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

[MIKA27]

^ Explains my apple-shaped body

[MIKA27]

Beijing man builds plush country villa - on top of 26-floor high rise compound

The man, known only to his neighbours as "Professor Zhang", has received no planning permission and ignores complaints from other residents of noise and structural damage

A mysterious Chinese medicine practitioner has built an unplanned, unlicensed multi-story villa on top of a 26-floor residential high rise compound in Beijing.

It comes complete with elaborate fake rockeries, real trees and grass, and covers the entire of the top of the building.

The reportedly illegal construction at the Park View building in Haidian district has taken some six years, after its owner – known only to his neighbours as “Professor Zhang” – bought the then-relatively modest penthouse apartment.

Residents living below him have complained of the noise coming from the extraordinary villa, as well as water leaks and structural damage.

But amid growing anger in China that the rich can do as they please with a large degree of impunity, the building’s management company, local urban management officials and even the police have been asked to step in and help.

They have refused to take steps to stop Prof. Zhang, and would not speak to local media reporting the story.

The newspaper Beijing Morning News said its reporters were able to confront the eccentric homeowner, but he told them he was not concerned by what his neighbours had to say.

He said: “Since I dare to live here, I am not worried about complaints.”

And he put the noise down to the fact that he has a high-flying lifestyle, saying: “Famous people come to my place and sing. How can you stop them?”

Users on social media website Weibo are thought initially to have drawn attention to the structure, and while many have rallied together with the increasingly discontent residents, others poked fun at the villa’s unusual appearance.

“Even the Hanging Gardens of Babylon are overshadowed by this hanging villa in Beijing,” wrote one person on the site, according to the South China Morning Post.

The vast majority add-ons, alterations and renovations in China are done without proper permits, but that doesn’t stop an increasing trend of wealthier landowners moving their fences to claim public space, adding extensions to the side of buildings, and even putting extra floors (and trees) on top of their homes.

MIKA: Looks a little like Tony Starks mansion!

[MIKA27]

Alfredo Moser: Bottle light inventor proud to be poor

Alfredo Moser's invention is lighting up the world. In 2002, the Brazilian mechanic had a light-bulb moment and came up with a way of illuminating his house during the day without electricity - using nothing more than plastic bottles filled with water and a tiny bit of bleach.

In the last two years his innovation has spread throughout the world. It is expected to be in one million homes by early next year.

So how does it work? Simple refraction of sunlight, explains Moser, as he fills an empty two-litre plastic bottle.

"Add two capfuls of bleach to protect the water so it doesn't turn green [with algae]. The cleaner the bottle, the better," he adds.

Wrapping his face in a cloth he makes a hole in a roof tile with a drill. Then, from the bottom upwards, he pushes the bottle into the newly-made hole.

"You fix the bottle in with polyester resin. Even when it rains, the roof never leaks - not one drop."

"An engineer came and measured the light," he says. "It depends on how strong the sun is but it's more or less 40 to 60 watts," he says.

What is refraction?

• Refraction is the bending of light, which is caused by a change in its speed
  
• The speed of light is determined by the density of the substance through which it passes
  
• So refraction occurs when light passes from one substance to another with a different density - eg from air to water
  
• In the case of the "Moser lamp", sunlight is bent by the bottle of water and spread around the room
  

The inspiration for the "Moser lamp" came to him during one of the country's frequent electricity blackouts in 2002. "The only places that had energy were the factories - not people's houses," he says, talking about the city where he lives, Uberaba, in southern Brazil.

Moser and his friends began to wonder how they would raise the alarm, in case of an emergency, such as a small plane coming down, imagining a situation in which they had no matches.

His boss at the time suggested getting a discarded plastic bottle, filling it with water and using it as a lens to focus the sun's rays on dry grass. That way one could start a fire, as a signal to rescuers. This idea stuck in Moser's head - he started playing around, filling up bottles and making circles of refracted light.

Soon he had developed the lamp.

"I didn't make any design drawings," he says.

"It's a divine light. God gave the sun to everyone, and light is for everyone. Whoever wants it saves money. You can't get an electric shock from it, and it doesn't cost a penny."

Moser has installed the bottle lamps in neighbours' houses and the local supermarket.

While he does earn a few dollars installing them, it's obvious from his simple house and his 1974 car that his invention hasn't made him wealthy. What it has given him is a great sense of pride.

"There was one man who installed the lights and within a month he had saved enough to pay for the essential things for his child, who was about to be born. Can you imagine?" he says.

Carmelinda, Moser's wife of 35 years, says her husband has always been very good at making things around the home, including some fine wooden beds and tables.

But she's not the only one who admires his lamp invention. Illac Angelo Diaz, executive director of the MyShelter Foundation in the Philippines, is another.

MyShelter specialises in alternative construction, creating houses using sustainable or recycled materials such as bamboo, tyre and paper.

"We had huge amounts of bottle donations," he says.

"So we filled them with mud and created walls, and filled them with water to make windows.

"When we were trying to add more, somebody said: 'Hey, somebody has also done that in Brazil. Alfredo Moser is putting them on roofs.'"

How much energy do the lamps save?

• The plastic bottles are up-cycled in the local community, so no energy is needed to gather, shred, manufacture and ship new bottles
  
• The carbon footprint of the manufacture of one incandescent bulb is 0.45kg CO2
  
• A 50 Watt light bulb running for 14 hours a day for a year has a carbon footprint of nearly 200kg CO2
  
• Moser lamps emit no CO2
  

Following the Moser method, MyShelter started making the lamps in June 2011. They now train people to create and install the bottles, in order to earn a small income.

In the Philippines, where a quarter of the population lives below the poverty line, and electricity is unusually expensive, the idea has really taken off, with Moser lamps now fitted in 140,000 homes.

The idea has also caught on in about 15 other countries, from India and Bangladesh, to Tanzania, Argentina and Fiji.

Diaz says you can find Moser lamps in some remote island communities. "They say, 'Well, we just saw it from our neighbour and it looked like a good idea.'"

Light to work in Bangladesh

Most homes and businesses in the slums of Dhaka have no power and no windows, so 80-90% of them hook up to electricity lines illegally - and fall back on candles or kerosene lamps during regular blackouts.

A voluntary organisation called Change began distributing the bottle light, or botul bati, earlier this year. It's helped hundreds of people - including sari makers and rickshaw repairers - whose livelihoods depend on having sufficient light.

There were teething problems. "Some people said they felt poorer after installing a bottle light," says Change founder Sajid Iqbal. The group counters this by stressing that each one helps tackle climate change.

Unlike some other charities, Change charges a small amount for the lights - roughly the price of 2-3kg of rice. "If you give the light for nothing, people don't maintain them," Iqbal says. "They don't understand their value."

People in poor areas are also able to grow food on small hydroponic farms, using the light provided by the bottle lamps, he says.

Overall, Diaz estimates, one million people will have benefited from the lamps by the start of next year.

"Alfredo Moser has changed the lives of a tremendous number of people, I think forever," he says.

"Whether or not he gets the Nobel Prize, we want him to know that there are a great number of people who admire what he is doing."

Did Moser himself imagine that his invention would have such an impact?

"I'd have never imagined it, No," says Moser, shaking with emotion.

"It gives you goose-bumps to think about it."

MIKA: IMO - This is the article of the year. Truly inspirational and a perfect example of how a humble guy who is poor, should in this instance gain the accolades that 'Should" follow. Somehow I think he will not as the greedy corporate s will no doubt take this idea and stamp it as their own. I do hope there is a patent on this?

A very special thanks to Oliver (Oliverdst) for his PM and heads up about this article. Much appreciate you reading the thread and contributing.

[MIKA27]

Is Wagner’s Nazi stigma fair?

The world is celebrating 200 years since the birth of Richard Wagner – but not Israel, where his music is taboo. Is it fair that Wagner’s works are tainted by his anti-Semitism and the Nazis’ enthusiasm for them?

“Egoism, overweening ambition, opportunism, deceit, spite, jealousy, arrogance, philandering, profligacy and racism.” Such is the “formidable catalogue” of personal attributes, according to scholar Barry Millington, of which Richard Wagner stands accused.

Certainly there are few cultural figures as divisive as the composer, polemicist, dramatist and conductor born in Leipzig on 22 May 1813. Yet nobody, whatever their thoughts on the man, can overstate Wagner’s significance to music. The extremity and the force of his genius altered forever the course of the art form in a way that only a handful of others – Bach, Beethoven, Schoenberg – have ever done.

Wagner’s output is already recognisable to millions who have no interest in classical music. This year it will be harder than ever to avoid not just the Ride of the Valkyries and the Bridal March, but everything else besides. From Sydney to London, New York to Berlin, Melbourne to Seattle, Milan to Bayreuth, his work – which is not exactly neglected in other years – is at the forefront of programming everywhere.

