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

[MIKA27]

An Inflatable Table That Lets You Work On A Cushion Of Air

Amsterdam-based Blofield is known for its collection of premium inflatable furniture that looks like it could actually pass for real couches and chairs. But the company has gone a different direction with its newest line, doughnuts. They look more like the inflatable inner tube you’d take to the beach, but are designed to serve as desks and chairs for working or dining.

Available in a variety of different colours and fabric finishes, the doughnuts can be used indoors or out and Blofield claims they can seat up to six people comfortably. If you’re the type who moves often it could make for an easy-to-transport alternative to a more traditional dining room table since it can be inflated and deflated in just minutes with an included pump.

However, as anyone who’s ever used an air mattress can attest, inflatable furniture isn’t the most stable place to sit. And with a table full of food resting on the doughnuts inflatable tube, you’ll want to make sure your dinner guests don’t get too rambunctious. Or accidentally drop a knife or a fork on it, since a single puncture can put the $US2,400 doughnuts completely out of commission. Blofield

[MIKA27]

Breaking News: Police: At Least 4 Dead in Dallas-Area Shootings

(DALLAS) — A series of shootings in the Dallas area killed at least four people and wounded others, but authorities said early Thursday that a suspect was in custody.

Police were first called to a home in southwest Dallas around 10:30 p.m. Wednesday where they found four gunshot victims, two of whom had died, Dallas police Sgt. Warren Mitchell told media outlets.

The suspect in that shooting fled to nearby DeSoto, where he was involved in another shooting, Mitchell said.

At the second location, four other people were shot, with two of them dying, DeSoto police Cpl. Melissa Franks said.

Franks said police took the suspect into custody at the scene of the second shooting. Authorities said the suspect is a male but have not released any other information about him.

[MIKA27]

Brave New Garbage: London's Rubbish Bins Track You Using Your Smartphone

Remember the “smart” rubbish bins that popped up around London a few years ago? Placed throughout the city, the LCD-equipped cans broadcast info and ads (mainly ads) to passers-by. Now, the company that makes them is testing new functionality for the two-year-old devices, allowing them to track and analyse the signals from nearby smartphones. How come the worst part of the Minority Report future is the one we get first?

According to Quartz, the company that owns the rubbish bins — Renew — is partnering with the makers of a new technology called Presence Orb, an analytics tool that tracks consumers via their Wi-Fi connected devices (like “a cookie for the physical world,” the company explains). Embedded in the rubbish bins, the system can detect devices and observe their behaviour, using a unique ID code called a MAC address that is embedded in every Wi-Fi enabled gadget. Orb is accurate down to a 50th of a second, and tracks everything from the speed of pedestrians to what make of phone they’re using.

The possibilities for advertising, of course, are almost endless. The software will let Renew sell businesses a whole range of data about the potential customers right outside their doors. Stores will be able to set up customised ads, for example, that appear on the rubbish bins’ LCD screens when a target customer passes by. For example, if it knows you’re a regular at a certain bar, the cans might show you an ad for a different happy hour at a bar nearby. It’ll also allow stores and brands to find out more about the daily routines of their customers (or, to-be customers), like when they stop for coffee and where. And based on data from millions of phones and tablets, Orb can generate detailed animations of how people move through specific areas (and particular stores).

Is it legal? Pretty much. Unlike the US, the EU has laws that require websites to let users know when they’ve offloaded a cookie.

Nothing like that exists for MAC addresses, though — so Orb isn’t really doing anything illicit. And Renew, for their part, insist that they can’t find out information like your name or address — only your device’s unique ID number.

Right now, Renew is only conducting tests of the system, but so far things have gone well: In June, they tracked more than four million devices over a single week, peaking at 946,016 devices detected in a single day. And that’s just from 12 Orb-enabled rubbish bins in central London. “With the Renew ORB technology, we will cookie the street,” said Kaveh Memari, CEO of Renew, in a release. That must be music to the ears of advertisers — though maybe not consumers.

[MIKA27]

Airbus' Next-Gen Transport Plane Is Stronger Than Hercules

A nation’s military does more than defend sovereignty. Most also act as first responders, delivering humanitarian aide to disaster victims. But, as Hurricane Katrina demonstrated in the US, getting supplies into areas affected by natural disasters (or even forward operating bases) is far easier said than done. That’s why a collaboration of European nations have spent more than a decade developing a heavy transport plane fit for the 21st century, the Airbus A400M Atlas.

The A400M Atlas is a four-engine turboprop transport aircraft designed by Airbus as a tactical airlift platform. It measures 45.1m long and 14.6m tall with a 42.4m wingspan, putting it squarely between the C-130 and the C-17 in terms of size and speed (but still way smaller than the Antonov An-225). A quartet of 8202kW Europrop TP400-D6 turboprop engines and four eight-bladed 5.2m-diameter “scimitar” props grant the plane a 780.5km/h cruising speed, a service ceiling of more than 11,277m and a range of 3298km to 6389km, depending on the load. That’s over 160.9km/h faster and 1609.3km farther than the C-130 Hercules. Plus, the Atlas’ beefy power plant, combined with its reinforced landing gear and lightweight carbon fibre reinforced plastic wings and rotors, allows it to take off from short, unpaved runways in as little as 980m.

Interestingly, the A400M’s propellers are designed to turn in opposite directions. This not only reduces maintenance and replacement costs (most turbo prop planes have left- or right-handed engines depending on which wing they go on; this uses a gearbox to only turn the blades backwards so the engines themselves become universal), it also produces superior lift, reduces torque, prop wash, and yaw compared to the older designs where both engines on each wing turned the same direction.

Most impressive is the new plane’s cargo capacity. At 37,013kg (116 paratroops or 66 stretchers with 25 attending medics) at 17.7m long, 4m wide, and 3.7m tall, it holds roughly double what the Hercules can. In addition, the Atlas is outfitted with aerial refuelling equipment, allowing it to be used as a flying gas station, and can also be equipped with a variety of electronic surveillance and countermeasures for ISR operations.

To control this very large, very heavy plane without sacrificing manoeuvrability, speed, or altitude, the Atlas’ three-person crew rely on a fly-by-wire flight control system similar to that found in the B-2 Stealth Bomber. All pertinent flight information is displayed in the glass cockpit — digital displays rather than traditional analogue gauges. Multi-Colour Infrared Alerting Sensor (MIRAS) missile warning sensors have also been integrated into the plane’s countermeasure systems.

While the collapse of the Soviet Union and disagreements between the partner nations of France, Germany, Italy, Spain, the United Kingdom, Turkey

Belgium, and Luxembourg have slowed the development of the craft over the past decade, Airbus is under contract to produce more than 200 A400Ms at a pace of 30 per year. Initial deliveries are expected to begin later this year once the plane has finished its final rounds of flight testing. And when they do, the skies will be that much safer.

[MIKA27]

Groundbreaking New Particle Could Make Hard Drives 20 Times Smaller

Scientists have finally created a long-theorised particle called the skyrmion. The best way to imagine a skyrmion is to think of a magnetic field that resembles a twisted vortex of atoms. In a normal particle, the charges of the atoms all line up in the same direction, but in a skyrmion, they’re arranged in these little twister shapes that also happen to be quite stable. You can move them around and shake them up, but they won’t come untwisted.

This is where they come in handy for data storage. Information is burned onto a hard disk by turning the magnetic north poles of normal clusters of atoms up or down to denote a “one” or a “zero,” a digital bit. But if you push these particles too closely together, the magnetic fields begin to interfere with each other and scramble the data. This doesn’t happen with skyrmions. Because of that unique vortex shape, you can squeeze the particles super close together, and the magnetic state of each bit will remain stable.

The really exciting news is that scientists think that they can make devices like optical hard drives up to 20 per cent smaller using this technique. The bad news is that we’re a ways away from making such devices. The idea of skyrmions has been around since the 1960s, but only in this latest study have scientists proven that they were able to actually use them to write data. Even then, they were only able to do it about 60 per cent of the time.

But you know what? We used to burn data onto CDs that used to skip, like, 80 per cent of the time, and look at us now. You probably can’t even remember the last time you heard something skip.

[MIKA27]

You Can Ditch Microsoft Points After The Next Xbox 360 Update

Microsoft Points are going away very soon. Like, as soon as the next Xbox 360 system update. You’ll be able to turn all your meaningless points into real money whenever that happens.

Microsoft’s Xbox Wire blog has got the news:

Earlier this year, we announced that we are bringing local currency to Xbox 360 and Xbox One consoles. This change was a direct result of customer feedback. You told us you want to be able to buy things using money instead of points, and we listened.

