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NASA Is Sinking Into The Ocean

In October 2012, just a few days before Hurricane Sandy slammed into New Jersey, it was churning north past the narrow strip of white sand beach separating NASA’s most celebrated spaceport from the sea.

For several days and nights, heavy storm surge pounded the shoreline, flattening dunes and blowing sand right up to the launchpads. A stone’s throw away from the spot where a Saturn V rocket sent the first humans to the Moon, the ocean took a 30m bite out of the beach.

“I think the telling story is that the storm was almost 230 miles [370km] offshore, and it still had an impact,” Don Dankert, an environmental scientist at NASA, tells me as we stand with ecologist Carlton Hall atop a rickety metal security tower overlooking Space Coast. It is a hot, breathless day, and the surf laps gently at the deserted shore.

“It makes you wonder what would happen if a storm like that came in much closer, or collided with the coast,” Dankert adds.

That’s a troubling question for NASA, an agency whose most valuable piece of real estate — the $US10.9 billion ($14.2 billion) sandbar called Kennedy Space Center — is also its most threatened. The beating heart of American spaceflight since the Apollo program, Kennedy was, and still is, the only place on US soil where humans can launch into orbit. Today, the centre is enjoying a revival, following a few dark years after the space shuttle program was mothballed and crewed launches were outsourced to Russia. The shuttle’s former digs, Launch Pad 39A, is being renovated by commercial spaceflight company SpaceX for the Falcon Heavy, a beast of a rocket designed to ferry astronauts into orbit and beyond. A few kilometres up the road, Launch Pad 39B is being modified for the SLS rocket, which NASA hopes will send the first humans to Mars.

But a glorious future of bigger and badder rockets is by no means assured. In fact, that future is gravely threatened, not by the budget cuts that NASA speaks often and candidly about, but by climate change. If humans keep putting carbon in the atmosphere, eventually, Kennedy won’t be sending anybody into space. It will be underwater.

Aerial view of Kennedy Space Center’s two Launch Pads, 39A and 39B, along with the Launch Control Center, which includes the Vehicle Assembly Building. Launch Pad 41b is located at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station.

“We are acutely aware that, in the long-term sense, the viability of our presence at Space Coast is in question,” says Kim Toufectis, a facilities planner in NASA’s Office of Strategic Infrastructure.

There’s a very good reason NASA built Kennedy Space Center, along with four other launch and research facilities, on the edge of the sea. If rockets are going to explode (and in 2016, they still do), we’d rather them explode over water than over people. “To launch to space safely, you have to be at the coast,” says Caroline Massey, assistant director for management operations at Wallops Flight Facility in Virginia.

Kennedy’s location, at the southern end of the Merritt Island wildlife refuge and just northwest of Cape Canaveral Air Force Station, has a few other perks. Launch pads and other resources are shared with the Air Force, and weather conditions are good year-round. Being close to the equator allows rockets to snag a bigger velocity boost from the rotation of the Earth.

And yet, even as architects were drawing up plans for Kennedy in the early 1960s, NASA knew the spaceport’s exposure — to rising sea levels, hurricanes and the general wear and tear of the ocean — might one day cause catastrophic damage. “They were absolutely concerned about it,” says Roger Launius, associate director at the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum and former chief historian for NASA. “But they wanted to launch over water. You don’t want to drop first stages over cities.”

Aerial view of Kennedy Space Center’s shoreline before any launchpads were installed, left (1943) and in modern history (2007).

Now, that water is rising. Globally, sea levels have gone up about 20cm since the early 1900s. For the past two decades, the pace of rise has been quickening, in step with accelerated melting on the Greenland ice sheet. At Kennedy, conservative climate models project 12 to 20cm of sea level rise by mid-century, and up to 38cm by the 2080s. Models that take changing ice sheet dynamics into account predict as much as 1.28m of rise by the 2080s. In an even more dire scenario, Space Coast sees over 1.8m of rise by the end of the century, causing many of the roads and launchpads, not to mention sewers and buried electrical infrastructure, to become swamped. “I hope we don’t go there,” Hall said.

On top of rising seas, Kennedy faces a stormier future — more extreme hurricanes in the summer and nor’easters in the winter. “We started to notice a real issue with coastal erosion following the 2004 hurricanes,” says John Jaeger, a coastal geologist at the University of Florida.

Jaeger is part of a team of scientists who’ve been studying long-term shoreline recession at Space Coast, which can be traced back to the 1940s through aerial photographs. But while natural erosion has been reshaping Kennedy’s sandy fringes for decades, a recent uptick in powerful storms has Jaeger worried for the future. “As geologists, we know it’s these big events that do all the work,” he says.

NASA’s Climate Adaptation Sciences Investigators Workgroup (CASI) shares this concern. In a recent review of the space agency’s climate vulnerability, this team of in-house Earth scientists and facilities managers cited extreme weather and flooding as major hazards to future operations at Kennedy. Even under modest sea level rise scenarios, 10-year flood events are expected to occur two to three times as often by mid-century. And the more the ocean rises, the easier it will be for storms to cause flooding.
“I use the metaphor that a small change in the average can lead to a big change in extremes,” says Ben Strauss, vice president for sea level rise and climate impacts at Climate Central. “In basketball, it’s pretty hard to get a slam dunk, but if you raised the floor a foot, they would happen all the time.”

In other words, the coastal damage caused by Sandy may be a small taste of what Kennedy Space Center is in for.

After soaking in the view for a few moments, Dankert, Hall and I climb down from the watchtower and drive south to Kennedy’s dune restoration site, which was completed in 2014 with federal Hurricane Sandy relief funds. Stretching a little over 1.5km between Launch Complexes 39A and 39B, the dune’s grassy slopes rise like lightly yeasted bread over the sprawling beach. If you didn’t know better, you might think the shoreline had looked this way for centuries.

View along the beach of Kennedy Space Center’s dune restoration site in 2014.

“We’re drawing a line in the sand,” Dankert says.”The dune not only prevents storm surge from ploughing inland, it’s a sand source that replenishes the beach.”

It’s an astonishingly low-tech barrier when you consider the artificial pumping systems installed at Miami Beach to keep the ocean at bay, or the enormous seawalls some experts think we’ll need to save Manhattan. But in protecting its shoreline, NASA is trying to be considerate of all of its residents. In addition to rockets, Kennedy is home to a stunning array of wildlife, from bobcats and coyotes to southeastern beach mice, scrub jays and gopher tortoises. It’s a major nesting site for protected leatherback, green and loggerhead sea turtles, with thousands of baby turtles born on this small stretch of beach each year.

“We are a wildlife refuge — that is a huge part of our program,” Dankert says, adding that in addition to maintaining the shoreline, Kennedy’s newly-restored dune blocks artificial light from the launch pads, which can disorient female sea turtles as they’re coming ashore to nest.

For the past few years, the dune has held strong, preventing the ocean from spilling over onto the historic shuttle railroad that traces along the coast. Eventually, NASA would like to put in another 3km of dune, fortifying the entire shoreline between Launch Complexes 39A and 39B.

