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

[MIKA27]

A Better Fix For Your Old, Aching Back From A New Biomaterial

When you get older, your back aches. Why? One explanation is those cushy shock absorbers called nucleus pulposus (NP) between your vertebrae that provide support, spine, mobility and equal weight distribution are worn down. Unfortunately, you can’t exactly take your vertebrae to the mechanic’s shop for a tune-up. But thanks to a new biomaterial created by researchers at Duke University, old aching backs might get some relief.

The material is a liquid full of regenerative cells that’s injected directly into the tissue in between the vertebrae. Once infused, it turns into a gel, which helps hold in the healthy NP cells, helps repair damaged cells and aids new ones in forming.

Therapeutic injections to delay the degeneration of spinal discs aren’t exactly new. But the problem is they don’t last — new cells often leak after a few days. With the new method, the viscous solution works like a glue, forming a gel when three liquid components mix, usually after about five minutes, and it should last for significantly longer than 14 days. We don’t know exactly how long that is, but hey longer is better. The material has been tested in rats with moderate success. And while we can’t trade in our backs when we get old, maybe we can get a little relief.

[MIKA27]

Monster Machines: This Micro-Penetrator Impregnates Planets -- With Science

After nearly a decade and billions of dollars in R&D costs, we’ve still barely scratched the surface of Mars. That sort of outlay just won’t work for exploring Jupiter’s moon Europa, especially since all the interesting parts of the moon, like its potential subterranean ocean, are encrusted with meters of ice. But with the help of the UK’s new space penetrator module, we may be able to inject our scientific devices metres deep into other celestial bodies.

The space penetrator is a lightweight, bullet-shaped, self-contained instrument module designed to be shot into the strata of extraterrestrial bodies. So rather than attempt to safely land a rover, have it scoop up surface soil, process, analyse and transmit its findings back to Earth while hoping that at no point does anything go wrong to disrupt the multi-billion dollar mission or anyone asks what the dirt is like a bit further down, the space penetrator would perform the analysis directly in the before transmitting the data back mission control. No sticky wheels, no dusty solar panels, no fuss, no muss.

The penetrator has been under development for more than a decade now, originally part of the failed British Moonlite program, and is funded by the ESA. Weighing just 13kg, the penetrator could usher in a new low cost means of exploring the solar system. It would be launched from an mother ship into orbit around the target body as part of a satellite. This satellite would act as a launching pad for the penetrator, ejecting the device to rocket down into the planet’s surface at 200-300m/s aboard a solid rocket motor. As the penetrator nears the surface, it will jettison the engine and impact nearly 3m into the crust.

Once stopped, the penetrator’s accelerometer determines how deeply it’s burrowed and activates its onboard sensor suite. These sensors will be mission specific, of course, but are expected to employ a variety of seismometers, magnetometers, geochemical, radiation and thermal sensors. In addition it will likely have imaging capabilities as well, including a descent camera, ground imager and microscope. It will even carry a min-drill to collect ice samples. All of this data is then relayed through the mother ship back to Earth.

While the system is not yet ready to be shot into the depths of space, UK researchers have just carried out a successful impact simulation at the QientiQ rocket track at Pendine in West Wales. The team reports that a prototype penetrator survived being shot into a nine-tonne cube of ice at 340m/s and withstanding 24,000 G’s of force during the impact (that’s roughly 1000 times what fighter pilots experience when punching out).

“It was really successful because the entry velocity was higher than expected and all the systems we’ve looked at so far have survived,” Astrium UK representative Marie-Claire Perkinson told BBC News. The project remains under development, although engineers are confident that they’ll have a flight-ready production model ready by the end of the decade. Now they just to need a mission to use it on.

[MIKA27]

Watch out: That Headache might be flesh eating maggots in your brain:

http://youtu.be/8oU0sPZjamU

One poor woman came back from a holiday in Peru to discover that the monster headache and scratching noises she was suffering from were actually maggots burrowing through her ear canal into her brain.

It seems the brazen little sod, the New World Army Screw Worm fly, saw her ear canal as a safe haven to lay some eggs while she was out and about walking (!); it didn’t even wait until she was sleeping. After jetting back to the UK, the blighters hatched, turning into little flesh-eating maggots that decided to burrow deeper into her ear towards her brain. It wasn’t until she woke up one morning to find her pillow soaked with ear fluid that she realised the shooting pains in her head and face could be something serious.

The 27-year-old carted herself off to A&E, which referred her to an ear, nose and throat specialist (ENT). The ENT team described what they saw as a “writhing mass” of creatures buried deep inside her ear. After trying to get them out, they only receded deeper into her ear, burrowing a 12mm hole in her ear canal. Trying to drown them out with olive oil failed too, and so the poor woman had to sedated while the doctors went to work with a microscope and speculum.

What the horrified medics found was not just a couple of maggots living there inside her ear, but a whole family of eight large maggots. Thankfully all the little buggers were removed and, luckily enough, they hadn’t made it as far as the woman’s brain.

Apparently she had felt a fly duck into her ear, but hadn’t thought anything of it once shooing it out of there. Next time a fly comes anywhere near your head, you might want to freak out a little bit — I know I bloody will.

[MIKA27]

'Smart' knife that detects tumours could curb spread of cancer

A surgical knife that can detect when it is cutting through cancerous tissue is being tested in hospitals, raising hopes that the spread of cancer left behind after surgery could soon be curbed more successfully.

The device helps surgeons by indicating exactly which tissue to remove from a patient, reducing the need for repeated surgery.

During an operation electrosurgical knives are used to cut and cauterise blood vessels. The device works by sucking the smoke this process creates into a mass spectrometer, which indicates whether the cut tissue is cancerous or healthy.

While surgery is often the best hope of a cancer cure, more than 20 per cent of the cancerous tissue may be left behind under current procedures.

“This could be a real game-changer for tumour resection surgery,” said the knife’s inventor, Dr Zoltan Takats, from Imperial College London.

As well as potentially improving cancer survival, the device could save thousands of pounds per patient by cutting the cost of lab tests and follow-up operations. A customised version of the “iKnife” is being tested at St Mary’s, Hammersmith and Charing Cross hospitals in London.

In an early study, the knife identified malignant tissue in cancer patients undergoing surgery with 100 per cent accuracy. Results of the preliminary study, involving 91 patients with cancers, are reported in the journal Science Translational Medicine. Lord Darzi, Professor of Surgery at Imperial College, said: “In cancer surgery, you want to take out as little healthy tissue as possible, but you have to ensure that you remove all of the cancer.”

A company called Medimass has been set up to develop the device commercially. Dr Takats, one of its founders, said the team hoped to be able to secure a partnership deal with a “big industrial player” to produce and distribute the iKnife.

Modified versions of the device could have a number of non-medical applications, including food testing. “We’ve already shown that it can distinguish between horse meat and beef, and it works on cooked as well as raw meat,” Dr Takats said.

[MIKA27]

How War in Syria Turned These Ordinary Engineers Into Deadly Weapons Inventors

Abu Yassin pulls open the heavy iron gate of the school and steps back. “Peace be upon you,” he says in Arabic, grinning and extending a hand, his arm stained to the elbow with aluminum powder. “Welcome, welcome.” He turns and waves for me to follow.

We walk along a short pathway toward the front door, past an assortment of ordnance laid out on the concrete, bombs that fell from the sky but failed to explode: an ovoid 88-millimeter mortar shell, a big 500-pounder with twisted tail fins, a neat row of pale-gray Russian cluster bomblets, their nose fuses removed. “Later! I will open them later!” he says, eyebrows waggling with anticipation.

The four-story school is shaped like a C around a set of basketball courts, paved with stone tiles and pocked at the far end with small dark craters. A set of white plastic lawn chairs and a table have been arranged in the central courtyard near the door leading into the school. A young boy walks over in silence. “Let’s see, coffee or tea?” Yassin says, distracted, contemplating the plastic furniture. Another assistant, an older man in a filthy smock, comes out and stands beside us holding a silver cylinder the size of a soda bottle. It’s wrapped in clear plastic tape and sprouts a red fuse, which the man proceeds to light. The fuse sputters as he steps forward and pitches the cylinder underhand across the courtyard, where it bounces and rolls to a halt some 30 yards away.

“Explosion!” he yells as Yassin looks on.

With a deafening clap, the bomb bursts in a cloud of flame and smoke, buffeting our faces with a pressure wave. Yassin scurries forward and crouches on his haunches to examine the crater it leaves. Slowly he walks back, shaking his head. “Very bad, very bad,” he mutters—but then, remembering his guest, his expression brightens to a smile. “Please, sit down.”

Abu Yassin, a former network engineer who has emerged as one of Aleppo’s most prolific weapons manufacturers.

THE CONFLICT IN ALEPPO, like the wider civil war in Syria, has been mired in stalemate for more than a year. The rebels moved into the country’s largest city in the late summer of 2012, seizing nearly two-thirds of it within a couple of weeks. Since then, though, regime and rebels have stayed locked in grinding urban warfare. The business of Aleppo’s inhabitants has become violence—and Abu Yassin has bent his unusual ingenuity to that task. A former network engineer, he has become one of Aleppo’s premier bomb makers, part of a burgeoning homemade-weapons industry that has sustained the Syrian revolution. Yassin’s factory inside the abandoned school churns out hundreds of pounds of explosives every day, and he is constantly seeking to innovate ways of killing people.

