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

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Cancer Survivor Receives Jaw Thanks To New 3D Printing Technique

Shirley Anderson of Indiana was in great need of a prosthesis. Doctors found a cancerous lump on his tongue in the 1998 and shortly after, he began radiation treatments. He underwent a radium implant to help him replace some of his lower jaw, but it didn’t work. So he turned to prosthetics.

Dr. Travis Bellicchi, a maxillofacial prosthodontics resident at Indiana University, made the man a traditional prosthesis out of clay, but it was so large and uncomfortable that Anderson could only wear it for four hours at a time. So, Bellicchi started looking for a digital solution and eventually turned to 3D printing.

According to Formlabs, a digital model of Anderson’s face was created to capture bone detail, so that researchers could test a much lighter prosthesis for their patient.

The results are pretty astounding. We’ve known about similar techniques, including using 3D printing to create affordable artificial limbs, along with efforts such as with a man who received a new face in 2013.

However, with Anderson, researchers, including Bellicchi and student Cade Jacobs, have created a new workflow that can create new body parts in a short amount of time. It’s called the “Shirley Technique” and it combines digital and traditional approaches to prosthesis production.

According to Indiana University, researchers used 3D printing to create a mould of the face. The negative space where Anderson’s chin and jaw would be is then used to create a prosthesis that is more realistic, lighter and creates a more natural break around the edge.

“My motivation to use traditional materials is that they are predictable, they are bio-compatible, they have research behind them, and we know how to do the characterisation to make them lifelike,” Bellicchi told the university.

Researchers added that so far, the method has been used on six other patients, including a man who received a new ear in just six weeks.

Check out the results below.

 

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Did Prehistoric People Watch The Stars Through This 6000-Year-Old 'Telescope'?

Prehistoric humans may have observed the sky via primitive lens-less “telescopes”, according to a team of British astronomers who have studied the long passageways of ancient megalithic tombs. The details were presented this week by Kieran Simcox, a student at Nottingham Trent University, at a meeting of the Royal Astronomical Society.

Technically it’s not a telescope (with or without a lens), per se. According to Simcox, it’s more like a very primitive version of a camera obscura, the basic concept behind the pinhole camera. All you need to create a camera obscura is a small hole in a shade or a wall, so that light can pass from a sunlit garden, for instance, into a darkened room, projecting an inverted image on the wall opposite the pinhole.

The key difference with the megalithic clusters is that the narrow entrance creates an aperture of about 10 degrees, sufficiently restricting the view by naked eye to make it easier to observe the sky — specifically, certain stars — during pre-dawn and twilight hours. Simcox and his colleagues are exploring the precise conditions under which this might work in the laboratory. Is it just a question of eye adaptation, or do other factors, like the size of the aperture or background colour of the sky, play a role?

What we might have seen from Carregal do Sal megalithic structure, at dawn in late April, circa 4000 B.C.

“In a sense, the long passage of the passage grave would act as a long tube that would not only focus the attention on a narrow band of the horizon, but also block out most of the light, as well as the atmospheric scattering that brightens the sky around the point where the sun is about to rise,” Fabio Silva of the University of Wales told Gizmodo. “By spending the night inside the passage grave, the eyes will be dark-adapted and, therefore, might be able to see the faint star rising, whereas someone outside the megalithic structure, already with light-adapted eyes due to the pre-dawn scattering, wouldn’t.”

(Left) The “window of visibility” while standing in the dolmens’ chamber. (Right) Orca de Santo Tisco, a dolmen with a much smaller passage.

It’s always a tricky proposition to speculate about how such ancient structures may have been used by prehistoric peoples. But Simcox et al‘s work is based on an earlier pilot project focusing on passage graves in Carregal do Sal in Portugal. That yielded a new way of identifying alignments between how the passages and entrances of the prehistoric are oriented, and celestial objects. Based on this, Silva said that the mostly likely target would be the star Aldebaran.

“From the wider archaeological record connected to the societies that built the passage graves, we know that these were pastoral communities, that still practised hunting and gathering,” he said. Such communities would pass the colder winter months in river valleys (where the dolmens are located) and move to higher ground in the spring — most likely to Serra da Estrela (“mountain range of the star”).

Six thousand years ago, people would have been able to see Aldebaran’s first rise at dawn in late April or early May. Silva thinks this suggests those communities may have relied on such observations to tell them when it was time to move to higher pastures.

However, it could also be the case that such sites were used in initiation rituals, similar to the ritual use of caves in Mediterranean regions during the Neolithic era. “When the youth would hit a certain age, they would be shown this ‘special’ way of viewing a star before it would usually be visible,” Simcox said.

Along with forensic astronomy, the field of cultural astronomy is booming of late, although some form of so-called “archaeoastronomy” has been around since the late 1800s, according to Silva. “Because the sky is often ignored by the wider archaeological and anthropological communities, [such interdisciplinary work can yield] many insights,” he said. These include the use of celestial cycles as primitive calendars, how those cycles become encoded in myth and folklore and illuminating deeper connections between the night sky, rock art and architectural structures.

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This 5-Year-Old Scientist Knows More About Tornadoes Than You

When I was five, I was repeatedly falling off my bike. Oliver, however, puts my five-year-old self to shame, because he’s over here making cool YouTube videos about tornadoes.

