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

[Fuzz]

A Fantastic Photo Of The F-35 Refuelling

Here’s a fantastic photo of the F-35 receiving mid-air fuel from a Boeing KC-10, taken on June 19 in Patuxent River, Maryland. It looks so tiny (and so close) to that massive tanker.

Considering all the problems the F-35 has had during its development, you sure this wasn't Photoshopped?

[MIKA27]

Considering all the problems the F-35 has had during its development, you sure this wasn't Photoshopped?

Hmmmmm.....

[MIKA27]

Ambulances Highjack Car Radios To Let Drivers Know They're Coming

Everyone knows they should pull to the side of the road when an ambulance with its blaring siren approaches. But what if you’ve got the windows rolled up, the radio blaring and can’t hear it coming?

That’s not a problem in Guayaquil, Ecuador, where the ambulances actually hijack nearby AM and FM signals to let drivers know they’re nearby.

The clever approach isn’t illegal either. A creative agency called Maruri Grey actually worked with the Radio Association of Ecuador to outfit ambulances with low-power broadcast antennas that override all AM and FM stations within a 1km radius of the vehicle. So anyone within the vicinity of the ambulance would be alerted it was coming well in advance, reducing the time it had to slow down for traffic ahead to clear.

And even though radio has been replaced by CDs and MP3 players as in-vehicle entertainment, response times for the ambulances was actually reduced by up to 40 per cent with the new system. So now we just sit back and wait for pizza delivery drivers to install their own pirate radio transmitters to guarantee a piping hot pie delivered on time.

[CanuckSARTech]

A very cool thing with that radio ambulance. There could definitely be some unique opportunities there for emergency services.

I can't tell you how many times people do stupid things while driving, let alone when we're coming up behind them with lights and sirens. Both myself and my co-workers have had people fail to yield to pull over to the right, and instead:

• turn left
  
• turn right in front of you
  
• come to a DEAD stop - in the middle of a highway
  
• try to accelerate to be far enough ahead that they don't have to get out of your way
  
• stop, start, turn left, stop, start, turn right, etc.
  
• if you're at a lighted intersection, just sit there and stare at you in the mirror, rather than get out of the way
  
• if at a lighted intersection, actually put their car in REVERSE and back up into you
  

And, last but definitely not least:

• call 911 to complain that the police car behind them is trying to run them over and not respecting their use of the road!
  

Like I said....people are stupid.

[MIKA27]

London's plan to build a Garden bridge over the Thames:

Thomas Heatherwick, designer of the London Olympic Cauldron as well as the British Pavilion at the 2008 Shanghai Expo, has unveiled renderings for a garden-filled pedestrian bridge across the Thames. Though more than £60 million in funding must still be found to make the project a reality, Heatherwick will proceed to submitting plans in the spring, and the bridge will undoubtedly benefit greatly from the support of long-time proponent Joanna Lumley (Patsy on Absolutely Fabulous):

It’s quite strange to talk of something that doesn’t exist yet, but the Garden Bridge is already vivid in the plans and the imagination. This garden will be sensational in every way: a place with no noise or traffic where the only sounds will be birdsong and bees buzzing and the wind in the trees, and below the steady rush of water. It will be the slowest way to cross the river, as people will dawdle and lean on parapets and stare at the great cityscapes all around; but it will also be a safe and swift way for the weary commuter to make his way back over the Thames. There will be grasses, trees, wild flowers, and plants, unique to London’s natural riverside habitat. And there will be blossom in the spring and even a Christmas tree in mid-winter. I believe it will bring to Londoners and visitors alike peace and beauty and magic.

The bridge will connect Temple to the Southbank with an elegant profile across the river. The heavy piers on either side of the main span only serve to emphasise the thinness of the very centre of the bridge, an effect obtained, no doubt, with help from the engineering consultant, Arup. And then there is that design touch which is so characteristic of Heatherwick: a flower blossom motif that striates the mass of the bridge and makes it seem to grow out of the river bottom (and that provided the inspiration for both the Olympic Cauldron and Expo Pavilion).

[MIKA27]

Like I said....people are stupid.

+1 - I think that must be a universal issue as all of your above happens this way also.

[MIKA27]

Voyager 1 Discovers Bizarre and Baffling Region at Edge of Solar System

Not content with simply being the man-made object to travel farthest from Earth, NASA’s Voyager 1 spacecraft recently entered a bizarre new region at the solar system’s edge that has physicists baffled. Their theories don’t predict anything like it.

Launched 36 years ago, Voyager 1 and its twin Voyager 2 made an unprecedented tour of the outer planets, returning spectacular data from their journey. The first Voyager sped out of the solar system in 1980 and it has since been edging closer and closer to interstellar space. The probe is currently out more than 120 times the distance between the Earth and the sun.

Scientists initially thought that Voyager’s transition into this new realm, where effects from the rest of the galaxy become more pronounced, would be gradual and unexciting. But it’s proven to be far more complicated than anything researchers had imagined, with the spacecraft now encountering a strange region that scientists are struggling to make sense of.

“The models that have been thought to predict what should happen are all incorrect,” said physicist Stamatios Krimigis of the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory, who is lead author of one of three new papers on Voyager appearing in Science on June 27. “We essentially have absolutely no reliable roadmap of what to expect at this point.”

The sun produces a plasma of charged particles called the solar wind, which get blown supersonically from its atmosphere at more than 1 million km/h. Some of these ions are thrown outward by as much as 10 percent the speed of light. These particles also carry the solar magnetic field.

Eventually, this wind is thought to hit the interstellar medium – a completely different flow of particles expelled from the deadly explosions of massive stars. The extremely energetic ions created in these bursts are known as galactic cosmic rays and they are mostly blocked from coming into the solar system by the solar wind. The galaxy also has its own magnetic field, which is thought to be at a significant angle to the sun’s field.

Researchers know that Voyager 1 entered the edge of the solar wind in 2003, when the spacecraft’s instruments indicated that particles around it were moving subsonically, having slowed down after traveling far from the sun. Then, about a year ago, everything got really quiet around the probe. Voyager 1’s instruments indicated at the solar wind suddenly dropped by a factor of 1,000, to the point where it was virtually undetectable. This transition happened extremely fast, taking roughly a few days.

At the same time, the measurements of galactic cosmic rays increased significantly, which would be “just as we expected if we were outside the solar wind,” said physicist Ed Stone of Caltech, Voyager’s project scientist and lead author of one of the Science papers. It looked almost as if Voyager 1 had left the sun’s influence.

So what’s the problem? Well, if the solar wind was completely gone, galactic cosmic rays should be streaming in from all directions.

Instead, Voyager found them coming preferentially from one direction. Furthermore, even though the solar particles had dropped off, the probe hasn’t measured any real change in the magnetic fields around it. That’s hard to explain because the galaxy’s magnetic field is thought to be inclined 60 degrees from the sun’s field.

No one is entirely sure what’s going on.

“It’s a huge surprise,” said astronomer Merav Opher of Boston University, who was not involved in the work. While the new observations are fascinating, they are likely something that theorists will debate about for some time, she added.

“In some sense we have touched the intergalactic medium,” Opher said, “but we’re still inside the sun’s house.”

Extending this analogy, it’s almost as if Voyager thought it was going outside but instead found itself standing in the foyer of the sun’s home with an open door that allows wind to blow in from the galaxy. Not only were scientists not expecting this foyer to exist, they have no idea how long the probe will stay inside of it. Stone speculated that the probe could travel some months or years before it reaches interstellar space.

“But it could happen any day,” he added. “We don’t have a model to tell us that.” Even then, Stone said, Voyager would not have really left the solar system but merely the region where the solar wind dominates.

For his part, Krimigis didn’t even want to speculate on what Voyager might encounter next because theorists’ models have so far not worked extremely well.

“I’m convinced that nature is far more imaginative than we are,” he said.