Brand new complete Ring Cycles, gala concerts, debates, discussions and documentaries are all scheduled, many with stellar casts. And operas such as Parsifal, the Mastersingers of Nuremberg, The Flying Dutchman and Lohengrin will be presented countless times – along with the soaring five-hour epic Tristan and Isolde, whose evocation of sex, love and infatuation was so radical that Wagner once told his muse Mathilde Wesendonck that if the work were ever to be “performed well” he feared “it would be banned.”

One country that will not be partaking of the birthday celebrations is Israel, where Wagner’s music is, effectively, banned. The boycott has little to do with the searing psychological realism attained in Tristan and Isolde though, and everything to do with the fact that for many Israeli Jews, Wagner’s music carries irrevocably the taint of its association with and appropriation by the Nazis.

Guilty by association

The conflation of Wagner and Hitler has always posed difficulties for any principled listener, Jewish or otherwise. And with Wagner in everyone’s eyes and ears this year, a litany of vexing questions beckons. Can we listen to, watch or perform Wagner’s music with a clear conscience? Was Wagner’s music despicably perverted by the Nazis, or did their adulation merely expose its inherent perversions? And in what circumstances can Wagner conscionably be performed by or for Jews?

No easy answers ensue – but some facts stand. It is incontrovertible that, like many Germans of his day, Wagner was virulently and unapologetically anti-Semitic. If the 1873 stock market crash and attendant agricultural crisis of the mid-1870s further poisoned the climate against Jews and their supposed economic liberalism, Wagner had already made his monstrous sentiments clear, beginning with his infamous 1850 treatise On Jewishness in Music. Although the musicological and academic jury is still out as to whether the music dramas can themselves be described as anti-Semitic, there is little doubt as to their composer’s ideology.

But another fact is equally inescapable: Wagner was not, as we understand the term, a Nazi. “I am sure there are people in Israel who support the ban who think that Wagner was around in 1940,” comments the Israeli Jewish conductor Daniel Barenboim, who will conduct the Berlin Staatskapelle in a complete Ring Cycle at this summer’s BBC Proms in London. Wagner died in 1883. Hitler was born in 1889.

‘Use, abuse and misuse’

Barenboim is also quick to point out that widespread recognition of Wagner’s anti-Semitism did not prevent his music from being performed by Jews even after Hitler came to power. In Tel Aviv in 1936, for example, the Palestine Philharmonic – precursor to today’s Israel Philharmonic – memorably performed the prelude to Act 1 and Act 3 of Lohengrin under the baton of Arturo Toscanini. “Nobody had a word to say about it,” Barenboim remarks. “Nobody criticised [Toscanini]; the orchestra was very happy to play it.”

A Jewish prohibition on playing Wagner only came into effect later due to what Barenboim describes as the “use, misuse and abuse” of his music by Hitler, who had related in Mein Kampf the experience of seeing Lohengrin as a 12-year-old: “In one instant I was addicted. My youthful enthusiasm for the Bayreuth Master knew no bounds.”

Today, as Barenboim knows all too well, any attempt by a composer to perform Wagner in Israel invites outrage. In 2001, his considered decision to offer a piece of Wagner as an encore led to widespread condemnation – particularly regrettable, he says, because the audience had been asked beforehand, during a measured 40-minute discussion, if they would like to hear it. Those who did not were invited freely to leave; they were less than five per cent of the audience. “The idea this was a scandal was started the next day by people with a political agenda, not those in the concert hall,” he tells me, stressing his respect for “anybody’s right to choose not to listen to Wagner.” But, he says, “in a democratic society there should be no place for such taboos.”

The Wagner issue is particularly nettlesome for many listeners because invariably the music itself engenders precisely the opposite feelings. For overwhelming emotion, love, passion and humanity there is little comparable to Wagner. But perhaps this inherent contradiction is where the composer’s most radical value lies. Referring to the famous “

”, that paved the way for the great untethering of tonality in the 20th Century, Barenboim says: “A composer with less genius and with a poorer understanding of the mystery of music would assume that he must resolve the tension he has created. It is precisely the sensation caused by an only partial resolution, though, that allows Wagner to create more and more ambiguity and more and more tension as this process continues; each unresolved chord is a new beginning.”

As the birthday parties commence this month, expect the ambiguities and the tensions to rumble on.

[MIKA27]

How Egyptian god Bes gave the Christian Devil his looks

The lewd, leering face of the Egyptian god Bes can be seen in modern images of the Christian Devil, writes Alastair Sooke.

Earlier this year I visited the temple of the goddess Hathor at Dendera on the west bank of the Nile in Egypt. Dating from perhaps the first century BC, the temple is decorated with a relief depicting Cleopatra, paramour of Julius Caesar and Mark Antony, and Egypt’s final pharaoh. Few images of Cleopatra survive – a haggish profile stamped on a bronze coin suggests that she looked nothing like Elizabeth Taylor in Joseph L Mankiewicz’s epic film of 1963 – so the relief at Dendera is tantalising and important.

Yet my eye was drawn to another figure altogether who was considerably more ugly than pointy-chinned Cleopatra. This frightening character appears in several places around the site, but he is especially prominent in a relief carved onto a fragmentary limestone pillar that once supported a smaller building known as the ‘birth house’ near the temple.

With the squat, stocky body of a bandy-legged dwarf, he faces outwards, arms akimbo. His grotesque head has a leering, lewd expression, as his thick tongue lolls towards his chin, while the strands of his beard end in flickering spirals. A tail dangles suggestively between his legs. This, I learned, was the ancient Egyptian deity Bes – who was beloved for centuries not only in Egypt but also across the Mediterranean, and ultimately helped to shape the appearance of the Christian Devil.

Although he never had a state-sanctioned cult, Bes was tremendously popular in ancient Egypt. He was worshipped in ordinary homes, where he was associated with many of the good things in life: sex, drinking, music, and merriment. He also had an important protective function, and was often invoked during childbirth (hence his appearance in the divine birth house at Dendera). In other words, although to modern eyes he may appear frightening, he was actually decent. Friend to beer-swilling carousers and expectant mothers alike, he warded off noxious spirits like a gargoyle on a medieval church.

Wine, women and song

According to the Iranian archaeologist Kamyar Abdi, “The Bes-image was used in ancient Egypt to decorate a large number of personal belongings and furniture. [He] was carved on beds or headrests, mirrors and spoon handles, amulets, and cosmetic containers.” As a result, museums around the world contain thousands of artefacts (including ‘magical’ wands and knives) adorned with the hypnotically repulsive face of Bes, who often wears a distinctive plumed headdress, and shakes a rattle. The Egyptian Museum in Berlin, for instance, contains a colourful vase decorated with his mask-like features and mane-like hair.

The origins of Bes remain obscure. Perhaps he is a composite of up to 10 separate deities. From an art historical point of view, he is certainly a curiosity: unlike most Egyptian gods, who usually appear in profile, Bes is brazen and frontal, as well as comical. Some scholars suggest that he emerged in sub-Saharan Africa. It is possible that he began life as a lion or cat rearing on its hind paws.

Ultimately Bes was celebrated because he was never official or exclusive. Mischievous and irreverent (it was said that he could make babies laugh by pulling funny faces), he was resolutely down-to-earth – a god for commoners rather than royalty. Performers tattooed their bodies with images of Bes because of his associations with music and dancing, while prostitutes may have placed tattoos of Bes near their genitalia, in order to stave off sexually transmitted diseases.

By the end of the second millennium BC, Bes had proliferated across the Mediterranean world. Even local, non-Egyptian craftsmen produced objects decorated with his image. Early in the first millennium, the Phoenicians became big fans of Bes, as the Romans would too. Bes occasionally appears dressed as a Roman legionnaire. His rampant popularity even survived the advent of Christianity.

Gods and monsters

Though his influence waned around the time of Constantine, Bes still stamped himself upon Western culture. Ancient Egypt was an important source for Christian artists – imagery of the goddess Isis with her son Horus offered a prototype for representations of the Virgin and Child. In a similar fashion, Bes was an important antecedent for the Devil. Occasionally he appeared with a forked tail, a serpent, or with serpents issuing from his body – all of which would become attributes of Satan. In the mosaic of hell dating from about 1280 and attributed to Coppo di Marcovaldo in the Florence Baptistery, snakes emerge from the ears of the Devil in the largest image of Satan in Europe.

Above all, though, Bes’s grotesque expression was a model for the grisly visage of the Devil. For instance, in the glorious Byzantine mosaic of the Last Judgement in the Cathedral of Santa Maria Assunta on the island of Torcello in the Venetian Lagoon, a swivel-eyed blue ogre with a wild white beard presides over a fiery infernal lake in the bottom right corner. Just as other elements of the composition, such as the weighing of the souls, derive from ancient Egyptian art, so parts of this monster’s gruesome DNA (including his fierce face and frontal aspect) belong to an iconographical tradition stretching back to representations of Bes. Unlike Bes, the ogre is not a dwarf – but a tiny figure, whose identity remains uncertain, sits upon his lap (a visual memory, if you like, of Bes’s short stature). In addition, the ogre’s striking blue skin may recall the vivid ultramarine colour of commonplace Bes amulets, which were often made from glazed earthenware.

