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

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Making A Replica 400-Year-Old Sword Using Ancient Techniques Is Pretty Damn Hard

Watch as the guys from Baltimore Knife and Sword make a 400-year-old Dandao sword from China using some really old techniques and machinery. It’s awesome to see iron sand transformed into steel in a smelter that would be similar to the ones the Chinese used centuries ago. It’s almost cooler to see a block of steel get stretched out in a rolling mill that’s been used to make horseshoes for 80 years.

But the best part is seeing how damn hard it is to make the 400-year-old sword. Even with the aid of some modern cheats, turning sand into a steel blade takes so much work that it’s incredible that people actually managed to do it in the first place.

MIKA: The opening scene, for a second I thought that was David Caradine 

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It's Official: Game Of Thrones Ends After Season 8

The night is dark and full of terrors, also sadness. HBO has confirmed that Game of Thrones‘ eighth season will be its last.

The network’s programming executive Casey Bloys told Entertainment Weekly at the Television Critics Association’s press tour that HBO is going along with the plan from Game of Thrones showrunners David Benioff and Dan Weiss to end the show after season eight. This isn’t exactly a new announcement, as we’ve known for months that the show would likely last eight seasons, but this is the first time HBO has confirmed it.

“Yes. they have a very specific plan about the number of seasons they want to do,” Bloys told EW. “If I could get them to do more, I would take 10 more seasons. But we take their lead on what they think they can do the best version of the show.”

That doesn’t mean it’s the end of the Game of Thrones-iverse. Bloys expressed interest in a Game of Thrones spin-off show, something A Song of Ice and Fire author George RR Martin himself has supported.

Game of Thrones returns sometime in winter 2017 for season seven, which will get seven episodes. Season eight could get as few as six. Bloys also confirmed that Game of Thrones likely won’t be up for any Emmy Awards next year, because of season 7’s production delays to film in summer.

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The Horrifying Reason Siberia Is Dealing With An Anthrax Outbreak

In a news report that could easily be the plot of a cult horror movie, an anthrax outbreak has swept the remote Yamalo-Nenets district of western Siberia, killing 1500 reindeer since Sunday. According to NBC News, authorities think the outbreak began when some zombie anthrax thawed out of an infected reindeer corpse and woke up.

It’s been an exceptionally hot summer in Siberia, with temperatures in some provinces soaring up to 5.5C above average. The extreme heat has triggered a seemingly endless rash of freak weather, natural disasters and signs of ecological malaise, including enormous wildfires, record flooding and natural jumping castles that might be explosive.

But above all else, this week’s anthrax outbreak — the first to hit the region since 1941 — signals that global warming is transforming Siberia’s lonely wilderness into a feverish nightmarescape. Thirteen members of the nomadic Nenet community have been hospitalised, while more than 60 others are being temporarily relocated to avoid contracting the bacterially-transmitted disease that is, again, believed to have blossomed to life out of a sodden corpse.

Meanwhile, the Nenet community’s reindeer are dying in droves. According to NBC News, people stopped vaccinating reindeer against anthrax about a decade ago, after the region had gone half a century with no outbreaks. Authorities are now scrambling to rectify that, but it’s likely that more of the animals will die in the coming days.

While the idea of frozen life forms waking up and wreaking havoc sounds borderline supernatural, scientists have been aware that this can happen for a long time. As I wrote last year, a new field of study called “resurrection ecology” has sprung up around the discovery that certain bacteria, fungi, plants and even animals will sometimes thaw out after long periods of suspended animation — up to millions of years, if the preservation conditions are good — and go about their business again.

In most cases, these resuscitated time travellers are completely benign. In fact, if scientists confirm that patient zero for the Siberian anthrax outbreak was a reindeer corpse, it’d be one of the first recorded instances of a frozen microbe thawing out and proceeding to trigger an outbreak.

But it probably won’t be the last. As the Washington Post notes, the Yakutia region east of Yamal is home to 200 burial grounds for cattle that died of anthrax more than a century ago. “As a consequence of permafrost melting, the vectors of deadly infections of the 18th and 19th centuries may come back,” Russian scientists ominously noted in a recent scientific paper.

Man, the future is going to be awesome.

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Larry The Lobster Rescued From Restaurant, Dies Getting Shipped To Aquarium

Animal rights activists were appalled when they learned that a 7kg, 100-year-old lobster was about to become someone’s dinner in Florida. So they organised to “rescue” it and deliver it to an aquarium in Maine. They even gave it a name: Larry.

Well, Larry has now gone to that big ocean in the sky. Which is to say that Larry’s dead. Cause of death? Overeager animal rights activists, it would seem.

After Larry was spotted on the local news for his gigantic size, an organisation called iRescue raised money to pack Larry in ice and gel packs and ship the lobster from Sunrise, Florida in a styrofoam container. Larry’s journey up the east coast to Maine was only supposed to take one day. Instead, Larry didn’t arrive until over a week later.

When Larry was first packaged for shipping last week, FedEx refused to take him. The restaurant’s styrofoam container was said to be leaking and iRescue, the animal rights organisation that was paying for the “rescue”, had to pick up the package and arrange for Larry to have a temporary home in some tank somewhere else.

