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

[MIKA27]

Scotch’s 5,000-Year-Old Key Ingredient

American craft spirits brands have recently taken a cue from ’cue—barbecue, that is. People love the smoky flavor of meats cooked slow and low over a carefully-tended, smoldering fire and distillers have begun to add that complex essence to their liquor.

Hillrock Estate Distillery, in New York’s Hudson Valley, for one, smokes the barley it grows on its land over peat fires. Corsair Distillery in Nashville goes even further with its Triple Smoke whiskey, using grains smoked over peat, as well as beech and cherry wood fires. The smoke adds flavor, aroma and a richness and depth to the whiskey. (There is even a new gin made with applewood-smoked juniper.)

But this technique, of course, is old hat to the world’s most famous whisky makers in Scotland. Scotch is often associated with the smoky tang of peat and is described using words like iodine, bonfire and tar and diesel, or the more abstract Band-Aid. Peat is a polarizing flavor. Those who enjoy it have an insatiable desire for it, seeking out whiskies with ominous names like Big Peat, Peat Monster and Supernova.

But despite the ingredient’s fame, just about anytime I conduct a single-malt tasting for the public, a brave soul works up the nerve to ask me, “So…what is peat?”

It is a simple question with an equally simple, if a bit lengthy, answer. Peat starts as peat moss, the gardening compost found in bags at your local hardware store. The moss grows in bogs and wetlands. As it grows, year after year, the weight of new growth gradually presses older plants down into the water and mud.

But because this plant matter is under water, away from air, it does not rot. It compacts and becomes a solid, dark brown mass. The process is actually the earliest stage of coal production. And, like coal, carbon-rich peat can be burned for fuel. About two percent of the world’s land surface is peat, and it has been a traditional source of fuel for much of human existence.

Scotch whisky uses peat on a small, hand-labor scale. Peat cutters work a bog with hand tools, cutting two-foot-long strips of peat—called turves—and turning them out on dry ground to drain. The dried turves are then sent to the malt makers.

The first step in making malt for whisky is to wet barley so it begins to germinate and its stores of starch turn into readily fermentable sugar. The final step is to heat up the barley, which prevents the grain from sprouting and growing into plants.

Today that is usually done in giant natural gas—fired ovens, the advantage being that the method doesn’t affect the flavor of the grain, which ultimately produces a fruitier, lighter whisky. But when you’re making a smoky whisky, go old school: reach for the turves. In a peat-fired malt kiln, the malt is spread out on a perforated floor directly above a chimney, allowing billows of the pungent smoke rising up from the peat fire to flavor the grain.

The smoke is more than distinctive, it’s regional. Echoing the wine world’s so-called terroir—the effect of place on the flavor of a wine—peat is different everywhere it is cut. Plants, soil, water source and temperature can all differ, and that makes for clear variations in smoke flavor. Chemical analysis reveals that these differences are indeed real and measurable. And while the human nose has known that for years, it is nice to have scientific authentication.

Most Scotch distillers buy their smoked malt; the big Port Ellen malting, on the island of Islay, supply many of them. But some still smoke their own grains in small in-house facilities. On the island of Orkney, I followed a load of peat from Hobbister Moor, to the nearby fireroom at Highland Park’s distillery. The cutting face at Hobbister is about six-feet deep, revealing about 5,000 years’ worth of peat. All the way down, where the peat was quite black and solidly compacted, I could still see individual plant stems dating back to 3,000 B.C.

Once the peat was dried and taken to the distillery, I got a chance to shovel some into the fire. But I screwed up: things went up in flames. “Don’t waste it,” I was told. I quickly shoveled more in on top of the hot spot and a rewarding cloud of reek rose. In 15 years, you can enjoy a bottle of the final product—and thank me.

[MIKA27]

A Closer Look At The Stunning Movie Art Of MondoCon '16

Mondo is mainly known for their insanely gorgeous collection of pop culture posters and other collectable pieces, but in recent years, it’s also transformed itself into an event. The third MondoCon begins this weekend, and to celebrate, we have a look at three of the gorgeous prints that will be available to attendees.

There’s a host of other merchandise being made available at the con, including two pretty sweet vinyl soundtracks for The Fountain and The Monster Squad, featuring art by Nicole Gustafsson and Gary Pullin respectively, as well an artbook of the work of Jock. But Mondo’s main draw will always be its pop culture prints, and we have an exclusive look at three of the many prints that will be available this weekend, making their debut here: Oliver Barrett’s The Martian, Tom Whalen’s Wall-E and a fantastic commemoration of Disney’s old The Legend of Sleepy Hollow cartoon by J.C. Richard (the latter two produced in collaboration with Cyclops Print Works). Check ’em out:

THE MARTIAN by Oliver Barrett / Mondo.

Mondo X Cyclops Print Works: The Legend of Sleepy Hollow, by JC Richard

Mondo X Cyclops Print Works: Wall-E, by Tom Whalen

Kicking off in Austin, Texas, this Saturday, October 22 (Formula 1 Weekend), the third MondoCon will feature a great many more posters (some still to be revealed) along with a plethora of panels offering inside looks at not just the creative process behind the lavish posters Mondo is known for, but the movies and media that inspire their artists. This year includes everything from screenings of A Clockwork Orange and Enter the Dragon to a panel with composer Clint Mansell to celebrate the 10th Anniversary of The Fountain, to a live poster creation by Olly Moss, Jock and Jay Shaw.

Tickets for MondoCon 2016 are available now. Head to the link for more info, too.

[MIKA27]

Daredevil (Idiot?) Almost Misses The Water From 40 Metres Up

I’m totally safe and sitting in front of a computer screen, and yet I’m sweating because watching this guy pull his crazy jumps from buildings is just not OK. This one is especially brutal because I really didn’t expect him to end up where he landed. He starts on the roof of the building 40m in the air and ends up safely down in the harbour — but I thought he was gunning for that soft middle landing of water between the dock and not, like, on the freaking other side.

He barely dodges the dock too. The wrist camera angle is even scarier because you see the world fall around him as he’s making his jump.

 

[MIKA27]

MIT's Fusion Reactor Broke A World Record Right Before The Feds Shut It Off

MIT’s fusion program has fallen on hard times, but that hasn’t stopped it from smashing world records and keeping the dream of limitless, carbon-free energy alive. At an International Atomic Energy Agency summit in Japan this week, researchers involved with MIT’s Alcator C-Mod tokamak reactor announced that their machine had generated the highest plasma pressure ever recorded.

The fusion reactor hit this milestone near midnight on September 30, the very last day of its operation. “We were pushing parameters purposefully at the end, to see if we could exceed the value we’d achieved in the past,” Martin Greenwald, the deputy director of MIT’s Plasma Science and Fusion Center told Gizmodo. “It was pretty exciting.”

Fusion is a futuristic energy source physicists have been chasing for about 50 years. The idea, in a nutshell, is heat atoms up to a hundred million degrees or so, at which point they rip apart and become a free-flowing mess of protons and electrons called a plasma. Then, harness the tremendous bursts of energy released when stripped atomic nuclei collide.

The problem is that in order to get more energy out of a fusion reactor than we put in, we need to achieve a self-sustaining plasma, one that burns on its own with only minimal energy inputs. But plasmas can only reach this so-called “steady state” if they can be contained, and extraordinarily hot atomic soup does not like to be contained. It likes to splatter everywhere.

