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These Men Ate Poison So The US Could Have The FDA

If you sat down to eat at any point and in any part of the US in the 1800s, nothing on your plate was quite what it seemed. The level of vile, often toxic contamination in basic consumer products was almost unimaginable to modern folk raised under the auspices of the FDA.

Your morning coffee? If it wasn't already mixed with chicory, there was probably quite a bit of sawdust mixed in, with scorched and ground peas, beans, or dandelion seeds for colour. The honey in your tea? Sweetened corn syrup complete with wax "honeycomb". The spices on your table? Finely ground coconut shells, burnt rope, or straight up floor sweepings. The flour in your bread? Mixed with crushed stone, gypsum, or dirt.

The brown sugar in your grandma's biscuits? Spiked with ground insects. The scotch in grandpa's after supper tipple? Poisonous wood alcohol dyed honey brown. The milk in Junior's glass? Certainly watered down, almost definitely whitened with chalk or plaster of Paris, often dosed with a preservative like formaldehyde to keep it "fresh," and occasionally topped with pureed calf brains to mimic the "cream" on top.

The fact that past generations managed to survive their own kitchens was a medical marvel in its own right, and those dark days are only barely behind us. We've only made it this far thanks largely to the efforts of one zealous chemist, and a few brave, iron-stomached volunteers dubbed the Poison Squad.

A new book from Deborah Blum — The Poison Squad: One Chemist's Single-Minded Crusade for Food Safety at the Turn of the Twentieth Century — takes us back to a time when the very idea of government-enforced regulations was laughable.

In 1883, Dr. Harvey Washington Wiley, a chemistry professor from Purdue University, was named chief chemist of the agriculture department. A farmer's son, he was horrified at the additive-riddled state of the American food industry, and once he assumed his new office, he began methodically investigating food and drink fraud.

During the course of his campaign, he became famous for conducting shocking human tests on groups of young men who volunteered to test tainted food products for the good of the nation, and who came to be known as "The Poison Squad". Ultimately, Wiley won — the landmark 1906 Food and Drug Act was known as "Dr. Wiley's Law" — but he spent 30 years fighting inside and outside the lab to help make America's kitchen safer.

In doing so, he willingly risked the lives of dozens of patriotic young volunteers, a decision that still raises serious ethical questions.

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"Yeah, from our modern perspective that Poison Squad experiment looks so ethically dubious."

In an echo of modern medical trials, which often draw in poor and working class subjects, many of the applicants for what would become Dr. Wiley's "Poison Squad" were financially struggling young clerks who responded to the lure of three square meals a day, recruited to test potentially poisonous substances.

The volunteers had to record everything they ate and drank, record their weight and pulse rate before every meal, collect their urine and faeces for lab analysis, and be examined by a doctor twice a week.

The first round of trials started with the cleaning product borax, then also a popular preservative, because Wiley expected it to be fairly harmless. By the study's end, half of the twelve men had dropped out due to ill health. Wiley's attitude on borax changed as a result; "It should not, I believe, be put in foods of any kind except when they are plainly marked, and even not then except in special cases."

Volunteer Letter for "Poison Squad"

The next trial featured salicylic acid on the menu, and had an even more immediate effect on the Squad, who began exhibiting signs of nausea and dizziness almost immediately after digging into their spiked victuals. The final report showed that the men had experienced chronic stomach pain, appetite loss, and weight loss, and Wiley's chemistry team found that ingesting salicylic acid on a regular basis results in a "depressing and harmful influence upon the digestion and health and general metabolic activities of the body."

When it came time for the Squad to test out sodium sulfate, a salt of the preservative sulphurous acid (a close sibling of the highly corrosive sulphuric acid), the results were grim. Only nine of the twelve members made it to the end, and two became so badly ill that the scientists halted the study altogether for fear of the others becoming sicker. This result alarmed Wiley to no end, and kicked off yet another crusade against toxic preservatives.

"Yeah, from our modern perspective that Poison Squad experiment looks so ethically dubious, and obviously it would never be approved by one of today's Institutional Review Boards," Blum agrees. "But Wiley himself said that when he started the Poison Squad tests, he himself didn't realise how dangerous the additives were. That doesn't mean that he wasn't taking a deliberate risk with the health of these young men because he was; I think, frankly, he had reached a point where he was desperately worried about the effects of these additives on Americans across the country, and thought that only an experiment of this nature would illuminate the problem and make a difference."

"And these young men really believed they were doing something good for their country, and they were proud of that public service. They hand-painted a sign outside the Poison Squad dining room that read None But the Braved Dare Eat the Fare'."

All of this begs the question: When presented with evidence that so much commercially available food and drink was tainted, why would the government have opposed food safety regulations in the first place? Why did it take a crew of human guinea pigs publicly risking their lives to goad lawmakers into action?

"It seems so surprising today, because we've grown up in a time of consumer protection regulations and agencies but in the 19th century, none of those existed," Blum explains. "No FDA, no EPA, there was no precedent for such federal protective agencies and acts. And when it came up — as it certainly did with food and drink starting in the 1880s — there was real push back. First, from businesses who enjoyed operating without any government-set limits on what could do. They gave an enormous amount of money to both congressmen and government officials friendly to their viewpoints and succeeded in killing proposed food and drug safety regulations for decades."

The Poison Squad Cook. William S. Carter, who worked at the Bureau of Chemistry and FDA from 1902 to 1946, began as an assistant to Harvey Wiley on the so-called "poison squad" study of the impact of food preservatives on health. He later served as a technician in several laboratories and earned a degree in pharmaceutical chemistry while serving the agency.

As Blum also explained, one of the biggest obstacles that Wiley and other food safety crusaders faced was a very American problem: in short, people didn't want to be told what to do or what to eat — and even if they were literally eating poison, those who opposed these kinds of food safety regulations wanted the choice, dammit!

The debate over individual rights versus the common good hamstrung progress in this arena for far longer than was sensible or even reasonable, but, as Blum says, when the 1906 Food and Drug law did finally pass, it established for the first time that the US government considered protecting consumers part of its obligation, a precedent that stands as a landscape-altering moment in this country.

As Blum notes, another reason for this divide lay in the States' continued reliance on capitalist, as opposed to more socialist, modes of thinking, and the government's often uneasy balancing act between supporting American business and protecting American citizens. Across the ocean, Europe had already gotten a handle on its own food safety strategy well before Dr. Wiley set off on his crusade. Their model was more precautionary — if there is evidence of possible harm from an additive, let's remove it until we know that it's safe — than the States' wait and see if it kills anyone approach, which is why many more additives are still restricted in Europe than in this country.

And to be clear, adulterated food and poisonous additives definitely killed a lot of people, from babes in arms to war veterans. Honestly, given the amount of toxins, garbage, and poison that lurked within an overwhelming percentage of American food products during this time, it's almost impressive that more people didn't fall ill and die in droves. Chances are that unless they were filthy rich (and even then) your ancestors were eating a lot of dangerous garbage.

Were people of this period blessed with iron stomachs? Was there a sort of tolerance to bad food that we've since lost, or that has morphed, perhaps, into a tolerance of modern junk food?

Harvey Wiley in the Lab 

"I recently heard the medical historian Howard Merkel describe the 1800s in the United States as the century of the 'great American stomachache'; contrary to our ideas of rosy-cheeked, farm-fresh health back in the day, people were really not eating wonderfully well," Blum explains. "Some of that was lousy and even toxic food products, and some of that was the lack of any real understanding of nutrition. And, of course, fairly primitive medicine, including the lack of antibiotics, so people really did not live that long. Average life expectancy in the year 1900 was about 46 years for men and 48 years for women.