As with all government projects, the hang-up is funding. The post-Sandy dune reconstruction was completed for a cool $US3 million ($3.9 million), using beach-quality sand trucked up from Cape Canaveral. “We got really lucky — that sand was a big cost-saver,” Hall says, noting that the bill might have run in the tens of millions had NASA been forced to dredge sand from offshore.

An Atlas V rocket lifts off from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station’s Launch Complex 41, illumining nearby Kennedy Space Center’s dune restoration site.

Still, 10, 20 or even 50 million dollars pales in comparison to the value of the launchpads that sit just half a kilometre inland. “To rebuild a pad is a few billion dollars,” Hall says. “To spend a few million every few years instead is a pretty good investment.”

Although Kennedy is NASA’s most threatened asset, all of the space agency’s properties — some $US32 billion ($41.9 billion) worth of infrastructure used for scientific research, aeronautics testing, astronaut training, deep space missions and vehicle assembly — face challenges in a changing climate. Sea levels at the Johnson Research Center in Texas are rising at a whopping 6.4cm per decade, faster than any other coastal centre by a factor of two or three. The Michoud Assembly Facility in New Orleans sits below sea level, surrounded by 5.8m-high levees, on rapidly-sinking ground. Inland facilities are bracing for more excessively hot days, and the Ames Research Center in Silicon Valley is preparing for a future of drought.

“This is a very large concern for our agency as a whole,” Toufectis says. And given our growing need to go into space, not just for scientific research, but to harness new resources, colonise other worlds and monitor and study the one overburdened biosphere we’ve got, anything that threatens future operations and NASA threatens the entire world.

At Wallops Flight Facility on Virginia’s eastern shore, climate change isn’t some existential problem for the future — it’s reality. The centre’s sounding rocket launch pads, which have sent countless aircraft models and science experiments into suborbital space, sit on a 15 square-kilometre barrier island just a few dozen metres from the ocean, alongside two Virginia-owned pads used for satellite launches and ISS resupply runs. Sea levels are rising, storms are getting fiercer and protective beaches are eroding rapidly. “We live with climate change every day,” Massey says.

Areas around five coastal NASA centres that would be inundated by 12 inches (30 cm) of sea level rise (red).

 

Wallops Island started hardening its defences in earnest in the ’90s, when NASA erected a 6km stone seawall in front of the launch pads. But while the wall initially helped to reduce storm damage, the beach beyond it was soon worn to shreds. By the mid 2000s, storm waves were breaking directly against the wall, causing sections to crumble into the sea.

And so, in the autumn of 2012 and the winter of 2014, with a $US54 million ($70.8 million) investment from Congress, NASA and the US Army Corps of Engineers dredged around three million cubic metres of sand from offshore, and a new beach was built beyond the wall. The impact was sudden and dramatic.

“When Hurricane Irene hit in 2011, Wallops [Island] was flooded, we had $3.8 million [$AU4.9 million] in storm damage, and we couldn’t work there for a few weeks,” Massey says. But when Sandy, virtually the same strength as Irene, blew past Virginia’s coastline a year later? “There was no island flooding to speak of, and we could have kept the power on the entire time,” Massey says. “The only difference was our shoreline protection program.”

At Wallops as at Kennedy, shoring up the shoreline every few years is considered an economical way to manage the risk right now. But looking out toward the late 21st century and beyond, NASA may be forced to leave some of these launchpads behind. “In the long-term, I would be shocked if we don’t see more than six feet [1.8m] of sea level rise,” Strauss says. “That amount may simply be incompatible with a lot of NASA’s coastal infrastructure.”
Picking up and moving inland, or “managed retreat” in the urban planning parlance, is the last thing the space agency wants to do. Ironically, it probably won’t be a major storm or flood that forces NASA’s hand. It will be its employees. You can’t have rocket launches on Space Coast if you can’t find engineers, mission directors and launch personnel willing to run them — which is to say, people willing to live and work in an increasingly hostile environment.

“The point at which we get serious about moving is the point at which the community is no longer viable,” Toufectis said.

Full-scale withdrawal at any of NASA’s centres is probably decades away. But at Wallops, the seeds of a managed retreat mentality are already starting to sink in. There’s now an intensive screening process for what can be built on the island: “It has to be something we can only do safely over water,” says Josh Bundick, program manager for management operations at Wallops.

Newer buildings are placed on elevated pilings or raised floors, with all critical electrical infrastructure installed above the flood line. Island operations are run by a skeleton crew, while the vast majority of Wallops employees work at the facility’s main base a few kilometres inland. NASA hasn’t broken off its relationship with Wallops Island, but it is creating distance.

As I head back to Kennedy’s visitor centre, ogling the tremendous Vehicle Assembly Building where the Saturn V rocket was put together, I can’t help but feel a strange sense of cognitive dissonance. Here I am, at a place that radiates optimism, that flaunts the raw power of human technology that was built to explore the infinite, only to learn of man’s essential helplessness in the face of nature. The sense of two parallel realities grows stronger as I return to my hotel in Titusville, where gaggles of tourists take selfies with replica astronaut suits and locals share beers over the latest SpaceX gossip. This isn’t a community with any intention of going anywhere.
But no matter what the future holds for Space Coast, one thing is clear: Defending this shoreline now isn’t a waste. Places on the front lines of climate change have lessons to teach us about standing one’s ground, and deciding when the ground can no longer stand. And those lessons may wind up being more valuable than a hundred launchpads.

“Look, human beings are all mortals,” Strauss says. “But that doesn’t stop us from leading meaningful lives. I could tell you that the barrier islands on the Atlantic coast may not survive this century and almost certainly won’t survive the next, but that doesn’t mean we can’t make good use of them now. We just have to keep our eyes open.”

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Massive Earthquake Along The San Andreas Fault Is Disturbingly Imminent

A series of quakes under the Salton Sea may be a signal that the San Andreas Fault is on the verge of buckling. For the next few days, the risk of a major earthquake along the fault is as high as 1 in 100. 

The United States Geological Survey has been tracking a series of earthquakes near Bombay Beach, California. This “earthquake swarm” is happening under the Salton Sea, and over 140 events have been recorded since Monday, September 26. The quakes range from 1.4 to 4.3 in magnitude, and are occurring at depths between 4 to 9km.

Quakes recorded under the Salton Sea on 27 September 2016

For seismologists, these quakes could represent some seriously bad news. The swarm is located near a set of cross-faults that are connected to the southernmost end of the San Andreas Fault. Troublingly, some of these cross-faults could be adding stress to the San Andreas Fault when they shift and grind deep underground. Given this region’s history of major earthquakes, it has some people a bit nervous.

Calculations show that from now until October 4, the chance of a magnitude 7 or greater earthquake happening along the Southern San Andreas Fault is as high as 1 in 100, and as low as 1 in 3000. On the plus side, the likelihood of it happening decreases with each passing day. These estimates are based on models developed to assess the probabilities of earthquakes and aftershocks in California.