His father posted the video on Reddit yesterday, and it’s racked up a whole lot of Reddit gold already. According to dad, Oliver has wanted to make science videos since he learned to talk.

I’m not saying Oliver managed to coax out what I can only assume is my soul from the abyss in which it currently sits, but I’m not not saying that, either.

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A Great White Shark Got Caught Napping On Camera For The First Time Ever

Do you know what a sleeping great white shark looks like? It’s never been seen before. Until now. A robotic submersible captured the first-ever footage of a great white taking a nap, and you can see it innocently catch some Z's with its mouth hanging wide open. It looks maybe seven per cent less frightening than a great white that’s awake.

The shark doesn’t stop swimming, though its movement slows down tremendously and its body goes into this relaxed auto-pilot mode. The great white has to keep on moving, or it would sink to the bottom and suffocate.

Discovery posted this footage from Shark Week 2016’s Jaws of the Deep and explains what’s happening below.

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B&O Play's Beoplay H5 Wireless Earphones Turn Into A Necklace For Peace Of Mind

B&O Play has just launched its new Beoplay H5 earphones, a pricey wireless set targeted at runners, which will hang securely around your neck with the power of magnetism.

The earphones, which are connected by a cable covered in sweat-loving braided textile each have an inbuilt magnet. Whenever you need to pop them out of your earholes, simply click them together to form an attractive — Get it? Get it? — necklace of sorts, and rest easy in the knowledge that you’ll only lose them if some douchebag actually rips them off.

The magnets also connect the earphones to the cubic charger that comes included with them. Battery life is a claimed (up to) five hours, which is enough time to complete a marathon twice if you try hard enough and stop being a pathetic, limited human being.

The H5 features a 6.4mm dynamic speaker, an electromagnetic transducer and Bluetooth 4.2 with Digital Sound Processing. Through the Beoplay app, you can choose from a variety of set profiles or tinker with the sound yourself, so there’s no more excuse for not getting hyped for those 6am weekday runs.

The earphones are housed in a sweat-resistant combination of textured rubber and polymer, and the set also comes with seven pairs of ear tips. The Beoplay H5s are available to buy right now, and will set you back a wallet-pounding $389 in Australia.

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Apple Supplier Drops A Possible Hint About The Death Of The Headphone Jack

Cirrus Logic, a prominent supplier of audio technology for brands like Harmon Kardon, Sony and Philips, announced a new development kit that will make it easier for companies to create headphones using the Apple Lightning connector.

The announcement comes in the wake of a flurry of rumours suggesting that the iPhone 7 will not feature a headphone jack like older models. Instead, the rumours say, Apple will use its proprietary Lightning port to transmit audio.

So why the hell would Apple move away from the 3.5mm headphone jack that’s been a standard for decades? Well, one of the big advantages of Apple’s Lightning port is that it works as a charger both ways. That means it the port can be used to charge the device (either iPhone or iPad) in addition to being able to charge or power accessories connected to it (such as a pair of headphones).

The development kit will be made available through Apple’s MFi Program and includes reference design and other helpful tools that companies can use. Here’s how Cirrus Logic explains the benefits to the new dev kit:

The MFi Headset Development Kit demonstrates the advantages of Lightning-connected headsets over conventional analogue headsets. For example, digital connectivity with an integrated, high-performance DAC and headphone driver delivers high-fidelity audio to the headphone speakers. In addition, Lightning-connected headphones can interact with an iOS app to create a more custom audio experience, such as personalised EQ settings.

It’s important to note that Lightning headphones have actually been available for a couple of years now. Apple introduced the MFi specifications in June 2014 and Philips released two Lightning-based headphones — the Fidelio M2L and Fidelio NC1L — since the specifications were made available.

As John Gruber points out, it’s unclear if Cirrus Logic has insider information about whether Apple is actually going to remove the 3.5mm headphone jack from the iPhone, or whether it’s just trying to anticipate the big change. Either way, it appears that the company is in a prime position to embrace an emerging standard in audio transmission.

If Apple actually decides to move away from the 3.5mm headphone jack, it remains to be seen if the company will continue to ship the iPhone with a pair of headphones. Some rumours suggest that the iPhone will continue to ship with 3.5mm headphones and a Lightning adaptor, while others suggest that the company will try to upsell Beats headphones to new iPhone users.

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Researchers Just Found A Giant Cache Of Water Underneath California

Last year, researchers estimated that California had lost 238 trillion litres of water over the course of 18 months of drought. Now, a huge reservoir of underground water — three times bigger than engineers thought — has been found under California. But it still won’t solve the state’s drought troubles.

Researchers from Stanford University announced their find in a paper today in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Up until now, estimates of the amount of water beneath California’s Central Valley were less than a thousand cubic kilometres. Now, researchers say the reservoir contains 2700 cubic kilometres of usable water, or approximately 2.7 quadrillion litres. That’s several times what the state has reportedly lost. So why won’t it solve California’s drought woes? Part of the problem is where it was found.

Earlier estimates of the size of the reservoir were low, in part, because most studies had only looked up to 300m underground. That made sense based on old technologies, but, as the state dried up and our digging tech got better, water companies have been able to go deeper and deeper. Most of the water found by the Stanford researchers in this survey was between 300 and 900m below the surface. That’s still close enough to the surface to retrieve, study leader Stanford’s Rob Jackson told Gizmodo.

