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The Year's Best Astronomy Photos Will Transport You To Another World

The Royal Observatory Greenwich in the UK has shortlisted its nominees for its annual Insight Astronomer of the Year competition. From stunning aurora and shooting stars through to solar flares and distant nebulae, these images are guaranteed to astound.

This competition is now in its ninth year, and it only seems to be getting better. The shortlisted candidates (shown below) are some of the best astronomically-themed photos we've ever seen, and they showcase a wide array of celestial phenomenon.

This year, over 3,800 professional and amateur photographers from 91 countries submitted their photos. Winners will be announced on September 14, 2017, at a special ceremony at the Royal Observatory Greenwich. The winning images will be displayed in a free-of-charge exhibition at the Observatory's Astronomy Centre starting September 16th.

Crescent Moon Over the Needles, Ainsley Bennett (UK)

This glorious shot shows the seven per cent waxing crescent Moon setting in the evening sky over the Needles Lighthouse at the western tip of the Isle of Wight. Despite the Moon being a thin crescent, the rest of its shape is defined by sunlight reflecting back from the Earth's surface.

Aurora Over Svea, Agurtxane Concellon (Spain)

The purples and greens of the Northern Lights loom over the coal mining city of Svea, in the archipelago of Svalbard. The earthy landscape below the glittering sky is lit up by the industrial lights at the pier of Svea.

Eastern Prominence, Paul Andrew (UK)

A large, stellar prominence — a glowing cloud of gas extended in a magnetic field — reaches from the surface of the Sun during late August 2016. There are a number of different prominence types that have been observed emanating from the Sun, but this so-called "hedgerow" prominence resembles wild shrubbery.

Solar Trails Above the Telescope, Maciej Zapior (Poland)

This freaky shot was taken with a solargraphy pinhole camera. The image charts the movement of the Sun over the Astronomical Institute of the Czech Academy of Sciences, Prague, with an exposure of half a year (December 21, 2015 to June 21, 2016). To create the photo, regular black-and-white photographic paper (a photosensitive material) was used, but not developed. After exposure, the negative was scanned and processed using a graphic editing program to adjust colour and contrast. The rainbow of colours of the trails are the result of the photosensitive paper changing as it is exposed to different temperatures and humidity.

Ghostly Sun, Michael Wilkinson (UK)

Here's the Sun photographed in Calcium-K light, depicting our star's inner chromosphere (a gaseous layer that, along with the corona, constitutes the star's outer atmosphere). In the colour-rendering scheme used, the surface is shown in negative, with the sunspots as bright spots, and the area outside the Sun's outer perimeter (limb) shown with increased contrast, highlighting a surge on the western limb, and several small prominences.

Beautiful Tromsø, Derek Burdeny (USA)

A stunning aurora above the harbour in Tromsø, Norway. The photographer, Derek Burdeny, did not realise what he had shot until six months later when he was reviewing his images.

Sh2-249 Jellyfish Nebula, Chris Heapy (UK)

Located in the constellation of Gemini, IC443 is a galactic supernova remnant, a star that could have exploded as many as 30,000 years ago. Its globular appearance has earned the celestial structure the moniker of the Jellyfish Nebula.

Fall Milk, Brandon Yoshizawa (USA)

This spectacular image shows the snow-clad mountain in the Eastern Sierra, while the Milky Way Galaxy hovers above.

Hustle and Peaceful, Prisca Law (Hong Kong)

Taken from The Peak — the highest mountain on Hong Kong Island — this vivid image shows the hustle and bustle of the city in contrast to the peaceful starry sky.

ISS Daylight Transit, Dani Caxete (Spain)

The International Space Station (ISS) whizzes across the dusky face of the Moon, while photographed in broad daylight. This is a real shot, with no compositing or clipping.

Mr. Big Dipper, Nicholas Roemmelt (Denmark)

An explorer observes the constellation of the Big Dipper perfectly aligned with the entrance to a large glacier cave in Engadin, Switzerland. This is a panorama of two pictures, and each is a stack of another two pictures — one for the stars and another one for the foreground. The photographer didn't adjust the photo in any other way — all elements are where they are supposed to be both in time and space. 

Near Earth Object 164121 (2003 TYI), Derek Robson (UK)

On the night of Halloween 2016, the Near Earth Asteroid 164121 (2003 YT1) made a close encounter with Earth at three million miles.

NGC 2023, Warren Keller (USA)

Hidden in the constellation of Orion, at a distance of 1,467 light years from Earth, is nebula 2023. This object is most often photographed next to the famous Horsehead Nebula, but here the photographer has given NGC 2023 the spotlight. The detail in this shot is breathtaking.

Reflection, Beate Behnke (Germany)

The reflection in the wave ripples of Skagsanden beach mirrors the brilliant green whirls of the Aurora Borealis in the night sky overhead. To get the effect of the shiny surface, photographer Beate Behnke had to stand in the wave zone of the incoming flood. Only when the water receded very low did the opportunity to capture the beautiful scene occur.

A Brief Rotation of Mount Olympus, Avani Soares (Brazil)

This series of Mars images was taken between June 1 and July 3, 2016, showing Mount Olympus in three different positions. Mount Olympus — also known as Olympus Mons — is the tallest volcano in the Solar System.

Orion's Gaseous Nebulae, Sebastien Grech (UK)

Located 1,300 light years away from Earth, the Orion Nebula is found in Orion's Sword in the famous constellation named after the blade's owner. The Orion Nebula is one of the most photographed and studied objects in the night sky. The nebula is thought to measure about 24 light years across and have a mass 2,000 times that of our Sun.

An Icy Moonscape, Kris Williams (UK)

A lone stargazer sits atop the peak of Castell-Y-Gwynt (Castle of the Winds) on Glyder Fach Mountain in Snowdonia, North Wales, beneath a starry night sky during freezing temperatures in mid-winter.

A Battle We Are Losing, Haitong Yu (China)

The Milky Way rises above a small radio telescope from a large array at Miyun Station, National Astronomical Observatory of China, near Beijing. This image depicts the ever-growing light pollution we now experience, which together with electromagnetic noise has turned many optical and radio observatories near cities both blind and deaf.

Ignite the Lights, Nicolas Alexander Otto (Germany)

After a long hike from his small cabin to Kvalvika, Lofoten Islands in Norway, photographer Nicolas Alexander Otto arrived at the slopes above the beach around midnight. During the hike, the auroral display was relatively weak, but when he arrived at the beach the sky erupted in a colourful spectacle of greens and purples set against the mossy, green landscape.

Shooting Star and Jupiter, Rob Bowes (UK)

A shooting star flashes across the sky over the craggy landscape of Portland, Dorset, as Venus looks on. The image is of two stacked exposures: one for the sky and one for the rocks.

Super Moon, Giorgia Hofer (Italy)

A brilliant shot of the Super Moon illuminating the night sky as it sets behind the Marmarole, in the heart of the Dolomites in Italy. On the evening of November 14, 2016, the Moon was nearly 360 km away from the center of the Earth, the closest occurrence since 1948. It will not be closer again until 2034. On this night, the Moon was 30 per cent brighter and 14 per cent bigger than other full moons.

The Road Back Home, Ruslan Merzlyakov (Latvia)

Gorgeous noctilucent clouds stretch across the Swedish sky illuminating a motorcyclist's ride home in this dramatic display.

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A Woman And Her Zombie Stalker Make For The Ultimate Odd Couple In It Stains The Sands Red

A desperate woman, a decaying man, and a vast desert are the three main characters in It Stains the Sands Red, an unusual zombie movie that's both gory and heartfelt and admirably makes the most of its minimalist set-up.