“We know that little amulets of Bes were exported all over the eastern Mediterranean,” says Anja Ulbrich, a curator at the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford. “So people definitely knew the image of Bes, and it may have influenced depictions of Greek demons and satyrs.”

These in turn influenced depictions of the Devil: there are obvious similarities between Satan and his sylvan forebear, the raucous Greek goat-god Pan, with his beard, hairy haunches and cloven feet. Like Bes, Pan was associated with prodigious sex. “The Church did to Pan what Stalin did to Trotsky,” the art critic Robert Hughes writes in Heaven and Hell in Western Art. “The attributes of Pan were given, in art, to the Christian Satan.” “The Christian faith had to compete with a lot of well-loved religions and cults,” Ulbrich explains. “So it demonised them.”

To the ancient Egyptians, Bes was a friendly, protective god. Yet the Christians cast him as alien and disturbing in order to demonstrate the triumph of the new faith over older customs. So next time you find yourself considering an artistic representation of the Devil – such as Giotto’s bearded, pot-bellied monster munching on sinners in the Arena Chapel in Padua – spare a thought for his art-historical forefather, Bes. If nothing else, Bes teaches us that appearances can be deceptive.

[MIKA27]

Are Grimm’s Fairy Tales too twisted for children?

On the covers are the most innocent of titles: Grimm’s Fairy Tales in their English version or Children’s and Household Tales in the original German editions published two hundred years ago. Nice tales for nice children.

But behind the safe titles lie dark stories of sex and violence – tales of murder, mutilation, cannibalism, infanticide and incest, as one academic puts it. They are far from anything we might imagine as acceptable today. If they were a video game, there would be calls to ban them.

Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm were writing in a different world. They lived in the town of Kassel in Germany and studied law and language as well as writing more than 150 stories which they published in two volumes between 1812 and 1814.

Some stories have fallen out of favour but some – Red Riding Hood, Cinderella, Hansel and Gretel, Snow White – seem eternal.

They have morphed into countless adaptations; Disney disneyfied them and new filmmakers and novelists continue to rework them.

Comics from Japanese Manga to the erotic and ‘adult’ depict the characters of the Grimm brothers’ tales.

But even in their original, they are far from saccharine, according to Maria Tatar, professor of Germanic folklore and mythology at Harvard University: “These tales are not politically correct. They are full of sex and violence. In Snow White, the stepmother asks for the lungs and liver of the little girl. She's just seven years old and she's been taken into the woods by the huntsman. That’s pretty scary.

“And then the evil stepmother is made to dance to death in red-hot iron shoes. In Cinderella, you’ve got the stepsisters whose heels and toes are cut off.”

Adult themes

These tales of gore and sexuality – John Updike called them the pornography of an earlier age – are still going strong. “I can't even keep track of the number of new versions of Snow White,” says Professor Tatar. “And these aren't just Disney productions – you have film-makers making very adult versions of the fairy tales, drawing out the perverse sexuality of some of these tales.”

They are tales of right and wrong. There are clear morals to be drawn – deception and dishonesty are punished; honest hard work is rewarded; promises must be honoured; beware of strangers – and especially the forest.

But that can’t be the enduring appeal. Moralistic lectures never entertained anyone – but gory tales of suspense are a different thing. They do have an eternal following. As Professor Tatar puts it: “They give us these ‘what if’ scenarios – what if the most terrible thing that I can imagine happened? – but they give us these scenarios in the safe space of ‘once upon a time’. I'm going to tell you the story and I'm going to show you how this hero or this heroine manages to come out of it alive.” And not just alive, but also ‘happily ever after’.

It’s clear that many children love the gory bits. And it’s clear that many parents don’t. A survey last year found that many reported that their children had been left in tears by the gruesome fate of Little Red Riding Hood. Some parents wouldn’t read Rumpelstiltskin to their children because it was about kidnapping and execution. And many parents felt that Cinderella was a bad role model for daughters because she did housework all day.

Some pop culture versions of the tales have sugar-coated their more unpalatable aspects. It’s true that the Cinderella made by Disney in 1950 is a work of schlock – the titles of the songs (A Dream is a Wish Your Heart Makes”, Bibbidi-Bobbidi-Boo and Sing Sweet Nightingale) give the flavour. But Disney’s older animated versions of Grimm Fairy Tales are much darker.

“In Snow White which was made in 1937,” says Professor Tatar, “the Wicked Queen goes down into the basement where she's got a chemistry set which she's going to use to turn the apple into a poisoned apple. There are ravens down there and skulls and mysterious dusty tomes.

“And then she transforms herself into an old hag. She goes from the fairest of all to the ugliest of all.

“I think that's really an adult moment which enacts our anxieties about aging. First, her voice changes and then her hands begin to change and there she is a decrepit old woman.

“I think Disney picked up on the scariness of fairy tales as something which appeals to both children and adults”.

Evil thoughts

You get a flavour of these debates and nuances in the town of Kassel in Germany at the moment. It’s where the two brothers grew up and lived (in the same house, Wilhelm married to Henriette; Jacob single until his death).

There have been productions of some of the tales in the Botanical Gardens and a thought-provoking exhibition in the city’s documenta-Halle. It displays the original publications of the tales and the dictionaries and other works produced by the brothers.

But the most interesting exhibits are the ones designed to make people think. There are videos of glossy perfume adverts featuring a radiant Little Red Riding Hood taming the wolf with her fragrance. There is a section marked “No Access for Minors?” where, behind a thick curtain, you can read the most violent extracts from the tales through slits in the wall.

One of the curators, Louisa Dench, said these extracts show that good triumphs over evil and that the bad get punished. There are clear choices. “There is good and there is bad and you know what’s good and what’s bad and there’s no question about it. And that’s very understandable for children. It’s very clear, and good always wins. That’s important”.

She thinks the secret of the enduring appeal is that much is left to the imagination. “You have only limited characterisation so there’s a lot you can imagine yourself,” she says. “If someone reads them to you, your mind can build up its own picture. That’s part of the magic”.

It is a magic based on fantasy and that may be what protects the tales from the unmitigated wrath of parents. Children – some children – do seem to like the darkness of horror but, perhaps, not if it becomes too realistic. Some parents feel uneasy about tales for children where a child's hands are cut off (The Girl without Hands) or where a man is pushed down stairs (The Story of the Youth Who Went Forth to Learn What Fear Was) – but children know it is fantasy.

Their fantastical darkness may have protected today's video games from the wrath of tougher laws. Two years ago, the Supreme Court of the United States struck down a lower court's ruling that video games should be banned. Justice Scalia ruled that depictions of violence had never been regulated. “Grimm’s Fairy Tales, for example, are grim indeed,” he wrote, referring to the gory plots of Snow White, Cinderella and Hansel and Gretel.

Grim, indeed. And exciting, too, to generations of children and adults for two hundred years – and perhaps for another two hundred.

[MIKA27]

Germans hunt turtle after attack on boy

Residents of a German town have joined a determined search for a turtle blamed for an attack on a young swimmer.

A lake was drained at the weekend in the hunt for what is suspected to be an alligator snapping turtle.

Firefighters and local helpers at the Oggenrieder Weiher, in Bavaria, are wading through mud hoping to find the reptile, which is not a native species.

The turtle, nicknamed Lotti, is likely to be some 40cm (16 inches) long and weigh at least 14kg (30 pounds).

An eight-year-old German boy on holiday was bitten while bathing in the lake a week ago. His Achilles tendon was severed in two places, and zoologists in Munich later concluded that an alligator turtle had probably attacked him.

Such turtles are native to North America, so German authorities believe the reptile must have been released into the lake by its owner. Since 1999 there has been a ban on keeping the turtles in Germany, the daily Sueddeutsche Zeitung reports on its website.

The local mayor, Andreas Lieb, has offered a 1,000-euro (£859; $1,330) reward for whoever finds Lotti, while warning against any attempt to trap the turtle without expert help.

Lotti may be lying low in the thick mud, so it could be a long and perhaps fruitless search. Volunteers are reported to be beating the mud with the brooms more often used to put out small woodland fires.

About 500 fish were transferred to a nearby pond when the lake - which is about the size of a football pitch - was drained. But Mr Lieb has described the whole incident as a "disaster", coming at the height of the holiday season.

[MIKA27]

Missouri State Fair rodeo clown banned for Obama mask

The Missouri State Fair has banned for life a rodeo clown who donned a mask bearing the likeness of President Barack Obama for a mocking comedy act.

The clown's act on Saturday night - during which fans were asked whether they wanted to see "Obama run down by a bull" - drew swift denunciation.

Fair organisers said on Monday the act was "inappropriate" and apologised for the "unconscionable stunt".

A spokesman for Gov Jay Nixon said the clown's act was "deplorable".