[MIKA27]

Racing to the Clouds in the Mad Machines of Pikes Peak

Nearly every year since 1916, over 100 of the most talented, most heroic, and most bat-****-insane drivers and riders descend on the base of Pikes Peak outside of Colorado Springs, Colorado. The goal: make it up the 12.42-mile, 4,720-foot ascent on either two wheels or four – all without flying off one of the 156 gut-punishing turns.

It's Germany's Nürburgring draped on a Colorado mountain nearly three miles above sea level. And it's one of the most phenomenal motorsports events in the world.

At this weekend's race, the cast of competitors and characters is just as diverse, but the track is anything but. What used to be a combination of tarmac stages and dirt sections has been completely paved over, which means the speeds are quicker, the times are lower, and the risk is as high as the mountain is tall.

For the second year in a row, electric racers and juiced-up motorcycles are joining their fuel-burning counterparts to stake a claim as the fastest machines to Race to the Clouds. And because oxygen starvation isn't an issue for EVs, this could be the year that electrics begin to dominate the mountain.

APEV Monster Sport E-RUNNER Pikes Peak Special

Nobuhiro "Monster" Tajima is The Man. In 2007, he decimated Rod Millen's 13-year reign at the top of the mountain when he ran his Suzuki Sport XL7 to the top of the peak in 10:01.408. Four years later, he broke his own record and finally cracked the 10-minute barrier with a time of 9.51.278 in his SX4 Hill Climb Special.

But all those wins came at the cost of hydrocarbons. So last year, Monster went electric. And it was a smoking disaster. Less than halfway up the mountain, Monster had to end his run due to a motor mishap that sent plumes of smoke into the cockpit, ending what was expected to be the coming-out party for purpose-built electric racers.

This year, the 63-year-old Monster is back with his new E-RUNNER, and is aiming to topple the 10:15.652 EV record set last year by Fumio Nutahara in an Toyota-backed electric racer. His goal: to break 9:30.

Toyota TMG EV P002

Monster has his work cut out for him, both with his car and his opponent. Toyota is back this year with the second iteration of its electric racer, with none other than Rod Millen -- multiple Pikes Peak winner -- at the helm.

The TMG EV P002 is packing 536 horsepower and a pavement-rippling 885 pound-feet of torque. That should be more than enough to eclipse the Toyota team's 10:15.652 run last year, and help set a new sector record when it runs through the oxygen-starved fourth section where most internal combustion engines are struggling to suck in sacrificial air.

Mitsubishi MiEV Evolution II

Mitsubishi isn't content with second place, which is where they landed last year behind Toyota's all-electric racer. So for 2013, it's completely redesigned the MiEV Evolution racer, and slotted two-time Dakar Rally champ Hiroshi Masuoka and six-time Pikes Peak overall motorcycle champion Greg Tracy behind the wheel.

Amazingly, Mitsubishi is using the same electric motor it employs on its insufferably underpowered iMiEV electric runabout. But it's modified the motor for higher power and more torque. Oh, and there are four of them -- two in the front and two in the rear. Combine that with Mitsubishi's fantastic (and fantastically Japanese-sounding) Super All-Wheel Control (fancy words for torque-vectoring all-wheel-drive), a brace of high-capacity lithium-ion batteries and a tube frame with carbon fiber bodywork, and it's unlike any iMiEV you'll see running through the mall parking lot with a rent-a-cop at the wheel.

Lightning

Lightning isn't out to compete. It's out to dominate.

The California-based electric bike manufacturer holds the land speed record for an electric two-wheeler, clocking 215 mph at the Bonneville Salt Flats. It's also dominated at the track, with electrically-powered wins everywhere from Laguna Seca to Le Mans. And this year, it's heading to Pikes Peak with all-time record holder and two-time consecutive Pikes Peak champion Carlin Dunne.

But more impressive than the speed, skill, and engineering is the fact that Lightning won't leave a carbon footprint on the famed mountain. Their bike is powered exclusively by solar energy, using technology developed and cribbed from SMA and Trina Solar, with lithium-ion batteries supplied by EnerDel, all of which will be the lone source of power for their electric superbike.

Yokohama HER-02

Yokohama is returning to Pikes Peak after placing fifth in the EV category in 2012. The Japanese tire company's second effort is taking the lessons learned from year's past and distilling them into a tube-framed, dual-spoilered little beastie dubbed the HER-02.

Power is provided by a 250-hp electric motor driving the rear wheels, with juice sourced by a 37 kWh lithium-ion battery pack. But despite its minimalist exterior, the HER-02 is a bit of a heavyweight, clocking in at around 2,500 pounds. But simply for shear badassness, we're hoping it lands somewhere on the podium.

Honda CR-Z Supercharged

We can all admit that the Honda CR-Z was a bit of a letdown. Or a complete snoozefest, a hatch without a clue, a triumph of marketing over innovation, and an insult the wondrous CRX that supposedly served as its inspiration.

How to fix it? It's called a "soop-er-charge-r", and along with a host of breathing mods to get more air in and exhaust out quicker, it boosts the anemic 1.5-liter four-pot to 185 hp and 169 lb-ft of torque. Add in a host of HPD suspension parts (Honda's internal pseudo-tuning division) and you've got a hybrid hatch that can finally zig, zag, and zap. Oh, and if our birdies at Honda are to be trusted, we'll be seeing the same supercharger setup for the CR-Z going on sale this fall.

OSCar eO PP01

The Japanese may be dominating the alt-powertrain space at Pikes Peak, but Latvia -- yes, Latvia -- is gearing up for a fight.

The OSCar eO PP01 (ah, the Latvians...) is making its first appearance at The Peak this year with a "tubular spaceframe" EV wrapped in a carbon fiber body. Underneath that prototype-inspired shape is a 536-hp electric motor driving all four wheels, with Baltic touring car champ Janis Horeliks slotted inside.

While this is the team's first trek to Colorado, they've got more than enough experience producing torture-tested EVs. The crew's electric off-roader has clocked more than 12,000 miles in three continents and competed in the grueling Dakar Rally.

Six Zeros

Is this sounding like fun? Think you could hack it yourself? Nathan Barker thinks so. The Australian -- with no previous professional road racing experience -- is hopping aboard his own 2013 Zero FX electric motorcycle to tackle the mountain for the first time. But he'll be in good company.

Zero is partnering with its largest dealer, Hollywood Electrics, to help Barker achieve his dreams. He'll be joined by the editor of Motorcyclist magazine, Aaron Frank, a long-time road racer; Jeremiah Johnson, a two-time TTXGP racer on a Zero S; Brandon Nozaki Miller who set three land speed records at Bonneville on his modified Zero S ZF6; and Jeff Clark, a veteran of the San Felipe 250, Baja 500 and 1000, running his own modded Zero FX. Team spirit? They got it.

Honda Odyssey

It's an Odyssey. It's a freaking Honda minivan. On Pikes Peak. Competing. Like, for real.

Honda's certifiable manufacturing team from Alabama has put together a fully-caged, twin-turbo'd V6 mom-mobile, with a fully adjustable suspension, wheels wider than a Lamborghini's and tires that could wrap the circumference of the Earth. Honda isn't giving us any details on exactly what's going on under the hood of this psychotic soccer-schlepper, but figure something on the order of 500+ HP.

Peugeot 208 T16

If there's one high-test-burning racer that we're aching to see run up the mountain this year, it's the Peugeot 208 T16.

None other than Sébastien Loeb -- nine-time World Rally Champ, with 78 rally wins and an astonishing 116 podium finishes -- will be manhandling Peugeot's return to Pikes Peak exactly 25 years after the French marque last broke the record with Ari Vatanen behind the wheel of the legendary 405 T16.

But in 2013, it's a different game.

While the 208 T16 shares some suspension and chassis architecture with the Le Mans 24 Hours-winning 908, that's where the similarities end in Peugeot's bid to dominate the mountain. They've shaved the weight of the racer down to 1,929 pounds, and then fitted it with a twin-turbocharged V6 good for an astonishing 875 horsepower -- more than a modern F1 car. Add in the massive amount of aerodynamic upgrades, and if there's any car to beat the overall record at this year's race, the Pug is it.