“It’s a little more expensive to use, but some towns and businesses are already using groundwater 1000 feet [300m] or more deep,” he noted. The problems, however, aren’t just getting to the water; there are also questions about the quality of that water once we get there.

About 30 per cent of the underground water supplies that the Stanford researchers found run right into drilling sites for either oil or natural gas — and that means that they could easily be contaminated. There’s also the possibility that, by tapping so deeply into the reservoirs, we could cause the ground to noticeably sink, a process the researchers say has already begun from relatively shallow tapping in the Central Valley.

But even if we could find a way to get to the water easily — and found it to be relatively clean when we did — it still wouldn’t yet be time to fill California’s pools with a slurry of bottled water and almonds. “We need to be careful about using it,” Jackson told us. “California’s groundwater pumping has been in overdraft for years, especially during the drought. Finding more water than expected doesn’t mean we should waste it.”

Plus, California’s drought is just one of the worldwide droughts we’re seeing. It’s no anomaly. In our new, hotter climate, droughts are normal, even expected. This reservoir, then, doesn’t need to just help compensate for California’s current drought — it needs to help prepare for the next one, and all the ones after that.

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Bionic Earbuds Are Like A Smartphone You Can Leave In Your Ears Forever

Doppler Labs, the company that wants to stick a Jarvis-like computer in every ear, will go live with its first bionic buds. Anyone can buy the device later this year, and it is some futuristic stuff.

We’ve been following Doppler Labs for a few years now. The company made its first inroads to your ears via a set of fashionably-designed earplugs. Since then Doppler has been plugging away at the concept of what it calls “active listening” with the idea that it might be the first company to turn in-ear computers into a thing. In February, we had the opportunity to test out Doppler’s proof-of-concept Here Active Listening System, a set of computerised buds that altered the sound of the world. It was an impressive if imperfect execution of its lofty ideas.

Available for pre-order now in the US and later this spring elsewhere, the new Here One is the company’s first proper consumer product. It will be available to anyone who can shell out $US300 ($408). Like the Here Active Listening System, Here One is a pair of smart wireless earbuds. They process sound from the world around you and either amplify, deaden or modify it, depending on what settings you use. With the concept product you could use the company’s app to block out the unwanted sounds of your commute or modify the sound of live music. Some of the more experimental settings allowed you to do things like apply psychedelic flange to the world, just in case the bad trip scenes from Fear and Loathing are something you’d like to experience without taking drugs.

The company is also beefing up the audio powers for its first widely-available product. The Here One will be a set of truly wireless buds that can stream music and access phone-based assistants like Siri and Google Now. This is something of the white whale for the audio world. Despite a number of Kickstarters and even a few products that are coming to market, nobody has nailed it yet. And again, the combination of sound from your phone and sound from the real world can be customised, so you can wander around aware of what’s going on while also rocking tunes.

Additionally, Doppler Labs is launching some new audio processing powers, based in part on feedback from the early adopters who bought into Here Active Listening.

First, you’ll be able to personalise the sound of the Here One using a brief on-boarding procedure that takes about one minute per ear. You’ll be asked questions and played some sound, and your input will be used to tailor the device’s algorithms to your ears.

Second, Doppler says it has improved its real-world sound filtering so that the buds can better differentiate between the screech of a train and the shrill voice of your whiny best friend. Oh goody.

Doppler isn’t disclosing the specifics of the hardware under the hood, but it will say that it’s using several processors and several microphones to make the magic happen. In particular, the microphones are “directional”, meaning that the system can tell which direction sound is coming from and adjust its listening powers accordingly.

Doppler Labs’ ambition is to create “the last thing you ever put in your ears”, and the company knows it hasn’t gotten quite there yet. For one thing, Here One still needs a phone to work, so it’s not quite Jarvis-in-a-bud yet. What’s more, the hardware is still on the clunky side and limited battery life will be an issue for the foreseeable future. Hell, I’m not even sure Doppler’s ambitions are something I want or that people will accept. Do you want a computer talking into your ear at all times forever? That said, with all the promises Doppler is making about its forthcoming product — I’m ready to listen.

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The Most Terrifying Glass Slide Ever Opens Atop A Skyscraper

Beware this new Los Angeles attraction if you’re afraid of heights. 

The Skyslide, a glass slide fixed along the tallest building west of the Mississippi River, is open for business this weekend. Thrill-seekers can pay $US25 ($33) to slide down 13.72m of bulletproof glass nearly 304.80m in the air.

The strength of the glass is enough to withstand hurricane winds and an earthquake, according to the BBC.

The slide is a part of OUE Skyspace LA, a rooftop observatory that gives visitors 360 views of the city at the top of the US Bank Tower. This is a great idea for people who want a high vantage point to view the expanding metropolis, and the slide works for people who don’t think that’s enough.

As someone who just moved to Los Angeles, though, you won’t see me going down it anytime soon. And I used to love slides. If the slide was able to freak out an Associated Press reporter who says she’s jumped out of planes, then I’ll pass. Amanda Lee Myers wrote:

As I hooked each foot into a little mat that helps riders pick up speed and avoid skidding on the glass, I felt my hands trembling. And when I scooched slowly toward the point of no return, I thought strongly about turning around.

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China Finished Building Its Alien-Hunting Telescope

China just finished building the world’s largest radio telescope, and is now better-equipped at searching for aliens.