After we settle into the plastic chairs, the boy returns bearing a tray of Turkish coffee. From a quarter mile away, we can hear gunfire and shelling at the front line—the thump of outgoing artillery, the crunch of incoming. Periodically, the older assistant returns and lobs another bomb into the courtyard, its blast interrupting our conversation as bits of concrete plink against the plastic table. Yassin then wanders over to inspect the crater, squatting down like a tracker on his quarry’s trail. The bomb maker added nitrocellulose to his mix today, in a bid to give his explosives more power; now he is checking the craters for residual ammonium nitrate, which would indicate an inefficient reaction.

Soon three more guests arrive, led in by Yassin’s younger brother Abu Ali. (Abu means “father of” in Arabic, and many rebels take their son’s name as a nom de guerre; I have used them in this story at their request.) Ali, who runs the business half of the operation, owned a small shopping mall in Aleppo before the war; he is jowly and unshaven, clad in a tattered, calf-length leather trench coat and a cream turtleneck sweater streaked with grease. He has brought with him a rebel commander, a stout man wearing a pistol in a shoulder holster, along with two of the commander’s men. They have just come from a nearby front line. “I need 50 of every kind of bomb,” the commander tells Yassin, who nods toward his assistants.

As the soldiers ferry armloads of homemade grenades to their waiting car, Yassin and the commander walk into what was once the principal’s office. Now hanging on the wall above the desk is the rebel tricolor—green, white, and black, with three red stars—and below it a black flag with a Muslim profession of faith written out in stark white Arabic script, the kind of flag displayed by Islamist groups linked to al Qaeda. The center of the room is dominated by a long wooden table upon which lie samples of Yassin’s homemade wares: mortar shells, detonators, antitank mines, bottles of foul-smelling ammonium and napalm, shotgun-launched grenades, and hand-thrown bombs of various shapes and sizes. In the corner stands a robot stippled in green camouflage, with four wheels and a single arm ending in a claw. The commander tells Yassin about an upcoming operation to capture a mosque held by the regime.

Yassin nods and strokes his beard. Already he is calculating exactly which explosives and mines will be most useful, how much they will cost, and how he will balance this commander’s demands with the needs of the dozens of other rebel groups that come to him each week, desperate for weapons. After two years of increasingly vicious combat, the civil war has become a battle of annihilation, one increasingly tainted by sectarian extremism and human rights abuses on both sides. Nearly 100,000 people have died, and the rebels all know that they too will likely join the dead if the government of Bashar al-Assad prevails. Once they led ordinary lives, many of them in the ranks of the middle or professional classes, but those days are gone. They fight for their lives and for their country, but Abu Yassin is also fighting for his own redemption—for a victory that might justify, in retrospect, the dark purpose to which he has turned his prodigious powers of invention.

Workers assemble grenades at a makeshift factory in a rebel-held district of Aleppo.

AFTER THE COMMANDER LEAVES, Yassin sits down at the desk. Until the war ends, he is the closest thing to a principal that this school will have. With silver fingers he plucks a cigarette from his pack of Cedars and pulls out a lighter marked Seny Eriosson. He is wearing a gray tracksuit, and his dark, matted curls are covered by a faded orange-and-black-checkered cotton kaffiyeh that he wears over his head like a bandana, winding the tails across his brow in the Arab style. This, together with his fur-lined vest, lends him a rustic air, but he speaks in the lengthy, didactic manner of a professor. When asked a question, he often looks upward in calculation, drums his fingers against his beard, and then mutters a rhetorical “OK” before he finally launches into an answer. His high cheekbones are sun-darkened and gaunt, and as he speaks his eyes bulge and narrow with the intensity of a mad prophet.

His cigarette lit, Yassin talks about the day when it first seemed possible Assad could fall. He had been working in Lebanon, building and maintaining the corporate IT network of a firm in Beirut. The office was a place of rationality and achievement, demarcated from the chaos of the city by air-conditioning. It was a Microsoft shop. Yassin wore a jacket and tie. He was splitting his time between a Beirut apartment and a home in the nearby Syrian capital of Damascus, where his wife and two children lived. Though the average Syrian had suffered under decades of economic stagnation and isolation, Yassin’s yearly salary was roughly $25,000, which meant he lived well. He wasn’t especially political. When the Arab Spring arrived and unrest in Egypt and Libya spread to Syria and the army was ordered into the streets, Yassin couldn’t believe what he was watching. Glued to Al Jazeera in his Beirut apartment, he was amazed at the mayhem in the Syrian streets, the open defiance of Assad.

Even then he regarded this unrest as an interested spectator, not a participant. He kept his job and his cross-border commute. But toward the end of 2011, as the uprising became an armed rebellion, it also took on an uglier cast. Resistance hardened among the Sunni Muslims (roughly 75 percent of Syria’s population), who had grown tired of rule by Alawites, a sect that represents just one-eighth of Syrians but happens to include the two men, Hafez al-Assad and now his son, who have ruled the nation since 1970. Yassin is from a Sunni family in Aleppo, and his brother and parents still lived in the city; as the killing there escalated, he was drawn to go fight beside his friends and loved ones. He resigned from his job, returned to Damascus, and kissed his wife and children good-bye—that was the last time he saw them. Then he drove 200 miles north into the fury of the civil war, crossing regime lines into the rebel-held portion of the city.

By the time he arrived, he found that Ali had already joined a band of fighters in the south of the city, in the working-class neighborhood of Salaheddine. Yassin initially volunteered as an ambulance driver, which let him witness firsthand the human sacrifice the rebels were making. His first ambulance was hit by a mortar shell just seconds after he got out of it. His second went up in flames after its gas tank was shot while he was driving.

Meanwhile, he observed that his brother’s group of fighters, just like the others around town, suffered primarily for lack of weapons.

The Salaheddine group had 85 pump-action shotguns that had been smuggled in from abroad, as well as three dozen Kalashnikov assault rifles they had captured from the regime. Against them, Assad had a professional army equipped with heavy machine guns, tanks, artillery, and air power. One day Yassin was in the headquarters of the katiba—the local battalion, which does its best to supply bands of fighters—and watched as a commander arrived and asked for ammunition. Supplies were desperately low, and the commander was allotted just 50 bullets for his entire team. The commander’s face fell; he would be sending his men to die.

Yassin’s mind was working. He had no military experience. As a young man, he had studied to be a lawyer. Then he had worked as a sales representative for a commercial expo and trade fair company. After that he had gone back to school to study network engineering.

Now, at the age of 39, he would reinvent himself again. He and Ali left frontline combat to build a new operation, which they dubbed the Military Engineering Katiba. As startup capital, they used the savings they’d accumulated before the war. They couldn’t manufacture rifle rounds, but they could make explosives and grenades to help their fighters conserve ammunition. Using the contacts they had built with other rebel units, they were granted use of the school, long since abandoned, many of its windows smashed in by shelling from the front line in Salaheddine. They swept the courtyard clean of glass and got to work.

A selection of Abu Yassin’s homemade bombs.

MOST MODERN EXPLOSIVES get their power from compounds that have complex nitrogen bonds. Ammonium nitrate, one of the world’s most prevalent fertilizers, fits the bill nicely. It can be obtained in large quantities, and due to its low cost it’s widely used as an explosive in mining and quarrying. And because it’s so easily obtained, it’s a favorite of terrorists and guerrillas the world over.

“Any peasant can obtain it,” Yassin tells me at the school. We walk into one of the classrooms, which has been entirely emptied of furniture. Instead, 50-kilogram sacks of Turkish fertilizer sit stacked against the far wall, surrounded by empty artillery shells and lengths of aluminum piping to be used as casings for future bombs. An older man and two young boys—they can’t be more than 12—are at work without gloves or masks, their faces and hands as black as coal miners’. With a shovel, they mix an enormous pile of gray powder; a fine particulate suspension hangs in the air, illuminated by rays of sun through the glassless windows. Several additives are mixed with ammonium nitrate to boost the power of the explosion. The most common is diesel fuel, but Yassin claims to have a nine-part secret recipe that works far better; the one key ingredient he’ll reveal is powdered aluminum, hence the silver dust that constantly coats his hands and arms. He casts an expert eye over the pile. It hasn’t been completely blended yet, and I can still pick out many of the constituent parts by their color and texture: whitish fertilizer, chunky grains of TNT, black ground charcoal, silver aluminum dust.

In the jargon of explosives engineering, ammonium nitrate is “insensitive,” which means it’s difficult to detonate. Think about a campfire: You need to burn paper and then kindling before the flames are hot enough to consume thick wood. Bombs are much the same. You need a “primary” explosive, some highly sensitive substance that reacts in contact with a burning fuse or an electrical spark. Yassin and his brother used Google to find instructions for making common primary explosives such as mercury fulminate and lead azide. Then, taking over the school’s chemistry lab, they tested the recipes. One day when Ali and some others were making mercury fulminate, the stuff exploded on them. Four men lost eyes and fingers, and Ali’s face and arms were peppered with glass shards. Since then, Yassin has tried to source commercial blasting caps from Turkey whenever he can.