Our goal is to make this transition as easy as possible for you. After the next Xbox 360 system update, when you go to buy something or redeem a Microsoft Points card or code on your console with your Microsoft account, we’ll add to your account an amount of currency equal to or greater than the Xbox Marketplace value of your Microsoft Points, which will be retired.

Making a purchase will be faster and easier than ever. You will see item prices expressed in local currency; no need to calculate what an item costs! You will still be able to directly purchase content from Xbox stores using any current form of payment available in your region, including credit cards. And with a rollout starting in late 2013, you’ll also be able to buy new Xbox Gift Cards (denominated in your local currency) through our online retailers and in local retail stores. These gift cards can be added to your Microsoft account online and are another easy-to-use payment option for customers.

Don’t worry about your Microsoft Points Cards either. We’ll continue to accept purchased Microsoft Points Cards and codes until further notice, and we’ll add to your account an amount of local currency equal to or greater than the Marketplace value of those points. In addition, we know you’ve worked hard on your Microsoft Points earned through Xbox Live Rewards. These will remain in your Xbox Live account and transition to local currency with the rest of your Microsoft Points.

We’re excited to bring local currency to Xbox Live. It’s a decision based on your feedback, and another way we’re working to make Xbox Live the best community for gaming and entertainment today.

Also worth noting: any Microsoft Points you convert will expire on June 1, 2015.

[MIKA27]

This Beautiful Hubble Image Solves A 40-Year Scientific Mystery

This image, captured by the Hubble Space Telescope, depicts the Magellanic Stream: a long ribbon of gas which stretches nearly halfway around our galaxy. But it also solves a 40-year mystery of where the damn thing came from, too.

The image shows how the Large and Small Magellanic Clouds — two dwarf galaxies which orbit our very own Milky Way — are at the head of the gaseous stream. Since it was discovered in the 70s, scientists have wondered if the gas came from one or both of the clouds.

Now, Hubble observations have confirmed that the original stream came into being when gas was stripped from the Small Magellanic Cloud about 2 billion years ago. Then, much more recently, a second stream of gas from the Large Magellanic Cloud joined it. Case closed!

[MIKA27]

Scientists Have Created A Malaria Vaccine That's 100 Per Cent Effective

For the first time in history, scientists have completed successful human trials of a malaria vaccine that provides 100 per cent protection against the often fatal disease.

Currently, we have no truly effective method of protecting against malaria. Even the World Health Organisation had only set their sights on a vaccine with an 80% efficacy rate — and they weren’t planning to have that until 2025. Because before today, according to Anthony Fauci, director of the US National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases in Bethesda, Maryland, “we have not even gotten anywhere near that level of efficacy.” But this newest incarnation has surpassed everything we thought possible.

Called PfSPZ, the vaccine is made from weakened sporozoites (SPZ), the form of the malarial parasite Plasmodium falciparum (Pf) when it’s in its initial infectious state. Even though the parasite is weakened, it’s in its whole form, thus invoking an immune response. The six human subjects that were given five intravenous doses of PfSPZ were 100% protected when they were later bitten by infectious mosquitoes — five of the six unvaccinated control participants and three of the nine people only given four doses went on to develop malaria.

Previously, most of the malaria vaccines being experimented with only used a few of the parasite’s proteins. Stephen Hoffman, head of the Maryland developing firm Sanaria, decided to test a vaccine using the whole sporozoite after researching past experiments going back to the 1970s in which strong, long-lived protection from malaria resulted from volunteers being exposed to thousands of bites from irradiated infected mosquitoes. Stefan Kappe, a malaria researcher at the Seattle Biomedical Research Institute in Washington, tells Nature:

The trial results constitute the most important advance in malaria vaccine development since the first demonstration of protection with radiation attenuated sporozoite immunization by mosquito bite in the 70s. This is a pivotal success.

But part of the reason it’s taken so long to get to this point is that the process of actually making the vaccine is incredibly difficult and complex. First Sanaria had to raise mosquitoes in sterile conditions “on an industrial scale.” He would feed them blood that had been infected with the malaria parasite and then exposed to radiation to so that the parasite would weaken. That way, the body would recognise its presence without being infected with the actual disease.

Next, billions of these parasites were harvested from the mosquitoes’ salivary glands, purified, and cryopreserved. And while all this was happening, most researchers in the field were expecting him to fail. They didn’t think it would be possible to mass-produce this parasite in a way that passed the highly strict quality and safety standards that human medicine must undergo. And now, as Fauci mentioned to Nature,“To my amazement, Hoffman did it.”

Now, the trial is going to need to be repeated and over a much wider range of participants in the regions where malaria is most rampant. This way, scientists will be able to determine if it’s actually effective against strains different from that used in the vaccine, as well as how its effects might vary according to age, gender, etc. From what we’ve seen so far, though, we have every reason to hope that we may be on our way to making malaria a thing of the past.

[MIKA27]

These Gorgeous Black And White Photos Turn Truckstops Into Art

Sometimes it feels like the romance of the road is lost at truck stops. Those oases of diesel fuel and stale coffee seem too industrial, too pragmatic to fit into a Kerouac-style vision of road tripping. Photographer Michael Massaia lends some highbrow class to the truck stop with his series Seeing the Black Dog. Suddenly, those hulking 18-wheelers look gorgeous.

Inspired by his own insomnia, Massaia photographs trucks parked for the night at highway rest stops across New Jersey, their drivers asleep in their bunks. His process is 100% do-it-yourself, shooting on large-format film which he develops by hand. Named after the phantom black dogs truckers hallucinate once sleep deprivation sets in, this series captures the stark, haunting stillness of road warriors at rest. Check out the whole collection here.

[MIKA27]

NASA Predicts How Common Forest Fires Will Be In The US By 2100

It’s been a terrible few years for fires, with thousands of homes lost every summer. NASA is using its two Earth-monitoring satellites, Terra and Aqua, to help monitor forest fires from space — and to find out how much worse it’s going to get.

There are plenty of reasons fires have gotten worse. For one thing, more Americans are building homes in fire-prone areas. And the changing climate has brought pine beetles — which turn living trees into dead kindling — to the Rockies by the droves. But there are also bigger, underlying shifts that are stoking the flames: The increasing dryness of land across the country.

NASA describes this concept as “potential evaporation”, a way to gauge how dry the land will be on any given day. Using satellite data going back to 1980, they’ve created a new projection for potential evaporation in America over the next 90 years, releasing the results of the study on YouTube yesterday. As you can see, it doesn’t look great. Using a maximum increase of one millimetre of evaporation per day, their projection shows how “fire country” is set to absorb new parts of the US.

“We consider a 1 mm/day increase in potential evaporation to be an ‘Extreme’ event for fires, something like 2012 in Colorado,” NASA’s scientists explain on YouTube. “By these projections, fire years like 2012 would be the new normal in regions like the western US by the end of the 21st century.”

To make matters worse, areas that aren’t at risk today — like parts of Michigan and the East Coast — might, in a few decades, start to see fire activity.

[MIKA27]

Report: Apple's Next iPhone(s?) Coming September 10

According to report from AllThingsD, Apple will be taking the lid off of its new iPhone a month from today, on September 10. Save the date for what should be a big day — especially if it’s not the only debut Apple’s got up its sleeve.

While Apple rumours are as Apple rumours does, AllThingsD is as reliable a source as you’re going to get outside of Cupertino itself. But even if the date is certain, plenty of questions remain as to what, exactly, we’ll see there. Here’s our best bet for now.

iPhone 5S

If there’s one thing Apple — and Tim Cook, in particular — is good at, it’s squeezing every last ounce of utility out of the supply chain. That means that while other companies might switch up design (and with it, manufacturing processes) every year or more, Apple’s generally content to stick with the same basic shape for at least two generations. Think 3G/3GS, 4/4S.

That means the head-liner should basically be an iPhone 5 with better internals and a few key embellishments and rumoured leaked parts have so far backed that theory up. The biggest change for the vast majority of iPhone buyers will be iOS 7, which we already know pretty much everything about.

On the hardware side, you can expect to see a faster processor, better battery, improved camera; you know, the standard spec bumps. The one major change on the hardware side may be biometric security in the form of a fingerprint reader. Apple purchased a company that specialises in just that a year ago, and code indicating that fingerprint scanning is a strong iPhone 5S potentiality is hidden deep in the bowels of iOS 7.