The iRescue team packed up Larry again eight days later and used different gel packs and a different styrofoam container — presumably one that wouldn’t leak. Larry was finally shipped successfully on Tuesday, but when Larry finally arrived at the Maine State Aquarium around noon on Wednesday he was dead.

And frankly, it sounds like iRescue should have used some more cold gel packs if they wanted to give Larry a shot at surviving the journey.

“This lobster had a bit of a, you know, circuitous route from its origin,” Jeff Nichols, a spokesman for the Department of Marine Resources told the Portland Press Herald. “You need to really surround it in gel packs. This container really only had three.”

But even with all this effort, other animal rights organisations weren’t too keen on Larry living out his life in some no good aquarium like a common Sea Monkey.

“PETA is calling on the Maine State Aquarium to let this elderly crustacean live out his golden years in freedom and peace,” the always level-headed organisation said in a statement before Larry met his unfortunate demise.

Larry was originally purchased for a family dinner at the Tin Fish restaurant in Florida. It’s not clear what’s being done with Larry’s body now, but he probably wasn’t fed to anything at the the aquarium given the strict quarantine rules.

My guess is that Larry probably wound up in a dumpster. RIP Larry. We hardly knew ye, but you were obviously too delicious for this world.

 

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First Look At The Great Wall, A Movie About Matt Damon Fighting Monsters On The Great Wall Of China

Oh, did I mention that it is also apparently the most expensive Chinese movie of all time? This looks and sounds like all kinds of madness.

The trailer emphasises its grand scale and the weirdness of Matt Damon being the star of this movie, surrounded by Chinese actors and in a thoroughly lavish Chinese setting.

In fact, save for Damon and a handful of brief shots of Pedro Pascal’s character, the cast is overwhelmingly Asian, and yet the trailer makes it clear that Damon is the main star, despite the Chinese talent involved. It’s quite an unfortunate look given the recent conversations about Asian roles in Hollywood filmmaking.

These new images below come via Entertainment Weekly. Due out in February of 2017, The Great Wall is directed by House of Flying Daggers and Hero‘s Zhang Yimou, and boasts an impressive mix of Chinese and Western filmmaking — Yimou joined the project, being developed by Universal, to try and bring an authentic Chinese approach to the movie and its setting. It’s even got a cast that blends the likes of Damon, Willem Dafoe and Pedro Pascal, with Chinese superstars like Andy Lau, Luhan and Jing Tian.

And yes, it also has the absurdity of being a grand fantasy action movie set a thousand years in the past, with supernatural monsters assaulting the Great Wall of China. It kinda sounds like the Helm’s Deep sequence from The Two Towers, but amped up to 11 and turned into the most expensive blockbuster ever made in China.

We don’t know much else about the movie — Yimou’s interview with EW mainly discussed the challenges of a Chinese director making an English-language Hollywood blockbuster — but it certainly feels like it not only came out of nowhere for a film out so soon, but also like it could be a wild ride. Definitely one to keep an eye out on.

 

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An Evening at Ernest Hemingway’s Favorite Bar

Ernest Hemingway may not be the father of American literature, but there are few who would deny him a spot as one of the genre’s most prolific prodigal son. He didn’t necessarily fit the traditional mold of a writer and instead carried himself in a way that most men have wet dreams about. He’d be just as capable of punching you in the face as writing a poem apologizing for the blood on your shirt. He was a hardened journalist, an uncooperative combatant, a Nazi ass-kicker, a remarkably capable drinker, and a Nobel Prize-winning master of the literary arts whose style people still try to emulate.

Paris was a big city for Hemingway, as evidenced by A Moveable Feast, his correspondences from the time period, and his second novel, The Sun Also Rises. Throughout his tenure in the City of Light, his indisputably favorite bar was the Ritz Bar, located in the hotel of the same name.

The Bar Hemingway (or The Hemingway Bar, if French isn’t your first language and you don’t live your life backwards), as it’s now named, is consistently ranked one of the top bars not just in Paris, but in the entire world. On a recent trip to Paris with Cool Material’s friends at Remy Martin, I paid a visit to this famous bar. This is what I found:

Finding It

Getting to the bar takes a bit of instruction, since there’s no fancy electrically lit signage or outward bells and whistles. It involves walking down the hallway at the main entrance of the hotel, then down through another hallway, and then yet another hallway, followed by a staircase. But once you arrive at the Hemingway Bar, you know you’re right where you belong.

Nostalgia For More Than Nostalgia’s Sake.

Although the Hemingway Bar is jam-packed with Hemingway memorabilia, it’s not done tastelessly. This isn’t one of those chain restaurants with a bunch of goofy shit tossed up on the walls to distract you from the terrible food.

Rather, the Hemingway Bar is filled with things that represent Hemingway and the magical Bordeaux-slamming unicorn that he was. Animal skulls, boxing gloves, typewriters, phonographs, hand-written original letters, oh, and a shotgun that hangs above the bar at all times… They’re all here, on display, for the public and parched.