“Swarm-like activity in this region has occurred in the past, so this week’s activity, in and of itself, is not necessarily cause for alarm,” cautions the USGS.

That being said, this is only the third swarm that has been recorded in this area since sensors were installed in 1932, and it’s much worse than the ones recorded in 2001 and 2009. This particular stretch of the San Andreas Fault hasn’t ruptured since 1680, and given that big quakes in this area happen about once every 150 to 200 years, this fault line is considerably overdue.

A big fear is that the rupturing of the southern portion of the San Andreas fault could cause a domino effect along the entire stretch, cracking the fault from Imperial County through to Los Angeles County. Another possibility is that the Salton Sea swarm could cause the nearby San Jacinto fault system to rupture, which would in turn trigger the collapse of the San Andreas Fault.

Should the Big One hit, it won’t be pretty. Models predict a quake across the southern half of California with a magnitude around 7.8. Such a quake would cause an estimated 1800 deaths, 50,000 injuries and over $US200 billion ($261 billion) in damage.

But as the USGS researchers point out, this is far from an inevitability. The swarm under the Salton Sea may subside, or fail to influence the gigantic fault nearby. Moreover, the estimates provided by the scientists are exactly that — estimates. The science of earthquake prediction is still very much in its infancy, and these models are very likely crunching away with insufficient data. No need to panic just yet.

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Enraged Frenchman Smashes iPhones And Fights With Security At Apple Store

 

Have you ever been so pissed off in an Apple store, filled to the brim with obnoxious teens and clueless old people, that you wanted to smash all of the shiny devices on display? When this Frenchman didn’t get his way with Apple customer support, he did exactly that.

It’s not entirely clear why this guy went on a rampage against these innocent iPhones (missing headphone jack, maybe?), but according to French media reports, he was arrested following his tantrum. He also smashed at least one iMac and multiple MacBooks. The horror!

Another video shows the iPhone murderer fighting with shopping centre security as he grabs their throats and tries to escape. The confrontation with security starts about a minute into the video.

 

 

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Zack Snyder Reveals A Very Tiny Hint About Justice League's Deathstroke 

And here’s a blown up and reoriented look at what’s on his tablet. You know, like sane people make and pin to walls with highlighted documents and string connecting them:

And it looks like Slade Wilson — with eyepatch, so no helmet — talking to someone.

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Hot Toys' New Rogue One Figures Are All About The Empire - @Fuzz

When you need a bunch of fancy action figures to be out as soon as possible to coincide with the launch of a new movie, it’s good to be bad — especially if you’re the faceless entities of an evil empire. Which means if you want some Rogue One Hot Toys, then what you’re getting for the foreseeable future is all things Imperial.

Now that it’s September 30, the company has revealed a few more more “new” Rogue One figures to celebrate the arrival of the movie’s merch on toy shelves. I say “new” because really, the only new figure joining the Death Trooper is the Shore Trooper — Darth Vader and the “Jedha Patrol” Stormtrooper are just minor tweaks to existing toys.

But still, they look nice. Vader is a bit different to the A New Hope-specific toy Hot Toys released a while ago, with updated armour details that make him look a little more like the Revenge of the Sith-era Vader than the one of the original trilogy. The new Stormtrooper is essentially the old one, dirtied up and given a backpack.

The new Shore Trooper though, is actually new. The mix of armour and cloth material looks great, and it’s nice to see some Imperial troopers who aren’t just clad in various shades of white or black.

Unlike most Hot Toys, the figure doesn’t come with much — just a stand, some alternate hands and the trooper’s new double-barrelled gun — but it’s a swanky addition to the sixth-scale Imperial army, indeed.

None of the new figures are quite up for pre-order in the West just yet, but Vader, the Jedha Patrol Stormtrooper and the Shoretrooper are all due for release early next year.

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Here's Another Trailer For Jack Reacher: Never Go Back

A second trailer for Jack Reacher: Never Go Back has dropped, and it gives you just a little bit more insight into the new action franchise’s continuing storyline. If you like Tom Cruise punching people in the face and Tom Cruise kicking people in the face, this movie is going to be very much your speed.

The second Jack Reacher flick will be out on October 20.

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Huge Australian Meteorite Shows How Unsafe Earth Really Is

Climate change is cited endlessly as the most dire threat our planet faces, all the while fiery doom hurtles through space every day, narrowly missing our beloved blue planet. If you enjoy sleeping, it’s probably best not to think about it – until headlines like this one pop up, that is.

Earlier this week, a massive fireball streaked across the sky above Queensland, Australia before apparently impacting the Earth or exploding above ground. Residents reported feeling the ground shake and being blinded by an immense flash of light. According to the Brisbane Times, police received multiple calls from concerned residents who were frightened by the impact. While the exact nature of the falling object is unknown, astronomer Owen Bennedick at the Wappa Falls Observatory told Brisbane Times that reports of the impact spread across a 100-kilometre radius, showing that “whatever it was, it was big.”

Bennedick went on to say that these strikes show just how unprepared governments, astronomers, and space agencies really are when it comes to preparing for and detecting Earthbound objects such as meteorites and asteroids:

There’s not enough research done around the world and not enough observatories or observing time to do it. It’s only when they get a big scare, like when comet Schumacher-Levy hit Jupiter or when the one blew up over Chelyabinsk, everyone sort of runs to the telescope and looks for a while then they get bored and go off and do other things.

Earlier this month, a massive asteroid capable of severely damaging the Earth passed between the Sun and Moon before it was detected. This incident and others like it caused NASA scientists to issue a statement warning of this critical lapse in Earth’s preparedness. A current NASA project is testing methods to snare and redirect Earthbound asteroids before they reach our planet, but these technologies have yet to be tested on actual asteroids in space.

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RENAULT TREZOR CONCEPT

Renault is giving a whole new meaning to the term ‘taking the top off’ of a car. Don’t quite know what we mean by that? Just take a look at their newest electric concept, the Trezor.

Fresh off of an unveiling at the Paris Motor show, the car has been generating a lot of chatter among the auto-press. The general consensus is that it’s a more ‘mature’ vehicle, one befitting from the marque’s recent streamlining of their primary product line under the command of designer Van den Acker. Mostly though, it’s just cool looking. Oh, and fast. Did we mention that? The fully electric car boasts a 260kW battery that puts out 360 horses and 282 pound feet of torque, allowing it to speed from 0 to 62 miles per hour in under four seconds. In addition to the all that oomph under the hood, the overall design of the thing is almost otherworldly. It is 15 feet long, 6 feet wide, only 3 feet tall, and instead of doors the entire top half of the coupe lifts up for occupants to get in and out. Don’t feel like driving? No problem – it has autonomous driving capabilities as well. Now all we have to do is try and convince Renault to make more than just one of these.

 

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HICKIES 2.0

Four years ago a young couple popped up on Kickstarter with a simple but brilliant idea. They wanted to ditch laces in favor of a series of rubberized clasps that would turn any pair of sneakers into a comfortable slip on. It was a hit. Now, the company has come back with an updated version of this invention – Hickies 2.0.

With this second version, the brand was looking to build a more flexible, durable, and comfortable pair of laces, something they managed to achieve in a few different ways. First, by increasing the contact area of the fish-hook system by nearly 40%, each clasp was made more secure so the likelihood of it coming unhooked while you were running is much lower. Second, they increased the thickness by nearly a third, making each Hickey that much more durable and longer lasting. Never give a second thought to untied laces while exercising again. When these come out this December, they’re expected to retail for $18. [Purchase]

 

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GOTENNA MESH

For some reason, the need to connect to a WiFi or network for assistance always occurs at the most inopportune moments. Maybe it’s a testament to your adventurous nature or maybe you need to work on your karma. Whatever the case, goTenna Mesh will ensure that whenever that need arises, you won’t be left in a dead zone.

In short, the goTenna Mesh is the first 100 percent off-the-grid, long-range consumer mesh network. Simply pair the Bluetooth device with your smartphone to facilitate communication with other mesh users that will only grow stronger and increase in range as the user base increases. You can send messages, share locations, or chat privately while still using the mesh network. It sends messages via a 1-watt UHF radio transmission that doesn’t require towers, routers, or satellites to function. Typical ranges will be up to three miles in open terrain and up to one mile in say a congested forest in the mountains. However, as previously stated, the range will increase alongside an increase user base. It’s the perfect option for outdoor excursions, international travel, crowded events where service is slow, or emergency situations. It’s available now for reservation on Kickstarter and a single pair is slated to retail at $179. [Purchase]

 

[MIKA27]

Take A Deep Dive Into The Beautiful Making Of Nixie Tubes

A Nixie tube is an old-school device that was mostly used for displaying letters and numerals. Back before the advent of LCDs, these cold cathode tubes could be found in voltage meters, calculators and other gadgets.

In 2011, Dalibor Farny discovered that Nixie tubes were no longer being manufactured so he decided to take it upon himself to make some. The painstaking process that goes into manufacturing these things at home is covered in minute detail in this gorgeous little video.

So sit back and luxuriate in the fine spinning glass, tweezered wiring and snipped metal.

 

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Death Is Coming In The First Trailer For Pirates Of The Caribbean: Dead Men Tell No Tales

Jack Sparrow is a no-show in the first trailer for Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Men Tell No Tales, but he casts a large shadow.

The fifth film in Disney’s blockbuster franchise opens May 26 and it seems like Javier Bardem’s Captain Salazar will be hot on the tail of Sparrow, once again played by Johnny Depp. 

Directed by Joachim Rønning and Espen Sandberg, Dead Men Tell No Tales will bring back Orlando Bloom, Geoffrey Rush and others. Here are some stills from the trailer.

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Hurricane Matthew's Impact On Haiti Could Be Catastrophic

The extremely dangerous Hurricane Matthew continues to barrel north, with the centre of the storm expected to approach southwestern Haiti by later today. The National Hurricane Center’s latest bulletin calls Matthew “life threatening”, and forecasters are making dire predictions about the how much damage Caribbean nations might suffer.

Hurricane Matthew intensified rapidly on Saturday, reaching Category 3, then 4, then 5 status in a matter of hours, and becoming the strongest Atlantic tropical storm since 2007. The hurricane has since cooled back off to a Category 4, which is to say, still a very dangerous cyclone packing 220km/h sustained winds with even stronger gusts. Parts of Jamaica are already being swamped by the storm, which was centred some 330km south of Kingston as of 2:00AM AEST.

Given Matthew’s current speed and track — moving northward at approximately 9km/h — tropical storm conditions are expected to reach Haiti later this morning, with full-on hurricane weather unleashing a torrent over the southwest coast later this afternoon. The storm is then predicted to gain speed, approaching eastern Cuba tomorrow morning and the Bahamas by Wednesday afternoon Australia time. While some fluctuations in intensity may occur, the NHC advises that Matthew will likely remain a powerful Category 4 hurricane through mid-week.

Matthew’s impact on the Caribbean is looking more severe by the hour, particularly in Haiti and the southwest Dominican Republic, where as much as 102cm of rainfall could trigger “life threatening flash floods and mudslides.” Rip-roaring winds and “large and destructive waves” will add to the danger, especially along the southern coasts and Haiti and Cuba, where water levels could swell 3.35m above the high tide line.

“It’s undoubtedly Haiti,” Weather Underground meteorologist Jeff Masters told Gizmodo when asked which nations are going to see the worst impacts. According to Masters, Haiti is particularly vulnerable due to environmental degradation, which has left the land stripped of trees and extremely prone to erosion. “The risk is Haiti is also greater due to poverty — you’ve got 50,000 people who have been living outdoors [since the 2010 earthquake].” he said.

The Bahamas are expected to get hammered hard by mid-week, with storm surges of up to 4.5m feet predicted in the latest NHC forecast. Impacts on the United States remain highly uncertain, but according to Masters, Florida, North Carolina and New England could all see heavy rainfall. “Right now, the greatest risk is for North Carolina, but that could change,” he said. “The only thing we’re sure of as far as the US goes is that we’ll see a lot of pounding waves hitting the entire east coast.”

In the Caribbean, governments and international aid organisations are scrambling to make last-minute preparations. USA Today reports that the Haitian Civil Protection agency has opened 576 temporary shelters, while the US Agency for International Development has deployed disaster response teams to both Haiti and Jamaica. But with storm’s outer bands already drenching Jamaica, the south coast of Haiti and the Dominican Republic, time is running out. “Preparations to protect life and property should be rushed to completion,” the NHC said.

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Hammond, Clarkson & May's The Grand Tour Has A New Sort-Of-Stig

 

In another teaser for the seriously-actually-imminent first season of The Grand Tour — which hasn’t yet been confirmed for Aussie TV screens, although we’re confident that Foxtel or one of the free-to-air networks will pick it up — Hammond, Clarkson and May have some big stonking forced-induction supercars to test.

To do that, they need a tame racing driver a racing driver. And that driver? Ben Collins, former Stig for the BBC’s Top Gear — y’know, back when it was being hosted by… Hammond, Clarkson and May.

Including a quick dig at Fifth Gear host (and racing driver) Tiff Needell, this video gives us our best idea yet of what The Grand Tour is actually going to be like — and what that is seems really very quite like Top Gear, which certainly isn’t a bad thing. Incredible cinematography, a bit o’ banter between the lads, and some fast cars going very sideways around a track. Yeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeees.

It doesn’t look like Ben Collins slash the Stog slash the guy who told the world he was the Stig when the world didn’t know is sticking around for The Grand Tour beyond this segment, but who knows at this point. 

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Deepest Underwater Cave Discovered

A team of explorers in the Czech Republic has just discovered the world’s deepest underwater cave. The legendary Polish diver Krzysztof Starnawski, leading a Czech-Polish expedition supported in part by a National Geographic grant, found on September 27 that the flooded limestone abyss measures 404 meters (1,325 feet) deep.

That beats the previous record holder, 392-meter (1,286-foot) Pozzo del Merro in Italy, by 12 meters (39 feet).

Starnawski first explored the Czech cave, named Hranická Propast, in 1999. The limestone formation developed in an unusual way, he told National Geographic last year, that suggested it could extend down a great distance: hot water saturated with carbon dioxide bubbled up like a volcano, which wore away the rock from the bottom up. The team said the water made their exposed skin itch.

Krzysztof Starnawski and Jan "Honza" Musil dive at a depth of approximately 55 meters in Hranická Propast cave, Czech Republic. 

Over the past two years, Starnawski completed dives that offered further clues. In 2014, he reached a depth of 200 meters (656 feet)—which he thought was the bottom. Instead, he found an extremely narrow opening called a “squeeze passage” that led to another vertical tunnel, pitch-black and circled by rough limestone. He lowered a probe through the tunnel and ran out of line at 384 meters (1,260 feet), just shy of the Italian cave’s limit.

Last year, Starnawski returned to Hranická Propast to find that the squeeze passage had crumbled, widening the aperture. He was able to dive through it to a depth of 265 meters (869 feet). He released another probe, and this time, it hit bottom at 370 meters (1,214 feet), likely on top of a pile of debris from the collapsed passage above.

The team gets ready to send the ROV to the bottom of Hranická Propast cave. 

On this week's dive, technicians who stayed topside guided an ROV into the deep. Starnawski spoke with National Geographic Adventure about his team’s discovery and the challenge of exploring at such forbidding depths.

What did you hope to achieve on this expedition?

The dive on September 27 was one in the long series of dives that I did in the last 20 years in Hranická Propast. They all had the same goal: to explore the cave further and deeper. As the expedition leader for the last several years, I've prepared the equipment and the route in and out for the ROV’s dive, so the ROV could go beyond the limits of a human diver, and get through the restricted passage and between the fallen logs and trees.

How did your dive and the ROV’s search for the bottom unfold?

During this push, the most important part of the job was done by the robot. I scuba dived down to 200 meters just before the ROV’s deployment to put in the new line for the robot to follow. The goal was to give the ROV a good start from there to the deepest part of the cave. I came back to the surface, and then we went down with the robot to a depth of 60 meters (197 feet). From there, the team at the surface navigated it, via fiber-optic cable, down along my new line to 200 meters deep. Then it went down to explore the uncharted territory—to the record-breaking depth of 404 meters.

Krzysztof Starnawski (left) and Bartlomiej Grynda navigate the ROV to the bottom of Hranická Propast cave, Czech Republic. 

Why did you opt to deploy an ROV at that point, instead of diving farther down?

My intention was not to achieve the deepest dive by a human, but to assist the exploration by the ROV. In this cave we wanted to explore beyond the 400-meter limit. It can't be done, so far, by a scuba diver in the cave. So I invited Bartlomiej Grynda from GRALmarine, with his custom-built ROV, to send the robot as deep as possible to explore the cave. The results were astonishing.

What was going through your mind during your dive?

I'm always focused on the task. I've been to this cave many times before, and a dozen times to the depth of approximately 200 meters, so I felt pretty confident. The goal for this particular dive was to make the ROV operation smooth, easy, and most effective. This time that meant showing the robot the way through the cave.

But robots do not do the job instead of us. We, the humans, are still needed to show them where to go.

How did you verify the new record?

The ROV that reached 404 meters has a depth gauge that was tested and certified by our state commission, so we are 100 percent sure the measurements were accurate.

After diving to a depth of 200 meters, how long did you have to sit in the decompression chamber near the surface? How did you pass the time?

In the dry decompression bell that is underwater, I spend between two and four hours. And it's 40 percent of the entire dive time. Usually I read. I laminate book pages to prevent paper from being destroyed by water. Crime stories and political thrillers are good reads!

[MIKA27]

The CIA’s Legendary Blackbird Was Actually the First Stealth Warplane

A newly released, formerly top-secret official CIA history details the Blackbird’s hidden past as the world’s first operational stealth warplane.

In 1956, the U.S. Air Force had a big problem. The high-flying, camera-equipped U-2 spy plane had flown for the first time just a year earlier. But as America’s main strategic reconnaissance aircraft, the subsonic U-2 was already obsolete.

The Air Force’s solution was to develop a new spy plane. The resulting Blackbird more than matched the U-2’s impressive high-altitude performance and added the ability to fly at three times the speed of sound.

In 35 years of military and CIA service, the Blackbird became legendary for its blistering top speed and sinister appearance. But a just-released, formerly top-secret official CIA history underscores the Blackbird’s lesser-known but equally important accomplishment.

In addition to being really, really fast, the Blackbird was also the world’s first operational stealth warplane—an honorific that most historians reserve for the 1980s-vintage F-117.

In the mid-1950s, America’s first spy satellites were still in development. The only way for the Pentagon to spot the Soviet Union’s army divisions, airfields, and command centers was to fly an airplane overhead and snap photographs.

The U-2 was supposed to revolutionize aerial reconnaissance. And in way, it did. Upgraded with new sensors and engines, the U-2 is still the Air Force’s most important spy plane, 61 years after its first flight.

But with big, straight wings that readily bounced back radar signals, the U-2 proved highly vulnerable to Soviet air defenses. “The U-2 was not only detected by radar as it penetrated denied territory, but was tracked quite accurately in its earliest flights over… Soviet areas,” the CIA noted in an official history the agency completed in 1969.

The document was released through a Mandatory Declassification Review and the once-top-secret history was posted by Governmentattic.org.

With a top speed of just 500 miles per hour, the U-2 was too slow to outrun supersonic surface-to-air missiles. In 1960, a missile blew Gary Powers’s U-2 out of the sky over the Soviet Union, sparking a diplomatic crisis.

The Pentagon wanted its next spy plane to sneak right past Soviet radars. As luck would have it, Edward Purcell at Harvard University had just invented a new material that could absorb radar energy. “His discovery led to laboratory work in techniques to blanket portions of the aircraft radar-absorptive materials in order to reduce radar detection,” the CIA noted.

The Air Force added the new material to a few U-2s, but that made the planes too heavy. The flying branch went back to the drawing board. “Focus turned to the feasibility of a reconnaissance aircraft designed to greatly reduce radar cross-section specifications as the primary objective.” The Air Force gave the new spy-plane project the code name Gusto. Plane-makers Lockheed and Convair developed competing designs.

While Convair’s design team veered off to a dead-end effort to develop a small, Mach-4 plane that launched in mid-flight from a bomber “mothership,” Lockheed’s own team plugged away at a slightly more conventional aircraft for the Gusto requirement.

Lockheed’s A-12—that was the CIA’s version of the Blackbird—took off for the first time in April 1962 and, together with the Air Force’s follow-on SR-71 version of the plane—ushered in a new era of espionage. Made largely of titanium and built around two immensely powerful J58 engines, the Blackbird could fly as high as 85,000 feet at a top speed of Mach 3.3 while lugging up to a ton and a half of sophisticated sensors.

The Blackbird’s stealth qualities took shape at a secret base in Nevada that would come to be known as Area 51. A small team of engineers tweaked and tested the spy plane’s radar-reflectivity, pursuing the two main principles of stealthiness—materials and shaping.

“The airframe areas giving the greatest radar return were the vertical tail, the inlet and the forward side of the engine nacelles,” the CIA noted. “An improvement in the chine [the side edge of the plane’s fuselage] and wing regions was also being looked at.” The engineers experimented with new ceramic materials with high degrees of magnetic permeability and low conductivity, meaning they can suck up electromagnetic energy such as radar.

“It was hoped that a significant reduction in radar return could be accomplished,” the CIA explained. In May 1967, the intelligence agency finally put the Blackbird to the stealth test. A detachment of the speedy planes deployed to an Air Force base in Japan for 58 spy flights over North Vietnam and neighboring countries as part of Operation Black Shield.

The results were… disappointing. The Blackbird was a stealth jet. But it wasn’t as stealthy as the military and CIA had hoped it would be. “Enemy radar tracking was reported on all but four missions,” the agency admitted. Communist forces launched eight surface-to-air missiles at the Blackbirds. Seven missed. One exploding missile apparently managed to nick a Blackbird with a small metal fragment.

“The [radar] cross-section levels that the designers achieved were, in fact, quite low,” the CIA explained. “However, the advances the Soviets were making in their radar defense network were equally impressive.”

Washington banned Blackbirds from flying directly over hostile territory unless they were assisted by electronic radar-jamming. But that doesn’t mean the Blackbird failed as a stealth plane.

Indeed, the Mach-3 spy jet helped the Air Force and CIA to appreciate an important truth. Stealth alone can’t protect any plane. “There is no silver bullet,” Col. Alex Grynkewich, the Air Force officer heading the flying branch’s concept-development for its next stealth fighter, said… in 2016.

Which is why today’s F-22 and F-35 stealth fighters are also heavily armed and supersonic. And why the Air Force’s current B-2 stealth bombers usually attack their targets in concert with other warplanes, cruise missiles, and plenty of electronic jamming.

“All possible means of reducing vehicle vulnerability [must] be exploited,” the CIA asserted in its 1969 history. Sixty years ago, that meant making the Blackbird not only the world’s fastest spy plane, but also the world’s first stealth plane.

[MIKA27]

This Robot Could Save The Great Barrier Reef

The world’s first robot built to control the devastating crown-of-thorns starfish could be transformed into a versatile “robo reef” protector — thanks to the Australian Google Impact Challenge.

The Great Barrier Reef Foundation has teamed up with QUT roboticists Drs Matthew Dunbabin and Feras Dayoub to enter the COTSbot into Google’s Impact Challenge, which helps not-for-profit organisations develop technologies that can help to tackle the world’s biggest social challenges.

Announced today as one of 10 finalists, the Foundation is now in the running for one of four $750,000 grants. If it wins, the team will build on the successful COTSbot platform to create the RangerBot, a low-cost, vision-enabled autonomous underwater vehicle.

“This project is about giving those looking after our coral reefs the tools they need to protect these precious resources,” the Foundation’s Managing Director, Anna Marsden, said. “More than a billion people depend on reefs for their food and livelihood — they stand to lose the most if those important ecosystems are destroyed”.

The team aims to put the cost-effective, flexible RangerBot into the hands of the people at the front line of looking after and managing coral reefs, as extra “hands and eyes” to manage the critical environments.

Dr Dunbabin, from QUT’s Institute for Future Environments and Science and Engineering Faculty, said he and Dr Dayoub felt honoured to work on the RangerBot with the Foundation.

“Environmental robotics is a real passion of ours and we see so much potential for these advanced technologies to transform the way we protect our world’s precious reefs,” Dr Dunbabin said. “A $750,000 prize would allow us to expand our current platform’s functionality into a truly multipurpose, multifunction tool for monitoring a wide range of issues facing coral reefs — coral bleaching, water quality, pest species, pollution and siltation included”.

The upgrades would mean the RangerBot would be able to stay under the water almost three times longer than a human diver, gather vastly more data, and operate in all conditions and all times of the day or night. Dr Dunbabin said the RangerBot could also help map expansive underwater areas at scales not previously possible.

Unlike current single-purpose marine robots — which are manual, expensive and based on acoustic technologies, the RangerBot would use innovative vision-based technologies.

“This represents a quantum technology leap in both marine robotics and reef protection – the only autonomous, affordable, multifunction solution for effectively detecting and addressing threats to coral reefs, making RangerBot widely available and accessible to reef communities worldwide,” Dr Dunbabin said. “I guess you could call RangerBot the Swiss Army Knife of marine robotics.”

Ms Marsden said the RangerBot represented a wonderful opportunity for the Great Barrier Reef, which has lost half its coral cover over the past 30 years.

“Even though the Great Barrier Reef is internationally acknowledged as the best managed reef globally, due to its size and complexity, effective management is a mammoth and expensive task,” she said. “RangerBot has the potential to revolutionise the way we manage our oceans and may be a missing piece in the puzzle to save our precious reefs”.

The 10 Google Impact Challenge Australia finalists will present their projects to a panel of judges on Wednesday October 26, after which the winners will be announced. They will be assessed on their impact, technology and innovation, scalability and feasibility.

We’ll be covering more of the finalists in more detail over the next few days, so keep an eye out!

[MIKA27]

Curiosity's Latest Selfie Is An Instant Classic

NASA’s Curiosity rover has completed its survey of “Murray Buttes”, and is now set to venture even higher along the slopes of Mount Sharp. The intrepid rover took the opportunity to snap a selfie as it proudly stood in front of some rather dramatic Martian features.

This striking image, taken on 17 September 2016, is actually a composite of 60 individual pictures taken by the rover’s Mars Hand Lens Imager (MAHLI). The camera and the arm are not included in the composite, which is why it looks as though a Martian inhabitant took the time to snap a pic of the four-wheeled exploratory vehicle.

The dark mesa in the background is called “M12”, and upper Mount Sharp can be seen at the top right. M12 stands about 7m above the base of the sloping rocks seen just behind the rover. For the past several weeks, Curiosity has been drilling and collecting rock powder samples in the region. Many of the pictures taken during this phase of the mission have been some of the best we’ve ever seen, revealing intricate eroded rock formations.

Click here to download wallpaper versions of the top pic.

With the Murray Buttes region conquered, NASA scientists have set their sights to a destination that will require the rover to do some further climbing. Curiosity is scheduled to make a 2.5km uphill trek where it will explore a ridge rich in iron-oxide-rich hematite. Beyond that, the rover will investigate an exposure of clay-rich bedrock.

The route driven by Curiosity from the location where it landed four years ago to its current location at Murray Buttes, and the path planned for reaching destinations at “Hematite Unit” and “Clay Unit” on lower Mount Sharp. 

Both of these areas likely originated from different environmental conditions, but the mission scientists are eager to see if either of them might have once hosted a habitable environment; both hematite and clay typically form in soggy conditions.

“We continue to reach higher and younger layers on Mount Sharp,” noted Curiosity Project Scientist Ashwin Vasavada in an agency release. “Even after four years of exploring near and on the mountain, it still has the potential to completely surprise us.”

In addition to the selfie, NASA has also released a stunning 360-degree interactive panorama. Using your mouse, you can manually steer Curiosity’s camera and investigate the barren Martian landscape.

[MIKA27]

Giant Prehistoric Shark Megalodon Had a Big Toothy Cousin

Just when you thought it was safe to jump into your time machine, travel back 20 million years and go for a swim, researchers have discovered about a dozen 20-million-year-old fossilized teeth of a newly identified extinct shark that was a close cousin of Megalodon, the super-predator megatoothed shark that some estimate reached a length of 18 meters (59 ft) during its reign of underwater terror. Was Megalolamna paradoxodon another big-toothed terror? And what’s with the paradoxical name?

According to a new study in Historical Biology, 1.8-inch-long (4.5 cm) teeth were found in Peru, Japan and California and North Carolina in the U.S. The teeth matched each other but no other known shark species of the early Miocene epoch. They had some qualities of the megalodon family (Otodontidae) and some qualities (their big size) of the Lamna family of mackerel sharks which includes salmon sharks, mako sharks and the great white shark. As a result, Kenshu Shimada, a paleobiologist at DePaul University and author of the study, decided it was a new genus, Megalolamna.

Locations where teeth of Megalolamna paradoxodon were found

The species name “paradoxodon” (meaning paradoxical teeth) comes from the fact that the shark appeared suddenly and there’s no indication when it split from the Otodus family of sharks with otodus (Greek for ear-shaped) teeth. Shimada says this also indicates that the megalodons (Carcharocles megalodon) properly belong in the Otodus group and as a result are not the direct ancestor of the great white shark (Carcharodon carcharias).

Confused? Let’s get back to the Megalolamna paradoxodon. While a cousin of the megalodon, Megalolamna was relatively smaller, reaching a maximum length of around 10 meters (33 ft). That’s not quite a bus but still bigger than today’s great whites at 4 meters (13 ft). They had grasping-type front teeth and cutting-type rear teeth to eat medium-sized fish.

While it seems to have reached extinction relatively quickly, Megalolamna paradoxodon still covered a lot of territory, most likely due to its size and lack of predators – Shimada doesn’t believe that megalodons ate megalolamnas. The extinction of both species was probably due to a combination of global cooling, declining fish supplies and the emergence of predators such as killer whales.

Fortunately, we still have great whites … for now.

[MIKA27]

Ben Stiller Reveals His Private Battle With Prostate Cancer

Ben Stiller revealed today that he was diagnosed with prostate cancer two years ago. The 50-year-old actor made the announcement on The Howard Stern Show on Tuesday that he was diagnosed with "immediately aggressive" prostate cancer when he was 48.

"At first, I didn't know what was gonna happen," Stiller said. "I was scared. It just stopped everything in your life because you can't plan for a movie because you don't know what's gonna happen."

Opening up about his cancer for the first time, Stiller said he had been getting a PSA blood test for a number of years, and when his doctors saw his test numbers rise, he visited a urologist, received an MRI and a biopsy, and was told he had cancer.

"It came out of the blue for me," Stiller said. "I had no idea."

With no history of prostate cancer in his family, Stiller called his Meet the Parents co-star Robert De Niro, who beat prostate cancer a few years ago.

"The first thing I did when I got diagnosed was get on the internet to try to learn," Stiller said. "I saw De Niro had had it. I called him right away."

Stiller, after visiting a few doctors, received "robotic assisted laparoscopic radical prostatectomy," as he explains in a Medium essay, which removed all the cancer. He's now been cancer free for two years.

"What I had — and I'm healthy today because of it — was a thoughtful internist who felt like I was around the age to start checking my PSA level, and discussed it with me," Stiller wrote. "If he had waited, as the American Cancer Society recommends, until I was 50, I would not have known I had a growing tumor until two years after I got treated. If he had followed the US Preventive Services Task Force guidelines, I would have never gotten tested at all, and not have known I had cancer until it was way too late to treat successfully."

Now "100 percent" free of cancer, Stiller told Stern that even before his diagnosis, he was "creating the whole movie in my head. I'm picturing the funeral."

[MIKA27]

Star Wars, Batman, Rick & Morty, and More Lead an Insane Lineup of Exclusive New York Comic-Con Art

If you’re attending New York Comic-Con, you’re going to want to visit Bottleneck Gallery at Booth #2171—just be prepared to stand in line. The gallery has an unbelievable lineup of exclusive limited edition art that it will be releasing all throughout the weekend, and we’re stoked to premiere a few of the pieces.

The Force Awakens by Ise Ananphada

Presented along with Acme, the print available in three editions, all 36 x 24 inches. The regular is the 20-color screenprint above, which costs $110 and comes in an edition of 475. (This will also go online at 2:00 pm ET Saturday for fans not at Comic-Con, so follow @BottleneckNYC on Twitter.)

It’s also available in a gold variant for $65, part of an edition of 275.

And there’s also a line-art on pewter edition of 100 for $50. Only 20 of these prints will be sold per day at the con.

South Park by Tom Whalen

The 12 x 36-inch screenprint is $40, part of an edition of 300.

It also comes in a “Kenny’s Dead” variant; it’s $50, edition of 150.

Rick and Morty by Dave Perillo

Whalen’s arch-nemesis tackles another popular cartoon with an 18 x 24 inch print in an edition of 300. It costs $50.

Shall We Dance? by Mark Englert

This 1989 Batman inspired piece is a 12 x 36-inch screen print, will run you $40, and comes in an edition of 300. 

Those are our exclusive reveals but there’s so much more. Olly Moss has his first print in several years, this Garfield-inspired piece that’ll be on sale Friday ($50, edition of 100):

Bottleneck is also teaming up with Grey Matter Art for some sweet Marvel pieces. Here are two, Venom and Spider-Man by Mark Chilcott, each 16 x 24-inch prints ($40, edition of 100):

And here’s Captain America by John Keaveney, an 18 x 24-inch giclée ($45, edition of 75):

There will also be pieces by Laurent Durieux, Matt Ferguson, Florey, Jock, Brad Hill, Martin Ansin, Tomer Hanuka, and many others.

Suffice it to say, it’s gonna be a very expensive convention for art collectors.

[MIKA27]

Jordan Peele Made A Racially Charged Psychological Thriller And It Looks Great

Most of us know Jordan Peele as one half of the comedy team from Comedy Central’s Key & Peele. We expect to see him in crazy comedies like Keanu, which came out earlier this year. But next year, Peele steps behind the camera for a psychological thriller he both wrote and directed.

It’s called Get Out and Universal just announced it will be out February 24 in the US. Check out the creepy first trailer.

Who expected THAT from Peele? I know I didn’t — though, recalling Key and Peele sketches like this, maybe I should have.

But there are some great visuals in that trailer, as well as the intriguing racial angle that seems to drive the mysterious story. Are the suburban white people brainwashing the black people? Taking over their bodies? Are there supernatural elements at play? That trailer leaves us with more questions than answers, and that’s exactly what we want.

Get Out, which stars Daniel Kaluuya, Allison Williams, Bradley Whitford, Caleb Landry Jones and Catherine Keener, opens February 24 in the US. An Australian release date has not been announced.

 

[MIKA27]

Nissan's Hardcore GT-R NISMO Is Coming To Australia In 2017

In its 32 years of history, the famed Nissan Motorsports sub-brand has never had a proper presence in Australia, selling factory-tuned cars to racing enthusiasts. That’s set to change from next year, with the hyperbonkers Nissan GT-R Nismo on sale in the country from February. More track-tuned, performance-focused Nismo cars are planned for the rest of next year, too.

Nissan will introduce Nismo to Australia in February during the Bathurst 12 Hour by running not one but two GT-R Nismo GT3 cars, hoping to repeat its 2015 victory. The GT-R Nismo that the company sells here to road-going customers will be surprisingly close under the hood, though, with the same turbo setup as the GT-3 and a bunch of weight-reducing carbon fibre performance goodies.

From the tweaked VR38DETT powerplant Nissan can extract 441kW and 652Nm from the 2017 GT-R Nismo, and at $299,000 it’s not going to be cheap — but the first cars in a limited yearly production run will be offered to already-loyal Nissan GT-R customers. So, the quickest way to buy a 2017 GT-R Nismo might just be to buy one or two regular GT-Rs. You know, one for the commute and one for the weekend, so you can save the Nismo-spec car for carving up the race track.

[MIKA27]

Suicide Squad's Getting An Extended Edition, But What's Being Added?

It’s not a huge shock that Warner Bros. would take advantage of what, according to Jared Leto, is a giant pile of his craziest material. So, following in a trend designed to get people to buy several copies of the same movie, Suicide Squad is getting an extended edition. But as we’ve seen time and time again, nothing involving Suicide Squad can ever be simple.

Honestly, there are so many parts of this extended cut being released that are amazing. And by “amazing”, I mean “hilarious and ironic”. The first is, of course, that this release brings to mind the story that there were two cuts of this film: The one Warner Bros. had the company that made the trailer do, and the darker one that director David Ayer actually wanted. The movie we got is supposedly a compromise between the two visions. The question is which version the extended cut shows us more of.

The second thing is that this edition is still probably not Ayer’s, since he told Collider, “We have a chunk, there’s definitely over 10 minutes of material on [the DVD]. But this cut of the movie is my cut, there’s no sort of parallel universe version of the movie, the released movie is my cut.” That doesn’t sound like he’d be in the mood to make another version.

And the third amazing part is, as always, related to Jared Leto. He’s said there’s probably enough cut footage of him to make an entire Joker movie out of. He also said, in that same BBC radio interview, that the footage would all come out if he died. Or, you know, on an extended cut release. Which we are, contrary to Ayer’s comments and Leto’s belief that he’d have to die first, obviously getting.

Here’s the announcement video, which contains absolutely nothing new:

The digital version of the extended edition will be available November 15, and the Blu-ray on December 13.

[MIKA27]

Hurricane Matthew Triggers Large-Scale Evacuations On The US East Coast

As rescue workers begin to grapple with the destruction in Haiti following the nation’s worst hurricane in 50 years, Matthew is now steering a course directly for the southeastern United States, prompting widespread evacuations.

Matthew weakened somewhat during its trek over mountainous Haiti and eastern Cuba yesterday, but it remains a powerful, Category 3 storm packing 195km/h winds, according to the National Hurricane Center. Unfortunately, as the storm moves over extremely warm waters in the Bahamas today, meteorologists expect it to regain some of its lost strength.

By the time Matthew reaches Florida’s eastern shores tomorrow morning Australia time, it’s expected to be a powerful Category 3 — possibly even a Category 4 storm, commanding fiercer winds than Hurricane Sandy in 2012. The latest hurricane forecast models show Matthew making a close pass up the Florida peninsula on Friday (how close exactly we’re not yet sure) before reaching Georgia and the Carolinas by Saturday afternoon. Interaction with the land will cause storm to weaken, but impacts in the southeast are expected to continue into the weekend.

Those impacts include tropical storm force (63km/h+) and hurricane force (119km/h+) winds, heavy rainfall and surges of up to 1.5m. In particular, the National Hurricane Center warns of the potential for deadly flooding up and down Florida’s east coast over the next 36 to 48 hours.

“The combination of a dangerous storm surge and the tide will cause normally dry areas near the coast to be flooded,” the Hurricane Center said. “There is a danger of life-threatening inundation.”

Screenshot of the NHC’s storm surge probability graphic, showing the likelihood of more than 0.91m of storm surge from 11:00AM EDT on Wednesday, October 5 (2:00AM AEDT on Thursday, October 6) to 3:00PM ET on Saturday, October 8 (6:00AM AEDT on Sunday, October 9). Green areas indicate a <30 per cent probability of 0.91m surge, yellow areas indicate 30-50 per cent probability and orange and red areas indicate 50 per centor greater.

Most of Florida’s east coast is under a hurricane warning or watch right now, with residents of certain coastal communities being told to evacuate. An evacuation of Charleston, South Carolina’s second-largest city, was set to begin at 6:00AM AEDT today. According to Governor Nikki R. Haley, other areas of the state will be evacuated starting tonight. Tens of thousands of National Guard troops have been mobilised to assist.

A man rides past an uprooted tree in Leogane, Haiti on Tuesday, October 4.

Speaking at FEMA headquarters in Washington this morning, US President Obama urged citizens to take evacuations seriously, warning that a direct hit by the storm could have a “devastating effect” on the southeast. Florida Governor Rick Scott has been equally apocalyptic in his language, saying that Matthew could lead to “massive destruction” unseen in decades.

Haiti, the most impoverished nation in the Western Hemisphere, took a direct hit from Hurricane Matthew yesterday. Aid workers are nowhere close to assessing the full extent of the damage, but the storm is already being called the “worst humanitarian event” to strike the nation since a devastating 2010 earthquake left 50,000 people homeless. At least 10,000 Haitians are in shelters and hospitals are overflowing, according to UN special representative for Haiti Mourad Wahba.

Leogane, Haiti, Wednesday, 5 October 2016

Baracoa, Cuba, Wednesday, 5 October 2016 

Baracoa, Cuba, Wednesday, 5 October 2016.