And if you want to see why Peugeot and Pikes Peak are synonymous in the collective minds of speed junkies, check the video below.

http://youtu.be/J-K1B4sTX4o

[MIKA27]

Cuban Evolution in Pictures:

“For centuries, Cuba’s greatest resource has been its people,” writes Pico Iyer on the Caribbean nation In the twilight of the Castro era, Cubans are finding that change brings both hope and anxiety.

With the help of local journalist Abel Gonzalez Alayon, Eskildsen photographed tobacco plantations, roadside fruit vendors, migrant workers and beachfront resorts — capturing all in the vibrant saturation of medium-format color film.

A group of youngsters in Central Havana sit on a street corner to discuss the latest news of the Spanish La Liga football league. Their hair is styled like their idols'—soccer stars and Reggaeton singers.

In route to his job as a welder, 62-year-old Carlos stops at a government cafeteria to buy cigarettes.

Cockfighting, a Cuban tradition, takes place in an anti-aircraft bunker to avoid the police. Fighting is not forbidden, but gambling, which is always present at the matches, is.

Antonio Perez Hernandez shows off his prize-winning rooster prior to a fight in Campo Florido.

Havana’s most famous street, the Malecón, as a cold front rolls in.

At his teacher's request, Rodney Cajiga, gets his hair cut in Justiz, a small town east of Havana.

Corrugated zinc sheets barely cover a grocery store.

Jesus, a fisherman from Puerto Escondido, returns from the sea. “It was a good day, despite the cold front,” he said, displaying one of the fish he caught.

Roberto, 22, is a college dropout from the East, who moved to a small cottage in Havana to farm with his father, Jorge. “My wife got pregnant and I had to support her and the child. Here I have a chance," he said

A pumpkin for sale, cut in half for clients to see it is still fresh.

Delvis Montero, 39, works seven days a week making charcoal and earns $100 a month. “I work hard so my children can go to school and never have to do this extremely hard work," she said.

Madelin, who works at a Havana boutique, hitchhikes to work each morning rather than taking the bus.

Around 7 in the evening, Cubans begin preparing dinner. Central Havana, usually crowded, look deserted.

At night, neighbors leave their doors open to let the breeze in.

Yunier Utre, 19, lives in the Teodoro Rivero settlement in Jaguey Grande, Matanzas province. He works in the mango plantations from sunup to sundown.

Tourists relax on lounge chairs at Melia Las Americas in Varadero, which is next to the only 18-hole golf course in Cuba.

The wiring for the electrical system at a tenement in Old Havana

Old Havana at dusk.

Juan Lara, 72, takes his cows to graze roughly 10 miles from his home every morning.

Juan Carlos has been a fisherman all his life. Close to 70, he keeps this cottage in the Puerto Escondido fishermen’s village. “I have a real house in my town, 20 miles from here," Carlos said.

Jaguey Grande’s Library, where students from nearby schools come every day to do their homework.

Fidel Hernandez sets fire to the bushes around the fence he just installed to keep his goats enclosed. He has taken his grandson with him, as he says that he loves to hang around his grandpa.

The growth of small private businesses, like this one in Pedro Pi, is a sign of changing times.

A woman at a telephone booth in Pedro Pi. There is only one phone in this farmer’s community, 12 miles from downtown Havana. Neighbors come to make their calls, get their messages and share gossip.

A huge concrete school building.

Ricardo Rodriguez and his wife travel 30 miles every day to the town of Ceres to buy charcoal that they later sell in the town of Cardenas, near the Varadaero resort in Matanzas province. “The profits are meager, but we survive on that," Rodriguez said

Aguedo Leon (far right), 82, goes to the cattle register in Campo Florido, Havana city, to report the birth of a calf. It is mandatory for farmers to do so immediately after the cow delivers. Failing to report a new birth can result in a $20 fine

Outside Havana, an old American car with a new Japanese engine is used as a taxi.

At the Puerto Escondido fishermen’s village, a welder repairs the carriage they use to move fish into town.

Ormiles Lores Rodriguez, 40, works as an accountant at the Grito de Baire farmimg cooperative. She says salaries have improved and employees get bonuses every three months if they meet their output quotas.

Dusk falls on Old Havana.

Despite its age, the driver claims his car can reach speeds of 100 miles per hour, thanks to its engineering that includes a mix of American, Russian, Japanese and Cuban parts.

Two young men wait to go out with a girl in Old Havana. "We dress to impress her," they said, "and we take pictures to our barber for him to know exactly what we want."

A woman prays to Yemaya, the sea goddess, on the Malecón, Havana's main esplanade.

[MIKA27]

THE POISON SQUAD: AN INCREDIBLE HISTORY

Under the authority of the U.S. government, Harvey Wiley, upper right, presided over a team of borax-eating men known as the Poison Squad.

While the kitchen in the basement of the Agriculture Department’s offices in Washington DC was unorthodox, it was hard to fault the food. The menu was wide and varied, and the chef, known only as “Perry,” had an impressive resume, including a stint as the “head chef for the Queen of Bavaria.” The chicken was fresh, the potatoes perfectly prepared, the asparagus toothsome yet not tough.

Everything was of the highest quality.

Including the poison.

At first, it was borax, a bright white mineral, finely ground, and shipped in fresh from the burnings wastes of Death Valley, CA, where it was mined. Perry hid it in the butter, until he noticed that the twelve workers who took their meals at his table were avoiding the spread. Next, he mixed it in with their milk, but they stopped drinking the milk, too, complaining that it tasted “metallic.” Finally, Perry gave up, and began packing the borax into capsules. Between courses, the diners would dutifully wash them down.

In 1902, when the group that ate at Perry’s table first convened, it didn’t have a name. Its leader, the Agriculture Department’s Chief Chemist, Dr. Harvey Washington Wiley, referred to the project as the “hygienic table trials,” but it wasn’t long before Washington Post reporter George Rothwell Brown came up with a better name: The Poison Squad.

The goal of the Poison Squad was simple: they were tasked with trying some of the most commonly used food additives in order to determine their effects. During each of the poison squads trials, the members would eat steadily increasing amounts of each additive, carefully tracking the impact that it had on their bodies. They would stop when the members started to get sick.

THE RIGHT STUFF

The human lab rats were “twelve young clerks, vigorous and voracious.” All were graduates of the civil service exam, all were screened for “high moral character,” and all had reputations for “sobriety and reliability.” One was a former Yale sprinter, another a captain in the local high school’s cadet regiment, and a third a scientist in his own right. All twelve took oaths, pledging one year of service, promising to only eat food that was prepared in the Poison Squad’s kitchen, and waiving their right to sue the government for damages -- including death -- that might result from their participation in the program.

Squad members needed a lot of patience. Before each meal, they had to weigh themselves, take their temperatures and check their pulse rates. Their stools, urine, hair and sweat were collected, and they had to submit to weekly physicals. When one member got a haircut without permission, he was allegedly sent back to the barber with orders to collect his shorn locks. Most of the squad members didn’t get extra pay for their hazardous duty: in return for their patience and obedience, they received three square meals a day -- all of which were carefully poisoned.

There was one more rule: although many of the most prominent food crusaders were women, squad members had to be men. An outspoken misogynist, Dr. Wiley was prone to referring to women as “savages,” claiming that they lacked “the brain capacity” of men. His staff was similarly inclined: when the program replaced Chef Perry with a female cook, one worker griped that ladies were not fit for cooking — or poisoning. “A woman! Tut, tut. Why the very idea!,” he reportedly said, “A woman can potter around a domestic hearth, but when it comes to frying eggs in a scientific mode and putting formaldehyde in the soup -- never.”

Wiley had other quirks. A Civil War veteran and graduate of Indiana Medical College and Harvard, he was among the first professors hired at Purdue University. He was also one of the first fired, an unfortunate turn of events that occurred when he scandalized the University administration by playing baseball and buying a bicycle -– a mode of conveyance that, in the words of one of the University’s trustees, made him look “like a monkey … astride a cartwheel.”