Walking into the bar, perhaps the second thing one notices, the first being the massive display of beautiful, beautiful bottles of booze, is a wonderful tribute to the late great American storyteller located directly stage left of the bar. There’s an almost altar-like homage to Hemingway, complete with portraits, candid photos, and photos of him during his time as a war correspondent for Collier’s, a bust sculpture of him, and other various memorabilia invoking the namesake of the Hemingway Bar.

A walk around the dimly lit bar reveals leather smoking chairs and wooden tables with brass accents; beautiful wooden book shelf lined with everything from literary classics to modern cocktail guides and other assorted ornaments; the skull of what looks like a bull on one end of the bar, and a mounted pair of 14-point buck antlers at the other; and an ambiance that feels genuine. Looking around—and conveniently ignoring the patronage—this place feels so old that I can almost hear Hemingway boisterously half-yelling from the bar.

But How Are The Drinks?

The staff at the Hemingway Bar comprises some of the most noteworthy bartenders and mixologists on the entire planet, all of whom are handpicked by the bar’s Head Bartender, the one and only Colin Peter Field.

A tidbit the boozier among you may find funny (or appalling?), I actually had no idea who Field was when I sat opposite him at the bar. He isn’t a man who screams pomp or self-signification, and never even hinted at his importance. Instead, he talked casually about the bar, its history, its prior and present clientele, and he made me a couple damn fine cocktails. I only learned of his prominence as a bartender after some supplementary research to write this story. C’est la vie, no?

I had several Sidecars, a signature drink at the Hemingway Bar that’s made with cognac, Cointreau, and lemon juice. They were wonderful. And there’s also no way in hell I’m going to a cocktail bar as famous as the Hemingway Bar and not having my favorite type of martini—the dirty gin variety. It was eye-blurringly fantastic. Mr. Field, if you ever read this, I apologize for disrespecting the dress code of your bar, and I appreciate you not spitting in my martini. Hugs and kisses.
The Hemingway Bar features several other game-changing cocktails, including an iteration of the Bloody Mary that utilizes different in-season varieties of tomatoes from which each drinker may choose. The tomatoes are then juiced fresh for each individual Bloody Mary. If that’s not elegance, I don’t know what is.

Drinking As An Experience, Not a Pastime

But perhaps the most interesting aspect of my time at the Hemingway Bar was learning about its colorful history from Mr. Field. He explained that the Hemingway Bar—along with the rest of the Paris Ritz—closed in 2012 for renovations, and just opened back up last month.

The Ritz Bar’s name was changed in 1994 to honor Hemingway, and his son, Jack Hemingway, loaned nearly all of the artifacts from Hemingway’s life to it—not for financial gain, but because the bar played such a massive role in Hemingway’s early career.

Field and I discussed how Hemingway did, in fact, storm the Ritz with a band of French Resistance fighters, and that they did have a hell of a party when Hemingway arrived. As the story goes, upon entering the bar on the day Paris was liberated, he immediately ran a tab for 51 dry martinis.

The day after Hemingway “liberated” the Ritz Bar from the Nazis, Hemingway hosted a lunch at the Ritz, and he invited a few he knew were in the area.

Helen Kirkpatrick Milbank, a then-reporter for Chicago Daily News, said in an SF Gate interview that at the lunch, she expressed an interested in leaving early to attend the victory parade. She said in the interview that when Hemingway replied, “What for? You can always see a parade, but you’ll never again lunch at the Ritz on the 26th of August, the day after Paris was liberated.”

Aside from Hemingway, the bar’s most famous patrons include Coco Chanel (who lived at the Ritz for over three decades), French novelist and essayist Marcel Proust, that guy who wrote the Gatsby book, Princess Diana (Who actually dined at the Ritz before her fatal car wreck in 1997), and others—including some not-so-cool guests, like Hitler’s Luftwaffe.

At the end of the day, the bar aims to pass on Hemingway’s spirit of living every moment as though it’s one that you’ll never, ever get to repeat. It’s nostalgic, but not to the point of nausea. It’s also genuine, and its memorabilia-laden walls put some distance between it and a 5-Star Michelin-Rated Applebee’s.

It’s a special bar, to say the least.

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Scrambler E-Bike

This awesome E-Bike is inspired by a scrambler motorcycle! Built by Dutch custom bicycle workshop Timmermans Fietsen, the spectacular Scrambler E-Bike features a frame from a 30s transport bike, fat studded tires, a raised handlebar, a custom built headlight grille and saddle frame, and is equipped with a 3 speed hub, Avid BB7 disc brakes, a Supernova rear light, a Luna Cycle Color Display, ABUS Cycling folding lock, Gates Carbon Drive Belt setup, Marzocchi fork and a Lepper saddle. The bike can be ordered as a 25km/h or 45km/h version.    

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KIKORI JAPANESE WHISKEY

While most Japanese Whiskey leans towards the flavors you find in Scotch, Kikori Japanese Whiskey has a distinct flavor profile thanks to a 100% rice mashbill. Kikori uses local rice that has been cultivated in southern Japan for over 2000 years, and then cooks it in giant steel steamers. Each batch then spends at least three years in American Oak, French Limousin oak, and Sherry casks before being bottled at 82 proof. Leaning more towards Irish Whiskey than Scotch, it's a light, refreshing option with plenty of flavor and complexity.

