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

[MIKA27]

SUNSET RANCH

Located on 113 acres in the Uinta Mountains near Park City, the Sunset Ranch is a sprawling ode to the American West.

The home mixes rustic materials like hand-hews timbers, stone walls, reclaimed barn wood, and metal roofs to create a space that includes three bedroom suites and a gourmet kitchen. In fact, the property offers three kitchens, as well as nine fireplaces, a screening room, an infinity pool, an elevated hot tub, a separate guest area above the bar, and acres upon acres of trails, pasture, and untouched nature.

[MIKA27]

Australians Are Spending A Lot Of Money On Public Transport

The average Australian family is spending up to $22,000 every year to get around, according to the Australian Automobile Association.

The AAA commissioned Australia’s first Transport Affordability Index to track transport affordability by analysing tax, tollways, public transport and finance costs as a proportion of average household income across states and territories.

The AAA commissioned this work so both consumers and policy makers can have a clear picture of exactly how much transport really costs, and how policy decisions at state and federal levels will affect household budgets over time.

The Index is based on the incomes and transport costs of a hypothetical household in each capital city that consists of a couple with children, two cars, and it assumes that one member of the family drives to work, while the other catches public transport.

Hypothetical suburbs were also chosen as they were middle to outer ring suburbs, had a relatively high population density, had access to public transport, and in Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane, would require driving through toll roads to access the CBD. The Index’s data baseline is quarter one (January to March) 2016.

Sydney households continue to face the highest transport costs of any city in Australia both in dollar terms and as a percentage of household income, by a wide margin. A typical two-car Sydney household faces weekly transport costs of $419 per week, ahead of Brisbane and Melbourne (at $376 and $348 per week respectively) — and that’s without even taking parking costs into account.

In contrast, in the higher income but lower density cities of Perth and Canberra, weekly transport costs for similar hypothetical households are lower at $301 per week and $300 per week respectively. Higher incomes in these capitals also mean transport is more affordable.

Brisbane has the highest cost of public transport incurred by the hypothetical family analysed in the Index, followed by Perth and Sydney.

Across all capital cities the highest cost for households was the car loan payment of the new car. This cost was followed by fuel, public transport, registration, and licencing. However, where tolls were present, they constituted the second highest cost in Sydney, and third highest in Melbourne.

The exceptions to these trends were Brisbane — where public transport was the second highest cost (a higher cost than fuel); Hobart and Darwin, where car maintenance and servicing recorded higher costs than registration and licencing.

The cost of servicing both cars in Darwin is almost 40 per cent higher than Melbourne — in large part due to servicing costs associated with older cars and the cost of tyres.

Fuel costs demonstrated the greatest variability as the cost of petrol increased by around $4 per week in many states. The exception to this trend was in Darwin, Hobart and Canberra, where prices either stayed static or decreased. Adelaide recorded the lowest petrol prices, while the highest prices were experienced in Hobart.

AAA Chief Executive Michael Bradley said the index demonstrates just how much of the household budget is taken up by transport costs.

“The Index initially shows around 13 per cent of an average household budget in most capital cities is spent on transport, which is remarkable when you consider that electricity, water, and telecommunications costs account for only one to three per cent of income combined,” Mr Bradley said.

“Australians know transport is expensive, but they might be surprised to know just how expensive. The average household will spend fourteen thousand dollars a year on transport in Hobart, but up to twenty-two thousand dollars a year if they live in Western Sydney.”

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Mark Hamill Boosts Campaign For Terminally Ill Man To See Rogue One Early

The Star Wars community is rallying around a man with cancer who wants nothing but to see Rogue One: A Star Wars Story before he passes.

Back in April, British illustrator Neil Hanvey was given eight months to live, meaning it’s possible he won’t get a chance to see Rogue One when it hits UK theatres in December. You might already be familiar with his work, especially related to his love of Star Wars, like this mashup of King Tut and a stormtrooper.

His wife, Andrea, and healthcare assistant Amy Duncan (who works at the hospice where Hanvey is being cared for) posted on Facebook asking for support to help him get an early screening from his hospital bed, using the hashtag #RogueOneWish.

Support has been coming in from all over the world. Rio Olympics 2016 Mountain Bike Manager Paul Davis tweeted from the starting line. Star Wars fan podcast network The Cantina Cast is boosting the campaign. Mark Hamill himself has been getting more eyes on #RogueOneWish with retweets.

We’ve been seeing a rise in campaigns to help terminally ill superfans get screeners for films they may not live to see in theatres. The collective movement started last year with a massive online campaign to let Daniel Fleetwood see an early screening of Star Wars: The Force Awakens, prompting director J.J. Abrams and Disney to grant his wish. Batman superfan Barry Henderson also got a sneak peek of Batman v. Superman: Dawn of Justice, after director Zack Snyder personally stepped in to help.

#RogueOneWish may not be the first online campaign to help a terminally ill fan, nor will it be the last, but it’s still inspiring to see so many fans rally around one of their own.

Fandoms are becoming bigger and more connected, allowing (and encouraging) fans to support each other when they need it most. At times, we may get bogged down with hate, harassment, and exclusionary derision of what a “true fan” even is, but none of that lasts. In the end, fandoms are about one thing, being fans together. Whether it’s enjoying a midnight screening together, or helping one man see his favourite stories come to life one last time.

[MIKA27]

Dwayne Johnson Says Jumanji Is Not A Reboot

We’ve been a bit cautious for the past several months about the new Jumanji flick. After all, the original is well beloved (at least for 90s kids), and it seems weird to remake the semi-serious kids movie as an outright buddy comedy. Well, Jumanji star Dwayne Johnson is putting our fears to rest (kind of).

The actor shared an update about Jumanji in an Instagram post about Fast and the Furious 8 wrapping up shooting. In true “The Rock” fashion, the photo is him getting out of a jet — because when Johnson tells us something, he’s going to do it while getting out of a jet.

“In two weeks I’ll reunite with ol’ friends Kevin Hart and Jack Black and we have the honour to introduce a whole new generation to the amazing world of Jumanji,” Johnson wrote. “For the record we are NOT making a reboot, but rather a continuation of the awesome Jumanji story.”

The key word here is “continuation”, which likely means it won’t be a direct sequel. It’s probably going to be a broader part of the Jumanji cinematic universe, acknowledging the events of the past while also being its own story. Sort of like how Jurassic World is technically part of the Jurassic Park franchise but also totally not.

I’m still not completely on board with another Jumanji film, but this does give me a little more hope that we could see something interesting. Besides, Johnson’s right: kids deserve a chance to get their own Jumanji. But if it sucks, we’ll all be sadder than orphaned Kirsten Dunst.