Rodeo clowns are an established part of the sport in the US.

In addition to entertaining the fans with comedy sketches between bull riding and other competitive feats, they distract the bulls once they have thrown their riders, in order to give the cowboys a chance to escape.

The most popular rodeo clowns can take in $2,000 (£1,293) per night at the largest events, according to the US Bureau of Labor Statistics.

In amateur video taken of the event in Sedalia, Missouri, a performer wearing what appears to be a toothy Obama fright mask, jacket, and straw cowboy hat can be seen standing in the middle of the rodeo arena.

The announcer is heard calling attention to him, at which point a voice cries over the public address system: "I know I'm a clown, he's just running around acting like one, doesn't know he is one."

The unidentified clown's numerous detractors have insisted rodeo is a competitive sport and a brand of family entertainment, not a political platform.

"All members of the Missouri Rodeo Cowboy Association are very proud of our country and our president," the association's board of directors said in a statement.

"This type of behaviour will not be tolerated."

State Representative Steve Webb, like Mr Obama a Democrat, suggested the act had "racial overtones", in an interview with the Kansas City Star.

In 2012, Mr Obama lost the state of Missouri in the US Midwest 54% to 44%. But in 2008, he lost the state by fewer than 4,000 votes.

[MIKA27]

When Ian Fleming picked my grandfather to steal Nazi secrets

When naval intelligence officer Ian Fleming set up a secret commando unit during World War II, among those handpicked for duty was Theo Ionides - my grandfather. His band of real-life James Bonds helped change the course of the war.

My grandfather was - at 39 - already an old man by military standards when he joined Royal Navy Volunteer Reserve in the early years of World War II. So it was perfectly plausible when he told my grandmother that they kept him well away from the front line, out of harm's way.

His story was that the Admiralty had got him doing dull, technical stuff, poking around in the innards of new torpedoes and mines. But that couldn't be further from the truth, as my family discovered just a couple of years ago.

In fact my grandfather, Lieutenant Theo "Rusty" Ionides, had been handpicked by none other than Ian Fleming to be part of the Bond creator's top secret crack team of commandos. He'd been trained in all the tricks of intelligence gathering, ready to be sent into battle ahead of the advancing troops at D-Day.

The story of 30 Assault Unit, as the commandos were known, is a tale of audacious derring-do. 30AU was Commander Ian Fleming's greatest single contribution to the war effort and became the real-life inspiration for his most famous creation, James Bond.

Real-life 007

• Ian Fleming was a WWII naval intelligence officer
  
• Personal assistant to both directors of naval intelligence
  
• Founded and oversaw 30 Assault Unit
  
• Poured his personal experiences of wartime espionage into the 007 books
  
• First James Bond novel, Casino Royale, written at his holiday home in Jamaica in 1952
  

It all began in the now famous Room 39 of the Old Admiralty Building. This oak panelled office overlooking Horse Guard's Parade and out across to the garden of 10 Downing Street is where Fleming worked as a volunteer officer in naval intelligence throughout WWII.

It is a sterile place now, used for training and lined with white Formica-topped tables and a large whiteboard. According to Nick Rankin, a historian who has written the definitive history of the unit - Ian Fleming's Commandos: The Story of 30 Assault Unit in WWII - it was very different place 70 years ago. Bakelite phones would have been ringing incessantly, filing cabinets crashing open, the fire crackling in the hearth.

Then, Room 39 was packed with men, all smoking like chimneys. These were the cream of naval intelligence, tasked with using their guile and imagination to come up with novel ways of confounding the Germans.

Overseeing them from the adjoining office was the formidable Admiral John Godfrey, their boss and the inspiration for M in the James Bond novels.

And back at the start of the war, the main preoccupation of his team was how to address a key British weakness - the fact that the Germans led the Allies in all sorts of technologies - encryption, rockets, submarines, torpedoes, mines and much more.

In 1942, Fleming proposed a simple solution - steal it.

His plan is outlined in a succinct single-page memo, hammered out on a typewriter in Room 39. It is headed Proposal for Naval Intelligence Commando Unit and right from the first paragraph it is clear that - in the spirit of 30AU - the idea itself is stolen.

"One of the most outstanding innovations in German intelligence is the creation by the German NID [Naval Intelligence Division] of special intelligence 'Commandos'... their duty is to capture documents, cyphers [sic] etc before these can be destroyed by the defenders," writes Fleming, under his codename F. "I submit that we would do well to consider organising such a 'Commando'."

Godfrey's response is plain to see. "Yes," he has scrawled in large letters at the foot of the page. "Most decidedly."

30AU was born.

In essence what Fleming was proposing was a team of authorised thieves and looters - mavericks who would operate ahead of the forward troops and who were instructed to do whatever necessary to capture enemy intelligence, equipment or personnel.

The men of 30AU were trained in all the key commando skills - hand-to-hand combat, booby traps and explosives. Many learned to parachute, handle small boats or dive as frogmen. They learned how to break and enter, how to pick locks and crack - or blow - safes (and were required to sign a document promising not to use these new skills in civilian life).

30 Assault Unit - Ian Fleming's brainchild - in training in West Sussex for D-Day.

Each man signed the back of the group photo, taken in spring 1944.

Successes included seizing information such as photos of German shipyards...

... the capture of an Enigma code machine...

... and playing a part in the arrest of the German naval commander Karl Doenitz.

As the war drew to a close, officers posed at Hitler's mountain residence.

Heading home in June 1945. The 30 indicates the unit, and RN for Royal Navy.

But despite their considerable skills, the first foray of A Commando, as it was known then, was not a success. It came in August 1942 when they were part of the disastrous Allied assault on Dieppe. Fleming was there in person to witness the disaster - his only experience of battle.

Paul McGrath is one of the last survivors of that raid. He's now 90 but still has a ramrod straight back. His clear, bright eyes sparkle and his face lights up as he recalls his adventures with the unit. Except when I ask about Dieppe.

He remembers sitting hunched on the deck of the destroyer taking him and his comrades into battle. As they approached Dieppe, the German gunners, dug into emplacements in the cliffs, opened up with everything they had. A large shell exploded just 20ft (6m) from where he sat.

Paul McGrath

More than 70 years on from that day, McGrath searches for words to describe the abject terror that gripped him as the blast wave hit. He says he was "frozen on deck, completely paralysed".

"I was petrified with such a terror it stunned my mind," he has written. "I lay on the deck with a sort of premature rigor mortis, immobilised by the awful thought of an immediate and terrible death."

That, he says, is when what had been for him the game of war turned deadly serious. "The sods were actually trying to kill ME!"

When the landing craft became lodged on a submerged object just a few metres from the beach, he realised the game was up.

Machine and cannon fire rained down from the cliffs as McGrath and the other commandos stripped off their kit, throwing aside their weapons.

Those that could swim dived off the boat and swam for their lives through a sea foaming with bullets. McGrath - not a strong swimmer - says he was beginning to go under when the smokescreen cleared and he was spotted by a small Allied boat which dragged him aboard. It was the first of many close calls for McGrath.

But almost 1,000 other men had no such luck. They died in the raid at Dieppe, which most military scholars regard as an unmitigated disaster. Fleming's commandos came back empty-handed. They hadn't even stepped ashore.

A British landing vessel and tanks after the Dieppe raid

Yet back at the Admiralty, Godfrey had not lost faith. Replacements were recruited for the lost men and the team was prepared for Operation Torch, the assault on North Africa.

Here Fleming's Red Indians, as he once called them, were more successful. They were deployed again during the offensives in Malta, Sicily and the Italian mainland during 1943. This rag-tag collection of marines and intelligence experts seized codes, secret documents and all sorts of novel German kit including an Enigma machine. They even bagged an Italian admiral.

So when the Allies were planning the greatest offensive of them all, Operation Overlord - code name for the Battle of Normandy, starting with D-Day - top brass wanted 30 Commando, or 30AU as the troop had been renamed, to be part of it.

That meant more personnel so, while 30AU was at work in the Mediterranean, back in Britain the men of Room 39 were busy recruiting. At a new base in Littlehampton, West Sussex, this new cadre was being trained in the essential commando skills. Among them was my grandfather.

Lt Ionides with Anthea and Penelope (right) on their outing to Hampton Court months before he died

A key condition of joining the unit was absolute secrecy. All members had to sign the Official Secrets Act. So my grandfather told my grandmother nothing about his new role. She knew he had been in training before he visited London in March 1944, but not what his role was to be.

The last pictures of him were taken on that visit when he took his two daughters - my mother Penelope and her sister Anthea - to Hampton Court Palace on a spring afternoon.

The family only discovered his involvement a couple of years ago, thanks to a coincidence.

My cousin Alexander is an eye doctor at Moorfields Eye Hospital in London and the only one of the family to carry my mother's maiden name, Ionides.

One day a patient asked him a startling question.

"Ionides is an unusual name," he said. "Was your grandfather called Theo?"

