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

[Fuzz]

Old KGB Radio Intercept Stations Are Still Operational And Listening

[MIKA27]

That Massive Russian Rocket Explosion Was Caused By Dumb Human Error

Last week, a Russian rocket called Proton-M exploded over a spaceport in Kazakhstan just seconds after it launched. Turns out we can blame some dumb humans for the blast — investigators found that the rocket’s angular velocity sensors had been installed upside down.

According to a report, when sifting through the wreckage, investigators discovered that these key parts — called DUS — were put into place incorrectly, even though they had arrows on them showing which way was up and which was down. The result? The flight control system was getting the wrong information about the rocket’s position, and it swung out of control and exploded when it tried to correct it.

Apparently, the person culpable for the debacle was an inexperienced technician, and his work hadn’t been double-checked, the report said. And even if it had launched successfully, there probably would have been more problems because the wonky DUS still haven’t explained what appeared to be an engine fire when the rocket took off.

Fortunately, the only casualties were three navigation satellites; no humans on the ground were injured. But it’s not the first time a Proton-M rocket has malfunctioned — it happened once in 2007 and again in 2010. So while we can’t be sure if we won’t see an accident again, at least one engineer has probably learned a very embarrassing lesson.

[MIKA27]

Apple Found Guilty Of Price Fixing

US District Judge Denise Cote has found that Apple is guilty of colluding with five book publishers to fix ebook prices artificially high in the iBookstore, thereby forcing Amazon and other online booksellers to do the same. There’s no word yet on how much cash money and concessions Apple will have to fork over, but beyond the punishment hopefully it will serve as a warning to stave off other online retail conspiracies.

In April 2012, the US Department of Justice filed an anti-trust complaint against Apple the five book publishers alleging that the companies “conspired to raise, fix and stabilise the retail price for newly released and best-selling trade ebooks”. Apple went ahead with a non-jury trial last month, and today the court ruled that Apple had indeed colluded by suggesting that they should all charge prices such as $US12.99 and $US14.99 in the iBookstore, rather than the standard ebook price of $US9.99.

In a statement, given to the AP and others, Apple spokesman Tom Neumayr said that Apple had done nothing wrong and that it would appeal the decision.

According to the trial record pieced together from obtained emails, depositions and testimony, the story of collusion begins back in 2009 when Apple SVP Eddy Cue started studying the ebook market in advance of the iPad’s release. Lo and behold, Apple realized that the market for ebooks was potentially huge and that their main competitor was Amazon.

Cue — which the record goes out of its way to paint as a “master negotiator” — and his team knew that publishers didn’t like Amazon’s rock-bottom $US9.99 pricing for ebooks, and that as a whole the publishers were hoping to drive that price up.

The record goes into clinical detail about Cue’s meetings with various publishers and how Apple subtly “orchestrated” a conspiracy to drive prices higher than they would naturally be to the detriment of both Apple’s competitors and consumers. It’s a surprisingly engrossing read, if you have the patience for all 160 pages.

Indeed, Judge Cote is unequivocal in her decision:

The question in this case has always been a narrow one: whether Apple participated in a price-fixing scheme in violation of this country’s antitrust laws. Apple is liable here for facilitating and encouraging the Publisher Defendants’ collective, illegal restraint of trade. Through their conspiracy they forced Amazon (and other resellers) to relinquish retail pricing authority and then they raised retail e-book prices. Those higher prices were not the result of regular market forces but of a scheme in which Apple was a full participant.

In other words, the collusion between Apple and the publishers artificially raised the prices beyond what competing retailers would have set themselves, and presumably higher than the natural price. This is bad for you, because you shouldn’t have to pay more money just because executives want to wring more cash out of your wallet.

[MIKA27]

A Hotel Full Of Secret Rooms Invites An Epic Game Of Hide-and-Seek

The Suitcase House Hotel is the perfect place to hide out. It has an entire network of rooms hidden beneath the floorboards, like an architectural Swiss Army knife. Check out these amazing hiding places — or, as the hotel probably refers to them, the places where you brush your teeth and sleep.

Created by Hong Kong-based architect Gary Chang, the beautiful fortress is nestled in the hills near the Great Wall. The long, narrow Chinese hotel uses space in really interesting, unconventional way, with a series of undetectable compartments hidden under notched floorboards that open to reveal different programs. Pull up one of the convertible pieces, and you’ll find sinks and a bathroom. Remove another, and there’s a library and a study. Another conceals a sleeping chamber, and another, a sauna. These pneumatically assisted panels make the space infinitely configurable for events and lodgings. This diagram shows the different ways in which you could change up the suitcase house:

So while your conventional hotel uses regular old vertical doors as entrances to rooms, the Suitcase House has its doors located horizontally on the floor. It would definitely make for a competitive game of hide-and-seek.

[MIKA27]

An Over-The-Top Conference Table Is The Perfect Use For Obsolete 747s

Boeing’s 787 Dreamliner and Airbus’ A380 are both competing to replace an ageing fleet of 747s that have served passengers for more than 40 years. But what’s to be done with all those jumbo jets once they’re been replaced? MotoArt has the answer, at least when it comes to the 747′s gigantic engines: a stylish conference table that looks suitable for a meeting of the world’s most evil supervillains.

Though incredibly massive at 4m across, the jumbo jet conference table — made from a 747′s General Electric engine nacelle — can actually be disassembled so it will easily squeeze into a lift. And it’s as functional as it is beautiful, with six pop-up power and connectivity ports, internal LED lighting and an engine spinner from a B-52 to help sell the effect and justify the table’s $35,000 to $45,000 price tag. Add a bowl of snack-sized peanut packs and the experience will be perfect.

MIKA: OMG, I so want one of these!

[MIKA27]

Gold Nanoparticles Give Plastic Skin Life-Like Senses

Using tiny gold particles and a kind of resin, a team of scientists at the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology has discovered how to make a new kind of flexible sensor that one day could be integrated into electronic skin, or e-skin. If scientists learn how to attach e-skin to prosthetic limbs, people with amputations might once again be able to feel changes in their environments. The findings appear in the June issue of ACS Applied Materials & Interfaces.

The secret lies in the sensor's ability to detect three kinds of data simultaneously. While current kinds of e-skin detect only touch, the Technion team's invention "can simultaneously sense touch, humidity, and temperature, as real skin can do," says research team leader Professor Hossam Haick. Additionally, the new system "is at least 10 times more sensitive in touch than the currently existing touch-based e-skin systems."

Researchers have long been interested in flexible sensors, but have had trouble adapting them for real-world use. To make its way into mainstream society, a flexible sensor would have to run on low voltage (so it would be compatible with the batteries in today's portable devices), measure a wide range of pressures, and make more than one measurement at a time, including humidity, temperature, pressure, and the presence of chemicals. In addition, these sensors would also have to be able to be made quickly, easily, and cheaply.

The Technion team's sensor has all of these qualities. The secret is the use of monolayer-capped nanoparticles that are only 5-8 nanometers in diameter. They are made of gold and surrounded by connector molecules called ligands. In fact, "monolayer-capped nanoparticles can be thought of as flowers, where the center of the flower is the gold or metal nanoparticle and the petals are the monolayer of organic ligands that generally protect it," says Haick.

The team discovered that when these nanoparticles are laid on top of a substrate – in this case, made of PET (flexible polyethylene terephthalate), the same plastic found in soda bottles – the resulting compound conducted electricity differently depending on how the substrate was bent. (The bending motion brings some particles closer to others, increasing how quickly electrons can pass between them.) This electrical property means that the sensor can detect a large range of pressures, from tens of milligrams to tens of grams. "The sensor is very stable and can be attached to any surface shape while keeping the function stable," says Dr. Nir Peled, Head of the Thoracic Cancer Research and Detection Center at Israel's Sheba Medical Center, who was not involved in the research.

And by varying how thick the substrate is, as well as what it is made of, scientists can modify how sensitive the sensor is. Because these sensors can be customized, they could in the future perform a variety of other tasks, including monitoring strain on bridges and detecting cracks in engines.

"Indeed," says Dr. Peled, "the development of the artificial skin as biosensor by Professor Haick and his team is another breakthrough that puts nanotechnology at the front of the diagnostic era."

[MIKA27]

New Google Maps For Android: Slick Looks, Better Navigation

A tweaked version of Google Maps for Android is now rolling out, which includes a bunch of new features first mentioned by the search giant back in May. The new app appeared in the Play Store last night and brings the app to the masses.