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New York's Governor Wants To Ban Sex Offenders From Playing Pokemon GO

What do Rio Olympians and New York state sex offenders have in common? Soon, neither will be playing Pokemon GO, or at least that’s the hope of Governor Andrew Cuomo.

In a letter sent to Niantic CEO John Hanke, the developers of the massively popular game, Cuomo asked for help in having sex offenders barred from playing. The trade? Cuomo gives Niantic access to the information stored under the Electronic Security and Targeting of Online Predators Act — which is regularly shared with social networking sites — which contains email addresses, screen names and other online identifiers for offenders. In return he asks Niantic to do the rest. Cuomo’s letter opens:

Protecting our children and ensuring their safety is our top priority, and the State of New York is moving swiftly to respond to troubling news that young children using Pokémon GO are being steered to locations in close proximity to, or even at, sex offender residences.

Concern stems from an “informal investigation” (as the New York Times put it) carried out by state Senators Jeffrey D. Klein and Diane J. Savino. They compared the residences of 100 sex offenders to in-game locations and found that a gym or PokeStop was within half a block of a sex offender’s home in 59 of those 100 cases. Considering how many PokeStops are in New York City that’s truthfully not so surprising. Nevertheless, The Times reports that this overlap is the cause for two pieces of forthcoming legislation which would change how sex offenders are able to use augmented reality.

Although many reports of crimes being committed via Pokemon GO have been overblown, there have been a few robberies and a car accident. Likewise, Cuomo isn’t the only one demanding change from Niantic. Everyone from the staff of war memorials to the die-hard users is angry. And lest we forget, today is also the day a hacker collective threatened to take down the game’s servers. So it’s shaping up to be a very bad week for Pokemon GO. And it’s only Tuesday.

 

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An Enormous California Bushfire Could Quadruple In Size

An out-of-control bushfire ripping through California’s central coast is expected to get worse before it gets better. On Saturday, California’s Department of Forestry and Fire Protection (CalFire) announced that the so-called Soberanes fire, which has already burned an area larger than San Francisco, could quadruple in size and rage for another month.

A 30,000 acre bushfire on Friday, the Soberanes fire expanded rapidly this weekend, scorching over 40,000 acres in Monterey County by Monday. More than 5000 firefighting personnel are working to extinguish the blaze, which has destroyed 57 homes, threatens 2000 more and has claimed at least one life.

As of last night, the fire was only 18 per cent contained. Now, the US Forest Service is steeling itself for the possibility that this will become one of the worst bushfires of the summer, engulfing up to 165,000 acres by the end of August.

A firefighter watches a helicopter prepare to drop water on a fire in Monterey County.

The Soberanes fire is proving exceptionally difficult to fight due to an unfortunate combination of geography — it’s burning through steep, forested ridges of the Carmel highlands 200km south of San Francisco — and unusual weather patterns. While most fires die down at night, this one seems to charge up as a humid marine air mass pushes drier air uphill.

“A lot of times fires will lay down, and kind of get quiet at night,” meteorologist Ryan Waldron told KSBW News. “In this situation, it’s unique in that the air mass actually tends to get drier at night, which allows the fire to stay active essentially 24 hours a day.”

It’s been a rough bushfire season for California, which is now in its fifth year of record-breaking drought. The same week that the Soberanes fire broke out, another vicious bushfire erupted near Big Sur, choking Los Angeles with smoke and forcing thousands to evacuate. At nearly 40,000 acres, the Sand Fire is now close to being contained.

Both the Soberanes and Sand Fire are emblematic of the so-called “megafires” that have become eerily common in recent years. These are fires that burn hotter, spread more rapidly and are more difficult to predict and contain than the smaller bushfires the United States, Canada and Australia see by the thousands each year. Megafires were virtually unheard of before the 1990s, but thanks to a combination of human encroachment on wildlands and climate change, they’re now eating up roughly half of the US Forest Service’s annual resources.

The Soberanes fire remains “very active“, and CalFire is issuing regular updates.

[MIKA27]

NASA Sending a Spacecraft to Potential Killer Asteroid

There’s an asteroid heading towards a near-Earth encounter in 2018 that’s dangerous enough to influence NASA engineers to send a spacecraft to meet it, scan it, get close enough to vacuum samples from its surface and bring them back for study. Why? The pass-by in 2018 may alter its course enough to cause a collision when it returns on its next trip around the sun. Shouldn’t the vacuum suck up the whole thing now when it has a chance?

The asteroid, discovered in 1999 by the The Lincoln Near-Earth Asteroid Research (LINEAR) project, is named Bennu. Bennu is a big asteroid – approximately 500 meters in diameter, weighing over 60 million tons and heading to Earth’s vicinity at over 100,000 km per hour (62,000 mph). Put that all together and you have an impact potential of 3 billion tons of explosives or enough to wipe out most life on the planet.

It gets worse. Bennu’s path is difficult to predict because it suffers from the Yarkovsky effect – a trajectory shifting caused by it absorbing and releasing solar heat. Is there any good news?

We estimate the chance of impact at about one in 2,700 between 2175 and 2196.