ONE MAN'S VISION

At Purdue, Wiley experimented with food additives, testing each chemical by, in his words, “trying it on the dog.” Soon after getting hired by the Agriculture Department, he waded into the pure food fight, pushing for federal regulation of additives. In response, high-paid lobbyists from the packing and canning industries went on the offensive, shutting down each of Wiley’s proposed bills.

To show the physical costs of food additives, Wiley designed the table trials -- and convinced Congress to give him $5,000 to fund them. Officially, the goal was to “investigate the character of food preservatives, coloring matters, and other substances added to foods, to determine their relation to digestion and to health, and to establish the principles which should guide their use."

Unofficially, Wiley hoped to use the table trials as a springboard to enact widespread food regulation.

Wiley’s first target was borax. One of the most common food preservatives in 1902, it tightened up animal proteins, giving the impression of freshness; consequently, packers often used it to doctor decomposing meat. From October 1902 to July 1903, Wiley’s squad ate it with every meal, as was demonstrated by a Christmas menu published by the Poison Squad’s kitchen: “Apple Sauce.

Borax. Soup. Borax. Turkey. Borax. Borax. Canned Stringed Beans. Sweet Potatoes. White Potatoes. Turnips. Borax. Chipped Beef.

Cream Gravy. Cranberry Sauce. Celery. Pickles. Rice Pudding. Milk. Bread and Butter. Tea. Coffee. A Little Borax.”

The Poison Squad soon became famous for its borax consumption, and Wiley became popularly known as “Old Borax.” Before long, the group determined that borax did, indeed, cause headaches, stomachaches, and other digestive pains…in addition to imparting an unpleasant flavor to food.

A LEGEND BUILDS

Borax defeated, the poison squad moved on to test other common additives, including sulfuric acid, saltpeter and formaldehyde.

One of their targets, copper sulfate, was especially disturbing: used by food producers to turn canned peas a bright shade of green, it also caused a host of health woes, including nausea, diarrhea, vomiting, liver damage, kidney damage, brain damage, and jaundice. Today, it’s commonly used as a pesticide.

Even after Wiley’s squad managed to demonstrate the negative effects of several additives, he still had to fight against the powerful food lobby. In fact, the Secretary of Agriculture himself suppressed several of the Poison Squad’s reports; the one on benzoic acid only got out because a staffer misunderstood his orders and sent it out to print while the Secretary was on vacation.

But while lobbyists could suppress Wiley’s findings, they couldn’t control newspapers, which breathlessly reported on the group’s menus and members, its poisons and their effects. Afraid that the press might trivialize his efforts, Wiley tried to stem the tide, instituting a blackout and threatening to fire any member of the squad who leaked information. This didn’t keep stories from appearing in the papers: denied access to facts, reporters printed rumors and made up elaborate tales. Eventually, Wiley relented, and began to actively publicize the squad. As he later bragged, “My poison squad laboratory became the most highly advertised boarding-house in the world.”

The Poison Squad was also memorialized in songs and advertisements (pdf). The most famous was probably “The Song of the Pizen (Poison) Squad,” by poet S.W. Gillilan, a poem that exaggerated the squad’s exploits:

On Prussic acid we break our fast;

we lunch on a morphine stew;

We dine with a matchhead consomme,

drink carbolic acid brew;

Corrosive sublimate tones us up

like laudanum ketchup rare,

While tyro-toxicon condiments

are wholesome as mountain air.

Thus all the "deadlies" we double-dare

to put us beneath the sod;

We're death-immunes and we're proud as proud--

Hooray for the Pizen Squad!

Wiley’s efforts eventually paid off. On 1906, Congress passed the Meat Inspection Act and the Pure Food and Drug Act – the first federal laws aimed at food regulation. In the process, Wiley also had to cede his bully pulpit to the biggest bully of them all: Teddy Roosevelt. Although the Pure Food and Drug Act was originally known as “the Wiley Act,” Roosevelt took full credit for its passage, leaving Wiley in the cold.

Even so, Wiley’s power grew: the Bureau of Chemistry was charged with enforcing the new law. The Poison Squad closed up shop in 1907, and Wiley left the Agriculture Department in 1912, moving on to become head of testing for Good Housekeeping. And if there was some irony in the famed misogynist becoming the public face of one of America’s most prominent women’s publications, it was only added to by the fact that, in 1911, he married Anna Kelton, a suffragette who was literally half his age. By all accounts, the pair led a happy life together: they had two sons, and were still married when Wiley died on June 30, 1930, on the 24th anniversary of the passage of the Pure Food and Drug Act. Today, they’re buried together in Arlington National Cemetery, a fitting tribute to the man who is still referred to as “The Father of the FDA.”

MIKA: The above mantra of the Death squad should probably apply at my house when my wife cooks!

[Fuzz]

Ambulances Highjack Car Radios To Let Drivers Know They're Coming

They used to use this in the Harbour Bridge Tunnel and M5 Airport Tunnel for people who were speeding. If a speeding car was detected, a general message was played over all car radios in the tunnel advising them to slow down.

Not sure if it still in use, though.

[Fuzz]

A very cool thing with that radio ambulance. There could definitely be some unique opportunities there for emergency services.

I can't tell you how many times people do stupid things while driving, let alone when we're coming up behind them with lights and sirens. Both myself and my co-workers have had people fail to yield to pull over to the right, and instead:

• turn left
  
• turn right in front of you
  
• come to a DEAD stop - in the middle of a highway
  
• try to accelerate to be far enough ahead that they don't have to get out of your way
  
• stop, start, turn left, stop, start, turn right, etc.
  
• if you're at a lighted intersection, just sit there and stare at you in the mirror, rather than get out of the way
  
• if at a lighted intersection, actually put their car in REVERSE and back up into you
  

And, last but definitely not least:

• call 911 to complain that the police car behind them is trying to run them over and not respecting their use of the road!
  

Like I said....people are stupid.

Oddly enough, you can still be fined for running a red light if you scoot ahead to give way to an ambulance. There have been several instances here in NSW where drivers received a fine in the mail from red light cameras because they scooted ahead.

It was reported recently on one of our current affairs programs. Yeah, yeah, who really believes the BS on current affairs programs....

[MIKA27]

It's Almost Worth Breaking Your Arm For This Crazy 3D-Printed Cast

Plaster casts are bulky, obnoxious, heavy, inevitably sweaty, occasionally pink. In short, they are no fun. But this 3D-printed “Cortex” cast could change all that. Sure, it looks a little like a fishnet stocking, but have you seen a old-fashioned cast lately?

A conceptual project designed by a Victoria University of Wellington graduate with the suspiciously awesome name Jake Evill, the Cortex cast is lightweight, ventilated, washable and thin thanks to its polyamide skeleton. But the bonuses aren’t all for the wearer; the material of Cortex casts could be reused, unlike plaster.

Ideally, computer software would be fed x-rays of the break and 3D scans of the limb, and would design an appropriate cast shape for fixing it up, with the cast’s densest parts concentrated around the actual break. The cast could then be printed out in pieces and assembled around the break with permanent fasteners. When all is said and done, it’d still have to be sawed off as usual.

Then there’s the matter of time. Evill explains it this way:

At the moment, 3D printing of the cast takes around three hours whereas a plaster cast is three to nine minutes, but requires 24-72 hours to be fully set. With the improvement of 3D printing, we could see a big reduction in the time it takes to print in the future.

It sounds pretty good, but I’m seeing just one problem. How are you supposed write hideous signatures in Sharpie on surfaces that skinny?

[MIKA27]

You Can Explore The Ghost Island That Inspired Skyfall On Street View

If this view looks familiar, it’s because it was the inspiration for the Javier Bardem’s cyberterrorist HQ in Skyfall. Now, you can explore the real-life island on Street View.

While none of the Bond movie was actually filmed on the island, found just off Japan’s Nagasaki Peninsula, it’s certainly clear that the researchers spent some time there. Hashima, sometimes referred to as Gunkanjima (“Battleship Island”), was once home to 5000 people — but was abandoned in 1974 when its coal industry failed. It took Google just two hours to map the place, and now you can waste a couple of minutes looking around it.

