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

[MIKA27]

Watch An Insanely Relaxing Flight Across The Arctic Ice Plains, By NASA

What you see here is some of the best footage shot from the front and back mounted cameras on one of the P-3B aircraft that runs NASA’s IceBridge missions. These vistas are from the spring mission over Greenland and the Arctic, but NASA’s going back for more this fall.

See, NASA’s not just concerned about space. Every so often, it sends an endeavouring pilot to sweep the vast arctic deserts, slurping up scads of data about glaciers and ice floes with radar and laser altimetry. And that’s all great, but the real prize is the view.

IceBridge tackles Antarctica from time to time as well, so stay tuned and maybe you’ll catch a glimpse of the Mountains of Madness.

But until then, enjoy the scenery.

[MIKA27]

'Glitch' Made All Doors In Maximum Security Prison Open All At Once

A Florida prison says that a computer “glitch” is to blame after all of the doors in the maximum security wing opened without warning. Wired has news for them though. Sometimes, these kinds of glitches are caused by sneaky characters called hackers. And this situation looks pretty suspect.

The incident happened back in June at the Turner Guilford Knight Correctional Center in Miami, but newly released surveillance footage is sparking some scepticism that it was a random act of code. As the video shows, the inmates are all safely locked in their cells one minute, and the next, the doors fly open. One inmate jumps straight out as if had been anticipating release, walks down to meet a fellow inmate who reportedly gave him a shank and just a few seconds later, he can be seen trying to stab yet another inmate (who, incidentally, straight up jumped off the balcony, suffering a broken ankle and fractured vertebrae). We’re left wondering if this wasn’t the plan all along.

Even the guards admit that the circumstances surrounding the incident are “suspicious”. Perhaps the mostsuspicious part is that fact that this was the second time in as many months that these doors opened without warning, leading some to suspect that the first incident was a test to see how long it would take guards to react. After security researchers told them that the computer system controlling the doors was vulnerable, Wired asked the guards if they thought a hacker might’ve been behind the funny business.

The guards said they hadn’t even considered that. They’re exploring all possibilities, though, including the idea that guards themselves might’ve been involved.

It’ll probably take a few weeks to figure out what exactly happened in Miami earlier this year. One thing is glaringly clear based on what we already know. Whether because of bugs or hackers or crooked guards, the computer system that keeps murderers and rapists and drug dealers and pedophiles locked up is not infallible. A correctional institution in Maryland also had this little door-opening problem earlier this year, so maybe it’s time we just double check how we’re keeping all those cell doors secure. All else fails, an actual lock and key might not be that bad of an idea…

[MIKA27]

If You Use A Drone To Film Your Wedding This Is What You Deserve

Honey, let’s not waste money on a human photographer. I know this guy with a quadcopter and a GoPro. Baby, it’ll be awesome. No no, I promise. I promise. I mean what could possibly go wrong? This is gonna be so epic.

[MIKA27]

Chubby Checker Can Sue HP Over Chubby Checker Penis-Measuring App

Remember that time Chubby Checker wanted to sue HP over a penis-measuring WebOS app that was alsocalled “Chubby Checker”? There’s more fun to come: ol’ Chubs just got the go-ahead to sue the pants off HP.

On Thursday, US District Judge William Alsup ruled that Ernest Evans (ol’ Chubs) is well within his rights to ravage HP — specifically the company’s now-defunct Palm unit — for trademark infringement. HP tried to get the case dismissed by claiming Checker never actually accused HP of knowing about the infringement in the first place. But now Alsup has now ruled that publishing the app in the first place was enough of a boner to justify the suit.

This should be good.

[MIKA27]

New Carbon Supermaterial Is Stronger Than Graphene And Diamond

Move over graphene; get outta here diamond. There’s a new carbon supermaterial in town, and it’s stronger and stiffer than either of you.

Researchers from Rice University in Houston have calculated the properties of a new form of carbon that promises more strength and stiffness than any other known material. Called Carbyne, it’s a chain of carbon atoms linked either by alternate triple and single bonds, or just by consecutive double bonds. And it’s quite something.

Their mathematical models predict that Carbyne is a little stronger than both graphene and diamond, and around twice as stiff as the stiffest known materials. It’s also fairly flexible — a bit like a strand of DNA.

Carbyne is itself currently highly elusive; astronomers once thought they detected it in interstellar space, but on this planet it was only synthesised a few years ago in chains up to 44 atoms long. Until now it’s been thought of as too reactive to reliably create and study.

But, perhaps most interestingly, the research also suggests that, while Carbyne might be highly reactive, in certain forms it could comfortably last in the lab for days. If the predicted properties can actually be harnessed and put to use, graphene may just have had its day.

[MIKA27]

You Can Turn Any Surface Into A Touchscreen With A $150 App

Ubi Interactive and Microsoft have been working together to develop software that can — with the addition of a Kinect and projector — turn any surface into a touchscreen. Now, you can buy the app that powers it for about $150.

That might sound expensive, but this is a first step on a long road. Besides, it’s kind of aimed to enterprise use in the first instance anyway. That’s apparent in the sales model too: the basic $150 app supports screens up to 45 inches, while professional ($380) and business licences ($800) provide 100-inch support. The number of supported touch points increases with pricing too — from just one on the basic version, up to 20 on the $1500 enterprise edition.

The app runs on any Windows 8 PC and supports Microsoft’s touch-friendly Metro interface, with the Kinect studying the surface illuminated by a projector, responding to gestures from the user. The software has been beta tested by 50 organisations, but Ubi is now taking orders for the software. So, if you have a Kinect, projector and a hankering for a touch-sensitive wall, now you know what to do.