According to Xinhua, about 300 “builders, experts, science fiction enthusiasts and reporters” watched the installation of the Five-hundred-metre Aperture Spherical Telescope, or FAST, in the southern Chinese province of Guizhou. The project took five years and 1.2 billion yuan ($238.7 million) to complete, and the reflector covers the area of roughly 30 football fields.

FAST is almost twice as large as the next biggest radio telescope, which is in Puerto Rico. It will be used for early-stage research by Chinese scientists for a couple years, and then be used more widely. FAST is capable of detecting gravitational waves, pulsars and, eventually, amino acids on other planets.

Everything come with a price. In order to make room for FAST, the Chinese government displaced 9000 people who lived in the area, and to do so paid these people only 12,000 yuan ($2387). The government could have done much better here but considering China’s long history of displacing people (over 40 million displaced since the 1970s), this is a relatively paltry number.

Let’s hope the telescope lives up to its promise. As Liu Cixin, a Chinese sci-fi writer who won the 2015 Hugo said, “I hope scientists can make epoch-making discoveries.”

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12.4 LITRE RADIAL-ENGINED 1939 PLYMOUTH PICKUP

Dropping a 12.4 litre Jacobs R-755 radial engine into a 1939 Plymouth pickup truck seems like the sort of thing you might do if you’d been tasked with the job of building a modern chariot for Mars – the ancient Roman God of War.

The truck is the work of the Corns family, based out of Colorado where they run a 40 acre salvage yard with hundreds of vehicles and tens of thousands of parts. Each Wednesday evening the Corns family invites friends to come by and they set to work on a project vehicle – the rules for joining this weekly get together are “Love cars, bring beer, and have a sense of humour.”

The project for the radial-engined truck began years ago when Gary Corns bought the beat up old 1939 Plymouth from a regular customer. It sat for over 30 years as they worked on other projects and ruminated over what they should to with it – until one day when Corns senior found an old seaplane in a nearby airplane wrecking yard that still had its Jacobs R-755 radial engine bolted to the front.

The first order of business was to see if they could get the old radial to run, amazingly it fired up with minimal fuss in a cloud of smoke and a roar that would send a chill down the spine of Cthulhu.

The Corns team set about finding a suitable single-barrel updraft carburettor on eBay, they then fabricated the parts needed to fit it to the Jacobs R-755. Once it was fitted the ignition system could be tuned and the valve clearances adjusted to within specification – likely for the first time in decades.

The Plymouth truck’s original chassis was beyond saving so a new tube chassis was welded up, this also allowed them to extend the front of the truck to allow adequate room for the new power plant. The body was heavily modified as it was fitted to the new chassis, rivets were used extensively as a hat-tip to the aeronautical past of the 7 cylinder radial and the attention to detail is remarkable.

If you’d like to read more about the truck you can click here, if you’d like to visit the Corns Family website you can click here.

 

 

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COMPASS BOX THE PEAT MONSTER WHISKEY

If it's peat and smoke you crave, it's tough to go wrong with The Peat Monster from Compass Box. It's a blend of single malt whiskies from the south coast of Islay and the village of Port Askaig, vatted with Ardmore. It was then matured in a mix of first fill and refill American oak casks. The result is a peaty dram that is balanced nicely with malt and fruit flavors. It might not be the biggest monster on the whiskey shelf, but it's certain to be one of the the best blended scotch whiskies you'll come across.

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A-FRAME CLIFF HOUSE

Set on a mountain ridge, the A-Frame Cliff House takes full advantage of its setting by straddling the cliff's edge. As a result, the lower level enjoys unfettered views of the mountains that rise across the lake below, with floor-to-ceiling windows and a glass-bordered balcony that runs along the edge. Details are scant when it comes to the interior, but it does appear that the home includes two more floors above ground, with an entrance on one side and sitting/living area on the other. Sadly, it's only a concept, but we wouldn't be surprised to see someone build something similar in the real world very soon.

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These ABCs Of Bug And Animal Deaths Make Us The Monsters

Short film Accidents, Blunders, and Calamities reworks Edward Gorey’s The Gashlycrumb Tinies for a family of possums. It’s an ABCs of accidental animal expirations, with great animation.

The short was made by 44 students at Media Design School, and it’s so good it’s almost hard to watch. Gorey’s style and the outlandishness of what he wrote made it easier to handle than some of the deaths animated in this. I was legitimately heartbroken, which does prove the talent on display. But also take this as a warning if hurt animals are one of those things you just can’t handle.

 

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This Is The Last Thing Japan's Lost Black Hole Satellite Saw Before It Died

Earlier this year, Japan launched a groundbreaking black-hole-monitoring satellite — only to lose control of it almost immediately under strange circumstances. Now, we finally can see what Hitomi did right before it died.

When JAXA launched Hitomi in February of this year, scientists were giddy over the possibilities of what the black hole monitoring satellite might tell us about the mysteries of the universe. It was only up there a month when something went wrong. A series of unfortunate events caused by both human errors and software flaws sent the satellite spinning out of control. Despite attempts to regain control, Hitomi continued to spin and throw debris into space. Eventually, JAXA declared that the $US273 million ($364.7 million) satellite was beyond recovery.