"But we also didn't have good public health programs and tracking in place so it's very difficult to know with precision — except for some extreme cases — when food was directly lethal," she continues. "By 'extreme,' I mean things like 'embalmed milk' scandals in which the dairy industry's use of formaldehyde as a preservative directly killed children or the use of toxic dyes in candy (arsenic for green, lead for red and yellow) poisoned consumers. The latter should remind us that junk food, pre-regulation, was even worse for us than junk food today!"

So not everyone was getting sick at the dinner table, but enough people were that the problem became impossible to ignore, even from the most anti-regulation corners. At the time, the fight for "pure food" legislation was held up as a bipartisan cause, and by and large, the government officials pushing for food regulations were Republicans — ironic now, given modern Republicans' severe allergy to any kind of regulations at all.

These 19th century lawmakers made a conscious choice to uphold their farmer-heavy constituency interests over their own inclination towards cosiness with business and market interests, which resulted in the passage of landmark food safety legislation like the 1938 Food, Drugs and Cosmetics Act that created the modern FDA.

However, in the ensuing decades, the idea of the government regulating anything at all seems to have shifted firmly into the liberal camp, and the Trump administration in particular stands to undo everything that Dr. Wiley spent his lifetime fighting to achieve.

In 2016, Trump told pharmaceutical executives that his administration would cut 75 per cent to 80 per cent of FDA regulations, "at a level no one has ever seen before." One of his biggest proposed food-related changes would bring the nation's multiple food safety enforcers like the FDA and US Department of Agriculture (USDA) under the auspices of a single agency — The Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), which presents immediate issues and runs the risk of politicising food safety in dangerous ways (like for example, causing the outsize influence of powerful meat interest groups to balloon).

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"I kind of picture [Wiley] rolling in his grave."

He's also pushed through legislation overhauling USDA rules for meat inspection at pork processing plants, which workers fear will lead to a sped-up pace and resultant injuries. In general, the kinds of work environments regulated by the FDA — slaughterhouses, meat processing plants, farms — are generally full of sharp things and slippery machinery, and the human beings tasked with their operation tend to benefit from more regulations, not less.

"I kind of picture [Wiley] rolling in his grave," Blum says when asked to describe her opinion of how the chemist would view Trump's war on safety regulations. "His bottom line was that consumers come first and I think he'd be appalled, as many of us are, at the current administration's efforts to undo many of our hard-won protections. We're still far better off than we were in the 19th century, [but] the most important issue at the moment is not to go backwards.

"The Trump administration has indefinitely delayed some of the FSMA enforcement provisions. It's even proposed that some regulation of food safety be returned from the FDA to the more Agribusiness-friendly US Department of Agriculture. Wiley was at the agriculture department and he would be the first to say that this would be a huge mistake. He's a reminder that these protections were hard-fought in his day and we should do everything we can to keep them."

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San Luis Retreat 

Looking for a special place to unwind, disconnect and immerse yourself in nature?  This super stylish, tranquil mountain retreat surrounded by swaying forests and majestic peaks in South Tyrol, Italy, is for you. The San Luis Retreat is composed of several wooden chalets and treehouses set around a glacier mint-clear lake. All have terraces, large windows and most chalets have their own hot tubs and saunas. Some chalets teeter on the edge of the lake, others have views of the forest and mountains, while the treehouses poke up through the branches. Wood, natural fabrics and stone abound inside and there are crackling log fires and lots of space for relaxing. The main attraction however, is  the double height, barn-style pool area with floor-to-ceiling windows decked out with wood, stone and roaring fires. 

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GUINNESS BOURBON BARREL STOUT

For nearly 200 years, Guinness was stored and shipped in barrels. To honor that tradition the legendary Irish brewers have teamed up with Bulleit for the first in a new line of barrel-aged beers. The iconic stout is brewed in Dublin and then sent to the new Guinness Open Gate Brewery in Baltimore where it spends eight months maturing in Bulleit Bourbon barrels. The new brew is available in limited supply until the end of the year in 11.2oz bottles at an ABV of 10%.

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THE GLENROTHES 25-YEAR-OLD SCOTCH WHISKY

One of the elder statesmen in the new Soleo collection from The Glenrothes, this 25-year-old dram pays homage to the soleo wine-making process. The single malt is matured in a high proportion of first fill sherry seasoned oak casks before being bottled at its natural color. The Soleo collection replaces Glenrothes current vintage and reserve portfolio offerings and this quarter-century old whisky has already won an award for Best Speyside Single Malt at the 2018 Ultimate Spirits Competition. $500

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Alita: Battle Angel's New Trailer Digs Into The Heart Of The Most Advanced Weapon Ever

 

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This Deep-Sea Fisherman Is Still Posting His Discoveries And OH GOD THE TEETH WHY DOES IT HAVE TEETH

Back in 2016, we introduced you to the photos of Roman Fedortsov, a deep-sea fisherman who posts his discoveries to Twitter and Instagram. The monsters he pulls from the deep are horrifying, to say the least. So it seems like a good time to check back in with Fedorstov’s social media.

I wonder how he’s doing with his... OH DEAR GOD WHAT IS THAT.

 

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Upsettingly Large Fungus In Michigan Weighs 440 Tons And Is 2,500 Years Old

It’s nicknamed the “humongous fungus”—an unusually large fungal growth belonging to a single genetic individual. An updated analysis of this gigantic fungal beast shows it’s substantially larger and older than scientists initially thought.

This single genetic individual, known as C1, belongs to a species of fungus called Armillaria gallica, otherwise known as the honey mushroom. When University of Toronto biologist James B. Anderson first studied this large growth in 1992, he was astounded by its sheer size. Anderson and his colleagues estimated that it was 1,500 years old, weighed 100,000 kilograms and covered around 37 acres of forest floor in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. The C1 specimen, which has latched onto hundreds, if not thousands, of tree roots, was declared to be among the largest and oldest organisms on Earth.

Nearly 30 years later, and as a final scientific act before his retirement, Anderson decided to return to the Michigan forest to take more precise measurements of C1 and to see if its cells had changed over the decades.

A. gallica sprouting as honey mushrooms on the forest floor.

Looking at hundreds of samples taken from 2015 to 2017, Anderson had to revise his earlier estimates. As he points out in his updated study, the gigantic fungus is actually closer to 2,500 years old and it weighs around 400,000 kilograms, or 440 tons. The growth covers about 173 acres (70 hectares), which is roughly the same size as the total floor area of the Pentagon building.

“I view these estimates as the lower bound,” said Anderson in a statement. “The fungus could actually be much older. However, we think we have circumscribed its entire dimensions, which wasn’t the case in 1992.”

Like other fungi, A. gallica sprouts mushrooms on the forest floor, but this species also utilises a subterranean network of mycelium—underground tendrils that sustain the oversized organism by searching and latching onto sources of food.

Fungi, as you may recall from grade 4 science class, aren’t capable of photosynthesis, instead having to obtain food by growing on other living or dead organisms, such as decaying plant or animal matter. The tendrils of Armillaria fungi are equipped with an organ called rhizomorphs, and A. gallica’s rhizomorphs can suck nutrients from living wood. And in fact, this species is known to infect living trees, and then continue to feed off the decaying matter. Anderson says A. gallica has “a large role in decaying wood and in causing root disease.”