"Yes," replied Alexander.

"Did he fight in World War II?"

"Yes," he answered again.

Then came the real eye-opener.

"Did you know he was handpicked to be part of a top secret commando unit set up by Ian Fleming?"

The answer to that question was a resounding no. This amateur historian had opened a chapter of family history that we had no idea existed.

My grandfather was born in March 1900, the middle child of a well-to-do family of Greek origin that had fallen on relatively hard times.

Allen 'Bon' Royle

We've got the letters he wrote from school to his parents. It is clear he was very excited by WWI and eager to join up. As soon as he was 18 he joined the Royal Navy but during training, the war ended and Midshipman Ionides didn't - to his disappointment - ever see action.

He left the navy shortly afterwards and secured a place at Oxford in the university's new discipline, engineering. He never finished his degree - we don't know why - but his engineering expertise was to find a useful role in the next war.

Theo never really settled down. In the early 1920s he went to work for the Greek merchant company Ralli Brothers in India. His sister Elfrieda apparently told him the parties were fantastic.

But Ralli Brothers did not prosper and the company's Indian operations were closed in 1930. He returned home to London and, with Britain in the grip of the Great Depression, found himself unemployed. He finally managed to get work at a dry cleaning firm. This was a brand new technology in Britain, and probably more glamorous than it seems now.

Nevertheless, when war was declared in September 1939, he was very eager to sign up.

Having served as a midshipman, the obvious place for him was the navy. According to family legend, he had quite a struggle to persuade them that a 39-year-old could be useful, even lying about his age to get in. It was his engineering skill that did it.

He was finally offered a commission as a 2nd Lieutenant in the Royal Navy Volunteer Reserve.

My grandfather became an expert in torpedoes and mines. He was deft at defusing the things, but also had an eye for technology, so was sent abroad to try and scout out new weapons.

It seems he caught Fleming's eye when he brought the innards of some particularly intriguing new torpedo back to the Admiralty from Sicily.

After a couple of months of commando training in Littlehampton, he was bundled on to a boat to join the greatest sea-borne invasion force in history - the D-Day landings.

Unfortunately he was not to play a big role in what happened next.

The D-Day landings

The Normandy landings on 6 June 1944, codenamed Operation Overlord, took three years of meticulous planning by the Allied forces. A naval and aerial bombardment supported the main amphibious assault to drive the Germans out of occupied France.

The coastline chosen for the invasion, running from Carentan in the west to Caen in the east, was divided into five beaches. A series of prefabricated piers - used to roll equipment and supplies ashore - stretched seven miles along the coast. The first day of the assault ended with 150,000 men onshore, but this came with the loss of 2,500 men. It marked the beginning of the end of the war in Europe.

I've managed to track down three surviving veterans of the unit, men who were with him on that journey. None knew my grandfather in life, but 70 years on, all three remember his death very vividly indeed.

Four days after D-Day, the landing on Utah beach was easy. "Like stepping ashore at Margate," recalls Pte Bill Marshall.

The problems came after 30AU bedded down for the night in a field a few miles inland. The veterans all remember the German plane that suddenly appeared over the hedgerow and the bombs it dropped - a new kind of anti-personnel weapon, they were later to discover.

Almost 70 years on, I sat with each of them as they described how the shower of bomblets it released exploded, sending spinning scythes of shrapnel hurtling out over the field.

"There was a kind of humming and fluttering like butterflies," says Marshall, clearly still intrigued by the sound after all these years.

But there was nothing gentle about this weapon. Twenty-two men were injured, three fatally - one of whom was my grandfather.

Allen Royle - "Bon" Royle as he became known in the unit - tells me how he walked over to where the injured men were lying, many screaming in agony.

"I remember the medical orderly opening the buttons on your grandfather's shirt. I don't know why I remember it so well, but I do. His shirt was soaked in arterial blood," he tells me.

"The orderly opened it up and I could see his chest and the entry wound where the shrapnel went in - I think it was a bomb fin. He would have died immediately, I'm sure of that."

He is matter of fact as he says this. It is clear that Royle saw many horrific things during the war.

I'm surprised now how unmoved I am as he describes my grandfather's death. I suppose I am insulated from the horror by seven decades, and by the journalist in me who is keen to hear the facts - excited by these old men's stories of wartime derring-do.

It is a different story in Normandy.

Bon Royle and his son Nick made the journey back to Utah beach and retraced the unit's movements. Nick Royle texted me a photo of the map of Normandy they'd used. He'd circled a field in pencil.

A few weeks later a farmer leads me towards the spot marked on the map. He had no idea that any English soldiers had died there.

Paul Woodage, the military historian who accompanies me, isn't surprised. So many people died in the days after D-Day, no-one knows where all of them fell.

We continue through the mud towards a gate into another field.

"I'm not superstitious, but lots of people just know when they are in the right place," Woodage suggests.

The map Nick Royle texted - the field is circled on the right

I'm not superstitious either, but he's right. We walk through a gate and into the field and it just feels right - this is where it happened. All the glamour and excitement of the connection with Fleming and James Bond evaporates.

That's when I remember the famous Rupert Brooke poem about the nobility of dying for your country and the "corner of a foreign field that will be forever England".

I am proud of my grandfather and I believe the cause he and the others who died there were fighting for was noble. But the fact is that standing in the field where my grandfather died doesn't make the pain of loss my mother has carried all her life any more meaningful. If anything it makes it less so.

This place will never be forever England, I think. This is a miserable place for anyone's life to end.

I turn and trudge away, feeling hollow.

But as I walk I begin to wonder if I'm being hasty. I have no doubt that he would have been very proud of what 30AU went on to achieve.

His comrades seized the entire German naval archive, later used as evidence in the Nuremberg trials. They captured top-secret German technology and some of the scientists behind it, and even played a part in the capture of Hitler's successor Admiral Karl Doenitz, thus sealing the end of the Third Reich.

Of course this is just some corner of a foreign field, but that's not the point. The field doesn't matter. What's important is the corners of all our hearts where the memories of the dead and what they achieved live on.

[MIKA27]

You've Been Lied To About Carrots Your Whole Life Because Of Nazis

You’ve probably heard the myth that eating lots of carrots will magically improve your vision. The bad news is that it’s a total lie. The good news? It’s one that helped the Allies defeat the Nazis.

Here’s the truth: Carrots are rich in beta carotene (Vitamin A), and thus eating lots of carrots helps promote good eye health. That’s a different thing entirely from vision; pumping yourself full of Vitamin A doesn’t bring you any closer to 20/20 than doing pushups all day would.

So why do we think carrots help us see better? Smithsonian Magazine reports the theory of John Stolarczyk, curator of the World Carrot Museum (Yes! It exists). According to Stolarczyk, the myth began during World War II, when the Nazis were bombing the bejeezus out of London at night. Then, seemingly out of no where, the British Royal Air Force started shooting down more Nazi planes. How did they do it? With the help of a new radar that the RAF, of course, did not want anybody to know about. Smithsonian explains:

The Royal Air Force were able to repel the German fighters in part because of the development of a new, secret radar technology. The on-board Airborne Interception Radar (AI), first used by the RAF in 1939, had the ability to pinpoint enemy bombers before they reached the English Channel. But to keep that under wraps, according to Stolarczyk’s research pulled from the files of the

Imperial War Museum

, the Mass Observation Archive, and the UK National Archives, the Ministry provided another reason for their success: carrots.

When the papers asked how pilots where shooting down planes in the dark, the RAF simply responded that pilots had been hitting their root veggies hard. A bold-faced lie! But one that helped save London — and the world — from Nazi tyranny. [Smithsonian]

[MIKA27]

Bloomberg: Retina iPad Mini & thinner iPad are coming:

Bloomberg is reporting that a retina iPad Mini and a thinner iPad are both set to release later this year. That would confirm previous reports about how the full-sized, big boy iPad was getting the iPad Mini design treatment with a narrower bezel and a thinner body and that the iPad Mini would finally get a Retina display.

Bloomberg cites the last three months of the year as the target release date for the retina iPad Mini and thinner iPad (that would be October, November and December). When reports about upcoming Apple products from reputable outlets like Bloomberg start to corroborate with other reports about Apple from other reputable outlets like the WSJ, well, patterns start to emerge and a glimmer of truth can maybe, possibly be seen through the trash pile known as the Apple rumour mill.

Things can change, obviously, but as of right now, it’s looking like the next iPad will look like the iPad Mini and the next iPad Mini will finally have a display quality similar to the retina iPad. Big brother looks like little brother, little brother looks like big brother.

Bloomberg also reported that the next iPhone will be announced at a September 10 event, something we’ve also heard before.

[MIKA27]

Monster Machines: These Timber Transports Were Built From The Wood They Shipped

Almost all early sawmills utilised water power to drive their sawblades and were therefore located on riverbanks. This made delivering wood a breeze — just chop down a patch of timber upriver, push the felled logs into the water and float them down to the mill.