When Hitomi died, though, researchers also announced that they’d managed to scrape a little bit of data from the satellite and would be detailing it in upcoming papers. Some of that data is out today in a new paper in Nature, which shows Hitomi’s final observation. It has some fascinating implications for what we know about the role of black holes in galaxy formation.

Hitomi’s final observations were of the Perseus Cluster, a galaxy cluster 240 million light years away with a supermassive black hole at its centre. The satellite was able to get this view of the galaxy, as well as to measure its X-ray activity:

Researchers expected to see teeming activity in the centre of the cluster, but Hitomi’s final X-ray observations showed very little action.

“The intracluster gas is quieter than expected,” co-author Andrew Fabian of Cambridge University told Gizmodo. “We expected that the level would be higher based on the activity of the central galaxy.”

But the finding isn’t just a surprising oasis of calm in a turbulent galaxy. It also gives us insight into just what role black holes play in how galaxies do — or don’t — form.

“The surprise is that it turns out that the energy being pumped out of the black hole is being very efficiently absorbed,” co-author Brian McNamara of the University of Waterloo told Gizmodo. “This hot gas that we’re looking at with Hitomi is the stuff of the future, it’s the gas out of which galaxies form. There is much more of this hot gas than there are stars in the galaxy, or there’s more stuff that wasn’t made into galaxies than that was.”
That means that nearby black holes play a big role in the eventual size of a galaxy. “What it shows is that black holes very effectively control the growth rate of galaxies,” said McNamara.

Of course, the finding underscores how little we still know about the role of black holes in galaxy formation. It also gives us a tantalising look at how much promise the satellite held before it was lost.

The loss is even bigger because Hitomi marked what researchers hoped would be the end of a long-standing struggle to finally stick an X-ray microcalorimeter — a device used to take incredibly precise measurements of the energy in X-rays — into space. The findings in today’s study were based on just a very small sample of data researchers were able to get from Hitomi’s microcalorimeter before it was lost, and it already has them speculating over what could have been.

“The measurements on the Perseus Cluster showed the potential of the Hitomi X-ray microcalorimeter to transform our understanding of the velocities of hot gas throughout the Universe,” Fabian said.

Before Hitomi, there were two other attempts to send a microcalorimeter into space — and both ended in strange accidents. In 2000, a rocket mission that would have sent the first microcalorimeter into space exploded upon launch. In 2005, a microcalorimeter actually made it into space, but was destroyed by a coolant leak. It wasn’t until 2016 with Hitomi that a microcalorimeter was successfully launched long enough to take take measurements — only to be lost along with the entire satellite shortly after.

“It’s a huge loss, because just from that glimpse we can see the wonderful science that might have been over the next five years,” said McNamara. “We had a whole landscape of planned observations and that first glimpse we got with the detector shows the richness of what we could find. There were surely discoveries that would have been made when we opened that window.”

Still, even though Hitomi’s microcalorimeter and the observations it would have made are lost, there are other opportunities to send another microcalorimeter into space aboard some other upcoming mission.”There loss, but there’s also hope, we never give up,” McNamera said. “We’re hoping we can still get one there.”

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The High-Priced World of Rare Whiskey

From liquor cabinets to ghost distilleries, whiskey collectors are hunting for the rarest bottlings to add to their collections.

Bill Thomas has 4,500 bottles of whiskey at his house and nearly 2,700 bottles at Jack Rose Dining Saloon, his Washington, D.C. bar and restaurant. Many of them are worth thousands of dollars and are one or two of a kind. 

Despite their rarity, Thomas will open any one of them anytime. On the night I visited his home, we tasted an array of old and rare whiskies worth about $7,000 total, including a 19-year old, 1982 W.L. Weller Bourbon that currently fetches $2,500 at auctions and private sales.

But Thomas is far from alone. Thanks to an increased demand and interest in bourbon, rye and Scotch, there’s now a real pandemonium for vintage and rare whiskies in the United States and around the globe.

There are a few sources for the most sought-after whiskies. The most common and easiest to find are limited-edition bottling from modern distilleries that contain rare or “experimental” liquor. Why do they bother? The short answer is distillers release special whiskies a few times a year, like during the holidays or before Father’s Day, to generate media and collector attention. Depending upon how well they’re received, collectors like Thomas may snap up these whiskies for their collection causing their price on the secondary market to escalate.

The suggested retail price of these whiskies can range from the reasonable, under $50, to the extreme, like Macallan’s new 65-year-old single malt. It just went on sale last week and sells for $35,000 a bottle if you can get your hands on one of the 300 allocated for the US. It does come in a special Lalique decanter, which is a collectible in itself.

The rarest of these offerings are ones that are from distilleries that are no longer around, so-called ghost distilleries. While the stills may be long gone some of the barrels have been saved and looked after. The world’s largest liquor company Diageo is bottling a number of these whiskies under its aptly named Orphan Barrel Whiskey Distilling Co. brand. As part of the program, it has put out a number of interesting spirits, including the 20-year-old Barterhouse Bourbon, which was found in an old Stitzel-Weller warehouses in Louisville.

There are also a number of Scotch distilleries that were mothballed or closed but stocks of their single malt survived. Two popular ghost distilleries with drinkers and collectors are Port Ellen and Ladyburn. While you can still buy bottles of these Scotches now, some collectors are stockpiling them in hopes that the price will skyrocket when you can no longer find it in stores.  