Echoing the aesthetic of the browser-based Maps, the overall look is sleek: fewer buttons, clearer fonts, tighter menus.

In terms of features, navigation is heavily improved: alternative routes are presented more clearly, traffic issues pop up instantly, and there’s even a dynamic re-routing feature, which will update your directions if you stray from your intended path. Elsewhere, reviews have been given an overhaul —- including Zagat ratings being converted to fit with Google’s five-star scale — and local guides are more prominent than before.

It’s not all great news: Sadly, the offline maps option has been removed from the app. But, there’s an Easter egg built in, which means you can kinda claw back that feature. Find the area you want available offline, search for “OK maps”, and the current pane should be cached. Not convenient, but better than nothing.

The app is rolling out over the next week or so to devices with Android 4.0 and up.

[MIKA27]

Bruce Lee Wants You To Be Like Water And Drink Johnnie Walker

http://youtu.be/r1xBQQnddwg

Martial arts superstar Bruce Lee is the latest deceased celebrity to re-appear in CG form to sell you things.

Joseph Kahn, who directed the video, explains:

We shot it in Hong Kong, and then we worked with vfx company The Mill in London to create a completely CGI Bruce Lee over nine months. EVERY shot of his head and every detail in there is completely cgi. We got Shannon Lee, Bruce Lee’s daughter, to come aboard and we really picked her brain to make sure that everything was accurate from look to soul. We wanted to be as respectful to the man and legend as we could.

MIKA: Nice, still looks CGI but beinga Bruce Lee fan, it's great to see him again.

[MIKA27]

Raising a WWII Bomber From the Depths of the Ocean:

Archaeology is not, in general, a thrilling and exciting pastime. But sometimes, gently moving dirt around with paintbrushes gives way to something more adrenelaine-pumping — in this case, trying to raise a rusted and rotting German bomber from the depths of the English Channel, without the whole thing falling to bits.

Monday 26th August, 1940, started as another day in the Battle of Britain. RAF bombers had executed the first raid on Berlin the night before, and the Luftwaffe were out for revenge. The twin-engined Dornier bombers allotted to the German Air Force’s 7th Squadron were part of the counterattack, tasked with hitting Debden and Hornchurch airfields.

One Dornier didn’t make it, though. Flying above the clouds short of the English coast, Dornier 5KAR was separated from the rest of the pack, and set on by RAF Boulton Paul Defiants. Both engines and the cockpit were hit, and the Dornier was forced to crash-land on the Goodwin Sands, just off the coast of Kent, at low tide. The surviving crew were rescued, and the wreck was forgotten about.

Shift forward 60 years, and a recreational diver stumbled across the wreck in September 2008. Owing to the combined effects of tide and shifting sand, the poor old Dornier was lying upside-down on a bed of chalk.

Rather surprisingly, this mostly-intact wreck is the only one of 1,500 original Dorniers that still remains. Obviously, it’s of some historical interest, so a plan was drawn up to pluck the bomber off the sea floor.

The first step in the recovery operation was to determine exactly what bits were left, and what condition they were in. Side-scan sonar and magnetometer surveys were conducted. A multibeam echo sounder is used to build up a surprisingly detailed 3D model of the plane and surrounding seabed.

Next, divers from the RAF Museum and Wessex Archaeology conducted a physical swimming-round-and-poking-it survey, to work out which bits of the plane were still structurally sound, and which were waiting to crumble away at the faintest touch. A few minor artefacts were picked up, and a plan drawn up.

Roll forwards a few years, and with the funding in place, the RAF Museum contracted salvage experts SeaTech to do the (literally) heavy lifting. In conjunction with chemists and physicists from Imperial College London, who assisted in determining the structural integrity of the aircraft, it was determined that just whacking some loading straps round the plane and hitting ‘go’ on the winch would be a bit of a non-starter.

Instead, an aluminium lifting frame was to be assembled around the upside-down plane, to take the load. From the beginning of the salvage operation, though, things didn’t quite go to plan. May was a pretty terrible month for weather (as we all probably remember fondly, sitting in our offices sweating away the mid-summer pounds); as a result, the salvage team had to return to port on four separate occasions.

All those delays took a fair chunk out of the budget for the project, and by late May, the plan was changed. Instead of the aluminium lifting frame, the salvage divers inserted a spar down the centre of the Dornier, attached lifting points to the strongest parts of the remaining structure, and lifted the aircraft as one single piece in an hour-long operation. The engines will come up at a later date.

The restoration effort began as soon as the plane was landed on the salvage barge. Rinsed off with fresh water and with a jelly-like substance applied to delay corrosion, the Dornier was taken to its new home at Cosford.

There, in two specially-constructed poly tunnels, any remaining salt water was rinsed away, and a mixture of chemicals applied to prevent any further damage. It’s the same method used for the Mary Rose when she was dragged out of the Solent, but a new technique for aircraft.

The exact blend of chemicals was determined by scientists from Imperial College London. Based on tests from samples of the Dornier they’ve already been working on, a mixture of citric acid and sodium hydroxide was initially used; however, it’s an on-going process, and the chemicals will be collected after they’ve been applied to the Dornier, and re-analysed to see if the process is working as intended.

A few other challenges remained. Of course, this being Health & Safety Britain, a risk assessment had to be carried out to ensure that the wreckage was safe to work on. Unsurprisingly, on a war plane, an ammunition magazine was found, the Army bomb squad called out, and the offending article X-rayed, and found to be empty.

After that, the Dornier was split — gently — into segments, so that the restoration work could begin properly. The ultimate aim is to have the Dornier restored and on display at the RAF Museum in Hendon; for now, the restoration work can be seen live at the RAF Museum in Cosford

[MIKA27]

The X-47B Drone Has Landed On A Carrier, And War May Never Be The Same

It’s not often that we get to witness aviation history being made, but when we do, it’s often awesome. Such is the case with the US Navy’s X47B, which just became the first unmanned aircraft to land on an aircraft carrier.

Landing a drone on an aircraft carrier was not a cheap or easy task. The so-called “Salty Dog 502″ has been in training to accomplish such a feat for years now, and the program has cost the government over $US1.4 billion. It won’t spend anymore, because the US Navy is retiring its two X47B’s and sending them to navy museums in Florida and Maryland. The aircraft deserve nothing less than being enshrined. “Your grandchildren and great grandchildren and mine will be reading about this historic event in their history books,” said Rear Admiral Mat Winter. “This is not trivial.”

How untrivial is it?

Some of the top brass say that Wednesday’s accomplishment is second only to the introduction of naval aircraft way back in 1911.

And the thought of robot planes zipping on and off of floating runways is probably just as scary to the people of 2013 as the idea of planes on boats was to the people of 1911.

Nevertheless, Wednesday’s landing was just one of many milestones the X-47B has hit in recent years. The Northrop Grumman drone is a big drone with a 19m wingspan, though it can fold its wings into a more compact shape. The two aircraft have more or less been in nonstop testing since their first flights in 2011 and made its first “catapult takeoff” from land six months ago. The operation moved to the aircraft carrier earlier this year, and in May, the X-47B made its first catapult takeoff from the deck and made nine touch-and-go landings.

The X-47B was never armed, but the two drones will change warfare as we know it. Just imagine: now the US Navy can launch unmanned aerial vehicles that can fly for dozens of hours without refueling from anywhere in the world. Although the test planes will gather dust in a museum, the technology that made the carrier takeoffs and landings possible will be applied to the rest of the drone fleet. The US Navy will start accepting proposals for a new carrier-ready drone next month and hope the aircraft will be in service in three to six years.

The first landing:

The first launch:

[MIKA27]

NASA Caught The First Glimpse Of The Solar System's Stunning Tail

The solar system isn’t stationary; it’s careening through the infinite abyss of space as we speak. Just like a comet, it comes complete with its own tail, and for the first time, we’ve actually been able to see it.

The new data is thanks to NASA’s very own Interstellar Boundary Explorer (IBEX), which has been sitting some 200km out from Earth, painstakingly mapping the edges of the solar system. IBEX watches for formerly-charged deep-space particles that crash into the heliosphere’s outer hydrogen atoms and come shooting back towards us. And by mapping out three years-worth of those suckers, IBEX has whipped up the first, pixelated images of what our tail looks like.

The tail’s mostly made up of solar wind plasma and a magnetic field that extend forever outward behind the solar system, eventually merging back into the unremarkable blackness of interstellar space.

With more incoming data from IBEX and more number-crunching by the lab coat wearers here on Earth, we’re bound to find out more about this mysterious comet-like tail years down the line. But for now, it’s cool to know our little corner of the universe is its own shooting star.

[BehikeLover2]

A Terrifying Staircase To Nowhere Provides Dizzying Views Of The Alps

can you post a google maps link where it is? I cant find it...

[MIKA27]

can you post a google maps link where it is? I cant find it...

This is all I could find for you: Der Dachstein

[MIKA27]

LG's World's Slimmest 1080p Display Is Impossibly Thin

With everyone racing to become the thinnest, slimmest thing in technology, LG just showed off how skinny it has gotten. Millimetres matter man! LG’s new 1080p HD display is perfect for giganto smartphones at 5.2 inches big and just 2.2mm thin. On top of that it only has a 2.3mm bezel, which makes it practically floating glass.

The LG display is supposed to be the slimmest and narrowest display made for mobile devices. How does LG get its display so thin?

LG implemented a new touchscreen technology called Advanced One-Glass Solution where dual flexible printed circuits are “inserted between the panel and touch film, reducing the number of lines on the panel by more than 30 per cent.”

More things in less places. No wonder the Optimus G2 looks so hot.

[MIKA27]

Monster Machines: NASA's Student-Designed Arctic Explorer Survives Its First Tundra Test

After a five-month expedition to the wilds of Greenland, the GROVER (Greenland Rover and/or Goddard Remotely Operated Vehicle for Exploration and Research) has returned, intact and toting some valuable climate data. Not bad for an ROV developed by engineering students.

Sure the GROVER only travelled a total of 30km during its five-week shakedown run, but the trek has given researchers valuable insights into future design improvements as well as valuable data regarding 2012′s massive ice sheet melt-off. For one, the GROVER did not run 24/7 under the never-setting arctic sun as it was originally meant to. The region’s extreme conditions forced the research team to dial back its operating limit to just 12 hours per charge. What’s more, Greenland’s varied icy terrain played havoc with GROVER’s treads, demanding repeated adjustments to the system’s traction control, power and speed (all 1.93km/h of it) to prevent it from miring in the tundra.

“This is very common the first time you take an instrument into an environment like Greenland,” Hans-Peter Marshall, the project’s science advisor, said in a press statement. “It’s always more challenging than you thought it was going to be: Batteries don’t recharge as fast and they don’t last as long, and it takes computers and instrumentation longer to boot.”

Mobility issues aside, the GROVER did collect valuable data on Greenland’s ice sheet formation. Specifically, the rover used its radar array to successfully detect a newly formed layer of ice created from a massive summer meltoff last year and measure its thickness. Now that the GROVER is safely back at base camp, NASA researchers have already begun upgrades. Future iterations are expeted to run longer, stronger, and maybe even harbor packs of smaller drones. “One thing I can imagine is having a big robot like GROVER with several smaller ones that can move radially outwards to increase the swath GROVER would cover,” Marshall said. “Also, we’ve been thinking about bringing back smaller platforms to a larger one to recharge.” Soon, the barren northern wastes could be populated by slow-crawling, radar-blasting scientific motherships.

[MIKA27]

A New Apple Store In Spain Is Being Built On 15th-Century Ruins

Here’s a fun game: archaeological dig or building a new Apple Store? In at least one case, the answer is both. In what’s supposed to be the basement of a new Apple Store in Madrid, workers have uncovered a 15th-century hospital.

While renovating a building the building at 1 Puerto del Sol, the construction team found the outer walls of the Buen Suceso hospital, which was razed in 1854 in favour of expanding the Puerto del Sol. Some of the ruins had already been discovered in 2009, when a new train station was being erected.

This find delayed the construction of the rail station by 10 months, and the wall is now preserved behind glass panels. But Apple is still ploughing through with building its 11th Spain location. While it has preserved historical aspects of other stores (take its Paris Louvre location, for example), that might not be the case with these hospital walls.

Permits for the new store were issued before anyone was aware of the ruins, and apparently the director of Madrid’s Heritage Department told Apple it could just build the new floor to “symbolically” mimic the lines of the old walls. Peace, history, now please everyone buy some iPads.

[MIKA27]

A Comfy Throne That Explodes Into Plush Stools To Seat All Your Guests

A king or queen is nothing without their subjects, so if you’re on the hunt for a comfy chair that’s worthy of your greatness while not leaving everyone else sitting on the floor, the Quartz marks the end of your search.

When fully assembled its modular cushions form the perfect nook to bury yourself in with a good book, just make sure all the change is out of your pockets before you plunk down. And when company comes a-callin’, the segmented cushions all pop out of the Quartz chair providing ample places for everyone to sit.

If you’ve got kids at home the chair even makes for an over-sized puzzle that tests their shape-matching skills, and a host of other uses you’ll need to think of before you even come close to justifying spending $14,000 on it. Unless of course you’re actually royalty, in that case all you need to do is raise taxes a bit to bring this wonderful creation home.

[MIKA27]

A Shuttle Veteran Celebrates Her Spacecraft

Marsha Ivins, who bet her life on the shuttle Atlantis, pays the retired ship a visit

I’d been off the planet for 13 days—12 days, 20 hours, 20 minutes and 4 seconds to be precise—when the space shuttle Atlantis touched down on runway 22 at Edwards Air Force Base in California on February 20, 2001. It was the 102nd mission in the Space Shuttle program, and the 23rd for Atlantis. It was my fifth and final space flight and I knew going into it that it would be my last. I’d had a good run, as they say: 5 flights in 11 years, with a little bit of everything—satellite deployment and retrieval, a visit to Russia’s Mir space station and now an assembly flight to the International Space Station, joining the first station crew on board.

Actually, it was more than a good run, it was a pretty incredible run, and three of my five flights had been aboard this same ship that had once again brought me safely home. Walking off the orbiter I was proud to have been part of this mission, this program and this agency. As I stepped through the hatch, I turned and kissed Atlantis, to the surprise of the ground support folks. After all you are not supposed to touch the tiles, much less put your lips on them. But I didn’t know any other way to say thank you to the spacecraft and, well, to everything and everyone around it.

At that moment I could never have imagined the mournful days to come: the horror of the Columbia accident still two years away; the indefensible cancellation of the Constellation program—which would have returned humans to the moon and produced a new generation of heavy-lift booster; and the ambling, unfocused human spaceflight program that would replace it, a program so poorly defined that it amounts to no real program at all. Had I known all that back then, I would have put my arms around Atlantis if I could have figured out a way.

Here we are a decade later, and this never-imagined future has become a heartbreaking reality. We bear painful witness to the erosion of the capability and the spirit that let us put the first human footprint on the moon and defiantly welcomed the challenge of space exploration.

Today NASA’s “year in review” in human spaceflight shows the ferry flights of the remaining Orbiters to their homes in museums around the country. And that’s it. So it was with great trepidation that I accepted the invitation, as a former Atlantis crew member, to participate in the opening ceremonies for the “Space Shuttle Atlantis Celebration” June 28-29 at the Kennedy Space Center Visitor’s complex, when Atlantis would be unveiled in its new $100 million facility.

After a total of 33 missions and 126 million miles flown between 1985 and 2011, including the one that marked the end of the 30- year Space Shuttle program, Atlantis certainly deserved the tribute. So I expected great hoopla and fanfare. I expected too to feel melancholy for the end of a 30 year program in human spaceflight and angry at no foreseeable future. I expected a memorial. What I did not expect was for it to be…right.

The multiscreen surround sound movie show that is the entrance to the exhibit ends with the screen fading to transparent, though an image of an Orbiter—its payload bay doors open, its robotic arm extended, flying towards you as you could only ever see it from space—is still visible. And then the screen rises to reveal Atlantis herself.

The gut punch of emotion I experienced is impossible to convey using mere words. The orbiter, suspended from the ceiling, seemed to be flying free—graceful and elegant in its impossibility, and its reality.

Looking at the spacecraft, I felt a visceral wave of memory—of people loved, of people lost, of days spent inside the vehicle off the planet, of years spent in and around the program, helping to support other shuttle flights, of a career devoted to human spaceflight.

I felt the presence of all the people whose labors of love now hung motionless before me.

There was no more hardworking, dedicated, fiercely proud team than the one at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida. The men and women who processed the shuttles did their work with a devotion and a passion that is probably unheard of anywhere else. We the crew may have been the face of the missions, but these people were the heart. And this display is a testament and an homage to that workforce.

The building that is now home to Atlantis is full of stories, history, hardware and lots of hands-on interactive stations. The pictures are of the people who worked on the shuttles. The stories are their stories and the interactive stations are all narrated by NASA engineers, not actors, not artificial voices. Real people explaining the science and engineering of real spaceflight in the kind of how-cool-is-that! way that only people who love their work can share. Unlike most museum displays that are about what they have done, this one is about what we as a team and a nation have done.

And at the center of it all is a real spaceship—an exhibit that doesn’t just honor the life of the vehicle, but that salutes the hearts and souls of the people who made it work. May we live up to your memory. All hail Atlantis.

[MIKA27]

Filmmaker Captures His Terrifying Polar Bear Attack On Camera

Any documentary filmmaker likes to get up close and personal with their subjects, but Gordon Buchanan pushes the limits more than most. As part of his thrilling documentary The Polar Bear Family and Me he ventured into the arctic landscape, bravely locking himself inside a protective booth so he could capture never-before seen footage of polar bears in the wild.

But during the middle of filming, the unthinkable happens. The hungry poplar bear suddenly turns her attention to him and his tiny capsule.

[MIKA27]

Epic Illustrations Of US Presidents Fighting In Battle

Ever thought you see the day when Obama was riding a lion with a light saber? Neither did I until now...

Like many of us, one suspects that illustrator and visual artist Jason Heuser wishes that our elected leaders could be a little more courageous & fantastical. That goes a long way into explaining his inspiration behind these incredibly awesome illustrations.

Bill Clinton, Ronald Reagan, Abe Lincoln, George Washington, Teddy Roosevelt are all recreated in the midst of battle or tooled up ready to take on the naughty evil-doers. You can get your hands on prints of images via his online store (they’re reasonably priced too) in the meantime, enjoy watching some of the most famous US Presidents in history kicking some serious ass.

Barack Obama Riding A Lion

Bill Clinton Being A Ladies Man…

Ronald Reagan Riding A Velociraptor

George Washington Battling The Zombie Hordes

Abe Lincoln Riding A Grizzly Bear

Teddy Roosevelt Squares Off Against Big Foot

George Washington Just Being Awesome

[MIKA27]

FRIDAY FUNNY: 17 Individuals With Outrageously Awful Fashion Sense

Whether by choice or accident the fashion of these following 17 people will certainly raise some eyebrows. Wigs, ill-fitting items and dictator look-a-likes are just a few of the dumbfounding photos we’ve selected below.

Maybe it’s all in good jest and we’re being overly critical, but then again you never can tell can you? Was it all for attention and shock-value or can you legitimately label them as horrendous fashion victims?

[MIKA27]

Alone with the Strangler

In the idyllic Boston suburb of Belmont in 1962, Sebastian Junger's parents hired three men to build a studio behind their house. One was a hardworking father of two named Al DeSalvo, who two years later confessed to being the Boston Strangler. In an excerpt from his new book, the author writes about his mother's brush with death, DeSalvo's strange behavior, and the lingering mystery of the Strangler case.

One morning in the fall of 1962, when I was not yet a year old, my mother, Ellen, looked out the window and saw two men in our front yard. One was in his 30s and the other was at least twice that, and they were both dressed in work clothes and seemed very interested in the place where we lived. My mother picked me up and walked outside to see what they wanted.

They turned out to be carpenters who had stopped to look at our house because one of them—the older man—had built it. He said that his name was Floyd Wiggins and that 20 years earlier he'd built our house in sections up in Maine and then brought them down by truck. He said he assembled it on-site in a single day. We lived in a placid little suburb of Boston called Belmont, and my parents had always thought that our house looked a little out of place. It had an offset saltbox roof and blue clapboard siding and stingy little sash windows that were good for conserving heat. Now it made sense: the house had been built by an old Maine carpenter who must have designed it after the farmhouses he saw all around him.

Wiggins now lived outside Boston and worked for the younger man, who introduced himself as Russ Blomerth. He had a painting job around the corner, Blomerth said, and that was why they were in the neighborhood. My mother said that the house was wonderful but too small and that she and my father were taking bids from contractors to build a studio addition out back. She was an artist, she explained, and the studio would allow her to paint and give drawing classes at home while keeping an eye on me. Would they be interested in the job? Blomerth said that he would be, so my mother put me in his arms and ran inside to get a copy of the architectural plans.

Blomerth's bid was the low one, as it happened, and within a few weeks he, Wiggins, and a younger man named Al were in the backyard laying the foundation for my mother's studio. Some days all three men showed up, some days it was Blomerth and Wiggins, some days it was just Al. Around eight o'clock in the morning my mother would hear the bulkhead door slam and then she'd hear footsteps in the basement as Al got his tools, and then a few minutes later she'd watch him cross the backyard to start work. Al never went into the main part of the house, but sometimes my mother would bring a sandwich out to the studio and keep him company while he ate lunch. Al talked a lot about his children and his German wife. Al had served with the American forces in postwar Germany and was the middleweight boxing champion of the American Army in Europe. Al was polite and deferential to my mother and worked hard without saying much. Al had dark hair and a powerful build and a prominent beak of a nose and was not, my mother says, an unhandsome man.

The studio that they built, when it was finally finished, had a high concrete foundation set into a slight hill and end walls of fir planks with a steep-pitched shingle roof that came almost down to the ground. There was a Plexiglas skylight at the roof peak that poured light onto the hardwood floors, and there was a raised flagstone landing that my mother populated with large plants. The job was completed in the spring of 1963; by then Blomerth and Wiggins had moved on to other work, and Al was left by himself to finish up the details and paint the trim. On one of those last days of the job, my mother dropped me off at my babysitter's and went into town to do some errands and then picked me up at the end of the day. We weren't home 20 minutes when the phone rang. It was the babysitter, an Irish woman I knew as Ani, and she was in a panic. Lock up the house, Ani told my mother. The Boston Strangler just killed someone in Belmont.

The victim's name was Bessie Goldberg, and she had been found by her husband raped and strangled in their home on Scott Road. Several days earlier, a 68-year-old woman named Mary Brown had been raped and bludgeoned to death in the small town of Lawrence, north of Boston. They were the eighth and ninth sex murders in the Boston area in almost a year, and the public had started calling the killer the Boston Strangler. My mother rushed out to the studio, where Al was painting on a ladder, and told him the news. It's so scary, my mother remembers telling him. I mean, here he is in Belmont, for God's sake! Al shook his head and said how terrible it was, and he and my mother talked about it for a while, and eventually she went back into the house to start dinner.

My mother didn't see Al again until the next day. He showed up with Blomerth and Wiggins because the job was almost done and they had to start packing their tools and cleaning up the site. Blomerth had brought a camera for the occasion, and he arranged us all inside the studio and took a photograph. I'm looking straight at Blomerth—no doubt because he said something to get my attention—and my mother, seated on a maple-wood bench, is looking down at me, her firstborn child, rather than up at the camera.

She is 34 years old and her dark-brown hair is pinned high on her head and she wears a paisley shirt with the sleeves neatly rolled up and she appears primarily interested in the baby on her lap. Behind my mother and off her right shoulder is Old Mister Wiggins standing politely in a sweater-vest with his hands clasped behind his back and a claw hammer jammed headfirst into his front pocket. His shirt is buttoned right up to his chin, and he looks like he's at least 75 years old. Standing next to Wiggins and directly behind my mother is Al.

Al and I are the only people looking directly at the camera, and whereas I have an infant's expression of puzzled amazement, Al wears an odd smirk. His dark hair is greased up in a pompadour, and he is clean-shaven but unmistakably rough-looking, and he has placed across his stomach one enormous, outspread hand. The hand is visible only because my mother is leaning forward to look at me. The hand is at the exact center of the photograph, as if it is the true subject around which the rest of us have been arranged.

When Israel Goldberg pushed open the front door, all he heard was the radio playing, and he stepped inside and called out to his wife. No one answered. He had several bundles in his arms, an assortment of frozen vegetables that Bessie had asked him to pick up for a dinner party that night, and he walked down the hallway and into the kitchen, and it wasn't until he was putting the food away in the refrigerator that it occurred to him something was not right. His wife had hired a man to help her clean the house that day, but the place was silent, and there wasn't even a note for him. "Bess!" he shouted, but there was still no answer, and now his curiosity turned to fear. He dropped his overcoat on the floor and ran upstairs, still calling his wife's name. He checked their bedroom, he checked the closets, he checked the spare room and the bathroom and their daughter's old high-school room that she still occasionally slept in—no one.

He could hear the shouts of children playing kickball in front of his house; a boy named Dougie Dreyer was single-handedly scoring run after run against an assemblage of neighborhood girls. John F. Kennedy was president, America was not yet fully at war in Vietnam, and Belmont, Massachusetts, where Israel and his wife had moved 10 years earlier, was arguably the epitome of all that was safe and peaceful in the world. There were no bars or liquor stores in Belmont. There were no poor people in Belmont. There were no homeless people in Belmont. There were no dangerous parts of Belmont, or poor parts of Belmont, or even ugly parts of Belmont. There had never been a murder in Belmont. It was—until the moment Israel Goldberg went back downstairs and finally glanced into the living room—the perfect place to live.

The first thing he noticed was that the floor lamp next to the sofa had been knocked over. Its pedestal was propped on the arm of the divan, and it was slanted downward to rest on the carpeted floor. He went over to investigate. Beside the lamp was the partially crushed lampshade. Between the lampshade and the knocked-over lamp was the body of his wife.

Bessie Goldberg was lying on her back with her skirt and apron pulled up and her legs exposed. One of her stockings had been wound around her neck, and her eyes were open, and there was a little bit of blood on her lip. The first thought that went through Israel Goldberg's mind was that he'd never seen his wife wearing a scarf before. An instant later he realized that her head was at the wrong angle, her face looked puffy, and she wasn't breathing. According to the children on the street, Israel Goldberg was inside less than a couple of minutes before he screamed and ran back out and demanded to know if they had seen anyone leave the house. They hadn't, though they would later remember a black man passing them on the sidewalk as they walked home from school. A black man was not a common sight in Belmont in 1963, and virtually every good citizen who had seen him walking down Pleasant Street that afternoon remembered him.

In hindsight—Belmont now forever marred by its first murder—some witnesses agreed that the black man might have looked like he was in a hurry. He had glanced back several times. He had walked fast, hands in his coat pockets, and had almost walked into some bushes as he passed Dougie Dreyer and two neighborhood girls on their way home from school. A sub-shop owner named Louis Pizzuto had caught sight of him from behind his restaurant counter and was sufficiently curious to step around to the doorway to watch him pass. The black man had stopped in at the Pleasant Street Pharmacy, across the street, and then re-emerged a few minutes later with a pack of cigarettes. The teenage boy who worked at the pharmacy said that he had bought a pack of Pall Malls for 20 cents but had not seemed nervous. A middle-aged woman agreed that he hadn't seemed nervous but observed that the skin of his face was "pocky." A few minutes later, Louis Pizzuto walked into the pharmacy to find out what the black man wanted.

Not much, it seemed, except the cigarettes. The black man was tall and thin and wore brown checked pants and a black overcoat. Some remembered him wearing a dark hat and sunglasses, and some remembered that he had a mustache and sideburns. Soon it would be known that he crossed the street to the bus stop and boarded the first bus that came, which, unfortunately, was going in the wrong direction. Instead of getting off, he stayed on it to Park Circle, smoked a cigarette with the bus driver during the five-minute layover, and then continued back toward Cambridge. He stepped off the bus in Harvard Square at 19 minutes to four and walked past Out-of-Town News, apparently to the closest bar he could find. He would have been sitting at the bar counter ordering a 10-cent beer just as Israel Goldberg opened the door of his strangely quiet home. He would have been in a taxicab heading toward a friend's apartment in Central Square when police cruisers began converging on Scott Road. And he would have been walking around Central Square looking for his girlfriend—who had left him several days earlier—when investigators at the Goldberg house found a slip of paper from the Massachusetts Employment Security Office with his name on it. Bessie Goldberg had hired him to clean the house, which would have made him the last person to see her alive.

The black man's name was Roy Smith. He was originally from Oxford, Mississippi, but his records at Employment Security had him living at 441 Blue Hill Avenue, in Roxbury. That was not true, as it turned out; he really lived with his girlfriend at 175 Northampton Street, in Boston. The landlady, however, told the police that Smith's girlfriend had moved out four or five days earlier. Two plainclothes officers stayed on Northampton Street while word went out to the Cambridge police that Smith might be in the area looking for his girlfriend. At 11:13 p.m. the police issued a bulletin, accompanied by Roy Smith's mug shots and fingerprint data from a previous arrest, announcing that he was wanted for murder in the town of Belmont. Bessie Goldberg was the ninth Boston-area woman to be raped or sexually assaulted and murdered in the previous year, and like her many of the victims had been elderly. If Roy Smith had indeed killed Bessie Goldberg—and by now the authorities knew his criminal history included grand larceny, assault with a dangerous weapon, and public drunkenness—they had their first break in a series of murders that had virtually paralyzed the city of Boston.

A special police unit had been convened to track down the Boston Strangler: The "Strangler Bureau," as it was commonly known, had screened 2,500 sex offenders and brought in 300 of them for close questioning. They had interviewed 5,000 people connected to the victims, and combed through half a million fingerprint files. It was the most thorough investigation in Massachusetts history, and their spectacular lack of success was leading the public to attribute nearly supernatural qualities to the killer: he was inhumanly strong; he could break into any apartment, no matter how well locked; he could kill in minutes and leave no trace at all. Women bought guard dogs. They went out only in pairs. They placed cans in darkened hallways as a sort of early-warning system.

Reportedly, one high-strung woman thought she heard something in her apartment and leapt to her death from her third-floor window rather than face whatever it was. Virtually every month there was another sick, brutal murder in Boston, and the 50-man tactical police unit—specially trained in karate and quick-draw shooting—was helpless to stop them.

The way Bessie Goldberg died was considered a classic "Boston Strangling," so Smith's arrest prompted many local reporters to announce that the Strangler had finally been caught. The few reporters who held back on that announcement resorted to a theme of random violence in the suburbs that was almost as compelling. Until now, all the stranglings had occurred in apartment buildings in downtown Boston or in working-class towns north of the city. Bessie Goldberg was the first woman to be killed in a one-family home in an affluent neighborhood, and if a murderer could strike there, he could strike anywhere. "This is Belmont, these things just don't happen here!" one of Bessie's neighbors told the Boston Herald.Another reporter described the Goldberg house as a "rambling ten-room colonial … on a street of similarly expensive homes." Actually, it was a modest brick-and-clapboard on a street that virtually overlooked a highway. It was also imagined by the press that Bessie Goldberg had put up a "terrific struggle" for her life, though there was little evidence of that. She had, in fact, died with her glasses on. The details of sexual assault, of course, were respectfully muted.

Whether or not Smith was the Boston Strangler, the case against him for the Goldberg murder was devastating. By his own admission, he had been at the Goldberg house most of the afternoon and had left around three o'clock, a fact confirmed by numerous people in the neighborhood. Israel Goldberg had arrived home at 10 minutes to four—again confirmed by numerous people—and no one had spotted anyone else going into or out of the Goldberg house during the intervening 50 minutes. The house was in disarray, as if Smith had not finished cleaning, and there were no signs of forced entry. Smith had committed the murder because, realistically, no one else could have. All that remained was for him to confess, which—considering the evidence—seemed almost inevitable. If Smith confessed to second-degree murder and served his time peacefully, he could expect to be out in 15 years or so. For a habitual criminal accused of murder in a city terrorized by a serial killer, it wouldn't be a bad deal.

At 9:37 on the morning of November 7, 1963, Roy Smith rose from his seat at the calling of his name and faced Judge Charles Bolster in a courtroom at the Middlesex Superior Court, in East Cambridge. Smith stood in the defendant's dock, which came up to his waist and had a small door that was locked behind him to signify that he was not free on bail. The room had 30-foot ceilings and tall arched windows and was possibly the most ornate piece of architecture Smith had ever stepped into. Next to him at the defendant's table was his young attorney, Beryl Cohen, and across the room on his left was a 12-person jury plus two alternates, all men. Judge Bolster was a respected but undistinguished judge who was known to be unapologetically fair toward the defense despite being an arch-conservative in an extremely liberal state.

"Mr. Foreman, gentlemen of the jury, the case before you is the case of the Commonwealth versus Roy Smith," began Richard Kelley, the prosecutor. "He is charged—and the Commonwealth shall prove—that on March 11, 1963, he robbed, raped and murdered Mrs. Israel Goldberg, Bessie Goldberg, at 14 Scott Road, in Belmont."

Prosecutor Kelley had a case on his hands that was both utterly straightforward and oddly elusive. On the one hand, Smith was a longtime petty criminal with several assault charges on his record who was the last known person to have seen the murder victim alive, and who had left the victim's home less than an hour before the body was found. On the other hand, not one shred of physical evidence linked Smith to the body, and not one person saw him do anything wrong. People saw him go into the Goldberg home. People saw him leave the Goldberg home. People saw him take the bus, buy his liquor, ride around town, do whatever he did, but no one saw him kill Bessie Goldberg. What happened at 14 Scott Road that afternoon could never be determined with absolute certainty, so a jury of peers was required to decide what they thought happened. This was exactly the kind of case that the great, awkward loops of logic employed by the law are designed to resolve. Roy Smith's case was entirely circumstantial but nearly airtight, marred only by the fact that he refused to admit that he did it. A jury would have to step in and say it for him.

Louis Pizzuto was one of the Commonwealth's most important witnesses because he—and he alone—claimed that Roy Smith looked agitated and nervous as he walked away from the Goldberg home. Without Pizzuto, Smith was just another man walking down the street. Pizzuto owned a sub shop called Gigi's, and around three o'clock on the afternoon of March 11, he had seen Smith walk past his shop on the opposite side of Pleasant Street. Pizzuto got up from his seat and walked to the doorway to follow Smith's progress. He watched Smith go into the pharmacy and then emerge a few minutes later and continue walking up Pleasant Street toward the bus stop. According to Pizzuto, Smith glanced behind him continually as he walked. Curious, Pizzuto left his shop and walked across the street to the pharmacy.

Pizzuto was a big man, and as he testified he pulled a handkerchief out of his pocket and began to dab the sweat off his face. "You asked the kid in the drugstore," Beryl Cohen said, "whether the colored fellow went in there?"

"Yes."

"Is that what you said to him? … Did you say, 'Was there a colored fellow in there buying cigarettes?'"

"I said, 'Did a colored fellow come in the drugstore?' … I didn't ask him 'cigarettes.'"

"Did you say 'colored fellow'?"

"Yes."

"There was Kenneth Fitzpatrick you were talking to?"

"I don't know his name, he works in the drugstore." …

"Did you say to Ken Fitzpatrick, 'Did you see the big darkie'?"

"No, I did not."

"You didn't say that?" …

"I might have said '*****.'"

"You might have said '*****.' You didn't say '******'?"

"Well, I might have said '******.'"

"You might have said '******.' Did you say 'the big darkie'?"

"I wouldn't say it."

"I'm asking you whether you said it."

"Well, yes, I think I said it."

"You did say it. What did you say?"

" 'Was that ****** in your place?'" …

"Did you say 'the big ******'?"

"No, I didn't say no big ******."

Pizzuto had alerted the Belmont police that he'd seen a black man walking down Pleasant Street, but he'd alerted them before he knew there'd been a murder nearby; he'd alerted them simply on principle after noticing police cars in the area. Everyone on Pleasant Street, it seemed, had noticed Smith walk by, and perhaps everyone on Pleasant Street had had the same thought: What's that black guy doing out here? Not everyone, however, was as forthright about it as Pizzuto. Belmont was a sophisticated town where few people would openly say anything racist, but that didn't mean they weren't thinking that way. The merchants in Belmont Center or the bankers up on the Hill may have been just as suspicious of Smith as Pizzuto was, but most would never have owned up to it.

The thing about racism, though, is that it doesn't necessarily mean the black guy didn't do it, either. The Commonwealth's case against Smith advanced across a broad front that kept Cohen dashing back and forth on the parapets like a man trying to defend a fortress by himself. First came the children. All four of them were asked by Kelley whether they understood what it meant to tell the truth, and all of them answered that they did. Three of the children testified that they passed Roy Smith on their way home around three o'clock and that he looked like he was in a hurry but not necessarily nervous. The children all testified that soon after they got home they organized a kickball game in front of the Goldberg house, and that Dougie had scored eight runs in a row by the time Mr. Goldberg got home. They testified that while they were playing no one else came or went from the house until Mr. Goldberg arrived, and that he was inside only a few minutes before he rushed back out. A neighborhood girl named Susan Faunce said that when he re-emerged he was screaming and crying so hard that she could barely understand him. "Why did this happen to me! Oh, my Bessie!" she understood him to say.

"Maybe she went into town," another little girl, Myrna Spector, said to Mr. Goldberg, trying to be helpful. Moments later, the children heard the sirens.

After the children came the issue of the money. Richard Kelley called a succession of taxi drivers, liquor-store clerks, pharmacists, and Roy Smith's friends to add up exactly what Smith spent in the 24 hours following the murder. And the amount—"Not a grand total to you … but for Roy Smith, it was blood money," as Kelley would later tell the jury—was $13.72. That was almost $8 more than he should have had, according to what Smith said he was paid at the Goldbergs'. Even more damning, the liquor-store clerk said that he'd seen Smith pull a 10 and five ones out of his pocket when he paid for his liquor, and Israel Goldberg testified that he'd put a 10 and five ones on Bessie's night table before leaving that morning.

And then there was the rape. Why did Roy Smith—who was accused of killing Bessie Goldberg so that he could get away with the robbery—also rape her? At his feet was a dying 63-year-old woman. Was he overcome by lust? By rage at whites? Was he simply insane? Kelley offered no psychological or legal theory on the rape, beyond the fact that Smith was possibly drunk and essentially capable of anything. That rape had occurred, however, was beyond dispute: Dr. Arthur McBey of the state-police crime laboratory testified that a vaginal smear taken from Bessie Goldberg showed "numerous intact spermatozoa." The fact that the sperm cells were intact meant that the sex act had occurred very recently. This was not sex that had happened a day or a week earlier; this was sex that had happened at the same time as the murder. Furthermore, there was a small stain on the outside of Smith's trousers that turned out to be sperm as well, though it could not be determined how old it was. But it looked very much like Roy Smith had raped Bessie Goldberg and then just pulled up his pants and fled.

The final component of the Commonwealth's case was a trip that Smith took to Boston to pick up his television set. Every person in the car that night testified in one way or another that Smith did not want to stop at the apartment when he saw that there were policemen outside it. Testimony by the driver of the car—a man named William Cartwright—was particularly damning: "I got to Shawmut, he asked me to slow down, then he said, Go faster, they're still here," he told Richard Kelley under direct examination. "I seen two gentlemen in the dark on the other side of the street."

This was crucial for the Commonwealth. Other than Louis Pizzuto, no one who encountered Smith on the afternoon of the murder thought that he looked agitated. That was a problem. Murder upsets people; it even upsets murderers. Kelley had shown that Smith had the opportunity to commit the crime and that he had too much money in his pocket; now, with Cartwright, he could show that Smith was avoiding arrest and was therefore aware of his own guilt. There were layers upon layers of corroborating testimony, medical testimony, meteorological testimony, but at its essence the Commonwealth's case was this: Roy Smith killed Bessie Goldberg because no one else could have. And then he acted exactly like someone who had committed a murder but did not have the resources or the imagination to actually save himself afterward. He had simply avoided the inevitable as long as possible.

"You have the defendant here, Roy Smith, whose age is 34 years, 35 years," Kelley told the jury during his summation. "Five foot eleven, about 150 pounds, black hair, brown eyes, slim build, long sideburns and a moustache. And what else do we know about him? We have these pants—these clothes. There are holes in them; I ask you not to criticize the defendant at all for that; for poverty, no one can defend against. But there is nothing that a good bar of soap can't do. I'm not criticizing his sanitary habits, but I say this: In view of his drinking, is he a man of excessives? Now Mrs. Bessie Goldberg: A very hardworking, good housewife, was thrifty, a gentlewoman, without prejudices, who opened her home to this defendant … and that was repaid by the worst ingratitude conceivable: Death."

Richard Kelley served with the navy in the Pacific during World War II and was slated, along with his brother, to be part of the force that was to attack mainland Japan. Richard Kelley was a man who was very clear—all law aside—on the concept of duty, on the concept of right and wrong.

"Can anyone of us go into the mind of a person that commits any crime of this nature and compare their standards of conduct with yours?" he went on. "Your standards, your backgrounds, your experiences are distant. Roy Smith had no money to go any place else. Was there anyone in the world that this man befriended enough to turn to? Much has been said through the whole trial that he wasn't nervous. Who is to say if he is nervous? Some people may be as cold as ice. Is this defendant in that category? Does he sit quietly and stoically in the box there without any show of emotion? If he is a man of little self-control, would he not stop at the first place for cigarettes after such an undertaking? It is a circumstantial case, gentlemen, and your duty is not an easy one. But I ask you this—"

No one on the jury knew what a difficult moment this must have been for Richard Kelley. He was from Boston. He was Irish. The terrible news had come into the courthouse just hours earlier, and he had delivered his entire summation knowing something that almost no one else in the room knew.

"I ask you this: In these times, do not be lacking in courage. Be true to yourselves, then you will be true to the defendant. You will be true to the people of the Commonwealth. You will be true to the laws we should all uphold. You sit in the capacity of fact-finders, and I urge each one of you that you leave here with the satisfaction that you will never look back and say, I did not perform the duty that was called upon me."

Richard Kelley sat down, and Judge Bolster turned to face Roy Smith. He told him that, since this was a capital case—one in which he could be put to death—he had the right to address the jury. "The privilege is yours," Judge Bolster said, "if you wish to avail yourself of it."

Roy Smith rose from his seat in the defendant's box. He had shaved his mustache and his sideburns and stood before the jury in his new suit under the high vaulted ceilings. Outside was a dull, overcast day, waiting to rain, and the trees were already stripped of their leaves. Smith must have drawn a deep breath. He must have heard his voice shaking as he spoke his few words into the huge room. They would be the only words he spoke during the trial, and they would perhaps be the most important words of his life. "I would like to say to the court and jury," Smith said, "that I did not kill Mrs. Goldberg, or rob her, or rape her. She was alive when I left. Thank you."

The jury had been sequestered in a hotel, as was the custom at the time, for over two weeks. They knew little of the recent events of the world and absolutely nothing of the events of that day. Judge Bolster turned in his seat to address the jury and spoke with all the solemnity of a judge and all the sorrow of an American. "Now I have a very sad duty, gentlemen, I don't know whether you have heard. Early this afternoon one or more assassins in Texas, apparently from high up in a building, fired shots at some of our officials. They hit the president, the vice president and the Governor of Texas, and the president, early this afternoon, died. I ask everyone in the room to rise."

The jury rose. Some were crying, others were simply in shock. Not only were half the jurors Irish, they were from Kennedy's original congressional district. It was as though they'd just learned that someone had killed their brother.

"I thought fast," Judge Bolster went on. "I am willing to take the responsibility. You have been here almost three weeks. I venture to think that if the president were here … he would do what I am doing. We are going ahead, but we are going ahead in a thoughtful sorrow about what has transpired. I have watched you gentlemen, and I think you are men of sufficient mental integrity not to let this influence you in any way in the decision of this case. This case is on its own evidence and on the arguments that have been ably presented to you, and so we are going forward. And will you please make every effort to be sure that your decision in this case is in no way tainted by the national disaster that has struck us. So you may retire, Mr. Foreman, and gentlemen, and we start at 8:30 in the morning."

With that, the trial of Roy Smith was over. Smith returned to his cell at Billerica House of Corrections and the jury returned to their hotel rooms and Judge Bolster and Beryl Cohen and Richard Kelley returned to their homes and their children and their wives. Each man waited out the long night with his particular worries or fears, but they all had one thing in common: the president of the United States was dead and no one knew what would happen next.

The following day, Smith was convicted of murder and larceny—but not of rape—and sentenced to life in prison without parole.

A year and a half later, in the spring of 1965, the phone rang in our house, and when my mother answered it, she was surprised to hear Russ Blomerth on the line. Russ hadn't called in two years—not since the studio was finished—but he had odd and urgent news. Mrs. Junger, he said, I don't know how to tell you this. But I've just found out that Al DeSalvo is the Boston Strangler.

There was only one telephone in our house, a white rotary desk phone that sat on a shelf by the entrance to the kitchen, and next to the shelf there was a small stool. My mother felt her knees go out from under her, and the next thing she knew she was sitting on the stool. He was just caught on a rape case, my mother remembers Blomerth saying. And then he confessed to being the Boston Strangler.

Blomerth presumably wanted my mother to hear the news from him before she read it in the newspaper. DeSalvo had begun making lengthy confessions to the police, and Blomerth had already been contacted by investigators to provide corroborating evidence.

DeSalvo, as it turned out, had been alone or off the clock for every single strangling in the Boston area. The authorities were particularly interested in December 5 and December 30, 1962, which were the days Sophie Clark and Patricia Bisette had been killed. Blomerth said his records showed that on those days Al had come to our house by himself to check on the diesel heaters.

"The exact hours that he did this I have no way of knowing," Blomerth testified in writing. "But I must tell you that Albert was a truly remarkable man. He had unbelievable strength, energy and endurance. He was completely lovable to every individual while working for me. Never was there any deviation from the highest proper sense of things."

So Al had left our house and gone on to kill a young woman. Or he had killed a young woman and then showed up to work 20 minutes later; either possibility was too horrifying to contemplate. Al had spent many, many days working in the studio while my mother was home alone; all he'd had to do was ask to use the bathroom or the telephone and he was inside the house with her. It would be stupid to kill someone you were working for—you'd be an immediate suspect, like Roy Smith—but couldn't you do it on a day when no one knew you were there? Al came to our house to check the heaters unannounced and on no particular schedule.

What would have prevented him from attacking my mother and then slipping away afterward?

My mother hung up the phone and shuffled through her memories of DeSalvo. What about the afternoon when Bessie Goldberg was killed? Could Al have driven over to Scott Road—which he passed every day on his commute from Malden—and killed her and then gone back to work? My mother had come home that day to a phone call from my babysitter telling her to lock the doors because the Boston Strangler had just killed someone nearby. She had hung up the phone and gone out back to repeat the bad news to Al, who was on a stepladder painting trim. What could have possibly been going through Al's mind during that conversation? If he was indeed the Strangler but hadn't killed Bessie Goldberg, it must have been a terrific shock to hear about a similar crime so close by. And if he had killed Bessie Goldberg, there my mother stood at the foot of the ladder telling him about it.

How would my mother—alone in the house with dusk falling and a dead woman down the road—have appeared to the man who had just committed the murder?

And then there was an incident that had disturbed my mother so much that she hadn't even dared tell my father about it. DeSalvo had gone into our basement through a bulkhead door and called to my mother from the bottom of the stairs. She was alone in the house, and this is how she remembered what happened: "It was quite early. I heard the bulkhead door slam and I heard him go downstairs. I was still in my nightgown and bathrobe, and I hadn't gotten dressed yet. I heard him come in and two or three minutes later I heard him call me. So I opened the door to the cellar and I saw him down there at the foot of the stairs and he was looking at me. And he was looking in a way that is almost indescribable. He had this intense look in his eyes, a strange kind of burning in his eyes, as if he was almost trying to hypnotize me. As if by sheer force of will he could draw me down into that basement."

My mother knew almost nothing about Al DeSalvo at this point; it was only two or three days into the job and they had never even been alone together. She stood at the top of the stairs looking into Al's eyes and wondering what to do. What is it, Al? she finally asked.

There's something the matter with your washing machine, he told her.

My mother thought about that. Al had been in the house only a couple of minutes, and the washing machine wasn't even on. Why was he worrying about it? He was supposed to be outside building a studio, not in our basement worrying about the appliances. It didn't make sense. Clearly he wanted to get her down into the basement, and clearly if she did that, things would go very wrong. My mother told him that she was busy, and then she closed the basement door and shot the bolt.

A few moments later she heard the bulkhead door bang shut and the sound of Al's car starting up. He drove off and did not come back for the rest of the day. My mother didn't tell my father about the incident, because she was afraid he would over-react and cause a scene, but she decided that when she saw Russ Blomerth the next morning she would tell him she didn't want Al working on the property anymore. The next morning my father left for work, and this time the whole crew showed—Mr. Wiggins, Russ Blomerth, and Al. My mother got ready to confront Blomerth, but when she saw Al, he was so friendly and cheerful—Hi, Mrs. Junger, good morning, how are you?—that she hesitated. Was she over-reacting? Did she really want to get a man fired for the look in his eyes?

Al had a wife and two children to support, and in the end my mother didn't say anything.

It was only a matter of time before someone remembered Bessie Goldberg. DeSalvo never mentioned her name to the police, but the murder was almost identical to many others that he confessed to, and those confessions were filled with references to Belmont.

Any alert investigator would eventually get around to wondering whether there was some connection between the two. My mother, like a lot of people, always thought that Roy Smith might be innocent, so she was not surprised when a detective from the Strangler Bureau called and asked if she would answer some questions about Albert DeSalvo. Sometime in early 1966, Lieutenant Andrew Tuney and Detective Steve Delaney drove out to Belmont, parked in front of our house, and walked up the brick path to our door.

Delaney was not new to the Goldberg murder. Two years earlier, Delaney claims, just after he'd started working at the Strangler Bureau, Attorney General Ed Brooke had stopped by his desk to ask a favor. Delaney's job was to read through the crates of files, looking for patterns to the murders, and he says that Brooke wanted him to add the Goldberg murder to the list. Were there similarities, Brooke wanted to know, between the modus operandi of the Goldberg murder and the other murders?

It was a politically risky request because Smith had already been convicted—in fact, his case was currently under appeal—and Brooke seemed to be suggesting that someone else might have committed the murder. If the press found out, they would have a field day with it. A couple of weeks later Brooke ran across Delaney in the office and asked him if he'd had time to go through the Goldberg file. Delaney told him that he had, and that the M.O. had seemed to him exactly the same.

Brooke said he was sorry to hear that—very sorry—because word had gotten out that the Strangler Bureau was still investigating the Goldberg murder and it had turned into a political bombshell. Delaney would have to give the file back. According to Delaney, the Middlesex district attorney had gone to the state Supreme Court and complained that the attorney general's office could not simultaneously review the Roy Smith verdict and also explore the possibility that someone else had committed the murder. It was a conflict of interest. The judges agreed and ordered Brooke to reclaim the file from Delaney. (Contacted recently, Brooke—who went on to become a U.S. senator—says that he does not recollect these exchanges, although he acknowledges that Delaney's memory might be correct. He also could not find anything related to this matter in his personal files.)

At the knock, my mother opened the front door, let the two detectives into the living room, and offered them a seat on the couch.

Tuney was a tall, attention-getting man who was already a grandfather at 43 but still managed to maintain a certain reputation around town. ("Good booze and bad broads is what keeps us going," he once told a newspaper reporter about detective work.) Delaney had recently separated from his wife and was trying to decide whether to continue police work. My mother brought out a calendar with the dates of the studio job marked on it and described the incident in the basement. She showed them the photograph of her and Al and me and pointed out the ladder in the background that Al had been standing on when she told him about the Goldberg murder.

My mother wanted to know what would have happened if she had gone down into the basement. The detectives agreed that DeSalvo wouldn't have dared kill her, but they said he might have attempted a very forceful seduction. If he had killed her, they reasoned, he immediately would have become a suspect, and he was too smart for that. Delaney asked if he could keep the calendar, and my mother said that that would be all right, and after half an hour or so the men got up and put on their coats and hats and said good-bye. Either that same day or the next—Delaney doesn't remember—the two men marked their car odometer in front of my parents' house and then drove through Belmont to Scott Road. The distance was 1.2 miles.

Was it possible? Could DeSalvo have gotten into his car, driven to Scott Road, knocked on Bessie Goldberg's door, talked his way in, raped her, killed her, and then gotten back to our house before my mother and I arrived home? The trickiest—or least likely—part of this scenario was on Scott Road, where DeSalvo would have had to slip unnoticed past the neighborhood children. He also would have had to get into and out of the Goldberg house during the 48-minute window between Roy Smith's departure and Israel Goldberg's arrival. He would be threading an awfully small needle to do it, but it was still possible.

Another problem was the location: according to the F.B.I.'s analysis, all the murders DeSalvo claimed to have committed were in apartment buildings where many people came and went and residents might not be surprised if a maintenance man knocked on their door. But this was a house in the suburbs, where a stranger would stand out immediately because everyone on the street knew one another by their first names. Once you have DeSalvo in the house the crime is pure Boston Strangler, but how do you get him there? And why would a killer who seemed to have developed such a perfect technique for killing women suddenly abandon it for something far riskier?

Tuney and Delaney parked on Scott Road and walked around the Goldberg house, noting where the front and back doors were and how far Smith had to walk to get to the bus stop on Pleasant Street. One of the first things that struck Delaney was that the Goldberg house was easily approached from the back; it was a route, in fact, that neighborhood children said they used as a shortcut. If a killer wanted to enter the Goldberg house unseen from Scott Road, all he had to do was cross behind the Hartunians' house on the corner of Pleasant Street and walk about 120 feet to the Goldbergs' backyard. Workmen would not ordinarily use the front door of a house like the Goldbergs', so Bessie might not be suspicious if a man knocked on her kitchen door and said, for example, that he worked for the Belmont water department and wanted to check her meter.

If Delaney was the idealist of the two, Tuney was the seasoned pragmatist. He'd been in police work long enough to know that the politics of a case are everything, and that if you ignore them you'll get nowhere. Consequently, the first thing he'd done on the way to Scott Road was to stop at the Belmont Police Department and let the police chief know they were in the area. It wasn't required, but it was a matter of respect, and it may have been a courtesy that paid off. Delaney is not positive where they got this information, but he believes it was from someone at the department: apparently a neighbor of the Goldbergs' had seen a suspicious person on Scott Road on the afternoon of the murder and had called the Belmont police with the information, but the police had not followed up on it. The lead, such as it was, now belonged to Tuney and Delaney.

The neighbor turned out to be an elderly man with a bedridden wife, and Delaney has a memory of standing back while Tuney asked the man to repeat his story. On the afternoon that Bessie Goldberg was killed, the neighbor said, he'd been approached by a man in work clothes who had offered to paint his house as a side job on weekends. The man was white and probably in his 30s and—in Delaney's mind, at least—roughly matched a description of DeSalvo. The old man said he declined the work offer by saying that a private nurse he'd hired to help his wife needed him back in the house. The incident had stuck in his mind, though, and an hour later—when he saw police cars and an ambulance on Scott Road—he called the police department.

By then, however, every cop in Massachusetts was already looking for Roy Smith, and a white man walking around a white neighborhood knocking on doors would have meant absolutely nothing. That was, however, something that DeSalvo said he often did to find weekend work. Maybe he knocked on the Goldbergs' door and Bessie opened, Delaney thought. Maybe she let him in.

Maybe he said he needed to check her water meter or offered to paint her living room. Maybe she just turned away for a moment and he was on her. It was a classic Boston Strangling except that DeSalvo never confessed to it and Roy Smith was convicted of it; in every other respect it was identical to the 13 murders DeSalvo claimed to have committed.

Delaney and Tuney finished up on Scott Road and drove back to Boston without anything concrete to report. It was a delicate line of inquiry anyway—what with Smith's case under appeal and the attorney general himself warned away from making any awkward comparisons to other murders. It was a case, however, that Delaney never managed to get out of his head.

Roy Smith died of lung cancer 13 years into a life sentence. Two days earlier, a governor's commutation—effective immediately—had been handed to him at his hospital bed. It was unheard of for a lifer to be considered for commutation after only 10 years, and the only explanation was that a lot of people had to have doubts about Smith's guilt. DeSalvo was never linked to the Goldberg murder, but some thought it odd that he was stabbed to death within days of the 10-year anniversary of Smith's conviction for the crime.

[MIKA27]

9/11 Mastermind Kept Sane In Prison By Designing A Vacuum Cleaner

Besides being waterboarded and kept awake for 180 hours, there’s not an awful lot to do when you’re in the custody of the CIA for orchestrating the biggest terrorist attack in American history. So after he spilled all the secrets he could spill, 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheik Mohammed did what anyone in his position would do to pass the time. He designed a vacuum cleaner

As the Associated Press tells the story, the CIA had gotten what they needed from Mohammed, who has a bachelor’s in mechanical engineering, but wanted to keep him around and keep him sane in case they needed him in the future. This was a solid challenge for all detainees, especially since they’d just invested countless man hours breaking him down to tease a confession out of him. “We didn’t want them to go nuts,” one senior CIA officer told the AP.

The vacuum thing is weird to be sure, but it’s not the only odd concession the CIA made to their widely abhorred detainee.

Mohammed also held “office hours” where he’d lecture the intelligence officers about whatever was on his mind. He also became a big Harry Potter fan and even tried sending his fellow prisoners a message not to talk about Osama bin Laden’s courier through one of the books. It’s unclear if he planned to embed secret messages in his vacuum design; unfortunately, we may never know. As Mohammed’s lawyer explained:

“It sounds ridiculous, but answering this question, or confirming or denying the very existence of a vacuum cleaner design, a Swiffer design, or even a design for a better hand towel would apparently expose the US government and its citizens to exceptionally grave danger.”

Not to mention the Dyson empire.

[mazolaman]

I wonder if the CIA have read Our Man In Havana?

Looks like that chap would be better off designing the ShoulderShaver !

[BehikeLover2]

Filmmaker Captures His Terrifying Polar Bear Attack On Camera

Where is the Rest?? It stops at the worst possible moment!!!