There are a few different routes one can take to try and promote a steady state plasma. MIT’s doughnut-shaped tokamak reactor was focused on magnetic confinement, that is, using extremely powerful magnetic fields to force atoms close together. And, seeing as this method just bagged itself a new world record for a plasma pressure of over two atmospheres, it’s probably not a bad direction for fusion enthusiasts to keep pushing.

Unfortunately, the record was hit right before the Alcator C-Mod reactor, the world’s only compact, high-magnetic field fusion reactor of the tokamak design, was pulled offline for good. After 23 years of operation, the US Department of Energy has cancelled its support for MIT’s record-smashing device due to the fact that a gigantic, $US30 billion ($39 billion) superconducting reactor in France, called ITER, is now devouring the lion’s share of fusion research dollars. Depending on who you talk to, ITER is either the future of fusion energy, or a bloated, bureaucratic mess that will stall progress in the field for the next 20 years.

Either way, MIT’s fusion program, which has over the years attracted some of the most brilliant minds in plasma physics, has effectively been castrated. According to Greenwald, the university is now seeking to private investors to jumpstart a new line of research in low-cost, compact fusion reactors, which grad students drew up designs for last winter. It’s also applying for more government funding to study different aspects of the plasma confinement problem, including interactions between hot plasma and the more ordinary materials lining a fusion reactor wall.

The latest fusion milestone is a bittersweet one, and I stand by my belief that the real problem with fusion energy is not an intrinsic scientific barrier. It’s whether we can give academics the time and resources they need to tackle some enormous technological challenges, without the constant fear of losing funding support. The big payoff in fusion may not come for decades, but let’s remember what it is: Star power.

 

[MIKA27]

Someone's Making A Handheld Gaming PC

Imagine you’re sitting on the train, or you’re mid-flight, and you get the urge to play Civilization. Or Metro: Last Light. Or Skyrim. Or one of the many indie games in your Steam library.

Now imagine pulling not a laptop or a Windows tablet out of your bag, but a handheld PC. That’s what the Smach Z promises to do.

It’s basically a miniature gaming PC that uses a Radeon R7, 8GB of DDR 4 RAM and the AMD Merlin Falcon RX-421BD quad core SoC, compressed into the size of a handheld console. The Merlin Falcon can run at up to 3.4GHz, and while the Radeon R7 won’t come close to any of the latest and greatest GPUs on the market it’s enough to run the majority of the Steam back catalogue at playable frame rates.

The handheld PC is a Kickstarter project right now, sitting at €155,218 of its €250,000 goal. There’s 31 days remaining on the campaign, so it’s basically a certainty to get funded at this point, and you can see footage of the SMACH Z — and how some of the games play — below.

The controls are a little akin to what you’d find on the Steam controller: two haptic pads, four face buttons, a single analogue stick and a couple of forward/back buttons. It’s quite a wide unit, almost a little reminiscent of the Wii U:

Here’s the kind of performance the creators say you can expect from the SMACH Z, although I’d be tempted to drop some of the presets down:

Metro: Last Light Redux (720p. High settings) ~ 35 FPS
Company of Heroes 2 (720p. Medium settings) ~ 25 FPS
Jotun (1080p) ~ 45 FPS
Skyrim (720p. High setting) ~ 25 FPS
Just Cause 2 (720p. Medium settings) ~ 35 FPS
Spiral Knights (1080p) ~ 50 FPS
Overwatch (720p. Medium) ~ 30 FPS
Torchlight II (1080p. Very high settings) ~ 35 FPS
XCOM: Enemy Unknown (720p. High settings) ~30 FPS
Civilization 5 (1080p. High settings) ~ 28 FPS
Tomb Raider: Survivor (720p. Medium settings) ~ 40 FPS
Alien: Isolation (720p. Ultra settings) ~ 35 FPS

For a machine like this you’re not going to get buttery smooth 60fps at 1080p, especially on high presets, and I can see that being a dealbreaker for some. But maintaining above 30fps at 720p should be more than achievable on lower settings, and for something that’s less hassle than a full tablet or laptop that isn’t a bad option.

Keep in mind, this is a unit running Windows 10 — so you can happily turn it into a retro emulator or just stick to your GOG library. The makers are planning to integrate KODI for media centre functionality as well, and while it wouldn’t be the most intuitive experience you’ll be able to browse online with 5GHz Wi-Fi capability and bluetooth.

If you’re interested, you can learn more about the SMASH Z on Kickstarter. It’ll set you back just under $400 for the lowest available tier with a SMACH Z, while pledges for the SMACH Z Pro — which has 8GB DDR4 RAM, 4G connectivity, a front camera and “double internal HD” — start from $641. Shipping is an extra $14.30, and the developers are currently targeting April next year for a release.

What do you think: would you play PC games on a handheld device, or would it be better to spend more money on a Surface or a more capable laptop?

[MIKA27]

How Chuck Berry Became the Greatest Rock ‘n’ Roll Artist of a Generation

The most influential rock ’n’ roll artist of a generation will release his first new album in decades next year. On his 90th birthday, we look back at what makes him an icon.

Chuck Berry is the greatest rock ’n’ roll artist of his generation. Elvis Presley may have become the hyper-branded icon and Little Richard may have the larger-than-life persona, but it’s Chuck with the richest body of work. His distinctive guitar riffing made him a fixture on the charts in the 1950s and it made the instrument rock ’n’ roll’s definitive symbol. Unlike Elvis, Berry wrote and played his classic tunes, and unlike Richard, Berry managed to extend his career past his 1950s run with a string of strong singles in the early 1960s. Berry’s influence is impossible to overstate—as a songwriter, lyricist, and guitarist, he’s the most complete summation of what “rock ’n’ roll” is at its purest.

“Chuck Berry, he just leapt out of the radio at me,” Keith Richards said while honoring Berry at the 2013 Polar Awards in Sweden. “I ate him basically, I mean I breathed him—it wasn't just food, he was the air I breathed for many years when I was learning guitar and trying to figure out how you could be such an all-rounder. Such a great voice, such a great player and also such a great showman… it was all in one package.”

Berry isn’t the first rock ’n’ roller by any stretch or distinction. Sister Rosetta Tharpe’s flashy guitar leads were featured on hit records as far back as 1939. Wynonie Harris’s kinetic brand of jump blues hit the charts in the mid-1940s. The Ike Turner-penned Jackie Breston hit “Rocket 88” was released in 1951, Big Mama Thornton’s “Hound Dog” was a hit in 1953, and the Big Joe Turner version of “Shake Rattle & Roll” charted at No. 22 on the Billboard chart in 1954—with Bill Haley’s version going to No. 7 just three months later. Even Elvis Presley’s debut, his famous 1954 cover of Arthur “Big Boy” Crudup’s “That’s Alright,” predated Chuck Berry’s classic debut single “Maybelline” by a year.

But Berry is undoubtedly rock ’n’ roll’s greatest creative voice. No singular artist did more to shape the sound, image and attitude of rock ’n’ roll music, and no figure mainstreamed that sound more successfully than the man born Charles Edward Berry. Combining his swift-finger bluesy leads with an emphasis on country-inflected melodicism and a knack for clever wordplay and storytelling, Chuck’s winking story songs like “Sweet Little Sixteen” and “Beautiful Delilah” had Little Richard-level energy. But instead of banging away on a piano, Chuck’s guitar was always front-and-center—both musically and visually.