When Yassin and Ali started the katiba, their first product was a basic hand grenade that the rebels could use in close-quarter urban combat. They packed the explosives, along with steel tailings that would turn into deadly shrapnel, into plastic tubing, then inserted a detonator and booster charge. Once they’d mastered elementary bomb-making, they turned to more complex devices. There were large bombs, for example, made from empty fire extinguishers or propane tanks, which could be buried and then triggered by wire at the approach of regime forces. There were antitank mines with charges that cut through vehicle armor—a particularly advanced and lethal technology that had been devastating to American forces in Iraq.

But as winter went on and bodies filled the streets, Yassin dreamed of bolder inventions. For that he needed proper factories, with machines and engineers capable of building electronics. In January, Yassin got hold of a machine shop in the old city so he could start producing the weapons he saw in his head. In the school hallway, there is an olive-green 75-mm mortar, newly arrived from his shop. It’s the highest-quality homemade weapon I’ve ever seen. “This is the work of months of development,” Yassin says, patting the mortar. “It takes eight days to polish the inside of the tube.” Indeed, the inside of the barrel is perfectly smooth, and the tube connects to its stand with a pair of smoothly greased threads; the mortar shells, shaped like bowling pins, have been painted and finely milled.

Yassin is selling it for around $500—cheap, considering that a professional one on Aleppo’s black market would cost thousands of dollars. Yassin isn’t trying to make much of a profit. Once he masters a device, he keeps trying to find less expensive ways to manufacture it. With the homemade grenades, he has been able to cut costs by using steel tailings he gets for free from a generator factory. That has brought the unit cost of each grenade down to the equivalent of $3, which is exactly what he sells them for.

I ask him what he plans to make next. He rummages around in the principal’s desk, under a set of exam booklets, before pulling out a small brass device and handing it to me. “Take a look at this,” he says, and I turn it over in my hand. It looks like a plumbing fitting.

“It’s a pressure-sensitive detonator,” he says. “Be careful, it’s live.”

I flinch and hand it back to him, asking what it’s for.

He points to a stack of metal objects in the corner, shaped like old-fashioned fire-alarm bells. They are what are known in military parlance as victim-operated improvised explosive devices—or, in plain English, land mines.

In Aleppo’s old city, fighters launch homemade grenades with a slingshot.

AMONG THE SYRIAN REBELS, Yassin is far from alone in applying his ingenuity to homemade weapons. More than in any of the other Arab nations riven by war in recent years—more than in Egypt, Libya, or Iraq—the rebels here have taken a DIY approach to arming themselves. This has been born out of a combination of necessity (other rebellions have been better supplied) and uncommon opportunity, as rebels have been able to hold significant territory where workshops can be set up and kept safe from regime attacks. Though regional countries like Saudi Arabia and Qatar have supplied arms to the rebels—and the US decided in June to begin its own limited program—weapons have been scarce enough that the rebels continue to manufacture their own. The whole region around Aleppo, which had been the center of Syria’s heavy industry, quickly became particularly fertile ground; as the rebels captured machine shops, steel mills, and power plants, they began adapting them to the task of war.

Some of the rebels’ creations verge on the outlandish. When I ask about one odd-looking, 15-foot-long wooden trebuchet, which its proud creator is using to hurl 4-pound fragmentation bombs, he tells me he got the idea from the videogame Age of Empires.

Another Aleppo inventor gained fame with an armored car called Sham II (an improvement on an earlier Sham). Two crew members sit inside the car, an old diesel chassis with steel panels welded around the outside, and look at TV screens. While one drives, the other uses a PlayStation controller to aim and fire a machine gun mounted on the roof.

With the rebellion divided among countless autonomous little bands, each town and neighborhood has become its own armorer. But the demands of fighting Assad’s army have resulted in some limited coalescence among the fractious rebel katibas. In many areas, they have banded together into larger units called liwwas, Arabic for brigades. These units handle logistics for their subordinate katibas, sourcing weapons and materials from Turkey and Jordan as well as setting up factories and staffing them with workers. The liwwas also barter and trade weapons and expertise among themselves.

In Aleppo, I meet Abu Mahmoud Affa, a former housepainter who now commands a liwwa called Shield of the Nation. He is wearing camo fatigues and chain-smoking in his office, another abandoned school. With his big frame, protruding belly, and bushy white beard, he looks like a cross between Che Guevara and Santa Claus. His bulk is accentuated by his pixie-faced 12-year-old son, Mahmoud, who accompanies him everywhere toting an M-16 some two-thirds his height.

Affa agrees to drive me to one of the factories his men have set up, on the condition that I wear a blindfold. With a scarf wrapped around my face, I feel the car twist and turn as we speed through Aleppo’s narrow streets. Soon the hubbub of traffic and pedestrians dies off, replaced by the sound of machine-gun fire. We are entering a frontline area. At last the car stops, the passenger door opens, and I am pulled out and told to walk, Affa’s big hands guiding me forward.

“Who is this *******er?” someone asks, thinking I’m a prisoner.

“A journalist, he’s a journalist,” Affa says. The light through my scarf darkens, and finally the blindfold is lifted. I’m in a narrow one-room shop with a low ceiling and roller blinds on the front. Several fighters sit on mats with their weapons, smoking and regarding me with curiosity. Affa leads me toward the back of the shop, where the rebels have bashed a hole in the concrete. We duck through it, and I find myself in a second shop, dominated by a massive central lathe and a collection of machine tools.

Affa introduces me to Abu Abed, a slender balding man in an oil-stained smock who presides over the shop. Before the rebellion, he worked at a munitions plant near Al-Safira, south of the city, where the government made everything from bullets to helicopter-launched rockets. When he defected to the rebels, he brought his knowledge of weapons manufacturing with him. Shield of the Nation has a whole network of small factories like this one, each focused on different components. “Usually we work one item at a time and make a few hundred of them before moving on to the next,” Abed says.

This factory doubles as a head office of sorts, where the others send their pieces for assembly. It’s also where Abed and his colleagues experiment with new designs. Most of the equipment has been borrowed from an auto transmission workshop. Despite the fact that they’re working with explosives, everyone is smoking; piles of steel shavings and cigarette butts litter the floor. No one bothers with eye or ear protection, even as the lathe howls and shoots metal sparks across the room. “Now we’re making a piece for the mortar,” Abed says. The mortar is the liwwa’s pride; they designed it by reverse-engineering a captured 82-mm Russian model.

Aside from IEDs and grenades, their most popular item is a short-range rocket similar in design to the ones developed by Palestinian militants in Gaza. To make the rockets, they cut the U-joints off the ends of car driveshafts, later reusing them to join the mortar tube to its baseplate. To fire them, they employ an ingeniously crude method. After they use repeated test firings to determine the mortar’s range—usually around 2 kilometers—the rebels check Google Maps to pick a suitable spot that sits the same distance from their target. They transport the rocket there and then use a compass to aim it.

After blindfolding me again, Affa walks me out to the car. By the time I get back to my neighborhood in Aleppo it’s dark, and I lie on a mat on the floor of my borrowed apartment, listening to a city at war with itself: the woodpecker rattle of machine guns, the swoop of incoming mortars, the crash of artillery, the demented grind of a MiG’s cannon. The regime is shelling the town, and the rebels are firing back, but I can sense myself on one side of a more visceral divide—those who fire blindly into the dark and those who wait fearfully within it.

A deserted street in the Salaheddine district of Aleppo.

ABU YASSIN HAS MADE a promotional video for his Military Engineering Katiba. It begins with a montage of clips of his work—bombs exploding, beakers smoking, circuits and IEDs being assembled—accompanied by a dramatic orchestral track that sounds like it was ripped from a videogame. Then Yassin appears, sitting in a darkened room in front of a window, such that only his silhouette is visible. He looks like a supervillain. A Syrian rebel flag hangs above his shadow. “In the name of God the most gracious and most merciful,” he begins, and then goes on to list an extensive menu of products that his shop produces.

Yassin sees the video as a sort of marketing instrument, one that he can show to the rebel commanders who flock to him for weapons. He’s proud of what he has achieved on his own, without help from wealthy Arab donors or foreign intelligence services. “Nobody can tell me what to do!” he exclaims one day as we sit in the principal’s office, drumming his fingers against the wooden desktop. He is wearing the same grease-darkened scarf and gray tracksuit he had on when we first met. He rubs his eyes and calls for another cup of black coffee—he seems never to sleep. “And they all need me.”

Some of his inventions have failed. He tried to modify remote-controlled model airplanes to carry video cameras so he could use them as spy drones. But he couldn’t build the gear light enough for the planes to fly above the range of small-arms fire. Then there’s that claw-armed robot, which Yassin and some engineering students spent two weeks assembling, based on a design from a Japanese website. “We were forced to make our own circuits,” he explains, “and they had less capability than the ones the design called for.” He dreamed of using the claw to retrieve weapons or even wounded men on the battlefield, but the robot never worked well enough to deploy.

