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

[MIKA27]

IT worker accidentally broadcasts Bald Nun porn on giant electronic Billboard:

Normally, the worst-case IT screwups involve lost data and a £100 million bill for the NHS. But in this spectacular case, an over-worked and under-loved IT repairman accidentally broadcast 10 minutes of bald nun antics onto China’s equivalent of Picadilly Circus.

According to Phoenix News (and Google Translate), the poor guy was living in the building the billboard was attached to, to save on commuting times or something. At the end of a long and stressful day, and forgetting that his laptop was still hooked up to the big screen, he put on some relaxing soft-core nun porn.

[MIKA27]

The Turbine-Powered, Chevy Volt of Airliners Looks Fantastic

The European airline industry has seen the future of aviation. It’s sleek and organic, carries a sextet of turbines, and its powertrain works a lot like the Chevrolet Volt.

The European aerospace consortium EADS has recently shown everything from its largest airliner, the Airbus A380, to its latest electric airplane idea, the E-Fan. But tucked inside the company’s huge chalet at the Paris Air Show was a small model where the two concepts meet — in 2050.

The E-Thrust project is part of the EADS Innovation Works program, a partnership with engine maker Rolls-Royce. The two companies are looking at ways to meet the European Commission’s future vision of air travel, which includes dramatic reductions in emissions and noise.

Like the NASA turboelectric distributed propulsion research project (TeDP), the EADS distributed electrical aerospace propulsion project (DEAP) uses a serial electric hybrid system to power the airliner of the future.

Electric airplanes like the E-Fan, the long range Solar Impulse, or Chip Yates’ electrified Long-EZ all point to an ending where either range, speed or payload (often all three) are sacrificed for the ability to fly on pure electric power.

The idea behind the E-Thrust is to use several electrically driven fans to provide the thrust, but the power supply will be a gas-turbine engine employed during cruising when it just needs enough juice to stay in the air. When it needs more power — during takeoff and climbing — an “energy storage system,” (aka batteries) will provide an additional source of grunt for the fans.

As a starting point, the EADS concept has two banks of three electric fans tucked into the wing roots of the airplane. Because they can be much smaller than the fan-jet engines of today, they don’t have to hang from the wing, and are instead placed where they create less drag, and can also re-energize the air out the back reducing drag from the airplane’s turbulent wake. A single turbine engine in the tail ingests boundary layer air from the top of the fuselage in an effort to further reduce overall drag.

In many ways the E-Thrust concept is an electric deconstruction of current jet engine technology. Unlike the early days of jet aircraft, today’s airliners only get a fraction of their push from jet thrust. Most of the propulsion is provided by the giant fan at the front of the engine, which accelerates air just like a propeller.

These high bypass ratio fans are powered by the jets, and there’s no reason they couldn’t be powered by electricity instead. But since batteries are impractical in their current form as the sole energy source, you need an alternative supply to provide the majority of the power. So like Chevrolet has done with the Volt, EADS will use a relatively small jet engine as a generator to power the fans and charge up the batteries during cruise. With power reduced during the descent, the windmilling electric fans could recharge the batteries on the airplane, providing a small amount of regenerative energy — or in car terms, “regenerative braking” similar to how hybrid-electric cars recoup energy when braking.

The fact that the E-Thrust on display in Paris was simply a plastic display on a podium is a clear indication that it’s still a long way from taking to the skies. Both the DEAP system from EADS and NASA’s TeDP rely heavily on superconducting motors to provide the electrical power needed for flight, without the massive amounts of heat that would be generated by standard electric motors.

We don’t expect to see an E-Thrust airliner — or a TeDP plane from Boeing — anytime soon. But both ideas show promise and could spawn a concept that isn’t destined to vaporplane limbo.

http://youtu.be/GlqX4m0R6E8

[MIKA27]

Shocking video shows doctor punching patient in head and chest as he lies strapped to bed

Andrey Votyakov is seen hitting the man in the face and punching him in the chest while he is strapped to a bed

http://youtu.be/IMNnB4OWBgU

Shocking footage has emerged of a Russian anaesthetist punching a helpless heart patient as he lay strapped to a bed in intensive care.

Andrey Votyakov is seen hitting the man in the face and punching him in the chest while he is strapped to a bed.

The man later died at the Federal Centre for Cardiovascular Surgery in Perm, a city in the Urals, although his death is not believed to be linked to the attack.

The highly-regarded anaesthetist said he had punched the man when tired after a 36-hour shift.

The doctor became angry after the patient started abusing him.

According to reports Votyakov told Russian media: "As soon as I came into the room with my team he started to call me various derogative names. And I just got blown away by it.

"We had spent so much time with his very complicated case to help him recover and he said not a single word of gratitude.

"And then the chronic tiredness added to it. I got carried away, and I punched him several times at the presence of my colleagues.

"We continued the treatment after the incident, but sadly the patient died.

"I am very sorry for what happened and I want to apologise first of all to the patient himself and his family."

[MIKA27]

South Australian Cops To Use Drones For Bad-Guy-Chasing Activities

That’s right: South Australia has jumped on board with policing-by-drone, buying several UAV drones at around $200,000 a pop (including licensing, training, etc).

The tender process for the drone program is out there right now, according to the Adelaide Now, and it details how the SA Police are after drones with video, infrared and still cameras for chasing bad guys.

South Australia seems likely to join the ranks of the drone-based surveillance forces, including Customs, which plans to spend on autonomous drones to patrol the coastline for illegal fishing vessels.

[MIKA27]

Take An Eerie Tour Of America's Creepiest Ghost Towns

There are plenty of things that can make a ghost town, from dam projects, to nuclear disaster. The folks over at BuzzFeedVideo put together a rundown of some of America’s finest — and most unsettling — from a town built on a hellish inferno, to a city buried beneath Seattle.

So take a look, and appreciate the ruinous beauty. But the next time you run into your neighbours, maybe take a second to appreciate living around other human beings, too.

[MIKA27]

NSW Scientists Detect Massive, Unexplained Deep Space Explosions

Space is gigantic, so even though we have giant dishes trained to listen to it, we only hear a tiny slice. But scientists manning the Parkes radio telescope in New South Wales stumbled on a few blips worth hearing: four mammoth radio blasts that came from far outside the galaxy.

It’s not uncommon to heard the pop and hiss of radio signals when you’ve got huge dish pointed at the sky, but most of those tiny noises originate from somewhere in the Milky Way. “Close” by interstellar standards. These signals, which actually reached Earth between February 2011 and January 2012, had travelled a much longer way; scientists calculated that all four ploughed through much more plasma than is even contained in our Milky Way. And they were loud too; each packed energy roughly equivalent to what the sun puts out in 300,000 years.