Over the last few years, collectors are also looking to people’s personal liquor cabinets as a source of rare bottles. That bottle your great grandmother never opened from your uncle’s wedding might actually be worth something.   

The night I went to Thomas’ house, he had just brought home three bottles of a 1913 American whiskey by the Pennsylvania Gibson distillery in an original wooden crate, which he’d pick up from a local family’s estate for $250 each.

He admits buying alcohol at an estate sale or from an individual is a gamble, since you have no idea how the bottles were stored. “When I bought this I thought I’d be throwing $750 down the toilet,” he admits. But, fortunately, spirits are a lot heartier than wine and can be quite delicious even hundreds of years later if they’ve never been opened, stored upright and kept at room temperature. 

How’d the Gibson whiskey taste? It needed a little filtering but was delicious with bright spice notes and a lush mouthfeel. Not bad for a whiskey made more than century ago.

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This Planet With Three Suns Shouldn't Even Exist

Three hundred and twenty light years away in the Centaurus constellation sits one of the strangest planets humans have ever laid eyes on. It’s four times as massive as Jupiter and orbits twice as far out as Pluto — around one of its three suns.

Using a new instrument at the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope, a team of astronomers has spotted a planet in an exotic triple star system; it’s only the second such exoplanet known to science. And unlike the first triple-star exoplanet — which orbits very close to one star and very far from the other two — planet HD 131399Ab is gravitationally influenced by all three suns. Until now, astronomers weren’t sure such a planet could survive.

“I’d venture to say this is the weirdest orbit of any exoplanet we’ve ever found,” Kevin Wagner, an astronomer at the University of Arizona and lead author on the study published in today’s Science, told Gizmodo. “We know of no other planet in a configuration like this.”

Although astronomers have discovered thousands of exoplanets by transit photometry, only a handful of these worlds have been imaged directly. You can think of direct imaging like trying to see a firefly from a lighthouse 1600km away — an extraordinarily difficult thing to do. The only exoplanets we’ve imaged thus far are larger than Jupiter and sit in a comparable or wider orbit, where the glare of the parent star is less intense.

But as our instruments have improved, so has our ability to see a broader diversity of exoplanets, including some in multi-star systems that pose the added challenge of multiple sources of scattered light.

In 2014, the ESO’s Very Large Telescope was outfitted with a new instrument called SPHERE, which features an adaptive optics system for cancelling out the distortion of Earth’s atmosphere, as well as an instrument to block starlight, called a coronagraph. SPHERE is now one of the most powerful direct imaging tools planet hunters have at their disposal, and it bagged an exotic triple-star exoplanet on its very first observational campaign.

HD 131399A orbits a young A-type star, HD 131399A, taking a casual 550 Earth years to complete a single rotation. Far beyond its orbit, a Sun-like star and a K-dwarf (predictably named B and C) twirl about one another like dumbbells, while also revolving slowly around star A.

“The planet is about a third of a way out [between star A, and the B/C pair],” Wagner said. “All of the stars have a lot of gravitational influence on the planet, meaning it has a very irregular orbit that’s constantly evolving and changing.”

Whether the competing gravitational tug of three stars will cause the planet to be ripped apart or ejected from its overcrowded birthplace remains to be seen. In cosmic terms, HD 131399Ab is an infant, just 16 million years old. But the fact that it has survived this long suggests there could be more worlds like it. Some could even be small, rocky and habitable.

HD 131399Ab in the triple-star system HD 131399, as imaged by the ESO’s SPHERE instrument. It lies 80 AU from star A, while the binary pair B/C lies in a more distant orbit, also around star A

“We thought that [triple star planets] weren’t going to be common, or at least in this extreme configuration, so we hadn’t really looked,” Wagner said. Studying these systems will expand our understanding of the conditions under which planets form and migrate about.

Wagner is continuing to refine HD 131399Ab’s orbit to determine whether the planet will be stable over the long-term. But while its fate and the fate of triple star planets across the universe remains a question mark, that shouldn’t stop us from imagining what life on such a world would be like.

“I like to start thinking about it from when the planet is opposite all three stars,” Wagner said. “When they aren’t eclipsing, you’d see three suns in the sky. As the planet progresses in its orbit, the stars will start to grow apart, to the point where the setting of one coincides with the rising of another.”

In essence you’d have two seasons: One with three sunrises and sunsets every day, and another of perpetual daylight, where a rising star (or stellar pair) is always there to replace a setting one.

Now if that doesn’t make you want to hop in a spaceship and explore the universe, I don’t want to know you.

 

[MIKA27]

A Monster Typhoon Is About To Slam Into Taiwan

Taiwan is bracing as a category 5 super typhoon bears down on its coastline. Typhoon Nepartak is expected to bring torrential rainfall and enormous waves in its wake, meaning Taiwan, and subsequently mainland China, could be in for some serious flooding. This comes just days after central China experienced one of the deadliest flood-related disasters in its history.

What’s astonishing about this storm is not only how powerful it is — as USA Today notes, it’s the strongest first typhoon of the season to hit Taiwan in over 50 years — but how quickly it intensified, going from a tropical storm on Monday afternoon to a category 4 super typhoon on Tuesday. (A super typhoon is a tropical Pacific storm with maximum sustained winds of at least 241km/h). Yesterday, the storm reached its peak intensity and achieved category 5 status, with winds howling up to 281km/h.