OSIRIS-REx to the rescue

That’s Dante Lauretta, a professor of planetary science and cosmochemistry at the University of Arizona’s Lunar and Planetary Laboratory, explaining why the OSIRIS-REx mission, which he is principle investigator for, is not getting much attention in the lead-up to its launch on September 8th and eventual return with a sample in 2023. NASA is promoting it as a chance to study a 4 billion-year-old asteroid that has regularly passed by and may have had a previous big influence on Earth.

Bennu is a carbonaceous asteroid, an ancient relic from the early solar system that is filled with organic molecules. Asteroids like Bennu may have seeded the early Earth with this material, contributing to the primordial soup from which life emerged. We believe Bennu is a time capsule from the very beginnings of our solar system. So the sample can potentially hold answers to the most fundamental questions human beings ask, like ‘Where do we come from?’

How about a fundamental question like “Will anyone still be here in 2196?”

 

So NASA isn’t worried because no one working there now will be around in 150 years or so when Bennu could strike fast and hard. Lauretta thinks humans will have the technology by then to either destroy or deflect a dangerous asteroid, although the only options he could come up with were nuclear missiles or tractor beams.

Lauretta started research for the OSIRIS-REx Mission in 2004 and says he’s now feeling “anxious and proud” but “It’s a tense moment for all of us.”
Maybe we should write a letter of apology to future generations for not equipping OSIRIS-REx with a bigger vacuum.

 

[MIKA27]

A Wall Could Save the World’s Largest Living Thing

There’s a lot of talk in the U.S. these days about building walls but there’s a wall being proposed that has nothing to do with the presidential race … although maybe it should since it deals with saving the life of the largest and oldest living thing in the U.S.  – actually, in the world.

We’re talking about Pando. Yes, the world’s largest creature has a name (although not a movie … yet). Pando is grove of aspens in Utah that looks like thousands of trees above ground but is actually one living organism connected below ground by a single root system. Pando covered 43 hectare (0.43 sq. km or 0.166 sq. miles) and is estimated to be anywhere from 2,000 to a million years old, but size and age don’t protect Pando from hungry deer and cattle, drought, disease and insects. Without help, Pando (Latin for ‘I spread’) may find that its days are numbered.

It’s falling apart on our watch. The old trees are dying, and the young ones are being eaten.

Paul Rogers of Utah State University and the Western Aspen Alliance has turned his concern into an action plan to save Pando’s life. Since it’s a conventional forest above the ground, Rogers’ plan partially involves conventional conservation measures like controlled burning to stimulate growth, removal of juniper bushes to give the aspens more room and cutting down mature trees to allow younger and stronger saplings to spread.

Those conventional methods worked, but not fast enough to save Pando, so Rogers decided to go unconventional. Three years ago, he and his team built a border fence around part (7 hectare) of Pando to protect it from its greatest enemy – aspen leaf-loving cattle. After just three years, the fenced-in area of Pando is 8 times as dense in new trees as the unprotected area.

It was a neat surprise that we can get pretty good results with fencing alone.

That summarized Rogers’ recent report to the North American Congress for Conservation Biology in Wisconsin. He also mentioned his concern about the cost of fencing in all of Pando. While not has long as the border wall being talked about by a certain presidential candidate, the wall around Pando must enclose 106 acres, so its length must be a little over 1.6 miles or 2.58 km.

Do we have a moral obligation to protect the America’s and the world’s largest creature? Perhaps the cattle ranchers whose non-native animals are killing it might consider kicking in a little to pay for the wall. Don’t ask that certain presidential candidate for his opinion because Pando can’t pay for the wall all by itself.

If only Pando could vote.

[MIKA27]

FILSON SMOKEY BEAR WATCH

Only you can look good while preventing forest fires. As part of Filson’s Smokey Bear Collection, including additional items such as a water bottle, t-shirt, cap and blanket, this watch is a handsome tribute to one of their favorite outdoorsmen.

Each watch comes individually numbered with a certificate of authenticity, a book depicting the relationship between Smokey Bear and Filson’s efforts in preserving the outdoor lifestyle, and six vintage Smokey posters. It’s a great collector’s package that anyone who remembers the old wise bear would certainly appreciate. As for the watch itself, each Smokey tribute features Aragonite 715 quartz movement, a stainless steel case back with brass PVD plating, scratch-resistant sapphire crystal, and a unique dial face hosting a sketch of the famed PSA bear and his slogan we all know and love. Each watch is also assembled in Detroit at the Shinola Watch Factory. Use it for everyday carry, out camping as a friendly reminder around the campfire, or preserve it as an heirloom piece. Only you can decide its fate. Limited to 1,000 pieces and available now for $1,000. [Purchase]

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BMW R100 ‘THE FIVE’ BY FEDERAL MOTO

Canadian bike outfitters Federal Moto are known for producing some brilliant bike build-outs within the industry. They’ve been so successful in fact over the years that they recently opened a location in Chicago. And while many in the bike world were curious about the quality of a secondary location, we feel this bike, one of their first cafe racers from the U.S.-based location, serves as a harbinger for things to come for the American outpost.