In narrow stretches of water, the logs could be pushed down individually, in wider stretches they could be lashed together into sturdier rafts. And on Russia’s Volga and Vetluga rivers, they were assembled into giant inverted pyramids and loaded onto massive barges like these.

Known as Belyana, these ships were part of large-scale logging operations along the Volga and Vetluga rivers at the turn of the 20th century. They often measured in excess of 100m long, 6m tall and 25m wide. These giant boats had little trouble hauling 5000 tons of lumber (13,000 individual logs) at a time. They were constructed from the fir and pine logs they were built to ship. In fact, the name Belyana means “made of white wood” and is derived from the white colour of the debarked logs that went into their construction. Incredibly, assembling the earliest iterations of these river ships didn’t even require nails.

The logs that were to be shipped were first loaded on and lashed together into a widening platform. This was done to allow the crew access to the bottom of the boat in the event of a leak, which happened pretty much constantly. Anywhere from 13 to 80 men would be hired on to each ship and a vast majority of them were on bailing duty. These ships also incorporated a passageway running down the centerline, allowing the bottom logs to air dry as well as permit passage from one end of the ship to the other.

After the logs were set, crews built wooden guiding cabins atop the lumber stack. A roughly hewn house was built on either side of the platform, with a more finished captain’s deck house between them. These wooden homes served as crew quarters during the voyage but upon arrival at their destination, typically the city of Astrakhan, the entire structure — boat, cargo, and homes — were dismantled and processed into building materials.

[MIKA27]

The Forgotten Cold War Plan That Put a Ring of Copper Around the Earth

During the summer of 1963, Earth looked a tiny bit like Saturn.

The same year that Martin Luther King, Jr. marched on Washington and Beatlemania was born, the United States launched half a billion whisker-thin copper wires into orbit in an attempt to install a ring around the Earth. It was called Project West Ford, and it’s a perfect, if odd, example of the Cold War paranoia and military mentality at work in America’s early space program.

The Air Force and Department of Defense envisioned the West Ford ring as the largest radio antenna in human history. Its goal was to protect the nation’s long-range communications in the event of an attack from the increasingly belligerent Soviet Union.

During the late 1950’s, long-range communications relied on undersea cables or over-the-horizon radio. These were robust, but not invulnerable. Should the Soviets have attacked an undersea telephone or telegraph cable, America would only have been able to rely on radio broadcasts to communicate overseas. But the fidelity of the ionosphere, the layer of the atmosphere that makes most long-range radio broadcasts possible, is at the mercy of the sun: It is routinely disrupted by solar storms. The U.S. military had identified a problem.

A potential solution was born in 1958 at MIT’s Lincoln Labs, a research station on Hanscom Air Force Base northwest of Boston.

Project Needles, as it was originally known, was Walter E. Morrow’s idea. He suggested that if Earth possessed a permanent radio reflector in the form of an orbiting ring of copper threads, America’s long-range communications would be immune from solar disturbances and out of reach of nefarious Soviet plots.

Each copper wire was about 1.8 centimeters in length. This was half the wavelength of the 8 GHz transmission signal beamed from Earth, effectively turning each filament into what is known as a dipole antenna. The antennas would boost long-range radio broadcasts without depending on the fickle ionosphere.

Today it’s hard to imagine a time where filling space with millions of tiny metal projectiles was considered a good idea. But West Ford was spawned before men had set foot in space, when generals were in charge of NASA’s rockets, and most satellites and spacecraft hadn’t flown beyond the drafting table. The agency operated under a “Big Sky Theory.” Surely space is so big that the risks of anything crashing into a stray bit of space junk were miniscule compared to the threat of communism.

The project was renamed West Ford, for the neighboring town of Westford, Massachusetts. It wasn’t the first, or even the strangest plan to build a global radio reflector. In 1945, science fiction author Arthur C. Clarke suggested that Germany’s V2 rocket arsenal could be repurposed to deploy an array of antennas into geostationary orbit around the Earth. So prescient was Clarke’s vision, today’s communications satellites, residing at these fixed points above the planet, are said to reside in “Clarke Orbit”.

Meanwhile, American scientists had been attempting to use our own moon as a communications relay, a feat that would finally be accomplished with 1946’s Project Diana. An even more audacious scheme was hatched in the early 1960s from a shiny Mylar egg known as Project Echo, which utilized a pair of microwave reflectors in the form of space-borne metallic balloons.

Size of the copper needles dispersed as part of Project West Ford. (NASA)

As Project West Ford progressed through development, radio astronomers raised alarm at the ill effects this cloud of metal could have on their ability to survey the stars. Concerns were beginning to arise about the problem of space junk. But beneath these worries was an undercurrent of frustration that a space mission under the banner of national security was not subject to the same transparency as public efforts.

The Space Science Board of the National Academy of Sciences convened a series of classified discussions to address astronomers’ worries, and President Kennedy attempted a compromise in 1961. The White House ensured that West Ford’s needles would be placed in a low orbit, the wires would likely re-enter Earth’s atmosphere within two years, and no further tests would be conducted until the results of the first were fully evaluated. This partially appeased the international astronomy community, but still, no one could guarantee precisely what would happen to twenty kilograms of copper wire dispersed into orbit.

The West Ford dispersal system. (NASA)

On October 21, 1961, NASA launched the first batch of West Ford dipoles into space. A day later, this first payload had failed to deploy from the spacecraft, and its ultimate fate was never completely determined.

“U.S.A. Dirties Space” read a headline in the Soviet newspaper Pravda.

Ambassador Adlai Stevenson was forced to make a statement before the UN declaring that the U.S. would consult more closely with international scientists before attempting another launch. Many remained unsatisfied. Cambridge astronomer Fred Hoyle went so far as to accuse the U.S. of undertaking a military project under “a façade of respectability,” referring to West Ford as an “intellectual crime.”

On May 9, 1963, a second West Ford launch successfully dispersed its spindly cargo approximately 3,500 kilometers above the Earth, along an orbit that crossed the North and South Pole. Voice transmissions were successfully relayed between California and Massachusetts, and the technical aspects of the experiment were declared a success. As the dipole needles continued to disperse, the transmissions fell off considerably, although the experiment proved the strategy could work in principle.

Concern about the clandestine and military nature of West Ford continued following this second launch. On May 24 of that year, the The Harvard Crimson quoted British radio astronomer Sir Bernard Lovell as saying, “The damage lies not with this experiment alone, but with the attitude of mind which makes it possible without international agreement and safeguards.”

Recent military operations in space had given the U.S. a reckless reputation, especially following 1962’s high-altitude nuclear test Starfish Prime. This famously bad idea dispersed radiation across the globe, spawning tropical auroras and delivering a debilitating electromagnetic pulse to Hawaiian cities.

The ultimate fate of the West Ford needles is also surrounded by a cloud of uncertainty. Because the copper wires were so light, project leaders assumed that they would re-enter the atmosphere within several years, pushed Earthward by solar wind. Most of the needles from the failed 1961 and successful 1963 launch likely met this fate. Many now lie beneath snow at the poles.

But not all the needles returned to Earth. Thanks to a design flaw, it’s possible that several hundred, perhaps thousands of clusters of clumped needles still reside in orbit around Earth, along with the spacecraft that carried them.

The copper needles were embedded in a naphthalene gel designed to evaporate quickly once it reached the vacuum of space, dispersing the needles in a thin cloud. But this design allowed metal-on-metal contact, which, in a vacuum, can weld fragments into larger clumps.

In 2001, the European Space Agency published a report that analyzed the fate of needle clusters from the two West Ford payloads. Unlike the lone needles, these chains and clumps have the potential to remain in orbit for several decades, and NORAD space debris databases list several dozen still aloft from the 1963 mission. But the ESA report suggests that, because the 1961 payload failed to disperse, thousands more clusters could have been deployed, and several may be too small to track.

Active communication satellites quickly made projects like West Ford obsolete, and no more needles were launched after 1963. Telstar, the first modern communications satellite, was launched in 1962, beaming television signals across the Atlantic for two hours a day.

In Earth’s catalog of space junk, West Ford’s bits of copper make up only a fraction of the total debris cloud that circles the Earth.

But they surely have one of the strangest stories.

The scheme serves as yet another reminder that it was military might that brought the first space missions to bear, for better and worse. Like moon bases and men on Mars, it’s another long-lost dream born at a time when nothing was out of reach. Even putting a ring around the Earth.

[Habana Mike]

The Forgotten Cold War Plan That Put a Ring of Copper Around the Earth

"... the United States launched half a billion whisker-thin copper wires into orbit in an attempt to install a ring around the Earth. It was called Project West Ford, and it’s a perfect, if odd, example of the Cold War paranoia and military mentality at work in America’s early space program."

The Air Force and Department of Defense envisioned the West Ford ring as the largest radio antenna in human history. Its goal was to protect the nation’s long-range communications in the event of an attack from the increasingly belligerent Soviet Union.