[MIKA27]

This Building By Luxe Auto Designer Pininfarina Looks Like A Ferrari

Pininfarina: you may know it as the high-end Italian firm that designs fast, expensive cars like Ferraris and Lamborghinis. Now, for the first time, its designers are branching out into residential design with a condominium in Singapore. And it looks like the cars they design.

Many architects have designed cars, including Frank Gehry, Bucky Fuller and Le Corbusier. But very few car designers have designed buildings. Pininfarina’s plan for the 104-unit, 100m high condominium quite obviously harnesses many aesthetic features of a luxury automobile. The lines of the towering red building compliment those of the body of a pricey Porsche. And the warm wooden interior of the building echoes that of a sleek woodgrain dash. For example, this is a 2006 Pininfarina Ferrari P4/5:

And this is a Maserati Birdcage 75th, a concept Pininfirina designed in 2005:

And this is a render of the building:

Either of those cars would fit right in the garage of this Singapore residence. It makes sense that a luxury car designer would design a luxury condo. Hell, the people who are buying Pininfarina-designed Maseratis would clearly be in the market for a big, showy building to call home. Now they can have the car and the condo to match.

It turns out that Pininfarina has quite the corner on the luxury living market — it’s designed not just fancy cars, but also yachts and private planes. Real rich people stuff! One thing’s for sure — these guys definitely know their audience.

[MIKA27]

Learn Something New About Boba Fett In This Star Wars Screen Test From 1978

Despite spending most of his time standing around menacingly, bounty hunter Boba Fett quickly became a fan favourite after his debut in The Empire Strikes Back. As such, his creation has been documented extensively over the years — surely we know everything there is to know about the character? Well, perhaps not, at this video clip of Fett’s first costume test shows.

According to the clip’s description, the black and white footage was captured on June 28, 1978 at George Lucas’ home. Assistant film editor Duwayne Dunham wears the costume while sound designer Ben Burtt gives viewers the royal tour.

We all know Boba Fett was armed to the teeth. What you might not know is that he was armed to the legsas well; the clip gives us a closer view of dart launchers attached to the costume’s knees. A cool idea, but one has to wander how practical such a weapon would be.

I also didn’t know the radio voice stuff was built into the suit. I always assumed it’d been added in post-production — it’s not like there’s any lip-syncing to do.

The clip is interspersed with more recent interviews with the aforementioned production staff, where they provide us with a bit of back story to the screen test. As you’d expect, it’s fascinating viewing.

[MIKA27]

Terminator Reboot Set For 2015

Depending on how you feel about the idea, the new take on Terminator is now either promised or threatened, because Paramount and production companies Skydance Productions and Annapurna Pictures have now set a June 26, 2015 release date for what is currently just called Terminator.

Yes, just when you thought 2015 couldn’t get any more crowded, along comes another big title, assuming, of course, everything goes smoothly in the manufacturing stage.

As some have already assumed, the press release makes the companies’ plan clear: this is intended as a reboot of the franchise and will be the first part of a hoped-for trilogy. But despite the reworking, Arnold Schwarzenegger will be back in some capacity, even if the release doesn’t specify what that might be (and, in truth, only mentions him as the star of the original run).

And just what does this mean for The Legend Of Conan, which sees the Austrian Oak returning to one of his other iconic characters?

Producer Fredrik Malmberg isn’t worried, even though this new Terminator news would seem to conflict with Conan’s planned schedule. "We are still developing,” he told Empire. “Arnold is excited and one good thing doesn't take away the other. Scheduling production around major stars is happening all the time."

Avatar’s Laeta Kalogridis and Drive Angry’s Patrick Lussier have been at work fashioning aTerminator script and the next step will be to find a director willing to step into James Cameron’s shoes. Speaking of which, everyone is in a hurry to get the new movies made before the rights to the franchise revert back to the creator of the whole thing..

[MIKA27]

Escape Plan Trailer Busts Out

Previously known as The Tomb, the Stallone / Schwarzenegger prison break opus recently had a name change to Escape Plan. With that, here's the first full trailer, in which we learn that Arnold has gone grey, and that Sly "hits like a vegetarian".

As you'll just have gleaned, Escape Plan sees Stallone playing Ray Breslin, theworld's greatest designer of utterly impregnable high-tec prisons, who has to beat an unbeatable system to escape after being framed for some reason or other. He's also menaced by a man with a tazer and a leather mask.

Schwarzenegger is kindly old lag Church, and Jim Caviezel is the prison's villainous warden. He should watch Lock Up and see how that turned out for Donald Sutherland. Elsewhere we've got Curtis "Fiddy" Jackson, Vinnie Jones, Vincent D'Onofrio as the prison's deputy director, and Amy Ryan as Sly's business partner on the outside, who gets to do the walking-away-from-explosion-without-looking thang.

Escape Plan is directed by Mikael Hafstrom, and washes up on these shores later this year.

[MIKA27]

Pikes Peak Hill Climb Record Smashed By Weaponised Peugeot 208

http://youtu.be/6QKdnz8i14E

Now here’s a record to be impressed by.

http://youtu.be/4EsRyhxa5Tg

Remember Sebastian Loeb and his insane Peugeot 208 T16 hill climber? Turns out that he and the Red Bull team just absolutely obliterated the unlimited class-record on the Pikes Peak Hill Climb by a whole 90 seconds.

Loeb completed the Pikes Peak climb in 8:13.878 — a monumental achievement in the weaponised Peugeot.

[MIKA27]

Over-engineered speaker cables? Nope, actual speakers:

Do you live in a bizarre, warped, Escher-style home that’s made installing a booming sound system next to impossible? The Anakonda KAN200 might look like a well shielded audio cable, but it’s actually a flexible speaker designed to squeeze into spots where traditional boxy speakers don’t fit, but still require jam pumping.

Flexible enough to even be wrapped around a pole, the Anakonda KAN200 can be mounted to curved surfaces or other irregularly shaped architecture, and up to 32 of them can be daisy-chained together to cover large spaces.

At over six-and-a-half feet long the Anakonda speakers are aptly named since installation is probably like wrestling a large snake, and at $900 U.S per section they’re actually not outrageously priced as far as high-end home audio gear goes. But unlike a real snake, let’s hope these are properly balanced so they don’t hiss.

[MIKA27]

Edward Snowden Made A Statement From Moscow Via Wikileaks

The US is still in hot pursuit of Edward Snowden, as he reportedly shacks up in the Moscow airport after leaking details about NSA surveillance activities a few weeks ago. Now he’s broken his silence (if it really is him) to post this statement via Wikileaks. Surprise, surprise: he’s upset with Obama!

Snowden denounced Obama’s alleged orders to pressure world leaders into refusing the NSA leaker passage through their territory…

On Thursday, President Obama declared before the world that he would not permit any diplomatic “wheeling and dealing” over my case. Yet now it is being reported that after promising not to do so, the President ordered his Vice President to pressure the leaders of nations from which I have requested protection to deny my asylum petitions.

This kind of deception from a world leader is not justice, and neither is the extralegal penalty of exile. These are the old, bad tools of political aggression. Their purpose is to frighten, not me, but those who would come after me.

…before saying that the US State Department’s actions have left him “stateless”…

Although I am convicted of nothing, it has unilaterally revoked my passport, leaving me a stateless person. Without any judicial order, the administration now seeks to stop me exercising a basic right. A right that belongs to everybody. The right to seek asylum.

He finishes up by saying that the US government is scared of an informed electorate…

In the end the Obama administration is not afraid of whistleblowers like me, Bradley Manning or Thomas Drake. We are stateless, imprisoned, or powerless. No, the Obama administration is afraid of you. It is afraid of an informed, angry public demanding the constitutional government it was promised — and it should be.

…signing off with his full name

Edward Joseph Snowden

Why didn’t the statement include any laughs at the expense of those journalists he put on the plane to Cuba? That’s comedy-gold right there.

What do you think of Snowden?

[MIKA27]

Lame Duck Walks Properly For The First Time Thanks To 3D-Printed Foot

Buttercup the duck was born with his left foot turned backwards, making it nearly impossible and extremely painful to walk. But now he’s waddling again with a 3D-printed foot.