All of which sounds fairly standard, not likely to make much of a splash. But you know what might?

iPhone 5C

Rumours of a “budget” iPhone have been escalating for the last two years; the WSJ has been one of its major proponents. But it didn’t seem likely until more recently, when cheaper Android phones began to gobble up Apple’s marketshare in earnest (particularly in the crucial Asian market). Enter the iPhone 5c.

Here’s what we think we know about the budget iPhone: It will have a plastic shell. It will be cheap, but maybe not as cheap as you think. And it might come in a wonderful array of colours. As our friend Martin Hajek speculates:

As for internals, there are fewer credible sources. But it seems likely — given, again, Apple’s supply chain cleverness — that it will have the same guts as at least an iPhone 4S.

One More Thing?

There are plenty of rumoured Apple projects out there; an iWatch (someday!), a television (probably not!), an updated iPad and iPad mini. Should we anticipate seeing one of them in a month? Anything could happen — but these probably won’t.

While an iWatch seems inevitable, it seems unlikely that Apple is far enough along in its development to have a product ready to announce in four short weeks. As for an Apple HDTV, it’s far from likely that such a product will ever exist, but it certainly won’t happen before Apple locks in meaningful deals with content providers — something it hasn’t yet come close to.

As for the iPad and iPad mini, their release cycles have gotten unpredictable enough that they could show up now or next spring. If they do come along on September 10th, don’t expect much more than a spec bump for either.

Still though, the iPhones should be more than enough — especially if there really is, for the first time, more than one of them.

[MIKA27]

Revealed: What the West has given Syria's rebels

Britain has so far handed over equipment worth £8m - but can it help on the front line?

The holy month of Ramadan is over and both sides in Syria’s civil war are preparing for a new round of attrition. Now, documents obtained byThe Independent and extensive talks on the ground have revealed the level of equipment sent by the West to Syria’s rebels – divided between the Islamists and more moderate factions – to equip them for the fight.

After a series of reverses in the battlefront, opposition forces have recently struck back, taking control of a strategically important military air base they had been trying to overrun during months of fierce clashes. Menagh, north of Aleppo, was captured last week after a suicide attack that breached regime fortifications and unnerved the defending troops. Two and half years on from the start of the uprising against Basher al-Assad, the most potent weapons in the armoury of the opposition in their most notable recent triumph were not tanks or missiles, but human bombs.

The best case scenario for the rebels now would appear to be attempts at a land-grab to create a position of strength before the much-delayed ceasefire talks, “Geneva II”, take place in the autumn. The alternative is continuing, relentless blood-letting, which has already cost more than 100,000 lives in the deadliest chapter of the Arab Spring.

The British Government is considering sending weapons to the moderate rebel fighters, arguing that a failure to do so would not only further empower President Assad but also weaken future potential Western allies. The bulk of the arms that get into opposition areas in Syria go to Islamist rebels, courtesy of wealthy benefactors in the Gulf, especially Qatar.

So far the UK has sent around £8m of “non-lethal” aid, according to official papers seen by The Independent, comprising five 4x4 vehicles with ballistic protection; 20 sets of body armour; four trucks (three 25 tonne, one 20 tonne); six 4x4 SUVs; five non-armoured pick-ups; one recovery vehicle; four fork-lifts; three advanced “resilience kits” for region hubs, designed to rescue people in emergencies; 130 solar powered batteries; around 400 radios; water purification and rubbish collection kits; laptops; VSATs (small satellite systems for data communications) and printers. In addition, funds have been allocated for civic society projects such as inter-community dialogue and gathering evidence of human rights abuses. The last “gift” to the opposition, announced by William Hague last week, is that £555,000 worth of counter-chemical warfare equipment is on standby.

The items, channelled through the Free Syrian Army (FSA), are of use to the opposition, but they will have little impact on the fighting. Even the chemical equipment may not be of much use without adequate training. Potential users need the ability to assess threats and calculate the correct dosage for medication, along with an appreciation of differing field conditions, stressed Hamish de Bretton-Gordon, who has served with the UK’s specialist biosecurity forces and is in favour of sending the WMD kit to the rebels.

Any military aid from Britain will not arrive until Parliament returns from its summer break. Last month the Commons approved by 114 votes to one a motion calling for the “explicit consent” of MPs, in both debate and vote, before weapons are sent to Syria.

France was instrumental, alongside the UK, in lifting the European Union arms embargo on Syria which would allow supplies to be sent to the rebels. But the messages from the Hollande government on the issue have been ambiguous. Last month Foreign minister Laurent Fabius stated that it would not be possible to send weapons as they may fall into the wrong hands and end up being used against France.

French fears are informed by the country’s experiences during the recent intervention in Mali, when French forces encountered surface-to-air missiles that had been looted from Libya. Some of the stock was brought to Mali by Tuareg tribesmen who had been in the pay of Muammar Gaddafi, while others had come from Islamist rebels who had been fighting his regime.

The French had provided arms on the ground in the Libyan conflict, airlifting around 40 tonnes to the rebels in the Nafusa mountains in the west in preparation for the assault on Tripoli. Some Syrian opposition commanders in Jordan and Lebanon have claimed that French-supplied weapons – assault rifles, pistols and ammunition – have already arrived, although this is strongly denied by Paris.

Instead both France and Britain, say they are exploring high-tech methods to ensure any weapons supplied in the future are tracked and can be de-activated if they come to the possession of hostile groups. In essence this would apply to missiles, the tools the opposition need the most to counter Assad’s warplanes and armour.

But weapons specialists urge caution about the availability and effectiveness of such “fail-safe” systems. An official at MBDA, one of Europe’s largest missile manufacturers, points out that its products do not come off the production line with such features and complex and expensive alterations would have to be carried out.

Matt Schroeder, director of arms sales monitoring project at the Federation of American Scientists, said that “controllable enablers” could restrict the use of anti-aircraft missiles, but added: “If you are really concerned about diversion of weapons into the wrong hands, none of them alone are sufficient.” Technologically proficient jihadists could, he stressed, outsmart the smart-controls – something the Pentagon is fully aware of.

In June the US administration announced that it would give “direct military aid” to the rebels because the Assad regime had crossed the “red line” set by Barack Obama when it used chemical weapons on the rebels. Until then congressional committees had blocked the sending of arms because of the jihadist threat but now, two months on, opposition fighters say they are yet to see much sign of the new armaments. In any event, US officials say that in the immediate future only small arms are likely to be dispatched and even then only after careful vetting of the groups that are getting them.

CIA officers have, in fact, been carrying out such vetting since June last year. But the political and religious beliefs of the rebel khatibas or battalions, have not remained constant. “The problem is that some of the khatibas which used to be semi-secular have now become Islamist. So it’s a question of constant monitoring,” said a security contractor, a former US army Ranger who is part of a liaison team with the Syrian opposition in Turkey.

The same uncertainty has limited the number of “moderate” fighters passing through training camps in Jordan run by former Western military personnel; fortnight-long courses largely restricted to instructions on tactics and the use of small arms. Particular emphasis is being placed on the creation of teams designed to rush in and ****** chemical arsenals. That, says Abu Khalid, a rebel officer in Idlib province, is “a joke”. “Where are these secular commando teams?” he says. “We haven’t seen them. But then we haven’t seen many chemical weapons either. Assad doesn’t need to use them, he is killing enough with his tanks and planes. We need missiles to fight that, and that is what the Americans and Europeans are not giving us.”

There is some evidence, however, of small quantities of missiles arriving in Syria for the opposition, some of them apparently obtained from Croatia in a shipment organised by the Americans and paid for by Gulf states earlier this year. More recently the rebels have also used Konkurs wire-guided anti-tank missiles from former Warsaw Pact arsenals, while 82mm recoil-less rifles have been deployed in recent gains near Latakia, a regime stronghold, and in the defence of Aleppo.

But the missiles are largely in the hands of Islamist groups such as Jabhat al-Nusra and Ahrar al-Sham. The Islamists’ ever-increasing power is now a direct threat to the moderates, as was shown by the recent assassination in Latakia of Kamal Hamami, a member of the FSA’s supreme military council, by the al Qa’ida-linked Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant. Qassem Saadeddine, a FSA official, recalled: “They phoned to say they had carried out the killing of infidels. They said they will kill all of the supreme military council.”

The assault on Menagh was led by Islamic State of Iraq and Levant which provided the two suicide bombers. “They decided to use the suicide men to save the few rockets they had. As you know it was very effective as a strategy” said Abu Khalid, the moderate rebel officer. “We believe that suicide is haram [forbidden] by our religion. But the Salafists are proud of it. That is another advantage they have over us.”