What caused them is unknown, and considering each was mere milliseconds long, there’s not too much to study. Scientists still have their guesses though, which include colliding magnetars — magnetically charged neutron stars — evaporating black holes or gamma ray bursts. You know, big stuff.

Although it’s our first time hearing bangs from so far away, it’s probably not that uncommon; there’s just only so much of the sky you can listen to with satellites. Scientists have extrapolated that we’re missing some 10,000 similar bangs every day. If the aliens every decide to say high, let’s hope we get lucky and actually hear it.

[MIKA27]

What Caused the Boeing 777 Crash? Here’s What We Know So Far

Details are beginning to emerge as to the cause of the Asiana Airlines crash, which killed two and injured 182 on Saturday at San Francisco International Airport

On Sunday, the National Transportation Safety Board began the long process of determining what went wrong on Saturday when Asiana Airlines Flight 214 crashed upon landing at San Francisco International Airport, killing two people and injuring 182.

The NTSB’s “Go Team” assembled early in the morning to begin the first part of their investigation into the cause behind the devastating crash. Nothing — including pilot error — has been ruled out, according to investigators. Both black boxes have been recovered and sent to the NTSB lab in Washington for analysis.

NTSB Chairman Deborah Hersman said in a press conference on Sunday afternoon that the voice recorder showed that the jetliner attempted to abort its landing and come around for another try 1.5 seconds before it crashed at San Francisco airport. The recorder also showed that there was a call to increase airspeed roughly two seconds before impact, which was the first indication that the plane was having problems.

Hersman told CNN earlier in the day that the internal damage to the plane iss “really striking,” and investigators were thankful there weren’t more deaths.

Yoon Young-doo, president of Asiana Airlines, said in a press conference on Sunday that the company believes there was no engine defect.

While details regarding the plane’s landing have yet to be confirmed, video and flight tracking software show that the tail of the aircraft slammed into the edge of the runway first and broke off, sending the fuselage skidding on its belly, where it stopped just left of the runway and erupted in a ball of flame and smoke. The Daily Beast has a detailed report of the path and subsequent destruction of the plane after it landed, but all indications are that the aircraft was intact when it reached the runway.

Aviation expert and former pilot Jim Tilmon told CNN that it appeared that the pilot came in too low and pulled up too late. “For whatever reason, the pilot did not have enough power available to correct the rate of descent that brought him into contact with the ground before he wanted to be there,” Tilmon said.

According to a FAA bulletin, airport technology called the Instrument Landing System, which helps pilots correctly approach the runway, was not operating at the time of the crash. However, Kevin Hiatt, chief executive of the Flight Safety Foundation, told NBC News that airports commonly take this system offline for maintenance on clear days. Indeed, San Francisco had ideal flying conditions on Saturday.

NBC News says that the pilot did not make a distress call before landing. Audio recording of the pilot’s conversation with the flight tower confirms this.

Asiana officials say the pilot was a veteran, who has been flying since 1996. Hersman said they hope to interview the aircraft’s crew within the next few days. They will be evaluated by a special team with the NTSB to determine whether a range of factors may have affected their performances — from fatigue to depth of experience.

Many experts are speculating if the cause of Saturday’s crash was similar to the incident with British Airways Flight 38 — also a 777 — which landed short of the runway at London’s Heathrow Airport in January 2008. That investigation concluded that the hard-landing was caused by ice that had gathered in the fuel system of that plane’s Rolls Royce engine. But Larry Rooney, veteran pilot, NTSB-trained accident investigator and executive vice president of the Coalition of Airline Pilots Association was cautious to link the two.

“One of the things they taught us in accident school is to never fall in love with a theory, the thing that you think [is the cause] at the onset might not be,” Rooney told TIME, adding that even the same model of plane could have one of several types of engines manufactured by different companies. And at this point, only the Rolls Royce engine has been known to have an issue with fuel icing.

But if it wasn’t ice, what did cause a seemingly normal flight to turn deadly? Investigators hope that the data they uncover from the black boxes, in correlation with interviews with the crew, will help them determine what happened so that they can prevent similar incidents in the future.

[MIKA27]

World's Largest Freshwater Turtle Nearly Extinct

The last known pair of Yangtze giant softshell turtles mated again in June.

The fate of a species is resting on the shells of two turtles at China's Suzhou Zoo.

In June, researchers collected eggs from the last mating pair of the critically endangered Yangtze giant softshell turtle (Rafetus swinhoei) in the hopes that at least one will be fertile.

The 220-pound (100-kilogram) freshwater giant, which spends most of its life burrowing in mud, was once common in its namesake Yangtze River, China's Lake Taihu and Yunnan Province, and parts of Vietnam.

By the late 1990s, however, human encroachment and poaching for use of the shells in Chinese traditional medicine rapidly depleted the population. Now, a total of four animals are known—two wild males in Vietnam and the mating pair at Suzhou Zoo.

It's the team's sixth year of breeding the turtles at the zoo, which is not far from Shanghai. So far, none of the eggs have hatched.

Researchers can't pinpoint the reason for the infertility, but they suspect a combination of factors, including poor sperm quality due to the male's age—roughly a hundred—an improper mating posture, and stress on the female.

Because the turtles are the last in captivity and too much human interaction could kill them, sperm samples cannot be taken nor tests run. Still, scientists are hoping that this year will be the lucky one.

"The resurrection of this iconic species in the wild, the largest freshwater turtle in the world, would be a symbol of hope," said Gerald Kuchling, founder of the Australia-based group Turtle Conservancy and a turtle-reproduction expert.

"Miraculous" Find

As is the case with many near-extinct species, by the time scientists realized the extent of the turtle's decline, the species was almost gone.

In 2006, the U.S. nonprofit Turtle Survival Alliance asked Kuchling to establish the sex of the last three captive giant softshell turtles in China, which at the time lived at the Shanghai Zoo, Suzhou Zoo, and Suzhou's West Garden Buddhist Temple.

When Kuchling landed in China in 2007, the Shanghai Zoo and Buddhist Temple individuals had already died. The Suzhou Zoo male was the last known Chinese survivor. Researchers sent an all-points bulletin to every zoo in the nation in the off chance a turtle had been misidentified.

Their call was answered: A photograph of a turtle at the Changsha Zoo looked promising. Kuchling, along with Lu Shunqing, China director for the Wildlife Conservation Society, traveled to Changsha, where they confirmed it was a Yangtze giant softshell—and a female to boot.