[MIKA27]

A Camping Lantern That Keeps Your Gadgets Glowing Too

If you’re on the hunt for the best way to accessorise your fancy new solar-powered tent, Goal Zero thinks its new Lighthouse 250 Lantern and USB Power Hub is exactly what the outdoors type who refuses to disconnect can use. Its internal rechargeable battery is good for up to 48 hours of illumination, but it’s also happy to share its charge with your dying power-hungry gadgets.

Using a dial you can adjust the brightness of the lantern, since the maximum setting of 250 lumens is probably going to reduce its claimed battery life. But so will hooking up your other gadgets to leech power from its included USB port.

So if it does end up dying before your outdoor adventures are over, a foldout manual crank on top will turn burned calories into extra battery life. Pricing and availability are still to be determined, but who could really put a price on not having to go a minute without Candy Crush?

[Gear Culture]

[MIKA27]

These Guys Tried To Pass Off Melting Blocks Of Ice As $4000 Worth Of iPads

Committing insurance fraud, mail or otherwise, is universally a fairly dumb thing to do — especially when your plan is literally designed to fail. Like, say, that of 29-year-old idiot Nathan Meunch and friend. Because if you’re trying to pass off a soggy, dripping cardboard box stuffed with ice as a $4000 stack of iPads, chances are — you’re getting caught.

Of course, it all started innocuously enough for Meunch when he sauntered into a UK post office in a soaking wet jacket. Meunch tried to explain away his damp coat by telling a mail clerk named Elaine Sloane that it was raining outside — a questionable claim considering the post office’s giant window told her that, you know, it wasn’t. But people are weird, so she went on to listen politely as he explained that he’d like to mail a box supposedly containing $4000 worth of iPads. And the return address? He, uh, couldn’t remember.

Sloane, for some reason, decided not to question this amnesic compulsive liar and accepted the package. About an hour later, a different employee noticed that the iPads seemed to be excreting water at an alarming rate (which, for iPads, should probably be any rate whatsoever) and that the tablets were actually just blocks of ice. Wrapped in a now-disintegrating cardboard box, which the post office employees decided they should probably go ahead and mail anyway. Because neither snow nor rain nor heat nor ice block masquerading as iPad something something probably applies in England too.

A few days later, lo and behold, the post office got an insurance claim in the amount of $4000 from 29-year-old Nigel Bennett — the box’s recipient. The poorly planned scheme was immediately exposed, and both men have been sentenced to 12 months of community service, 150 hours of unpaid work for the courts, and a roughly $800 fine. That may seem like a relatively shortlived punishment, sure — but the shame, my friends? That lasts forever.

[MIKA27]

Japan Wants To Build An Ice Wall To Contain Fukushima's Radioactive Water

Radioactive water full of carcinogenic chemicals is leaking out of the Fukushima power plant at a critical rate, critical enough for the Nuclear Regulation Authority to deem the situation an “emergency“. It’s one of those desperate times, and the measures under consideration sound a little bit desperate.

One of the leading candidates for a solution to TEPCO’s radioactive water problem involves building a mile-long underground ice wall around the plant to contain the leak. The idea is to drive vertical pipes spaced about a meter apart between 20m and 40m into the ground and to pump coolant through them. This would effectively create a barrier of permafrost around the affected buildings, keeping the contaminated water in and groundwater out. Kajima, the company that built the plant, is currently putting together a feasibility plant for the project which they say could be done by mid 2015. It’s a relatively simple job, but it’s going to be expensive.

But, hey, you can’t put a price on not poisoning unsuspecting citizens. Again, the radioactive water leak is really bad. Last week, Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe called it an “urgent problem”, and it’s not a problem that’s going to fix itself. The ice wall is also a proven method and one that the clean up crew at Fukushima has considered before. The strategy was used as early as the 1860s to shore up coal mines, and an experiment at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee recently showed that it can be used to contain radiation.

As one expert on frozen-earth projects told Bloomberg News, it’s kind of the natural answer at this point. “When nothing else will work,” he said, “it just jumps out at you and says ‘Wow, it’s a freeze job.’” Because what other kind of job would it be?

[MIKA27]

Tool That Looks For Consciousness In The Brain Could Change End-Of-Life Decisions

An experimental tool designed to “peek” into a patient’s brain and find signs of consciousness could eventually give doctors a way to more accurately judge chances of recovery from serious brain trauma – and in the process change the nature of end-of-life decisions.

Today, doctors don’t have many methods available to gauge the consciousness of a patient unable to respond verbally or in other subtle ways–such as blinking an eye, squeezing a hand, or raising a finger–in response to simple questions. In these cases, typically when a patient has suffered a severe brain injury, there’s ample guesswork that goes into determining whether consciousness is still lingering under the surface.

The best clinical method available to get closer to an answer involves placing the patient in an MRI machine and scanning the brain while telling the patient to envision an action like throwing a ball or running through a field. By tracking activity patterns in the patient’s brain, it’s theoretically possible to tell if the person is able to unconsciously acknowledge and process the request. If it appears that the patient’s brain can respond even though the patient can’t verbalize the response, the person is said to suffer from “locked-in syndrome”.

The problem with this method is that it’s far from clear what the brain activity is actually revealing about consciousness. Significant brain activity is possible even in a vegetative state, and isn’t necessarily a clue that recovery is possible.

Since consciousness is spread across multiple brain regions, it’s possible for one part of the brain to respond while others are entirely unresponsive. One way to think about this is the starter on a damaged car engine still working even though gas can’t reach the engine; a minimal “signal” from the starter is produced by turning the key, even though the engine can’t run.