Somali rebels destroyed British aid supplies

Humanitarian aid worth £480,000 was seized by militants linked to al-Qa’ida as they rampaged through southern Somalia.

The supplies, paid for by British taxpayers, were in warehouses captured by al-Shabaab and it is believed they were later set ablaze, according to the Department for International Development (DfID).

Details of the incidents appeared in the department’s annual accounts.

It said: “DfID’s partners had no prior warning of the confiscations being carried out and therefore had no time to prevent the loss by relocating goods.

“While the theft suffered represented a stores loss, the property was not stolen from DfID stores. DfID funding was provided to purchase goods but no benefit was received by the end recipient due to the theft.”

A spokesman for the department said: “DfID works in some of the most dangerous places in the world, including Somalia, because tackling the root causes of poverty and instability there ensures a safer world and a safer UK.

“Working in conflict-affected and fragile states carries inherent risk. DfID does all it can to mitigate against this but, on occasion, losses will occur. We work with our partners to design programmes that protect our investment from misuse or theft.”

[MIKA27]

Werner Herzog Made a Documentary About Texting While Driving. And It’s Haunting.

"From One Second to the Next," the rather unlikely film below, came together when AT&T approached the legendary German filmmaker Werner Herzog and asked if he would direct a series of short films warning people about the dangers of texting while driving.

"What AT&T proposed immediately clicked and connected inside of me," Herzog told the AP. "There's a completely new culture out there. I'm not a participant of texting and driving—or texting at all—but I see there's something going on in civilization which is coming with great vehemence at us."

The result is haunting. It focuses on four accidents, some of them fatal, and Herzog aims his camera squarely at the faces of both victims and perpetrators, asking them to describe in detail what happened and the aftermath. Herzog emphasizes the change in civilization he perceives in part by examining an accident in which an Amish family was killed and another in which a horse-shoer's truck was involved.

It is not easy viewing, but, for the "more than 40,000 high schools" and "hundreds of safety organizations and government agencies" where it will be shown, I suspect it will be effective. As Herzog says, "In one second, entire lives are either wiped out or changed forever."

[MIKA27]

Brazil Seeks Answers in ‘Amityville’ Copycat Murders

It was a tragic incident, as inexplicable as it was shocking. According to local police, Marcelo Pesseghini, a 13-year-old Brazilian boy in Sao Paulo, took his father’s pistol late Sunday night and shot his policemen parents, his grandmother, his great aunt and, the next day, himself.

The killings shocked the country and drew international coverage that pounced on indications that he was inspired by the 1974 murder of a family in Amityville, New York (the basis for the supernatural horror book and subsequent film, The Amityville Horror).

But in Brazil, where retaliation against police is common in the longstanding war on organized crime, another theory has gained steam.

A colonel in charge of the mother’s police battalion fed fuel to the fire when he told local radio Wednesday that the boy’s mother, Andreia Pesseghini, had previously provided useful information in an inquiry into police officers suspected in a series of ATM robberies.

Investigators say there is ample evidence that suggests the boy was the culprit, but the commander’s comments have sparked suspicions that the killing spree was not a horrifying, freak incident, but, instead, another episode in the city’s vicious ongoing crime battle. “Today I am not convinced,” Police Colonel Wagner Dimas said on radio.

Once a hotbed for gang violence, including a spate of clashes between gangs and the police in May 2006 that left 186 people dead, Sao Paulo has seen dramatic drops in homicides. But gangs continue to target police officers (more than 70 were killed last year), and a series of ATM heists linked to current and former officers revealed the level of corruption within the force.

Dimas, who has since clarified that there was no formal ongoing investigation into police involvement in the thefts, suggested Andreia Pesseghini, 36, may have been targeted for providing information on the crimes. Marcelo’s father, 40-year-old Luís Marcelo Pesseghini, was a member of the elite Rota SWAT team in the Sao Paulo police force that has garnered notoriety for its brutal crackdowns on criminal gangs.

Between 1980 and 2011, Brazil was the 7th most violent country in the world. Nearly 41,000 people were murdered in Brazil in 2010, according to UN statistics, or about 21 per every 100,000 people. By way of comparison, the murder rate in the U.S. that year was 4.8 per every 100,000. Brazil has redoubled efforts, with limited success and not without controversy, to combat the violence as it prepares to host the World Cup next year and the Olympics in 2016.

Investigators have said they will pursue Dimas’s claims but confirmed that Marcelo Pesseghini remains the only suspect. The boy allegedly killed all four members in his family over the night between Sunday and Monday. Afterward, security cameras show that he drove his mother’s car to school early that morning and then spent the day in school before receiving a ride home from a friend’s father. He was found dead with a gun in his hand.

Investigators say they found a separate revolver in his school backpack, and they spoke to a friend of Marcelo Pesseghini’s who said the boy had said he wanted to be a hired killer and planned to kill his parents and run away in his mother’s car. He had also uploaded to social media a famous photograph that ostensibly depicts the ghost of one of the victims in the Amityville massacre, when, in 1974, Ronald DeFeo Jr. shot and killed his parents, two brothers, and two sisters while they slept.

[MIKA27]

The Most Bonkers Scientific Theories (Almost) Nobody Believes Anymore

Look, I’m not here to tell you what to think. But you need to be grateful for science – all of it. Even the crazy stuff. Even for folks who could have sworn it was possible to turn iron into gold, and even for that time when a brilliant astronomer thought that there could be life on the sun. Because great leaps in human understanding are always surrounded by backward steps and dead ends. It has to be OK to fail. Spectacularly.

In this gallery we present to you the silliest of the silly scientific theories, some of which you’ll no doubt recognize because for whatever reason people refuse to give up on them. So remember, there are no dumb theories, just dumb reasons to keep believing in long-discredited theories.

Above:

Lambs That Grow Like Weeds – Literally

The ancient Greeks were the first to have the crazy idea that a lamb could grow right out of the ground, with a stem attached to its navel. Pliny the Elder later mentioned it, and Europeans picked up the idea again in the 14th century.

This is the exceedingly strange legend of the Vegetable Lamb of Tartary.

Now, these folks were well aware of where lambs came from. They were baby sheep that came out of mommy sheep. Or a stork drops it off. Or whatever. But their story may have arisen out of the first Western accounts of cotton plants, which an ancient Greek by the name of Megasthenes found in India, referring to them as “trees on which wool grows.”

Then boom, people start thinking that lambs can grow out of the ground. Said Sir John Mandeville, a sort of 14th century travel writer, of India: “There grew there a wonderful tree which bore tiny lambs on the ends of its branches. These branches were so pliable that they bent down to allow the lambs to feed when they are hungry.”

The allure of the Vegetable Lamb of Tartary continued into the late 1700s, when it was still debated by botanists. Those being experts in plants.

Phrenology: Like Reading a Crystal Ball, But With People’s Heads

They say you shouldn’t judge a book by its cover, but they never said anything about not judging a man by the bumps on his skull. So phrenologists went out and did just that.

By taking measurements of the skull, phrenology’s founder Franz Josef Gall argued around the turn of the 19th century, you could determine a person’s personality traits, propensities, and intelligence. This was because the region of the brain responsible for, say, self-esteem, would grow larger in a more confident person, consequently pushing out the skull. Phrenologists could feel a subject’s head for these abnormalities, a bit like a psychic reading a crystal ball, in the sense that both practices are absurd ways to relieve people of their money.

Aside from its many scientific problems, phrenology also had social consequences. The theory came about in the dark days of colonialism and wormed its way into Europeans’ judgments of the peoples they were subjugating. For instance, in Rwanda, the Belgians' phrenological assessments deemed the Tutsis more intelligent than the Hutus, helping to sow the seeds for a genocide that took place decades later. And these methods were of course broadened to deem Europeans inherently more intelligent than Africans.

But Franz Josef Gall’s theory that behaviors and thought processes are contained in certain parts of the brain turned out to have a grain of truth. Decades later, brain scans showed that many parts of the brain are indeed more active during specific activities. More recently, there's been a backlash against the kind of overly simplistic "neophrenology" that pins specific functions on specific brain regions. Exactly what job – or jobs – any given part of the brain does is a question that will keep neuroscientists scratching their heads for years.

Life on the Sun and, for That Matter, Life on Every Planet. Life for Everyone!

The sun is such a violent ball of energy that if you look at it from Earth, it'll burn your eyeballs right out of your head. But in the 1700s, when telescope-aided astronomy was still a young discipline, some thought the sun to be a regular old terrestrial body covered by a “resplendent surface.”