 

[MIKA27]

The Face Of An Egyptian Mummy Recreated By A Melbourne Forensic Sculptor

It almost defies belief what modern science is capable of. Take this facial reconstruction of Meritamen, a mummified Egyptian woman who may have lived anywhere from 2000-3500 years ago. The reconstruction was conducted by scientists and researchers from Monash University, the University of Melbourne, the Victorian Institute of Forensic Medicine and many others.

According to an article by Pursuit journalist Andrew Trounson, the talents of a number of professionals were required to get to the point where forensic sculptor Jennifer Mann could conduct the reconstruction.

Forensic Egyptologist Janet Davey had the task of identifying the gender and age of Meritamun, while Gavan Mitchell, an imaging technician at the Department of Anatomy and Neuroscience, spent a great deal of time “tweaking and design” the 3D-printed skull used as the base:

It took 140 hours of printing time on a simple consumer-level 3D printer to produce the skull that has been used to reconstruct Meritamun’s face … [and] because the 3D printer builds from the bottom up and the print is always more detailed at the top, Mitchell has to print out the skull out in two sections to better capture the detail of the jaws and the base of the skull.

Finally, Mann could get to work on putting the face together, of which part of the process can be seen in the timelapse above.

But the adventure doesn’t stop here. Carbon dating results are still on the way to determine Meritamun’s exact age and Stacey Gorski, a biomedical science student at Melbourne uni is working on the details of Meritamun’s health and diet (pre-mummification of course).

 

MIKA: WOW, looks alot like Julia Roberts IMO

 

[MIKA27]

Shipwreck Hunters Bag An Amazing Discovery At The Bottom Of Lake Ontario

A group of retirees-turned-shipwreck hunters have discovered the remains of the Washington, an 18th century trading vessel that sank to the bottom of Lake Ontario in 1803. The 16m sloop is the second oldest shipwreck to ever be found in the Great Lakes.

The Washington was a commercial trading vessel that transported furs and household goods across lakes Erie and Ontario in the late 18th century. On 6 November 1803, it departed Kingston harbour bound for Niagara with two crew and several merchants on board. A severe storm developed on Lake Ontario later that day, and the ship never made it back to harbour. There were no survivors, and only the ship’s yawl ever washed up on shore.

The Washington is an important historical find for several reasons. As the discovery team notes on their website, it’s the oldest intact commercial sailing vessel to be lost and found on the Great Lakes, representing an unusual and poorly-studied model that was soon replaced by schooners. While many ships are believed to have sailed across the Great Lakes between the Revolutionary War and the War of 1812, very few artefacts from this time period remain.

 

“It just gives us a better understanding of what life on the Great Lakes was like at such an early time,” Carrie Sowden, archaeological director at the National Museum of the Great Lakes told the Wall Street Journal.

The discovery team includes three upstate New York retirees: Avid shipwreck diver Jim Kennard, who has found over 200 lost vessels since the 1970s, former Air Force Reserve pilot and electrical engineer Roger Pawlowski, and retired architect Chip Stevens. The team, which goes out shipwreck hunting 15 to 20 times a year, discovered the Washington off deep waters in Oswego using sonar scanning in late June. An ROV was deployed three weeks later to take high-resolution images and confirm the find.

Side scan sonar image of the sloop Washington.

Bow-to-stern top view of the sloop Washington

As satisfying as the discovery is, the team has no plans to salvage the ship, or to divulge its location to the broader public. Further analysis of the wreckage will be left in the hands of archaeologists as Kennard, Pawlowski and Stevens move on to uncharted waters. Hundreds of ships are thought to have sank on Lake Ontario, and thousands more across the Great Lakes.

[MIKA27]

The Mayans May Have Had a Mathematical Genius

Researchers studying the Mayan culture have long been impressed by the Dresden Codex – the 11th century text considered to be the oldest book written in the Americas and possibly based on a book written 400 years before. It has been assumed the book was an astrological and numerology guide but new analysis suggests it was the work of a mathematical genius who developed a sophisticated new way of record-keeping.

This is the part that I find to be most rewarding, that when we get in here, we’re looking at the work of an individual Mayan, and we could call him or her a scientist, an astronomer. This person, who’s witnessing events at this one city during this very specific period of time, created, through their own creativity, this mathematical innovation.

The Preface to the Venus table in the Dresden Codex

University of California, Santa Barbara, anthropologist Gerardo Aldana writes in the Journal of Astronomy in Culture about a new discovery in the Venus Table, a part of the Dresden Codex that tracks the movement of the planet Venus. He discovered what he describes as a “mathematical subtlety” used by the author of the table to adjust for the odd orbit of Venus, which lasts 583.92 days, not 584 days.

That extra eight-one-hundredth of a day, it adds up when you talk about projections into the future or you look back at historical records. What this astronomer found when he or she was sitting at the top of this building at Chichen Itza and watching Venus, relative to their calendar, they’re seeing the pattern and trying to make it fit with the historical records they have and they come upon this one, really elegant, mathematical equation that allows them to tie it all together.

Aldana used a different interpretation of the Mayan word “k’al” – which he says means “enclose” – to show that the leap day the astronomer created for Venus was an innovation, not an accident, that turned the Mayan calendar into an important tool for scheduling rituals and planning events in a culture that placed a great deal of importance on the movements of Venus.

This puts the Mayans on par with the other great astronomers and mathematicians of the world, says Aldana.

If you talk about the earliest Greek astronomers that we know of, they were doing the same kind of things. [The Mayans’ were] much more festival, ritual, events that involve large communities or large groups of society, and in this case they wanted it to be timed by the visibility of Venus. This is why I make the comparison to Copernicus, because Copernicus was worried about how good their astronomical models were so that they could do things like set the timing of Easter.

This is more than a mathematical discovery, says Aldana. It’s a new way of looking at the history of the Mayans.

We talk about ‘the Maya’ as though that’s a meaningful term — how can you capture all these millions of people with one phrase? Popular culture has misrepresented the Mayan [people] in so many ways that we have to almost excavate or peel away that stuff to get at their experiences and what they tried to do and what they recorded.

Attempting to describe an entire culture or group of people with just a few words still gets us in trouble, doesn’t it?

 

[MIKA27]

KIRK & SWEENEY 23-YEAR RUM

Vanilla and caramel are just a couple of the flavors that come from a great rum. And those flavors are intensified with a rum like Kirk & Sweeney 23-Year Rum — in large part due to the 23 years it spends inside oak barrels. The brand was named for a wooden schooner that smuggled rum from the Caribbean to the U.S. during prohibition, and this 23-year-old expression is worth smuggling as many bottles as you can while it's still available.