In addition to characterising the size, weight, and age of C1, Anderson also studied its cells, which were compared to a reference genome of A. gallica. Analysis of over 245 cell samples showed that DNA mutation rates in the C1 individual are exceptionally low. Some mutations were observed, but they didn’t seem to influence the health of the fungus or its appearance.

“What we think that tells us is that there must be some mechanism by which the fungus protects itself from mutations,” said Anderson.

That mechanism somehow allows the fungus to localise mutations in areas where they don’t cause much damage. In the paper, Anderson and his colleagues speculate that this mechanism prevents deleterious mutations from occurring in parts of the rhizomorphs responsible for perpetuating the organism’s ongoing growth and development. Learning more about this process, the researchers argue, could lead to developments in cancer research.

“It could be an interesting point of comparison,” said Anderson. “Cancer is so unstable, mutates at a high rate, and is prone to genomic changes, while A. gallica is a very persistent organism with few mutations.”

The study still needs to go through peer review, but it’s currently available at the the biorxiv preprint server.

As a final aside, the humongous fungus of Michigan, while large, is not the world’s largest creature. That distinction goes to an individual growth of Armillaria ostoyae in eastern Oregon, which covers 2,385 acres of the Malheur National Forest. This particular individual is estimated to be anywhere from 2,400 to 8,650 years old. Or, by another measure, the largest organism could be the 13-million-pound clonal aspen forest of Utah, which, sadly, is now dying.

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Scientists Spot Tantalising New Super-Earth Around Nearby Star

Artist’s impression of the planet and Barnard’s star setting

Scientists have spotted strong evidence of a super-Earth orbiting the second-closest star system to the Sun, according to new research.

The evidence consists of a slight repeating change to the light from Barnard’s star, a small star 5.9 light-years away. The data suggests the presence of a cold planet at least 3.2 times heavier than Earth, orbiting at a much farther distance than expected. But its relative closeness to Earth makes it an important world that scientists may soon be able to take a picture of directly.

“Detecting the near-most planets has intrinsic interest, as these are the planets that we can expect to directly characterise best within next few decades,” the study’s senior author Guillem Anglada-Escude, from Queen Mary University of London, told Gizmodo. “In this case, the moderately large angular separation should enable direct imaging soon.”

Barnard’s star is the closest single-star system to Earth, and like many nearby stars, it is relatively dim and cool, with a temperature around 3,000 Celsius, and a mass and radius both around a sixth those of the Sun. Its characteristics are similar to other potential exoplanet-hosting stars we’ve gotten excited about, like Proxima Centauri and TRAPPIST-1.

Despite a history of promising but ultimately fruitless searches for planets around this star, an analysis of archival data from observations of the star’s velocity seemed to reveal a slight repeating signal. The scientists needed more before making a conclusion, so they took lots of spectrometry data measuring the slight shifts in the wavelengths of the star’s light caused by changes in its velocity relative to Earth. They observed the star on “every possible night” using the CARMENES spectrometer on a telescope at the Calar Alto Observatory in Spain, as well as through other telescopes, and published their results in Nature.

The followup data revealed the slight signal that would match a super-Earth orbiting Barnard’s star every 233 days, at about 40 per cent the distance between the Earth and the Sun. That’s about the same as the average distance between Mercury and the Sun. It sounds close, but it’s quite far compared to similar M-dwarf systems that astronomers have observed.

Though the planet is outside the star’s habitable zone, meaning it’s really cold, it’s an important potential target for exoplanet studies, Paul Robertson, physics and astronomy professor at the University of California Irvine professor who was not involved in the study, told Gizmodo. Its distance means that there’s the potential to image the planet separate from the star, rather than implying the existence of a planet based on changes to starlight.

Its important to note that there’s still some ambiguity to the data; there’s a reason they call this a candidate detection. And who knows, perhaps there are closer exoplanets that just haven’t been detectable yet.

“I would have liked to see a more thorough analysis of the stellar rotation period,” said Robertson. “Exoplanet hunters worry a lot about the stellar rotation period, because if you have features like starspots rotating across the stellar surface, they can create false-positive exoplanet signals. The authors of this study go to a lot of effort to demonstrate that this signal is not an astrophysical false positive, but there is still some ambiguity as to the actual rotation period of the star.”

Anglada-Escude would like to continue taking data on the star, and hopefully detecting the planet through other direct or indirect methods.

But it’s an exciting prospect, for sure, and tantalising. “This planet is a cold super-Earth, possibly a giant analogue to the Saturn moon Titan which is very rich in hydrocarbons,” said Anglada-Escude. “Who knows if something could grow there...”

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A Massive Impact Crater Has Been Detected Beneath Greenland's Ice Sheet

An unusually large asteroid crater measuring 31km wide has been discovered under a continental ice sheet in Greenland. Roughly the size of Paris, it’s now among the 25 biggest asteroid craters on Earth.

An iron-rich asteroid measuring nearly a kilometer wide struck Greenland’s ice-covered surface at some point between 3 million and 12,000 years ago, according to a new study published today in Science Advances.

Location of the Hiawatha impact crater.

The impact would’ve flung horrific amounts of water vapour and debris into the atmosphere, while sending torrents of meltwater into the North Atlantic—events that likely triggered global cooling (a phenomenon sometimes referred to as a nuclear or volcanic winter). Over time, however, the gaping hole was obscured by a 1,000-meter-tall layer of ice, where it remained hidden for thousands of years.

Remarkably, the crater was discovered quite by chance—and it’s now the first large crater to be discovered beneath a continental ice sheet.

“In 2015 I was looking at a new map of the bedrock below the Greenland Ice Sheet and discovered a large circular feature under the Hiawatha glacier in northwest Greenland,” Nicolaj K. Larsen, a co-author of the study and a geoscientist at Aarhus University, told Gizmodo. “In other words, it was a coincidence that the crater was discovered.”

Larsen, along with his colleague Kurt Kjaer from the Natural History Museum of Denmark, immediately recognised that they had stumbled upon something special, but it soon became apparent that the depression would be hard to confirm as a remnant of an ancient asteroid strike.

Map of the bedrock topography beneath the ice sheet and the ice-free land surrounding the Hiawatha impact crater.

The first step was to analyse aerial surveys taken of Greenland from 1997 to 2014 by researchers from the University of Kansas. But the data resolution of these surveys “was not sufficient,” according to Larsen, so a team was sent to Greenland to collect superior, higher-resolution ice-radar data of the Hiawatha glacier and the bedrock beneath. This was accomplished in 2016 using wideband ground-penetrating radar (or in this case, ice-penetrating radar) developed at the University of Kansas.

That said, signs of the impact crater were also visible to the naked eye.

“You can see the rounded structure at the edge of the ice sheet, especially when flying high enough,” John Paden, a co-author of the study and an engineer at the University of Kansas, said in a statement. “For the most part the crater isn’t visible out the aeroplane window. It’s funny that until now nobody thought, ‘Hey, what’s that semicircular feature there?’ From the aeroplane it is subtle and hard to see unless you already know it’s there. Using satellite imagery taken at a low sun angle that accentuates hills and valleys in the ice sheet’s terrain—you can really see the circle of the whole crater in these images.”

An illustration of an aeroplane using radar to map the topography below the ice sheet. 