Chuck Berry had broken into the music business by gigging regularly at the Cosmopolitan Club in his hometown of St. Louis, playing in the Sir John’s Trio alongside pianist Johnnie Johnson. It was Johnson’s style that would inform Berry’s distinctive riffs on guitar, and Berry himself explained that his sound came from a myriad of influences. 
“Well, the first time I heard in that was in one of Carl Hogan’s riffs in Louis Jordan’s band,” Berry explained in the 1987 rock doc Hail! Hail! Rock & Roll. “We have T-Bone Walker, I love T-Bone Walker's slurs and his blueses; so put a little Carl Hogan, a little T-Bone Walker and a little Charlie Christian, the guitarist in Tommy Dorsey’s band, together: Look what a span of people that you will please. And that’s what I did in ‘Johnny B. Goode,’ ‘Roll Over Beethoven’—and making it simple is another important fact, I think, that resulted in a lot of the artists understanding, and being able to play, my music. If you can call it my music, but there’s nothing new under the sun.”

Berry’s performances were famously high-energy, with his distinctive “duck walk” becoming a rock ’n’ roll mainstay. Having been forged in the tradition of black music, Berry would later reflect on why he thought it important to be so visual. Berry presented rhythm ’n’ blues showmanship to a white audience that had largely been unaware of it before the mid-1950s.

“People don’t want to see 17 pieces in neckties,” he said. “They wanna see some jeans, some gettin’ down and some wigglin’. Charlie Christian played amplified guitar with Benny Goodman’s quartet. He was the greatest guitar player that ever was. But he never looked up from the guitar. But I put a little dance to it. They appreciate seein’ something along with hearin’ something.”

Berry’s music was also undeniably youthful. Songs like “Sweet Little Rock & Roller” and “Too Much Monkey Business” were playfully bawdy but emphasized a youth culture centered around dancing, rock ’n’ roll music and cars, echoing the kind of breakthrough that Bill Haley had enjoyed with “Rock Around the Clock” after the song was featured in Blackboard Jungle in spring 1955. That song became a cultural touchstone in the mainstreaming of rock ’n’ roll and the marrying of the genre to American youth culture. And Berry was the artist who most fully realized the shift that “Rock Around the Clock” had indicated was coming.

During an NBC appearance in the late ’70s, Berry was asked who he would consider the founding father of rock ’n’ roll.

“It’s not for me to say, but I’m surely a cog in the wheel,” Berry stated. “Louis Jordan and Elvis Presley and even Fats Waller and… Little Richard was great in the beginning and Bill Haley… we all got the ball rolling.”

That ball would roll right through the British Invasion of the 1960s, the emergence of psychedelic music in the late ’60s/early ’70s, frenetic punk riffs that emerged later in that decade, and the glossy hard-rock tunes popularized for the MTV generation in the 1980s. Chuck Berry is rock ’n’ roll’s pulse. He’s been embedded in the genre’s very DNA since 1955.

The late 1950s and early 1960s saw Richard walking away from rock ’n’ roll to pursue Christian ministry, Buddy Holly’s death in a plane crash, Presley drafted into the Army, and Jerry Lee Lewis being blackballed. In 1959, Chuck Berry was arrested under the Mann Act, which made it a felony to engage in interstate or foreign commerce transport of “any woman or girl for the purpose of prostitution or debauchery, or for any other immoral purpose.” Berry met a 14-year-old girl in Juarez, Mexico, and would claim that he’d simply offered her a job at his nightclub in St. Louis. She went to the police and Berry was arrested, and subsequently convicted in 1960. Sentenced to five years, Berry successfully appealed his conviction, citing disparaging and racist remarks made by the judge.

Regarding the trial, author Bruce Pegg mentions in his Berry book Brown Eyed Handsome Man, that Berry’s attorney was adamant that the judge consistently made references to race throughout the proceedings. “Quite simply,” writes Pegg, “Merele Silverstein maintains with these outbursts Moore made a mockery of Chuck’s race. Every witness that got on the stand, when they identified somebody, the judge would interrupt and say ‘Was that a white man or a black man?’ attempting to remind the jury at every turn that they needed to view the events through the lens of race.”

Nonetheless, Berry was again convicted following a retrial in 1961 and sentenced to three years at the Federal Medical Center in Springfield, Missouri. For years, Berry would deny that he’d gone to prison.

“That’s the misconceptions that people have, that Chuck Berry went to jail,” he said in 1972. “They’re just totally wrong. It might have said something in the large papers in the bigger city headlines and things. But, you take a look at any of the local papers and you will see that I was acquitted. I never went to jail.”

While he would never again be the rock ’n’ roll rebel icon he was in the 1950s, Elvis returned from the Army in 1960 to a burgeoning film career. Upon his release from jail in 1963, Berry had no leading-man roles waiting, but he would return to the charts with singles like “Nadine,” “No Particular Place to Go” and “You Never Can Tell.” Like so many of his classic hits, all of these songs were written by Berry. Unlike virtually all of his ’50s peers, Berry was still able to deliver career-defining songs in the ’60s following his prison stint—songs that weren’t uninspired pop or re-workings of older ideas. “Promised Land” was a song that featured Berry subtly incorporating social awareness into his lyrics. The song refers to several cities where the Freedom Riders stopped in May 1961 as they rode buses through the South in protest of Jim Crow.

“He was stopped [throughout the South],” Berry biographer Howard DeWitt once explained. “But he kind of flipped a middle finger in their face.” Berry was pragmatic about making songs that could attract mass audiences—and long after his peers were past their primes, it was clear he still knew how to do just that.

“You don’t just go to the studio and say, ‘I’m going to write a hit.’ It becomes a hit when people like your compositions,” as Berry explained to Esquire in 2007. 

Though he was nearing 40, Berry still resonated with a generation of young people. Despite his songs’ appeal, Berry admitted that he never felt much more than a superficial kinship with the teens who were gravitating to his records. “I didn’t connect with the kids. I was in the studio. I never saw the kids,” he said. “I hoped they liked it, of course. And then I’d go write some more. And then I’d go buy me a home. Very American.”

Berry has always been unapologetically business-minded (“Respect isn’t enough. You’ve got to have a proprietary interest”), and fiercely autonomous. For much of his career, he’s managed his own business affairs and frequently traveled alone; he demands that concert promoters provide a backing band for his shows. In the late 1950s, he purchased a 35-acre plot in St. Charles County where he would subsequently build Berry Park, a sprawling compound with a 17,000-square-foot mansion, guest cottages, a nightclub and a swimming pool shaped like a guitar. It’s a testament to his vision and determination. 

Berry has made money from the top-selling covers of his songs that are featured on albums by British Invasion acts, his touring, and other business endeavors over the years. He’s been a steady performer for decades, though health issues have forced him to scale back in recent years. In 2012, he explained that his voice just isn’t there anymore.

“Give you a song? I can’t do that. My singing days have passed,” he said. “My voice is gone. My throat is worn. And my lungs are going fast. I think that explains it.”
But despite his claims in 2012, Berry is celebrating turning 90 with new music—his first new album in 38 years. Featuring collaborations with his children, the album is Berry’s belated follow-up to 1979’s Rock It and is dedicated to his wife of 58 years, Thelmetta. 

“This record is dedicated to my beloved Toddy,” Berry said via statement. “My darlin’ I’m growing old! I’ve worked on this record for a long time. Now I can hang up my shoes!”
If this is the last recording from Chuck Berry, he’s more than earned his down time. Before the upheaval of the 1960s simultaneously made rock ’n’ more eclectic and more diluted, the definitive template of the genre was forged via Chuck Berry’s sound. But more than that, he became rock ’n’ roll’s greatest ambassador. There was no “Fat Elvis’ period for Chuck Berry. Pick a year and you’d see him delivering vital, honest rock ’n’ roll on a stage somewhere. And pick any artist and you can see where his lineage courses through popular music.

The Beach Boys’ “Surfin’ USA” was a rip of Chuck’s “Sweet Little Sixteen.” The Beatles covered Berry in their early shows and recorded covers of “Rock & Roll Music” and “Roll Over Beethoven.” Bob Dylan cited Berry’s “Too Much Monkey Business” as the inspiration for “Subterranean Homesick Blues.” It’s impossible to not hear a song like “Memphis” as a touchstone for Paul Simon’s songwriting. And The Rolling Stones’ first single was a cover of “Come On,” Berry’s last single before prison.

In 1969, Berry was interviewed by Rolling Stone and, after discussing the impact of Les Paul on his playing (“I suppose he’s a jazz musician. His ‘How High the Moon’ is just beautiful”), he was asked about his own impact on disciples like Mick Jagger. Berry scoffed at the Stones frontman.

“Not to my knowledge have I talked to this person of whom you spoke—Dick Jagger?” Berry said at the time—but he knew the band and his influence on it. “The Rolling Stones… The Rolling Stones have a reflection to my music, I wouldn’t deny it. I think that’s honest.”

Berry would interact with those inspired by his music on a fairly consistent basis. He appeared on The Mike Douglas Show in 1972 with John Lennon and Yoko Ono for a rousing performance of “Johnny B. Goode.” In Hail! Hail! Rock & Roll, the rock ’n’ roll legend was honored by Bruce Springsteen, Etta James, Eric Clapton, and Keith Richards. Berry and Richards would develop a love-hate relationship forged in both respect and frustration. In 2014, Richards recalled during an appearance on The Tonight Show With Jimmy Fallon an incident where Berry punched him in the face.

“I was back in a dressing room; he was doing a gig,” Richards explains. “He went up to collect the money, I think. He was a tightwad—bless you, Chuck. But his guitar was laid out in its case like, ‘Aw, c’mon, Keith,’ you know, ‘just a touch. Just let me give it an E chord.’ He walks in and goes, ‘Nobody touches my guitar!’”

“There were fireworks,” said Hail! Hail!... director Taylor Hackford in an interview with Rolling Stone shortly after the film’s premiere. “Keith forced Chuck for the first time in 20 years to play like he hadn’t played in a long time.”

“If it’s sweetness and light, everyone kissing on the lips, it’s not that interesting to me,” he continued. “These were two strong personalities. The pupil and the mentor, and in this case Keith was the leader of the band, and he put together a great band. Keith forced Chuck to rehearse, and he didn’t like that. But there was a mutual respect."

Friends and associates have had to wrestle with the duality of Berry’s personality; just as fans have been forced to face the more sordid elements of his past and legal history.

Alongside his early 1960s conviction, Berry would serve time in the late 1970s for tax evasion and, in 1989, Berry was sued by Hosana A. Huck, a former cook at Berry’s Southern Air Restaurant in suburban Wentzville. 

The suit accused Berry of creating videotapes of her using the restaurant’s bathroom “for the improper purpose of entertainment and gratification.” In 1990, the rocker’s home was raided and authorities found videotapes, marijuana, weapons, and cash. Shortly thereafter, he was sued by several other women who accused Berry of videotaping them in bathrooms on his property. Berry would settle the videotape suits for roughly $1.3 million in 1994.

Honoring Chuck Berry, as with so many other icons of his generation, comes with more than a little baggage; but as the legend turns 90, it’s important to celebrate the richness of his legacy—warts and all. We have always taken Chuck Berry for granted. He emerged from every scandal still Chuck. He didn’t die young in some mysterious tragedy, never became a reclusive genius and hasn’t been omnipresent at award shows and TV tributes. He’s just always been out there, rockin’ and a-rollin’ and playin’ guitar just like he’s ringin’ a bell. We should give him his flowers while he’s still with us. He fought hard enough for them.

“It amazes me when I hear people say, ‘I want to go out and find out who I am,’” he told Esquire in 2007. “I always knew who I was. 

“I was going to be famous if it killed me.” 

[MIKA27]

The New Assassin’s Creed Movie Trailer Will Take You Higher

“I believe you are destined for great things.”

That’s shifty-seeming businessman Alan Rikkin (Jeremy Irons) giving his sales-pitch to Callum Lynch (Michael Fassbender) in the latest trailer for the forthcoming action film Assassin’s Creed, which is based on the best-selling video game series. Fassbender’s character is probably going to need a good bit of convincing: A career criminal, he’s been recruited into a secret cabal of dangerous warriors, and his new gig requires him to tap into the memories of an ancient relative, so that he can fight in the Spanish Inquisition (if that all sounds a might confusing, check out our explanatory Creed screed from earlier this year).

Judging by the latest footage in this new trailer—which includes glimpses of costars Marion Cotillard and Michael K. Williams—Fassbender will get quite the workout in Creed.

He leaps from rooftop to rooftop, and either employs or avoids all manner of weapons, including axes, crossbows, arrows, torches, and daggers. But will the fierce fighter have the stamina, and the wherewithal, to get through the Inquisition without making a single Monty Python joke?

We’ll find out when Assassin’s Creed opens Dec. 21.

[MIKA27]

SEGA MEGA DRIVE ULTIMATE PORTABLE GAME PLAYER

What the Beatles and the Rolling Stones were to rock and roll, Nintendo and Sega were to early home gaming. So it’s no surprise that, with Nintendo’s announcement of their plug-and-play NES Classic, Sega is looking to get themselves in on the action. Sega, however, has already released versions of their classic consoles as plug-and-play machines – so, in order to stay both fresh and to offer up something their competitor hasn’t, they’ve released a fully-loaded handheld console.

Called the Sega Mega Drive Ultimate Portable Game Player – quite a mouthful – this retro gaming console is chock full of 80 Sega games (40 16-bit classics and 40 “bonus games”), including multiple entries from both the Sonic and Mortal Kombat catalogs. That’s more than double what Nintendo has promised. And, though you might think the 3.2″ LCD screen on this device doesn’t compare to your massive HDMI flatscreen, you don’t have to choose one or the other – the SMDUPGP can plug directly into your television. It even has an SD card slot so that you can download additional games to play on your device. It retails for just $54. [Purchase]

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The Best Whisky in the World, According to Jim Murray

There’s no shortage of whiskey recommendations, but there aren’t that many that come from as renowned a place as Jim Murray’s Whisky Bible.

Every year, Jim Murray compiles a list of his favorite international whiskeys, and his picks always end up surprising some people. Booker’s Rye 13 Year Old is his pick for best whisky in the world this year, saying it’s a “staggering example of a magnificent rye showing exactly what genius in terms of whiskey actually means.”

Second place goes to Glen Grant 18 Year Old, while third is taken by William Larue Weller Bourbon. But those are just his overall top three. He also has picks in every type of whiskey you can think of, so if you’re looking for a whiskey themed activity for the next year, sip your way through this list.

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Star Wars Art: 

Star Wars fans rejoice, Star Wars Art: Ralph McQuarrie is a new book showcasing the most iconic artist in the history of Star Wars. Ralph McQuarrie worked hand-in-hand with George Lucas to help establish the saga’s visual aesthetic, its inimitable look and feel. The 800 page, two-book set features over 2,000 illustrations from conceptual paintings, costume designs, storyboards, book covers, and even Lucasfilm´s annual holiday cards, all rescanned and rephotographed for this book. 

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Mysterious 'Hybrid' Animal Discovered In 18,000-Year-Old Cave Art

By combining archaeological, paleontological, and genetic evidence, an international team of researchers has identified a previously unknown hybrid species that contains both bison and cattle DNA. The discovery solves a longstanding mystery about the origins of modern European bison.

A new paper published in Nature Communications serves as an excellent case study in how several different disciplines can be brought together to solve a complex scientific problem — and how the work of ancient humans can be brought in to help. Owing to a dearth of fossils, paleontologists have struggled to understand the origins of the modern European bison, one of just a few large land mammals to survive the late Pleistocene extinctions at the end of the last Ice Age some 11,000 years ago.

By analysing the ancient genomes of 64 bison, and cross-referencing these findings with ancient European cave art and radiocarbon-dated bones, researchers have shown that a new species of bison appeared around 120,000 years ago. This event was an unexpected product of the interbreeding between the now-extinct Steppe bison and the aurochs, an ancestor of modern cattle.

This hybrid creature would eventually emerge into the animal we recognise as the European bison, but there’s a tremendous 108,000-year gap in the fossil record. European bison only appeared in the fossil record around 11,700 years ago, which coincided with the disappearance of the Steppe bison. Due to a lack of older fossils, paleontologists were at a loss to explain where this new creature suddenly came from.

To solve this enduring mystery, Alan Cooper from the University of Adelaide in Australia recruited the assistance of several other institutions, including the University of California, Santa Cruz (UCSC), Polish bison conservation researchers, and paleontologists across Europe and Russia. And unbeknownst to the ancient humans who drew paintings on the walls of caves over 20,000 years ago, they’d be recruited as well; their renditions of these ancient species would be used to fill the holes left in the fossil record.

The geneticists on the team extracted the bison’s evolutionary history from its ancient DNA, revealing a hybridisation event in its distant past that involved the Steppe bison and the aurochs. Radiocarbon dating was applied to bones and teeth found in caves across Europe, allowing the scientists to establish timelines and trace the genetic history of bison populations through time.

“From radiocarbon dating the bones we can see that the Steppe bison and our new species alternated through time in terms of ecological dominance, such that only one or the other was common in Europe for large swathes of time, and that the changeovers between the two species match big climate switches,” Cooper told Gizmodo. “Our new species dominated during periods when conditions were more tundra-like, without warm summers.”

Incredibly, early cave artists recorded distinct creatures consistent with these findings. Despite the fossil gap, the evolution of these animals as depicted in cave art between 21,000 and 18,000 years ago was accurately matched to the genetic evidence. To prove this, Cooper’s team sought the expertise of French cave researchers, who verified the presence of two distinct forms of bison art in the Ice Age caves. What’s more, the ages of the paintings matched those of the different species.

They didn’t know it at the time, but the cave artists were documenting two species in transition. Looking at the paintings, the researchers noticed changes in the appearance of bovids that coincided with the emergence of European bison. Paintings that were older than 18,000 years ago depict animals with long horns and large front legs (similar to the American bison, which are likely descended from Steppe bison). But more recent paintings from around 12,000 to 17,000 years ago show animals with shorter horns and smaller humps — animals that are similar to Modern European Bison.

Reproduction of cave art representing a Steppe bison

The researchers say the cave paintings are reliable in terms of their accuracy, recording more detail than what’s typically appreciated. “In this case, supposed stylistic or cultural variation in bison depiction turned out to be accurate recording that there were two different forms of bison at the time: the new hybrid species we’ve detected, and the standard Steppe bison,” Cooper told Gizmodo.

The discovery of a hybrid species came as a surprise to the researchers, who say this doesn’t typically happen to mammals. When it does happen, such as the intermixing between polar bears and brown bears, the “daughter” species is almost always subsumed back into the population of the parent species — the brown bears in this case. The reason is that the hybrid isn’t really adapted to any particular environment, consisting of half of one animal, and half of another.

“Clearly, our new bison escaped this trap and managed to carve out a niche for itself on the Ice Age European landscape,” Copper told Gizmodo. “Not only that, it went on to survive the megafaunal extinctions that took down the other large species, including the Steppe Bison — and remains the largest land mammal in Europe.”

This animal has had a history of touch-and-go survival, one that extends right through to the 20th century. Following the First World War, the population was reduced to just 12. This tremendous bottleneck resulted in significant alterations to the bison’s appearance, which explains why the ancient form appears so much like a new species. Today, the European bison survives in protected reserves in forests between Poland and Belarus.

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New Force Awakens Deleted Scene Proves Why You Should Always Let The Wookiee Win

C-3PO’s sage advice to R2-D2 in A New Hope served as a terse reminder as to why you should never cross Chewbacca — but The Force Awakens nearly had a scene that would have reminded us of this wisdom in a much more brutal fashion, and now you can see a glimpse of it.

Revealed through Entertainment Weekly today, and included among others on the upcoming 3D re-release of the film alongside a new commentary track from director J.J. Abrams, the new deleted scene takes place on Takodana, and sees Rey bump into her “old friend” Unkar Plutt in Maz’s bar, just after Finn departs the group.

Plutt is trying to reclaim the Millennium Falcon, but the young scavenger is having none of it. Happily, Chewbacca is there to offer his help in getting the point across:

Although the clip above doesn’t show it, Unkar’s goading of the wounded Wookiee leads to a rather graphic moment in The Force Awakens‘ novelization, which was based on an earlier draft of the movie script. After Plutt provokes him, Chewie responds with the same threat Han warned he was capable of after nearly losing that game of Dejarik in A New Hope:

Grabbing the thrusting arm, a roaring Chewbacca twisted and ripped it off at the shoulder, throwing the dismembered limb clear across the room. Looking down at himself, Plutt let out a scream of agony…

It would have been rather graphic, especially from the usually restrained Star Wars movies, to show someone’s arm getting torn off… but it’s hard to deny that Unkar Plutt would have deserved it. One quarter-portion for all those doodads?! What a jerk.

The Force Awakens 3D re-release hits shelves November 2.

 

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Behold, Your New Guardians Of The Galaxy

James Gunn has dropped the first teaser poster for Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2 — and not only does it give us our first “official” look beyond concept art of just how adorable baby Groot is, it gives us our first good look at the new incarnation of the team.

Just how goddamn cute is little baby Groot? (He’s clutching Star-Lord’s boot, if you didn’t spot him at first.)

While the teaser poster doesn’t tell us much, it does seemingly confirm what the first concept art teased, and something that was rumoured for many months — Karen Gillan’s Nebula and Michael Rooker’s Yondu are now part of the team.

Not seen just yet? Pom Klementieff’s Mantis, who we definitely know is a new member of the Guardians.

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And Whilst on topic: Watch The Guardians Of The Galaxy Vol. 2 Teaser Trailer Right Here

The first trailer is full of cryptic looks at the team, including Yondu, Nebula and new costumes for Gamora and Star-Lord, but ends with one solid gag — Drax consoling Star-Lord after a seeming breakup with Gamora. “You just need to find someone who is pathetic, like you.” Awesome.

Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2 hits theatres 27 April 2017.

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Watch New York City Chess Hustlers Get Pwned By Grandmaster Magnus Carlsen

It’s tough to beat the chess hustlers in New York City’s parks — unless you’re the best chess player in the world.

A new viral video shows 25-year-old Norwegian chess grandmaster Magnus Carlsen leaving the famous Marshall Chess Club in New York City, and deciding to take a stroll over to Washington Square Park, where he walks straight up to the best players and destroys them in about 10 moves.

“At the moment, I didn’t know who it was,” said one of the chess hustlers. “I was just playing. I tried to win, but when I saw him make a move, already I knew it was like… you know… he’s a very strong player. In like 10 moves, he checkmated me.”

Most players are just trying to complete a defensive castle within 10 moves, but Carlsen just went straight for the kill, and somehow succeeded. Pure genius. No wonder Carlsen has been described as the “Mozart of Chess” before. Check out the full video, complete with an appearance from Liv Tyler (?), for a complete understanding of how ridiculous this kid is.

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Crazy Guy Stings Himself With One Of The Most Painful Insects On The Planet

The tarantula hawk is neither a tarantula nor a hawk — it’s a very big, very mean desert wasp. And of course someone on the internet decided to get stung by one.

Oddly, the tarantula hawk isn’t a particularly aggressive insect. Generally they buzz around, eating nectar and avoiding humans or other animals. It’s even the state insect of New Mexico. The thought of friendly, brightly coloured bugs peacefully humming around cacti almost makes up for their horrifying reproductive cycle.

A quarter inch long, the female’s stinger is vital to the process of making more tarantula hawks. The sting itself — which is one of the few to rank as a 4 on the Schmidt sting pain index — is used to paralyse an unsuspecting tarantula so that an egg can be laid inside its body. As it grows it eats away the spider’s organs until bursting out Alien-style to begin the process anew. Unsurprisingly, a sting that can make a spider unable to fend off its new job as a living womb is enough to impart excruciating pain on a human.

Thankfully, that pain only lasts about 5 minutes, but it looks to be a very, very long 5 minutes. View from 10:40 Mark

 

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AIRBNB DRACULA’S TRANSYLVANIAN CASTLE

Bran castle, which is located in the principality of Transylvania, Romania is the only edifice in the entire country which exactly matches the description of legendary vampire Dracula’s castle in Bram Stoker’s novel. Which makes sense, as it’s been reported that the author used a description of the very same castle as a reference whilst writing. And this Halloween, thanks to Airbnb, you and a guest can win a complimentary trip to stay there in vampiric style.

The rental company’s promotion, which requires no purchase, is perfect for horror, history, and literature fans alike. Upon arrival – “anytime after 7pm,” as specified on the contest page – the winners will be greeted by their host Dacre Stoker, great grandnephew of the famed writer, and taken on a guided tour through the castle’s labyrinthian corridors. Following the tour is a grand candlelit dinner in the main dining hall, before the guests are left to rest in the Count’s Crypt – in which they will sleep in velvet-lined coffins. To enter, you need only submit a short answer to the following question: “what would you say to the Count if you were to come face-to-fang with him in his own castle?” Just be sure to leave your garlic and crucifixes at home, as neither are welcome within the hallowed walls.

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BREITLING EMERGENCY NIGHT MISSION WATCH

As aviation moved out of its infancy and into a prominent form of transportation, Breitling grew with it. Pilots and adventurers alike have come to trust the Swiss, family owned brand to help them navigate safely across oceans and through space. Daring trips don’t always go perfectly, however, which is why Breitling built the Emergency Watch, a model that just recently announced new colorways.

Measuring in at 51mm and with a case thickness of 21.6mm, the Emergency Watch has a commanding presence on the wrist that is further highlighted further by the bezel, face, and straps that now come in a loud yellow, blue, or orange. Inside of the thick titanium casing is a dual antenna that when deployed sends out a dual frequency signal to the international Cospas Sarasat satellite system. Once transmitted, it triggers an emergency response system that can come rescue you from any predicament, no matter where you are. As far as traditional specs on the watch – it features a super-quartz movement that is ten times as accurate as regular quartz watches, a chronograph that measures up to 1/100th of a second, a digital day and date calendar, and a bi-directional bezel. The titanium case and cambered sapphire glare-proofed crystal are capable of keeping the watch waterproof for up to 164 feet underwater. You can get yours for around $18,000. [Purchase]

 

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Earthquake Faults Around San Francisco Are Dangerously Interconnected

Geologists have discovered that two deadly faults beneath San Francisco — the Hayward and Rodgers Creek faults — may be linked. Should one slip, it could trigger the other fault to collapse as well, causing an earthquake even larger than the one that struck back in 1989.

Geologists are very familiar with the Hayward Fault and its potential to unleash devastation along the populated subdivisions just east of San Francisco, but a new paper published in Science Advances by researchers from the US Geological Survey shows that a less-appreciated neighbour to the north, the Rodgers Creek Fault, may be connected. The discovery of a “missing link” between the two faults could change the way city officials plan for the next big earthquake in the Bay area.

Scientists are quite certain that the next major earthquake to strike the region will probably result from a rupture in either the the Hayward or Rodgers Creek faults, but as the new research from USGS geologist Janet Watt and colleagues shows, these faults, which now appear to be interconnected, could rupture simultaneously. If that were to happen, it would produce a magnitude 7.4 quake along their combined 118 miles (190 km).

A quake of this strength would cause extensive damage and loss of life. And at a magnitude 7.4, such a quake would be five times stronger than the 6.9 Loma Prieta quake in 1989, which led to 63 deaths and nearly $US10 ($13) billion in damages.

The Hayward Fault stretches from San Jose to San Pablo Bay, passing through Berkeley and Oakland. New research it extends far enough northwards to join with the Rodgers Creek fault.

Previous work suggested that the two faults were separated by a two-mile wide buffer under the bay. The Hayward Fault stretches for 62 miles (100 km) from San Jose to San Pablo Bay, passing through Berkeley and Oakland, while the Rodgers Creek Fault runs 56 miles (90 km) north of the bay through the heart of northern California.

Watt’s team used high-resolution subsurface imaging to visualise the Hayward fault as it runs under San Pablo Bay. To their surprise, they discovered a previously undetected strand of the fault that bends toward and connects with the Rodgers Creek fault. Using computer models, the researchers found that the stress patterns fit in perfectly with visual observations of fault deformation and seismic activity in the area.

Because they’re interconnected, these two faults basically act as one, making it considerably easier for an earthquake rupture at either the northern or southern portions of the two faults to continue straight on through.

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Everything You Need To Know About X-23, And Why Her Appearance In Logan Is So Important

The first trailer for Logan dropped this morning, giving us confirmation of the long-standing rumour that comic book hero Laura Kinney — a.k.a. X-23 — will be in the movie. If that name doesn’t ring a bell for you, we’re here to help: it’s because little Laura could end up being the key to the future of Wolverine on the big screen.

To put it simply, Laura is a female clone of Wolverine, first introduced in the comics in early 2004. She was actually first created for two episodes of the animated series X-Men: Evolution‘s third season by Craig Kyle and Christopher Yost, before Marvel decided to bring the character over to their comics. Her first comics series, NYX, showcased the teen X-23 in action with no details on her mysterious past, which wouldn’t be fully unveiled until she got her own self-titled miniseries in 2006 and 2011, X-23: Target X and X-23: Innocence Lost.

In the comics, ever since Wolverine escaped the Weapon X project, there were attempts to recreate the successes that lead to his adamantium-encased bone, but they all failed. Martin Sutter, the head of the original Weapon X program, recruited a mutant geneticist named Sarah Kinney to lead a new version of the project — one that, instead of simply trying to bond adamantium to a live test subject, would instead simply clone Weapon X’s biggest successes.

Kinney faced a problem, though. The project’s last sample of Logan’s DNA was heavily damaged, and attempts to make a male clone failed 22 times. Kinney suggested to Sutter that a female clone be created out of what was left of Wolverine’s material — eventually he agreed, leading to the birth of X-23. (Long story short, when Sutter refused at first, Kinney defied him and made a female clone anyway, which led Sutter’s sadistic protege Zander Rice to force Kinney to be impregnated with the clone as “punishment” for defying Sutter. Ick).

Rice exposed the young clone to a series of horrifying experiments to hone her into a ruthless assassin — forcefully removing her claws (X-23 has two on her hands, instead of Logan’s three, but has a third that can protrude from her feet) to bond them with adamantium, and then brutally putting them back in her . Rice also exposed her to radiation to trigger her mutant powers and accelerate her growth, even controling her with a chemical “trigger scent” that would drive her into a blind rage.

After Rice used X-23 to murder Sutter and take control of the project, Kinney helped the clone escape and kill Rice — only for Rice to use the trigger scent on her, causing X-23 to accidentally kill her own mother. Although she was free, she was alone, but Kinney gave X-23 one final thing before she died: the name “Laura.”

Laura went on the run, at first trying to find members of her mother’s family, before ultimately deciding to go after the man responsible for her hellish life: Wolverine himself. Their first encounter ended with SHIELD arresting Laura for her past killings, but she was eventually let go, and spent the next few years watching Wolverine from a distance while just trying to live a normal life, reconciling her murderous past — and occasionally helping Wolverine on secret missions. It wouldn’t be until after the Scarlet Witch rendered most of mutant-kind powerless in 2006 that Laura would step up to the plate as an official member of the X-Men, and then later on as a member of Wolverine’s reformed X-Force, the X-Men’s more violent, covert ops team.

Over the years since her first debut, Laura’s character has been softened, as she’s begun to explore the human side her mother desperately tried to give her as a child. Like Wolverine, she struggled with her violent nature, forming a strong bond with the man who was, essentially, her father, and eventually rose into prominence as one of the most important members of the X-team. Then Logan died — like, actually, finally died — in 2014, leaving her without another of the most important people in her life.

After doing some soul-searching Laura decided to take on the mantle of Wolverine herself — the moment that makes her younger self’s appearance in Logan so vital. Since Marvel soft-rebooted its comic universe last year, Laura’s been the star of All-New Wolverine, wearing her own version of the classic Wolverine costume, and dealing with all new threats (and even other secret clones of herself). Even though there’s actually a Logan running around in the Marvel Comics universe — a time-displaced older incarnation from the famous Old Man Logan storyline, which Logan the movie is also inspired by — she is now, in the eyes of her fellow mutants and heroes no longer X-23, but Wolverine.

That’s arguably the reason why she’s now being introduced into Fox’s live-action mutant universe: it’s long been stated that Logan will be Hugh Jackman’s last outing as Wolverine, a role he’s played for over a decade now. With the arrival of X-23 in Logan, it seems like a very good chance that, just as happened in the comics, Fox is shaping up for Laura Kinney to take on the Wolverine movie franchise once Logan’s journey comes to an end.

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Here's What's Going On In The First 'Logan' Trailer

Hugh Jackman returns as Wolverine (it’s Old Man Logan you guys!) and brings some serious goosebumps along for the ride in the new trailer for ‘Logan’.

What you’re looking at right there is the work of director James Mangold — a fittingly gritty, thrilling and somehow still sombre ride towards the end of Logan’s tale — and the start of Laura’s. That song — perfection. It’s a nod to Logan’s “country” influences and a tale of struggle with the everyday. It’s clear from the outset this film is heavily influenced by Steve McNiven and Mark Millar’s comic masterpiece “Old Man Logan” — set in a future where villains rule the world.

“Mutants — they’re gone now.” The funeral scene with Logan, alone, leaves us wondering who is farewelling — I mean, safe to say it’s probably one of the X-Men, given the solemn helpless nature of everything that’s happening. In case it’s not clear — Logan is old now. People are dying. He is aging, Charles Xavier is aging, Logan can’t recover from injuries like he used to and Professor X is losing control over his abilities. What hope does the world have?

“She’s like you. Very much like you.” IT’S X-23 HELL YEAH! Old Logan, meet young Laura. In the comics she’s Wolverine’s clone and we only see her after Logan’s death. So seeing them interact on screen, and develop a bond is downright beautiful. We don’t see her claws, any real evidence of her powers in this trailer, or even that she is a clone of Logan (she may very well not be in this film) but I’ll bet anything we see her kick some serious butt by the end of this film.

As for the bad guys? That’s the Reavers — in the comics they are a bunch of rag-tag criminals put together by Donald Pierce on a personal mission to wipe out all mutants. Oh, and they also happen to be cybernetiaclly enhanced. So cybernetic enhancements = ok. Mutations = bad. These guys aren’t the brightest, but it looks like they have government backing in Logan. This isn’t good news.

Of course it’s not all wistful environment shots, menacing glances and hand holding in this trailer — there’s an action packed car-chase here too, but oh boy, there’s a lot to unpack here. Professor X wants Wolvie to look after Laura. He needs him to pick up the slack and be a hero. He needs him to do what he no longer can. Guys, I don’t think we’ll be seeing much of the former head of the School For The Gifted after this film.

If the tone of this trailer is anything to go by, Logan is a little more dusty, a little more violent, and a whole lot more tugging on the heartstrings than previous Wolverine films have shown. Despite the hit-and-miss nature of the X-Men cinematic universe, I’m seriously pumped to see this play out on the screen.

 

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Here's Our First Good Look At The Nintendo Switch

The Switch is a brand new console from Nintendo. You can play games on it on your TV, but you can also play games on it not on your TV. Yep, the Switch switches: taking the best parts of the Wii U and the PlayStation 4’s Remote Play, it’s a console that you can take with you and play wherever you are.

Detail on the Switch is still scant; we know that it’s powered by a custom Nvidia Tegra mobile processor, using the same architecture as the company’s most powerful graphics cards — but obviously scaled down massively for the Switch’s form factor and need for energy efficiency. Since you can pop the Switch’s central portion out — like an oversized smartphone — and carry it around while gaming, that’s where all the smarts and processing power will have to live.

If it’s using a variant of the Tegra X2 rather than the older Tegra X1 suggested by Eurogamer — likely, since it has a Pascal GPU inside — it’ll have significantly more power than other mobile-grade gaming devices like Nvidia’s own Shield K1 tablet. That’s a Good Thing for smooth, beautiful gameplay.

It looks like a pretty damn powerful portable gaming console, too — playing games like Skyrim, Splatoon and a new Zelda title called Breath Of The Wind with lovely 3D graphics. More important than that, though, is its utility: a controller that can be used in about a zillion different ways with and without the portable console attached.

What we don’t know: Is it a touchscreen? Is there a stylus? Will it be connected to the ‘net? How long will the handheld’s battery life? These questions, and more, will (hopefully) be answered before the NX’s Switch’s launch in March 2017.

 

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There's An Enormous Natural Gas Seep Along The US West Coast

From British Columbia to Northern California, planet Earth’s got a case of the toots. A recent deep ocean mapping survey has learned that a geologically-active strip of seafloor called the Cascadia Subduction Zone is bubbling methane like mad. It could be one of the most active methane seeps on the planet.

“It’s like bottles of champagne all along the seafloor,” said Jesse Ausubel, an organiser for the 2016 National Ocean Exploration Forum, where the gaseous discovery, along with other intriguing finds from recent deep ocean surveys, is being presented this week.

For years, scientists have been aware that methane, an odourless, colourless gas produced naturally during microbial digestion (and more famously, by farting cows) bubbles up from the seafloor where the conditions are right. Recent scientific surveys have discovered hundreds of methane seeps along the Atlantic continental margin, and it’s believed there could be thousands more across the world.

Understanding these seeps — where and when they occur, and what controls their activity — is a hot topic in Earth science research today, given that methane is a potent greenhouse gas. In fact, many scientists worry that by warming the oceans, climate change is speeding up the very processes that produce methane, in addition to melting icy methane hydrates that accumulate on the seafloor. In theory, this could lead to an enormous release of heat-trapping gases to the atmosphere.

But it’s hard to draw any firm conclusions just yet, because our understanding of seafloor methane seepage is still very limited. “The question of what’s rare and what’s common is wide open,” Ausubel said. “The basic geologic map of the seafloor remains to be made.”

A NOAA-led survey of the Cascadia Subduction Zone, performed by the E/V Nautilus over the winter, was a first attempt to get a handle on how much natural methane seepage is occurring over this geologically-active area. Although the ROV only mapped a small fraction of the subduction zone in detail, it identified some 450 individual bubble streams, which nearly doubles the number of methane vents that have been spotted along US coastlines.

Washington University oceanographer Paul Johnson, a collaborator on the survey, called the finding a “very significant discovery”, adding that there are likely a lot more methane plumes that E/V Nautilus missed. “The capability to image methane bubble streams in the water column is relatively new, so it is fair to say that the more we look, the more we find,” he said.

Whether this giant methane seep could be contributing to our climate problem remains to be seen, but it’s a question that merits further study. “We definitely want to map more complete sections of the margin, to get a better handle on the distribution of these seeps,” lead researcher and NOAA oceanographer Bob Embley told Gizmodo.

Embly added that we still don’t have a good sense of whether the methane seeps are continuous, like natural gas running out a pipe, or more intermittent and dependent on seafloor conditions. We also don’t know how much of the methane actually escapes to the atmosphere.

By the way, this absolutely charming, googly-eyed squid was also discovered on an E/V Nautilus expedition this past winter. Expect a lot more where he came from as scientists continue to probe flatulence in the abyss.

 

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This Robot Could Save Aussie Farmers $1.3 Billion A Year

Agricultural robot Agbot II, designed and built by QUT with support from the Queensland Government, could save Australia’s farm sector $1.3 billion a year by reducing the costs of weeding crops by around 90 per cent.

Farmers saw the robot in action at Bundaberg last week, when the fully-autonomous Agbot ll was demonstrated for the first time.

Professor Tristan Perez, leader of QUT’s agricultural robotics program, said Agbot II’s sensors, software and other electronics enable it to navigate through a field, detect and classify weeds and then kill them either mechanically or chemically. The robot can also be used to apply fertiliser.

“In future versions, the robots could also feed back data on such things as soil and crop health and the state of diseases as they conduct their operations. This would enable better management decisions driven by paddock specific real-time information,” he said.

The robot was also demonstrated for Minister for Agriculture and Fisheries, Leanne Donaldson.

“The Robotics partnership between the Queensland Government and QUT is a great example of how government and can work together to help our agricultural industries,” the Minister said. “My Department invested $3 million into this project to help producers use technology to increase efficiencies, profitably and sustainably.”

Professor Perez said Agbot II has demonstrated an outstanding performance in the use of robotic vision and artificial intelligence for the detection and classification of different weed species.

“The cutting edge robotic vision gives Agbot II the ability to spot-spray selected weed species and use mechanical tools to remove other weeds species that are herbicide resistant,” Professor Perez said. “To date, we have concentrated on the three weeds that are relevant to Queensland: volunteer cotton, sow thistle and wild oats, and the vision system operated with 99% accuracy in the classification of the correct species based on the images collected by the robot cameras.”

He said one of the key problems is that weeds are becoming increasingly immune to chemical control and that was why it was important an agricultural robot could not only detect, but classify the weed species on the spot and decide which actions to take to treat them.

“Agbott ll’s vision system can identify weeds and decide in real time which are better to spray and which are better dealt with, for example, mechanical or thermal methods,” he said. “The light weight of AgBot II, which is about 600kg, will help reduce soil compaction that affects the yield by limiting the root development of the crops. Also due to weight, the robots can be deployed faster onto fields after rain to keep a tight control of weeds before they drop their seeds”.

AgBots are designed to work in groups, which increases the reliability of weeding operations. If one robot has a problem and fails, the others continue operating. This is not the case with a single tractor or single sprayer operation. Agbot ll is solar powered at present, which is better for the environment and the farmer’s budget.

Professor Perez said QUT’s Farm Robotics team was at the forefront of innovation in agricultural robotics.

“We are integrating deep agricultural knowledge and systems science with powerful digital technologies such as big data analytics, economic modelling and decision science into these farm robots,” he said.

The QUT team is currently in discussion with potential commercialisations partners to take this technology to Australian farmers soon. QUT’s program on Strategic Investment in Farm Robotics (SIFR) is co-funded by the Queensland Government, through the Department of Agriculture and Fisheries.

The three-year program, conducted at QUT under the ARC Centre of Excellence for Robotic Vision with the support of QUT’s Institute for Future Environments, aims to develop and fast-track farm robotic technology that will reinvigorate agricultural productivity by increasing production and reducing costs.

The SIFR program takes an integrated approach and focuses not only on technology, but also on key enabling factors for its adoption, including economics and business; risk, regulation and policy; and social aspects such as workforce education and training.

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A Future Where Tiny Swarming Robots Bring Me My Phone Is The Future I Want

 

Making robots act like humans is hard, but making robots act like insects is considerably easier. And if you’ve ever seen a towering ant hill, or a massive bee hive, you know that thousands of insects working together can accomplish impressive things. So why not have a bunch of tiny robots do the same?

Researchers from Stanford University in the US, Université Paris-Sud, and Université Paris-Saclay in France, developed these simple one-inch Zooids micro robots featuring a pair of wheels, a battery, a touch sensor, a gyroscope, and an optical sensor. They’re a far cry from Boston Dynamics’ ATLAS humanoid bot, but still remarkably capable.

They’re not going to lead military troops into battle, but as demonstrated in this video, the Zooids can work together for a variety of different purposes such as acting like animated pixels in an interactive display, or more mundane chores like bringing you your smartphone when you simply don’t feel like reaching for it.

In terms of artificial intelligence, the Zooids are straight-up dumb. But using an overhead projector that allows a separate computer to track and monitor their positions at all time, the micro robots can be sent complex instructions to perform complicated tasks by working together.

Imagine having thousands of these crawling across your floors. Sure, it would be a little creepy at times, and occasionally you’d accidentally step on one. But your days of having to pick up after yourself would be long gone. And with enough of them sharing the load, you could even program them to carry you to bed each night. That’s a future I’d sign up for.