[MIKA27]

Why Settle For Just 30 Games When This Tiny Aluminium NES Clone Plays All Of Them

Despite a $US500 ($655)+ price tag, the Analogue Nt, a gorgeous NES clone made from a solid block of aircraft grade aluminium, has been continuously selling out since it was first released back in 2014. If you keep missing out, you can always grab one off eBay for $5000, or wait until January when a smaller, cheaper, improved version will go on sale.

Unlike the forthcoming Nintendo Entertainment System: NES Classic Edition which can only play 30 built-in NES games, the new Analogue Nt mini can play all of the original 8-bit Famicom and NES carts you still have from your childhood, or have since re-bought. Its hardware not only perfectly plays every game, it actually improves them since most of us would use the console with a flatscreen hi-def TV.

The console’s shell is still made from solid aluminium, but is about 20 per cent smaller than the original Analogue Nt, and now includes an HDMI connection which was a $US79 ($104) upgrade for the original hardware, in addition to analogue RGB composite and component hookups.

The Analogue Nt mini also includes a single NES Retro Receiver, and an 8Bitdo NES30 Bluetooth controller so you can play your favourite old-school games completely wirelessly right out of the box. Just because you have a soft spot for classic 8-bit gaming doesn’t mean you still like tripping over cords.

Not only is the Analogue Nt mini smaller while still packing more features and a wireless controller, it’s also priced about $US200 ($262) cheaper than if you were to similarly equip and upgrade the original Analogue Nt. It doesn’t ship until January 2017, but you can pre-order it now for $US449 ($588). Not exactly cheap, especially when compared to the thousands of original NES consoles still on eBay, but doesn’t your nostalgia deserve the best?

[MIKA27]

This Modern-Day Western Is the Best Movie of the Summer

 

The 2016 summer movie season has been disappointing, especially if you discount some of the more solid animated family films. The spate of sequels and reboots certainly left a lot to be desired. Suicide Squad ended up as not much more than a two-hour exercise in excessive music licensing. Ghostbusters was decent but unable to rise above toxic pre-release criticisms and stalled out at the box office. For adults though, there were few bright spots. The Nice Guys and Popstar: Never Stop Never Stopping provided some R-rated laughs, but, again, raise your hand if you saw either. The Shallows is a tight thriller that's likely to become a HBO staple. There's a takeaway from the last few months of hype: Chris Pine was in a fantastic movie and it didn't involve Starfleet. It's called Hell or High Water, and you should make it your business to catch it if it's playing at a theater near you.

Set in very dusty Texas (though shot, and shot incredibly well, in New Mexico), in a series of fewer-than-one horse towns, the film stars Pine and Ben Foster as outlaw brothers, Toby and Tanner Howard, racing the clock to knock over a few banks. Their motives, and the cleverness of their scheme, become clear fairly early on, but it never gets boring, especially when things start to go horribly wrong and the shots start firing.

Pine is revelatory as Toby, and it's great to see him leave the brash type role he's done well in three Star Treks to Foster (one of his generation's best character actors and arguably the most talented member to emerge from the Disney Channel pipeline) and give his interpretation of the criminal-with-a-soft-side trope while at the same time playing a rake who's responsible for everything that goes wrong. Pine's Toby is a man of purpose and principal, but he's also a ball of rage as witnessed by an unspoken threat to a loan officer or an outburst at a gas station that's played for the whoa-shit-factor and then for laughs when Foster reacts. The two have an easy, lived-in chemistry, and despite not resembling each other all too much, they're perfectly matched as brothers. There's an underlying sadness to their interactions and mission as a whole (an excellent family melodrama exists in a different edit), but both actors acquit themselves well, helped by great writing.

The performance most likely to stick with you, however, is Jeff Bridges as the grizzled Texas Ranger in hot pursuit of the Howard boys. Marcus Hamilton is an instantly iconic Jeff Bridges character—half True Grit's Rooster Cogburn, half Crazy Heart's Bad Blake—and he hasn't been this good in years. It's a gregarious, soulful performance, a veteran actor playing a veteran lawman and you believe every part of it—even the clichés go down as smoothly as a Shiner Bock. If you squint, the character could be Jeff Lebowski if he never tried pot and went straight back in the '70s.

The repartee between Hamilton and his half-Mexican, half-Comanche partner Alberto Parker (Gil Birmingham, the First Nations actor familiar to anyone with a Netflix account) is some of the film's best. Their relationship is established from their first scene together: These two have worked with each other for years and respect each other as cops and as men, even if that's shown through insults about alcoholism and Alzheimer's. If the characters weren't named, you'd think they were Dead and Pan. If a cable network wants to do a prequel series about these two, I'd be into it.

The real star of the movie though, oddly, may be its writer Taylor Sheridan. In just his second film (last year's Sicario was his debut), the former actor (he played Deputy Hale on Sons of Anarchy) has perfected his authorial voice. He's got an ear for dialogue and a knack for memorable characters—no matter how briefly they're on screen. Moreover, he possesses a thesis: how the West was lost. Yeah, crime isn't great, but neither is the bank foreclosing on your house. By means legal and illegal, everyday folks get fucked over by institutions bigger than them (a scene in which Bridges attempts to confiscate a waitress's $200 tip as evidence is especially heartrending) and there's no escaping it. Sometimes the only solution is to game the system right back. In Sicario, that meant playing by cartel rules; in Hell or High Water, it's feeding the snake its own tail. Sheridan probably isn't a seer, but Hell or High Water even finds the space to reflect on concealed-carry permitting. (Sheridan's making his directorial debut next year and it should be on everyone's most-anticipated list.)

Make no mistake, Hell or High Water's subtext shouldn't get you down. It's an extremely enjoyable picture with quite a few laugh lines (a Mr. Pibb burn has stuck with me). At times it's languid, content to bask in its world, like in a number of scenes where characters shoot the shit over a beer or five or interact with eye witnesses, waitresses (one waitress in particular is a standout), and hotel clerks. Other times it'll leave you covering your mouth or biting your lip. The sense that something could happen in a number of scenes will make you giddy when the release does or doesn't come. This is a movie that knows how to ratchet up tension and does it with gusto.

Sitting pretty at 98% on the Tomatometer, Hell or High Water didn't escape notice from the critics, and audiences are catching up to it as well. It grossed just under $600,000 on 32 screens its opening weekend before adding around $3 million last weekend after expanding to another 440 theaters. Hell or High Water is pulpy as hell, one of the best movies of the summer, and a dark horse awards contender for Jeff Bridges and screenwriter Taylor Sheridan. I'm jealous of you because you still get to see it for the first time.

[MIKA27]

How Tesla Just Made The Fastest Car You Can Buy

Tesla has just created the fastest car you can buy — and it’s all thanks to the company’s new 100 kilowatt-hour (kWh) battery. The Model S P100D with Ludicrous Mode is a slightly upgraded version of the Model S P90D (with a 90 kWh battery) that was released in March. But this new version can go 0-to-97km/h in just 2.5 seconds.

The Model S P100D with Ludicrous Mode features a slightly larger battery pack than previous models, and while it looks practically identical to previous iterations, the guts of the new 100 kWh battery have been completely retooled.

“It’s a complete re-do on the cooling architecture,” said Tesla CTO JB Straubel on a conference call during the announcement. “It’s pretty amazing we can do that without changing the external size and shape of the battery pack.”

The Model S P100D with Ludicrous Mode features a slightly larger battery pack than previous models, and while it looks practically identical to previous iterations, the guts of the new 100 kWh battery have been completely retooled.

“It’s a complete re-do on the cooling architecture,” said Tesla CTO JB Straubel on a conference call during the announcement. “It’s pretty amazing we can do that without changing the external size and shape of the battery pack.”

Tesla CEO Elon Musk said during the same conference call that the company is “very close to the theoretical limit” of what it can do with current battery technology. He said for future improvements, it will require a next-generation battery cell that the company is currently developing in partnership with Panasonic.

The Model S P100D with Ludicrous mode will cost $US134,500 ($176,437), and the 100 kWh battery that enables that speed will also be available in the Tesla Model X P100D with Ludicrous Mode SUV for $US135,500 ($177,749) (making it the world’s quickest SUV).

In an unprecedented move, Tesla will also allow current Tesla Model S and Model X P90D owners to upgrade to the 100 kWh battery for only $US20,000 ($26,236). The incurred cost will be used to recycle the old 90 kWh batteries. In short, you can make your vehicle one of the fastest cars in the world with a small $US20,000 ($26,236) upgrade — almost in the same way you’d upgrade a computer.

If you’re eager to get your hands on one of these P100D Tesla vehicles, you’re not alone. The demand for these cars is high, and Musk emphasised how hard the company is working to meet interest from consumers. “People don’t appreciate how hard manufacturing is,” he said. “We think we can do about 200 cars a week. We’re working very hard to ramp that up as quickly as possible.”

“We’re going to work very hard with each passing week to produce the highest number of 100 kWh packs we can make,” he added. “It seems like it’s not that big of an increase in energy from 90 kWh, but it just gets exponentially harder to increase the energy density.”

[MIKA27]

This Australian Team Just Launched A Giant Racing Drone That Can Hit 200km/h

By now, it’s highly likely you’ve heard of drone racing. Tiny drones, hitting speeds of up to 120km/h, flown through underground carparks and abandoned buildings by pilots wearing goggles which give them a hair-raising first person view of the action. Now, in Australia, a group has built a 1.5-metre 30kg racing drone that can hit 200km/h.

The sport has been quietly gaining momentum as drone technology improved over the past several years, but finally hit the mainstream largely due to a group of Australian enthusiasts whose clandestine meets on the east coast resulted in viral images like this one:

Then came the first “Drone Nationals” held in the USA in July, and won by an Aussie, Chad Nowak.

This year, the Drone Racing League was founded and funded by the owner of the US NFL Miami Dolphins league. South Korea now has a 1,395-square-metre arena for people to fly and race drones in:

It’s been a rapid rise, but one group of Aussies – and a Kiwi – think they’re staying ahead of the curve.

Freedom Drone Sports are well on the road toward launching “Freedom Class”, a category with a notable point of difference compared to regular racers. 

Their “V1” – a 1.5 metre, 30kg monster they say is capable of carrying a 300kg payload. The team is led by CEO Chris Ballard, who featured in some of those underground videos last year.

The idea behind Freedom Class is purely speed and spectacle, but above all, the kind of speed and spectacle a packed stadium of spectators can see.

They’re working hard to get all the technical details and regulations in place, and have been teasing out pics for months on their Facebook site. And last night, they uploaded the ultimate teaser – a (very) brief proof of concept. In the video above, you can see the first footage of the V1 in action — but blink and you might have missed it.

But did you see the claimed speed it was capable of? 200km/h.

It’s polarising viewers. The haters say it’s not enough, the believers just want it to happen faster. But there’s a lot on the line – last weekend, the inaugural Australian Nationals were run on the Gold Coast. Up for grabs was sponsorship to compete in the World Drone Racing Championships in Hawaii later this year.

One of the winners was 12 years old, in a sport which is being spoken about in terms of “the next F1” and figures of $20 billion a year are bandied about. The winner of the most recent championship in Dubai took home $250,000.

So it makes sense that the Freedom Drone Racing team want to get it right. They’re already promising a “spectacle in the middle of Melbourne over the Yarra off Central Pier, hopefully before the end of 2016”:

 

If – or, as it looks to be the case, when – it lifts off, “spectacle” sounds like the right word. Watch this space.

[MIKA27]

Daylight's End Trailer Proves Lance Henriksen Is Invaluable During A Zombie Apocalypse

 

Daylight’s End looks like yet another zombie apocalyptic action movie, but it has a secret weapon: Lance Henriksen, who is pushing 80 but is still quite obviously 100 per cent badarse. He may have a supporting role here, but anyone in a doomsday plague survival situation would be lucky to have this Aliens veteran by their side.

Daylight’s End is out now in US theatres and on iTunes. An Australian release date has yet to be confirmed

[MIKA27]

These Glowing Rocks Actually Capture One Of Nature's Most Beautiful Phenomena 

Looks at first like somebody threw a bunch of glowing beads on some rocks, but what you see here is actually alive.

In a series titled “The Weeping Stones”, Tdub Photo, a photo and video company based in Japan, were able to photograph a group of bioluminescent shrimp, which they poured over rocks in the Seto Inland Sea in Okayama, Japan to give the appearance of tears. Bioluminescence is one of our favourite biological tricks in nature, and to see it so beautifully depicted here might make our week.

But it wasn’t as simple as finding the shrimp in their natural state, so they needed to get creative.

The creatures are known as Vargula hilgendorfii, or more commonly, sea fireflies. They’re about 3mm long and indigenous to the coasts off southern Japan. They typically live at the bottom of shallow water and come out at night, where Trevor Williams and Jonathan Galione, the duo behind Tdub, were able to fish them out.

“They generally live in the sand in shallow water so you often see them being washed up on the shore, but in order to get quantities like we use in our photos you have to fish them out,” the duo wrote on their website.

They used preservative jars that had lids with drilled holes, rope and some raw bacon, and then covered the jars with duct tape (to prevent the jars from breaking when submerged in water). They put the bacon inside the jars and sank them in the water for up to an hour, where the shrimp were attracted to the bacon smell (we would probably end up in the same predicament). Then the contents of the jars were poured out over the rocks, after which one of them took the shots.

The duo wrote that the shrimp only glow for a short amount of time — around 20 to 30 minutes — but that covering them with water will bring the glow back.

You can see more of the duo’s photos on their website, Instagram and Facebook page.

[MIKA27]

Deadly Old Disease is Rising Again from Siberian Graveyards

The news from Siberia keeps getting worse. Melting permafrost is causing underground methane pockets to either implode or explode into giant, ever-expanding, ground consuming craters. Melting permafrost thawed out dead reindeer and woke up the anthrax that killed them, spreading the disease among herders. Now, melting permafrost is causing erosion in the graveyards of a town partially wiped out in the 1890s  by an outbreak of smallpox, potentially unleashing the disease again. Besides the location, is there a common theme here?

The Siberian Times reports that researchers from the Virology and Biotechnology Center in Novosibirsk have been dispatched to Salekhard, a town in Yamalo-Nenets Autonomous Okrug on the Arctic Circle to investigate cemeteries suffering from such serious erosion that graves are opening and dead bodies are being exposed … bodies whose bones show the telltale sores of smallpox infection.

According to Boris Kershengolts, deputy director for research at the Institute for Biological Problems of Cryolithozone, the area was hit by a major smallpox epidemic in the 1890s which killed at least 40 percent of the townspeople. Victims were buried in the upper layer of permafrost on the bank of the Kolyma River. Unfortunately, the recent combination of melting permafrost and flooding has caused the Kolyma’s bank to erode and open up the graves.

Initial reports on preliminary analysis of the bones say that only fragments of smallpox DNA have been found in the graves, not actual surviving smallpox viruses. However, this is not the first time smallpox fragments have been found in melting areas of Siberia – stories of smallpox victims in thawing graveyards date back to 1993 and mummies of smallpox victims were allegedly unearthed in 2002. Throw in the fact that smallpox vaccinations have stopped since the disease was eradicated from the wild in 1980 and you’ve got the potential for another epidemic disaster.

Microbiologist Sergey Netesov from Novosibirsk State University says people should stay away from fenced-off graveyards and burial sites where smallpox and anthrax victims may have been uncovered, but the real danger spots are areas where money is more important than health concerns — mines and oil fields.

It is a recipe for disaster. If you start having industrial exploration, people will start to move around the deep permafrost layers. Through mining and drilling, those old layers will be penetrated and this is where the danger is coming from. If it is true that these viruses survive in the same way those amoeba viruses survive, then smallpox is not eradicated from the planet – only the surface.

Has the story of smallpox gone a full circle? Nestov found fragments of smallpox in animals killed in the 1890 epidemic and investigated a case in the 1990s when a Siberian milkmaid caught what appeared to be cowpox from cattle.

And since people are not vaccinated anymore, it is possible, as was once the case, that there will be a new transition of the virus from animals to humans. This probability is non-zero. Once it has been happened in history, it may happen again.

Dr. Donald A. Henderson, a leader in the eradication of smallpox, died just last week. Who will take his place? Do we need a doctor, a microbiologist, a climate change specialist or someone with the power to stop mining and energy companies?

[MIKA27]

Lamborghini Centenario Roadster 

Meet the spectacular new Lamborghini, the Centenario Roadster a beastly supercar with an impressive 770-hp V-12 engine, making it the most powerful Lamborghini ever. This automotive masterpiece was unveiled at last week at Pebble Beach, following the debut of the coupe version earlier this year. and just like the hard-top model, this version will also be a one-off limited edition. They will cost more than $2.2 million with only 20 to be made, and guess what, theyve all been sold already!    

 

[MIKA27]

This Is How South Florida Ends

It’s a scorching midsummer day, and the sawgrass is still under a pale blue sky. Waist-deep in water and sinking slowly into the muck, I fend off mosquitoes as a man from South Florida’s Water Management District mixes a bag of salt into a hot tub-sized bucket on the side of the road. Nine metres away in the marsh, another city official wearing waders and a bug hat stands on a narrow steel walkway, dangling the end of a long hose over a plexiglass chamber.

The experiment seems innocuous enough. Seawater is being added to a freshwater wetland, and scientists are observing what happens. The grim subtext is that this same experiment is about to play out in real life and on an enormous scale, from here in the southern Everglades, to Miami 65km east, to the Florida Keys due south. If scientists are correct, much of South Florida will be underwater by the end of the century.

A sawgrass marsh in southern Everglades National Park.

Standing next to me, pulling strands of what looks like a moss-covered scarf out of the water, is Viviana Mazzei, an ecology PhD student at Florida International University. It’s a periphyton mat, she explains, a unique symbiosis of algae, bacteria and other microorganisms that forms the base of the Everglades’ food chain. When the saltwater comes, it’s expected to die, with profound ecological consequences.

“The urgency for doing this work has never been greater,” Tiffany Troxler, the FIU ecologist leading the experiment, told me later that week over the phone. “The Everglades is a world treasure, and we’d like for people to continue coming here to enjoy it for a long time.”

Today, the Everglades is fighting a war. Its adversary — rising sea levels brought on by man-made climate change — is relentless and merciless. It’s coming faster than we think. And unlike an earlier war between man and the so-called river of grass, this fight will have no winners.

The first war on the Everglades began over a century ago, when European colonists arrived in South Florida intending to grow crops and build cities, and instead found themselves wading through a mosquito-infested swamp. It was a dreary, dismal, abominable place, “suitable only for the haunt of noxious vermin, or the resort of pestilential reptiles” according to an early government report.

In other words, it was America’s last frontier, and man’s God-given right to conquer it. And so, men conquered, or at least they tried. For decades, efforts to tame the wetlands proved futile. The tides turned in 1928, when a devastating hurricane flooded Lake Okeechobee — the enormous freshwater reservoir that fed wetlands to south — sending nearly 3000 Everglades pioneers to a watery grave. That disaster prompted the US Army Corps of Engineers to erect an enormous dyke around the lake, cutting off the Everglades’ lifeblood and draining hundreds of thousands of acres for agriculture. East, west and south of Lake Okeechobee, the Army Corps dug thousands of kilometres of levees and canals to move water around in a more orderly fashion.

An example of an artificial canal dug to divert water in South Florida.

Fast forward to 2016. The Miami metropolitan area is home to nearly six million people and hundreds of billions of dollars‘ worth of real estate. It’s a popular travel destination, a gateway to Latin America and headquarters to major multinational corporations including Burger King and Office Depot. The gentle creep of freshwater down a 160km-long, 96km-wide river of grass is no more — it’s been replaced by the largest flood control structure in America.

A quick drive inland reveals what subjugation of the Everglades has wrought: An ecosystem in shambles. Reduced to less than half of their former extent and receiving only a third of the freshwater that they used to, most of the remaining wetlands are far too dry. Populations of native birds, fish and reptiles have declined precipitously; invasive species are rampant. Toxic algae blooms are now a summertime tradition. So-called “white zones” — vast expanses of dead vegetation — speckle America’s largest wetland like canker sores.

Still, all of the ecological problems triggered by development and artificial drainage pale in comparison to the existential threat now posed by too much carbon in the atmosphere: Sea level rise.

Since 1930, sea levels in South Florida have risen nearly 30cm. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change conservatively predicts another 30cm of global sea level rise this century, as polar ice caps melt and warming seawater expands. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, meanwhile, projects up to 2m of rise.

A freshwater sawgrass marsh in Everglades National Park.

Hal Wanless, a geologist at the University of Miami who’s spent 50 years documenting the past 18,000 years of sea level changes in South Florida, thinks the highest government projections are too low. “The important thing we have learned from studying the past is that sea level rises in pulses,” he told me when I met him in his office on campus. These pulses, which have caused as much as 10m of sea level rise per century in the recent geologic past, are tied to periods of “rapid ice sheet disintegration” on Greenland and Antarctica.

Wanless believes we’re entering another such period now. And the evidence is certainly mounting. In the late 1980s, scientists were talking about how Greenland might start to melt due to global warming; by the mid 1990s it was already happening. Now, that melt is accelerating. A recent study in Geophysical Research Letters estimates that Greenland lost a trillion tonnes of ice between 2011 and 2014, contributing twice as much to global sea level rise as it did during the prior two decades.

All of this is just the beginning. A recent study in Nature Climate Change concludes that if every nation aggressively reduced its carbon emissions now, we’d still be locked into 30m of sea level rise over the long term.

Flat, low and on a porous bedrock, South Florida is extremely vulnerable to the impacts of sea level rise.

And when it comes to vulnerable coastlines, South Florida is at the top of the list. Not only is the region very flat and very low, it sits on a porous limestone bedrock built of ancient reef structures. “The analogy most commonly used is Swiss cheese,” Doug Yoder, deputy director of Miami Dade’s Water and Sewer Department, told me. Over thousands of years, acidic rainwater has eaten holes through the limestone, allowing the ocean to bubble up from below.

“You can’t build dykes or sandbars to keep it out,” Coral Gables’ mayor Jim Cason said. As mayor of a city that would have been underwater just a few million years ago, Cason is acutely aware of his community’s tenuous relationship with the sea. He has a saying about South Florida: “Our future is what happens to ice.”

“Many people still don’t get it,” Wanless said, describing an instance when he was called out to Miami Beach’s Public Works Department in 2009. At the time, the city’s now-infamous tidal flooding was just starting to garner attention. Wanless recalled a group of men in suits and ties saying, “Dr Wanless, we’re having a problem. We need to know where to put the water.”

“I said, you can put it anywhere you want,” he told me. “It’s the ocean. It’s arrived.”

The battle against rising sea levels is conspicuous at Miami Beach, which is already spending hundreds of millions of dollars raising its roads and building pumps to divert the invading saltwater into Biscayne Bay. But along South Florida’s wilder coastlines, a more dramatic siege has garnered comparably little attention.

Take Cape Sable, a lonely expanse of marsh, mangrove swamp and white sand beach at the southwest toe of Everglades National Park. Wanless has been trekking out here for decades, and he’s watched the shoreline fall back hundreds of metres. “This is a very dynamic area, and it gives us an inkling of the kinds of changes we’re going to see,” he said.

Google Earth image of Cape Sable with historic shoreline position overlain, via Erik Stabenau

Cape Sable’s troubles began in the early 20th century, when settlers cut canals to the ocean to drain the inland swamp and gain access for cattle pasture. The land was eventually abandoned, but the canals remained and broadened over time, channeling saltwater into the sawgrass marsh, a freshwater ecosystem. Today, this is causing the marshes’ thick peat soils to collapse.

“You have to understand that these highly organic peat soils we have in the Everglades are a balance between the production of plant matter and the forces breaking that plant matter down,” Steve Davis, an ecologist at the Everglades Foundation, told me. “As these soils become exposed to salt, you strongly tip the balance toward a more rapid breakdown.”

Peat collapse is now being observed at freshwater-starved inland marshes, too, and as seawater continues to invade, the problem will get worse. “The more we look, the more evidence we see,” Davis said. “The rate of elevation loss we could be looking at is potentially dramatic.”

The sawgrass-mangrove transition zone near the southern edge of Everglades National Park.

According to Erik Stabenau, an oceanographer with the National Park Service, the issue of whether or not to restore Cape Sable’s collapsed marshes — now open lakes of seawater — is complicated by sea level rise. “We can shut down the flow through the canals so you don’t get saltwater in there,” he said. “And we might be able to manage it for a generation or two. But we’re in the forever business.”

Further east, the ecosystems of Florida Bay are also suffering, thanks to historic drainage problems and modern climate change. Covering 2072 square kilometres between the southern coastline and the Florida Keys, the bay is home to a stunning variety of plants, fish, birds, endangered manatees, bottlenose dolphins, loggerhead sea turtles and American crocodiles. Like a thirstier version of parklands to the north, it receives far less freshwater than it used to.

If there are too many hot days and not enough rain, salinity levels in Florida Bay skyrocket — which is exactly what happened last autumn following a severe drought. The consequence? Tens of thousands of acres of seagrass wilted and died, blanketing the estuary in a plume of yellow sulfide.
For now, the die-off appears to have ended. But as kilometres upon kilometers of dead seagrass stews in the summer heat, it’s being gobbled up by jellyfish, which excrete nitrogen and phosphorus-rich waste. This, ecologists fear, could trigger an enormous algae bloom, choking out sunlight and sucking the remaining oxygen out of the bay. “It’s sort of a chain reaction that causes the die-off to persist over a long time,” Davis said.

One way or another, it will take the seagrass years to recover. In the meantime, Florida Bay will continue to fight storm surges and rising sea levels at half-health. Whether this means the ocean will plow further inland faster is unclear.

Eventually, the seawater will push inland, and if Wanless is right, eventually is coming soon. This adds urgency to the research of Troxler and her students. After watching a freshwater wetland get hosed down with brine, Mazzei and I drive south to a brackish site, where the same treatment is being applied. Here, the dearth of freshwater caused by recent drought and so many dykes up north has taken a toll. In some places, tufts of sawgrass stand nearly 30cm above the peat; their long white roots exposed like teeth with receding gum lines.

A Florida International University-led saltwater addition experiment is taking place in the Everglades to explore the effects of rising sea levels.

Ben Wilson, an ecology PhD student from Alabama, is out in the muck taking measurements of carbon dioxide, methane and other invisible gases from the saltwater addition plots. These chemical fingerprints, he explains, will help scientists understand how important ecological processes like carbon sequestration will be impacted by rising sea levels.

I ask Wilson if studying a doomed ecosystem gets him down at all. Not really, he says. “If we can learn anything that helps us preserve these ecosystems a little longer, to me that’s worth it.”

One could dismiss the plight of the swamp as trivial compared with the annihilation of entire cities along South Florida’s coastline, but the two are inextricably linked. The millions of people living in the Miami metro area drink from the Biscayne aquifer, a vast freshwater lens underlying much of South Florida. If the Everglades becomes too salty, so will Miami’s water supply. “The extent that these wetlands can hold together is the extent that we get water quality protection,” Troxler said.

Freshwater flows through the Biscayne aquifer in a southeasterly direction, mixing with seawater when it arrives at the coast. But as sea levels rise, the saltwater front is advancing. Already, this has caused a handful of drinking wells at Hallandale Beach to become contaminated. With another 20cm of rise, more than half of the flood control structures built to keep the seawater at bay could become useless. “Gravity is just not going to work as well as it used to,” Yoder said.

There is, however, a way to buy the communities of South Florida time: By restoring the flow of freshwater from the north to push back against the rising seas. And that’s exactly what Everglades conservationists have been fighting to do for decades.

A 20km west of Miami, the strip malls peter out and give way to expansive meadows of sawgrass, marking the edge of Everglades National Park. If you want to cross the park to catch a boat tour out of Everglades City, there’s only one direct route — the Tamiami trail.

Cutting straight across the park like a pencil line etched into a pastel landscape of muted greens and browns, the Tamiami trail was considered a feat of engineering when it was laid down in the 1920s. Now, as with many other legacies of South Florida’s development boom, it’s clear the highway has inflicted untold harm on the Everglades.

A section of the Tamiami Trail.

A canal roughly the width of the highway itself rims the Tamiami’s north-facing side, catching freshwater and diverting it east, to aquifers along the coast. “The Tamiami trail has become an obstruction to north-south water flow — it basically acts as a dam,” Julie Hill Gabriel, director of Everglades policy for Audubon Florida, told me. “One of our big challenges is, how do you get that obstruction out of the way?”

For now, the solution lies in raising parts of the road so that water can flow underneath. A 1.6km section of the so-called Tamiami bridge was completed in 2013, and construction of another 5km segment could begin this autumn in the US (spring in Australia). Eventually, the US federal government plans to extend the bridge up to 10km.

A dirt road just north of the Tamiami Trail.

It’s a major symbolic victory for conservationists, but in reality the Tamiami bridge is a small piece of what’s needed to solve the Everglades’ water problems. The fundamental issue is that not enough fresh water comes south from Lake Okeechobee anymore — and that problem calls for more complex and costly engineering solutions.

That’s where the Comprehensive Everglades Restoration Plan (CERP) comes in. Formally launched in 2000, this multi-decade, Army Corps-led effort to restore the Everglades by putting the water back where it needs to be was initially pegged as a $US10.5 billion ($13.8 billion) project. Nearly 20 years in, it’s been plagued by delays and budget cuts, fought by agricultural lobbies and remains nowhere near completion. Meanwhile, the estimated cost of CERP has soared.

One of the biggest challenges facing Everglades restoration is simply acquiring land south of Lake Okeechobee, in what’s known as the Everglades Agricultural Area (EAA). “We need big, engineered wetlands,” Zack Jud of the Florida Oceanographic Society told me. “Instead of flowing billions of gallons of water [from Lake Okeechobee] to the coast, we need to send it through filtration marshes, so that by the time it gets to the south, it’s clean enough to give to the Everglades.”

Algae blooms, such as the one pictured here in Stuart, Florida from July 2016, are one ecological side effect of agriculture and artificial drainage in South Florida.

But most of the land that could store water to send into these wetlands is owned by several politically powerful sugar companies, who like South Florida’s plumbing the way it is.

In 2014, after a large parcel of land south of the lake went on the market, Floridians voted overwhelmingly in support of Amendment 1, which earmarked hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars for its purchase. Instead, the state took that money and used it to purchase anything and everything else in the name of conservation. They even gave some of it directly to farmers. Environmentalists place the blame squarely on the sugar lobby.

“Amendment 1 was misappropriated, and we did not get the opportunity to buy land south of the lake,” Jud said. “The governor sided with the sugar industry.”

Despite recent setbacks, proponents of Everglades restoration are encouraged by the public support their cause has garnered. It’s now widely agreed that moving more freshwater south is the best (and perhaps only) shot at revitalising the Everglades — stopping peat collapse, preventing seagrass die-offs and allowing more natural ecological transitions to occur as climate change progresses.

What’s more, with rising sea levels threatening to wipe South Florida off the map, a healthy Everglades could be the last line of defence. “You could say Everglades restoration is a waste of money because it’s all going to be drowned anyhow,” Wanless said. “But if you can have a more reliable, higher level of freshwater running through the Everglades, and the wetlands can build up peat again, you can keep the saltwater encroachment at bay better. And that’s worth it’s weight in gold.”

“Putting that water back certainly buys us time,” Stabenau said. “It certainly buys us environmental resilience. Does it solve the problem forever? I don’t think sea level is going to come up just a few inches and stop. But if it turns out down the road that we have engineering solutions to climate issues and water problems, we’re buying ourselves time to figure that out.”

On my last day in the Everglades, I took a tour of Ten Thousand Islands, a swampy archipelago rimming Florida’s southwest coast. For thousands of years, Native Americans lived here like kings, feasting off oysters, crabs, lobsters and fish. Peregrine falcons soared overhead as our airboat navigated tufts of land held together by twisted mangrove roots. The silhouettes of sausage-shaped manatees appeared and faded again. A bottlenose dolphin caught our boat’s wake and followed it, leaping in and out of the water as my tour guide made sharp turns to kick up surf.

Tiny islands held together by mangroves are a ubiquitous feature of Ten Thousand Islands.

In this tattered mosaic of water and land, the Everglades is still wild. The existential threats I’d spent the last week learning about seemed to fade into irrelevance. It was difficult to imagine how humans could destroy something so vast.

My guide seemed to share this view. The rise and fall of the sea, he said, was something that city folk in Miami worried about. Out here, the will of the ocean was inevitable, as much a part of the fabric of life as the rise and fall of the sun.