The odds don't look good for Molly (Brittany Allen), a high-maintenance party girl who finds herself stranded in the desert outside of Las Vegas with a very persistent lone zombie in pursuit. But don't be fooled by her clashing animal prints — Molly is made of surprisingly tough stuff, though she's also helped by the fact that her undead stalker is awkward and slow-moving.

If she can just keep briskly marching toward the airstrip where a ride out of zombietown awaits (she hopes), she'll survive. Easy, right?

Of course not — it's the scorching desert, after all, and her supply of water, vodka, cocaine, candy bars, and tampons is perilously limited. And this is a horror movie, so if Molly didn't toss common sense aside and stop to take a nap once in a while, there wouldn't be much tension to work with. The bulk of It Stains the Sands Red follows Molly's platform-booted trek with her snarling suitor in tow; it's a remarkably simple set-up (with shades of It Follows, at least initially) that proves unexpectedly enjoyable to watch.

Allen makes what could've been a one-note character someone you want to root for. Though she does some truly dumb things, she's also very funny. ("From now on, you'll be known as Small Dick. Smalls, for short," she tells the zombie during one of their many one-sided conversations.) Eventually, Molly meets some fellow survivors on the road — and realises that the worst thing to run into during a zombie apocalypse isn't necessarily a zombie.

In fact, having a zombie around can actually be helpful in the right moment.

Director and co-writer Colin Minihan — one half of "The Vicious Brothers," the duo who made Grave Encounters — adds interest with some fleeting flashbacks that reveal just enough (Molly has a kid, somewhere), and somehow makes the desert look like a golden-hued place where it's always magic hour, even with a ghoul breathing down your neck. The very odd bond that forms between Molly and Smalls actually feels earned, not forced into the story.

And if you're worried that there's too much frenemy stuff and not enough zombie stuff, rest assured that Molly gets to test her mettle in that realm before the end. If the stripped-down It Stains the Sands Red never quite lives up to its magnificently trashy title, it still offers an interesting spin on the genre — no small feat, considering the never-abating popularity of zombie movies.

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THESE ARE THE OLDEST PHOTOS OF 15 FAMOUS CITIES AROUND THE WORLD

This collection of photos reveals how iconic city skylines looked like back in the mid-19th century.

This was back when the camera had first invented and still required an extremely long exposure period. The long exposure coupled with the the fact that there were less cars and skyscrapers makes many of these cities look like ghost towns!

Take Toronto for example – the city still had big, empty dirt roads back in1865 when the shot in this series was taken. And Tokyo? You definitely won't spot any of those neon ads which have become so synonymous with Tokyo's aesthetic.

Keep scrolling for rare throw-back photos of San Fransisco, Jerusalem, Mumbai, L.A., and more!

1. Athens, 1845

2. Berlin, 1840

3. Bombay, 1850

4. Copenhagen, 1840

5. Dublin, 1848

6. Edinburgh, 1848

7. Jerusalem, 1844

8. London, 1839

9. New York, 1848 and 1850

10. Paris, 1838

11. Rome, 1842

12. Singapore, 1844

13. Sydney 1855 and 1858

14. Toronto, 1856

15. Washington, D.C. 1846

 

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‘Suburbicon’ Trailer

The Coen brothers and George Clooney have teamed up plenty of times before, but never with Clooney behind the camera this significantly. And while he’s still a relatively new director (only 7 directing credits, compared to his 78 acting credits), if there’s material he can nail, it would be a cooperative effort between him and the Coen brothers. Maybe that was the plan all along with Suburbicon, a crime comedy set in the recently established suburbs of 1959. The trailer features everything you’d want in a project like this, with high stakes scenarios juxtaposed with the visual comedy of O Brother Where Art Thou. There’s no doubt it’ll be entertaining, but we’re most excited to see what changes Clooney will make to the formula. Expect there to be classic Coen brothers moments, but to come at them from a George Clooney angle.

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THE MACALLAN IN LALIQUE SIX PILLARS COLLECTION

Between 2006 and 2016, The Macallan collaborated with French crystal house Lalique to release some of their rarest single malts in individual crystal decanters. Each of the six whiskies was aged between 50 to 65 years and together are known as the Six Pillars Collection.

Individual bottles are highly sought after, so this entire set, up for auction through Bonhams, is certain to be one of the most desired whisky auctions in recent memory and is estimated to fetch over half a million dollars.

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SKAGEN SIGNATUR HYBRID SMARTWATCH

Not everyone wants to wear a screen on their arm, yet wrist-bound notifications are handy for anyone with a smartphone. The Skagen Signatur Hybrid Smartwatch is an affordable option that gives you the latter without the former. Its sleek design mirrors the circular case in everything from the pushers to the ends of the hour and minute hands, while a Bluetooth connection lets it automatically update to the correct time and date, let you know when you get a text or call, control your music, and track your sleep and activity. Available in four different colorways.

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This $740,000 iPhone Robbery Sounds Like The Craziest Heist Movie

A year-long manhunt ended last weekend, when police arrested a gang of five Romanian stunt thieves near a large collection of Van Gogh paintings in the Netherlands. In their hideout, the cops found €500,000 ($739,817) worth of iPhones that the suspects allegedly lifted off the back of a truck — while it was barrelling down a highway.

Dutch press are calling the highway manoeuvre the "Romanian method". Apparently, the thieves drive a modified van right up to the bumper of a cargo truck, and then two of them climb out the van's sun roof and down onto the hood. Next, the most insane of the two cracks the lock on the back of the truck, while the other hood-bound thief holds his legs. Once the truck's doors are open, they climb in and transfer the expensive cargo back to the van. According to police, this single Romanian gang has been responsible for 17 highway heists in the past two years.

The Romanian method itself dates back even further than that. A video released by the Romanian police in 2012 shows an attempted heist that took place in May of that year. Filmed by a police helicopter in complete darkness, the video clearly shows two thieves emerging from the sunroof and climbing up to the hood as their vehicle tailgates a cargo truck. For some reason, after peeking in the truck, they abort the robbery. It's unclear if the recently arrested Romanian gang used an identical technique, but they had certainly perfected their strategy.

Meanwhile, the Van Gogh connection is tenuous. Police found the suspected thieves holed up in the tiny village of Otterlo near a national park in the central area of the Netherlands. The main point of interest in Otterlo is the Kröller-Müller Museum, which happens to contain one of the world's largest collection of Van Gogh paintings, second only to the Van Gogh Museum.

Were the thieves planning to hit a shipment of expensive paintings next, pulling off an art heist of historic proportions? We don't know, but it sure would make a great movie.

[MIKA27]

Here's Why Everyone Goes Nuts For Rally Finland

Watch this video and you'll understand why people lose their minds over Rally Finland. I could tell you it's the fastest event on the World Rally Championship calendar, but that wouldn't explain it in the way that a car flying sideways through the air set up for another flat out corner does.

This is the newest edit from Tor Andre Børresen, with a view count already in the six figures a day after it went up. I must make the pilgrimage myself. One day.

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Magnificent Sandstone Statue Uncovered Near Legendary Cambodian Temple

Describing it as something that only happens in the movies, a team of Cambodian archaeologists have uncovered an 800-year-old sandstone statue weighing 200kg. Experts say it's the most significant statue to be discovered in the famous archaeological site of Angkor Park in years.

Archaeologists and looters have been sifting through the dirt of Cambodia's Angkor Archaeological Park for years, and these days very little is unearthed other than the odd pottery shard. This area is home to the largest religious monument in the world — a Hindu temple built by the Khmer empire in the early 12th century, and later transformed into a Buddhist monument. So imagine the surprise when archaeologists with the Apsara Authority, the government organisation that manages Angkor Park, unearthed this incredible statue, just 40cm underground.