Built from a BMW R100 and dubbed “The Five,” this bike is a sleek trimmed-down Cafe Racer that pays tribute to the past. The airhead was slimmed down and the original bodywork thrown by the wayside except for the fuel tank. Federal Moto then added a new fender, airbag hole cover, and now rides on an under seat dual-shock setup. The leather seat on top features an embedded LED light that functions both as a turn signal and taillight and the motor was entirely rebuilt and treated with a set of Mikuni VM34 carburetors. Out the back, twin Cone Engineering stainless steel mufflers complete the entire setup. Aesthetics notwithstanding, Federal Moto did America proud with this first build and we for one can’t wait to see what’s next on the docket for this outfit.

[MIKA27]

Why The Last Wooly Mammoths On Earth Went Extinct

While the Sumerians were inventing writing over five thousand years ago, one of the last populations of wooly mammoths was making a desperate bid for survival on a remote Aleutian island. Now, we know how they died.

Wooly mammoths started to vanish from Eurasia and North America toward the end of the last ice age some 12,000 years ago, due to a combination of climate change, habitat loss and human hunters. But on a few lonely islands, including Siberia’s Wrangle island and Alaska’s St Paul, mammoths managed to hang on thousands of years longer.

Now, by carefully reconstructing the history of the St Paul mammoths, scientists have dated the population’s extinction to 5600 years ago, plus or minus a century. The analysis, which appears today in the Proceedings of the National Academies of Sciences, also reveals the rather mundane reason these majestic creatures finally kicked it: They ran out of water.

A remnant of the Bering land bridge that connected North America to Eurasia during the last Ice Age, St Paul became an island between 14,700 and 13,500 years ago, as glaciers retreated and sea levels rose. The island would shrink rapidly for thousands of years, until eventually, it was just 110 square kilometres in size.

On this diminutive scrap of land in the middle of the ocean, a few dozen mammoths were cut off from the world. And for several millennia, they managed to hang on, drinking from a handful of freshwater lakes and chowing down on the island’s scrubby tundra vegetation. Then, all of a sudden, they vanished.

To find out why, a team led by Matthew Wooller of the University of Alaska Fairbanks collected sediment cores from Lake Hill, a small freshwater lake located toward the middle of the island. First, the researchers analysed traces of mammoth DNA and fungal spores found in herbivore poop to figure out exactly when the animals disappeared. They then used numerous climate “proxies”, including pollen, microfossils and stable isotopes, to tease out any environmental changes that could be responsible.

Not only did the scientists hone in on a precise extinction date for the St Paul mammoths — some 900 years later than scientists had previously thought — they were able to reconstruct a detailed series of events leading up to it.

Around 7800 years ago, Lake Hill started getting smaller and shallower, probably due to a shift toward a more arid climate. At first, this simply limited the mammoths’ freshwater supply. But eventually, the lake got so shallow that the water quality degraded rapidly. “It became muddy and fairly crappy to drink,” Wooller told Gizmodo. “That was probably the tipping point.”

Wooller and his colleagues suspect that the mammoths themselves are partially to blame for these changes. “When they started congregating around these limited water holes, they probably destroyed the vegetation [on the banks], causing more erosion and infilling of the lakes,” lead study author Russ Graham explained. “Ironically, the mammoths contributed to their own demise.”

The end times of the St Paul mammoths highlight factors that could have led to the extinction of other straggler populations, including those found on Wrangle island off the north coast of Siberia. Wrangle island is much larger, which may explain why its mammoth population outlived the St Paul mammoths by more than a thousand years.

But at the end of the day, the Wrangle mammoths likely succumbed to similar problems of resource scarcity. “I suspect it was the same thing,” Wooller said, adding that a careful paleoenvironmental analysis is needed on Wrangle to confirm the hypothesis.

Graham pointed out that there is also evidence for humans co-existing with mammoths on Wrangle island, so the story might be more complex.

The extinction of the St Paul mammoths is also a cautionary tale in the age of human-caused climate change. Today, sea levels are once again rising, causing islands around the world to lose ground and decreasing the amount of space, food and freshwater available for their inhabitants. Indeed, several south Pacific islands are already facing water crises due to prolonged drought. Meanwhile, low-lying areas like South Florida risk losing their freshwater supply to direct saltwater encroachment.

“Fortunately, in very dire situations, humans have something mammoths don’t: They can get on a plane and leave,” Wooller said.

Of course, many island nations would rather not abandon ship, which is why they have been fighting tooth and nail for the world to adopt stricter carbon reductions policies to curb climate change. If the past is any indicator, time is of the essence.

[MIKA27]

George R.R. Martin Shares A Peek At A Game Of Thrones' Illustrated 20th Anniversary Edition

“It has been a helluva 20 years,” George R.R. Martin reflects in his latest Not a Blog post, marking the 20th anniversary of the publication of a little something called A Game of Thrones. The author celebrates his landmark book with a special new edition, with an intro by John Hodgman and dozens of gorgeous illustrations.

Martin writes that there will be 73 black-and-white drawings and eight full-colour plates; some have been seen previously, in board games, calendars and the like, but over half are completely brand-new. And he brags a little, but who can blame him?