"It's a bit miraculous we found her," said Emily King, the Suzhou Zoo breeding program's field assistant.

Breeding Roadblocks

Although moving the Changsha Zoo's female—the younger of the pair at then 80 years old—to the Suzhou Zoo was risky because of the stress it would cause the animal, zoo officials and researchers had no choice.

Surveys in the wild consistently had turned up no Yangtze giant softshells aside from the two males already known in Vietnam. These individuals haven't been captured because catching and transporting them could be fatal.

Either the Suzhou Zoo pair would mate, or the species would go extinct.

In May 2008, after much red tape, the female finally arrived in Suzhou. Just over a week later, the turtles mated-despite the fact that the female had likely never met a male.

A month later, the female laid her first clutch of 45 eggs on the zoo enclosure's beach, 32 of which were incubated.

To determine if an egg is fertile, the scientists candle them, or hold a candle behind the egg to look for a developing embryo.

The initial batch yielded no hatchlings. Later that month, a second batch was equally infertile.

The turtles mated each of the following years, but with the same result.

Di Min, a zoologist at the Suzhou Zoo, said when the program started there was talk about assisted reproductive techniques, a kind of "turtle IVF."

"But the best and safest is they breed naturally. There's only this pair—if we lose one, especially the female, we don't have any chance."

The team doesn't know how much longer the zoo turtles will live or continue to mate, but scientists suspect Yangtze giant softshells can live well over a hundred years.

Turtle Team Optimistic

Despite these setbacks, scientists are staying optimistic about saving the turtle.

"We have these two [suzhou] animals, and hopefully in the very near future, as opposed to far distant, we'll have baby Rafetuses on our hands," added field assistant King.

"In one shape or another, the program will go on, because everyone is invested in having this species continue."

[MIKA27]

The Most Extreme Foods People Eat Around The World

From fresh, crunchy locusts to eggs hard-boiled in urine, cultural ideas about what constitutes a delicacy vary drastically by region.

But the world is getting smaller, and ideas about what’s acceptable to eat are changing. The U.N. recently told people to suck it up and learn to eat bugs, which are filled with protein and fibre.

And in the wake of the January’s horse meat scandal in the U.K., many people wondered aloud: Why don’t we eat horses when we eat cows and other similar mammals?

Here are 14 amazing pictures of some of the most extreme cuisines from around the world, and it turns out that people living in Western nations are pretty picky when it comes to what they will and won’t put on their plates.

Be warned: Some photos are not for the faint of heart (or stomach).

A butcher in Bolivia slices into a boiled sheep's head. Sheep's head soup is a popular dish in Bolivia.

A worker cuts up a roasted cat in the back room of a restaurant in the Ivory Coast. Cat meat is a traditional food in much of Africa and Asia.

Turtle meat is sold at a market in a Nicaraguan port town. The going rate in Nicaragua? About $1.10 per pound.

A restaurant in Yogyakarta, Indonesia features a burger made of cobra meat. About 1,000 cobras are caught in Yogyakarta, Central Java and East Java provinces each week and are sold for their meat for around to $1.15 each.

A woman in Al Jazeera, Sudan prepares a dish with camel liver. Between 1996 and 2002, Sudan was estimated to have produced between 72,000 and 81,000 tons of camel meat each year.

Slaughtered dogs are prepared for sale in Duong Noi, a small village in Vietnam. Dog meat is a common dish in many Eastern Asian nations.

In Canh Nau, Vietnam, rats were once eaten as a last resort in cases of extreme hunger, but they're now eaten as part of a special dish prepared at the end of each lunar calendar.

A woman prepares a guinea pig for cooking in Langui, Peru. Guinea pigs are a delicacy in many parts of South America.

Snake meat is seen as part of a soup dish in China, where snake meat is a traditional part of many regional cuisines and is believed to be good for the health.

In Taiwan, cobra eggs and embryos (pictured here at a snake farm in Southern Taiwan) are eaten for good health.

A Chinese woman eats from an ox and dog penis dish at a penis restaurant in Beijing that serves over 30 types of animal penises in traditional hotpot style. In China, many animal penises are thought to have medicinal properties.

Hard-boiled eggs cooked in boys' urine are a springtime snack in Dongyang, Zhejiang province in China. MIKA: WTF!?

In Kampong Cham province, Cambodia, a vendor sells deep-friend spiders to customers at a bus station. $2.00 will get you 10 crunchy spiders seasoned with garlic.

In Lahore, Pakistan, men line up for Siri Paya, a traditional breakfast dish made of goat heads and feet.

[MIKA27]

What the Night Sky Would Look Like if Cities Went Dark

Thierry Cohen began his professional career in 1985 and is seen as one of the pioneers of digital photography. Cohen currently lives and works in Paris. Since 2010 he has devoted himself to a single project – “Villes Enteintes” (Darkened Cities) – which depicts the major cities of the world as they would appear at night without light pollution, or how they would look if we could see the stars.

According to the Danziger Gallery, which represents Cohen in the United States:

Cohen’s method is original and precise…he photographs the world’s major cities, seeking out views that resonate for him and noting the precise time, angle, and latitude and longitude of his exposure. As the world rotates around its axis the stars that would have been visible above a particular city move to deserts, plains, and other places free of light pollution.By noting the precise latitude and angle of his cityscape, Cohen is able to track the earth’s rotation to places of atmospheric clarity like the Mojave, the Sahara, and the Atacama desert. There he sets up his camera to record what is lost to modern urban dwellers.

Compositing the two images, Cohen creates a single new image full of resonance and nuance. The work is both political and spiritual questioning not only what we are doing to the planet but drawing unexpected connections between disparate locations. Equally importantly it asks: what do we miss by obscuring the visibility of stars? As the world’s population becomes increasingly urban, there is a disjunction with the natural world which both Cohen and science posit causes both physical and psychological harm. Cities that never sleep are made up of millions of individuals breaking natural cycles of work and repose. Cohen’s photographs attempt to restore our vision, and in beautifully crafted prints and images offer the viewer a possibility – to re-connect us to the infinite energy of the stars.

1. Shanghai

2. Rio de Janeiro

3. San Francisco

4. Paris

5. Tokyo

6. Shanghai

7. Sao Paulo

8. New York

9. Los Angeles

10. Hong Kong

[MIKA27]

Samsung's Latest Ad Is Mind-Bending, Bizarre And Kind Of Creepy

http://youtu.be/uhM-DuM2WgE

Ninjas. Goats. Fruit. Breakdancing. What the f**k did I even just watch, Samsung?

Here’s the latest ad for the Samsung Galaxy S4, aired in Iceland. It features a handsome man sitting in a field of boulders pondering the meaning of an actual apple. Not the phone — the fruit.

The handsome man presses, prods and swipes over the fruit, quizzically wondering why it won’t do what he wants it to do.

Presumably it’s because the apple is smarter than he is.

A shining ray of light enters the scene, however, when our Icelandic hero picks up a Galaxy S4. It’s all smiles with this thing.

In no time at all though, we’re transported to another place: an abandoned building featuring black-clad ninjas dancing around our hero…and a goat.

Seriously, this ad put me on edge. Is it selling phones or an underground art installation?

[MIKA27]

The Largest Structure Ever Built Has Opened In China

At what point does a building become a city? At 1.2 million square feet, the New Century Global centre certainly toes the line.

New Century, which has been under construction since spring of 2012 (which isn’t long, for a building of this size), opened officially on July 1. The 18-story, glass-and-steel frame structure sits above a new subway station in Chengdu, a Sichuan province city of more than 14 million and one of China’s fastest-growing megalopolises.

What will visitors find inside its glassy walls? It’s actually fairly standard, as mega-structures go: A 14-screen IMAX theatre, shops, restaurants, offices, hotels, a Mediterranean village reconstruction (duh), and finally, its pièce de résistance — a massive artificial beach that boasts realistic sunsets and sea breezes, thanks to a huge LED screen on one side. A 500,000-square-foot art centre designed by Zaha Hadid is under construction next door.

It’s not so much what New Century contains as how much of it. It’s hard to visualise numbers like 1.2 million square feet, so here are a few comparisons. You could fit three Pentagons inside its walls, or 20 Sydney Opera Houses. It’s nearly 500,000 square feet larger than the building it beat out for the title, Dubai’s International Airport Terminal 3. The largest building in the US, by comparison, is the Palazzo in Las Vegas, which comes in at #11 worldwide.

It’s worth pointing out that New Century isn’t the first megastructure of its kind, though it is the largest. Architects and planners in China are pioneering the construction of entire urban regions from scratch. The title of world’s largest structure, in that light, is really just a way for New Century’s developers to distinguish it from the pack.

[MIKA27]

Belkin Thunderbolt Express Dock Review: So Pointless, So Expensive, So Good

What the hell is this thing? Why does it cost so freaking much, and why the hell do I want it so much? I can’t explain it…

What Is It?

A massive docking station for your Thunderbolt-enabled Mac laptop.

From left to right, it’s packing an Ethernet port, a Firewire port, two Thunderbolt ports, a headphone jack, mic in and three USB 3.0 ports. All those are wrapped up in a slim, silver aluminium-coated, MacBook-esque log.

The Thunderbolt ports allow you to daisy-chain up to five Thunderbolt devices to the dock at a time. One Thunderbolt port will always be lost to connect to your Mac.

What’s Good?

This thing is really freaking handy. Odds are — unless you have a high-end MacBook Pro — you probably only have one Thunderbolt port on your Mac and more than a few adapters to use at once on it. If you want to connect to Ethernet, HDMI and/or Thunderbolt displays or storage, for example, you’re going to find yourself coming up short. That’s where this thing comes in handy.

It’s a space-saver’s wet dream, this thing, and if you’re a Mac fanboy who loves the look of your MacBook, this thing handily sticks with your sleek, silver aesthetic.

What’s Bad?

Good. God. Why is this thing so outrageously expensive?!

Before you scroll down and look at the price, take a guess how much it will set you back. $100? $200?

NOPE: $349.95

That is next-level bonkers.

Sure it’s useful, but why the hell does it cost so much?

To add insult to injury, the Belkin Thunderbolt Express Dock doesn’t come with a Thunderbolt cable to attach to your Mac in the box: you have to buy that one yourself at an additional cost of $45.

“But Luke,” I hear you ask, “why must I spend an additional $45 on a two-metre Thunderbolt cable when the 0.5-metre one will do for just $35?” Because, dear reader, the Belkin Thunderbolt Express Dock doesn’t position the Thunderbolt ports very well, so you’re left dragging the dock around your desk by your laptop anytime you go to reposition.

The Thunderbolt Dock has a nifty little divot through the middle where you can loop your Thunderbolt cable through to the other side, but it still doesn’t get you all the way to your Mac’s Thunderbolt port if you opt for the short one. It’d be way better if the second Thunderbolt port was on the front of the device. but that’s not happening here.

Also, it gets crazy hot. Not-burn-your-hand-hot, but hot enough that you’ll notice if you stick your finger on it.

Should You Buy It?

It’s clunky, it’s expensive and it’s not great value, so why do I still want to part with the better part of $400 for it? Why? Is it because Belkin has tapped into the Apple zeitgeist perfectly with this thing? Maybe. Is it because it gives me more access than I could dream of than with just my one Thunderbolt port? Probably. Is it priced at a person who has more money than sense? Most definitely.

Don’t get me wrong, if this was even $100 less and came with a 2-metre Thunderbolt cable in the box, it’d be a no-brainer. Just think long and hard before you part with your cash for one.

[Fuzz]

I've always said the first fully enclosed and self-sustaining arcologies will be built in China. This is just one more step to reality.

[Fuzz]

Belkin Thunderbolt Express Dock Review: So Pointless, So Expensive, So Good

Go PC... $50 for a 7 port USB 3 hub.

[MIKA27]

8 Inventions That Were Way Ahead Of Their Time

The jetpack, the flying car, free electricity for the world – all these ideas are way ahead of our time in the practical sense.

With time on our side, however, the idea of what’s out of our technological reach is always changing. Circuits get smaller, engines get more efficient, bored scientists find new and interesting solutions to unusual problems.

Then that cutting-edge stuff becomes commonplace and gets used as a foundation to go a little deeper, rattle a few more technological sabers.

For example, we couldn’t explain to you how a flush toilet works, but ancient Minoans were building them in 18th century BC.

Here’s a collection of this and 7 other inventions that were simply ahead of their time.

Contact lenses – 1632

Rene Descartes, the 'I think therefore I am' guy, is actually the first on record as having come up with the idea of corrective lenses in a 1632. (Leonardo da Vinci had a similar but ultimately different idea before him). Instead of using semi-sexy language like 'corrective lenses,' Descartes described them as glass tubes filled with liquid, placed in direct contact with the cornea.

Solar cells – 1883

The solar cell was first demonstrated experimentally in 1839. But Charles Fritts, in 1883, was first to build a functioning solid state version.

Vending machine – some time in the first century

Forget your Cokes and Mike & Ikes -- the first vending machine dispensed holy water. It was a device invented by Hero of Alexandria in the first century.

If anyone's especially interested in vending machines, make sure to look into its culture in Japan. Yes, it's a culture.

Military mind control – right now!

Future soldiers may be equipped withhelmets that hack their brains.

'An Arizona State University researcher...is trying to develop a military helmet equipped with technology to regulate soldiers' brains. The technology is transcranial pulsed ultrasound, which delivers high-frequency sound waves to specific regions of the brain...For example, he or she might want to be more alert after being awake for many hours or relax when it's time to catch some shuteye. The soldier might even be able to relieve stress or become oblivious to pain, eliminating the need for morphine and other narcotics.'

Mercedes Biome – right now!

This creation is so ahead of it's time that it's not even available for purchase. It's a Mercedes concept car and it sounds awesome.

'Engineers...created the car as part of the Los Angeles Design Challenge, which called for a safe and comfortable compact car of the future that could accommodate four passengers, demonstrate good handling and weigh only 1,000 pounds (454 kilograms). The BIOME represents the Mercedes-Benz vision. It is made from an ultralight material called BioFibre so that the finished vehicle, though wider than a typical car, only weighs 876 pounds (397 kilograms).'

Difference engine – 1822

Though one was never built in his lifetime, Charles Babbage proposed his idea for a difference engine, a kind of minimalist steampunk take on what a computer should do.

His ideas helped lay the foundation for the personal computers we have today.

Electric car – 1828

In 1891, William Morrison built what we today would recognise as an electric car. It carried six passengers at a top speed of 14 miles per hour.

His car was instrumental in helping drum up interest in exploring the idea of electric car as a major means of transportation.

Flushing toilets – 18th century BC

There's nothing new under the sun. A different version of the flushing toilet in your house right now dates back to 1800 BC in ancient Minoa.

[MIKA27]

Russia's Surprisingly Sane Plan To Build A Floating Nuclear Power Plant

Nuclear-powered submarines, aircraft carriers and even icebreakers have been in operation for over 50 years now with a remarkable success rate. So Russia is planning to further commercialise that technology by building a fleet of floating nuclear power plants that will provide electricity to remote areas where building a permanent reactor is either too expensive or too dangerous.

The first floating nuclear power plant is expected to be in operation by 2016. Using two KLT-40 naval propulsion reactors, it will produce up to 70MW of electricity — enough to power a city with 200,000 residents. Initially the plants will be targeted at remote operations like oil drilling platforms and the like, but they could also be used in places like Japan, where a tsunami would pose less of a safety risk if a nuclear power plant could literally ride out a storm.

The portable plants offer additional functionality too. They can be easily modified to serve as floating desalination plants, producing 240,000 cubic metres of fresh water every day. And in an extreme emergency they could help get a coastal area back on its feet by stepping in when local power generating facilities have failed.

[MIKA27]

Every Public Sculpture Should Be A Full-Size Chrome T-Rex

Every public, abstract sculpture in the world suddenly seems super lame. Why? Because right now there’s a full-scale, blinged-out Tyrannosaurus Rex standing over the Seine in Paris. Nothing will ever be the same again.

Designed and constructed by French artist Philippe Pasqua, the ‘saur is made up of 350 chrome-moulded bones and stands 4m tall and 6m long. As for why it’s there, the answer appears to be pretty simple: because it’s awesome, and because contemporary art along the Seine is good for getting tourists stoked about taking boat rides.

But whatever the reason, it’s just good to know that somewhere, there is a chrome T-Rex looming over passersby. Now we just need to put one in every city.

[MIKA27]

How A Design Trend Is Helping Prevent Wildfires In The American West

As wildfires continue to plague the American West, fire prevention is becoming more and more important. And prevention doesn’t always mean Smokey the Bear PSAs. In fact, the lumber industry has developed a symbiotic relationship with the very material feeding many of the fires.

It’s called Beetle Kill Wood, and you’ve probably seen it, even if you don’t recognise it. The blue-tinged wood is the result of the Mountain Pine Beetle, which has swarmed forests in Colorado and across the West in recent years, feasting on the pines that make up almost 10 per cent of many forests. The dead husks of trees that are left behind usually end up toppling over — and often become the dry kindling needed to feed a growing wildfire.

Figuring out a way to remove Beetle Kill Wood has been a huge topic in recent years — but it’s being made a bit easier by the growing demand for the stuff by architects from California to Colorado. According to a story on Archinect, Beetle Kill Wood is officially a trend in the design world, with architects harvesting the stuff from their own backyards and selling it for $250 per linear foot or more. In fact, there are now entire companies that specialize in the look, which is known as “denim wood” amongst designers.

It’s fascinating to see demand for a fashionable material develop symbiotically with a real — if perhaps unintentional — benefit to the public. Now how long before IKEA offers a veneer option?

The National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) campus in Colorado.

Beetle Kill panels at Proper, a restaurant in Tucson.

Beetle Kill Wood furniture by Beetle Builds.

[MIKA27]

Watch Someone Get Arrested Via Google Glass

Google Glass is incredibly amazing and slightly terrifying. It’s the future of wearable tech that also presents a challenge to the future of privacy, as this video can attest to.

On July 4, a Glass Explorer was down at the New Jersey boardwalk and watched “the tail end of a fight” before an arrest took place. The Explorer filmed the whole thing.

No context, no defence: just a crowd gathering around a heated confrontation, followed by gentlemen being led away in cuffs. This is what people are afraid of when it comes to Glass.

[MIKA27]

Solar Impulse Ends Cross-Country Flight With Tiny Little 8-Ft Wing Gash

It took two months for Solar Impulse, the little solar-powered plane that could, to make it from Washington state to New York’s JFK airport. Two months of 45mph speeds, multiple stopovers, and cursing at clouds. But after surviving all that time and distance, the flight’s triumphant finale was cut short by a torn wing.

Late night, an eight-foot tear in the underside of the Solar Impulse prompted the plane to land at 11 pm last night, instead of the originally scheduled Sunday morning touchdown. The only casualty was a planned Statue of Liberty photo op. And getting there a little earlier didn’t change the fact that Solar Impulse is now the first solar-powered plane had made it all the way across the US.

Fueled by approximate 12,000 solar cells installed on its wings, and 360 kilograms of batteries to store the excess power, the sun-soaked Swiss sailor will be seeking even bigger fish in the future; its next planned flight will take it around the globe in 2015. Hopefully they’ll be packing plenty of duct tape.

[MIKA27]

‘Holographic Duality’ Hints at Hidden Subatomic World

According to modern quantum theory, energy fields permeate the universe, and flurries of energy in these fields, called “particles” when they are pointlike and “waves” when they are diffuse, serve as the building blocks of matter and forces. But new findings suggest this wave-particle picture offers only a superficial view of nature’s constituents.

If each energy field pervading space is thought of as the surface of a pond, and waves and particles are the turbulence on that surface, then the new evidence strengthens the argument that a vibrant, hidden world lies beneath.

For decades, the surface-level description of the subatomic world has been sufficient to make accurate calculations about most physical phenomena. But recently, a strange class of matter that defies description by known quantum mechanical methods has drawn physicists into the depths below.

“I’ve grown up as a physicist just living on that flatland, that 2-D space,” said Subir Sachdev, a physics professor at Harvard University who studies these strange forms of matter. Now, there is a whole new dimension to explore, he said, and “you can think of the particles as just ending on that surface.”

Of all the strange forms of matter, cuprates — copper-containing metals that exhibit a property called high-temperature superconductivity — may be the strangest. In new research published online June 24 in the Journal of High Energy Physics, physicists at the University of California-Santa Barbara have explored the deeper phenomena that they claim are connected to the perplexing “surface-level” behavior of cuprates. By focusing their calculations on that underlying environment, the researchers derived a formula for the conductivity of cuprates that was previously known only from experiments.

“The amazing thing is you start with this theory and out you get the conductivity of these strange superconductors,” said Sachdev, who was not involved with the work.

The results bolster the evidence that this new way of looking at nature’s building blocks is real and that it is “strikingly literal,” said Jan Zaanen, a theoretical physicist at Leiden University in the Netherlands.

What’s more, the results could be seen as an unusual, indirect kind of evidence for string theory — a 40-year-old framework that weaves together quantum mechanics and gravity and is as mathematically elegant and profoundly explanatory as it is unproven.

With looming questions about the nature of dark matter, the mysterious substance thought to constitute 84 percent of the mass in the universe, and the search for a “theory of everything” that mathematically describes all of nature, researchers say the findings could have sweeping implications.

“There is a realistic chance that we will make enormous progress in fundamental physics in the next couple of years,” Zaanen said. “It’s moving very, very quickly.”

Below the Surface

If waves and particles are like the turbulence on the surface of a pond, the connection between that turbulence and events in the interior of the pond was first described by a mathematical principle discovered in 1997. In a landmark paper, Juan Maldacena, an Argentinian-American physicist then at Harvard University and now at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, N.J., showed that events taking place in a 3-D region of space mathematically correspond to very different events taking place on that region’s 2-D boundary. (Events in 4-D also correspond to events in 3-D, and 5-D to 4-D and so on.)

Consider the 3-D interior and 2-D surface of the metaphoric pond. For the correspondence to work, the interior must be mathematically described by string theory, in which electrons, photons, gravitons and the rest of nature’s building blocks are invisibly small, one-dimensional lines, or “strings.” Mass and other macroscopic properties correspond to the strings’ vibrations, and interactions between different kinds of matter and forces come from the way strings split and connect. These strings live inside the pond.

Now, imagine that the 2-D surface of the pond is described by quantum mechanics. Particles are the splashes on the surface, and waves are the cascade of ripples from those splashes. On the surface of this imaginary pond, there is no force of gravity.

The holographic duality, discovered in 1997 by Juan Maldacena, says that events inside a region of space that involve gravity and are described by string theory are mathematically equivalent to events on the surface of that region that involve particles and are gravity-free.

Maldacena’s discovery, known as the holographic duality, showed that events in the interior region, which involve gravity and are described by string theory, are mathematically translatable to events on the surface, which are gravity-free and described by quantum particle theories.

“To understand this relationship, the crucial aspect is when the gravity theory is easy to analyze, then the particles on the boundary” — or, in the pond analogy, the surface — “are interacting very strongly with each other,” Maldacena said. The converse is also true: When the particles are calm on the surface, as they are in most forms of matter, then the situation in the pond’s interior is extremely complicated.

That contrast is what makes the duality useful.

The strange class of materials that includes cuprates belongs in the first category; experiments suggest that particles in these materials interact so strongly with one another that they lose their individuality. Physicists say the particles are “strongly correlated.”

The wavy ripples corresponding to each overlap so much that a kind of swarm effect is believed to occur. Strongly correlated matter can behave in diverse and unexpected ways that are difficult or in some cases impossible to describe with known quantum mechanical methods, said Sean Hartnoll, a physics professor at Stanford University. “You need a different way of looking at them than starting from single particle descriptions,” he said. “You don’t try to explain the ocean in terms of individual water molecules.”

If strongly correlated matter is thought of as “living” on the 2-D surface of a pond, the holographic duality suggests that the extreme turbulence on that surface is mathematically equivalent to still waters in the interior. Physicists can get at the surface-level behavior by studying the parallel, but much simpler, situation below. “You can compute things in that tranquil world,” Zaanen said.

In the mathematical parlance of the holographic duality, certain strongly correlated matter in 2-D corresponds, in 3-D, to a black hole — an infinitely dense object with an inescapable gravitational pull, which is mathematically simple. “These very complicated quantum mechanical collective effects are beautifully captured by black hole physics,” said Hong Liu, an associate professor of physics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. “For strongly correlated systems, if you put an electron into the system, it will immediately ‘disappear’ — you can no longer track it.” It’s like an object falling into a black hole.

A Superconductive Model

Increasingly over the past decade, studying the black hole equivalents of strongly correlated forms of matter has yielded groundbreaking results, such as a new equation for the viscosity of strongly interacting fluids and a better grasp of interactions between quarks and gluons, which are particles found in the nuclei of atoms.

Now, Gary Horowitz, a string theorist at UC-Santa Barbara, and Jorge Santos, a post-doctoral researcher in Horowitz’s group, have applied the holographic duality to cuprates. They derived a formula for the conductivity of the metals, which are approximately 2-D, by studying related properties of what may be their counterpart in 3-D: an electrically charged, peculiarly shaped black hole.

The work took numerical virtuosity. In cuprates, a swarm of strongly correlated electrons moves through a fixed lattice of atoms.

Modeling the metals with the holographic duality therefore required working the equivalent of a lattice into the structure of the corresponding black hole by giving it a corrugated outer surface, or horizon.

“When it comes to playing ball with black holes, you need Gary [Horowitz],” Zaanen said.

To determine a formula for the conductivity of cuprates, Horowitz and Santos had to study how light would interact with the complicated horizon of their black hole. The equations were too thorny to solve exactly, so they found approximate solutions using a computer. In their first paper detailing this approach, co-authored by Cambridge University physics professor David Tong and published in July 2012 in the Journal of High Energy Physics, they derived a formula that matched the conductivity of cuprates at high temperatures in response to an alternating current. In the new work, they extended the calculation down to the temperature range in which cuprates become superconductive, or conduct electricity with no resistance, and again found a close match with experimental measurements of real cuprates.

“It amazes me that such a simple gravity model is able to reproduce any feature of a real material,” Horowitz said. “So this is encouraging us to think harder.”

The accuracy of Horowitz and Santos’ model breaks down in some significant cases, such as for alternating currents with extremely high frequencies, but Sachdev said that considering how simple the corrugated black hole model is, “it couldn’t have worked any better.” Incorporating more of the microscopic details of cuprates into the structure of the black hole will probably deepen their congruence, he said.

Hartnoll, who recently used the holographic duality to model metal-insulator transitions in strongly correlated materials, hopes to build on the results by solving Horowitz and Santos’ equations exactly. “They have an input and an output; we’d like to decompress it and understand the critical steps in between,” he said. Doing so would reveal where the conductivity formula originates in the black hole environment, providing more insights about the corresponding forces at play inside cuprates.

A New Duality

Understanding the physics of cuprates could have important practical applications. Most metals start to superconduct when their temperature drops close to absolute zero. But, for reasons not completely understood, cuprates exhibit superconductivity at much more accessible temperatures, making them useful for devices ranging from high-power electrical cables to ship propulsion motors.

Cuprates are brittle and expensive, however, and engineering better versions by tweaking their properties could lead to dramatic improvements in a range of technologies, from magnetically levitating vehicles and other devices to more efficient power grids.

There is also the potential for advancing fundamental physics. If the holographic duality yields increasingly accurate predictions about the behavior of cuprates and other strongly correlated materials, these materials can be conceived as, essentially, being black holes in higher dimensions.

“If we had a model which reproduced all the features of a material, it could be viewed as a theory of it — a very unusual kind of theory, but given the duality, it’s equivalent to any theory you would produce on the boundary, with the usual particles,” Horowitz said. “And it might just be a lot simpler.”

The computer-rendered surface, or horizon, of a black hole that was used in new research as a model of materials called cuprates. The undulations on the horizon correspond to the periodic lattice of atoms inside cuprates.

The holographic duality echoes the wave-particle duality that led to the development of quantum mechanics. In the early 1900s, light, which was previously thought to be a wave, seemed perplexing in some experiments unless it was treated as particles, and electrons, thought to be particles, sometimes didn’t make sense unless they were conceived as waves. “The wave-particle duality was, when first proposed, a big surprise because these were two seemingly different concepts, and we learned that they are the same thing,” Horowitz said. The holographic duality “is more sophisticated, but it has that same feature,” he said. “You have two very different-seeming objects that turn out to be completely equivalent.”

But how does the holographic duality factor into our understanding of nature? Are the one-dimensional strings from the pond analogy real? Not necessarily, physicists say. In fact, the strings never factored into Horowitz and Santos’ calculations of the properties of the black hole they used as a model of cuprates. But the findings do give physicists a sense that “all these theories that we thought were different are actually all related,” Maldacena said. “It shows that string theory is not disconnected from the rest of physics.”

String theory may simply be the best mathematical language for grappling with certain aspects of reality, the physicists interviewed for this article said.

“Physics was traditionally reductionist; it wants to take something complicated and find out what the building blocks are,” Hartnoll explained. “The point is there’s not a unique way to do that: In some cases, electrons could be the building blocks, but in others, collective excitations of electrons are playing a more fundamental role than any of the individual electrons.

“We are trying to find the right building blocks to describe these strange phases of matter,” he said. “And they might be strings in one higher dimension.”

As physicists interpret what it means that particles in a strange, brittle metal mathematically correspond to strings and a peculiar black hole that exists — at least theoretically — in a higher dimension, the holographic duality enables them to “think differently about the mysteries in the laboratories,” Zaanen said. “And perhaps it’s not only about thinking differently; it’s about seeing the real, beautiful facts.”

[MIKA27]

Pakistan’s Bin Laden Report: What You Need to Know

A leaked Pakistani report on the May 1, 2011 U.S. raid on Osama bin Laden’s compound provides a first-hand view into the dysfunctions of a Pakistani government that both managed to play host to the world’s most wanted man and then failed to react to the U.S. operation which had to breach Pakistani sovereignty in order to kill him.

The Pakistani government established the Abbottabad Commission a month after the raid to investigate what was then a source of profound national humiliation. Led by the senior judge of the Supreme Court and comprising three retired military and police officers, the Commission had a mandate to report on government lapses and propose recommendations.

From the outset, the report notes, the Commission faced concerns that the government would suppress the report. “Accordingly, the Commission respectfully insists that in the national interest the Government of Pakistan discharge its obligation to make this report and its findings and recommendations public in both English and Urdu languages without delay,” the report says.

But the report was not released to the public until Al Jazeera published it today.

Here’s a round-up of five take-aways from the scathing report:

1. The Pakistani government was incompetent.

“The whole episode of the U.S. assassination mission of May 2, 2011 and the Pakistan government’s response before, during and after appears in large part to be a story of complacency, ignorance, negligence, incompetence, irresponsibility and possibly worse at various levels inside and outside the government.”

2. Bin Laden moved freely throughout Pakistan and continued coordinating al-Qaeda attacks.

Bin Laden entered Pakistan in early 2002 and remained almost entirely unmolested for nearly a decade in which time he remained active in planning al-Qaeda’s future attacks.

Once, Bin Laden’s car was stopped for speeding. Ibrahim al-Kuwaiti, his guard and courier, “quickly settled the matter,” and bin Laden drove off.

In 2005, bin Laden and his entourage of family members, Ibrahim and his family too moved to their newly constructed compound in Abbottabad, which was equipped with four electrical meters to conceal excessive energy use from the single compound by the large group. Bin Laden lived upstairs, often wearing a “cowboy hat” to avoid aerial detection when he moved about the compound.

Another time, Ibrahim’s young daughter Maryam recognized on television her “Poor Uncle”—the name for the man who lived upstairs and never left the house. Ibrahim subsequently banned any of the women in the compound from watching television.

Lt-Gen Ahmed Shuja Pasha, then Director-General of Pakistan’s military intelligence agency, the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), told the Commission that bin Laden “was to a degree actively planning al-Qaeda’s future operations.” While he cut off personal contact with al-Qaeda operatives following the joint ISI-CIA capture of Khalid Sheikh Mohammad in 2003, bin Laden still electronically communicated with operatives.

3. Pakistan failed to protect its borders because U.S. capabilities are just too good, among other reasons.

The Pakistani Director General of Military Operations told the Commission that the US operation succeeded because:

A:

Stealth Technology i.e. low radar signatures which minimized the chances of detection deep inside Pakistani territory.

"B:

Highly developed skills of US pilots in night-time and low level valley flying using Night Vision Goggles.

C:

Stand-by cargo helicopter with refueling capability i.e. quick refueling at night at a pre-selected isolated site.

d)

Availability of latest three dimensional digital map displays like hyper spectral digital maps. This allowed accurate mission planning of the route and landing site, besides enabling the pilots to fly at higher speeds with minimum stress.”

The Commission also notes that the Pakistani Air Force had not deployed Low Altitude Radars in the hilly region between Abbottabad and the border, and that the Pakistani military had not considered the threat of American incursions. From a Pakistani perspective, except for the border with India, “the world stood still for almost a decade.”

4. The Commission cannot rule out the possibility that someone in the government was complicit in hiding bin Laden.

“Given the length of stay and the changes of residence of [bin Laden] and his family in Pakistan … the possibility of some such direct or indirect and ‘plausibly deniable’ support cannot be ruled out, at least, at some level outside formal structures of the intelligence establishment.”

5. Those sources of support likely existed in the country’s notorious military intelligence apparatus, the ISI, which is known for its ties to militant groups in the region.

“A workable mechanism for intelligence sharing needs to be created, such as the Department of Homeland Security in the US…Unless [reform] happens, relations between the intelligence community and the people will remain adversarial and counter-productive. Instead of Pakistan making the transition from a dysfunctional security state to a functioning development state it will run the risk of becoming further degraded to an intelligence and police state.”

“In the premier intelligence institution, religiosity replaced accountability.”

[Duxnutz]

What Caused the Boeing 777 Crash? Here’s What We Know So Far

Details are beginning to emerge as to the cause of the Asiana Airlines crash, which killed two and injured 182 on Saturday at San Francisco International Airport

On Sunday, the National Transportation Safety Board began the long process of determining what went wrong on Saturday when Asiana Airlines Flight 214 crashed upon landing at San Francisco International Airport, killing two people and injuring 182.

The NTSB’s “Go Team” assembled early in the morning to begin the first part of their investigation into the cause behind the devastating crash. Nothing — including pilot error — has been ruled out, according to investigators. Both black boxes have been recovered and sent to the NTSB lab in Washington for analysis.

NTSB Chairman Deborah Hersman said in a press conference on Sunday afternoon that the voice recorder showed that the jetliner attempted to abort its landing and come around for another try 1.5 seconds before it crashed at San Francisco airport. The recorder also showed that there was a call to increase airspeed roughly two seconds before impact, which was the first indication that the plane was having problems.

Hersman told CNN earlier in the day that the internal damage to the plane iss “really striking,” and investigators were thankful there weren’t more deaths.

Yoon Young-doo, president of Asiana Airlines, said in a press conference on Sunday that the company believes there was no engine defect.

While details regarding the plane’s landing have yet to be confirmed, video and flight tracking software show that the tail of the aircraft slammed into the edge of the runway first and broke off, sending the fuselage skidding on its belly, where it stopped just left of the runway and erupted in a ball of flame and smoke. The Daily Beast has a detailed report of the path and subsequent destruction of the plane after it landed, but all indications are that the aircraft was intact when it reached the runway.

Aviation expert and former pilot Jim Tilmon told CNN that it appeared that the pilot came in too low and pulled up too late. “For whatever reason, the pilot did not have enough power available to correct the rate of descent that brought him into contact with the ground before he wanted to be there,” Tilmon said.

According to a FAA bulletin, airport technology called the Instrument Landing System, which helps pilots correctly approach the runway, was not operating at the time of the crash. However, Kevin Hiatt, chief executive of the Flight Safety Foundation, told NBC News that airports commonly take this system offline for maintenance on clear days. Indeed, San Francisco had ideal flying conditions on Saturday.

NBC News says that the pilot did not make a distress call before landing. Audio recording of the pilot’s conversation with the flight tower confirms this.

Asiana officials say the pilot was a veteran, who has been flying since 1996. Hersman said they hope to interview the aircraft’s crew within the next few days. They will be evaluated by a special team with the NTSB to determine whether a range of factors may have affected their performances — from fatigue to depth of experience.

Many experts are speculating if the cause of Saturday’s crash was similar to the incident with British Airways Flight 38 — also a 777 — which landed short of the runway at London’s Heathrow Airport in January 2008. That investigation concluded that the hard-landing was caused by ice that had gathered in the fuel system of that plane’s Rolls Royce engine. But Larry Rooney, veteran pilot, NTSB-trained accident investigator and executive vice president of the Coalition of Airline Pilots Association was cautious to link the two.

“One of the things they taught us in accident school is to never fall in love with a theory, the thing that you think [is the cause] at the onset might not be,” Rooney told TIME, adding that even the same model of plane could have one of several types of engines manufactured by different companies. And at this point, only the Rolls Royce engine has been known to have an issue with fuel icing.

But if it wasn’t ice, what did cause a seemingly normal flight to turn deadly? Investigators hope that the data they uncover from the black boxes, in correlation with interviews with the crew, will help them determine what happened so that they can prevent similar incidents in the future.

Automation dependency is going to be a hot topic going forward.

[MIKA27]

Stunning images show crowds standing just inches from huge wave as it bursts through giant dam on China's Yellow River

Despite looking like a scene from a disaster movie, the spectacle is actually a meticulously-planned method of transporting silt

Stunning new images have captured the moment onlookers stood just inches away from a huge wave as it burst through a dam on China's Yellow River.

Despite looking like a scene from a disaster movie, the spectacle is actually a meticulously-planned method of transporting silt, with bystanders at risk of little more than a soaking.

In fact, the large-scale silt-shifting operation has become something of a tourist attraction, drawing large crowds who, umbrellas aloft, watch the waves crash through purpose-built holes in the huge dam.

The system allows around 30 million tonnes of the suspended sediment to be relocated every year, with close to 390 tonnes shifted since operations began in the Luoyang section of the Yellow River 13 years ago.