Each copper wire was about 1.8 centimeters in length. This was half the wavelength of the 8 GHz transmission signal beamed from Earth, effectively turning each filament into what is known as a dipole antenna. The antennas would boost long-range radio broadcasts without depending on the fickle ionosphere.

"Today it’s hard to imagine a time where filling space with millions of tiny metal projectiles was considered a good idea."

".... But beneath these worries was an undercurrent of frustration that a space mission under the banner of national security was not subject to the same transparency as public efforts."

Concern about the clandestine and military nature of West Ford continued following this second launch. On May 24 of that year, the The Harvard Crimson quoted British radio astronomer Sir Bernard Lovell as saying, “The damage lies not with this experiment alone, but with the attitude of mind which makes it possible without international agreement and safeguards.”

Reminds me just a little of today's conspiracy theorist ideas about HAARP and chemtrails:

http://en.wikipedia....nspiracy_theory

Sounds like it's been done before!

[MIKA27]

Reminds me just a little of today's conspiracy theorist ideas about HAARP and chemtrails:

http://en.wikipedia....nspiracy_theory

Sounds like it's been done before!

Yes, I've read about HARP a while back. Apparently the chem trails are quite high up in the stratosphere and allow for signals to deflect off the chemtrails. Some even hypothesize that HARP is one big weather controlling weapon...

Thanks for sharing Mike

[MIKA27]

These Glow-In-The-Dark Rabbits Will Help Cure Diseases One Day

Glowing bunny rabbits aren’t just for Sherlock Holmes reboots and acid trips anymore. Scientists from the University of Hawaii recently collaborated with a team from Istanbul, Turkey, where a couple of bright green lab rabbits were just born as part of a larger effort to better understand hereditary illness and make cheaper medicine. Also: Glow-in-the-dark bunnies!

This isn’t some inhumane magic trick. The rabbits are part of a genetic manipulation experiment, one that the researchers hope will shed some light on hereditary diseases and hopefully lead the way to producing drugs to help cure them. The embryos of the two green rabbits were injected with a fluorescent protein from jellyfish DNA, giving them the “glowing gene.” The glowing effect is just to show that the genetic manipulation technique works, and in future experiments, researchers could inject beneficial DNA into the rabbits so that they might be used to produce medicine.

But for now, these bunnies just glow. “These rabbits are like a light bulb glowing, like an LED light all over their body,” Dr Stefan Moisyadi from the University of Hawaii told the local KHON news station. “And on top of it, their fur is beginning to grow and the greenness is shining right through their fur. It’s so intense.”

Don’t worry. It doesn’t hurt the little bunnies. Moisyadi says that the glowing rabbits will live long normal and healthy lives, pointing to a study from CalTech that yielded glowing mice that showed no adverse side effects. And who could forget the glowing dog from South Korea or the radioactive-like kitten from the Mayo Clinic who might hold the key for an AIDS vaccine?

As they experiment with bigger and bigger animals, the researchers gain a better understanding of how genetic manipulation works. Moisyadi hopes that one day they’ll “create bio-reactors that basically produce pharmaceuticals that can be made a lot cheaper.”

Next up are a batch of glowing sheep that will move the Hawaii-Istanbul team’s research forward. And believe it or not, these won’t be the first glowing sheep to show up in this weird world we live in. [Discovery]

[Fuzz]

These Glow-In-The-Dark Rabbits Will Help Cure Diseases One Day

Just think, soon you won't need a bedside lamp to read in the dark! And neither will you need to dress up for St Patrick's Day, you already glow green!!

[oliverdst]

Alfredo Moser: Bottle light inventor proud to be poor

My pleasure, Mika.

About this guy, Alfredo Moser, I heard this story few months ago but I confess I didn't pay a lot of attention and besides this article I had never heard about him again.

Let's hope his invention helps the poor and the ecological people.

[MIKA27]

An iPhone-Thin Battery Perfect For Charging Your iPhone's Thin Battery

There are almost as many external battery pack options for your smartphone as there are cases, and given the multitude of options there are probably two important factors to seriously consider: capacity and design. And a leading contender for both these considerations is the new Jackery Air.

The battery measures in at just slightly thicker than the iPhone 5, but its contoured housing and similarly sized dimensions means it can slip in your pocket as easily as your phone. And while the Jackery Air’s 5600mAh isn’t the largest you can buy, it’s certainly capacious enough given the back battery’s slim form factor.

Charging it from dead takes about six hours, but it promises to then boost the battery life of your iPhone or smartphone up to 200 per cent and it can be used with larger devices like iPads and other tablets. It’s on sale now for $US80 for a limited time, making it a pretty reasonable way to never have to deal with a low battery warning ever again.

[MIKA27]

Scientists Grow Human Heart Tissue That Beats With Total Autonomy

Coming fresh on the heels of the news that scientists are successfully 3D printing live, working, mini human kidneys, a new report in Nature is giving another burst of hope to the future of organ transplants. For the very first time, a research team has been able to grow human heart tissue that beats totally autonomously in its petri dish home.

The tissue itself came from induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs), which started as mature human skin cells and effectively “reprogrammed” back to an embryonic state and then coaxed into becoming the desired cell, in this case those with the potential to become heart tissue or multipotential cardiovascular progenitor (MCP) cells. This is the same method that scientists recently used for the far less practical, far more nausea-inducing feat of growing human teeth from urine.

Then using a decellularised mouse heart (which is basically exactly what it sounds like — a mouse heart stripped of all its cells, leaving behind a heart framework or “scaffold”), the researchers repopulated the heart scaffold with the MCP cells. According to senior investigator Lei Yang, PhD, and assistant professor of developmental biology at the Pitt School of Medicine:

This process makes MCPs, which are precursor cells that can further differentiate into three kinds of cells the heart uses, including cardiomyocytes, endothelial cells, and smooth muscle cells. Nobody has tried using these MCPs for heart regeneration before. It turns out that the heart’s extracellular matrix — the material that is the substrate of heart scaffold — can send signals to guide the MCPs into becoming the specialised cells that are needed for proper heart function.

After several weeks, not only had the mouse’s heart been fully rebuilt with the human cells, it was also beating again entirely on its own at a rate of 40 to 50 beats per minute. While this is certainly an incredible achievement the heart still isn’t quite at the level of effectively being able to pump blood throughout a human body — the average resting human heart rate is 60 to 100 beats per minute.

Still, with one person dying of heart disease every 34 seconds, this is more than enough cause for celebration. And we have every reason to believe that, one day in the not too distant future, repairing a severely damaged heart could be as easy as taking a simple skin biopsy and regrowing one of your very own.

[MIKA27]

Out Of The Comics, Into Reality: Jet Pack Moves Closer To Market

From Buck Rogers to James Bond, we all have a pretty concrete mental image of a jet pack — a motorized backpack with little handles in front and smoke shooting out of the back.

The New Zealand-based Martin Aircraft Co. doesn't just think it's turned the jet pack of your imagination into a reality. It thinks it's made something better.

"The ones that you've seen previously in history seem to have a very limited time of endurance," CEO Peter Coker tells NPR's Don Gonyea. "We wanted something that you could actually use on the day-to-day basis."

The company plans to put the jet pack on the industrial market next year.

The structure consists of an engine and two ducts — those wing-like structures coming out of the side — and a pilot console. The pilot can stand on the console, strap in and use joystick-style controls to fly around.

Last week, New Zealand's Civil Aviation Authority granted the company permission to conduct piloted tests of the one-person flying machine. Before this, most tests have been done with dummies via remote control.

The origins of the project go all the way back to 1984, when inventor Glenn Martin began tinkering with the idea in his garage. He started Martin Aircraft 20 years later, and he's been working with a team of engineers to perfect the flying machine ever since. A dozen prototypes later, the jet pack can travel almost a mile high.

"We reckon it can probably move about 8,000 feet, but we don't think many people will want to go much higher than that, particularly when they're strapped into this machine," Coker says.

He says it took some time for people to believe that the machine could really fly that high: "There was a perception amongst the public and certain aviators — a skeptical perception — that actually this thing doesn't get above what we call ground effect, i.e. a couple of feet."

To squelch that opinion, the company shot a video from a helicopter, showing off the altitude and the effectiveness of the ballistic parachute that can be deployed in the event of an emergency landing.

The company's first jet pack will be on the market in 2014 and will be targeted to first-responders, who could benefit from being able to cut through traffic and to have an aerial view. Martin Aircraft has gotten a lot of interest from fire services around the globe, as well as search-and-rescue, border patrol and bridge inspection teams. Since the machine can be flown unmanned, Coker says, there's also been tremendous interest from military institutions worldwide.

"What is really fantastic is taking something out of the comic books and actually using it in a practical world," he says. "This will change the whole dynamics of aviation."

The company hopes to put a more basic jet pack for recreational use on the market in 2015.