Florida will be underwater again someday, probably no matter what we do. But right now, on timescales that matter to people, it is people who will decide its fate.

As black-bottomed storm clouds rolled in, we hurried back to the shore.

 

[MIKA27]

Why The Joker In The Dark Knight Was The Ultimate Villain

Even if you didn’t see Suicide Squad and somehow escaped the reviews of it and, like, also didn’t hear the horror stories about Jared Leto’s Joker, you’d already know that it would never have topped Heath Ledger’s Joker in The Dark Knight anyway. Not only is Ledger’s Joker an iconic performance, his character was also the most perfect antagonist there’s ever been for Batman (or maybe, for any superhero). Lessons from the Screenplay analyses what an antagonist should be and shows how The Dark Knight’s Joker nails it perfectly.

Heath Ledger’s Joker is exceptionally good at attacking Batman’s weakness, rendering Batman’s strength and intimidation useless and using Batman’s moral code (that he can’t kill) against him (because Joker needs to be killed). The Joker also forces Batman to make choices to reveal his true character but also outsmarts him, like when Batman chose to save Rachel over Harvey Dent and ended up with Dent anyway.

But the most important thing that makes Joker the ultimate antagonist is that he and Batman want the same thing: Gotham. Batman wants to save it. The Joker wants it to be in chaos.

 

[MIKA27]

Set Worker Dies In Blade Runner 2 Accident

A construction worker was dismantling the set while production had already moved to another location.
A 28-year-old Hungarian construction worker was killed on the set of the untitled Blade Runner sequel in Budapest on Aug. 25, local studio Origo said.

"The worker was underneath a platform, upon which the set was constructed, when it suddenly collapsed," read a statement sent to The Hollywood Reporter by Origo Studios. "The cause of the accident is not yet known."

Hungarian news website Index quoted a spokesperson for the studio as saying that the incident occurred when the construction worker, whose name has not been revealed, was dismantling one of the sets, production on which had already wrapped.

The Origo spokesperson declined to comment to THR on possible causes of the incident, saying only that an investigation was in progress.

At the time of the incident, production of the untitled Blade Runner sequel was in progress on another location in the village of Etyek, where Korda Studios facilities are located, Index reported.

The sequel is directed by Denis Villeneuve for Warner Bros., starring Ryan Gosling, Harrison Ford, Jared Leto, Mackenzie Davis and Robin Wright.

The release is scheduled for October 2017.

[MIKA27]

Luke Cage Is Stronger Than A Speeding Bullet In First Clip

If there’s one thing you need to know about Luke Cage, it’s that he’s sick of buying new clothes.

Netflix released the first clip from the upcoming series Luke Cage Saturday, just a couple of weeks after we got our first trailer at San Diego Comic-Con.

The clip expands on the scene attached to Season 2 of Daredevil, where Luke Cage is duking it out with a bunch of baddies at a boxing gym, only to get showered with a wave of bullets. Luckily, our hero can deflect just about anything. Well, except his eye for style. Poor guy must go through T-shirts like napkins.

All 13 episodes of Luke Cage will be available to binge Sept. 30. Next, we’ll be getting the first season of Iron Fist in early 2017, followed by all our Netflix Marvel heroes coming together in the first season of The Defenders later that year. I’ve also included the teaser for that, but saying this, it doesn't show all that much.

 

[MIKA27]

Pelican Built An Indestructible Cooler In Case Your Beer Falls Off A Cliff 

If you travel with a lot of expensive camera, video or music gear, there’s a good chance you stuff it all in a Pelican case to ensure that it arrives unscathed. The company is known for its nearly indestructible cases, and now that it’s made a cooler, you’ll never have to worry about something happening to your drinks (Even your cigars).

Outfitted with locking latches that will foil everything from a possum to a bear, the Pelican Elite cooler also features freezer-grade seals and extra-thick insulation to keep everything inside chilled for as long as possible. Drop it off a cliff and the cooler will not only survive, but your beer will still be cold by the time you climb down to rescue it.

Available in capacities ranging from 19L to 142L, the Elite also comes in four different colour combos, includes a drainage spigot, cup holders on the lid and a bottle opener tucked under its rim. And there’s no reason you can’t also use it to transport expensive gadgets when filled with enough bubble wrap to stop your toys from bouncing around.

[MIKA27]

The New Blair Witch Trailer Will Make You Never, Ever Want To Go Camping Again

We were already looking forward to the new movie from Adam Wingard (The Guest, You’re Next) when it was called The Woods, and we had no idea it would be a sequel to The Blair Witch Project. Now we can barely contain ourselves waiting for its release, especially since each new trailer looks scarier than the last.

This newest trailer proves that the only thing more terrifying than the Blair Witch is being trapped underground in a claustrophobic, muddy tunnel… with the Blair Witch lurking behind you in the dark. “I don’t want to go in there,” the character protests — with good reason, it appears. Did her friends forget about the witch’s fondness for underground spaces?

 

[MIKA27]

Drone Footage Shows The Earthquake In Italy Was Far Worse Than Anyone Thought

Late last week, a massive 6.1 magnitude earthquake rocked central Italy. It was followed by nearly 200 aftershocks, devastating whole towns and burying residents under rubble. Over 4000 rescuers have been dispatched and the death toll has jumped to 247, the BBC reports.

Entire towns have been levelled, with Amatrice, Accumoli and Pescara del Tronto suffering the most damage. People not involved in the rescue and cleanup operations have been advised to leave as the buildings continue to crumble, creating hazardous conditions.

Drone footage below illustrates the extent of the destruction to Pescara del Tronto.

MIKA: God bless them all 

[MIKA27]

FERRARI 250 GTO BY UNIQUE & LIMITED

Unique & Limited is a company that chooses exceptional moments from racing history, and painstakingly recreates them.

These images are all from their series on the iconic Ferrari 250 GTO – a successful racer from the early 1960s that’s now the most expensive car in history, selling for $38,115,000 USD in a private transaction.

The car would take Ferrari to wins in the over 2 litre class of the FIA International Championship for GT Manufacturers in 1962, 1963, and 1964.

Buy the prints HERE

[MIKA27]

BOOMBARREL

The BoomBarrel by BoomCase is a self-contained sound system in a small barrel. Internally it has a 50 Watt amplifier, a lithium-ion battery offering up 18+ hours of usability, a 5.25″ aluminium or black cone woofer, and it has two silk dome tweeters on top.

With a frequency response of 70hz – 20,000hz and measuring in at 11″ x 8″ x 5″ with a weight of 7lbs, the BoomBarrel is a small, lightweight speaker unit ideal for use on picnics, beach trips, boat outings, or evenings by the pool.