The new tool, developed by researchers from Italy’s University of Milan, could provide doctors with a more objective method that gauges the complexity of a patient’s consciousness. The tool combines three steps: first a magnetic pulse is sent through a coil into the brain designed to “wake it up,” and then an EEG machine measures brain wave activity produced by neurons firing in response to the pulse. Finally, the activity is measured via a formula that puts a finer point on the nature of the patient’s consciousness.

That final step is the secret ingredient that makes this tool different: instead of simply trying to identify brain activity (something MRI machines can already do) it produces a measure of the complexity of consciousness–what the researchers call the perturbational complexity index (PCI). “Consciousness can grow and shrink,” said Dr. Marcello Massimini, a neurophysiologist who led the research, in an AP report about the experimental tool. By figuring out the level of “growing” or “shrinking”, doctors can more objectively gauge whether a patient is exhibiting an adequate level of consciousness to recover.

According to the AP report, the research team compared tests from 32 healthy people who were awake, asleep, dreaming or anesthetized, and 20 people with a variety of serious brain injuries. “The two patients with locked-in syndrome clearly were aware, scoring nearly as high as awake and healthy people,” they reported. “The patients diagnosed as being in a vegetative state had scores as low as people rendered unconscious by the most powerful anesthesia. The minimally conscious were somewhere in-between.”

The researchers emphasize that the tool is far from becoming a bedside medical option, but the research opens the door to measuring levels of consciousness that correlate with recovery from serious brain injury. This knowledge could potentially change the way end-of-life decisions are made by providing doctors and loved ones with a firmer means to evaluate whether a patient has the capacity to recover.

On the other hand, the same decisions could become all the more agonizing by knowing that even a minimal level of consciousness persists—not enough to spark full recovery, but enough to say that the patient’s brain is still functioning, albeit marginally.

The study was published in the journal Science Translational Medicine.

[MIKA27]

Aleppo: A city where snipers shoot children

Bustan al-Qasr is the last remaining crossing point between the rebel and regime-held sides of Aleppo. Snipers are rife and the atmosphere tense, yet hundreds are forced to use it every day to get to work, to study and buy food.

"Today, at about midday, I treated someone who had been shot in the arm," Sam tells me. "He was a child, they usually are. I think that the snipers are aiming for kids, just kids."

Sam, crouching behind sandbags at the Bustan al-Qasr crossing point, is the only doctor on hand to treat those targeted by the snipers.

He is 25, speaks in an urbane North American drawl and has humorous eyes twinkling above his surgical mask.

He is the son of Syrian exiles who settled in Canada. "I was in the final year of my studies to become a cardiac surgeon," he tells me.

But then he felt that he had to come here. Now he sleeps in a room in the field hospital where he works. And in his time off, he comes to Bustan al-Qasr to wait for the snipers to open fire.

The pavement he sits on is dotted with dark brown blood stains.

"On average I treat about 10 people a day, every single day, but Fridays are always the worst," he says. "Yesterday about 30 people were shot here."

Everybody reacts differently to the sound of the sniper's bullet.

When shots ring out, the sea of people in the marketplace parts as most people press themselves against the walls of the buildings - as if, somehow, that will save them.

But the fatalistic ones just carry on walking straight down the middle of the road in a gesture of defiance.

"Sometimes they just fire in the air, to scare people," I am told. But sometimes they do not - Sam's work bears witness to that.

The frenetic energy of Bustan al-Qasr's marketplace is super-charged with fear.

"At first we stayed away," a market trader tells me. "But then we started coming back. What else can we do? We have to live."

Sara is an activist and a student and she runs the gauntlet every week. Her home is on the rebel side of the city and she crosses over to pick up her notes from the University, which is in the regime-held part.

During exams, she crossed almost every day in her determination to do well. "One day I crossed in the morning, and by the time I came back 15 people had been killed there," she says.

She did pass her exams but she is disappointed with her marks. "I did better last year," she tells me. "No wonder," I reply.

And many families in wartime Aleppo can only buy food if they cross over into opposition-held territory.

Until recently, the checkpoint was controlled by a group of rogue rebel soldiers who tried to extort money from the already desperate people using it.

Buses and sandbags are used to try to protect people from snipers

The last time I came to Bustan al-Qasr they tried to arrest me and confiscate my camera. But then a sniper opened fire. In the confusion, I escaped.

Now it has been taken over by Ahrar Sureya, one of the city's largest rebel brigades. It is progress for the people who use the crossing point, but also a sign of how fluid and unstable Aleppo's testosterone-charged local politics has become.

This is a city of fiefdoms. Last week Bustan al-Qasr belonged to the criminals. Today it belongs to Ahrar Sureya. And next week, who knows?

The rebels take me to meet Abu Yassin, a senior official in the rebel-held part of the city's Sharia Court police force, who is now in charge at Bustan al-Qasr.

On a corner where the main street meets a side road he points to the buildings where the snipers are stationed, in a government-owned tower block, in an apartment building, in a minaret.

"There are 72 snipers aiming towards us," he says. "And they only ever shoot at civilians."

Some people in the rebel areas want the crossing point closed altogether. Those at Friday demonstrations here no longer call for democracy, or freedom, or human rights. They want the complete dismemberment of this already fractured city.

A young boy calls for the closure of the crossing point

And while closing Bustan al-Qasr might stop regime informants coming into the rebel side of the city, it would be disastrous for many.

It would mean failure for Sara, and maybe starvation for the families on the regime-held side. Because however chaotic, however deadly, Bustan al-Qasr is a lifeline.

It is the last artery connecting a divided city and the only choice for many people.

And the mass of human beings who throng around it - Sam in his field clinic, Sara with her lecture notes and the market traders in the sniper's sights - tell the real story of Aleppo's conflict: one of people trying to carry on with their lives amidst a war they never chose.