The machine is registered under New Zealand's Civil Aviation Authority, so flying one would require an ultralight or microlight license — the same thing needed to pilot a powered hang glider and some hot air balloons. And in case you were wondering, the engine is gasoline powered. As Coker says, "You could stop at a garage and fill it up."

The cost is only a ballpark estimate at this stage, but the anticipated price of a military model — which would have more sophisticated communication features — is around $250,000. For the individual and commercial sector, the projected cost is about $150,000 to $175,000.

Start saving up now!

[MIKA27]

Why are you so afraid of MSG?

How did monosodium glutamate get such a bad rap?

After a consumer crusade in the 60s, the compound has become synonymous with bad Chinese food, Doritos and processed cheese powder — but a new longform piece from Buzzfeed suggests we might have MSG all wrong. 50 years later, most of the original scientific criticisms of MSG have been disproven, but the stigma around the compound has yet to lift. Its root compound, glutamic acid, is the essence of the "umami" flavor crucial to many dishes, which has led a new generation of chefs like Momofuku's David Chang to seek out natural compounds to give them the same oomph. Chang says a few high-end restaurants are already using MSG for that reason but "everyone’s so afraid of being outed that nobody wants to talk about it." Still, in Chang's view, it's only a matter of time before the notorious salt comes out of the closet.

[MIKA27]

How One Perfect Shot Saved Pinball From Being Illegal

In May of 1976 in New York City, Roger Sharpe watched nervously as city council members piled into a Manhattan courtroom.

Reporters and camera operators had already begun setting up, eagerly anticipating the proceedings ahead. Roger, a young magazine writer for GQ and the New York Times among others, did not expect this kind of attention.

He knew lots of people, from bowling-alley-hanging teens to the Music & Amusement Association, were depending on him, but didn’t realise the whole country would be watching. Roger had been selected for this particular task not only for his knowledge and expertise, but for his legendary hand-eye coordination. He was there to prove that this was a game of skill, not chance. He was there to overturn the ban. He was there to save the game of pinball.

On January 16, 1920, the 18th amendment officially went into effect, making the production, transportation and sale of alcohol illegal in the United States. With that act of moral legislating, gambling became the next target. Coin-operated machines, usually associated with slot machines and betting horses, came under scrutiny. Pinball machines, with their recently-fitted coin mechanisms, became bright, and easy examples of “games of chance”. Politicians took to their pulpit to denounce pinball. Police raided parlors, bowling alleys, and bars that housed these machines. Politicians, literally wielding hammers, smashed these games to smithereens in a public show to illustrate that they too were “moral”. On January 21, 1942, Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia officially banned pinball in New York City and many other American cities soon followed suit.

Despite this ban, pinball designers continued to operate. While pinball was officially banned publicly, it was still legal to own machines for private use (not to mention rogue arcades and bars who placed pinball machines in dark corners in opposition to the bans). Companies like Gottlieb, Bally’s and Williams proceeded to develop new innovations for their games, like double flippers, free balls, and electronic games. In fact, many localities regarded “free balls” different than “free games” and allowed pinball machines that had this feature to be used at public locations. In addition, the artwork on the machines became more elaborate and intricate, attracting new visually-impressed fans. Even in the shadow of the ban, the pinball industry had found a way to survive.

Which brings us back to the May morning in 1976 with Mr Sharpe waiting patiently to enter the courtroom. He had been hired by the Music & Amusement Association (MAA, for short) to be their star witness in their pursuit to overturn the ban on pinball in New York City. Roger Sharpe, besides being a writer on the subject matter, was also a superb player himself, widely considered to be the best in country. He had been provided with two machines to prove his case, with one being a backup in the event that the first machine broke. While the MAA had been granted this hearing due to one committee member’s sponsored bill to overturn the ban, the other committee members were known to be against lifting the ban on pinball. The the MAA, the bill and Mr Sharpe were underdogs in this fight.

Upon entering the courtroom, Sharpe began eloquently to argue why the ban should be overturned, stating that while in the past, it may have been associated with gambling, this was no longer the case. It was a game that tested your patience, hand eye coordination, and reflexes. Quite simply, it was a game of skill, not chance.

As expected, Mr Sharpe was asked to prove this assertion. Thus, he began to play one of the machines in the pinball game of his life. But he was soon stopped by one particularly grumpy councilman. Afraid that the “pinballers” had tampered with the machine, he demanded that Mr. Sharpe use the backup. Sharpe agreed, but this added another degree of difficulty. You see, Mr Sharpe was extremely familiar with the first machine, having practiced on it a great deal in preparation for this hearing. He was not nearly as experienced the backup machine.

Nonetheless, he agreed and began playing on the backup. Despite playing well with the weight of a giant silver ball on him, the grumpy council member was not impressed. With the ban on the verge of not being overturned, Sharpe pulled a move that has become pinball legend.

Reminiscent of another New York sporting legend, he declared that if he could make the ball go through the middle lane on his next turn, then he would have proven that pinball is a game of skill- essentially, he was calling his shot, and staking the future of pinball on it. Pulling back the plunger, he let that silver ball fly. Upon contact with a flipper, the ball zoomed up and down, through the middle lane. Just as Sharpe had said it would. He had become the Babe Ruth of pinball and, with that, proved that there was indeed skill to the game of pinball. The council immediately overturned the ban on pinball. By playing a “mean pinball”, Roger Sharpe had saved the game.

Bonus Facts:

• Most pinball historians date the game back to King Louis XVI of France in the late 18th century where something called “Bagatelle” was played. It consisted of a billiards table, pins and a “bowled” ball. Nearly hundred years later, in 1870, a British immigrant named Montague Redgrave from Columbus, Ohio received a patent for his improvements to Bagatelle, included a spring loaded plunger. In 1931, Automatic industries attached a coin-mechanism to its pinball machine, “Wiffle Ball”, revolutionising pinball allowing the owners to make a profit and giving the player a chance to “gamble” on their playing. Soon after, David’s Gottlieb’s “Baffle Ball” was introduced. Gottlieb would go on to become one of the premiere producers of pinball machines.
  
• The best-selling pinball game of all-time is “The Addams Family” produced by Midway (under the Bally name) in 1991.
  
• All the way up until October 2004, it was illegal for people under 18 years old to play pinball in Nashville.
  
• There is only one company left that still produces physical pinball machines, Stern Pinball in Chicago.
  
• Roger Sharpe was a great pinball player for many years after, but he maybe now eclipsed by not only one of his sons, but two. According to the August 2013 pinball rankings, Zack Sharpe is currently ranked number one in the world, while Josh Sharpe is currently ranked number 15.
  

[MIKA27]

How Underwater Drones Are Searching For The Lost Pilots Of WWII

Deep below the Pacific Ocean, dozens of WWII pilots are laying in watery graves, still inside the aircraft took them across the sky decades ago. It’s far to late for a rescue, but as Popular Science explains, the people behind the BentProp Project — and their undersea drones — are surfacing these soldiers’ incredible history.

From Popular Science:

Last year, local spear fishermen diving on Palau’s western barrier reef stumbled across one of the most impressive finds: an intact plane. They alerted the owner of a dive shop, who passed photos of the wreck along to BentProp.

Scannon’s team eventually identified the plane as an American Corsair.

When [they] reach the Corsair, engineers lower the [autonomous underwater vehicle], now equipped with GoPro HERO3 HD cameras, into the water, and it once again begins a methodical sweep. Back in California, [the team] will use the thousands of captured images, plus hundreds of photos taken by human divers, to build a 3-D reconstruction of the plane.

BrentProp believes there are at least 8 more US planes hidden in this corner of the ocean, and using their autonomous underwater vehicle called “Remus,” they intend to find the rest. It’s an undersea mission that’s been a long time coming. You can hop over to Popular Science for the all the details of the awesome project.

[MIKA27]

Architecture Student Converts School Bus Into Cosy Home

School buses are so much fun. The springy seats, the awkward-to-open windows, the rumbling engine — it all hearkens back to a time in your life when you were younger, happier and worry-free. But did you ever imagine living in one? Hank Butitta did.

By his last semester at architecture school, Butitta had grown weary of doing projects that only existed on paper, ones that were destined to be filed away and forgotten. He got sick of making things that nobody cared about. So what did he do? He bought a school bus.

Over the course of 15 weeks, Butitta transformed the standard issue vehicle into a sleek and modern home. Equipped with all the necessary conveniences including two beds, a small kitchen and a bathroom, the converted school bus could rival any recreational vehicle in functionality — but it’s truly one-of-a-kind on all other counts. Once he’d given his final presentation, Butitta and some friends embarked on a 8000km road trip to test it out. According to his website, Hank Bought a Bus, the group is about halfway through, and based on their photos, the bus is a screaming success.

The view from the back of the bus looking forward:

The view from the front of the bus looking back:

The beds in action:

The ultimate bed:

The beds and emergency exit slash sweet seat:

The driver’s seat:

The backstory:

The final preparations: