. She is sick of whiny boys. And she is perfectly OK with dealing out death.

Anne crawled out of bed in her North Las Vegas house around 10 p.m. and started to get ready for her shift.

She pulled her chestnut hair into a bun and slipped on her olive green flight suit. In the kitchen, she packed fruit to snack on during her shift and stuffed her schoolwork into her backpack-sized lunchbox just in case it’s a boring night. Most nights she doesn’t have a chance to open a book.

Giving her dog, a tan Sher-Pei/pit bull mix, one last pat, she left her house and joined thousands of other workers leaving for the midnight shift. While most people were heading to hotels and casinos in town, Hubbard was on her way to Creech Air Force Base and a war.

Anne, an Air Force staff sergeant, was—and still is—a remotely piloted aircraft (RPA) sensor operator or “sensor.” At Creech, she is assigned to a reconnaissance squadron flying missions over Iraq and Afghanistan. Few weapons in the American arsenal are more relentless than the RPA fleet, often called drones. For more than a decade, the United States has flown RPAs over Afghanistan and Iraq, providing forces on the ground with an eye in the sky to spot terrorists and insurgents, and in most cases the firepower to destroy them.

As she rode to work, Anne—or “Sparkle” as she’s known to her fellow drone operators—wasn’t focused on the desert outside her window. It was 2009 and President Obama was sending troops in a surge to Afghanistan. Sparkle’s mind was on a desert 7,000 miles away. Over the next 24 hours she would track an insurgent, watch as he was killed by a Hellfire missile, and spy on his funeral before ending her night with a breakfast beer and a trip to the dog park.

A pilot's heads up display in a ground control station shows a truck from the view of a camera on an MQ-9 Reaper during a training mission. The Reaper is the Air Force's first "hunter-killer" unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) and is designed to engage time-sensitive targets on the battlefield as well as provide intelligence and surveillance. The jet-fighter sized Reapers are 36 feet long with 66-foot wingspans and can fly for as long as 14 hours fully loaded with laser-guided bombs and air-to-ground missiles.

MIDNIGHT SHIFT

The RPA has become the symbol of America’s ongoing wars, from Afghanistan to Somalia to Syria. And, 14 years after a U.S. “drone” first fired a missile at an al Qaeda operative, the morality and legality of remote strikes remains a matter of intense controversy. Earlier this year, the U.S. government revealed it accidentally killed one of its own citizens with a drone—a hostage held by al Qaeda—triggering another round of debate about when the U.S. is justified in using the remotely piloted planes to attack.

On Thursday, the Intercept published a cache of new documents about RPA missions in Afghanistan, Somalia and Yemen. The documents paint a damning picture of the RPA, including an internal U.S. military study that found a “critical shortfall” in how targets are identified. The government's reliance on cellphones has led to the wrong target being killed. The new documents also call into question the accuracy of the RPA. The Intercept reports more than 200 people were killed – only 35 were actual targets - in Afghanistan between January 2012 and February 2013.

“This outrageous explosion of watchlisting—of monitoring people and racking and stacking them on lists, assigning them numbers… assigning them death sentences without notice, on a worldwide battlefield—it was, from the very first instance, wrong,” the source of the documents told the Intercept. “We’re allowing this to happen. And by ‘we,’ I mean every American citizen who has access to this information now, but continues to do nothing about it.”

But for all the attention paid to RPAs, the men and women who operate the 21st century’s most divisive weapons system remain largely hidden from public view—except for reports about strikes, especially when a missile kills civilians. The Daily Beast interviewed more than two dozen Air Force officers and airmen in the RPA community last year at Holloman Air Force Base, New Mexico the RPA’s training base, to talk about life in the community and what it is like to wage a counter-terror campaign from the air. Because many of them will leave Holloman to join operational squadrons, we agreed to identify the pilots and sensor operators by their first names or call signs.

Sparkle’s first stop after she arrived on that day in 2009 was to check the schedule at the operations desk to see whom she was flying with on the midnight shift. Like factory workers, the aircrews work shifts, sometimes flying for eight hours at a time. The pilots and sensors are in constant rotation, so often a sensor will fly with a different pilot every shift.

She was flying with Patrick, a tall, lanky former B-1 bomber pilot. Patrick’s father-in-law, a former F-4 weapon systems officer, talked him into joining the Air Force with stories of low-level flying. Patrick deployed with a B-1 squadron and dropped bombs in Afghanistan, but because six months was too long to be away from his family, in 2009 he volunteered to fly MQ-9 Reapers instead. The RPA community, he thought, would be the best of both worlds. He could be home and still fly combat missions.

Known as “Spade” at the squadron, the call sign comes from being a family man.

“I had three kids as a first lieutenant with no end in sight,” said Spade, who now trains new RPA pilots at Holloman Air Force Base. “I got a vasectomy and the squadron found out. They named me ‘Spade’ as in female dog, neutered. Everybody thinks it is due to cards or something,”

Sparkle liked flying with Spade. He was laidback and trusted her to do the job. She had worked at a casino in Louisiana before she joined the Air Force for help in paying for college. She started as an imagery analyst, scouring satellite images for signs of militant activity. Then she got transferred to the remotely piloted aircraft program. She earned the call sign because her headset has bedazzled jewels running along the headband and earpieces.

“I use it to emasculate the enemy in the afterlife,” Sparkle said. “Many radical jihadists believe that being killed by a woman means they will not enter heaven. Considering how they treat their women, I’m OK with rubbing salt in the wound.”

Both Sparkle and Spade noticed a buzz around the building.

“Hey, we’re spinning up for a strike,” one of Spade’s fellow pilots said. “We might get to strike on our shift.”

And tonight it would be Sparkle’s job to guide the missile to the target.

The US military in Kandahar, southern Afghanistan, a Taliban stronghold, are using high-tech Predator drones against their enemy. They have approximately 8 there

16-SECOND MARK

Every shift started in the main briefing room, a big theater with a PowerPoint projector showing updates on the weather, target area in Afghanistan, and the status of the Reapers and Predators flying the various missions. After the mass brief, Spade and Sparkle stayed for a strike brief, their assignment that day. Another Reaper crew joined them.

The target was a mid-level Taliban leader. They squadron spent the last several weeks watching him, and now they’d been ordered to strike. The intelligence analysts put a series of slides on the screen diagramming the strike. A slide of a zoomed-in picture of the compound flashed on the screen. On the eastern side was a cemetery. On the western side was a compound where the target lived. Parked outside was his motorbike, which he drove to daily meetings.

The whole shot was choreographed down to the second. They knew from watching him for weeks that it took the man 12 seconds to get on his motorbike and drive to the edge of his compound. The plan was to hit him on a barren stretch of road between his compound and the cemetery.

Spade and the other pilot would fly in a circle with one Reaper always pointing toward the target. When the lead Reaper turned off, the trail Reaper would be in position to shoot. They’d be cleared to fire for 33 seconds. The intelligence department wanted the Hellfire missiles to strike him at the 16-second mark.

The level of planning was typical for planned strikes, Spade said.

“By collecting all that information, we can make sure that it is a legal target and we minimize collateral damage,” he said, using military jargon for civilian casualties. “We wanted to shoot him between Point A and B so there was no collateral damage. There was no way anyone good can get hurt and the bad guy dies.”

But these planned strikes aren’t the only RPA attacks. The U.S. also uses “signature strikes”—ones in which guys like Spade can pull the trigger if a target merely behaves like a terrorist. In these cases, it’s much harder to be sure that an attack isn’t hitting the wrong person, or won’t end a civilian life in the process. Warren Weinstein, the American hostage held by al Qaeda, was accidentally killed in just such a “signature strike.”

After the briefing, Spade and Sparkle walked to the Ground Control Station (GCS), the RPA cockpit, set up outside of the squadron building. The GCS is the size of a metal shipping container with a door on one end. Inside, a thin carpet covers the floor and a bank of monitors with two chairs sits at one end. Several air conditioners hum, keeping the electronics in the GCS cool. The lights are dim so the pilot and sensor can see the monitors.

Inside the GCS, the other crew was ready to switch out. The Reaper was already airborne and flying over the target area. The RPA community is unique in the Air Force. Drone pilots flying in the United States never take off or land. Crews deployed overseas do all the takeoffs and landings. That is a specialty skill in the RPA community. The crews in the United States switch out with the Reaper already in flight.

On the monitor, the target compound from the briefing slides filled the screen.

“Saw the lights flip on,” the pilot told Sparkle and Spade. “Haven’t seen him yet.”

Sparkle switched with the sensor operator first. Dropping down into the seat, she pulled the chair close to the console—she liked to be near the monitor. She hooked her bedazzled headset to the chair and started to work on the monitor’s picture.

Next to her, Spade climbed into the pilot seat and checked the fuel gauge and other instruments. Since Spade couldn’t hear the engine or feel how the Reaper was handling in the wind, the gauges were his only indicators.

“I want to make sure every single thing that can go wrong won’t go wrong from minute one,” Spade said.

With the other crew gone, the GCS was silent. The door was shut and locked. Spade and Sparkle spent the first few minutes going over the strike plan one more time. They talked about the desired point of impact or where the missile will hit when they shoot. They went over where Sparkle would guide the missile if the shot had to be aborted.

“Don’t let me forget, when you hear cleared to engage, automatically turn on the laser,” Spade said, referring to the beam of focused light that will lead the drone’s Hellfire missiles to their target.

The whole process took about 15 minutes. Then they settled in to wait for the target to appear.

The Predator has no pilot, and is controlled for his highly secret mission from Las Vegas. The team in Kandahar is in charge of their take off and landings. The drones have a highly powerful camera with infrared, as well as a still camera and two missiles.

PATTERN OF LIFE

The target compound was a biscuit-colored squat building with a head-high wall and an iron gate. The target’s motorbike was parked against one wall. There was no movement. Spade kept the Reaper in a racetrack pattern. Sparkle kept a constant watch on the compound, turning the camera to maintain the crosshairs on the building.

“It is pretty exciting the first eight or 10 trips around as you tweak everything and make it perfect,” Spade said.

But soon it gets boring. Keeping an “unblinking eye” on a target is one of the RPA’s signature missions, but it is also one of the dullest. Crews can spend hours watching one house.

To stay focused, RPA crews have come up with games to kill time. The crews debate the best restaurants in Las Vegas, monitor sports scores, and play RPA bingo over the secure Microsoft Internet Relay Chat, a text-based messenger program used by the crews and support staff to pass information.

“A pilot made cards and every time you saw something in your screen, a donkey, or a car, you got a bingo point,” Sparkle said.

The crews say they’ve watched fighters **** in the woods countless times or have sex, sometimes with animals. One sensor said he watched an Afghan target fight a goat for an hour. They’ll often zoom in tight so the intelligence analysts can watch too.

It is not unheard of for crews to track a target for two to three months. The constant surveillance creates an intimacy other fighter pilots and even soldiers don’t have with the target. The crews get to know the target’s family. They know the family’s mosque, the kid’s school.

“I understand there is an intimacy you get with your target,” Sparkle said. “However, you’re a bad guy and you’re doing bad things to the people I am here to support. We just don’t go out there and shoot stuff. There is a reason. They are always associated with some part of hurting our friendly forces. At the end of the day, when you boil it down to that one point, the rest of it goes out the window.”

Back over the compound, Sparkle and Spade watched and waited for hours. Two hours after the shift started, the target finally came out of the door dressed in the baggy shirt and pants typical of the region.

“He’s coming out,” Sparkle said as the crosshairs rotated to put the man in the middle of the screen.

There was excitement as both Spade and Sparkle instantly locked on him. The crosshairs followed him as he stopped along the wall to take a leak. Finished, he walked back into the compound. That kind of thing went on for hours until he finally got onto the motorbike.

Headsets go on. Extra radios go off. No one is allowed in the room. It is very quiet.

“Headsets on mean game time,” Sparkle said. “We’re fangs out.”

An MQ-9 Reaper taxis at Kandahar Airfield, Afghanistan.

‘FANGS OUT’

Sparkle’s fingers started to tingle as she kept the crosshairs on the target. It always happened when she was about to strike. During her first strike, her hand went numb from anxiety just before she guided a laser-guided bomb into a cluster of 15 fighters in Afghanistan.

“I remember thinking, I’m about to drop this weapon on this dude,” Sparkle said. “After you do five, six, 10, it is another day at work. You put your hard hat on.”

Next to her, Spade kept the Reaper level and headed for the target. The man started the motorbike and rode out of the compound and onto the dirt road. Sparkle’s crosshairs never wavered.

While Sparkle tracked the man, Spade checked his flight path and started to do the math in his head. At his current speed, he was going to miss him. The other crew was going to get the shot. It was the luck of the draw, and he’d lost.

“Outbound,” Spade said, letting the other crew set up the shot, and letting Sparkle know.

Sparkle and Spade didn’t have time to worry about not getting the shot. They had to be ready to follow up if the first shot failed. Sparkle kept her track on the motorcycle.

“You’re almost hoping the other guy screws up his timing so we can shoot,” she said.

Spade finished the outbound leg and started to turn back to the target as the other crew fired. A pair of Hellfire missiles raced from the rails of the Reaper and landed just in front of the motorbike, spraying the target with shrapnel. As the other Reaper peeled off, Spade came in right behind. Sparkle kept the crosshairs locked on the cloud of smoke and debris from the strike. It was up to them to do the battle damage assessment—and handle the feelings that come with taking a life from thousands of miles away.

“When you hit a truck full of people, there are limbs and legs everywhere,” Sparkle said. “I watched a guy crawl away from the wreckage after one shot with no lower body. He slowly died. You have to watch that. You don’t get to turn away. You can’t be that soft girly traditional feminine and do the job. Those are the people who are going to have the nightmares.”

It isn’t the shooting that haunts RPA operators. It is what happens afterward. Unlike their fighter brethren, RPA pilots and sensors often loiter nearby after a strike to make sure it was successful and to gather more intelligence. To do that, the sensor pod keeps the crater and the blasted body in the center of the frame.

Sparkle could see a bunch of hot spots all over the ground, which were likely body parts. The target was dead, but that isn’t always the case. The Hellfire missile only has 12 pounds of explosives, so making sure the target is in the “frag pattern,” hit by shrapnel, is key.

As the other Reaper flew home to refuel and rearm, Spade stayed above the target, watching as villagers ran to the smoldering motorbike. Soon a truck arrived. Spade and Sparkle watched as they picked up the target’s blasted body.

“It’s just a dead body,” Sparkle said. “I grew up elbows deep in dead deer. We do what we needed to do. He’s dead. Now we’re going to watch him get buried.”

A 2011 survey from the Armed Forces Health Surveillance Center found that RPA crews suffered from “high operational stress.” Experts think long hours, shift work and combat violence are some of the reasons for the high stress level.

“Remotely piloted aircraft pilots may stare at the same piece of ground for days,” Jean Lin Otto, an epidemiologist who was a co-author of the study, told The New York Times. “They witness the carnage. Manned aircraft pilots don’t do that. They get out of there as soon as possible.”

The Air Force now has mental health teams— psychologists, chaplains, doctors, counselors—assigned to big RPA bases to help pilots and sensor operators cope. But Spade said he has no trouble compartmentalizing it. He always goes back to one of the first intelligence briefings he got at the squadron. The analysts told him the Taliban and al Qaeda was putting suicides vests on kids. His mind went to his own kids.

“I am a dad number one and I am an Air Force pilot number two,” Spade said. “You mess with innocent kids and it is not hard for me to kill you.”

But that doesn’t mean what they see in the monitor doesn’t have any impact. Spade watched once as Taliban fighters took a group of men, bound and blindfolded, and executed them in the middle of the road. There was nothing he could do. Sparkle says she cried as she watched an Afghan man drag his wife out in the courtyard and beat her. She wanted to shoot, but couldn’t, so when she does have the chance to fire, she doesn’t hesitate.

“I know what they do to their women,” Sparkle said. “If you’re going to shoot a child in the head for trying to go to school, I have no problem with you being buried before sundown. I don’t think it is something to be upset about or cry about because they would kill me in a half a second if they could.”

Muslims try to bury the dead before sunset when possible, so a big part of the BDA is watching the funeral, Spade said.

“If a lot of people show up, we know he has a lot of support in the area,” Spade said.

As they circled the blast site, Spade and Sparkle watched as about 50 people lined up in straight, long rows near the gravesite. There were about 15 people per row. It took about a half-hour. As the Afghans buried the target, Sparkle made sure the video feed was clear. The intelligence analysts would check it later for leads on new targets.

At the end of the shift, Spade and Sparkle debriefed the mission. They watched the video of the strike again. Any mistakes were talked about and rectified. Spade was happy about everything that happened except that he didn’t get to shoot.

THE DOG PARK

After the debriefing, Sparkle met some of her unit mates at a bar that serves breakfast, and one free drink to members of the military.

“It’s a place that makes you feel appreciated,” she said.

Sipping her free Blue Moon draft, she ordered bacon and eggs with sausage on the side. Her squadron mates were the only people she could talk with about the strike and stress of the job. Sparkle said her job makes it hard to be friends with women.

“You feel a little pulled back from the world because of the types of things you do and everyone else goes on with their normal life,” she said. “A lot of the time it’s hard to relate to women that just want to have lots and lots of babies and be absorbed in their stupid reality TV shows. They don’t know how hard the world is beyond our borders, the danger that their kids will have to see in the future. It makes them seem frivolous and petty. This job has made me impatient with society’s petty trifles. It opened my eyes to the horrors of the world, the fault in religion.”

Dating wasn’t easier. She dated a bar manager and a pharmacy school student, but their worlds were too different.

“You want to date a guy and they just do jobs that seem so menial,” she said. “They gripe, *****, and complain about the most trivial things. Most are still wrapped up in their idea of masculinity. They think their jobs or their money should be impressive. It just isn’t anymore. I don’t care how much weight you can lift, not a damn bit. Get over yourselves.”

She is now married to a fellow sensor.

“It’s better to have someone who understands that you can take lives and not be a monster for being OK with doing something like that,” she said.

After the brief, Spade used the hour-long drive to decompress. The drive is essentially the split between combat and daily life. By the time he pulls into his driveway, the sun is up and his house is alive with the sound of kids playing cars on the tile floor. On his way up to bed, Spade tells his wife about the busy night. Nothing classified, but enough for her to know his shift wasn’t flying circles around a building. He’ll tell her more when he wakes up for dinner. For now, Spade just wants to rest.

“If I just struck 7,000 miles away I am probably not going to retain anything,” Spade said. “You should be tremendously excited that you just did your job well and there is one less bad guy, but you should be sad that you had to take a person’s life.”

Sparkle came home to her dog, eager to head out to the park. It is a ritual for the pair, who are part of a regular dog park crew. Sparkle likes it because no one is in the military. She isn’t “Sparkle” at the dog park.

“It’s great to sit and just share a love of dogs,” she said. “They make me happy to protect a world where we can spend lavish amounts of money on recreation places for our animals. The women I met there were strong and independent… and [the dogs] give us some subject to talk about other than work. Its an easy atmosphere in which to unwind.”

Her friends know she is part of the RPA community, but they have no idea what it is like to balance her suburban life while waging war 7,000 miles from the battlefield.

“Make any strikes today?” one of her friends asked.

“If I did,” she said, “I couldn’t tell you.”

[MIKA27]

Cuba Is Intervening in Syria to Help Russia. It’s Not the First Time Havana’s Assisted Moscow.

Not for the first time Cuban forces are doing Russia’s dirty work, this time in Syria. On Wednesday it was reported that a U.S. official had confirmed to Fox News that Cuban paramilitary and Special Forces units were on the ground in Syria. Reportedly transported to the region in Russian planes, the Cubans are rumoured to be experts at operating Russian tanks.

For President Obama, who has staked his legacy on rapprochement with America’s adversaries, the entrance of Cuba into the bloody Syrian civil is one more embarrassment. Russia, Iran, and Cuba—three regimes Obama has sought to bring in from the cold—are now helping to prop up the regime of Bashar al-Assad, ruler of a fourth regime he also tried in vain to court early on in his presidency. Obama has been holding his hand out in a gesture of goodwill to America’s adversaries only for them to blow him a raspberry back in his face—while standing atop a pile of Syrian corpses.

Yet for seasoned Cuba-watchers the entrance of the Cuban Revolutionary Armed Forces into the Syrian civil war is a surprise but hardly a shock. A surprise because Cuba was forced two decades ago to curtail its military adventurism by a deteriorating economy (the Cuban military has been reduced by 80 percent since 1991).

Largely thanks to the involvement of Cuban troops in the fight against Apartheid South African in Angola in the ’70s and ’80s (not to mention the more recent medical “missions” to disaster-stricken parts of the world) Cuba has gained something of a reputation for internationalism. At one point the Cuban presence in Angola reached 55,000 soldiers, inflicting a defeat on South African forces which helped precipitate the end of apartheid. “The [Cuban army’s] decisive defeat of the aggressive apartheid forces [in Angola] destroyed the myth of the invincibility of the white oppressor,” Mandela told the Cuban leader on a visit to Havana in 1991.

In recent years Angola has lent the Castro regime a romantic penumbra which says that, for all its faults, the Cuban revolution is on balance progressive (watch the film Comandante by the ludicrous Oliver Stone to get a sense of what I mean).

Yet while everyone remembers Cuban heroics in Angola, few remember Cuban terror in Ethiopia.

Those of us who are old enough probably recall the Live Aid concert organised by Bob Geldof in 1985, put on to raise money to help alleviate Ethiopia’s worst famine in a century. 400,000 people died in the famine of 1984/85, and while many people remember the gut-wrenching television images of fly-speckled children with pronounced rib cages and distended stomachs, few know that the tragedy was largely a consequence of the policies pursued by the Communist dictatorship that ruled Ethiopia at the time—a regime propped up by Cuba and the Soviet Union.

The Russians airlifted 17,000 Cuban troops to Ethiopia over the 14 years the Dergue—the dictatorship which ruled Ethiopia—were in power. During 1977-78 it is estimated that over 30,000 Ethiopians perished as a result of the Red Terror unleashed by the Communist government. During the terror, Sweden’s Save the Children Fund denounced the execution of 1,000 children—children whom the communist regime had preposterously labelled “liaison agents of the counter revolutionaries”.

As with Stalin’s war on the kulaks in the ’30s, Ethiopia’s Marxist government embarked on its own utopian ventures in the countryside, forcing between 12 and 15 million Ethiopians into collectivized farms. According to Alexander De Waal, one of the foremost experts on the Horn of Africa, “more than half this mortality [400,000] can be attributed to human rights abuses that caused the famine to come earlier, strike harder, and extend further than would otherwise have been the case.” The Ethiopian army, reinforced by Cuban troops, prevented the distribution of food to areas of the country whose inhabitants were rumoured to be sympathetic to opposition groups.

Following Russia’s lead, Cuba’s alliance with African nationalism extended to support for the bloody regimes of Nguema Macias in Equatorial Guinea and Idi Amin in Uganda. Cuba also gave political cover to the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan—an odd position for a member of the non-aligned group of nations to take, until you consider that the Soviet Union might have limited the massive aid it sent to the island had Cuba stepped out of line.

A genuine affinity certainly exists between many of the world’s dictatorships based on a common hatred of the liberal democracies. Quickly sensing the way the wind was blowing in Tehran, the former Cuban President Fidel Castro was one of the first heads of state to recognize the Islamic Republic of Iran in 1979, informing then-Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khomeini (disingenuously for someone who had previously interned religious believers in labor camps) that there was “no contradiction between revolution and religion.” Similarly cordial relations have also long existed between Cuba and Syria, where Cuba has intervened militarily in the past. From 1973 to 1975 a Cuban tank brigade was stationed facing the Golan Heights after the Israeli victory in the Yom Kippur War. In 1985, then-Syrian President Hafez al-Assad wrote to Fidel Castro honouring the friendship between both countries as beneficial “for the two peoples in their joint struggle against world imperialism and its allies.

Ultimately, though, Cuba’s reported entrance into the conflict in Syria should be seen as the island paying new dues to its benefactor in the Kremlin. While the Obama-Castro relationship has filled the headlines in recent months, the overtures the Russian leader Vladimir Putin has been making toward Cuba have gone largely unnoticed. Last year Putin wrote off a massive $32 billion of Cuba’s debts to Russia—a 90 percent reduction in what was previously owed. Putin also pledged to assist oil exploration projects off Cuba’s northern coast and reopenedRussia’s Cold War spy base in Lourdes, south of Havana.

Putin is reportedly indignant at the U.S. for what the Russian president considers to be U.S. meddling in his country’s “backyard” in Ukraine. Putin’s generosity toward Cuba is thus an attempt to wrestle back the initiative by discomfiting the United States 90 miles off the coast of Florida. But Russia’s newfound enthusiasm for Cuba has another happy side effect: just like in old times a Russian leader can ask its Cuban padawan to get its hands dirty.

[MIKA27]

This Rifle Doesn't Need Bullets To Shoot Down Drones

Hunting quadrotors with #8 buckshot might be a valid pasttime for some people, but the US Army is looking for a little more refinement.

The device you can see being used to kill an unsuspecting quadrotor is a ‘cyber rifle’, built by the Army Cyber Institute and demoed at the Association of the United States Army Annual Meeting and Exposition.

The name is a little misleading: it’s not really a rifle: it’s a Raspberry Pi and a Wi-Fi antenna cobbled together, which takes advantage of a known security flaw with Parrot quadrotors to ‘shoot’ them down. The rifle shape, according to an interview with Popular Mechanics, is “mostly for kicks”.

The familiar shape is meant to make it easier for military brass to understand the tactical application of cyber-weapons: it’s not some overly complicated computer; it’s just “Aim. Shoot. Crash.” The utility isn’t limited to drones, either: the ACI also showed it turning off lights and opening the doors of a cute little bunker.

[MIKA27]

Star Wars: Battlefront Trailer Is Strangely...Emotional?

Get out of my head/fantasies/emotions, you relentless holiday season marketing machine.