[MIKA27]

Samsung's Smart Watch Will Have A 1.1-Inch Screen With A Camera In The Strap And Speakers In The Clasp

It looks like Samsung is going to be the first major tech company to release a smart watch, and this is the best look we’ve had at it so far.

GigaOm has a full report on what Samsung is planning for its watch.

The key bits include a rectangular screen is 1.1 inches measured diagonally, a dual-core processor and should get “decent” battery life, a camera integrated into the watch strap, speakers built into the watch’s clasp, and a built in accelerometer should make it so the phone wakes up as you lift your wrist to look at it.

There will reportedly be touch gestures like swiping up and down, but it probably won’t support text. There will also be sensors to do some fitness tracking. It will have Bluetooth 4.0 and connect with a Samsung phone through a watch app and be announced at the start of September with the Galaxy Note 3 at the IFA conference in Berlin.

Samsung is likely to push developers making apps for it to only release their apps through Samsung’s Android app store, not Google’s Play Store.

[MIKA27]

What Is JJ Abrams Teasing Us With This Time?

There’s nobody better at teasing us with beautiful mysteries than JJ Abrams. His company, Bad Robot, now has a beautiful new one minute teaser for something that looks so good it doesn’t even have a name. Whatever could it be?

The caretaker of the Star Trek and the Star Wars franchises is an avid Twilight Zone fan, which is definitely what this little black-and-white teaser is reminiscent of: a spooky mystery featuring tales from the mysterious other side.

The short starts with an out of focus character falling onto the shoreline at night, before scrambling out of the water to the backing of an ominous voice-over. The video reaches a crescendo when another character with a stitched up face emerges.

There’s zero description on the video itself and the comments are disabled, so nobody can speculate in public.

What is this new mystery project?

MIKA: Frankenstein remake?

[MIKA27]

The mystery of the vanishing gun inventor

A photograph passed down through Cantelo's family and believed to be of him

William Cantelo, a 19th Century inventor rumoured to be working on an early version of the machine-gun, left his house one day and never returned. What happened to him, asks Steve Punt.

In the early 1880s, the residents of Bargate Street, Southampton, were probably a bit fed up with one of their neighbours.

From the cellar beneath the pub run by William Cantelo would come the sound of rapid gunfire.

Cantelo, an engineer and gun-maker, was experimenting with a new type of gun. Nobody knew what it was, but it produced shots in quick succession. It was clearly not your average rifle.

One day, Cantelo announced to his sons - also engineers - that he had perfected his new invention. It was a machine-gun, a weapon which used the energy of explosive recoil to load the next bullet. It would fire continuously until the bullets ran out. It was revolutionary.

Cantelo and his sons packed it away into cases, and Cantelo went off, presumably to sell it. He frequently travelled on sales trips, as a successful builder of - among other things - ships' capstans, and other bits of marine engineering.

William Cantelo was never seen again.

Flash-forward to November 1916.

As millions of Europe's young men were busy machine-gunning each other to death in World War I, the inventor of the weapon died, a very rich man and a knight of the realm. His invention had revolutionised warfare - the centuries-old infantry advance became useless, as it could be simply mown down.

Consequently armies retreated into trenches while the generals worked out how on earth to fight this new kind of war. The man who had brought about this murderous step-change was quietly buried in a south London cemetery.

Hiram Maxim (pictured) bore an uncanny resemblance to William Cantelo

His large and impressive monument contains no indication of what he invented. But his name is written in large letters - Sir Hiram Maxim.

Maxim is not just credited as the inventor of the rapid-firing, belt-fed gun - it bore his name. The Maxim Gun was the weapon of choice of the late-Victorian and Edwardian era, bringing industrialised efficiency to the business of killing people.

To use the phrase compulsory to all documentaries - it "changed the world forever". (Everything in TV documentaries always "changes the world forever", whether it's flush toilets or a new type of hat pin. But the machine-gun really did.)

But what happened to William Cantelo?

What we know of his story originates from a column in a local newspaper in the 1930s, when various witnesses were still alive. The article contains a photograph of Cantelo. And Maxim and Cantelo look uncannily similar.

When Cantelo's sons saw a photo of Maxim in a newspaper, they were amazed. It was the image of their missing father. They tracked him down at Waterloo station, and shouted "father!" at him. As they told it, they tried to approach him, but his train pulled away.

Hiram Maxim in 1915 and the best attested picture of William Cantelo (courtesy of Barry Cantelo)

Cantelo, though, seems to have vanished off the face of the earth. His family engaged a private detective to look for him, who supposedly traced him to America - but then the trail went cold.

A large sum of money was withdrawn from his bank account, but the bank in question long ago ceased to exist, and there is no record of where the money was sent or where it was withdrawn.

To complicate matters, both Cantelo and Maxim had large Victorian beards. The late Victorian era was not kind to the art of facial recognition, since most males over 30 sported luxuriant facial hair and all tend to look like a cross between Charles Darwin and a stern Santa. It seems likely, however, that the newspaper photograph captioned as Cantelo is, in fact, Maxim.

This doesn't, however, explain what happened to the vanishing gun-maker.

Cantelo certainly existed. He was well-known in Southampton. Gun-making ran in his family - there are numerous Cantelos, earlier in the 19th Century, who made various improvements to rifles, and at least one of them moved to America. Maxim, on the other hand, had come to Britain from America, where he had made enemies by arguing with Thomas Edison over who invented the light bulb, and generally making a nuisance of himself.

Maxim also complained - in his autobiography - of a "double" who was going round the US impersonating him. Was this Cantelo? Or was it Maxim's own brother, who also looked very similar, and also sported an enormous beard?

There doesn't seem to be any reason why the various witnesses should invent the tales of nocturnal gun-fire beneath the pub in Bargate Street. Cantelo may well have been working on a machine-gun, although the type of gunpowder used at the time would have produced too much smoke to make testing in a cellar very feasible.