Buttercup was born in a high school biology lab in November. Because of his bum foot, he was given to Feathered Angels Waterfowl Sanctuary in Arlington, Tennessee. The organisation’s Mike Garey, a software engineer, adopted Buttercup and began searching out solutions to get Buttercup walking again. He landed on 3D-modelling company, NovaCopy, which 3D-printed Buttercup a brand new webbed foot, based on photos of Buttercup’s sister Minnie’s left foot.

NovaCopy knew that traditional plastic used in a lot of 3D printers wouldn’t work because the material is too stiff. Instead, it created a mould that was used to cast a more malleable silicone foot for Buttercup. The cast is attached to Buttercup’s leg with a sheath, sort of like a flexible silicone sock. Last night, Buttercup’s adopted dad finally finished attaching the prosthetic, and Buttercup is waddling like a happy, normal duck. You can see a first look of the new foot in action in this video Garey shot last night:

Every time you think of a stupid, dinky 3D-printed toy you don’t give a crap about, just remember that there is an adorable duck out there walking thanks to the very same process.

[MIKA27]

The Cabin In The Woods Cabin Is Going To Actually Exist And It Sounds Terrifying

If you didn’t see Cabin In The Woods that was stupid of you. It’s really great. Scary, meta and pretty gutsy. And like all good things, well OK like all things, its brilliance is being exploited for a theme park attraction. But it sounds awesome. Some sort-of-not-really spoilers ahead.

Universal Orlando is adding the cabin as part of its 23rd annual Halloween Horror Nights event, which runs on and off from the end of September until November 2. Visitors do a walk through of the cabin, the Facility, and the cube cells and there’s more background on the mythology surrounding the movie. Michael Aiello from Universal says:

We are building the cabin completely. You’re going to walk through a forest to get there. You’re going into the cabin. You’re going to go into the cube cells. We’re literally taking everything we can in the film and giving you a kind of best-of montage of the film with this kind of linking story. You’re going to be in the control room when merman attacks.

Creepy, fascinating and terrifying. Sounds pretty much perfect.

[MIKA27]

Inside a start-ups plan to turn a swarm of DIY satellites into an "All seeing eye"

LOOKING DOWN FROM 500 MILES above Earth’s surface, you could watch the FedEx Custom Critical Delivery truck move across the country along 3,140 miles of highway in 47 and a half hours of nonstop driving. Starting off in Wilmington, Massachusetts, the truck merges south onto I-95 and keeps right at the fork for I-90. Then it winds its way across the width of New York State, charging past the airport in Toledo, through the flatlands of Indiana, Illinois, Iowa, Nebraska, and Wyoming, snaking down the mountain passes and switchbacks above Salt Lake City, across the Nevada deserts and over to Sacramento, then down the highway toward San Jose and off at the California 237 exit, headed for Mountain View.

Neither Jim nor Carla Cline, a married couple who take turns at the wheel, has the slightest inkling that the large wooden crate in the back of their truck might radically change how we see our world. When they finally pull into the parking lot of a low warehouse-like structure around the corner from a Taco Bell, more than a hundred engineers, coders, and other geeks who work for a startup called Skybox Imaging are there to cheer the Clines’ arrival. He and Carla delivered some dinosaur bones once, Jim tells me, leaning out the window as he idles by the curb. Elvis’ Harley too. “Never saw anything get the attention this got,” he says.

Dan Berkenstock, executive VP and chief product officer of Skybox, is in the cheering crowd, fidgeting with his half-filled coffee mug.

In worn Converse sneakers, short-sleeved blue oxford shirt, jeans, and glasses, he looks younger than most of the employees at the company he founded, which has been his passion ever since he dropped out of Stanford’s engineering school in 2009.

Berkenstock’s idea for a startup was far outside the mainstream of venture capital investment in the Valley, with its penchant for “lean” software plays and quick-hit social apps. But his company got funded nevertheless, and now Skybox has designed and built something unprecedented—the kind of once-in-a-lifetime something that makes the hearts of both engineers and venture capitalists beat faster. The Clines have just delivered the final piece: a set of high-end custom optics, which will be inserted into an unassuming metal box the size of a dorm-room minifridge.

“What would you say,” I ask Jim, “if I told you that you had a satellite in the back of your truck, and these guys were going to launch it into space?” He grins.

“I’d say that’s pretty damn cool,” he answers. “If they can get it up there.”

Data From Above

What can you really learn from 500 miles above Earth? Quite a lot, it turns out. Already, our limited commercial services for satellite imaging are providing crucial data to companies, scientists, and governments.

PARKING PATTERNS

Chicago-based Remote Sensing Metrics tracks the number of cars in parking lots to forecast retail performance.

DATA MINES

A view of the size of pits and slag heaps around a mine can allow for an estimate of its productivity.

BLEAK HOUSES

Insurance companies look at damaged property from above to validate claims and flag potential fraud.

CRUDE MEASUREMENTS

After an oil spill, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration tracks the size and movement of oil slicks.

FORTY YEARS AFTER humans first saw pictures of a blue and white marble taken from space, it’s remarkable how few new images of Earth we get to lay eyes on. Of the 1,000 or more satellites orbiting the planet at any given time, there are perhaps 100 that send back visual data. Only 12 of those send back high-resolution pictures (defined as an image in which each pixel represents a square meter or less of ground), and only nine of the 12 sell into the commercial space-based imaging market, currently estimated at $2.3 billion a year. Worse still, some 80 percent of that market is controlled by the US government, which maintains priority over all other buyers: If certain government agencies decide they want satellite time for themselves, they can simply demand it. Earlier this year, after the government cut its imaging budget, the market’s two biggest companies—DigitalGlobe and GeoEye, which between them operate five of the nine commercial geoimaging satellites—were forced to merge. Due to the paucity of satellites and to the government’s claim on their operations, ordering an image of a specific place on Earth can take days, weeks, even months.

Because so few images make their way down from space every day, and even fewer reach the eyes of the public—remember how dazzled we were when Google Earth first let us explore one high-definition image of the planet?—we can fool ourselves into thinking that the view from space barely changes. But even with the resolutions allowed by the government for commercial purposes, an orbiting satellite can clearly show individual cars and other objects that are just a few feet across. It can spot a FedEx truck crossing America or a white van driving through Beirut or Shanghai. Many of the most economically and environmentally significant actions that individuals and businesses carry out every day, from shipping goods to shopping at big-box retail outlets to cutting down trees to turning out our lights at night, register in one way or another on images taken from space. So, while Big Data companies scour the Internet and transaction records and other online sources to glean insight into consumer behavior and economic production around the world, an almost entirely untapped source of data—information that companies and governments sometimes try to keep secret—is hanging in the air right above us.

Here is the soaring vision that Skybox’s founders have sold the Valley: that kids from Stanford, using inexpensive consumer hardware, can ring Earth with constellations of imaging satellites that are dramatically cheaper to build and maintain than the models currently aloft. By blanketing the exosphere with its cameras, Skybox will quickly shake up the stodgy business (estimated to grow to $4 billion a year by 2018) of commercial space imaging. Even with six small satellites orbiting Earth, Skybox could provide practically real-time images of the same spot twice a day at a fraction of the current cost.

But over the long term, the company’s real payoff won’t be in the images Skybox sells. Instead, it will derive from the massive trove of unsold images that flow through its system every day—images that, when analyzed by computer vision or by low-paid humans, can be transmogrified into extremely useful, desirable, and valuable data. What kinds of data? One sunny afternoon on the company’s roof, I drank beers with the Skybox employees as they kicked around the following hypotheticals:

• — THE NUMBER OF CARS IN THE PARKING LOT OF EVERY WALMART IN AMERICA.
  
• — THE NUMBER OF FUEL TANKERS ON THE ROADS OF THE THREE FASTEST-GROWING ECONOMIC ZONES IN CHINA.
  
• — THE SIZE OF THE SLAG HEAPS OUTSIDE THE LARGEST GOLD MINES IN SOUTHERN AFRICA.
  