Yassin seems to believe that anything can be accomplished with the right combination of gadgetry—even advanced modern weaponry on a par with the stuff that militaries use. “There’s one kind of circuit that I’m looking for,” he says, “that will allow the rockets to track aircraft by seeking their heat.” It’s a self-conception that harks back to an older, pre-corporate ideal of the heroic solo inventor, like those of the golden age of American innovation in the days of Edison, the kind satirized by Rube Goldberg in the 1920s or, in the 1980s, by the breakfast-making contraption at the beginning of Back to the Future.

For all his technological enthusiasm, Yassin at times betrays how deeply his lethal new trade troubles him. “These things are for killing people,” he tells me once, in sudden disgust. “Every time I make a bomb, I feel sorrow.” He hopes that eventually, in the new Syria, the one that he will help to build, he will find justification for his bloodied hands. “I’m tired of talking about death,” he tells me one day. He announces that he is planning a new project called Amar (Arabic for “Works”) to revitalize the moribund and devastated city after the war. As part of this effort, he says, he has invented a new strain of bread yeast and a new kind of quick-drying cement. He wants to produce cleaning chemicals. He will make enough to supply the whole city. He will build as many factories as necessary. And the labor force? Why, the streets of Aleppo will be filled with unemployed men! “Working in such a factory will give them a purpose again and make them feel hope,” he says, eyes flashing. As for when Amar can begin, he is vague. In the meantime, he is left to feed and tend a machine that sucks in explosive material and spits out mangled bodies.

CURIOUS TO SEE his products in action, I visit a band of rebels he supplies in Aleppo’s old city, where the winding paths of what was once a medieval town have been built up three or four stories high. The buildings have high, thick stone walls and interior courtyards, which, coupled with the narrow streets and mazelike layout, make them ideal havens for urban guerrillas; the artillery and airpower have trouble reaching their targets, and tanks can’t enter the denser quarters. In the courtyard of a stone house in the Kastel Harami district, I meet with Abu Mohammed, a rebel leader affiliated with Ahrar al-Suria, or the Freemen of Syria.

Mohammed’s house is a well-appointed dwelling with grape vines, bronze wind chimes, and a small tortoise. The commander himself—tall and thin-lipped, with desert-camo pants and a black beard and turban—is squatting in the courtyard when we arrive, busily pouring an incendiary mixture of industrial adhesive and gasoline into a collection of empty Nutella jars.

He stands up and walks over to show me the rest of his arsenal. He has some rockets and a crate of homemade mortar shells; a grocery bag brims with spherical metal grenades the size of oranges, also homemade, with fuses sticking out of their tops, like bombs in a cartoon. After filling the rest of the jars, Mohammed and his men gather their rifles and head into the street. We wind our way like mice through the dense geometry of the old city. I follow him down a narrow alley, then into a courtyard. We weave through a hole bashed in the courtyard wall into a small cavity between the houses, then across a plank to another roof. Finally we descend into a third courtyard, where a group of rebels waits for us, clad in a motley mix of combat fatigues and regular clothes. They have assault rifles as well as a couple of grenade launchers and a light machine gun. The sound of gunfire and explosions, omnipresent in Aleppo, has intensified considerably. The crack and whiz of bullets is actually audible overhead. The attack is about to begin.

In the Salaheddine district, rebels and local residents carry the body of a fighter for burial.

Mohammed motions for me to follow him up another set of stairs at the far end of the courtyard. At the top, on a second-story terrace, a younger rebel waits next to an 8-foot-high metal stand shaped like a Y with a loop of thick elastic dangling from it. This, I realize, is a giant slingshot. The attendant rebel, thickset with a fan-shaped beard and close-shaved mustache, introduces himself as Abu Zakaria. He hefts a grenade from one of the shopping bags that another rebel has carried up. “Angry Birds,” he says in English, laughing and jerking a thumb toward the slingshot.

The crack of rifle fire sounds again, and bullets snap overhead—even closer than before, now that we’re one story up. Zakaria pats the wall we have our backs against. The regime soldiers are 15 meters that way, he tells me.

From the opposite side of the terrace, another group of rebels comes running, yelling for us to take cover. The previous night, they snuck up in the dark and planted a massive IED against the foundation of the house the regime soldiers were occupying. Now they are going to detonate it. We crouch and stick fingers in our ears just before an enormous blast shakes the earth, followed by the rattle and clank of falling debris.

Now it is time to engage the slingshot. Mohammed places a grenade in the band and draws it back tight, squatting on his haunches, clenching it with all his might. Zakaria puts a cigarette lighter to the fuse. With a snap, Mohammed releases the grenade—but the angle is too low. We hear the metallic clink of the bomb, that $3 staple of the Military Engineering Katiba, hitting the courtyard wall and bouncing back toward us.

Everyone shouts and scrambles to escape. Near me in the courtyard is a double-leaf door to a hallway, but one of the leaves is latched shut, and three men have already bunched up at the open side, jamming into a bottleneck. My only option is the bathroom, so I dive into it, sliding face-first on the cool tiling. Another rebel jumps in on top of me just before we feel the violent concussion of the grenade, which strikes me not as sound but as silence. For a full minute, the world is quiet. Then men’s voices fade in, sounding like faraway radio chatter. Gradually I begin to hear again, albeit with a tremendous ringing in my ears. Miraculously, no one is hurt.

Mohammed and Zakaria go right back to the slingshot and begin lobbing grenades toward the regime lines, this time successfully. After exhausting their supply, Mohammed waves for everyone to pull back to the lower courtyard, where they gather in a circle and chant “God is great!” After that we retreat another hundred yards into an alley. The assault has ended as abruptly as it began.

Instead of pressing the attack, the rebels break for an hour to lunch on falafel sandwiches.

When they return to the front line, the rebels are greeted with fresh machine-gun fire: The regime soldiers have regrouped. Neither the first rebel IED nor a second one have succeeded in collapsing their house. A group of rebels run shouting down the alley with a young compatriot, his face pale and taut. He has been shot through the thigh, and as they heft him into a waiting van and try to improvise a tourniquet, a bright arterial jet spurts crimson onto the cobblestones.

Afterward, as the blood congeals, Zakaria rests against the stone wall, fingers probing the skin of his trembling brow. “We’ve been fighting in this same position for three months,” he says, glancing at the ground. “But tomorrow we will advance, God willing.”

In Aleppo’s Al-Sukri neighborhood, residents search for survivors after a regime airstrike.

ON MY LAST NIGHT IN ALEPPO, I go for a final visit with Abu Yassin. Although it’s late March, the weather is still cold, and that evening has brought rain. A full moon illuminates the streets, but there is no power in most of the city, and as I approach the school, the waxy yellow of its generator-powered light stands out through the drizzle. One of Yassin’s henchmen opens the heavy gate for me; the bomb maker is sick, he tells me.

I find Yassin in the principal’s office, slumped into a sofa, a heavy woolen blanket wrapped around him up to his chin. There are dark hollows under his eyes, and his face looks even more gaunt. He makes a feeble attempt to get up. “Sorry,” he says, then coughs wetly. He has been bedridden with fever for two days.

I have a few lingering questions about his manufacturing process, but insistently he turns the conversation to Amar, his yeast and cement factories, his grandiose plans for the new Syria. He wants to show me something, he says. It is a picture of him before the war, in a suit and tie, clean-shaven, his angular features softened into a ropy handsomeness. The bearded and kaffiyeh-wearing man in front of me is almost unrecognizable as the same man. We both laugh.

“I hate this,” he says, glancing around his room full of weapons. “Do you know what my dream is?” He waits for a moment, and I shrug. I have heard all about the glorious future he envisions.

“My dream,” he says, “is to go to a café with my friends. Nothing more. Just a café. And then to walk home slowly and find my wife and children asleep.”

An incoming mortar round whistles outside in the dark; then, down the street, a distant thump.

“We hope that this bad dream is going to end,” he says. He sweeps his hands around the principal’s office. “This is a school! Where are the children? Where are they?”

He slumps forward a moment and then begins coughing. He rubs his temples, lights a cigarette, smokes until his cough subsides. He looks at me and forces a grin. “But I am hopeful for the future. Syria can be a great country again. Our laborers built half the Gulf countries. They can build our own.”

Yassin insists on walking me to the front gate himself. We stand for a moment, contemplating the empty moonlit streets. There is a vacant lot across the road from the school; beyond that stands a line of four-story apartment buildings, with one missing like a broken tooth. During this very day, a regime jet dropped a bomb on it, burying three families under the rubble. Despite his illness, Yassin helped supervise the rescue operation. He spent half the day inhaling pulverized concrete dust, shouting hoarsely for silence so he could listen for buried cries.

“It will be fine,” Yassin says again, gazing out across the empty lot. He turns to me, and his bulging, sallow eyes catch the moonlight. “You just … have to think!” he says in his broken English, stabbing his fingers toward his temple, the man of reason asserting his control over destiny. “You can do anything if you think!” A new chain of explosions flicker on the horizon like faraway lightning.

Yassin’s face relaxes.

“Peace be upon you,” he says, and turns to go.

[oliverdst]

Watch out: That Headache might be flesh eating maggots in your brain:

http://youtu.be/8oU0sPZjamU

One poor woman came back from a holiday in Peru to discover that the monster headache and scratching noises she was suffering from were actually maggots burrowing through her ear canal into her brain.

It seems the brazen little sod, the New World Army Screw Worm fly, saw her ear canal as a safe haven to lay some eggs while she was out and about walking (!); it didn’t even wait until she was sleeping. After jetting back to the UK, the blighters hatched, turning into little flesh-eating maggots that decided to burrow deeper into her ear towards her brain. It wasn’t until she woke up one morning to find her pillow soaked with ear fluid that she realised the shooting pains in her head and face could be something serious.

The 27-year-old carted herself off to A&E, which referred her to an ear, nose and throat specialist (ENT). The ENT team described what they saw as a “writhing mass” of creatures buried deep inside her ear. After trying to get them out, they only receded deeper into her ear, burrowing a 12mm hole in her ear canal. Trying to drown them out with olive oil failed too, and so the poor woman had to sedated while the doctors went to work with a microscope and speculum.

What the horrified medics found was not just a couple of maggots living there inside her ear, but a whole family of eight large maggots. Thankfully all the little buggers were removed and, luckily enough, they hadn’t made it as far as the woman’s brain.

Apparently she had felt a fly duck into her ear, but hadn’t thought anything of it once shooing it out of there. Next time a fly comes anywhere near your head, you might want to freak out a little bit — I know I bloody will.

Oh, boys, believe me, we are as afraid of your maggots as you are.

[MIKA27]

Kinect Has Gotten Super Good At Reading Sign Language

Reading sign language has always been in the cards for Kinect, ever since that showed up as a feature in some of the early patents. A while ago, it managed to read two of the most sweeping, exaggerated arm-based gestures. But since then, it’s gotten good. Like, really, really good.

A joint project between Microsoft Research Asia and the Institute of Computing Technology at the Chinese Academy of Sciences has allowed the bowing black box to read just about every gesture in American Sign Language and translate it into plain English or another language. And it doesn’t have to be just one at a time either; the software developed by the team lets Kinect parse whole sentences as one gesture flows into the next at natural speeds. It’s pretty impressive.

The ability to sign at a TV would definitely open up some options for deaf tech-fans, but it also shows just how far the Kinect has come. And with the fidelity of the new Kinect being as high as it is, chances are we are in for some more awesome stuff in the future.

So long as you don’t mind that the robot eye in your living room has damn good vision.

MIKA: Yazaar! Beat that one all you PS4 fanboys.... Keith!

[MIKA27]

Google Maps For iOS Has A New Interface

iOS: Yesterday Google updated Google Maps for the iPhone and iPad, bringing many of the features from its Android update last week to iOS devices. Most notably, the iPad has a whole new maps experience that’s suited to a larger screen, and all iOS users will benefit from improved driving directions, traffic predictions and transit options.

The latest version is available now in the iTunes App Store (hit the link below to grab it). The star of the show is the new iPad version, which finally brings a dedicated, tablet design and layout to maps, perfect for browsing if you’re looking for something specific, searching for destinations you want to visit, or if you need driving directions and prefer to use a large screen to plan your journey. The iPad version also now includes Street View, a welcome addition.

Google also updated Navigation in both iPhone and iPad versions to include traffic re-routing options (though access to this varies depending on where you are). If you prefer public transit instead, the new Maps also includes transit information for trains and buses around the globe, and if you prefer cycling to your destination, the app sports biking directions as well.

Google Maps (Free) [iTunes App Store]

[MIKA27]

Panasonic Lumix DMC-FZ70: Zoomier Than Any Point-and-Shoot Camera Ever

What you’re looking at here is the zoomiest point-and-shoot camera ever made. The Panasonic Lumix DMX-FZ70′s f/ 2.8, 20-1200mm lens offers up to 60x optical magnification. The previous top zooms only hit the 50x mark. That’s a lot of zoom. Look at that freaking lens.

Optical zoom — meaning zoom that’s done in the lens and not by some digital trickery — is a huge selling point for point-and-shoot cameras. As the image sensors in smartphones get better, a very long optical zoom is a feature that’s still attractive to ordinary people. It’s the quintessential tourist and family gathering feature.

Beyond their lenses, regular people like superzooms because they’ve got some of the look and feel of fancy DSLR cameras without actually being expensive and heavy like a DSLRs. This FZ70 is no different: It’s got a comfortable grip, a viewfinder, and even a mode dial with manual exposure settings in addition to the usual flavours of Auto. At 1.5 pounds, it’ll hardly be a strain on anyone’s neck as they amble about a foreign city.

But basically everything beyond the extra magnification her is more-or-less what you’d expect — From the 16.1-megapixel, 1/2.3-inch sensor all the way down. The final nice touch is that the price is pretty reasonable: The FZ70 will be available in September for $US400.

[MIKA27]

The 2020 Olympic Logos Are Playing It Safe After Blowjobs And Pedobear

The 2020 Olympics will be held in either Istanbul, London or Tokyo, but no matter where they’re held, the logo will be boring. There’s a 66 per cent chance the logo is going to be some stupid flower.

How did this happen? Indecision and fear. Brand New describes the arduous bidding process, which results in countries simultaneously trying to jam the logo designs full of conceptual content while making every effort bit to offend anybody’s sensibilities. You might remember that the London games in 2012 were mocked and criticised because the logo looked like one figure performing fellatio on another. And let’s not forget the embarrassment Vancouver felt in 2010 when it turned out one of its Olympic mascots kinda sorta looked disturbingly at home next to a creepy Pedobear.

So the resulting logos are simultaneously confused and bland. Take, for example, the Istanbul bid’s design. It’s a tulip, a traditional symbol for the city, combined with a skyline in a logo that looks like a bad Georgia O’Keeffe knockoff. In fact, all of these logos kind of have Georgia O’Keeffe vibe to them, huh? Wait, but isn’t her work also a little… suggestive?

When the International Olympic organising Committee picks the 2012 host city on September 7th, we’re going to get stuck with one of these. So which logo do you like best?

[MIKA27]

Foul play suspected in fatal express train crash near Paris

Fears are growing that sabotage or vandalism might have caused the train crash near Paris last Friday in which six people died.

Three of the four bolts fixing a steel plate which jumped out of position to derail the Paris-Limoges express are believed to have broken or come loose – something which is regarded as being almost impossible.

“In the memory of railwaymen, bolts have never given way on their own,” said Didier Aubert, leader of the railway section of the CFDT trades union federation. “A deliberate act of sabotage cannot be excluded.”

Officially, equipment failure is still regarded as the most likely cause of France’s worst railway accident for six years. But union leaders and railway experts say the provisional explanation put forward by the state railway company, the SNCF, is difficult to swallow.

A hefty steel plate joining two sections of rail – a “fishplate” – is believed to have leaped out of position and become wedged in point-work (where tracks criss-cross) at the approach to the station of Brétigny-sur-Orge, 25 miles south of Paris.

The axles of the third and fourth carriages of the crowded express, which was travelling at 80mph, struck the metal plate and the last four carriages derailed. Four people on the station platform and two people on the train were killed.

The track had been checked eight days before the accident. Railway experts say that it is conceivable for one bolt in a fishplate to break or come loose, but almost impossible that three out of four should fail at the same time.

[MIKA27]

Scandal for American justice: FBI could be at fault in 27 death row cases

Unprecedented federal review rules that the FBI may have exaggerated forensics in case of Willie Jerome Manning – a decision that puts other convictions in doubt

An unprecedented federal review of old criminal cases has uncovered as many as 27 death penalty convictions in which FBI forensic experts may have mistakenly linked defendants to crimes with exaggerated scientific testimony.

At issue is a once-widespread practice by which some FBI experts exaggerated the significance of “matches” drawn from microscopic analysis of hair found at crime scenes. Since at least the 1970s, written FBI Laboratory reports typically stated that a hair association could not be used as positive identification. However, on the witness stand, several agents went beyond the science and testified that their hair analysis was a near-certain match.

It is not known how many of the cases involve errors, how many led to wrongful convictions or how many mistakes may now jeopardise valid convictions. Those questions will be explored as the review continues. But it has already led to an 11th-hour stay of execution in Mississippi in May, after the Justice Department acknowledged flaws in forensic testimony by the FBI that helped convict Willie Jerome Manning of the 1992 murders of two university students. The 44-year-old had been hours away from receiving a lethal injection. Federal officials have offered to retest the DNA in the case.

The number of other cases under review places the examination firmly at the heart of the debate about the death penalty. The death row cases are among the first 120 convictions identified as potentially problematic among more than 21,700 FBI Laboratory files being examined. The review was announced last July by the FBI and the Justice Department, in consultation with the Innocence Project and the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers (NACDL).

The unusual collaboration came after it emerged last year that authorities had known for years that flawed forensic work by FBI hair examiners may have led to convictions of potentially innocent people, but officials had not aggressively investigated problems or notified defendants.

The new review listed examples of scientifically invalid testimony, including claiming to associate a hair with a single person “to the exclusion of all others”, or to suggest a probability for such a match from past casework.

Whatever the review’s findings, the initiative is pushing state and local labs to take similar measures. Last week, the Texas Forensic Science Commission directed all labs under its jurisdiction to take the first step to scrutinise hair cases, in a state that has executed more defendants than any other since 1982. Separately, FBI officials said their intention is to review and disclose problems in capital cases even after a defendant has been executed.

“We didn’t do this to be a model for anyone – other than when there’s a problem, you have to face it, and you have to figure how to fix it, move forward and make sure it doesn’t happen again,” FBI general counsel Andrew Weissmann said. “That tone and approach is set from the very top of this building,” he said, referring to FBI director Robert S Mueller. David Christian “Chris” Hassell, director of the FBI Laboratory, said the review will be used to improve lab training, testimony, audit systems and research, as it has done when previous mistakes were uncovered. The lab overhauled scientific practices when whistleblowers revealed problems in 1996, and again after three highly skilled FBI fingerprint experts declared that Oregon lawyer Brandon Mayfield’s fingerprint matched a partial print found on a bag in Madrid that contained explosive detonators in 2004, during the investigation into the train bombings which killed 191 people. US officials had called the match “absolutely incontrovertible” and Mayfield was taken into custody, but the FBI later admitted it had got it wrong, and the print actually belonged to Ouhnane Daoud, an Algerian.

“One of the things good scientists do is question their assumptions. No matter what the field, what the discipline, those questions should be up for debate,” Hassell said. “That’s as true in forensics as anything else.”

Advocates for defendants and the wrongly convicted have called the review a watershed moment in police and prosecutorial agencies’ willingness to reopen old cases because of scientific errors uncovered by DNA testing. Peter J Neufeld, co-founder of the Innocence Project, which supports inmates who seek exoneration through DNA testing, applauded the FBI, calling the review historic and a “major step forward to improve the criminal justice system and the rigour of forensic science in the United States.”

Norman L Reimer, executive director of the NACDL, also praised the effort, predicting that it would have “an enormous impact on the states” and calling on the defence bar to represent impoverished convicts. “That’s going to be a very big job as this unfolds,” said Reimer.

Unlike DNA analysis, there is no accepted research on how often hair from different people may appear the same. The federal inquiry came after the Public Defender Service helped exonerate three men from Washington DC through DNA testing that showed that three FBI hair examiners contributed to their wrongful convictions for rape or murder in the early 1980s.

The response has been notable for the department and the FBI, which in the past has been accused of overprotecting its agents.

Twice since 1996, authorities conducted case reviews largely in secret after the scientific integrity of the FBI Lab was faulted.

Weissmann said that although earlier reviews lawfully gave prosecutors discretion to decide when to turn over potentially exculpatory material to the defence, greater transparency will “lessen scepticism” about the government’s motives. It also will be cheaper and more effective because private parties can help track down old cases.

The review terms could have wide repercussions. The FBI is examining more than 21,000 federal and state cases referred to the FBI Lab’s hair unit from 1982 through 1999 – by which time DNA testing of hair was routine – and the bureau has asked for help in finding cases before lab files were computerised in 1985.

Of 15,000 files reviewed to date, the FBI said a hair association was declared in about 2,100 cases. Investigators have contacted police and prosecutors in more than 1,200 of those cases to find out whether hair evidence was used in a conviction, in which case trial transcripts will be sought. However, 400 of those cases have been closed because prosecutors did not respond. While the FBI employed 27 hair examiners during the period under review, FBI officials confirmed for the first time this week that records indicate that about 500 people attended hair comparison classes given by FBI examiners from 1979 to 2009. Nearly all of them came from state and local labs. State and local prosecutors handle more than 95 per cent of violent crimes.

In April, the accreditation arm of the American Society of Crime Laboratory Directors declined to order state and local labs to conduct reviews, but issued a public notice recommending that each laboratory evaluate the impact of improper statements on past convictions. FBI Lab officials say they have not been contacted by other labs about their review or who completed the FBI classes.

[MIKA27]

Vinyl Door Decals That Look Like Heavy Metal Sci-Fi Doors

Gadgets and Gear sells vinyl door decals that can make your ordinary wooden door look like a heavy metal airlock, armory, lab, or freight elevator door. The stickers are currently available for pre-order from Gadgets and Gear.

[MIKA27]

Jamie Foxx Rises as Electro in New 'Amazing Spider-Man 2' Clip

Jamie Foxx was spotted in April filming his role as Electro for The Amazing Spider-Man 2, and now footage of him as the electric villain just made its debut at Comic Con. In it, Electro (a/k/a engineer Maxwell Dillon) is wired up to an intricate machine as he builds his power. The clip ends with a message that reads "Electro Arrives," teasing another reveal with a location and time at Comic Con set for tomorrow.

The Amazing Spider-Man 2, also starring Andrew Garfield as Spider-Man/Peter Parker and Emma Stone as Gwen Stacy, will open on May 2nd, 2014.

[MIKA27]

Investigators: London Dreamliner Fire Was Again Caused By Batteries

An international team of investigators has concluded that the battery inside the emergency locator transmitter is the likely cause of the fire aboard a Boeing 787 Dreamliner parked on the tarmac at London Heathrow last week. The plot thickens.

So let’s be clear here: this is a cause for concern, but not in the way we might think. The Dreamliner’s main battery system was implicated in the January fire that grounded the Dreamliner for nearly four months. That system is completely different from the battery we’re talking about now. For obvious reasons, the Emergency Locator Transmitter (ELT) operates independently of the rest of the plane’s power.

It is important to note that like the battery system that failed before, the Honeywell manufactured ELT uses lithium-ion battery chemistry, which as we know has the tendency to go boom.

According to a bulletin released by the UK’s Air Accidents Investigation Branch:

Detailed examination of the ELT has shown some indications of disruption to the battery cells. It is not clear, however, whether the combustion in the area of the ELT was initiated by a release of energy within the batteries or by an external mechanism such as an electrical short. In the case of an electrical short, the same batteries could pride the energy for an ignition and suffer damage in the subsequent fire.

In other words, it’s not entirely clear whether an external short or the battery itself caused the fire, but either way, the battery was the fuel. Earlier in the bulletin, however, investigators note that there’s nothing else in the vicinity that could have caused a fire on a powered-down plane.

The bulletin calls on the FAA to perform a detailed safety investigation into the ELT. In a statement, Boeing says it supports the “reasonable precautionary measures”. After two fires in six months, we would certainly hope so

[MIKA27]

This Aussie-Made Wetsuit Makes You Invisible To Sharks

Other than getting sand in places it shouldn’t be, the worst thing about surfing is getting eaten by sharks. Thankfully, Australian scientists at the University of Western Australia and the folks at Shark Attack Mitigation Systems (SAMS) have invented something that will save you from the jaws of a hungry sea beast in the form of a shark-proof wetsuit.

As the boffins from SAMS explain, one of the final senses a shark uses before it attacks is its sight: tracking the target on the way into the nightmare of teeth. What the new wetsuit does is muck about with a shark’s visual sense by making the surfer blend right into the ocean behind him or her.

Just don’t expect to be especially stylish while wearing them. One of them makes you look like a Zebra, while the other is weirdly tie-dyed. On a more serious note: fashion comes second if what I’m wearing saves me getting my leg bit off.

[mazolaman]

Interesting article about Syria Mika, grim and sad.

[MIKA27]

Monster Machines: What The US Navy Shoots For Target Practice

Practice makes perfect. That includes the ability to accurately fire some of the biggest, baddest and deadliest weapons systems in the US Navy. But since the indiscriminate shelling of passing ships is generally frowned upon by the maritime community, here’s what US sailors take aim at instead.

The US Navy has long relied on radio controlled drones, like the MW-36A aerial drone or pilotless firefish, for bombing and gunnery exercises and, before that, used older ships no longer fit for combat for target practice. Today, the Pacific Targets and Marine Operations Division (PTMO) handles the operations of all airborne and seaborne targets used by the Navy. The division operates out of Naval Base Ventura County (NBVC) at Point Mugu and Port Hueneme in Southern California and runs the targeting logistics at Point Mugu Sea Test Range and Southern California Offshore Range near San Clemente, as well as a number of open ocean events. From modified jet skis to remote controlled cargo ships, if the US armada needs to shoot it, the PTMO will supply it.

These seaborne targets come in two varieties: powered and towed. The powered targets are designed to look like actual ships, skiffs, or fast attack boats. Towed targets are little more than glorified barges but are much more easily repaired/replaced than their self-propelled counterparts.

Powered Targets

QST-35A/B

The QST-35 is a multi-purpose SEaborne Powered TARget (SEPTAR). It’s a 17m long fibreglass hull powered by four gas-fed V8 Mercury Marine engines. It has a top speed of 12 to 30 knots, depending on the ocean conditions. While it can be piloted by a crew on simulations or when towing unpowered targets, the boat is controlled remotely during live fire exercises using the UHF-based Integrated Target Control System (ITCS), SeaCAN, Portable Command and Control Unit (PCCU), or the System for Naval Target Control (SNTC), depending on which government agency is attempting to blow it up.

The QST-35 does more than just putter around in the water, waiting to sink. With the addition of supplementary augmentation systems, such as radar simulators, RF/IR emitters, chaff dispensers and electronic warfare modules, the QST-35 can appear on a ship’s scanners as a much bigger vessel up to 40m away. It also, on occasion, has even been used as a mine countermeasure.

Fast-Attack Craft Target (FACT)

Slightly smaller than the QST-35 but nearly twice as quick, the Fast Attack Craft Target (FACT) is a multi-purpose target designed to challenge gunners with its agility and speed.

The $US350,000 fibreglass-hulled boat measures 15m long. A quartet of Yanmar 480HP diesel motors and cigar-boat shape allow the FACT to reach a cruising speed of 50 knots and top out around 58 knots with a range of roughly 400 nautical miles. Like the QAT-35, the FACT is radio controlled during live fire exercises using the same command links, and it too can be augmented to increase its Radar Cross Section (RCS), RF/IR signatures, deploy electronic countermeasures and record Miss Distance Information.

High-Speed Manoeuvring Surface Target (HSMST)

Packing 46 knots of speed into a hull length half that of the FACT or QDT-35, the 8m HSMST is fast and incredibly manoeuvrable — ideal for shallow water exercises. The HSMST shares its hull design with harbour patrol boats and is outfitted with a pair of 200HP outboard engines. As with the previous two, the HSMST can be augmented to adjust its threat signature.

Ship-Deployable Surface Target (SDST)

Think of a remote controlled Sea-doo. That’s the Ship Deployable Seaborne Target (SDST). It can be launched either from a naval vessel or from shore and jams over the waves at 20 to 49 knots. Its small stature and high top-end speed make the SDST a valuable resource in everything from surface gunnery exercises using the ship’s weapons to aerial gunnery using ship-launched helicopters to more austere visual/radar acquisition practice.

Mobile Ship Target (MST)

At 80m long, the Mobile Ship Target (MST) is the US Navy’s largest seaborne target. Its flat deck can be decorated with shipping containers or the entire superstructure of another ship, in addition to the standard RF/IR/radar augmentations, to accurately simulate a threat scenario. It putters about at just 15 knots thanks to a pair of 671 HP CAT 3412 DITA engines, but its size allows it to withstand waves that would swamp its smaller brethren.

Towed Targets

The US Navy would go broke if it used nothing but powered targets in its live-fire exercises — even a missile sans its high-explosive warhead can do a fair amount of damage to their fibreglass hulls. Instead, the surface craft tow barges with targets trussed up on their decks.

Low-Cost Modular Target (LCMT)

The LCMT is the latest in towed target technology. It’s a modular barge built from easily and inexpensively replaceable pontoons and scaffolding, but the real genius of the system is its adaptability. Instead of having the Williams Sled for missiles and gunnery shot, the Improved Surface Tow Target (ISTT) for direct fire, and the HARM barge for fighter jet-launched High Speed Anti-Radiation Missile tests, a single LCMT can do it all.

It’s got a kit for gunnery missions, Hellfire missions, HARM missions, and is currently developing one for the sea-skimming Harpoon anti-ship cruise missile. The LCMT is towed behind one of the surface targets, normally the HSMST, to improve the survivability of both.

[MIKA27]

Scientists Created An Impossible Supermaterial Totally By Accident

For more than a century, scientists have been saying the same thing: It’s impossible to water-free disordered magnesium carbonate. It’s too difficult. You’ll never amount to anything! Well, suck it, haters: Researchers at Uppsala University in Sweden have unveiled a super-absorbent version of magnesium carbonate that breaks the world record for surface area and water absorption.

They call their miracle material Upsalite, and it’s a form of magnesium carbonate — the inorganic salt used in everything from chalk to laxatives. Upsalite, however, has an incredibly high surface area, which is an extremely attractive quality since it means a material can absorb extra liquids. “It turned out that Upsalite had the highest surface area measured for an alkali earth metal carbonate,” explained scientist Maria Strømme in a press release, “800 square meters per gram.”

Like so many other great discoveries, Upsalite was actually an accident. The team at Uppsala was attempting to create a similar material using a reaction chamber at their lab. After a wild Friday night of reaction chamber antics, they accidentally left some material inside the machine. When they returned, they found a material unlike any they’d ever seen:

“Back at work on Monday morning we discovered that a rigid gel had formed and after drying this gel we started to get excited,” says Johan Goméz de la Torre. “A year of detailed materials analysis and fine tuning of the experiment followed.” One of the researchers got to take advantage of his Russian skill since some of the chemistry details necessary for understanding the reaction mechanism was only available in an old Russian PhD thesis.

What does Upsalite look like under a microscope? Imagine a surface of incredibly dense, empty pores, each with a diameter smaller than 10 nanometres — which explains why it’s so absorbent. It may eventually be used to keep electronics dry at smaller doses, or to clean up oil spills and toxic waste more safely. And to think it was entirely accidental.

[MIKA27]

Buy These Headphones, Help A Deaf Person Hear

It’s not often that you can indulge yourself with a shiny new toy and help someone in need at the same time. But with LSTN, an up-and-coming company that specialises in making headphones out of reclaimed wood, that’s the whole point.

LSTN is the brainchild of Bridget Hilton, a music industry veteran who was on a road trip through a redwood forest when she came up with the idea of making headphones out of wood. As a longtime guitar and piano player she could clearly comprehend the acoustic appeal, and from an aesthetic point of view she could imagine a truly unique product. So she found a local furniture manufacturer and cut a deal for some beech wood, cherry wood and ebony scraps that got shaped and polished into headphones.

So far, pretty standard stuff. But then Hilton partnered up with Joe Huff, a social enterprise buff, so make sure that LSTN wouldn’t just be in the headphone business. They would also be helping the hearing-impaired around the world. A portion of the purchase price for each set of LSTN headphones goes to the Starkey Hearing Foundation, a global organisation that’s committed to providing 100,000 hearing aids a year to those that need them. While she wouldn’t disclose exactly what per cent of the price goes to charity — she did say it was a “significant amount” of gross revenue — or how many hearing aids the Starkey Foundation had given out on her company’s behalf, Hilton did say that giving back was just as important to her as selling a product. She cited Tom’s Shoes as part of her inspiration for the model.

You’ve probably seen the other piece of inspiration: a viral YouTube video of a 29-year-old woman hearing her voice for the first time. “It’s a very transformative thing,” Hilton said, “when you see someone who’s never heard themselves speak and all of a sudden they can hear it’s incredible.” And if they’re doing their job, the team behind LSTN should be providing this experience to thousands of people every year. It’s too bad they won’t share exactly how many people they’re helping — the Tom’s one-for-one model really is remarkable — but LSTN’s certainly helping more hearing-impaired people than Dr. Dre.

For now, LSTN headphones come in two models: the chrome Troubadours and the folding Fillmores. They’re accompanied by a line of earbuds called the Bowerys which are, impressively, also made out of reclaimed wood. All of the models come with a microphone and controller so that they work with smartphones and music players. The headphones are sold through the LSTN website for $US150, $US100 and $US50 respectively and are scheduled to make their retail debut at Whole Foods in August.

And how do they sound? Pretty amazing, actually, especially for the price. This is the point, Hilton said. “A lot of headphones are made to sound good in one genre [like] hip hop or something,” she said. “For ours, we want them to sound good on any genre. We want to appeal to the general music fan.” Mission accomplished.

[MIKA27]

All The Gold On Earth Comes From Massive Space Explosions

Previously, astronomers had been under the impression that the heavy elements — gold, platinum, lead, uranium, etc — came from supernova explosions. But now scientists have announced a new theory for these highly valuable elements, this one involving two ultra-dense neutron stars and one spectacularly violent, grossly expensive collision.

We Are All Made of Stars

Essentially, we’re all here to today because some star somewhere in space exploded once upon a time. Down in the interior of stars, the high pressure and heat cooks up elements like carbon and oxygen atoms (the stuff we’re made of). So when it inevitably comes time for that star to die, that explosion shoots out all of the ingredients for life as we know it.

This explanation didn’t, however, quite manage to explain where the more dense elements got their start. Because while the majority of light elements come with a fairly simple recipe, a heavier one like gold requires 79 protons, 79 electrons and 118 neutrons — that’s a hell of lot of ingredients, which is why it takes these absurdly dense neutron stars, which come packing way more atomic supplies, to give us all those beautiful, heavy, glittering goods.

What’s a Neutron Star?

When a massive star enters Type II, Type Ib, or Type Ic supernova — or in other words, when its core is essentially crushed by the force of its own gravity — there are two potential outcomes. It can either turn into a black hole or emerge from its supernova cocoon as a neutron star. To the get the latter, you’d need to start with a star about 4 to 8 times the size of our sun. Once the star burns off enough nuclear fuel to the point that the core can no longer support itself, gravity finally wins and collapses the core with enough force to cause protons and electrons to assimilate. Which creates neutrons. Which, as you may have already guessed, is where neutron stars get their name.

To get an idea of just how dense a neutron star is, a mere teaspoon of the stuff would weigh about 10 billion tons. (Of course, if you actually did extract a teaspoon of neutronium goo, you’d lose all that wonderful gravitational force holding everything together, and the whole thing would immediately explode into a giant mass of neutrons about the size of a planet that would then break down to its individual proton and electron parts. To put it bluntly, you, dear reader, would die. But that’s neither here nor there.)

When Two Neutron Stars Love Each Other Very Much…

So under most circumstances, these insanely dense dead stars will float around the universe doing no one any harm. But in binary star systems, the two are destined to collide. And this is what NASA’s Swift space telescope observed during an all-sky survey on June 3.

After seeing a flash of light called a short gamma-ray burst (GRB) far, far way in the constellation Leo, astronomers were quickly able to deduce (with the help of a few theoretical models) that what they were seeing was the radioactive afterglow from a gargantuan mass of heavy metals created in the wake of a neutron star collision. Previously, scientists had only been able to hypothesize that GRBs were the result of two colliding neutron stars, but now we have actual proof.

Edo Berger, the astronomer who led the research at the Harvard-Smithsonian Centre for Astrophysics, describes the process:

When they make contact, several exciting things happen very quickly. Most of the material actually collapses to form a black hole. Some of the material then gets sucked into the black hole. That is the event that causes the gamma-ray burst. Some of the material gets spewed out into space. That material, since it came from neutron stars, is very rich in neutrons, and as a result, is very efficient at forming these heavy elements, including gold.

And considering how many particles these neutron stars have pushed together (literally until they can be pushed together no more), it makes sense that two of them combined would be able to make quite a bit of gold — enough to equal about 20 times the mass of Earth, to be more specific. Which is also enough to fill around 100 trillion oil tankers. But hey, gold isn’t everyone’s thing. Neutron stars get that — they also produce about eight times that amount of platinum.

But while mind-boggling in quantity, it’s not quite gold as you imagine it; what you’re getting from a neutron collision is atomized gold.

It won’t make into into your hands or onto your teeth (you do you) until it finds a big cloud of particles. These will eventually get shoved together by gravity and come out a beautiful solar system. Then, as the gold particles come together and the planet applies geological pressure, the particles will coalesce and, after about 1 billion years, become something you can see with your naked eye and subsequently covet.

With this new theory, it’s incredibly likely that all of our beautiful gold originates from this massively violent destructive force. Which is an incredibly cool thought. So friends, when you go home tonight, make sure to hug your gold tight and thank it for being here — it’s had pretty rough ride

[MIKA27]

Zack Snyder To Direct Batman/Superman Movie

It had to happen eventually. Warner Bros. has confirmed that Zack Snyder’s next Superman movie will also feature Batman, with the plot taking inspiration from Frank Miller’s critically-acclaimed graphic novel The Dark Knight Returns. But who will play the new Batman?

This was easily the biggest announcement at Comic-Con 2013 — or arguably any Comic-Con before it. Batman and Superman are finally going to share the big screen together after decades of botched projects and false starts.

The film is slated for release in 2015 and will chiefly comprise of the same creative team that brought us The Man of Steel. Henry Cavill will reprise his role as Superman/Kal-El with Zack Snyder returning to the director’s chair. David S. Goyer and Christopher Nolan will take care of writing and executive producing duties, respectively.

Here’s the official announcement from Warner Bros:

On the heels of the worldwide success of “Man of Steel,” director Zack Snyder is bringing together the two greatest Super Heroes of all time—Batman and Superman—for the first time on the big screen. The announcement was made today by Greg Silverman, President, Creative Development and Worldwide Production, and Sue Kroll, President, Worldwide Marketing and International Distribution, Warner Bros. Pictures.

The current hit, “Man of Steel,” has taken in more than $630 million at the worldwide box office to date, and climbing. Along with its star, Henry Cavill, the upcoming film brings back Amy Adams, Laurence Fishburne and Diane Lane.

The new Batman has yet to be cast.

Snyder is co-writing the story with David S. Goyer, who will then pen the screenplay. Production is expected to begin in 2014, with an anticipated release date in Summer 2015.

Silverman stated, “Zack Snyder is an incredibly talented filmmaker, but beyond that, he’s a fan first and he utterly gets this genre. We could not think of anyone better suited to the task of bringing these iconic Super Heroes to the screen in his own way.” Kroll added, “We are thrilled to be back in business with Zack and his team on this next movie. The success of ‘Man of Steel’ is a wonderful testament to the love and support that both fans and new audiences, worldwide, have for these characters. We are very excited to see what Zack has in store for all of us.”

Diane Nelson, President, DC Entertainment, noted, “Superman and Batman together on the big screen is a dream come true for DC fans everywhere. All of us at DC Entertainment could not be more excited for Zack’s continuing vision for the DC Universe.”

Zack Snyder, who made a surprise appearance at Comic-Con today, breaking the news to audiences there, later said, “I’m so excited to begin working again with Henry Cavill in the world we created, and I can’t wait to expand the DC Universe in this next chapter. Let’s face it, it’s beyond mythological to have Superman and our new Batman facing off, since they are the greatest Super Heroes in the world.”

The new film brings back Charles Roven and Deborah Snyder as producers. This time, Christopher Nolan and Emma Thomas are serving as executive producers, along with Benjamin Melniker and Michael E. Uslan. Thomas offered, “Whilst our ‘Dark Knight’ trilogy is complete, we have every confidence that Zack’s fresh interpretation will take the character in a new and exciting direction. His vision for Superman opened the door to a whole new universe and we can’t wait to see what Zack does with these characters.” The film is based on Superman characters created by Jerry Siegel & Joe Shuster, and Batman characters created by Bob Kane, published by DC Entertainment

After the colossal success of Marvel’s The Avengers it’s little wonder that DC is keen to bring its two most iconic superheroes together in one movie.

The only missing piece of the puzzle is the casting of Batman.

Apparently, Christian Bale is highly unlikely to return to the role, which means the character will need to be completely reintroduced for the new movie. During the Comic-Con announcement, Snyder indicated that while the film won’t be a direct adaptation of The Dark Knight Returns, it will “help us tell that story”. This suggests a much older Batman in the twilight of his crime-fighting years.

[MIKA27]

Revolutionary Space-Saving Vertical Farms in China

Due to China's rapid urban expansion, its no surprise that much of their usable farmlands are disappearing. While the country has the largest agricultural output and supplies over twenty percent of the worlds population, only ten percent of all the land China owns is arable. This was the main driving force behind Spain-based architectural firm JAPA's latest concept.

Located just outside city lines, Dyn-net or Dynamic Vertical Networks is a series of high-rise towers that supply the food needs of the metropolis. They would be constructed out of lightweight yet high tensile materials with a focus on using as many recyclable resources as possible. Each ring on the skyscraper has the ability to shift and change positions to better suit the plants. The structures use hydroponics to grow produce, using little to no soil at all, and will even be outfitted with labs to better monitor growth and nutritional value of the crops.

The buildings will be open to visitors, allowing them to learn more about local agriculture, while also taking in the 360 degree panoramic views each platform offers. The overall goal of the project is to save land, supply food, and become a biodiversity magnet for travelers from all around the world.

[MIKA27]

Airless Bicycle Tyres Means No More Punctures, Ever

A team of bicycle boffins in the US have invented an air-free bike tyre. This means no more punctures, no more bike pumps and no need to lug around spare tyres. Check out this video to see the patented technology in action.

“ERW Patented Airless Design make bicycling safer and more efficient,” the creators explain on their YouTube page. “Obstacles slide under the ERW wheels with precision and ideal comfort, and keeping the tread on the tire.”

The wheel design boasts adjustable treads which can be tailored to suit road or trail conditions. Naturally, the proof of the concept will come down to how well your bike handles, but on paper this sounds very intriguing — especially when you factor in the elimination of punctures.

So when can you snap up a pair of your own? Currently, the inventors are looking to license the technology to other companies which suggests it’s still at the prototype stage. There are also plans to introduce the tech to cars, trucks and military vehicles.

Check out the below video for a demo from the creators:

You can find out more about ERW Airless Tyres at the company’s website.

[MIKA27]

Monster Machines: The Sweat-To-Water Purifier

Nobody wants to drink their own processed urine like Kevin Costner did in Waterworld. That’s disgusting. But drinking your own sweat like Kyle MacLachlan from Dune, now that’s the ticket. And with the help of this new distillation device, people living in even the most parched environments will have easy access to potable water derived from their own bodily fluids.

Simply dubbed the “Sweat Machine”, this device distils water from sweat-soaked clothes using a technique known as membrane distillation. “They have something similar on the [international] Space Station to treat astronaut’s urine — but our machine was cheaper to build,” the device’s inventor, Andreas Hammar, told the BBC. The machine first spins the wet clothing in a centrifuge (aka a washing machine’s spin cycle) to extract the fluids from the clothing. The sweat is then heated and distilled through a newly-developed distillation membrane developed by HVR.

As the company’s website explains:

Water to be purified is heated and circulates in the middle of the cassette between the two membranes. The other sides of the membranes are cold surfaces. The difference in vapor pressure between the hot and cold side forces the water molecules through and only these due to the membrane design. When the water molecules reach the cold side of the membranes, the molecules condense and the purified water runs down to a receptacle. The result is the absolute separation of all non-volatile substances.

Indeed, Hammar touts the purified water as being cleaner than that from a tap. To prove it, as well as raise awareness for UNICEF’s efforts to bring water to some 780 million thirsty kids worldwide, Hammar set up a demonstration in downtown Gothenburg, Sweden for the Gothia Cup, and has handed out over 1000 cups of processed sweat since last week.

While there are no announced plans to further develop this specific device, hopefully enterprising engineers will be able to shrink all of the component equipment down to at least a backpack-sized device and eventually integrate it into some sort of rubber jumpsuit. And then we start work on the Thumpers.