What is really intriguing is whether Cantelo and Maxim ever met, and there is evidence to suggest that they did.

The Maxim machine gun

• Made by American-born British inventor Sir Hiram Maxim in 1884
  
• First fully automatic machine gun, using energy from the recoil to eject and replace spent cartridges
  
• Much more efficient than previous guns, like the Gatling Gun, which had relied on mechanical cranking
  
• The Maxim and variants were widely used during WWI
  

The daughter of another Southampton marine engineer called Philip Branon, wrote a letter at the time telling how Maxim had come to Southampton to see a type of propeller her father had invented. He had told his staff not to show it to him, though, because Maxim - she says - had "a reputation for brain-sucking."

This wonderful phrase clearly suggests a tendency to plagiarise ideas. But this is surely typical of how inventors see more successful inventors. It is, however, intriguing. It shows that Maxim did visit Southampton, and was meeting local engineers.

So what did happen to William Cantelo? Did he realise he'd been pipped to the post by Maxim, and come to a bad end trying to sell his own version of the gun? Or was there some Victorian melodrama going on underneath it all, a mistress or similar entanglement, leaving his family looking for reasons to explain their father's sudden departure?

It's a mystery worthy of Sherlock Holmes.

[MIKA27]

10 Heartbreaking Photos That Might Reduce You To Tears

They say a photo speaks a thousand words, so with the greatest respect to these heart-breaking moments from our history & the photographers that have shared them with the world, we’ll let these photographs speak for themselves.

1. Remembrance

A Russian war veteran kneels beside the tank he spent the war in, now a decommissioned & used amonument.

2. Peace

An unknown monk prays for an elderly man who had died suddenly while waiting for a train in Shanxi Taiyuan, China.

3. Grief

This is ‘Leao’ at the time this photo was taken, she had sat for the 2nd consecutive day at the grave of her owner who perished in the landslides in Brazil January 15 2011.

4. Loss

In the background a North Korean man waves his hand as a South Korean relative weeps. Just 436 South Koreans were allowed to spend 3 days in North Korea to meet their 97 North Korean relatives. The two countries have kept them separate since the 1950-53 war.

5. Death

As soldier sinks to his knees as the result of sniper fire in Venezuela, Navy chaplain Luis Padillo gives him his last rites.

6. Fear

An unknown French civilian cries in fear as Nazis storm France to occupy Paris during World War II.

7. Cruelty

Nazi military commander Heinrich Himmler inspects the concentration camps only to be confronted by Prisoner of War Horace Greasley. Greasley would regularly escaped from the camp and sneak back in. Allegedly managed this over 200 times. His reason? He was meeting a local German girl in secret with whom he’d fallen deeply in love with.

8. Kindness

An exhausted firefighter catches his breath & giving a dehydrated koala water during the devastating Black Saturday bushfires in Victoria, Australia.

9. Resolve

During tenth anniversary of the 9/11, Robert Peraza takes a solitary moment to remember the loss of his son at the World Trade Center memorial.

10. Love

After many years, a German World War II prisoner was finally released by the Soviet Union. This photo sees him being reunited with his daughter. She’d not seen her father since she was one year old.

[MIKA27]

Idiot Criminal's YouTube Vids Lead To Biggest Gun Bust In NYC History

New York City just saw its biggest gun bust in history. At least 19 people where involved in selling a nightmare arsenal of over 254 weapons, toting deliveries into the city by bus, using backpacks and suitcases. And Instagram and YouTube helped crack the case.

Aspiring rapper with questionable judgement Matthew Best made the stupid mistake of filming videos featuring cash and firearms in a recording studio in Bed-Stuy and then posting them out on the internet for funsies. Those videos, along with mobile phone wiretaps and purchases by an undercover cop, ultimately led to the series of arrests and and the record-breaking bust announced by Mayor Bloomberg today.

For months, the smugglers had been coming into the city from North and South Carolina on discount charter buses with backpacks and suitcases filled with guns, and then distributing them through a Brooklyn-based ring. Over the course of the 10-month sting, one undercover cop made a whole bunch of purchases, including buying an unassembled semi-automatic rifle hidden inside a horrendously conspicuous zebra suitcase. Apparently it was subtle enough.

SKS semi-automatic was in bag of a 22-yr-old woman among 19 arrested, 254 guns seized by NYPD in multistate case.

pic.twitter.com/gb1CtCG9wn

– NYPD NEWS (@NYPDnews)

August 19, 2013

Posting evidence of your involvement in a felony gun-smuggling ring online seems like the first thing a criminal should think to avoid.

But here’s to hoping they never learn.

[MIKA27]

This F-35B's Vertical Night Landing Makes It Look Like A Badass UFO

On August 14, the amazing, hovering F-35B made its first, vertical, at-sea night landing on the USS WASP. We’ve seen it hover before, and even do a vertical take off, but nothing quite compares to the sheer night-vision, sci-fi awesomeness of this clip.

This successful test is just one of many stepping stones on the way to actual deployment, but it’s an awesome glimpse into the future, even without the crazy night-vision effects.

The only problem is that Lockheed Martin’s video is troublingly silent. We put a soundtrack below. Now just start ‘em both up, sit back, and take it all in.

[MIKA27]

PS4 Is Coming To Australia On November 29

Playstation 4 is coming! When? November 29 to Australia. How much? The previously announced $549 price tag. Only 87 days to go, baby. Are we excited? Yesssss.

Today at Sony’s Playstation Gamescom press conference, the company finally spilled the details about when we’d finally get our mitts on the hot console. Mind you, we’ve been waiting for this information since PS4 was first announced all the way back in February.