Next, the scientists visited the edge of the glacier to collect river samples. Some of the minerals they analysed exhibited the telltale characteristics of a catastrophic impact, such as shocked quartz grains and other impact-related grains, such as glass.

Some pre-glacial channels were seen below the ice sheet at the site of the crater, which suggests the Greenland Ice Sheet was already in place when the asteroid struck. The exact timing of the asteroid strike, however, is fairly vague, with the researchers saying it happened between 3 million and 12,000 years ago. But preliminary evidence suggests it happened relatively recently. The crater appears to be well-preserved—a surprising observation given that ice is a powerful erosive force. The crater is likely fairly young from a geological perspective.

“It is correct that the crater is not well dated but there’s good evidence that it is geologically young, that is, it formed within the last 2 to 3 million years, and most likely it is as young as the last Ice Age [which ended around 12,000 years ago],” Larsen explained to Gizmodo. “We are currently trying to come up with ideas on how to date the impact. One idea is to drill through the ice and get bedrock samples that can be used for numerical dating.”

An example of the topographic data used in the new study.

Also, the incident was severe enough such that evidence of the impact should be detectable elsewhere on the planet. The impact likely triggered a global cooling event by delivering copious amounts of debris, dust, and water vapour into the atmosphere, blocking incoming solar radiation. At the same time, melting ice from Greenland’s ice sheet would’ve reached the North Atlantic, causing a weakening or shutting down of the North Atlantic current—the current that provides western and northern Europe with its relatively mild climate. Evidence of the impact should thus exist within our planet’s stratigraphy, allowing for more precise dating of the impact. Archaeologists and anthropologists could also help in this regard, to see if and when ancient populations of humans were affected by an asteroid strike dating back to this time period.

The discovery of this previously unknown impact crater in Greenland is welcome news, both in terms of our learning about it, and the future scientific work it’s sure to inspire. Confirming the existence of this crater is just the first step—there’s now plenty of related work to be done.

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Rogue One Isn't Just Getting A Prequel Series, It's Also Getting This Stunning New Poster

Two years removed from the release of Rogue One: A Star Wars Story, the story of Jyn Erso and her crew is cool again. Not that it ever wasn’t cool, but the fact that Cassian Andor is getting his own prequel series has certainly put the film back in the spotlight.

And now, wouldn’t you know it? A new poster is coming too.

This one is from artist Tom Whalen, who — in conjunction with Lucasfilm, Acme Archives, Bottleneck and Pulse Galleries — will release a poster based on the hit 2016 film on Thursday, November 15. Gizmodo is excited to exclusively debut both versions of the poster, starting with the regular edition, which is a 24 x 91cm screen print in an edition of 295 that costs $70.

And here’s the variant, which has a UV embellishment, in an edition of 150. it costs $75.

Both posters will go on sale at noon EST on November 15, at both Darkinkart.com and Bottleneckgallery.com.

Now, if the poster looks familiar, it’s not because you’ve seen it before. This is a brand new poster. But the art was repurposed from something you may have seen when Rogue One was in theatres.

“This poster was initially a series of three interconnected, collectible tickets that Slidestar created to promote Rogue One,” Whalen told io9 via email. “Tickets were given out (one a week) at Regal Theatres during the first three weekends of Rogue One’s release in 2016. The idea was always to have them function as a combined image when placed side by side, [so] I’m thankful we are circling around and finally making the full image available as a poster.”

The choice to focus on the Troopers instead of the main characters came because, like many Star Wars projects, Whalen was forced to design the art before he was able to see the movie. Still, he believes it’s a fair, and fun, representation of the film.

“There’s always a challenge in designing a poster before a film’s release because you can never know if you’re hitting the heart of the film’s message without seeing it,” he said. “Thankfully, there’s a baked-in cool factor to all things ‘trooper’ in the Star Wars universe, so focusing primarily on the Tank Trooper, Death Trooper, and Stormtrooper from Rogue One seemed like (and was) a no-fail direction.”

Whalen regularly works with Mondo, Gallery 1988, and other pop-culture art outlets—but, oddly, he’s only done a few Star Wars posters in the past. That’s not a knock on the franchise, though. Like many of us, it was formative in his childhood and he dreams of doing another Rogue One poster.

“I’ll apply my wishful thinking to my favourite Rogue One character, K-2SO,” he said. “He’s such a great character and droid design, I’d love to explore him on a full poster someday.”

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George R.R. Martin's Superhero Franchise Wild Cards Is Coming To Hulu

Most people know George R.R. Martin for his A Song of Fire and Ice series, better known as Game of Thrones. But that’s just one of the author’s universes. Another that he curates and edits is about to get the same treatment from another major provider. And it stars superheroes.

It’s called Wild Cards and according to The Hollywood Reporter, Hulu is near a deal to secure the rights to the franchise, which has been around since 1987 and contains 27 books (and counting). It’s “a shared universe of anthologies, mosaic novels and stand-alone stories written by a collection of authors and edited by Martin and co-editor Melinda Snodgrass.”

In the world of Wild Cards, a deadly virus was spread across the world in 1946. Most people died but those who survived either mutated or magically had superpowers. Now, decades later, the virus still exists and manifests itself later in life. So people don’t know if they are going to become the jokers, and mutate — or become the aces, and get super powers.

Syfy Films bought the rights to the franchise back in 2011 (the same year Game of Thrones debuted on HBO) hoping to make a movie. Five years later, when that didn’t happen, Universal Cable Productions took over with an eye on making multiple TV shows set in the universe. That’s what’s happening now.

Plus, it sounds like Hulu wants this to be a multimedia franchise—a big name series to compete with Netflix’s upcoming Chronicles of Narnia content and Amazon’s Lord of the Rings content.

This is a franchise that, over 30 years, has developed a whole legion of fans and creators. That alone makes it a world well worth adapting into live action.

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Spain To Ban The Sale Of All Petrol And Diesel Cars By 2040

Spain is wasting no time. The country plans to dramatically de-carbonize its economy by 2050, and that includes banning a lot of cars, according to a draft law the Ministry for Ecological Transition published Tuesday.

The Law on Climate Change and Energy Transition seeks to ban the sale of vehicles that depend on fossil fuels (including hybrids) by 2040, according to a document the ministry sent Gizmodo. Electric cars and their charging stations will take over. Spain also plans to take its electricity production 100 per cent renewable by 2050, which will further help it reduce its greenhouse gas emissions to 90 per cent below 1990 levels by then.

Why? To meet the goals set forth by the Paris Agreement and avoid global climate catastrophe, of course.

“Our proposal is to reduce Spain’s current greenhouse gas emissions by a third in just a decade, which we consider an international milestone and a sign of our firm commitment to the fight against climate change,” said Spain’s ecological transition minister Teresa Ribera, to Climate Home News.

If this draft law goes into force, Spain will end fossil fuel subsidies and the issuing of permits for oil and gas infrastructure both on land and offshore. All existing oil and gas operations must cease by the end of 2040. In their place, Spain wants to install at least 3,000 megawatts of solar and wind energy a year over 10 years. The country also plans to conduct a study to figure out a way to sustainably and equitably wean itself off oil, gas, and coal. Spain’s already planning on re-training programs for workers in these sectors.

But it’s not just about industry and cars. Spain is bringing this effort into people’s homes with plans to update its housing stock to be more energy efficient. Between 2021 and 2030, Spain plans to retrofit at least 100,000 homes a year with special attention to homes in “vulnerable groups”, per the text. Beginning in 2025, all new buildings must be “zero energy consumption”. Any building the government leases must also meet this requirement by 2025, or leases won’t renew.