• — THE RATE AT WHICH THE WATTAGE ALONG KEY STRETCHES OF THE GANGES RIVER IS GROWING BRIGHTER.
  

Such bits of information are hardly trivial. They are digital gold dust, containing clues about the economic health of countries, industries, and individual businesses. (One company insider confided to me that they have already brainstormed entirely practical ways to estimate major economic indicators for any country, entirely based on satellite data.) The same process will yield even more direct insight into the revenues of a retail chain or a mining company or an electronics company, once you determine which of the trucks leaving their factories are shipping out goods or key components.

Plenty of people would want real-time access to that data—investors, environmentalists, activists, journalists—and no one currently has it, with the exception of certain nodes of the US government. Given that, the notion that Skybox could become a Google-scale business—or, as one guy on the roof that afternoon suggested to me, an insanely profitable hedge fund—is not at all far-fetched. All they need to do is put enough satellites into orbit, then get the image streams back to Earth and analyze them. Which is exactly what Skybox is planning to do.

THE MOST IMPORTANT THING to understand about Skybox is that there is nothing wonderful or magical or even all that interesting about the technology—no shiny new solar-reflecting paint or radiation-proof self-regenerating microchip, not even a cool new way of beaming signals down from orbit. Dozens of very smart people work at Skybox, to be sure, but none of them are doing anything more than making incremental tweaks to existing devices and protocols, nearly all of which are in the public domain or can be purchased for reasonable amounts of money by anyone with a laptop and a credit card. There is nothing impressive about the satellites they are building until you step back to consider the way that they plan to link them, and how the resulting data can be used.

Berkenstock, John Fenwick, and Julian Mann first teamed up as grad students at Stanford to compete for the Google Lunar X Prize, which promised $20 million to the first group of contestants that could land a rover on the moon and send back pictures. The stock market crash of 2008 killed their funding, but the germ of the Stanford team’s idea—to use cheap off-the-shelf technology in space and make money doing it—stuck with them, and they hit on the idea of building imaging satellites along the same principles. “We looked around at our friends and realized that we knew this unique group of people who had experience building capable satellites at a fundamentally different price point,” Berkenstock says. “The potential was not just to disrupt the existing marketplace—we could potentially blow the roof off it and make it much, much larger.”

The idea was to start with a CubeSat, a type of low-cost satellite that aerospace-engineering grad students and DIY space enthusiasts have been playing with for more than a decade. The CubeSat idea began in 1999, when two engineering professors, looking to encourage postgraduate interest in space exploration, came up with a standard design for a low-cost satellite that could be built entirely from cheap components or prepackaged kits. The result was a cube (hence the name) measuring 10 centimeters on each side, just large enough to fit a basic sensor and communications payload, solar panels, and a battery. The standardized size meant that CubeSats could be put into orbit using a common deployment system, thus bringing launch and deployment costs down to a bare minimum that made it feasible for a group of dedicated hobbyists in a university lab or even a high school to afford. All told, a CubeSat could be built and launched for less than $60,000—an unheard-of price for getting anything into orbit.

The first CubeSats launched on June 30, 2003, on a Russian rocket from the Plesetsk site, and entirely transformed the world of amateur space exploration. A group of Stanford students worked with a private earthquake-sensing company to put up something called Quakesat, which aimed to measure ultralow-frequency magnetic signals that have been associated by some researchers with earthquakes. One team sponsored by NASA sought to study the growth of E. coli bacteria. (True to form, the NASA team reportedly spent $6 million on its first CubeSat mission.) Other teams launched CubeSats to study and improve the CubeSat design itself. The concept proved to be so simple and robust that a website called Cubesatshop.com sprang up to help even the laziest team of grad students build a cheap satellite of their very own: Just click on each of the tabs (Communication Systems, Power Systems, Solar Panels, Attitude Control Systems, Antenna Systems, Ground Stations, CubeSat Cameras) to order the necessary parts.

Skybox headquarters and staff in Mountain View, California.

AFTER 10 YEARS of CubeSat experimentation, it was left to Berkenstock, Fenwick, and Mann to realize that the basic principles of DIY satellite construction might be put to extremely profitable use. As the three men saw it, massive advances in processing power and speed meant not only that they could build a Sputnik-type satellite from cheap parts but that they could pack it with computing ability, making it more powerful than Sputnik could ever be. By extending the craft beyond the CubeSat’s 10-centimeter limit to roughly a meter tall, they could expand the payload to include the minimal package of fine optics able to capture commercial-grade images. Sure, it would be significantly heavier: Whereas the smallest CubeSat weighs 2.2 pounds, the Skybox satellite would weigh 220 pounds. But Skybox’s “MiniFridgeSat” could use software-based systems to relay imagery and hi-def video back to Earth, where large amounts of data could be stored and processed and then distributed over the web.

Mission control—someday.

When Mann and Berkenstock first brought up this idea with Fenwick—a spectral guy with a shaved head who vibrates at a Pynchonesque level of intensity—it turned out that he knew a lot more about satellites than they did. One of his jobs before Stanford had been as a liaison in Congress for the National Reconnaissance Office, the ultrasecret spy agency that manages much of America’s most exotic space toys. A graduate of the Air Force Academy and MIT, he took the job at the NRO after a series of laser eye surgeries failed to qualify him as an Air Force pilot. Even if Fenwick couldn’t talk about everything he knew, he could help do the math and hook the team up with other smart people. More important, he understood not just the value the US government might see in Mann and Berkenstock’s idea but also the threat. When I ask him whether his government experience came in handy in helping to design and build Skybox, he pauses and raises a hand to his head. “Every day I bite my tongue so I don’t go to jail,” he says, quite seriously.

Soon, in a Stanford management class, the three founders met the woman who would become their fourth—Ching-Yu Hu, a former J.P. Morgan analyst with experience in crunching big data sets—and together they wrote up a business plan. The four enrolled in Formation of New Ventures, a course taught by Mark Leslie, founder of Veritas Software. Leslie was impressed enough to get in touch with Vinod Khosla, of Khosla Ventures, who handed them off to Pierre Lamond, a partner of his at the firm. Lamond had been given a $1 billion fund to invest, roughly a quarter of which was supposed to go to “black swan” science projects—the sorts of ideas that would probably fail spectacularly but might pay off big, and at the very least would be fun to talk about at dinner parties. And sure enough, Lamond, who served as an intelligence officer in the French army before coming to California and ran half a dozen Silicon Valley companies over the past four decades, gave Skybox its first $3 million.

WITH THE MONEY, what had been a space company of young outsiders soon got a serious injection of Big Aerospace expertise. Worried about future fund-raising, Lamond soon felt (to Berkenstock’s huge disappointment) that Skybox needed an experienced CEO. So he brought in Tom Ingersoll, a former McDonnell Douglas executive who had left to start a ground-operations outsourcing firm, Universal Space Network, that sold its services largely to NASA and the Defense Department. Ingersoll, in turn, recruited a host of scientific advisers who had spent their lives in the traditional aerospace industry and government-sponsored big science programs.

Chief among these advisers was Joe Rothenberg, who ran NASA’s human space exploration programs and the Goddard Space Flight Center. Rothenberg’s leadership of the effort to fix the Hubble Space Telescope had made him a legend in the small fraternity of men who ran America’s space programs back in the days when they spent real money. When I first met Rothenberg, it was hard to understand just what he was doing there—despite the fact that he had no stake in the company, Rothenberg was working at Skybox two full weeks a month, looking for bugs in its systems. I soon realized that, to my surprise, he was there not to get rich but to help revolutionize space exploration.

Today’s NASA, Rothenberg freely admits, has failed to build and maintain the qualified workforce it needs, “and a large fraction of them, quite frankly, are aging people who should be retired or in different jobs.” Rothenberg looks at the young software engineers at Skybox and sees that they think in a fundamentally different way about how to solve problems, and he wants NASA to take note. “If you took somebody my age, 50 to 70,” he says, “then took these guys and gave them the same mission, you’d get two totally different spacecraft. And the price difference between them would be 10 to one.” The possibility that Skybox might serve as a model for a different way of doing things in space is a big reason why Rothenberg is there.

The Washington pedigrees of old heads like Rothenberg and Ingersoll might also come in handy. The disruptive threat that Skybox poses to the space-based commercial imaging market might also annoy some powerful people in the US government who could deny the company licenses, seize its technology or bandwidth, and place restrictions on the frequency and users of its service. Skybox has come as far as it has, Fenwick says, because the right people in Washington can see the use of its service. “If the wrong person gets pissed, they’ll shut us down in an instant,” he admits.

On one recent trip to Washington, Ingersoll says, a high-ranking government technologist warned him that “the antibodies are starting to form.” On the same trip, a senior Defense Department official took him aside and counseled, “You better be thinking about the role you want the government to play in your company.” To avoid any military-industrial squelching of its technology before launch, Skybox has loaded up on advisers and board members with high-level defense connections, including Jeff Harris, former president of Lockheed Martin Special Programs, and former Air Force lieutenant general David Deptula, who captained the Air Force’s use of drones and who may see similar utility in a constellation of cheap satellites sending back timely video from above Earth’s trouble spots. In the end, the government will likely commandeer some of Skybox’s imaging capabilities under terms similar to those imposed on other vendors. But Skybox feels confident that its network will be so wide and so nimble that there will be plenty of images—and data—left over for everyone else.

Building SkySat-1 in the clean room.

THE SKYBOX CLEAN ROOM, where the company’s first satellite, SkySat-1, is being made, is a Plexiglas-walled rectangle the size of a suburban living room; it’s also a place where any precocious 10-year-old with a few years of model-rocket experience might feel immediately at home. Fred Villagomez, a technician in his midforties, sits at one of three stations at a workbench examining the payload antenna feed through a pair of protective goggles and making small adjustments with an X-Acto knife. To the right of his work area is a bottle of acetone, of the kind that any mildly advanced basement model-builder might use to remove excess globs of glue. At the end of the bench are three surplus movie lights, which he is using to test solar arrays.

To an outsider’s eye, there is something sweet and almost cartoonlike about how Skybox is hand-producing homemade satellites with a hobby knife, all in an effort to launch a multibillion-dollar business. Before coming to Skybox, though, Villagomez worked at Space Systems Loral, which produces high-end space behemoths on classified budgets. Kelly Alwood, the satellite’s project manager, also worked at Loral after graduating from Stanford, and before that at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab. Her boss, Mike Trela, who oversees both the satellites and the launches, worked at the space program lab at Johns Hopkins.

Ronny Votel, who looks like a blond USC frat boy minus the letter jacket and who codes in a graphic environment called Simulink, wrote much of the early part of the software that will help the satellite track objects on the ground and manage large-angle maneuvers. He met Berkenstock at Stanford and was the second person hired after Skybox received its initial $3 million in funding.

“My first month on the job, I was vetting out telescope and optics packages,” he recalls. “I had no training in optics. But we knew the math and how to order a book off of Amazon and how to write code and do sanity checks. I think it was fear that drove us to do a good job.” The ground software alone will have 200,000 lines of original code, of which approximately 180,000 are already written.

That focus on software permeates Skybox’s business. Take the cameras: Compared with most satellites, they are cheap, lo-res, unsophisticated. “One of the image-processing guys once joked that the images from the satellite are equivalent to those from a free cell phone that you would have given away in Rwanda,” says Ollie Guinan, Skybox’s VP of ground software. But by building homegrown algorithms to knit dozens of those images together, Skybox can create “one super-high-quality image where suddenly you can see things that you can’t see in any one of the individual pictures.” That focus on off-board processing means less work has to be done in the satellite itself, allowing it to be lighter and cheaper. “Think about your iPhone,” Ingersoll explains to me during my second visit. “There was a time you had a phone, a Palm, a PC, and also a camera. Now the computing capability has improved to the point where it is fast enough, with a low enough power, at a low enough price, that you can integrate these functions into much smaller packages at a much lower cost.”

Guinan is a black-haired Irishman who grew up poor and spent nearly a decade working in the Valley on visas with short-term expiry dates before eventually landing a good job at Yahoo. When he fled for Skybox, he took five of his best engineers with him, as well as a healthy respect for the elegant and powerful architectures that can wring information and intelligence from good enough hardware. The more emphasis the design team placed on software, the smaller and cheaper the hardware became—and the less power the satellite required, which helped with the rest of the design, mainly by making it possible to carry a high-enough-quality optics package at a ridiculously low weight.

Skybox also found ways of piggybacking on other people’s technology. The image-reception system is built on top of a satellite TV broadcast protocol, the same one that allows DirecTV signals to get through an electrical storm or heavy rain. “They’ve put hundreds of millions of dollars into building these systems and making them as perfect as they can be,” Guinan points out. “We took advantage of that.” This means that Skybox will be able to use a 6-and-a-half-foot antenna to reach a dish the size of a dinner plate on the SkySat instead of the much more expensive, 30-foot antenna that commercial satellite-image companies typically require.

BETWEEN NOW AND THEN, the real question is whether Skybox’s VCs will be able to fund the company long enough to get SkySat-1 into space. Eight months after the satellite was complete, the team is still waiting for its launch provider, the Russian government, to deliver it to orbit. “The one piece of advice we got from everybody who came in here was ‘Oh, don’t worry about the launch vehicle,’” Berkenstock says with a wry look. After dallying with Elon Musk’s SpaceX, the company decided to go with the far less expensive Russian plan, which would launch SkySat-1 on a decommissioned Soviet ICBM.

It was only after signing the agreement and paying part of the cost of the berth that Skybox discovered the catch: The actual launch date depends on both the Russian defense ministry and the office of president Vladimir Putin signing off. That paperwork has stalled in the Russian bureaucracy, and so the former Soviet ICBM has remained in its silo—and the Russians have no intention of giving Skybox its money back. But in May, the Russians finally approved the launch. The team is cautiously optimistic about a September date, with a second satellite heading up perhaps four months later.

For now, the would-be kings of space are forced to wait. One afternoon, Guinan takes me upstairs to see where the Skybox team will sit when the first satellite finally launches. “The NASA guys came around and said, ‘You need more than a closet for an operations room,’” he says, as he shows me around the half-finished setup, which looks like something between a Monday Night Football broadcast booth and the floor of a call center.

As he shows me where the launch will be broadcast and where the racks of servers will go, it’s obvious that his heart lies not in space but here on Earth, where he will stitch together the images as they flood in. In its own weird way, this vision of the future is just as inspiring as sending men to the moon. Yes, Skybox is planning to put the equivalent of cheap cell phone cameras into space, to beam the pictures down via something that is more or less DirecTV, to use cheap eyeballs to count cars or soybeans or whatever someone will pay to count. But the data those cameras provide might save the Amazon basin or the global coffee market—the uses are thrillingly infinite and unpredictable.

Yes, it takes astronauts to plant flags on the moon. But what the Skybox team has built is effectively a new kind of mirror, reflecting the entire planet in a continuous orbital data stream that will show us to ourselves in new and useful ways. Provided, of course, that they can get it off the ground.

[MIKA27]

The real 'Hurt Locker': Photographs show the moment bomb disposal expert defuses device strapped to bomber's chest

In a scene reminiscent of the Oscar-winning film The Hurt Locker, images have emerged of a bomb disposal expert, dressed head-to-toe in protective gear, defusing a bomb strapped to a man wearing a suicide vest in Afghanistan.

The remarkable images show a member of the Afghan bomb disposal unit approaching the potential suicide attacker and calmly diffusing a device strapped to his chest.

According to reports the man was captured by security services before he was able to detonate the bomb in Jalalabad earlier today.

The soldiers that captured the man tied his arms around his back in order to prevent him from setting off the device.

It was also reported today that Afghan forces stopped another potential suicide attack in Kabul when a man dressed in uniform was shot dead.

The US is currently trying to revive a stalled peace process in the country ahead of the withdrawal of 100,000 Nato troops next year.