Sony also announced that the console would be available in North America on November 15. The console will hit 32 countries by Christmas. That’s an impressive rollout. Can the Xbox One keep pace?

We knew that the company would be putting the console out this year, but now we’ve got a date we can fixate on. And fixate we shall. How excited are you?

[MIKA27]

Using An Excavator As A DIY Water Park Ride Is Death-Defying Fun

http://youtu.be/-MDhv2XVHeI

When summer arrives, you’ll view ice cubes as a precious resource. You’ll see air conditioning as the greatest invention ever created. You’ll be jealous of these three guys in Russia who have hitched themselves to the insides of an excavator that dunks, swings, re-dunks, re-swings, re-re-re-dunks and keeps dunking them in a lake.

Who cares if it looks dirty. Who cares if it looks like you’d probably drown. It looks like a hell of a good time.

[MIKA27]

3 Teens Charged in Slaying of Australia Player

(OKLAHOMA CITY) — Prosecutors filed charges against three teenagers Tuesday after police said the boys randomly targeted an Australian baseball player as he jogged and shot him in the back, killing him, to avoid the boredom of an Oklahoma summer day.

Christopher Lane, 22, of Melbourne, died Friday along a tree-lined road on Duncan’s well-to-do north side. Two teenagers, 15- and 16-year-olds from the gritty part of the town, were charged with first-degree murder and ordered held without bond.

A third, age 17, was accused of being an accessory after the fact and with driving a vehicle while a weapon was discharged. He said in open court “I pulled the trigger,” but the judge directed him to remain quiet and said Tuesday was not the day to discuss the facts of the case.

The boy cried.

His bond was set at $1 million.

Police Chief Dan Ford has said the boys had the simplest of motives. He said in a variety of interviews that the 17-year-old had told officers that they were bored and killed Lane for “the fun of it.”

Meanwhile, family and friends on two continents mourned Christopher Lane, who gave up pursuit of an Australian football career to pursue his passion for baseball, an American pastime. His girlfriend tearfully laid a cross at a streetside memorial in Duncan, while half a world away, an impromptu memorial grew at the home plate he protected as a catcher on his youth team.

“We just thought we’d leave it,” Sarah Harper said as she visited the memorial. “This is his final spot.”

MIKA: R.I.P mate

[MIKA27]

LIFE Behind the Picture: Larry Burrows’ ‘Reaching Out,’ 1966

Wounded Marine Gunnery Sgt. Jeremiah Purdie (center, with bandaged head) reaches toward a stricken comrade after a fierce firefight south of the DMZ, Vietnam, October 1966

In October 1966, on a mud-splattered hill just south of the Demilitarized Zone (DMZ) in Vietnam, LIFE magazine’s Larry Burrows made a photograph that, for generations, has served as the most indelible, searing illustration of the horrors inherent in that long, divisive war — and, by implication, in all wars.

In Burrows’ photo, nowadays commonly known as Reaching Out, an injured Marine — Gunnery Sgt. Jeremiah Purdie, a blood-stained bandage tied around his head — appears to be inexorably drawn to a stricken comrade. Here, in one astonishing frame, we witness tenderness and terror, desolation and fellowship — and, perhaps above all, we encounter the power of a simple human gesture to transform, if only for a moment, an utterly inhuman landscape.

The longer we consider that scarred landscape, however, the more sinister — and unfathomable — it grows. The deep, ubiquitous mud slathered, it seems, on simply everything; trees ripped to jagged stumps by artillery shells and rifle fire; human figures distorted by wounds, bandages, helmets, flak jackets; and, perhaps most unbearably, the evident normalcy of it all for the young Americans gathered there in the aftermath of a firefight on a godforsaken hilltop thousands of miles from home.

The scene, which might have been painted by Hieronymus Bosch — if Bosch had lived in an age of machine guns, helicopters and military interventions on the other side of the globe — possesses a nightmare quality that’s rarely been equaled in war photography, and certainly has never been surpassed.

All the more extraordinary, then, that LIFE did not even publish the picture until several years after Burrows shot it.

The magazine did publish a number of other pictures Burrows made during that very same assignment, in October 1966 — pictures seen here, in this gallery on LIFE.com, along with other photos that did not originally run in LIFE — but it was not until five years later, in February 1971, that LIFE finally ran Reaching Out for the first time. The occasion of its first publication was a somber one: an article devoted to Larry Burrows, who was killed that month in a helicopter crash in Laos.

In that Feb. 19, 1971, issue, LIFE’s Managing Editor, Ralph Graves, wrote a moving, appropriately understated tribute titled simply, “Larry Burrows, Photographer.” A week before, he told LIFE’s millions of readers, a helicopter carrying Burrows and fellow photographers Henri Huet of the Associated Press, Kent Potter of United Press International and Keisaburo Shimamoto of Newsweek was shot down over Laos. “There is little hope,” Graves asserted, “that any survived.” He then wrote:

I do not think it is demeaning to any other photographer in the world for me to say that Larry Burrows was the single bravest and most dedicated war photographer I know of. He spent nine years covering the Vietnam War under conditions of incredible danger, not just at odd times but over and over again. We kept thinking up other, safer stories for him to do, but he would do them and go back to the war. As he said, the war was his story, and he would see it through. His dream was to stay until he could photograph a Vietnam at peace.

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Larry Burrows (1926 - 1971) in Vietnam, 1965.

Larry was English, a polite man, self-effacing, warm with his friends but totally cool in combat. He had deep passions, and the deepest was to make people confront the reality of the war, not look away from it. He was more concerned with people than with issues, and he had great sympathy for those who suffered …

He had been through so much, always coming out magically unscathed, that a myth of invulnerability grew up about him. Friends came to believe he was protected by some invisible armor. But I don’t think he believed that himself. Whenever he went in harm’s way he knew, precisely, what the dangers were and how vulnerable he was.

John Saar, LIFE’s Far East Bureau Chief … often worked with Larry, and today he sent his cable:

“The depth of his commitment and concentration was frightening. He could have been a surgeon or soldier or almost anything else, but he chose photography and was so dedicated that he saw the whole world in 35-mm exposures. Work was his life, eventually his death, and Burrows I think wouldn’t have bitched.”

All these years later, it’s still worth recounting one small example of the way that the wry Briton endeared himself to his peers, as well as his subjects. In typed notes that accompanied Burrows’ film when it was flown from Vietnam to LIFE’s offices in New York, the photographer apologized — apologized — for what he feared might be substandard descriptions of the scenes he shot, and how he shot them: “Sorry if my captioning is not up to standard,” Burrows wrote to his editors, “but with all that sniper fire around, I didn’t dare wave a white notebook.”

In April 2008, after 37 years of rumors, false hopes and tireless effort by their families, colleagues and news organizations to find the remains of the four photographers killed in Laos in ’71, their partial remains were finally located and shipped to the States.

Today, those remains reside in a stainless-steel box beneath the floor of the Newseum in Washington, D.C. Above them, in the museum’s memorial gallery, is a glass wall that bears the names of almost 2,000 journalists who, since 1837, have died while doing their jobs.

Kent Potter was just 23 years old when he lost his life doing what he loved. Keisaburo Shimamoto was 34. Henri Huet was 43. Larry Burrows, the oldest of the bunch, was 44.

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This Headless Ape-Bot Might Be Creepy, But It’s Programmed to Save Your Life

As part of a competition to design complex robots for search-and-rescue operations, NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory has unveiled the first video of their ape-like entry, RoboSimian. It’s a little creepy, in part because it has no head. But it’s hard to hate a robot that’s designed to save lives.

Designed and built by JPL and Stanford engineers, RoboSimian is a competitor in the DARPA Robotics Challenge, which calls on participants to create strong, dextrous, and flexible robots that could aid in disasters such as nuclear meltdowns or building collapses. They are intended to go places that would be too dangerous for humans. To win, the semi-autonomous robots will have to complete difficult tasks such as removing debris from a doorway, using a tool to break through a concrete panel, connecting a fire hose to a pipe and turning it on, and driving a vehicle at a disaster site. The competition, which began in 2012, will have its first trials in December and a final test to determine the winner one year later. Teams are competing for a $2 million prize.

Many of the teams in the challenge are creating fairly humanoid robots. RoboSimian, as its name implies, looks a bit more like one of our close ape cousins. It has four very flexible limbs, each of which will have a three-fingered hand. The hands seem like they will be quite useful for some of the DARPA-set requirements, such as climbing a ladder. The above video — with its background work-out music — shows the robot doing some nice pull ups as well as computer renderings of what the final machine may look like.

[MIKA27]

Maulings by Bears: What's Behind the Recent Attacks?

What should you do if you find yourself face-to-face with an aggressive bear?

The recent bear attacks in North America over the past week are unrelated to one another and are not indicative of a trend, experts say.

At least six people in five states have been mauled by black and brown bears recently. The latest incident occurred on Saturday, when a hunter in the remote Alaskan wilderness was attacked by an alleged brown bear, also known as a grizzly bear, and survived more than 36 hours before being rescued by the state's air national guard.

Last Thursday, hikers in Yellowstone National Park in Wyoming were attacked by a female grizzly after they got too close to her cubs. One of the men was clawed and bitten on his backside.

Also on Thursday, 12-year-old Abigail Wetherell was attacked by a black bear while out on an evening jog in northern Michigan.

According to news reports, Wetherell initially tried to run away from the bear, but she was chased and knocked down. After trying to escape a second time and failing, she played dead. A neighbor who heard the girl scream eventually scared the animal away, but not before it slashed Wetherell's thigh.

Over the weekend, conservation officers shot and killed a black bear they believed to be the one that attacked Wetherell.

Bear expert John Beecham said it's unclear from the accounts he's read why the animal might have attacked the girl. "It might have been a female [bear] and she had young, or the girl might have just come up on the bear fairly quickly while running through the woods, and it perceived her as a threat and attacked," he said.

Despite all of these bear attacks occurring relatively recently, the incidents are unrelated, said Beecham, who is a member of the International Union for the Conservation of Nature's (IUCN) Bear Specialist Group.

"They're not linked at all that I'm aware of," said Beecham, who specializes in human-bear conflicts.

Beecham added that while scientists do predict that surprise encounters between bears and humans will become more common as the two species encroach on one another's territories, a spike in bear attacks during one month of one year cannot be taken as evidence of that.

We asked Beecham to talk about some of the reasons why bears attack and what people should do if they find themselves face-to-face with a bear.

Is the number of reports of bear attacks higher than usual this summer?

There's been a number of attacks by both black bears and grizzlies in the past month or so. So that is pretty unusual.

Are some species of bears more aggressive toward humans than others?

Here in North America, brown bears or grizzlies, especially those living in the interior [of the continent], are more aggressive and involved in more attacks on people.

Probably one of the least aggressive is the American black bear.

What are some reasons why bears attack humans?

Typically, you see two types of attacks on humans. One is a defensive attack, which most typically involves defending young or a food source, such as a prey carcass.

[A bear might also launch a defensive attack] if you startle it. You might walk around the corner of a house and all of a sudden you're within just a couple of feet of the bear, and it responds immediately and attacks. That could be the case with this girl in Michigan.

Bears can also do what's called a bluff charge. That's not an attack; it's simply a behavior. The animal will pop its jaws and give you all kinds of signals that you're encroaching on its personal space and it's uncomfortable with that.