Now, none of this is for certain. The Spanish Parliament must support the ministry’s proposed law as they work to finalise the text. And the new Socialist Party that took hold with Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez’s election in June, under which this effort is happening, is the minority party in parliament, so this process likely to take a while, according to El País.

Plus, the Spanish government requires National Integrated Energy and Climate Plans, which will lay out the proposed energy portfolio, and a Low Emissions Strategy, which assesses the steps necessary to meet these goals, to complement this plan draft law. And some critics don’t think even this plan goes far enough.

Regardless, this law is a dramatic step forward in a time when the world is ramping up its oil and gas infrastructure. Maybe if Spain cuts off oil and gas, the rest of the world will fall in line.

[MIKA27]

Stan Lee's Spider-Man PS4 Cameo Is So Quintessentially Stan Lee

Stan Lee loved a good cameo. The legendary comics icon, who died yesterday at 95, got to sneak into so many movies based on heroes he’d helped bring to life over the past two decades—and even into some based on ones he didn’t.

But maybe the one that best encapsulates Stan Lee as a creative is one of his most recent.

Lee’s movie cameos are, by and large, brief moments of levity. From “Tony Stank” in Captain America: Civil War to his senior flirting in Spider-Man: Homecoming, they exist to be a tiny knowing nod as you go “oh look, Stan Lee!” to yourself. Rarely are they actually rooted in the emotional context of the wider film story — perhaps only his appearance in Spider-Man 3 came close to that idea, in a moment poignantly shared across the internet yesterday as the news of his passing broke:

The recent PS4 game Marvel’s Spider-Man also features a Lee cameo (sure, it’s a game and not a movie, but it’d almost feel wrong without one) that is likewise ephemeral and fleeting. But taking a look back at the wider scene in the game it’s placed in, it is perhaps the perfect Stan Lee cameo — and in light of his passing, it becomes one of the most perfect tributes to Lee’s legacy as a creator who played a part in forging some of pop culture’s most marvellous icons.

 

[MIKA27]

Has Pappy Van Winkle Fever Broken?

The acclaimed American whiskey brand has been so hard to get hold of for so long. We investigate whether drinkers have given up and are moving on to other bourbons.

Excuse me if I seem a bit distracted—it’s once again Pappy Season! The autumn allotment of Pappy Van Winkle Bourbon is starting to trickle out of Kentucky and is slowly headed to liquor stores around the country.

Of course, tracking down a bottle for a reasonable sum is the holy grail for whiskey collectors. Fans of the brand have even built tracking maps on Facebook and are eagerly reporting Pappy sightings and current retail prices. I’ve also seen a number of posts in private Facebook whiskey groups by members who are “ISO PVW” (in search of Pappy Van Winkle).

But while the frenzy for the whiskey is still there, it feels like—dare I say it?—we’re maybe past peak Pappy demand.

The whole craze for the Van Winkle line is still weird to me. I can still remember buying the 15-Year-Old Bourbon (my favorite expression of the brand) right off the shelf for a fairly reasonable $50. At the time, I didn’t have a hard time finding it and certainly didn’t have to enter a lottery to win the right to buy it. About six years ago, that all changed. That’s when Rip Van Winkle woke up, and things haven’t been the same since.

A quick history of the brand is in order. The Van Winkle family had been in bourbon for generations, since the 1890s, when Julian “Pappy” Van Winkle started selling whiskey in Kentucky. He made money, and bought a distillery that would become known as Stitzel-Weller. The distillery and brands were sold in 1972, but Pappy’s grandson, Julian Van Winkle III, continued to bottle bourbon he selected and bought under the Van Winkle brand name.

Van Winkle, like the Weller, Old Fitzgerald and Rebel Yell brands made and sold by Stitzel-Weller, has always been a so called “wheater.” That’s a bourbon that’s made with corn, malt, and wheat, rather than the more common corn, malt, and rye mash. The most famous wheater, is, of course, Maker’s Mark. What’s the big deal? The wheat makes for a smoother, less spicy bourbon, which may also be better for extended aging.

Julian Van Winkle started bottling some of the older Stitzel-Weller barrels; 15, 20, even 23-years-old, which at the time was positively ancient for bourbon. The long-aged bottlings were popular in Japan, although American drinkers initially had to be coaxed into even trying them. There was a lot of wood flavor; too much, many thought, until Julian found the right barrels, and awards started rolling in.

In 2012, things started to get crazy. So much so, that I began tracking Pappy’s prices on the Wine-Searcher website. In October 2012, the standard price of a 20-year-old Pappy Van Winkle was $152. By December, that price had tripled. Eight months later, in August 2013, it was just under $1,000. Suddenly, people had to have Pappy, and supply got blindsided by demand.

How popular has it become? Over the last few years, Van Winkle whiskey no longer hits a store shelf. The bottles come into a store, and are cautiously doled out to favorite customers. Julian Van Winkle and Buffalo Trace, who had entered a joint venture to ensure a supply of Van Winkle whiskey into the future, weren’t really interested in press coverage or advertising the brand anymore. It sold out instantly without any help at all.

Jonathan Goldstein, owner of the iconic Park Avenue Liquor Shop in Manhattan, regrets the situation. “We were able to support the brand and sell a great product for a reasonable price,” he recalls. But now “we get a handful of bottles and these are automatically sold to our customers who have been buying them for years.”

I live in Pennsylvania, a rigid control state, where the allocation runs through the Liquor Control Board (LCB). As of 2015, the LCB has run a lottery to determine which customers (and bars) will have an opportunity to buy a bottle, or an entire set of the different whiskies. It’s restrictive, and it’s only open to Pennsylvania residents, but it is at least fair, especially to people in rural counties who might otherwise never get a chance at a bottle.

Anyone with any connection to the whiskey business has been peppered with requests to “help me get a bottle.” But Julian is also painfully fair; I haven’t been able to get a bottle, since the last bottle of 15-year-old I bought in 2011. I’m shut out, too.

But it hasn’t been the end of the world. I’ve never been a prestige drinker, and there are a lot of good whiskies out there. I didn’t see Van Winkle as a must have, and that seems to be a position that’s catching on. I planted a poll on a whiskey enthusiast Facebook page to see what people thought about this year’s race for Van Winkle, and by far the most popular response was, “I’ll buy it if it falls in my lap.”

That keys with what Goldstein told me. “I really think the average person has realized that there are no ‘unaccounted for’ bottles,” he said. In order for consumers to get a bottle, they have to have some kind of inside track: know someone, be a very regular customer, or get lucky in a store lottery.

The Pennsylvania LCB provided me with stats on their statewide Van Winkle lottery for the past three years. In 2015, the first year of the lottery, there were 53,750 entries; in 2016, the pool peaked at 77,512; last year that number had fallen to 68,165. (It’s also interesting to see that out of the thousands of licensed bars and restaurants in the state, only 114 entered the lottery last year.) Maybe we have reached peak Pappy and the craze is mellowing a bit.

And what if we have? “The Pappyphiles have moved onto Weller, due to the wheated recipe,” Goldstein said, but “now this brand, too, is an allocated product in New York. I have not seen a bottle of Weller 12-Year-Old in a very long time.”

“People find replacements,” Goldstein continued. “The craze for the rare and hard to get is still active, but I think people are realizing how silly the PVW search has become.”

The last time I had some Pappy was this past spring at a friend’s place. My buddy Tom had gotten lucky in a lottery, and had the chance to buy three bottles of Pappy. We poured some of the 20-year-old and looked out over the creek and a bit later, poured some more. And it was good, no doubt. But next time, we’ll likely have Old Grand-Dad.

The reason you have whiskey, is to drink it. Don’t ever forget that.

[MIKA27]

An Alchemist Tries to Save the Soul of Rum From His Boston Kitchen

Stephen Shellenberger is digging into ancient rum research in hopes of helping modern distillers.

Stephen Shellenberger lives in a narrow apartment on a quiet one-way street in Cambridge, Massachusetts. One gets the feeling that the 35-year-old does not cook much. His kitchen table and counter are overrun by dozens of liquor samples in small, brown lab bottles, along with an array of stainless steel and glass equipment, some of which looks as if it escaped a high school laboratory circa 1958, and all of which appears inscrutable.

Welcome to Shellenberger’s time machine, the place where he’s exploring the depths of distilling past. There is a device that measures surface tension, a collection of round bottomed flasks, and tall glass apparatus clamped to stainless rods. Here, between the sink and the stove, is his pride and joy—a birectifier, which consists of glass tubes and coils and heating elements. It’s a device he rescued from obscurity and is trying to usher back into circulation.

His goal: to improve the distilling world—especially to give craft distillers an affordable path toward excellence by drawing on the forgotten work of others. And he makes a pretty good argument that the future lies in the past.

Shellenberger is an independent researcher, and supports himself as a restaurant manager and running a side business recasting antique doorknobs and the like. When earning a livelihood isn’t distracting him, he’s rooting through yellowing documents in search of lost secrets. Once found, he transcribes, scans, translates (when necessary), and summarizes his finding on his blog, Boston Apothecary.  

Shellenberger is essentially a latter-day alchemist.

Alchemists of yore believed that answers to life’s greatest mysteries could be found in the past. “The alchemist believed that the ‘ancients’ knew the secrets,” wrote F. Sherwood Taylor in his 1974 history of alchemy, “and his principal endeavor was to understand the meaning of their books. Modern science, on the other hand, looks forward to the time when her efforts will make known the things that have never been known.”

Shellenberger’s research didn’t take him quite to ancient Egypt, but to a lost golden age of spirits research, dating roughly from the 1930s to the 1970s. Many liquor industry scientists at the time devoted themselves to basic research, understanding yeast and distillation technology and things like the role of osmotic pressure during fermentation.

Shellenberger is especially fascinated by the rum research undertaken in Puerto Rico.

In particular, he’s curious about the work of Rafael Arroyo, a Louisiana State University graduate and long-time head of the chemistry department of the Agricultural Experiment Station at Rio Piedras in Puerto Rico. Arroyo spent much of his career studying sugar cane and the rum that came from it—it’s likely he knew more about the chemistry of fermentation and distillation than just about anyone before or since. He held patents for a fermentation process for producing butyric acid—a compound that’s essential for giving bold rums their overripe pineapple aroma—and was the author of the book Studies in Rum, published in 1945 by the ‪University of Puerto Rico.

Arroyo died in 1949 at the age of 57, and his studies began a long slide into obscurity. His research papers moldered in filing drawers and libraries; even his seminal book was available chiefly in rare book reading rooms, where it couldn’t be checked out.  

Shellenberger assembled a bibliography of Arroyo’s writing, and then began gathering his papers wherever he could find them—searching online, or requesting copies through a helpful interlibrary loan program at his local library. For others, he searched for long out-of-print journals on used book and auction websites. Then he scanned and uploaded PDFs of the articles to his blog, aiming to start a conversation with curious others. His site has links to several dozen of these documents (“The Arroyo fermentation process for alcohol and light rum from molasses,” from a 1949 Sugar Journal; Arroyo’s 1942 patent for “Ethanol Fermentation of Black Strap Molasses”). He also translated from the Spanish Arroyo’s 1938 circular entitled simply “Rum Manufacture” and uploaded that to his site. (“It is possibly the single greatest short read on rum production any new distiller can do,” Shellenberger writes.) He also convinced someone at Harvard to scan Arroyo’s book, and he posted a PDF of that for all to see as well.

The golden age of rum research entered its twilight in the 1970s. The production environment was changing. The best minds in the industry, which once would have been drawn to basic research, were deployed instead to deal with treating production waste as society turned to environmental concerns. The scientists also were assigned to address issues raised by health inspectors, who wanted replace old wooden tanks with stainless steel ones, and sweep out all the spiders. Alchemy was elbowed aside by society and science.

In reading through Arroyo’s work, Shellenberger came across a passing reference to a thing called a birectifier. “He described it in the book, but you’d skip over it in a heartbeat,” he says. “I didn’t know how significant it was.”

But he started digging, and eventually found a German journal that featured an engineer’s rendering; it was used for the analysis of dessert wine.

The birectifier was first developed by Dr. Curt Luckow of the Berlin Institute of Fermentology. A 1939 report of the Agricultural Research Station called it “an invaluable apparatus for the evaluation of commercial and aging rums.” As Arroyo noted in a report, “chemical analysis alone, as usually practiced, is almost entirely ineffective in the appraisal of the rum aroma, nor does it give an indication as to which particular constituents of the non-alcohol number of rums are mainly responsible for the nature of their flavors.” The birectifier filled that void.

At heart, the birecrifier allows a distiller to dissect a product, dividing it into eight fractions for analysis, largely by aroma. Each fraction offers clues about the process, and how best to tweak it—switching up the yeast strain, for instance. Arroyo revered what he called “rum oil,” a mixture of essential oils that gave can a rich rum considerable depth, and which he found often appeared in the fifth fraction. If a rum yielded a “naked” fifth fraction, with virtually no aroma, then the producer should head back to the drawing board.

The more Shellenberger read about the birectifier, the more intrigued he became. He eventually shifted from archival researcher to kitchen laboratory scientist. With descriptions and sketches of the birectifier in hand, he set out to rebuild this vanished bit of laboratory equipment. “I called 30 glass manufacturers,” he says. “Most didn’t reply.” Eventually he found an amenable glass maker, and started assembling other parts of the device, such as the heating elements.

He then began running all manner of spirits through it, and posting regular reports on what he was uncovering: “Birectifier Analysis of a Demerara Rum” was one. “Birectifier Analysis of a Role Model Vermouth” was another.

Shellenberger also got into the business of offering the birectifier to craft distillers. “I get a lot of emails from new distillers who are frustrated that they have no laboratory and no money to pay for consultants,” he says. “This is the most affordable analysis thing you can do.” And unlike sending samples out to a pricey lab for gas chromatography-mass spectrometry analysis—another way to dissect a product—he insists his lower-cost analysis actually reveals more about quality, since the high-tech approach overlooks the “rum oils.”

The cost of a birectifier is $2,100. So far, he’s sold four. Shellenberger suspects much of the traffic of people accessing his posts and papers on his website is not from distillers but from consumers seeking to educate themselves and broaden their understanding of what they’re drinking.

“I probably have ten times the readership with niche consumers as I do with distillers,” he admits. He suspects that educated drinkers revel in complexity, whereas distillers are more interested in “trying to weirdly dumb things down” into bullet points. “They want to reduce it all to a series of grunts,” he says.