The list of participating artists reads like an all star roster of fantasy illustrators, and includes such luminaries as John Picacio, Paul Youll, Gary Gianni, Didier Graffet, Victor Moreno, Michael Komarck, Arantza Sestayo, Magali Villeneuve, Ted Nasmith, Levi Pinfold, Marc Simonetti, and many more. We’ve had some stunning illustrated editions of A Game of Thrones before, to be sure, with the limited editions from Meisha Merlin and Subterranean Press… but each of those was illustrated only by a single artist. This will be the first edition to feature such a galaxy of talent.

Here’s a sample image from Martin’s post (he doesn’t name the artist):

Martin shares the memory that in 1995, when he signed his contract to pen the series, he thought it would be a total of three books, which he’d write in three years. (He also jokes about his inability to keep deadlines, that cheeky bastard.) A Game of Thrones: The Illustrated Edition will be out October 18.

[MIKA27]

How Black Holes Can Kill Us From Light Years Away

The Earth isn’t particularly close to any black holes — the closest candidate, A0620-00, is around 2800 light years away — so good on us for picking a nice cosmic neighbourhood to live in. But besides the whole “nothing escapes from them” thing and the hugely destructive supernova preceding their birth, black holes are bad news. They could end life as we know it, even from far away.

Right after a star collapses into a black hole (or two stars collide to do the same) a tremendous amount of energy is released as a gamma ray burst, Kurzgesagt explains. The ozone layer around Earth generally protects us from the gamma rays given off by our own sun, but a full-blown gamma ray burst is so much more powerful that it would cook the side of our planet that came in contact with it. Gamma rays are also capable of blowing apart the bonds in our DNA. Because these bursts are invisibly and move at the speed of light we probably wouldn’t know one was coming until it was too late. One minute the Eastern Hemisphere is going about its business; the next it’s a Mad Max wasteland.

The good news is that gamma ray bursts don’t happen all that often, and one would have to be coming from within our own galaxy in order to be of serious danger. Between the timescale required, number of black hole candidates nearby, and likeliness of a direct hit, Earth has more pressing things to worry about — like climate change, a Trump presidency or whether we’ll ever see a new season of Attack on Titan.

 

[MIKA27]

Brace Yourselves: Tom Clancy's 'The Division' Is Being Made Into A Movie

Tom Clancy’s The Division sold more copies in its first 24 hours of availability than any previous title in Ubisoft’s history, and recorded the biggest first week ever for a new video game franchise. So of course, it is now official film fodder.

Jessica Chastain (The Martian, Interstellar, The Help, Zero Dark Thirty) and Jake Gyllenhaal (End of Watch, Nightcrawler, Southpaw) are signed on to star in the film, and while games don’t exactly have the best track record when it comes to being adapted for the big screen, let’s just cross everything we can that this works, yeah?

“We are excited to collaborate with Jessica and Jake, two of Hollywood’s most talented actors and perfect creative collaborators to help bring Tom Clancy’s The Division to the big screen,” said Gerard Guillemot, Chief Executive Officer of Ubisoft Motion Pictures.

“Attaching Jake and Jessica is part of our development philosophy of working closely with top talent from the earliest stages to collaborate on a high quality film,” added Matt Phelps, Vice President of Ubisoft Motion Pictures.

Ubisoft Motion Pictures will develop the film with Gyllenhaal’s and Riva Marker’s (Beasts of No Nation) Nine Stories and Chastain’s Freckle Films.

This is just the latest announcement in a big production lineup for Ubisoft with Assassin’s Creed starring Michael Fassbender having recently finished shooting (the film is due to hit cinemas on 21 December).

Other Ubisoft Motion Pictures projects currently in development include: Splinter Cell at New Regency with Tom Hardy attached, Ghost Recon with Warner Brothers, Watch Dogs with Sony Pictures Entertainment and New Regency, as well as Rabbids with Sony Pictures Entertainment.

[MIKA27]

The Air Force Just Cleared The F-35 Fighter Jet For Combat

After a stunning 15 years of development and countless delays, the US Air Force just declared the first squadron of F-35A fighter jets ready for combat. The 34th Fighter Squadron at Utah’s Hill Air Force Base can now go fight bad guys anywhere in the world.

This marks a major victory for the US Air Force and represents the second branch to clear the very expensive jet for battle. The military can finally prove that the trillion or so dollars the Pentagon has committed to the project wasn’t a waste of taxpayer dollars. After all, what could go wrong that hasn’t already gone wrong?

[MIKA27]

Unprecedented Flooding Leaves Baltimore Suburb Looking Like A 'War Zone'

Heavy flooding in Ellicott City, Maryland this weekend left two people dead and necessitated the rescue of 100 others, in what one county executive described as the worst destruction in generations.

“We’ve never seen such devastation in Howard County for over 50 years,” Allan Kittleman, the county executive, told CNN. “It looks like a war zone.”

Kittleman said 15cm of rain fell in just two hours on Saturday night — roughly the same amount that the city, which lies roughly 20km outside of Baltimore, gets in a month. The National Weather Service reported that the nearby Patapsco River surged more than 4m, according to NBC.

Footage from both the flood and its aftermath showed how bad the damage was:

One victim, Jessica Watsula, 35, was killed after her car was swept up by rushing water; the other, 38-year-old Joseph Blevins, also died after his car got caught in the flooding.

At least 25 buildings were damaged, and videos from the scene showed cars floating down what had previously been city streets.

A state of emergency was declared in Howard County, and people have been advised to “avoid the [Main Street] area because of gas leaks and downed power lines,” according to NBC.

Elsewhere across the country, massive floods have wrought similar devastation — in West Virginia and in Texas, for example. And it’s not just flooding, either: Lately, the planet’s weather has generally gone completely off-the-rails crazy. 

 

[MIKA27]

The Evolution Of Joker In Film And TV History

The Joker is easily one of the best villains in film and TV (and obviously, comic book) history, but who is the best Joker? Jack Nicholson combined the mischievous campiness of the character with the deranged thirst for violence. Heath Ledger’s The Dark Knight Joker is somehow just as iconic as Nicholson and fit Christopher Nolan’s Gotham perfectly. And Mark Hamill has basically become the standard-bearer of the Joker through his work in the animated Batman series.

We haven’t seen Jared Leto’s version on the big screen yet, so we can’t consider him, but that’s still a helluva lineup for Jokers, not to mention the original Joker, Cesar Romero, providing a template for the others to follow (or not). So maybe instead of arguing who was the best Joker in film and TV history, we should argue that the Joker has been portrayed the best out of any superhero or villain in film and TV history.

[MIKA27]

AUCTION BLOCK: 2014 LOTUS C-01 MOTORCYCLE

Back in 2013 this Lotus C-01 began as a computer rendering but soon caught the attention of the bike world for its ground-breaking body shape in conjunction with the respected Lotus name. It’s the first time Lotus has its name affiliated with a motorcycle, and since the concept was sketched out by former Bugatti designer Daniel Simon who was responsible for the Tron Legacy Lightcycles, it’s not surprising why this bike has garnered so much attention as of late.

Only 100 of these futuristic-looking bikes were produced, and this is the only one available in North America. Its engine is an 1195cc liquid-cooled twin pushing out 200 horses housed within a steel, titanium, and carbon fiber frame. The chassis is highly notable as well, featuring 320mm Brembo racing brakes, twin Ohlins rear suspension, upside-down Sachs forks, and a 12-section carbon fiber shell. The wheels are also built from the super light material thanks to South African specialists BST. So if you’re sitting on close to a half million dollars and interested in purchasing this one-of-a-kind bike, it’s slated to hit auction August 18-20 in Monterey, CA. Best of luck.

[MIKA27]

What Happens When a Giant Whale Almost Eats Your Boat

These folks came to Quebec to see a whale, and everything went exactly to plan.

The whale, it seems, also got to do some people-watching.

 

[MIKA27]

Alien 5 is going to happen and Hicks is definitely in it

The Alien sequel that everyone's gunning for is the one that remains up on blocks. Neill Blomkamp teased an Aliens follow-up in early 2015 with a bunch of concept art that left jaws on the floor. Ripley *and* Hicks... ALIVE? Say it ain't so! Since then, the project went from a maybe to a definitely and back to the development zone, after Ridley Scott got his wish to make the Prometheus sequel Alien: Covenant first. 

The question isn't if it will happen, but when, according to Hicks. During a recent interview with Forbes, Michael Biehn - who played the rough n' ready Marine - recalled how he was first made aware of Blomkamp's movie. "Well, she’s [Sigourney Weaver] doing the movie, Chappie, and he pitches her an idea for another movie in the Alien franchise, which I thought was dead and gone as she probably did too as well as Fox. He tweeted out some pictures of me, he said he’s going take the third and fourth film and act like they never happened and things blew up... Sigourney says they are still doing their project." 

Blomkamp's film remains a passion project for Sigourney Weaver. She's said repeatedly that it's "worth the wait" and that it will give fans everything they're looking for. Everyone wants it to happen for that reason alone. Biehn believes it's more about 20th Century Fox not getting egg on its face. "It would be very embarrassing to Fox if they don’t give Sigourney the movie that she really wants to go out on." 

"I don’t know when it’s going to happen but I know it’s going to happen and I know I’m going to be in it," he confirms, before repeating a few details we heard from him last year. "There’s going to be a new Newt, she’s going to be about 26 or 27 and looks a lot like Jennifer Lawrence to me but I don’t know. Maybe there’ll be a passing of whatever and then the franchise can move on so they can make more money because that’s what it’s all about." 

The most recent piece of Blomkamp's concept art shows Newt all grown-up. That lends a bit of weight to Biehn's comments, although she still shares a remarkable similarity to Carrie Henn the actress who played her in the 1986 sequel - not Jennifer Lawrence. I'd watch either actress tackle the role at this point though if it meant the film was headed into production. 

[Fuzz]

1 hour ago, MIKA27 said:

The Air Force Just Cleared The F-35 Fighter Jet For Combat 

Yeah, just not anywhere important. According to reports, the manual states that the electro-optical targeting system (that computer thingy that lets you blow up stuff), cannot be used outside of the US. And never mind that it won't have an internal gun until 2019, because you can't target anything anyways.