And then you have predatory attacks, which is a completely different scenario, and the bear's behavior is completely different as well.

Can you talk more about what a predatory attack is like?

In a predatory attack, the animal is actually looking at you as a food source. Typically, the animal is stalking you, and you'll see the animal. Predatory attacks are extremely rare.

In those cases, you'll want to try to scare it off by yelling or throwing things at it. You've got to become a threat to discourage it from attacking you ... You want to get a stick, or if you don't have a weapon, make loud noises or threatening gestures toward the bear.

Try to make it think, "Okay, maybe the risk here is greater than I want to deal with."

What should a person's response be if they are dealing with a defensive bear attack?

If it's a defensive attack, play dead. The little girl from Michigan did absolutely the right thing. Because the bear perceives you as a threat and its objective is to eliminate the threat, once you become nonthreatening, the animal typically walks away.

What would you say to people who are frightened of bears after reading about these recent attacks?

I'd give them a little of my history. I've worked on bears since 1972. I've camped in the woods with them, and have trapped and handled over 2,000 bears. I've never had a close call. The risk is certainly there, but it's pretty minimal.

The best thing you can do is educate yourself about bears and what to do in certain situations. For example, if I'm traveling in grizzly country and I get into a tight space where I can't see very well, I make a noise, and I know if the bear knows I'm there, it's going to slip away quietly.

[MIKA27]

Ghost Demon and Cat Sharks Found:

A Hefty Surprise

A false catshark, this relatively rare species turned up in spades during the survey. Shark biologist Paul Clerkin got 35 of the ten-foot (three-meter) sharks.

Editor’s note: Some commenters have been asking why scientists killed these sharks for their study. To clarify, the sharks were caught as bycatch during commercial fishing operations. The researchers got them afterwards.

You never know what you’ll find when you go rooting around in the dark—especially the deep, dark, remote portions of the sea.

Shark biologist Paul Clerkin conducted a survey in the southern Indian Ocean in 2012 that yielded rarely seen deep-sea sharks, including a possible eight new species.

Among the exotic finds were elusive 10-foot-long (3-meter-long) false catsharks (Pseudotriakis microdon), a new species of ghost shark sporting what look like buck teeth, and a new species of filetail catshark.

The filetail catsharks were especially memorable for Clerkin, a graduate student at the Moss Landing Marine Laboratory in central California. “They are by far the most adorable shark ever created,” he said.

The catsharks are one foot (0.3 meters) long when fully grown, and have soft, chubby stomachs. “They’d be rolling back and forth on their fat bellies [on the ship], which is really cute, but hard when you’re trying to take a picture of them,” Clerkin said.

For his survey, Clerkin joined a commercial fishing boat trawling the waters above seamounts—or undersea mountains—for fish like orange roughy. He collected samples of sharks caught as bycatch in the ship’s nets, which the fishermen lowered to about 6,600 feet (2,000 meters). “We got a lot of weird stuff,” said Clerkin.

The remote location contributed to the high number of unknown or rarely seen sharks fishermen pulled up. It took about five or six days to reach the fishing grounds from a port on the island of Mauritius east of Madagascar.

“[This] area is one of the final frontiers for sharks,” Clerkin noted. Fishermen have operated in this part of the southern Indian Ocean for years, he said. “But this is the first time someone’s gone out there to document [the sharks].”

Shark biologist Paul Clerkin confers with colleagues at the Albion Fisheries Research Center on Mauritius about a shark he brought back from his survey.

Clerkin collected a few representatives of each shark species he encountered while recording data like length, gender, and sexual maturity. Clerkin’s work is part of a larger project called Assembling the Tree of Life, which is sponsored by the U.S. National Science Foundation and aims to figure out the evolutionary origins of every living thing.

“I took back a ton of sharks,” he said. The shark biologist ended up mailing about 1.3 tons of samples to laboratories and specialists in the U.S. via air freight.

Clerkin plans on naming at least one of the new species after his graduate adviser and a second one after his mother. “[Maybe] save it for a Mother’s Day gift or something,” he said.

A New Ghost Shark

This is a new species of ghost shark. Fused tooth plates give them a bucktooth appearance.

Chimera

This is a member of the Chimera genus. Researchers think it could be a new species, but must await genetic confirmation.

One of a Kind?

A new species of demon catshark—only one turned up during the survey. Fishers pulled it up from around 4,200 feet (1,300 meters).

Bird Beak Shark

A bird beak shark, known for its long, flat nose and the prongs on its scales.

'Adorable' Shark

A new species of filetail catshark. This diminutive species—adults come in around one foot (0.3 meter) long—are fairly uncommon.

Exposed

A second new species of catshark, this one sports needle-like, hooked teeth and exposed gills (white patch just in front of the fin).

Heavy Seas

High seas in the southern Indian Ocean would sometimes force a halt in fishing—and surveying—efforts. Some of the waves were big enough to crash over the top of the ship.

[MIKA27]

Venezuela's Maduro pledges action on women's hair thieves

Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro has called on the police to act against gangs that are stealing women's hair.

The thieves sell the hair - sometimes stolen at gunpoint - to salons where it is used for extensions and wigs.

Attacks appear to be on the rise, especially in the country's second largest city Maracaibo, local media report.

Mr Maduro used strong language against what he called "mafias that cut girls' hair".

Speaking at the inauguration of a train station in the capital Caracas, he said the government would guarantee that the thieves would be caught.

Several women have reportedly been targeted, being asked to tie their hair into ponytails so that gang members can easily cut it off.

However, the BBC's Irene Caselli in Venezuela says authorities are yet to receive any formal complaints.

One victim told a local newspaper that she refused to report the case to the police because she feared being teased.