And Shellenberger insists that what he turns up is accessible and not terribly technical. (Although sentences such as this, from a blog post earlier this year, may suggest otherwise: “I am also recreating Seagram’s botanical assay lab for essential oil yield calculation to scale botanical charges”).

“If people talk about the difference between an ale and lager, why can’t they talk about two different yeasts?” he says. “This is rum’s slow food moment. This is a case of the vinyl DJ versus the MacBook.”

[MIKA27]

Marie Antoinette’s Jewels, Hidden for 200 Years, Are Up for Sale

The doomed queen of France smuggled her jewels out of the palace in a wooden chest, and some haven’t been seen for centuries. Now her pearls and diamonds are going up for auction.

Conspicuous consumption is associated with one glittering monarch above all others: the infelicitous Queen of France, Marie Antoinette. From the rooms and rooms and rooms of furniture and decorative arts that filled Versailles and Fontainebleau, to the hundreds of gowns, shoes, and wigs that she bedecked herself with, the queen of Louis XVI was no stranger to the finer things in life. This spirit of excess was notably channeled by director Sofia Coppola in the over-the-top shopping montage in her 2006 film starring Kirsten Dunst as Marie Antoinette, set to the tune of “I Want Candy.”

It’s also true that the “affair of the diamond necklace”—a court intrigue in which the queen was (probably wrongfully) accused of purchasing an absurdly expensive piece of jewelry through crooked intermediaries—was one of the key moments that began to turn the people of France against the monarchy, thus hastening the events of the French Revolution.

This begs the question, then, what exactly happened to all that stuff when the engine fires of the French Revolution were stoked and burning at full blast? Well, plenty of it ended up in museums the world over of course, but what about the smaller, most portable of the valuables? Things like… the jewelry?

It turns out that before Marie Antoinette lost her head, she had the foresight to send many of her precious jewels back to her family. And now, on Nov. 14, in Geneva, Switzerland, Sotheby's will be auctioning off an unprecedented amount of jewels with royal provenance, 10 of which can be traced back to Marie Antoinette herself. These treasures have not been seen publicly in nearly two-and-a-half centuries.

In a press release, Sotheby’s spins the harrowing tale of how some of these jewels escaped the Revolution:

“In March 1791, King Louis XVI, Marie Antoinette and their children began to prepare their escape from France. According to accounts written by Marie Antoinette’s lady in waiting, Madame Campan, the queen spent an entire evening in the Tuileries Palace wrapping all of her diamonds, rubies and pearls in cotton and placing them in a wooden chest. In the following days, the jewels were sent to Brussels, which was under the rule of the queen’s sister, Archduchess Marie-Christine and which was home to Count Mercy Argenteau. The count, the former Austrian Ambassador to Paris, was one of the only men who had retained the queen’s trust. It was he who took delivery of the jewels and sent them on to Vienna, into the safekeeping of the Austrian Emperor, Marie Antoinette’s nephew.”

(This recalls a similar story in which the Hope diamond was safely mailed via United States Postal Service to the Smithsonian when Harry Winston gifted it to the museum in 1958. All these fabulous jewels traveling so far in a wooden chest, and ultimately being saved for the ages, is astounding.)

After Marie Antoinette was executed in 1793, her only surviving child, Marie-Thérèse de France, was released and sent to Austria, where she was ultimately given her mother’s jewelry. Having no children of her own, she then bequeathed the Marie Antoinette jewelry to an adopted daughter and niece, and thus the jewels ended up in the royal family of the Duke of Parma, where they have been ever since.

Of the jewels that Sotheby’s Geneva is offering at auction, it’s no wonder that the jewels of Marie Antoinette nearly all consist of diamonds and pearls. Remember, in the 18th century, natural pearls were valued far more than diamonds because they were rarer, as the pearl cultivation technology we have today did not exist until the early 20th century. Thus, the lot from this sale that is getting the most attention is a natural pearl pendant, suspended from a diamond bow. Its estimated auction price is $1 million to $2 million, but considering the extreme rarity of natural pearls of this size and its unrivaled provenance, I’m sure the estimate will be obliterated. Elizabeth Taylor’s pearl La Peregrina, a pearl of great fame and size to hit to auction block in 2011, sold for about $11 million in New York.

[MIKA27]

Has a Piece of the World’s Oldest Computer Been Found?

A lost piece of the world’s oldest analog computer (the Antikythera mechanism an ancient Greek device designed to calculate astronomical position) may have been discovered.

If you ask someone who invented the computer they might say Bill Gates or Steve Jobs. They would, of course, be wrong. Perhaps they might mention Alan Turing (who proposed a “Universal Computing Museum”) or the US Navy’s WWII era Torpedo Data Computer. But computers, which were initially conceived of as calculating devices, are much older than that and older than the modern world. The world’s oldest analog computer is the Antikythera mechanism, an ancient Greek device designed to calculate astronomical positions. And now media outlets are reporting that a lost piece, which somehow survived looters, has been discovered on the Aegean Seabed.

The Antikythera Mechanism was lost over 2,200 years ago when the cargo ship carrying it was shipwrecked off the coast of the small Greek Island of Antikythera (which is located between Kythera and Crete). The Mechanism was initially discovered in 1901, when Greek sponge divers found an encrusted greenish lump. They brought the mechanism, which they believed to be a rock, to archaeologist Valerios Stais at the National Archaeological Museum in Athens. Over the ensuing decades the site was looted, trampled on by explorers, and, in 1976, the famous French explorer Jean-Jacques Cousteau inadvertently destroyed much of what remained of the ship’s hull.

Initially no one knew want the lump was. Two millennia had eaten away at the ship and its cargo. Stais’ cousin, Spyridon Stais, a former mathematician, was the first to identify the gears in the mechanism. It was only with the development of advanced x-ray technology and the collaboration of numerous individuals (from Cousteau to modern historians of science like Alexander Jones) that the heavily corroded rock was revealed to be a technologically advanced calculator.

How advanced? The second century BCE Mechanism could do basic math, calculate the movements of the sun and moon, track the movements of the constellations and planets, and predict eclipses and equinoxes. It contains over thirty hand-worked cogs, dozens more than the average luxury Swiss watch. It may not have the faculties of an iPhone but it is more than a simple calculator.

In 2012, almost 50 years after Cousteau’s excavations, a new team of underwater archaeologists returned to re-examine the site. They discovered hundreds of previously unnoted artifacts, including bronze and marble statues, furniture, coins, and a sarcophagus lid. But last year, on the seabed, they discovered something else: an encrusted corroded disk about 8cm in diameter. X-ray analysis has revealed that the disk bears an engraving of the zodiac sign Taurus, the bull.

The discovery of a piece of the worldest oldest analog computer would be a huge and remarkable discovery on its own terms. But it has additional significance in what it can tell us about the development of the field of archaeology itself. As Sarah Bond, an associate professor of Classics at the University of Iowa, told The Daily Beast “The Antikythera Mechanism is an important object in the historical record of ancient technology, but is also a prism for tracking the development of archaeology as a professional field … It reveals the advanced astrological instruments created and used by ancient engineers, but the protracted nature of the undersea dig reveals archaeological advances in scanning, 3D modelling, and many other sophisticated approaches in reconstructing and analysing ‘the computer’.” Elsewhere Bond has written about the unseen labor of the divers who engaged in the risky work that discovered the original Mechanism.