As The Cambodia Daily reports, the sandstone statue was discovered on the second day of an excavation at Angkor Park, a popular tourist destination. The 1.9m statue, which once stood at least 2.1m tall, is missing its arms and lower legs, but the remainder is surprisingly intact. Engravings on its body and head are still clearly visible. Authorities say the statue will be studied, cleaned, and put on public exhibition in a museum at the northwestern province of Siem Reap, where Angkor is located.

The statue was made in the image of a guard, and it is thought to have once stood at the entrance of a hospital that was located next to the northern entrance of Angkor Thom, the famed walled city of King Jayavarman VII. During his reign, this 12th century king was responsible for the construction of over a hundred hospitals across his empire. Ankgor was the capital of the Khmer Empire, which prospered from the 9th to 15th centuries. The hospital where this statue was found was one of four built in the area, none of which have been thoroughly excavated.

"Jayavarman VII's reign was truly remarkable in terms of social programs," said Tan Boun Suy, deputy director-general for the Apsara Authority, in The Cambodia Daily. "The hospital consisted of wooden buildings and a chapel erected in stones. What is left is the chapel… as wooden structures have long disappeared."

The Apsara archaeologists will be working in the area for another 12 days, and they're hoping to make further discoveries. Not much is known about these hospitals and how they worked, or about the lives or ordinary people who lived during the time. In addition to this massive statue, the archaeologists also unearthed a piece of another statue, and evidence of wooden structures, including roof tiles and ceramics.

The archaeologists are also hoping to find statues of the Buddha. During the reign of King Jayavarman VIII, many statues of the Buddha were destroyed in an attempt to restore Brahmanism in the country. Some of the remaining statues were looted, but some statues of the Buddha were buried for protection. Back in 2011, archaeologists at the Angkor Wat temple discovered a pair of large Buddha statues, the largest to be found there in eight decades.

With the discovery of this hospital guard, there's now hope of finding other forgotten treasures.

[MIKA27]

Shot in the Dark

Spending six days in a cave without any light means hallucinations, hypothermia, and the potential for fatal falls. Why would anyone volunteer for one of the most extreme reality shows ever?

Is that real?"

"No. F**king. Way."

The man and woman stumble out into the muggy Missouri air, tearing up, then falling to their knees in the gravel. It's late afternoon, and the setting sun casts ochre rays through the willows and ash; lightning bugs have already appeared, neon flashes in the honeysuckle. But the man and woman have no idea what time it is, and their eyes aren't working that well either. For the past six days, they've been struggling to escape a hellish natural labyrinth carved into the hillside behind them, entirely in the dark.

Not half-light, not dimness, not relative dark: total, pitch darkness. Darkness so dark you can't see your hand in front of your face, or even be sure whether your eyes are open or closed. Lost within an ancient cave, the man and woman started off separate and alone, confronting mind-bending isolation that played tricks on their senses and produced ever-more-disorienting hallucinations. Fumbling and crawling, never sure which next step might break their necks or worse, they navigated through an alien environment marked by vermin, severe cold, tight confines, sudden drops, yawning pits, and sharp rocks. Eventually, they found each other deep below the earth, then painstakingly made their way to the surface. And the entire time, circling silently about them in the darkness, intimately near yet incredibly far away, has been a crew of producers and camera operators documenting their every move.

This isn't a psychology experiment or a military training exercise. It's a new show, Darkness, set to premiere on the Discovery Channel on August 2. Call it insane or call it brilliant, one thing is certain: it meets America's insatiable appetite for extreme reality TV, then takes it to a whole new level.

The premise of Darkness is simple. At the start of each episode, three people, all strangers to each other, descend to three different locations deep inside a cave or abandoned mineshaft. They then have six days to find each other and work their way out through a different exit, all without any source of light. They must do it without tools or resources beyond a helmet and a backpack containing some paracord, a little bit of water, and a tiny ration bar—everything else they eat (read: worms and insects), they must forage for themselves.

No gimmicks complicate the bare-bones concept. The cast are paid only for their time; there is no prize. Instead, they are motivated by some combination of personal or professional survival skills and a desire to push themselves to their limits. They have included an instructor in the military's Survival, Evasion, Resistance, and Escape program, a former Green Beret, several Marines, firefighters, and an archaeologist who's an expert in pre-modern "bushcraft." There are no teams, no competitive challenges, no winner's ceremony. "We can call it a test of survival or a social experiment, but it's really one and the same," says Rich Ross, president of Discovery. "It's unscripted horror meets psychological thriller in an extreme natural setting," elaborates Chris Grant, CEO of Electus, the company that developed and produces Darkness. "It's about tapping something atavistic, primal. The dark is an animal unto itself—it hurts." The true antagonist isn't other cast members, or artificial challenges: it's the darkness itself.

Fear of the dark is a basic, natural part of being human. Unlike the eyes of creatures that primarily go about their business at night, human eyes are built to operate best during broad daylight. The hardware of large predators who hunt in dark (say, lions) is almost the exact opposite. So in evolutionary terms, being afraid of the dark makes sense.

Of course, not many people in the industrialized world have to worry about being eaten by lions. But fear of the dark abides—and not just among children, who experience it almost universally. When an extreme version manifests in adulthood, it's known as nyctophobia (from nyx, the Greek word for night), a condition that has afflicted everyone from Augustus Caesar to Keanu Reeves to Muhammad Ali. Only a small fraction of adults will admit to pollsters they're afraid of the dark when asked over the phone. But when people are given a chance to list their fears in more private surveys, they're much more forthcoming: some forty percent of adults polled in the United Kingdom, for example, said they are scared to walk around their own homes in the dark, ten percent to the point that they'll won't even leave bed to use the toilet. Some medical experts argue that many cases of insomnia, which afflicts some sixty million Americans, may also stem from a fear of the dark. What keeps many of these people up isn't the threat of lions, but other, more metaphorical predators—the demons with which our minds, free of daytime distractions, populate the dark around our beds—worries, anxieties, regrets.

 

Of the three cast members on this episode of Darkness, which is tentatively set to air early next year, only one confesses to having ever been afraid of the dark. Sarah Williams, a twenty-seven-year-old photographer from Los Angeles, say she suffered from "a severe fear of the dark. It took me until I was in college to sleep without a light on—I was plagued by nightmares until I was seventeen." But this history didn't stop Sarah from signing up for Darkness—just the opposite. "In all aspects of my life," she says, "I'm looking for ways to push boundaries, to push my mind to its absolute limits, to places I've never experienced before." Five-foot-four and blonde, Sarah laughs easily, projects an almost Zen-like calm, and is tough as nails. What attracted her most to the idea of a week in a dangerous cave with a pair of survivalist strangers was that she couldn't fully prepare for it. "Being unprepared is one of my biggest fears," she says. "I felt like this was the ultimate test: just me, as I am, without anything, going into the situation."

The idea of being unprepared has a complicated history for Sarah. Back when she was first getting into camping and hiking, she went on an excursion in the Angeles National Forest with two guys who had told her they were real-deal outdoorsmen. Turns out, they weren't: they hadn't packed properly, didn't know how to conserve or purify water, and one of the two, who had claimed to be an Eagle Scout, kept trying to get directions through the wilderness on his iPhone. Four days later, well into one of the hottest weeks of a record-setting California drought, the group was totally lost and the two dudes were horizontal from dehydration, one sliding into shock. Over the strident objections of the men—"they were very aggressive"—Sarah took everyone's phones, retraced their steps, and climbed a mountain to find enough cell reception to call for a medevac.

In the four years since that near-disaster, Sarah's only gone trekking more. And while she prepared for Darkness by spending time in a sensory deprivation tank, her biggest preparation was making peace with the fact that she could never truly be ready. "The main thing is trust. I just had to trust that bad stuff wouldn't happen, or if it did, I would deal with it then."

 

Prior to this episode, Sarah's never been caving, but for Tray Heinke, caves are literally home. Tray hails originally from Missouri, but now lives on-site near the Indiana Caverns in Croydon, Indiana, where he works as a guide. Wiry and muscular, he looks like a well-tanned Christian Bale, but with a slight drawl and piercings. He's just turned forty, but for a long time didn't think he'd make it that far. "Back in high school, if you'd asked everybody to vote on who was most likely to die young, it would have been me," he says. "But now, most of my old friends are dead, and here I am, above ground." And below it, too: Tray is a hardcore caver who can compress his torso and strategically crush joints to fit his body through seven-and-half-inch-vertical passages. Clambering through caverns for the past three decades, he has broken limbs and flailed ribs more times than he can count: "Between caves and mosh pits, man, I've been lucky." Tray's also spent long periods of time living entirely off-grid, with only his dog and pet snake for company.

For the first half of his life, Tray lived hard. "It wasn't until I found caving that I got away from drinking and drugging," he says. "Now, don't get me wrong - I still have a drink from time to time, but it doesn't consume me, it doesn't consume my life. Mud is my drug of choice."

When Tray talks about caving, his eyes grow bright and wide, almost as if he's already underground. "I like the idea of going places that no other human has ever seen," he says. "Hiking in the mountains, you kinda hope to get into something like that, where you're hiking a part of the land that maybe somebody's never been before, but then you find a whiskey bottle or a cigarette butt to tell you somebody's been there. All parts of the surface have been discovered —underground is a whole different world." As a cave surveyor who maps undiscovered passageways, he frequently explores dead-end tunnels that no one else will ever visit again: "I've been in parts of this earth that have seen less human interaction than the moon."

Tray firmly believes that going underground in complete darkness is a terrible ideaL "You should never go into a cave without three separate light sources and three sets of batteries for each—our lights are our life." But the idea of Darkness drew him in anyway. "It goes against everything that cavers stress—but what would happen in a real situation if my lights got crushed, or something else? You don't do this, I shouldn't be doing this—but I wanted to prove to myself that I could."

 

Joining Sarah and Tray is a third cast member, Brandon Pope, who is thirty-eight and works as an industrial refrigeration technician. He spends his time away from work hiking in the Arkansas backwoods and teaching survival classes to children. A self-identified survivalist, Brandon also acknowledges that the proposition of Darkness violates rules he otherwise swears by. "I never leave home unprepared, I never go into the woods unprepared," he says. "You're always supposed to have your Everyday Carry gear—a firestarter, water purification tablets, my knives." But the idea of fending for himself in this extreme survival scenario presented a test he couldn't pass up. "I like pushing myself, being out of my comfort zone. I've never been afraid of the dark, never been afraid of creepy-crawlies." He wants to see if he can handle it. It won't be long before he finds out he can't.

The fourth major character on this episode of Darkness is the cave itself. Known unofficially as "The Cave State," Missouri is criss-crossed by some 6,300 caves. Carved by ancient waters into the hills near the small city of Hannibal lie two particularly remarkable caves, making up what is known as the Mark Twain Cave Complex. The first, formerly called McDowell's Cave, has been renamed Mark Twain Cave, after the American satirist who grew up in Hannibal and featured the cave (disguised as "McDougal") in Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn.Twain's tales drew on stranger-than-fiction true stories: in addition to offering a dangerous playground for Hannibal's children, McDowell's Cave played host, at varying points, to Civil War smugglers, bandits, and even a doctor turned DIY forensic scientist who tried preserving the body of his dead daughter in a giant glass jar suspended deep in one chamber. Today, the cave has been wired with lighting and lined with handrails to entertain crowds of tourists; Jesse James' signature, in pencil and soot, is visible on a wall not far from Brad Paisley's.

But the other cave in the Mark Twain Complex, Cameron Cave, is a different story entirely. Cameron is what's known as a wild cave, discovered much more recently and standing more or less unaltered in its natural state, save for a small cinderblock outbuilding constructed around its main entrance.

When you hear "cave," you may envision an open cavern or underground vault. But Cameron is a "maze cave," some 4.62 miles of tunnels arranged in a haphazard labyrinth of five hundred passages stretched across fifty-five acres. There are some small open spaces at the intersections where passages meet, but the passageways themselves are nothing like hallways or human-built tunnels. Many are cramped and diamond-shaped, tight on the bottom and top, with their widest part coming at irregular heights above an uneven floor that rises and falls in unpredictable waves. The walls of other passages are incredibly tall and straight, but also exceedingly narrow, requiring you to walk through sideways while sucking in your chest as you go. Dead-ends are common and precipitous drops are plentiful; tight ledges loom over ninety-foot-deep drops that cavers have given names like the Pit of Doom, the Big Nothing, or the Chasm of Death. Walking (or crawling) through these tunnels is like following the path of an ant that's gotten lost burrowing through a French pastry, except the layers aren't crispy dough, but razor-sharp rock that can tear skin or put out an eye, and where a stumble and fall can easily kill you outright or leave you, bones snapped like twigs, wedged at the bottom of some hellish abyss. Navigating any cave is inherently dangerous ("If you trip and hit your head on a rock," says Tray, "you could potentially be dead from a four-foot fall") but doing it a scenario where any false step could potentially lead to a dive from God knows how high is another order of magnitude of crazy.

When it comes time to film this episode of Darkness, Sarah, Tray, and Brandon each hike deep into different locations within Cameron Cave. With their each twist and turn, the light from the surface dims and they get ever more lost, until finally the darkness swallows them.

Caves have been sources for shelter, provided canvases for primitive art, and played host to ancient religious rites. But just because humans and caves go back a long time together does not mean they are welcoming, human-friendly spaces. And Cameron Cave is downright hostile.

First, there's the cold. As a rule of thumb, the temperature of any given cave is the average year-round temperature of the region in question. In northeastern Missouri, that means fifty-seven degrees—even when it's in the sweltering high nineties above. But the air temperature isn't the only issue. The cave's limestone is icy cold to the touch; when you sit or lie down, it leaches heat from your body like you're a fancy molecular gastronomy dessert on an anti-griddle.

The cold is what drives the first cast member out of the cave. "I hike in temperatures like that all day long, in short sleeves and shorts," Brandon says later. "But in a cave it's a completely different 56 degrees. I remember, first night I was in there, laying on the ground, it was almost instantaneous, the body heat was sucked right out of my body." He tried getting some rest, hoping to regain some energy. "I got out my blanket, and I laid down, using my blanket as a pillow. I dozed off, but the cold woke me up. I was frigid." He tried to go back to sleep. "I shave my head, which means a lot of my body heat goes out of my head. So I tried to cover up with my blanket, but from being on the ground, my blanket was a little damp." When he woke up a second time, he was shivering uncontrollably and couldn't feel his toes. At that point, Brandon started to worry about hypothermia. Realizing he simply couldn't adapt, he tapped out, activating a small emergency radio that called the crew to come and extract him. "I have a new respect for caves," he admits. "You can't go in there thinking you're Mr. Badass and going to make the cave your bitch."

Brandon's experience gets at another challenge of surviving underground, in the dark or otherwise: what happens to your sense of time. Brandon fell asleep twice, and only for thirty or forty minutes at a go. But when he awoke, he was certain that he'd been asleep for two eight-to-ten-hour stretches. When the safety crew came to retrieve him, Brandon was adamant he'd been underground for two full days. In reality, he'd only been below for twelve hours.

Scientists have documented this phenomenon extensively. Researchers who have undertaken simultaneous but separate sojourns into caves for extended periods will emerge with radically different estimates of how long they've been below—different from one another by weeks, and different from the calendar by yet more. Absent cues from the aboveground natural world or data from clocks or phones, our conscious perception of time can get weird, fast.

But that's nothing compared to what goes on inside our bodies. When people talk about your "circadian rhythm," they're actually referring to dozens of different physiological processes, cycles governing everything from your heart rate to your breathing to your immune system to your digestion to your body temperature. These sub-systems operate on their own timelines, but are largely kept in sync with each other as long as the body follows a roughly 24-hour cycle that tracks changes in ambient light and various social cues. In situations of irregular light and darkness, everything goes out of whack within a couple of days. It is not uncommon for test subjects living underground to start sleeping and waking in forty-eight-hour cycles, or to experience bizarre changes in their behavior or sense of self. Michel Siffre, a European scientist, spent months at a time in half-lit caves in the Alps and Texas as part of research he carried out for NASA. Siffre not only got hypothermia, but also went off the rails, in one instance desperately trying to befriend a mouse for companionship but instead accidentally crushing it and falling into near-suicidal despair. When asked about the impact of those experiments on his mind and body, Siffre, who's now in his seventies, describes it as "hell" and speaks of feeling like "a semi-detached marionette."

And then there are the hallucinations. Just because darkness deprives us of visual stimulation doesn't mean our hyper-vigilant brains won't try to generate some. In laboratory studies, researchers have been able to reliably provoke hallucinations in most subjects after only a single day of blindfolding. Those hallucinations generally follow a pattern—first, spots of light (called "phosphenes"), followed by shapes and colors, and finally even more elaborate illusions like walls, cityscapes, sunsets, and faces (one test subject, a woman in Boston, reported recurrent visions of Elvis). These visions are technically "pseudo-hallucinations," which means you see them while knowing that they're not real, but in the disorientation of total darkness, they can be distressing indeed.

For Sarah and Tray, the visuals started as spotlights and then progressed to geometric shapes and various scenes. Making things even trippier was an ever-increasing porousness between lucid dreams and waking reality. "The only time I knew I was asleep," says Sarah, "was when I could see, because then I knew I was dreaming." Tray had a similar experience. "Our brains will produce images of our hands even in darkness," he says, referring to a phenomenon known as "The Spelunker's Illusion." "At one point, I was waving my hand in front of a wall, and when I put my hand in front of me, it blocked my sight of the wall, and that's when I knew for sure I was asleep." The wall he saw was a surface of sheer rock, and it wasn't unfamiliar to him: It was the cave wall he had seen with his own eyes only a few months prior, when he had almost died below ground on a speleological expedition.

Prior to heading below that day, Tray and his caver friends had monitored the aboveground weather forecast, which predicted an inch to an inch-and-a-half of precipitation, likely snow, for an entire afternoon. Later that day, when they were deep within a complex of unexplored caverns, the weather suddenly changed, with four-to-six inches of hard rain falling in a single hour, a deluge that rapidly flowed underground. "We were in the worst possible place we could be," Tray says. "I was in an ear-dipper, which means I had an ear against the ceiling and an ear in the water." But the water kept rising, and, he says, "I had to go through the last ten feet with my face underwater holding my breath." Soaked and frigid, Tray and his friends barely made it to higher ground, and set up to wait for rescue. But the hours passed, supplies ran out, and one of Tray's friends fell into shock. "We were faced with two decisions: we either give up, lay down and die, or we go for it and die trying." Just when everyone had decided to go for it, Tray and his friends heard the calls of the rescue team around a bend. "I just started bawling," he says.

Dogged with hallucinations and haunted by traumatic memories, Tray and Sarah fumbled separately through Cameron Cave. Eventually, calling out into the darkness, they heard each others' voices.

There are two schools of thought when it comes to the question of how people interact in the dark. The first holds that, under cover of darkness, people try to get away with things. "Rulers that are watchful by night in cities are a terror to evil-doers, be they citizens or enemies," Plato pronounced some twenty-four-hundred years ago, expressing a sentiment still shared by many contemporary urban planners, who argue that erecting lampposts will bring crime down. Psychologists have documented a so-called "anonymity effect" whereby people will take advantage of low light conditions to cheat other players in small-stakes games.

But there's another, less pessimistic perspective. In our everyday interactions, we humans are constantly assessing one other, and most of us lean heavily on what we see. Even a cursory visual scan of another person yields a superabundance of information, from the cut of their clothes to their gender to the color of their skin to whether we find them sexually attractive. But when these cues are unavailable, your first impression of another human being is no longer whether they're a dude in a Yankees hat or a woman in Prada; instead, they're a disembodied voice telling you their story, or a hand in the darkness passing you a much-needed sip of water. Researchers have observed that job interviews carried out in darkness are less likely to be skewed by biases, and that groups of people interacting in low light may be more cooperative and less prone to stereotyping one another.

Three days into their experience underground, Tray and Sarah finally crossed paths. Whooping and yelling, they drew close, then introduced themselves. Says Sarah, "The moment I met him and he was like 'Hi, I'm Tray, I'm a caver,' I felt like it was heaven-sent." "Meeting Sarah was awesome," Tray concurs. Together, the two talked, and formed mental images of the other that were drastically different from reality. "I thought [Sarah] was much older than she is," says Tray, "Not by the sound of her voice, but just to hear her talk—she sounds much older. She's wise beyond her years." Sarah, for her part, decided Tray "was six-five and big-stature, big chested, a white guy from the Midwest, like a rancher, with a cowboy hat, and older, muscular, but with a little age on him, like an older Indiana Jones."

Sarah and Tray won't share how exactly they managed to puzzle their way out. "You're just going to have to wait and watch the episode," Tray grins. But they do say that they worked together and shared what few supplies they had—one tiny ration bar, supplemented by a cache of additional bars they found. "My guess is we consumed six hundred calories over the entire time, maximum," Tray says. The two spent time comparing hallucinations and talking about cookies and T-bones. Their circumstances were incredibly intimate, but the dynamic was one of comrades. To be sure, sex isn't at the top of the list of things you think about when you're preoccupied with not breaking your neck, but Sarah is frank about the realities of being a woman alone in the dark with a strange man: "I'm constantly listening, and being very, very aware of my surroundings." If the cold demanded it, Sarah says she would've been open to getting near Tray to share warmth, but early in their meeting, she set a clear boundary: "If you try anything, I'll stab you in the throat."

Towards the end of their time in the cave, Sarah's dreams began to change. Up to that point they had all been set at night, but in one of her last dreams she was aboard on a boat, watching "the most beautiful sunset I've ever seen in my life—waking, sleeping, anything." Or it could've been a sunrise—Sarah's not sure. Soon after, the two finally surfaced, then hugged and high-fived, mud and dirt flying everywhere.

And then, their eyes still not having fully adjusted to the light, their minds hovering in some psychic space between peak experience and utter exhaustion, Sarah and Tray turned to face glowing cameras and talk about their feelings.

Because the entire Darkness enterprise hinges on pitch-black surroundings and maximum isolation, the crew must cast no light and remain silent and disengaged unless absolutely necessary. Their cameras are variously customized to detect light beyond the visible spectrum (night vision) or heat signatures (thermal infrared), and are either carried either by hand or mounted on tiny drones. The cast members are illuminated by tiny LEDs on their helmets, which emit a light that's detectable in infrared but invisible to the naked eye. This means that while the cast sees only darkness, the cameras see their faces framed in a soft green glow, like a spacesuit out of an Aliens movie. Meanwhile, the entire cavern is being scanned via LIDAR, a technology that maps out 3D spaces using invisible laser pulses.

But the gadgets only go so far—people still have to be underground to operate them. Some of the crew wear night-vision goggles. These devices are marvels of engineering, to be sure, but compared to what you might expect from action movies or Call of Duty, they pretty much suck. They have a single lens, which sticks out from the middle of your face like the snout of a metallic anteater. There's no peripheral vision, you can't see your feet without bending your head all the way downward, and the visuals you do get are like looking through the pane of a foggy, grey-tinted porthole that turns into static if you make any sudden moves. Some crew members can't even use the goggles at all, since their camera eyepieces are offset, and combining the two is a good way to accidentally walk into an abyss. So they walk everywhere with one eye constantly glued to their camera, the other seeing nothing but blackness.

 

The audio crew has it particularly rough. Like everybody else, they're lugging sixty to seventy pounds of electronics on their backs, but they also have to operate the dials and buttons of accordion-sized mixing devices entirely by ear and feel, since all running lights and gauges have been blacked out with tape and markers. Yet wherever the cast decides to go, the crew must follow, even into rock formations with names like "Tall Man's Misery," where the cast can proceed on their hands and knees but crew must contort themselves while trying not to either snap an ankle or hit a button and accidentally erase an entire day's worth of tape. "The environment is oppressive— it's a dark, nasty place to exist," says executive producer Johnny Beechler. "Humans are not meant to be in the places we film. Especially in the dark."

Johnny's candor gets at something complicated. As a state of affairs into which adult human beings can consensually enter, Darkness is pretty intense. The cast members can leave at any time, but barring disaster, the crew are stuck. Everybody's got a bruise or a hair-raising story of backwards fall into nothingness, but they all keep showing up, swallowing grunts and yowls of pain so the cast members can't hear them.

The cast aren't the only ones sleeping weirdly, or having lucid dreams—some, Johnny included, get night terrors, or wake up convinced they're still inside the cave well afterward. A medic is on hand at all times during filming, and a psychologist is on call, too. Meanwhile, in the cave, a squad of specialists is in charge of safety. "Our mandate for the cast is no loss of life, no permanent injury," explains Phil Gaultier, a soft-spoken Canadian mountaineer. "But the cast is making their own choices. From a risk management perspective, [risk] has to be completely transferred to them. The safety net is very loose. We're there, we're present, but our mandate is not to interfere in their experience—which they signed up for. And which is what I think the viewer wants to see: people going through a real experience. And for that you have to have real consequences."

Real consequences can hurt: people have fallen off ten-to-fifteen-foot drops, walked face-first into rock formations, and tumbled down long slides. "That's when it gets very, very real for the cast," says Johnny. "We've had some lashing out, some frustration, and that's when we remind them: I didn't sign up for this, I have to document it; I didn't make you go there, I'm following you. You can't help them, you can't hold their hand. That's where it becomes very real."

At the end of the day, Darkness is a TV show—but the darkness itself couldn't be more real. For all the artifice that makes the experience possible, going into the cave as a cast member still means entering a hostile environment deprived of one of your primary senses. That also means embracing a kind of radical responsibility for allyour actions—from where you step next or how you shift your weight to your decision to come into the cave in the first place. You can never be certain whether the crew is nearby, but it doesn't really matter. "When you see somebody fall, my instinct is like, 'Let me help you up,'" says Francisco Cortez, the show's director of photography. "But instead, I do the opposite. I get in their face without them knowing I'm a couple of inches away, and I get their expression, their pain. They're going through a whole new traumatic experience, and you just see a whole different panic."

Cruising silently past a cast member in the inky blackness, undetected mere inches from their unseeing, wildly dilated eyes, crew members glimpse grief, agony, fear, joy, all of it framed by an unearthly green halo. "We're seeing a side of people that maybe they never knew they had, and we have the ability to capture it, document, and see the evolution of that," Francisco says. "The green image, it's still a green image, but as a storyteller, it doesn't matter, I take pride being able to see those moments, to document them."

"We cry down there," adds one of the crew. "A lot."

Audiences and critics may say they want novelty, but the advertising calculus means that creators are always juggling competing pressures to innovate and to play it safe. Darkness does have some television precedents, like a BBC special where an expert in trauma psychology confined six hapless Britons in dark cells for 48 hours, or a forgettable American game show where Jaleel White challenged contestants to a face a variety of Fear Factor-style challenges in the dark for a $5,000 prize. But in terms of its combination of inherent psychological pressures, natural environmental risks, and a collaborative survival dimension, there's never been anything quite like Darkness. If it feels like the brainchild of a mad scientist or demented philosopher, it kind of is. Max Levenson, who heads development at Electus and came up with the Darkness concept together with his team, dropped out of a philosophy Ph.D program to move to Hollywood and make TV. "Part of the idea behind this experiment was to understand how depriving participants of their most relied-upon sense would affect their relation to themselves, to each other, and to their environments," Max says. "The results have been crazy to watch on all three fronts. But, yeah, at the end of the day, it's the kind of philosophical experiment that would never get funded by the academy, and that's too entertaining not to be on television."

If Darkness is a kind of experiment in extremity—physical, psychological, even philosophical—then the possibilities for what happens next are as varied as the dispositions and stories of the cast members. "A misinterpretation of this would be, Well, how often can you watch people in the dark? Ross says. "And my contention is, as long as there are people, and people are different, the dark is not the issue. It's about three people working together, and what they learn, individually and collectively. It's different every time."

Although they have high hopes, multiple crew members insist that, no matter how the show performs, the time they spent on Darkness will be a highlight of their careers. As for the contestants, Brandon wants another shot, to show his kids he can do it—or at least to teach them that "if something seems impossible, still give it a try anyway." Sarah's biggest lesson is about the human capacity to meet challenges. "Before I went into the cave, one of the things my dad said to me was, 'don't be a victim of the cave, don't let the cave happen to you—be the light, be the force. You happen to the cave. I feel like I went through this uncertain situation, and I did okay, beyond okay—I feel like I completely grew from it." Sarah admits, "It shouldn't take this kind of drastic situation to come to these realizations, but we get set in our ways, and need to be shaken up once in a while."

Tray, for his part, is carrying around a more tangible takeaway: an unfinished pack of cigarettes. A smoker for three decades, Tray took his last puff just before entering Cameron Cave, and hasn't had a cigarette since. A crew member quit with him. They're staying in touch, keeping each other honest.

[MIKA27]

CAPE TOWN TREEHOUSE

Usually, for something to be considered a treehouse, the house in question at the very least has to be in the trees. Apparently no one told that to the architectural team at Malan Forster. Given how good their Cape Town Treehouse looks, however, we can’t say we’re too upset about their bending of the rules.

Rather than try and loft a living space up into a tree’s canopy, the South African architectural firm opted instead to build a freestanding vertically planned cabin in the middle of a small clearing. The house mimics the look of the surrounding trees while also making plenty of room for modern conveniences like a full bedroom, fireplace, and kitchen. The home is organized around a cube and is broken into three simple sections. First is the living space, then on the second floor the bedroom, and on the third, a roof deck. All parts of the home, from the top to the bottom, boast large windows that provide plenty of natural light and striking views of the treetops. Why didn’t we think of that when we were kids?

And NO....It doesn't have a humidor

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THE ARCHAEOLOGIST GIN

To truly go the extra mile in their tribute to the greatest legends in motorcycle history, the premium dry gin known as The Archaeologist is including motorcycle parts in the gin itself. The historic bike parts are cleaned and sealed with a tin alloy to make them safe to mingle with the gin in each bottle. So the 1939 Harley-Davidson Flathead includes actual camshafts from that bike found in the Mexican desert. Other expressions in the line include 1947 screw-nuts from Chile and 1962 Panhead rocker arms from South Korea. Each bottle of gin is then packaged using selected cardboards printed on an original Heidelberg Tiegel printing press from 1931.

[MIKA27]

RAY-BAN OUTDOORSMAN CRAFT SUNGLASSES

One of Ray-Ban's most iconic silhouettes gets a classy update with these Ray-Ban Outdoorsman Craft Sunglasses. This release takes the sporty shape and augments it with a perforated leather wrap over the front frame, top bar, and earpieces, adding a touch of style and comfort. Available in three styles, with green, brown, or yellow lenses.

[MIKA27]

FREEHAND HOTEL LOS ANGELES

With a mix of shared rooms and luxury suites, Freehand Hotel Los Angeles provides a laid-back hostel atmosphere in the middle of downtown. Although the prices are comparable to that time you backpacked through Europe, the accommodations are not. Shared rooms can sleep four to six people in their custom cedar bunk beds, featuring hand-woven linens, privacy screens, reading lights, and en suite bathrooms. If the communal thing isn't your cup of tea, the hotel also has 167 private rooms, including a 745-square-foot Burroughs Suite with a king bed, living room, and sweeping city views. With restaurants, bars, a rooftop pool, and cafe serving the finest Nicaraguan coffees, there are plenty of other ways to socialize that don't require bunking with strangers.

 

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Pack Your Bags: Scientists Found An Exoplanet With A Stratosphere

We're obsessed with the idea that somewhere out there in space there might be other places just like Earth — we'd even settle for remotely like Earth.

Now, an international team of astronomers have spotted a planet with a stratosphere: a layer in the upper atmosphere where temperature increases with altitude, and the closest thing you can get to an ozone layer.

This particular exoplanet — with the catchy name WASP-121b — is an ultrahot gas giant 880 light years away.

Earth's atmosphere consists of layers that can be delineated by temperature. The stratosphere is warmer than the troposphere, which is just above the surface. Exoplanets could, in theory, have stratospheres, but the only way to determine this is via the analysis of their chemical properties using remote sensing.

A previous claim has been made for an exoplanet having a stratosphere, but this remains open to question for a bunch of reasons - including the high variability of its host star.

Thomas Evans and team reported observations of WASP-121b made in November 2016 and January 2017 using the Hubble Space Telescope and the Spitzer space telescope, that show features in the emission lines corresponding to water. This lead researchers to conclude that the planet has a stratosphere.

The researchers say the temperature inversion is probably caused by the presence of vanadium oxide, with weaker evidence for titanium oxide. The WASP-121b spectrum is the first exoplanet to show spectrally resolved features of a stratosphere in emission.

In plain terms: the researchers think these atmospheric layers exist because of the chemical signatures they've detected from the infra-red radiation emitted by the planet.

These 'hot Jupiter' planets are relatively easy to study, according to experts - so refining our techniques on these before using them on cooler, potentially habitable planets is a good idea.

So, hey, maybe we're a little way off packing our bags. But it's cool to think about, right?
 

[MIKA27]

SOLID GRAY ALUMINUM BACKPACK

The amount of research and development that has gone in to creating durable fabrics for backpacks is almost impossible to account for. R&D departments the world round have toyed around with materials ranging from waxed cotton to Kevlar and Dyneema fabrics. Yet, few, if any have been as willing to push the boundaries as far as Solid Gray with their Aluminum Backpack.

Rather than looking for a material as tough as metal, the Netherlands-based backpack company actually chose to use aluminum to build their pack. Of course, this choice precipitated its own set of unique design challenges. And for the most part, we think they did a good job overcoming them. For instance, the interior of the backpack features a series of straps (like one for your laptop) and small compartments to protect your gear from being scratched and banged-up by the tough interior. As far as everyday comfort goes, the pack is surprisingly accomplished. The backpack is lightweight and easy to carry, and to top it off, the back padding on the bag is made from a closed cell EPDM foam. A solid choice for those looking to stand out from the crowd.

[MIKA27]

Two-Headed Bat Found In Brazil Is The Stuff Of Nightmares

Nature isn't always sunshine and kitties. This proved itself yet again recently, when researchers at the Universidade Federal Rural do Rio de Janeiro published a study on a pair of conjoined bat twins discovered in southeastern Brazil back in 2001. The animals were dead when they were discovered, which is almost always the case with animals born with a rare condition that results in two heads on a single body.

According to National Geographic, this is the third known case of conjoined bats. In humans, dicephalic parapagus — or partial twinning — is caused when the embryo of identical twins fails to completely split into two after fertilisation. Partial twinning is very rare and thus pretty understudied, so the researchers studying these bats hope to use the specimen to learn more about what causes to two heads to emerge side-by-side on one body.

"These twins are males and present separated heads and necks, but a conjoined trunk with an expanded upper thoracic region," the researchers wrote. "They developed two complete forelimbs and two complete hindlimbs, all laterally to the trunk. There is a volume in the upper midback and between the heads that resembles a third rudimentary medial forelimb, but X-ray images only suggest the presence of medial skeletal elements of the pectoral girdle (clavicle and scapulae) in this region."

The bats have similarly sized separate hearts, as well.

Researchers believe the twins are Neotropical fruit bats (Artibeus), which are endemic to parts of Central and South America as well as the Carribbean. Their placenta is still attached, so it's possible the bats died at birth.

Hopefully, the team can use the very dead, very spooky bats to learn more about what causes partial twinning.

[MIKA27]

Breakthrough in Freezing Brings Cryogenics One Step Closer

Whether you’re interested in traveling to other planets or galaxies, preserving your body for a time when medicine can heal it or just wanting to see one of the great tenets of science fiction become science fact, you have to wait until cryogenics or some form of suspended animation becomes reality. That day just got a little closer – at least for zebrafish. Researchers have successfully frozen and revived zebrafish embryos with a cryoprotectant solution containing a surprise substance – gold nanotubes.

The motto of cryogenics research up until this point should be “Freeing is easy, thawing is hard.” Actually, the truly hard part is keeping the freezing body from expanding during the process and damaging its tissues. As anyone who has filled ice cube trays knows, liquid expands when frozen. The ‘solution’ solution thus far has been to replace the liquid in a body with a liquid having antifreeze properties. This has worked for single cells, but single cells can’t do much once they’re thawed on a new planet.

Neither can zebra fish, but the embryos of those tiny tropical fish are translucent, making them perfect for observing the effects of what has been injected inside the, According to a recent paper published in the journal ACS Nano, researchers from the University of Minnesota, the University of Hawaii and the Smithsonian Institute got the idea to inject the embryos with gold nanotubes because of their quick thawing properties.

Here’s how it worked. The live zebrafish embryos were injected with the new solution, then flash-frozen to -196 degrees Celsius (-320.8 degrees F). After a few minutes of frozen solidarity, the scientists shot laser pulses at the embryos and quickly and evenly thawed them. The bad news is, only 10 percent of the embryos survived and continued to grow for at least 24 hours.

The good news is, ten percent of the embryos survived, proving cryogenics works and gold nanotubes are a key to reaching successful suspended animation, which is a key to reaching the far reaches of outer space.

It remains to be seen if the reanimated zebrafish embryos would grow into normal functioning adults that at least could swim upright and not shiver constantly. That’s a long way from human testing but you can bet there are people lining up to volunteer. The rest of us would be wise to make our current lives better by investing in companies that make gold nanotubes.

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‘Death Wish’ Trailer: Bruce Willis Basically Has His Own ‘Taken’ in Eli Roth’s Remake

MGM has released the first Death Wish trailer. Eli Roth’s upcoming remake stars Bruce Willis as Paul Kersey, a mild-mannered Chicago architect who goes on a quest for bloody revenge after his wife (Elizabeth Shue) and daughter (Camila Morrone) are the victims of a violent home invasion.

Charles Bronson starred in the original 1974 film, which spawned four sequels. Joe Carnahan (The Grey) penned the script for the remake. The movie will be Bruce Willis’ first starring role in a theatrically released feature since 2013’s RED 2.  For Roth, this is his first foray into the action genre after making his name with horror films like Cabin Fever, Hostel, and The Green Inferno.

This trailer is kind of all over the place. The film very much looks like it wants to be in the vein of John Wick, Taken, or even a street-level superhero movie, but I can’t tell if it wants to actually take the violence seriously or if it’s tackling it gleefully. Roth is certainly a curious choice to direct, and indeed Joe Carnahan was originally in line to direct this remake from his own script before parting ways over creative differences. Carnahan remains the only credited screenwriter, which is also interesting because in the wake of leaving the project, Carnahan expressed his desire to someday retool his screenplay into a different version of what that film would’ve been.

Alas, here we’re left with the Death Wish remake that MGM wanted to see, as envisioned by Roth, and to be honest I’m not quite sure what to make of it just yet. If the opening of the trailer is to be believed and this film actually wants to tackle the violence on the streets of Chicago today, making a shoot-em-up actioner where Bruce Willis violently murders bad guys for fun doesn’t seem like the wisest of decisions.

The film also stars Vincent D’Onofrio, Jack Kesy, Dean Norris, and Mike Epps.

 

[MIKA27]

Here's Your First Look At Deadpool 2's Cable

Last week, we got an excellent look at Zazie Beetz in action as Deadpool 2's probability-altering mutant mercenary Domino. Now, after months of teasing, we finally have a look at the movie's other mutant addition: Deadpool's long-time comrade and time-travelling maniac Cable.

As he did with last week's reveal, Ryan Reynolds posted the teaser image to Twitter today, presumably ahead of actor Josh Brolin filming scenes on location under the prying eyes of paparazzi.

Compared to the wonderful twist on Domino's design for Beetz's costume, this is an extremely comics-faithful look for the Cable, right down to the three-pronged scar over his eye — and yet, surprisingly creepy too.

Deadpool 2 hits US theatres 1 June 2018.

 

[MIKA27]

A MADMAN INFUSED GIN WITH VINTAGE HARLEY-DAVIDSON PARTS

The spirit of Harley-Davidson: now in drinkable form. Motorbike enthusiast (and possible evil genius) Uwe Ehinger has taken his passions for petrol and alcohol to an insane new level with the launch of The Archaeologist – a gin infused with actual vintage Harley-Davidson parts.

Ehinger is the founder of Ehinger Kraftrad, an internationally renowned manufacturer of custom-made motorbikes based in Hamburg, Germany. He has spent decades as a racing- and sports-bike rider, as a globetrotting retailer of rare bikes and parts, and as an engineer and entrepreneur. His mission to track down antique bikes in the most remote corners of the world earned him the nickname he has now given to his new venture, The Archaeologist.

The Archaeologist Gin is (unsurprisingly) the world’s first premium dry gin to contain Harley-Davidson engine parts. Each bottle houses an original part Ehinger discovered somewhere around the world: 1939 Flathead camshafts from the Mexican desert, 1947 Knucklehead screw-nuts from Chile, or 1962 Panhead rocker arms from South Korea.

Right now you have questions about hygiene and health codes. All parts used to “infuse” The Archaeologist Gin are specially cleansed and sealed with a tin alloy so it’s safe for them to be soaked in your beverage. They’re then soldered onto a steel structure and encased in a handcrafted bottle.

Serviceplan Group and renowned Hamburg designers Studio Oeding are behind the creative concept. The packaging is a nod to the original packing of antique engine parts, using authentic materials and historic techniques. The labels are printed on an original Heidelberg Tiegel printing press from 1931. Hand-stamped, tamper-proof seals and clenched hang-tags – each bearing the unique serial number of the engine part in its respective bottle – finish off the look.

If you’d like to get your hands on this especially manly drink, you’ll need to get in line. Every bottle is unique and will set you back more than US$1000. On top of that, the first run is reserved for Ehinger’s most loyal customers and is only served in Ehinger’s garage, and the limited number that were distributed via the website’s shop sold out within hours.

Advance orders for the next series can be placed online. In the meantime, learn more about The Archaeologist in the clip below.

 

[MIKA27]

JOHNNIE WALKER MY EDITION WHISKY

If you've ever wanted to customize your own bottle of Johnnie Walker whisky, you're in luck. The historic spirits brand is entering the world of crowdfunding with the My Edition project. It enables you to build out a blend that is tailored to your taste preferences and to customize the label with sleek engraving options.

Funders will also be able to choose from a limited edition presentation box designed by world class artists and chosen by you. The My Edition bottle is a perfect gift idea for the Johnnie Walker completist or whisky nerd in your life.

[MIKA27]

CASA PUJOL 87 TEQUILA

Añejo and Reposado tequilas are aged in wood and give the liquor a sweeter, milder flavor. But there's still something incredible about pure, unaged Blanco tequila. Distilled from 100% blue agave from the Jalisco highlands of Mexico, Casa Pujol 87 is an excellent example of a Blanco expression with classic tequila characteristics. And the clean, beautiful bottle design fits the brand's mission as well, designed by Monterrey, Mexico-based studio Anagrama.

[MIKA27]

Darren Aronofsky's Mother! Looks Like A Terrifying Psychological Thriller

Your parents always said, "Never talk to strangers." But maybe they should have also said, "Don't let them sleep in your house." That seems to be the start of something very bad in Darren Aronofsky's new movie mother!

The film stars Oscar winners Jennifer Lawrence and Javier Bardem as a married couple who one day decide to let a strange man into their house, played by Ed Harris. Then they let in a strange woman, too, played by Michelle Pfeiffer. And, in the first trailer for the film, those both look like really, really bad decisions.

We can't tell if mother! dives into realistic horror or if it's relegated to the mind of Lawrence's character, but we're intrigued to find out. Mostly because a film rarely gets a cast like this unless the material is strong and original.

Mother! opens October 12.

[MIKA27]

James Gunn Has Ideas For A Guardians Of The Galaxy Spin-Off

In the MCU, the Ravagers are a band of criminals with a specific code. In the comics, those characters were also the original Guardians of the Galaxy. And while there's been some speculation that the movies could switch the order around and have the Ravagers pick up the mantle, James Gunn recently talked about the spinoff potential of these characters.

Speaking with Collider, Gunn said, "There's always discussion with Ravagers — it would be The Ravagers. It's always a possibility. I would be excited." That seems to say that a Ravagers movie would be a separate endeavour from Guardians, whose third instalment is currently — obviously — Guardians of the Galaxy 3.

We saw this team show up in one of the end-credits sequences in the film: Stakar (aka Starhawk) played by Sylvester Stallone, Charlie-27 played by Ving Rhames, Aleta Ogord played by Michelle Yeoh, Michael Rosenbaum as Martinex, Krugarr (CGI), and Mainframe (voiced by Miley Cyrus). That's a pretty stacked cast list.

Gunn elaborated a bit on what he'd like to do with the Ravagers in an interview with The Hollywood Reporter, saying, "I'm definitely interested in the direction that these characters are headed and their roles in the Marvel Universe." If this doesn't refer solely to their appearances in the third Guardians movie, that pretty much rules out doing a prequel story, which is a shame because it means no Yondu. Of course, it also means no chance of baby Peter Quill running around, which is a good thing.

Gunn also made clear that despite the characters that appeared being Easter eggs for Marvel fans, they don't have the same backstory as the original Guardians they're modelled on. "That is not something that we're dealing with," he said about the comics' origin stories. "These are older characters and more criminal than our Guardians. So we're focusing on that."