It was only a matter of time before someone came along and argued extensively that life could exist there. That dubious honor fell on the discoverer of Uranus, William Herschel. Sunspots, he said, were atmospheric openings providing glimpses of the sun’s surface, or in fact mountains poking above the cloud layer. And according to Herschel, on that surface, like the surfaces of all the other planets, there existed life.

He wasn’t alone in his speculation of life elsewhere in the solar system. Herschel was working in a telescope-fueled era of intense interest in what creatures might populate other worlds. And it’s an interest that continues to this day. While creatures could not exist on the sun, except maybe the blargg from Super Mario, we’re currently exploring other seemingly wild theories, such as life forms inhabiting the ice-encased seas of Jupiter’s moon Europa.

A few years after Herschel put forth his theory, Thomas Young published a response in a collection called Natural Philosophy, in which he noted that among other problems the immense gravity of the sun would pose problems for life. Our understanding of the lifeless sun grew as the 1800s progressed, culminating in the early 20th century theory that the sun is a gigantic nuclear furnace.

Homeopathy: Medicine for People Who Failed Medical School, and Probably Middle School as Well

Here’s a fun little home experiment. Get a beer and dilute it with water to the point where the beer constitutes one part per 10,000. Then bump up the dilution until not a single molecule of beer exists in the solution. Now drink the “beer.” Do you feel buzzed?

Of course you don’t, because there’s no alcohol left. But the 18th century principles of homeopathy claimed that your water “remembers” the drug that it once mingled with. And it’s this principle that was once applied, totally ineffectively and therefore dangerously, to administering medicine. You see, practitioners of homeopathy believed that to cure a sick patient, you take a drug that causes similar symptoms in a healthy person and dilute it as much as possible. The more you dilute a drug, the more powerful it becomes for the patient. And various European governments bought into this, covering homeopathic treatments under their public healthcare programs.

Ha. I was kidding when I was talking in the past tense. People still believe this stuff. And some public healthcare programs in Europe, including in the U.K., still cover homeopathic treatments.

Unsurprisingly, study after study has proved homeopathy to be, in more scientific words, totally wack. But don’t take it from me.

Watch the Amazing Randi down an entire bottle of homeopathic sleeping pills. And somehow not fall asleep. That old fella must have a ton of energy.

Alchemy: That’s Gold, Jerry! Gold!

Gold isn’t just about vanity. It has all manner of uses, from dentistry to electronics to monetary exchange. But long before we knew just what the stuff was truly capable of, the human fascination with gold helped kick off a scientific revolution. You see, we can thank the alchemists and their kooky gold-laden experiments for the ascendency of chemistry in the 1600s.

Medieval alchemists placed so much value in gold that they worked tirelessly to somehow transform base metals, such as iron, into it. But to do so, they’d need to first discover the philosopher’s stone, the substance capable not only of initiating this transformation, but of bestowing man with immortality. Alchemy was about perfection – gold being the perfect element and immortality being pretty sweet as well.

And the discipline was serious business. Alchemists wrote in code, lest their successes escape the lab (none ever did, but not because they were coded). In 1601 an alchemist under the patronage of Friedrich I of Württemberg promised the duke he could extract gold from silver, which, it turns out, is impossible. So he faked it, got caught, and was hanged. Even Isaac Newton dabbled in the art, and by dabble I mean he wrote more about it than he did physics, amassing thousands of pages of notes over three decades of research.

For millennia, alchemy involved decidedly unscientific things like magic and spirituality, but it was the methods alchemists used that grew increasingly sophisticated. In the 17th century the silly superstitious aspects finally began to fall away, as chemistry, always a part of alchemy, emerged as a dominant discipline. Which is just as well, since now we know exactly why Mentos and Diet Coke don’t get along.

Astrology: I Sure Hope Those Rovers Aren’t Monkeying Around on Mars and Messing Up My Horoscope

The millennia-old idea that the stars and planets have some sort of influence on earthly events developed independently all over the world, from Europe to Central America, and was considered a legitimate scientific discipline until only a few centuries ago.

But just because everyone else is doing it, doesn’t mean you should too. Astrology is a pseudoscience, through and through. Never pay someone to give you an astrological reading, unless it comes with a free sandwich or something. And they can validate your parking. Then it may be worth it.

Yet astrology was once intertwined with astronomy. In fact, they were often indistinguishable until the 1600s, when the invention of the telescope set off a celestial revolution. Tracking the movements of planets and stars, while an ancient practice that didn’t necessarily involve divining your future, was supercharged with the introduction of the instrument, leaving astrology to descend further and further into the realm of pseudoscience. But it should be noted that astrology lent much to our understanding of the cosmos.

And that isn’t to say that astrology was all of a sudden considered silly in the 17th century. There had always been skeptics, including the great Roman orator Cicero. He argued that the planets were simply too far away from Earth to affect us, and that astrology really breaks down when you wonder if each guy who died in a certain battle was born under the same star. Oh, and twins with totally different personalities and paths wouldn’t make much sense either. I mean, did you ever see the movie Twins?Those two were comically different.

The Rain Follows the Plow Because the Plow Is Surprisingly Charismatic. Or Something.

A continent is a terrible thing to waste. Why would Americans go through all the trouble of acquiring our arid western lands if they couldn’t make money off of them? Damn Nature and her stubbornness!

But what if they could give her a little boost?

As farmers marched west in the late 1800s, the traditionally dry territories they settled in were suddenly gifted with increased rainfall. From this, some scientists concluded that the newly cultivated lands had been the cause of this climate shift. The thinking went that broken soil absorbed more water, which was readily evaporated, leading to increased rainfall. And it was a theory that amassed a following in the scientific community.

Never an industry to miss an opportunity, the railroads happily disseminated the theory in their advertisements. Could such an ad campaign have had something to do with railroads owning a good amount of land out west? Let’s go ahead and say it probably did.

Well, it turned out the increased rainfall the farmers were enjoying was just weird weather. The climate soon reverted right back into aridity, and the theory that rain follows the plow was left high and dry. Yet modern climate studies suggest that increased vegetation and urbanization might indeed affect rainfall, though far from reliably and far from being as widespread as an entire region like the Midwest.

And ironically enough, our industrial processes have contributed to a dramatically warmed climate, to the point where we’re already seeing impacts on crop yields. And what’s left of Glenn Beck’s sanity.

Spontaneous Generation: You Too Can Grow a Mouse From a Sweaty Shirt

Aristotle put forth the first comprehensive theory of spontaneous generation, the idea that a creature could arise out of an inanimate (or formerly animate) object, as a maggot “grows” from rotting meat. And it went unchallenged for 2,000 years, with a 17th century physician even proposing a home experiment to prove it: Drop a sweaty shirt – yes, a sweaty shirt – into an open-mouthed jar and add some wheat husks. Voila, the amalgamation has grown mice, which it turns out isn’t so much due to them just sprouting as it is to mice being partial to wheat.

Enter that physician’s contemporary, Francesco Redi, who had a sneaking suspicion that maggots were actually the larvae of flies. To prove it, he laid out different flasks, each containing rotting meat. Some of these flasks he sealed, others he left open, and still others he covered with gauze, allowing airflow but restricting flies. As we would today expect, he found maggots only in the open flasks.

Then came along Louis Pasteur, of dairy-aisle fame, to put spontaneous generation down for good. He boiled meat broth in a flask, then heated the flask’s neck and bent it into an S shape, thus allowing air to enter, but trapping particulate matter and microbes in the curve. The broth grew no microorganisms, until Pasteur tipped the flask, flooding the curve and pulling the microbes into the solution. Life then proliferated.

Now considered to be a founder of microbiology, Pasteur had smashed a millennia-old assumption and in the process lent pivotal evidence to the understanding that disease is not due to miasma – or “bad air” caused by rotting flesh – but to microbes floating around us and, rudely, invading our personal space.

An Earth as Hollow as Rush Limbaugh’s Head

If you lived 10,000 years ago, you'd be forgiven if you peered down into a cave and assumed it went on forever. Ancient peoples had a certain penchant for hyperbole. Jules Verne went epic with the idea inJourney to the Center of the Earth, and nearly 200 years before him a scientific theory about a hollow world came from none other than astronomer Edmond Halley, after whom the famous comet is named.

In an attempt to explain variations in our magnetic field, Halley proposed that the ground we tread is just the outermost shell containing two other concentric circles and a core, whose rotations confuse our compasses. Between these were luminous atmospheres capable of providing the light required for life. He was, of course, right about the core bit, which was confirmed with further study some 200 years later.

Now, Halley was a damn good scientist working with as much data as was available to him in the 17th century, and he admitted to his readers that this was certainly a strange tale. He put forth a theory that is fantastically wrong, but every step of the way supported his arguments, sometimes using Isaac Newton’sPrincipia, then addressed counterarguments. It was a milestone in theorizing about what can’t, and never will, be seen.

The hollow Earth was bunk, yes, but hilariously more on point 300 years ago than the flat-Earthers of today, who maintain this staggeringly vacuous wiki.

[MIKA27]

5 Bizarre Legendary Creatures from Japan

Most Westerners have heard tales of vampires, werewolves, and mermaids. But what about humanoid turtles that enjoy munching on children or skeletal whales that drift along the coast? Japan is full of bizarre tales about crypto zoological creatures and things that go bump in the night. Here are five of them.

The Ghost Whale

The bakekujira, or “ghost whale,” is a mythical beast said to live near the Western coast of Japan. The ghostly creature has no flesh, but is instead a massive skeleton that haunts the waves. Some tales, however, describe the beast as a rotting whale. Unknown fish and birds accompany the bakekujira, and attempts to kill the beast prove fruitless. A well-known legend speaks of harpoons passing through the whale with no effect. In 1983, residents of the coastal town of Anamizu spotted an intact whale skeleton floating near the shore. Japanese press labeled the skeleton a “real-life bakekujira.”

The River Monster

A kappa is a humanoid, turtle-like creature said to inhabit Japan’s ponds and rivers. The creatures vary in appearance from region to region, but generally possess scaly, reptilian skin, webbed hands and feet, and a turtle-like shell. Legend has it kappas derive their power from water-filled cavities atop their heads. If the water spills, the kappa dies or becomes immobilized.

According to Japanese legend, kappas enjoy kidnapping children and drowning swimmers but can be appeased by offerings of their favorite food: cucumbers. In 2010, Destination Truth traveled to Japan to investigate modern-day kappa sightings. However, the crew determined that witnesses had mistaken other animals for the legendary beast.

The Spider *****

The jorōgumo, a word which can be literally translated to ***** spider, is a legendary female creature known for seducing and murdering men. In some tales, the jorōgumo is a spider that can morph into a beautiful woman. In other tales, it’s a stunning woman that binds men in silken spider threads and then devours them in her home. The Jorōgumo is the inspiration for Super Street Fighter IV’s Juri Han.

The Monster Cat

A Bakeneko, or supernatural cat, starts off as a normal feline but gains supernatural powers over time. Cats over 10 years old or 8.25 pounds have the potential to become a bakeneko, as do cats with exceedingly long tails. Bakenekos possess a number of frightening powers, including the ability to fly, talk, walk on their hind legs, spit out fireballs, and even reanimate human corpses. The frightening felines may also acquire a taste for human flesh and can reach five feet in length.

The Butt Eye Man

A shirime is a bizarre creature that has an eye in place of an anus. Legend has it a samurai was walking down the street late one night when a man in a kimono asked for a moment of his time. The samurai was startled, but his surprise changed to terror when the man stripped down and bent over to show an eye where his anus should be. A similar creature, the nopperabo, also has eye for an anus, but this monster possesses a smooth, featureless face and is incapable of speech.

Interested in learning more about Japan’s legendary creatures? Check out this pageon Wikipedia, but be prepared to lose several hours of your life.

[MIKA27]

Sun's Magnetic Field to Reverse: What It Means

The flip could come in the next three to four months, scientists say.

The sun's magnetic field, which spans the solar system, is just months away from flipping, observatory measurements show.

"This change will have ripple effects throughout the solar system," solar physicist Todd Hoeksema of Stanford University said in a statement.

Hoeksema is the director of Stanford's Wilcox Solar Observatory, one of just a few observatories around the world that monitors the sun's polar magnetic fields.

The sun's magnetic field changes polarity approximately every 11 years during the peak of each solar cycle as the sun's inner dynamo reorganizes itself.

This next reversal—which will be only the fourth observed since tracking began in 1976—will mark the midpoint of Solar Cycle 24.

During a magnetic field reversal, "the sun's polar magnetic fields weaken, go to zero and then emerge again with the opposite polarity," explained solar physicist Phil Scherrer, also at Stanford, in the statement.

Scientists are already seeing signs of the reversal happening, and this time there's a twist: Data from Wilcox show that the sun's two hemispheres are oddly out of sync, with the North Pole already beginning to change and the South Pole racing to catch up. That means that for now, at least, the sun effectively has two South Poles.

Soon both poles should be completely reversed. "It looks like we're no more than three to four months away from a complete field reversal," Hoeksema said.

The Wilcox Solar Observatory has been observing the sun's magnetic field since 1975, and its scientists have been converting those numerical measurements into a map that can now be viewed online.

"What we're really happy about is we've never changed or upgraded [the observatory]," Scherrer said in an interview Wednesday.

"It's the only instrument in the world where you can look back over 40 years and know you're measuring the same thing. That allows us to compare fields from one cycle to the next."

What Does a Reversal Mean?

A reversal of the sun's magnetic field will have consequences throughout the solar system since the domain of the sun's magnetic influence—called the heliosphere—extends far beyond Pluto. Changes to the field's polarity ripple all the way out to the Voyager probes, which are racing toward interstellar space.

Playing a central role in solar field reversals is the "current sheet," a sprawling surface that juts out of the sun's equator where the sun's slowly rotating magnetic field induces an electric current.

The current itself is small—only one ten-billionth of an amp per square meter—but there's a lot of it, and the entire heliosphere is organized around it.

During field reversals, the current sheet becomes very wavy. Scherrer likens the undulations to the seams on a baseball.

As the Earth orbits the sun, our planet dips in and out of the wavy current sheet, and the transitions can stir up stormy space weather around us.

The geometry of the current sheet can also affect Earth's exposure to cosmic rays, which are high-energy particles accelerated to the speed of light by supernova explosions and other violent events in the galaxy.

Cosmic rays pose a threat to astronauts and space probes, and some researchers say they might also affect the cloudiness and climate of Earth.

The sun's current sheet functions as a barrier to cosmic rays, preventing them from penetrating into the inner solar system. And a wavy, crinkly current sheet appears to create a better shield against these energetic particles.

Earth's Flip-Flop Coming

The sun isn't the only body in the solar system with a magnetic field that reverses. Earth has a magnetic field as well, and it has flipped many times over the last billion years.

This isn't surprising, Scherrer said, because the magnetic fields of both the sun and the Earth are thought to be generated by similar "dynamo" processes that involve rotating and convecting electrically conducting fluids—molten iron in the case of the Earth and hot, ionized gases for the sun.

The difference, however, is that Earth's magnetic field reversals happen much less frequently—only once every 200,000 to 300,000 years on average, although the actual time can vary widely—and over much longer timescales.

An analysis of centuries-old ship logs performed in 2006, for example, found that the Earth's magnetic field weakens in staggered steps, and that its strength has declined by a few percentage points since 1840.

If this decline is continuous, scientists predict the Earth's magnetic field could reverse sometime in the next 2,000 years.

When it does happen, Scherrer thinks that the flip will happen gradually—as is the case with the sun—and won't be marked by any kind of calamitous drop of the Earth's magnetic field strength to zero.

"It won't just disappear and come back again," Scherrer said.

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Giant Maya Carvings Found in Guatemala

Archaeologist Anya Shetler cleans an inscription below an ancient stucco frieze recently unearthed in the buried Maya city of Holmul in the Peten region of Guatemala. Sunlight from a tunnel entrance highlights the carved legs of a ruler sitting atop the head of a Maya mountain spirit.

The enormous frieze—which measures 26 feet by nearly 7 feet (8 meters by 2 meters)—depicts human figures in a mythological setting, suggesting these may be deified rulers. It was discovered in July in the buried foundations of a rectangular pyramid in Holmul.

Maya archaeologist Francisco Estrada-Belli and his team were excavating a tunnel left open by looters when they happened upon the frieze. "The looters had come close to it, but they hadn't seen it," Estrada-Belli said.

According to Estrada-Belli, the frieze is one of the best preserved examples of its kind. "It's 95 percent preserved. There's only one corner that's not well preserved because it's too close to the surface, but the rest of it isn't missing any parts," said Estrada-Belli, who is affiliated with Tulane University, Boston University, and the American Museum of Natural History and who is also a National Geographic Explorer. His excavations at Holmul were supported by the National Geographic Society/Waitt Grants Program.

Maya archaeologist Marcello Canuto agreed, calling the frieze "amazingly and beautifully preserved."

"We often dream of finding things this well preserved, and Francisco did it," said Canuto, who is the director of the Middle American Research Institute at Tulane University in New Orleans; he was not involved in the project.

For example, despite being mostly faded away now, traces of red, blue, green, and yellow paint are still visible on the frieze.

"It gives you an idea of how intricate and ornate these sites that we are excavating must have been during their apogee," Canuto said. "These sites must have been a feast for the eyes when they were inhabited."

David Stuart, a Maya hieroglyph expert at the University of Texas at Austin, pointed out that archaeologists think most large Maya temples were probably decorated with similar sorts of designs.

"But not all temples were so carefully buried and preserved like this," said Stuart, who did not participate in the project. "Also, each temple facade was slightly different and therefore unique in terms of its detail and message."

Caught Between Two Great Powers

The section of the temple at Holmul where the frieze was found dates back to about A.D. 590, which corresponds to the Maya classical era, a period defined by the power struggles between two major Maya dynasties: Tikal and Kaanul.

The two kingdoms competed with one another for resources and for control of other, smaller Maya city-states. Until now, however, it had been unclear which dynasty Holmul owed its allegiance to, but an inscription on the newly discovered frieze reveals that the temple was commissioned by Ajwosaj, ruler of a neighboring city-state called Naranjo, which archaeologists know from other discoveries was a vassal city of the Kaanul kingdom.

"We now know that Holmul was under the influence of the Kaanul dynasty," Canuto said.

In 2012, Canuto's team found and deciphered a series of hieroglyphically inscribed panels at another Maya city of a similar size to Holmul, called La Corona, which was also under the patronage of the Kaanul kingdom.

Recent discoveries at sites like La Corona and Holmul are helping reveal how these sites, despite being relatively small compared with some of their neighbors, were important players on the region's larger geopolitical stage.

"We're now beginning to appreciate how all these hierarchical levels of sites were involved in a larger political game that put them on [the side of either Tikal or Kaanul]," Canuto explained.

All About Location

Why was Holmul—a minor city that was home to only 10,000 to 20,000 people—so important to the Tikal and Kaanul dynasties?

Previous work by Estrada-Belli suggests Holmul occupied a strategic position for both kingdoms. The city lay along the best east-west route between the Tikal dynasty's capital city, also called Tikal, and the coast. It also lay along a north-south route between the Kaanul capital city of Dzibanche and the Guatemalan highlands that did not pass through Tikal territory.

The Guatemalan highlands contained precious resources such as basalt, obsidian, and jade that were coveted by both kingdoms.

"A [Maya] king without jade was no king at all," Canuto said.

By controlling Holmul in the east and La Corona in the west, the Kaanul dynasty was able to effectively access these riches without going through the capital city of its rival.

Staying Put for Now

The frieze still lies buried in Holmul where it was initially discovered because it is too big to move, said lead archaeologist Estrada-Belli.

"We're going to try to preserve it and create a stable environment around it so people can eventually visit it," he said.

"We're very concerned about its present condition, so we had to re-bury the entrance tunnel to keep the humidity and climate around it stable."

The find is exciting readers around the web. @JalilCan tweeted, "I keep seeing "Ancient Maya Carvings found..." these Archaeologists NEED TO LEAVE STUFF FOR PEOPLE LIKE ME TO FIND."

Other tweeters talked up the struggle between Maya powers hinted at in the frieze, while others remarked at how the carvings used to be brightly colored.

[MIKA27]

Meet The $13 Billion Presidential Helicopters The US Scrapped And Sold To Canada

Getting anywhere in Washington DC traffic can be a nightmare, even if you’re the leader of the free world and have a motorcade at your disposal. But at least the president can hop aboard Marine One (the fleet of presidential helicopters) and rotor to his next appointment instead. The VH-3D Sea Kings that currently shuttle the POTUS around have been ready for retirement since 2003. So why has it taken so long to find a suitable replacement?

The presidential fleet does include a few VH-60N “WhiteHawk” helicopters, which are newer and slightly smaller than the Sea King, however the VH-3D constitutes the operational backbone of the group with 11 units in all. The VH-3D is a derivative of the Sikorsky SH-3 Sea King, a medium lift transport chopper that’s been in service since 1961. So by the start of the 21st century, the Sea King was nearing abdication and the Marine Corps started looking for a replacement.

In 2003, the DoD issued a Request for Proposals (basically an open solicitation bid sent out to defence contractors when the government wants new gear) for 23 new helicopters to replace the entire existing fleet — Sea Kings and NightHawks alike — designated the VXX proposal. Only two groups responded: Sikorsky (working with GE, Northrop, and others), which proposed a derivative of the H-92 Superhawk and chopper transport of choice for many heads of state; and AgustaWestland (along with Bell and Lockheed), which put forth the VH-71 Kestrel an American version of AugustaWestland’s very successful EH101 Merlin medium lift helicopter.

By January 2005, the Navy decided to go with the VH-71, redesignating it the US101. This 18-seat (4 crew, 14 passengers) all-weather helicopter measures 64 feet long and 22 feet high with a 61-foot rotor diameter powered by three 2,520HP GE CT7-8E turboshafts. It was originally designed as a Combat Search and Rescue platform. The Navy awarded the initial $US1.7 billion contract to AugustaWestland, pre-production design began, and that’s where the trouble started.

The project was immediately beset by cost overruns, and by 2007 — two years its kickoff — the development and retrofit costs alone had ballooned by 40 per cent ($US2.4 billion) over initial estimates. By 2008, building the entire fleet of 23 whirly-birds would cost a staggering $US11.2 billion — $US400 million per bird, about what an Air Force One 747 would run you — up from $US4.2 billion just three years before.

This near-tripling of cost did not sit well with the newly elected Obama administration. Running on a platform of change and fiscal responsibility after nearly a decade of ongoing military incursions into the Middle East, the incoming administration viewed the bloated VXX program as a meaty means of demonstrating both campaign promises to a waiting American public.

Despite the Navy in 2008 giving the go-ahead on the project (knowing full well about exorbitant cost), the VXX program ended in February 2009 — after the price had risen again to a solid $US13 billion — at the behest of President Obama himself. Instead, he directed that the remaining funds being applied towards upgrading the current Sea King/NightHawk fleet. Simply solution, right? Not quite, said the Congressional Research Service.

The CRS ran the numbers on the President’s plan and discovered that axing the VH-71 and retrofitting the VH-3D would, in the long run, end up costing the US taxpayers somewhere in the range of $US14 billion – $US21 billion — not to mention the $US3 billion they’d already blown on the Kestrel R&D so far. A savings bonanza, it was not. Plus any future fleet purchases wouldn’t be affordable until at least 2024, by which point the Sea Kings would be nearly eligible for Social Security.

Instead, the CRS put forth a four-option proposal for moving forward with a variation of the existing Kestrel program: One, continue the Kestrel model as currently developed (the Increment I and II versions, think of them as progressive prototype revisions). This option would cost about $US10 billion and have the choppers in the air by 2019. Two, build 23 units of just the Increment I Kestrel.

That would cost only $US6.4 billion and would have had them ready by 2012. Three, build just 19 Increment I’s for $US5.9 billion and also be ready by last year. Finally, spend just $US1.4 billion to upgrade the existing Sea King fleet though that wouldn’t actually satisfy any of the requirements for future presidential helicopters and would still need to be replaced in the coming decades.

By the end of 2009, the White House and DoD had reached a decision on the program. Upon signing the joint House and Senate Defence Appropriation Bill for FY 2010, the president sealed the fate of the VH-71. The bill appropriated $US130 million in total for the VXX program. $US100 million went towards recouping the programs various technology R&D costs while the remaining paid the Navy for its initial program studies. The administration was washing its hands of this R&Debacle, there would be no Kestrel for the foreseeable future.

With the program effectively back at square one, the US Navy published another RFP for a next-gen presidential helicopter.

Lockheed quickly jumped ship and signed on with Sikorsky’s proposed S-92 while Boeing has made a few vague rumblings about taking up with AugustaWestland to give the VH-71 another shot (and if not the Kestrel, perhaps an Osprey or a Chinook).

As Lexington Institute analyst Loren Thompson, told Defence News in 2010, “I do not believe that the story of VH-71 is over…

Secretary Gates has not made a convincing case for terminating the program, and there is no alternative helicopter that can satisfy range and payload requirements while still landing on the White House lawn.”

Whether or not the program moves forward in the next few years makes no difference to the nine VH-71s that had already been completed when the program was led out behind the woodshed. In June of 2011, the US government sold them to Canada for a tidy sum of $US164 million (more than paying for the FY 2010 appropriations tab). They’ll be used for spare parts for our Northern neighbour’s existing fleet of CH-149 Cormorants, another SAR derivative of the AH101. Word is, Canada might be eyeing them for use as VIP transports as well.

[ramon_cojones]

I had no choice in the iPhone 5. It was given to me by my employer. If I had a choice, I'd rather the 'antiquated' piece of junk Blackberry.

exactly my point dear lol, your apple hatred is hilarious

notice how apple enthusiasts couldn't care less about what other devices other people use but it's always android users trying to make themselves feel better...i always get a kick out of that

[MIKA27]

Researchers Identify 12 Asteroids Close Enough For Space Mining

Common sense would suggest that humans would want to do everything possible to discourage the asteroids hurdling through solar system from heading towards Earth. But in the too-futuristic era of space rock mining, that’s just not the case anymore.

This was on the back of researchers’ minds when a team from the University of Strathclyde in the United Kingdom parsed through the list of 9000 near-Earth objects to find which ones could be easily blasted into accessible orbit. They found 12 candidates that could be sent this way by changing their velocity by just 500m per second. These asteroids, so-called “easily retrievable objects”, are all about a million kilometres from Earth, and existing rocket technology would be enough to provide the thrust.

Now, the question is what to do with them. That will probably be left up to the deep-pocketed founders of Planetary Resources.

Unveiled last year, this asteroid mining company was founded by billionaires like Larry Page and Eric Schmidt, futurists like James Cameron and some NASA scientists. Their intended purpose is to wrangle and drill into some of the many thousands of near-Earth objects in search of valuable natural resources like, well, gold. Other asteroids are loaded with water that could prove incredible valuable to spacecraft in orbit. The challenge they all face now is how to grab the resource-rich asteroids.

The British researchers are undoubtedly onto something with their hunt for easily retrievable objects. If their research is correct, we could be lassoing asteroids into orbit within the next decade. And with each of those space rocks potentially holding billions of dollars worth of resources, it’ll be a veritable gold rush to get up there and drill into them.

[MIKA27]

exactly my point dear lol, your apple hatred is hilarious

notice how apple enthusiasts couldn't care less about what other devices other people use but it's always android users trying to make themselves feel better...i always get a kick out of that

[MIKA27]

Hyperloop Alpha: This Could Change Transit Forever

Inventor-entrepreneur-mad-scientist, Elon Musk just released an alpha design of his vision for the future of high-speed transit. This is our first look at the Hyperloop. After teasing the concept for months, we’re finally going to be able to figure out if this is a fantasy — or the beginning of our new reality.

Until now, everything we’ve been able to figure out about the Hyperloop has been based on a few basic claims: That it could get you from San Francisco to Los Angeles in about 30 minutes; that it would cost one-tenth the the estimated $US70 billion price tag of the proposed high speed rail line connecting the two coastal cities; and that it’s a cross between a rail gun, the concord and an air hockey table.”

The new system calls for aluminium pods to be shot through elevated steel tubes. The tubes would fly at a top-speed of some 1300kph. Musk thinks the system can be built for $US6-10 billion.

According to Musk, the new transit system is ideal for high traffic corridors between cities about 1500km apart. After that point, supersonic travel becomes much more practical.

So far, everything falls within the speculation in advance of the announcement. But here’s where things start to get crazy. As Musk has stated before, he doesn’t think that the answer is send the pods through the tunnel in a vacuum. Unfortunately, Musk also think that it’s far too inefficient to use a fan to generate huge columns of air, as was previously proposed by Musk’s “best guess” designer John Gardi.

So how does Musk think he’s going to get through all the air? The plan calls for each of the pods to come to battery powered air compressor on the front. Which actively transfers high pressure air from the front to the rear of the vessel.

It’s important to remember that what we’re looking at today is very much a preliminary design that Musk hopes to get input on. He has said that he has no plans to actually build the Hyperloop himself because he has enough on his plate with Tesla and SpaceX, which ultimately will mean someone else will need to step up to the plate. Or maybe he’s just playing coy and he’ll do it all himself.

Hyperloop Alpha

[MIKA27]

Buying Apple Products Is a Form of ‘Narcissism’

“When Steve Jobs introduced the Macintosh computer in a California auditorium in 1984, the screen displayed a photo of him. At one level, it was merely a way of demonstrating the computer’s graphics capabilities. At another level, it revealed an important dimension of the human-computer dynamic: To see oneself in a creation is the ultimate expression of one’s creative spirit…

Early computer advertisements rarely showed the user. The experience of using a computer was portrayed as a disembodied one, the mind of the user fusing with the computer to accomplish tasks.

In Apple’s 2002 “Window” ad, however, the active presence of a user suggests the integration of the self, the body, and the machine — a rhetorical move signifying computer and user as an integrated unit. The metaphor suggests that computers are not to be viewed as outside threats, but as intimate and integrated extensions of our own human faculties.

In the ad, a man is looking at himself just as much as he is looking at the impish machine. This recalls the Greek Narcissus myth where the young man is transfixed by his own reflection in the pool of water but does not recognize the reflection as himself.

The attraction of technology stems in part from our admiration of ourselves; personal technology points us back to ourselves. The man sees the computer as a separate entity, and yet the computer responds to his every move as if he were looking in a mirror. The computer symbolizes an extension of human thought, communication, and memory.

The Narcissus myth is thus revived in the guise of the gawking consumer.

In the process of personification, the rhetoric of the Apple ad recalls the narcissism at the heart of the human-computer exchange. The allure of the computer screen is linked to an ability to fill it with things that mirror the self. From emails to photos to work documents, the window of the computer screen presents the user with extensions of his or her own creativity, productivity, sociability, and memory.

I Think, Therefore iApple Buy

The marrying of human and machine consciousness in the “Windows” ad — where man comes to realize his admiration for the machine is due in part to how well it mirrors himself — was first suggested by the 1999 print ad “I think, therefore iMac.” The slogan is a satire of Enlightenment philosopher René Descartes’ famous phrase “I think, therefore I am.”

By substituting “iMac” for “I am,” the 1999 ad sets up a similitude between computing and thinking, reflecting the way we process information. For example, the extent to which we prefer one interface over another reveals a cognitive predisposition. So an insult hurled at Apple users is not just about the type of computer they use, but an attack on their structure of thinking — because computer choice is a reflection of one’s personality and way of looking at the world.

The ability for a product like the iMac to possess personality traits or to reflect a particular way of thinking and processing information grants it a human likeness.

Apple anthropomorphizing the machine reaches an apotheosis in the 2006 Apple “

” campaign, where the computers are no longer even present but are instead portrayed by human actors: Justin Long begins each ad by saying, “Hello, I’m a Mac,” and John Hodgman replies, “And I’m a PC.”

In a 2007 ad, PC appears dressed in a surgical gown, so Mac asks if PC is going in for a checkup. PC explains that he is going in to upgrade his operating system, “which is great, but I get a little nervous when they mess around with my insides.” PC laments that they have to update his graphics card, memory, and processors: “it’s major surgery.”

Visibly nervous, PC ends the commercial by saying, “Listen, Mac, if I don’t come back, I want you to have my peripherals.”

These ads rely on a metaphor that equates the human actors with the hardware and software of their respective computer systems. This biological analogy between computer parts and the human body reminds us that the metaphors that guide computer development come from our own human faculties, particularly cognition and memory.

But the reverse is also true. Our sense of self is now shaped by the technologies that are used to diagnose and repair the body. It’s easy to assume that the two actors in the “Get a Mac” campaign represent PC and Mac users, but the intent is clearly to grant the operating systems a human personality.

In the Mac narrative, differences in operating systems represent differences in cognition styles. Associating with a particular brand, then, is more than an affiliation to a name or corporate philosophy; it’s an affiliation to a way of thinking. The operating system is a metaphor for the mind.

The Apple ads, therefore, not only speak to the way in which technology has been personified (and extended as mirrors for the self), but also to the ways in which humans have been technologized.

As Marshall McLuhan put it, “We shape our tools and thereafter our tools shape us.”

MIKA: Amusing indeed...

[Habana Mike]

^ Explains my apple-shaped body