Other scholars have exhibited concern that the discovery of the new disk is being sensationalized. On social media David Meadows and Michael Press have rightly pointed out that the year-old discovery is only making news because of the sensational claim that it belongs to the Antikythera Mechanism. It is difficult to say precisely what this new piece is; it might be part of the original Antikythera Mechanism or part of a second similar device. The presence of the bull engraving  suggests that it may have predicted the position of the constellation of Taurus but it is difficult to say.

While scientific study continues,  the discovery has drawn attention to both the existence of this ancient ‘calculator’ and its amazing history

 

[MIKA27]

Leprechaun Returns Drops Trailer

Leprechaun Returns is coming to digital and On Demand services December 11, and today EW debuted the first trailer and new poster for the film. This is a direct sequel to the first film from 1993, starring Warwick Davis and Jennifer Aniston. Davis does not appear in the film, with franchise newcomer Linden Porco instead donning the make-up. This is the same character from the first film, and in this one he will be taking on a sorority house. Check out the trailer for the film, and the new poster down below:

Leprechaun Returns, directed by Steven Kostanski and starring Taylor Spreitler, Pepi Sonuga, Sai Bennett, Emily Reid, Oliver Llewellyn-Jenkins, Ben McGregor, Mark Holton, and Linden Porco as the Leprechaun, debuts on digital services and On Demand December 11, and on Syfy in 2019.

[MIKA27]

SHACKLETON BLENDED MALT SCOTCH – THE SPIRIT OF THE ADVENTURERS

Shackleton Blended Malt Scotch was developed to very closely replicate the exact whisky taken by Ernest Shackleton on his Nimrod expedition in 1907 to the Antarctic.

SHACKLETON’S SCOTCH

The whisky was to serve two purposes, firstly it was believed at the time that whisky and rum had warming properties that could save a man from freezing to death, and secondly there was the matter of morale – 25 cases of whisky buys you a lot of goodwill from your crew.

The whisky chosen by Shackleton for the expedition was Mackinlay’s Rare Old Highland Malt Whisky, we know that for two reasons – it was recorded in the logs, and because they discovered three unconsumed cases of it under the team’s wooden shack at base camp at Cape Royds in Antarctica.

It’s probably fairly safe to assume that the other 22 cases were enjoyed on the journey to the great southern continent by Shackleton and his men, meaning they would have had very little for the trip home. But this is understandable, whisky is delicious and the men were no doubt in need of plenty to steady their nerves and sea legs.

In 2007 exactly 100 years after the expedition, the three remaining cases were found in the snow and ice under the floorboards of the shack, it created headlines around the world and a team of whisky-makers led by Master Blender Richard Paterson decided to bring the recipe back by reverse engineering it after painstaking analysis.

SHACKLETON BLENDED MALT SCOTCH

Each bottle of Shackleton Blended Malt Scotch has been carefully blended to match the Shackleton batch of Mackinlay’s Rare Old Highland Malt Whisky.

It’s characterized by an easy drinking nature either neat or with ice (a little ice would be appropriate after all), it has notes of vanilla, honey, butterscotch, and orchard fruits with a pleasantly light peat after taste.

Depending on your region the pricing can vary, but you can generally expect to pay a little under $38 USD per bottle in the United States.

[MIKA27]

New Full-Length Trailer for Tim Burton’s ‘Dumbo’

Disney has released a new trailer for director Tim Burton‘s new live-action Dumbo movie is here. The film updates the classic animated Disney film and revolves around a circus owner (Danny DeVito) who enlists a former star (Colin Farrell) and his children t care for a newborn elephant, whose gift of flight takes the circus to new heights.

While Burton first made waves with dark and strange films like Batman and Beetlejuice, he’s actually been working within the realm of family/children’s films for quite some time now (from Alice in Wonderland to Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children), and he seems quite comfortable here in Dumbo. There are a lot of CGI backgrounds to be seen in this here trailer and I’m not entirely sold on the environment, but the tone of a genuine family film appears to be strong, and Farrell as a father figure is a big draw for me personally. Disney has yet to falter when it comes to these live-action remakes, so odds are this one’s a hit.

Written by Ehren Kruger, the film also stars Michael Keaton, Eva Green, Alan Arkin, Finley Hobbins, and, Nico Parker. Dumbo opens in theaters on March 29, 2019.

[MIKA27]

“Convince Me”: Third Trailer for ‘Glass’ Hits

 

[MIKA27]

A Trailer for ‘Replicas’, Starring Keanu Reeves and Alice Eve

Starring Keanu Reeves (John Wick, The Matrix, Speed) and Alice Eve (Marvel’s Iron Fist, Before We Go, Star Trek Into Darkness), the Jeffrey Nachmanoff-directed film has a little bit of everything. It’s even got Thomas Middleditch (Silicon Valley) and John Ortiz (Silver Linings Playbook)!

After a car accident kills his family, a daring synthetic biologist (Reeves) will stop at nothing to bring them back, even if it means pitting himself against a government-controlled laboratory, a police task force, and the physical laws of science.

Replicas hits theaters on January 11th 2019.

[MIKA27]

Game of Thrones Just Released 8 Scotch Whiskies, and There Goes Our Winter

Winter is coming, but ever so damn slowly. HBO finally gave fans a premiere month for the new and final season of Game of Thrones—April—which leaves us with five months to twiddle our thumbs and wait. How better to pass the time than by drinking?

Game of Thrones just released eight—yes eight, conveniently one for each season—bottles of single malt scotch whisky. Each scotch comes from a lauded Scottish distillery, and each is paired with one of the Houses of Westeros or the Night's Watch. For example, Cardhu Distillery was founded in 1824 by Helen Cumming and her husband John. Legend has it Helen would disguise the distillery as a bakery when taxmen came around to avoid paying alcohol taxes, and smuggle bladders of whisky under her skirts because she knew that she, a lady, wouldn't be searched. For this collection, Cardhu's Gold Reserve is bottled with House Targaryen's dragon crest, where another strong woman makes the calls.

Houses Tully, Stark, Lannister, Greyjoy, Baratheon, and Tyrell are also included, as is the Night's Watch with its own black bottle. The bottles are available now, and run from $30 past $100. If un-dead antagonist is more your style, Johnnie Walker just came out with a White Walker (duh) whisky. There's plenty of GOT booze to go around this winter while you're re-bingeing the first seven seasons.

[MIKA27]

G-SHOCK X TRANSFORMERS DW6900-IV WATCH

G-Shock’s latest timepiece is more than meets the eye, as the famed watch company is teaming up with Transformers toymaker Takara Tomy for a special project. To celebrate G-Shock and Transformers’ 35th anniversary in 2019, the two brands are collaborating to create a limited edition Optimus Prime watch.

The Transformers G-Shock DW6900-IV has a red bezel, blue bands, and a silver face with the iconic Transformers logo. And, when the backlight is activated, the legendary Autobot emblem appears. The box set also includes a fully-transforming Optimus Prime figure, which also acts as an elaborate watch holder to display your heroic timepiece. The figure also comes with a Matrix of Leadership insert to fill in the gap when the watch is on your wrist and a couple of blasters to help the big bad bot protect your G-Shock. Unfortunately, it looks like this will be a Japan exclusive when it drops on December 8.

 

[MIKA27]

The New Lego Movie 2 Trailer Blasts Off On An Intergalactic Adventure 

The Lego Movie 2 opens February 8, 2019.