As meteorologist Jeff Masters points out over at Weather Underground, ocean waters a full 1-2C hotter than usual have fed energy into the storm as it marches toward the coastline.

Total ocean heat content in the region surrounding the track of Typhoon Nepartak. High heat has helped the storm to intensify rapidly. 

Typhoon Nepartak is expected to make landfall over Taiwan today and reduce in intensity somewhat before churning up the coast of southeastern China. The onslaught of wind and rain could inundate regions of China that are still reeling from a week of monsoon-related downpours that flooded cities and left at least 181 people dead or missing.

The latest track of the storm from the Joint Typhoon Warning Center.

Taiwan often finds itself a punching bag for some of the tropical Pacific’s biggest and baddest storms, and on the heels of one of the most intense storm seasons in memory, it’s preparing for the worst. Some 35,000 troops have already been mobilised to aid in flooding and rescue operations. Now, there’s nothing to do but wait.

[MIKA27]

U.S. Company Wants 1000 Employees In Space By 2045

A Colorado-based company plans to put a thousand employees working in space over the next thirty years.  The company, United Launch Alliance (ULA), plans to create refueling stations in orbit around the Earth that allow commercial space vehicles to stay in operation without returning to ground. Employees would be needed to man refueling stations, make repairs on vehicles, and maintain life support functions.

ULA has laid out their vision in a presentation given at the Planetary & Terrestrial Mining Sciences Symposium and linked to on the company’s website. Plans include prospecting locations suitable for moon colonization, constructing massive orbital manufacturing stations, and developing “lunar resource extraction” outposts for mining the moon’s surface.

 

Parts 1, 2, 3 and 4 of ULA’s thirty-year vision

The company’s project, known as “Cislunar 1,000 Vision,” depends upon cooperation between ULA and Lockheed Martin and Boeing, makers of the Atlas and Delta rockets used to launch equipment and personnel into orbit. A new Centaur rocket which uses a propellant made from liquid oxygen and hydrogen is planned for extensive use, allowing for refueling using water mined from either the moon’s surface or from asteroids ‘caught’ in space.

Much of ULA’s plan depends on the successful development of the XEUS platform, a reusable interplanetary tanker that can land horizontally to allow for faster and easier refueling and loading of precious moon cargo.

George Sowers, ULA’s vice president for advanced programs, believes these new fueling methods will bring launch and refueling costs low enough to make mining the lunar surface feasible and, most importantly of course, profitable:

We’ve been chipping away at the problem of launch costs for years and years and years, and made incremental improvements, but not quantum improvements. The proposal here is that the transportation system be based primarily on liquid oxygen and hydrogen. It is a pretty readily available fuel combination.

If ULA can pull of their vision for a fully developed space economy based around their refueling methods, they estimate that their “gross space product” could reach $2.7 trillion a year, far above the GDP of many countries.

 

[MIKA27]

BikeBlock

BikeBlock was created for urban bike users that want to store their precious ride inside their apartment, but there never seems to be a stand that would look good enough for it... with that in mind Danish company Urbanature developed this minimalist industrial piece with an ultra modern concrete look, allowing you to showcase your prized possession, giving it a deserved place of honor in your apartment. BikeBlock keeps your wheels standing because of its considerable weight (18kg), and will prevent it from falling or tipping over. Its modern look will make it blend nicely in any urban apartment, it also features a soft leather finish on the base, so you don´t scratch your floor. You may use it for 24” to 26” wheels, with large or thin tires. Keep you bike nearby and in style with this contemporary stand.    

[MIKA27]

Han Green Outdoor Sunglasses 

Developed by Danish eyewear designer Han Kjobenhavn, the Green Outdoor Sunglasses feature a cool aviator shape and cage trim details on the sides. Available in matt black or titanium, the cool shades have a classic well-proportion shape, and feature full metal mesh side-shields for a more hard edged post-apocalyptic vibe. They also have adjustable nose-pads for a finely tuned fit, dark forest Carl Zeiss lenses, and come with a hardshell case and cleaning cloth.    

[MIKA27]

The Sole Surviving Print Of The Legendary 'Turkish Star Wars' Has Been Found

Star Wars fans who are also cult-movie junkies: Today is the equivalent of your birthday and Life Day rolled into one. The last remaining 35mm print of 1982’s The Man Who Saves the World, AKA “the Turkish Star Wars“, has been found. Toss aside your crappy bootleg, because you’ll finally be able to see this legendary rip-off in its full, wonderfully terrible glory.

The hero in this tale: Neon Harbour Entertainment’s Ed Glaser, whose previous acts of film preservation include shepherding the English-language DVD release of the Turkish remake of Rambo. Glaser reached out to share his find, and according to a Neon Harbour press release, the Star Wars print survived all these years due to some Han Solo-style subterfuge:

The 35mm print was discovered in the collection of a retired movie projectionist in northwestern Turkey. After its original exhibition he kept it rather than returning it to the production company, lying that it had been damaged during projection.

Glaser plans to restore the print (since no negatives apparently exist) — which he describes as “the Holy Grail”, so you know it’s in good hands — then release it on DVD, and perhaps even take it on a theatrical tour.

Much like 1973 cult classic 3 Dev Adam, otherwise known as Captain America and Santo vs Spider-Man, the Turkish Star Wars is evidence that fan films existed well before YouTube, Vimeo and the like came to be. Its original footage is interwoven with chunks that are shamelessly “borrowed” from the source material, A New Hope, as well as music from other movies (Raiders of the Lost Ark, Moonraker). The end result is a curious mashup of Turkish mythology as interrupted via Hollywood imagery.

Yep, it’s as weird as it sounds. Actually, incredibly, it’s weirder, and that’s why Turkish Star Wars become one of the most sought-after cult movies ever — the fact that it only existed in seventh-generation VHS dubs has only added to its allure over the years. But imagine seeing its most transcendently bizarre moments on the big screen, as breathlessly described by Neon Entertainment’s press release:

Memorable sequences involve the heroes battling robots inspired by “Battlestar Galactica” and “Forbidden Planet” — plus mummies, skeletons, and multi-coloured yetis. Another sees them in starfighter “cockpits,” wearing motorcycle helmets, as footage from the “Star Wars” Death Star battle is projected behind them — edits and all.

And that’s not even the half of it; the movie also features an evil wizard, galloping horses, limb-chopping kung fu fights and an array of insane costumes and “special effects”. Why not see for yourself?

[MIKA27]

Kiefer Sutherland Is Coming Back for the Flatliners Remake

A remake of the 1990 hit Flatliners just got a shock to the heart. Kiefer Sutherland, who appeared in the original, has joined the cast as “a seasoned doctor.” Like the first movie, this one is about a team of medical students who stop their own hearts to learn more about death.

There’s no word if Sutherland’s role will tie into the original film at all, but bringing him back certainly adds some prestige to this new version of the story.

Sutherland joins an already impressive young cast that includes Ellen Page, Diego Luna, Nina Dobrev, and Kiersey Clemens. Niels Arden Oplev, who directed the original Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, is directing, and filming starts later this month.

[MIKA27]

Blood Father Trailer Drops With A Bang

Mel Gibson’s latest is a rip-roaring thrill ride that shows exactly who you don’t mess with.

Gritty, dirty and dangerous, director Jean-François Richet’s action thriller Blood Father promises an adrenaline rush with its first blood-and-mud-spattered trailer. 

Starring Mel Gibson, Erin Moriarty, William H. Macy, Elisabeth Röhm, Thomas Mann, Diego Luna and Michael Parks, and produced by Chris Briggs with Why Not Productions, Blood Father is based on the novel of the same name by Peter Craig (who also wrote the screenplay). It has that vintage sepia-tinged feel of a 70s grindhouse movie that gives it the ominous cast of something really sinister lurking in the trailer park. 

Ex-con tattoo artist John Link (Gibson) has abandoned alcohol and the Hell’s Angels for his trailer-run tattoo parlor in an effort to stay sober and out of handcuffs. His only friend in this desolate existence is co-deadbeat Kirby (Macy). When Link gets a call from estranged daughter Lydia Carson (Moriarty), for most of whose life he’s been behind bars with manslaughter charges, he is thrown into a firestorm of events that blazes with fury. The teen meth addict has just witnessed a savage murder committed by her boyfriend, Jonah (Diego Luna). She also thinks she may or may not have killed Jonah herself—and now his thug friends are foaming at the mouth to kill her.

Link soon realizes that his high school dropout daughter has somehow gotten herself entangled with a faction of the Mexican mafia who can only keep Lydia from talking to the police with a shot to the head. They set off on a rollicking ride through the middle of nowhere that Variety describes as “90 hardened minutes of shotgun mayhem, drug goons with tattoos up to their throats, and a general dirty meanness.” The thugs who think no one messes with them fail to realize one thing as break numerous speed limits to gun down Link—exactly who they happen to be messing with.   

Blood Father goes off with a bang on August 12th  

 

 

 

 

[MIKA27]

Edge of Winter Trailer 

As if we didn’t already have enough reasons not to get stranded in the wilderness (especially when temps are below the freezing point), director Rob Connolly has just given us one more with his newest psychological thriller, Edge of Winter. 

You could almost mistake Edge of Winter for a feel-good family film until you realize one of the kids is hoisting a rifle bigger than he is. Because feel-good family films aren’t overshadowed by an eerie foreboding that something is going to (literally) go off the tracks the moment you think everybody is going to hug it out. They also don’t end up in a broken-down SUV in the middle of the woods just as the sun is breathing its last. 

Starring Joel Kinnaman (Suicide Squad, Run All Night), Tom Holland (Captain America: Civil War) and Percy Hynes White (Night at the Museum: Secret of the Tomb), Rachelle Lefevre (Under the Dome) and Shiloh Fernandez (Evil Dead), the film was also written by Connolly alongside Capote producer Kyle Mann. 

Recently divorced dad Elliot Baker (Kinnaman) is laid off from his job and threatened with losing custody of his two sons Bradley (Tom Holland) and Caleb (White), who are all he has left in the frozen world they live in. Before his son does anything dangerous with the rifle, Baker decides to take both his sons on a hunting trip that was supposed to be something of a warped Hallmark Channel bonding experience, but instead leaves them stranded in a desolate part of the woods. The adventure turns ominous after darkness shrouds the abandoned cabin they decide to spend the night in. Losing his sons to his estranged wife is a paranoia that gnaws at Elliot to the point of madness—and suddenly, the boys’ most terrifying threat in the wild unknown becomes someone who should have been their protector. 

Winter is coming to theaters August 12.