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

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Who Wants To Go Ice Skating Across This Wintry Martian Crater?

Korolev crater on Mars boasts an ice rink measuring over 80km wide—and it’s one of the most spectacular surface features on the Red Planet, as the latest image from the Mars Express spacecraft reveals.

Named after Russian rocket scientist Sergey Korolev, this incredible crater is located in the northern lowlands of Mars and just south of Olympia Undae—a large patch of dune-filled terrain that encircles the planet’s northern polar cap. It may look as if Korolev crater is filled with snow, but it’s actually ice. The impressive impact crater measures 82km across (82 kilometers), and at the center of the circle—it’s deepest point—the ice extends down for 1.1 miles (1.8 kilometers).

This stunning new photo of the crater was captured by the High Resolution Stereo Camera (HRSC) instrument on the European Space Agency’s Mars Express satellite, which has been in orbit around Mars for the past 15 years.

The image was stitched together from five distinct strips, each of which was captured during a different orbit this past April. The image was processed to show how Korolev crater appears when viewed from an angle, and colour corrected to show how it would appear to a human observer. An overhead view (below) and topographical view of the crater were also released by the ESA.

The ice within Korolev crater is a permanent feature, despite the six-month-long northern summer on Mars. It’s an example of a cold trap; the floor of the crater is quite deep, lying about 1.2 miles (1.9 kilometers) vertically beneath the rim. The ESA explains further:

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The very deepest parts of Korolev crater, those containing ice, act as a natural cold trap: the air moving over the deposit of ice cools down and sinks, creating a layer of cold air that sits directly above the ice itself.

Behaving as a shield, this layer helps the ice remain stable and stops it from heating up and disappearing. Air is a poor conductor of heat, exacerbating this effect and keeping Korolev crater permanently icy.

 

Should humans ever settle on Mars, this region might make for a sweet spot. Water is scarce on the Red Planet, so this polar region, with its extensive ice caps, could provide an ample supply of the precious liquid. Just as importantly, Korolev crater would provide a venue for the most epic game of hockey in the history of the Solar System.

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Before-and-After Pics Show Dramatic Collapse Of Tsunami-Causing Volcano In Indonesia

The entire southwest flank of Indonesia’s Anak Krakatau volcano is missing, as new radar imagery suggests. The erupting volcano triggered a massive landslide on December 22, generating a tsunami that has killed more than 420 people.

The dramatic radar images were taken by JAXA’s ALOS-2 satellite and subsequently analysed by Japan’s Geospatial Information Authority, reports the Associated Press. Normal satellite photographs of the volcano haven’t been possible owing to incessant cloud cover in the region. The before image was taken two days before the eruption on August 20, 2018, and the after image was taken two days after on December 24, 2018.

Wide view of the area, with surrounding islands. The concentric circles in the “after” pic are waves causes by ongoing seismic activity at the volcano. 

Looking at the photos, it seems the entire southwest flank of the Anak Krakatau island volcano has disappeared, likely the result of a cataclysmic landslide triggered by ongoing eruptions. The ensuing tsunami smashed into beaches along Indonesia’s Sunda Strait, killing hundreds.

As the images show, Krakatau is now significantly smaller than it was prior to the landslide. The concentric circles are waves moving away from the Anak Krakatau island volcano—a sign of seismic activity and eruptions, according to experts cited by the AP.

Indeed, ongoing eruptions have caused Indonesia’s disaster management agency to raise its alert level from two to three, the BBC reports. All flights around the volcano have been rerouted and a 5-kilometer (3-mile) exclusion zone implemented. Indonesian authorities are asking people to be on alert for another possible tsunami.

Anak Krakatau began to exhibit signs of renewed activity back in July, but it has been particularly active during the last couple of weeks. Very famously, an earlier iteration of the volcano produced a cataclysmic eruption in 1883, sending shockwaves around the planet, not once—but four times. The massive eruption affected global climate and caused temperature declines around the world.

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This Dark Star Wars Fan Film Perfectly Captures The Feel Of Darth Vader's World

“Vader Episode 1: Shards of the Past” is the first instalment in a fan film series by the Star Wars Theory YouTube channel, and it’s a good ‘un. Taking place in the early months of the Empire — after the full fall of the Republic but before the Clones were replaced with cheaper Stormtroopers — the film focuses on Darth Vader, forced to carry out the Emperor’s will even amidst deep resentment and confusion.

It’s fertile ground for a Star Wars story, as the recent comics have shown, and the creators of this film do some interesting things with it. It opens with a lengthy fantasy sequence, featuring Vader acting out all his fury at himself and his Master, before setting up a conflict that seems like it should be impossible.

Really, though, the star here is the visual design, which captures a live-action Star Wars look perfectly. It’s particularly thrilling to see Clone Wars-style clone armour in live action. It’s well worth a watch for that alone.

No word on when we’ll see more of this story, but I’ll be keeping a lookout.

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Brand-New Volkswagen Arrives At Dealer And Drops An F-Bomb To America

A dealership in Rochester, NY had a brand-new, German-built Volkswagen arrive for its pre-sales inspection, and with it came a little message. A message that wasn’t exactly grammatically correct, but the meaning behind it was unmistakable. The message? “Welcome Fuck of USA.”

I’m pretty sure the message-enterer wanted to say “Fuck off USA” instead of “Fuck of USA,” but I think we get the gist either way. Somewhere between the factory and the dealership, with that vast ocean in between, someone in that chain decided they needed to send the U.S. a clear message of how they felt, so they used the only tool they had available: the customisable welcome message setting deep in the menus of the Multifunction Display. It’s totally possible to do this, if you want.

I’m not going to reveal who tipped us to this or took the picture of the display, since I’m pretty sure there’s going to be people in trouble over this, but I’m pretty sure this message will be changed before any potential customers get a chance to even look at the car.

Unless it’s not the only one.

Uh oh.

I reached out to Volkswagen for comment, and while I haven’t heard back yet, I’m pretty confident that we’ll hear that this message is definitely not on-brand for Volkswagen, and Volkswagen has no desire to tell the United States to fuck off, or even to fuck of.

If I hear anything different, or even basically this from VW, I’ll update.

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THE COMPANY USING COGNAC MAKING TECHNIQUES TO CREATE LUXURY FRAGRANCES

Hennessy. It’s a name synonymous with the world’s most coveted cognac which was first distilled in 1765 by Richard Hennessy.

253 years on, that very name continues to traverse the upper echelons of today’s luxury segment, and it also lives on in Kilian Hennessy – the heir to this pioneering lineage of fine cognac makers.

Kilian Hennessy wanted to do things differently though. Whilst the young Hennessy spent much of his childhood around the family’s cellars in Cognac, it wasn’t the business of cognac that piqued his interest.

The Rise Of Kilian Hennessy

Before graduating from CELSA, the French School of Higher Studies in the Information and Communication Sciences, Kilian penned a thesis on the semantics of scent to investigate the common ‘language’ between gods and mortals.

It was a study that eventually brought him back to the phenomenon of the ‘angel’s share’ – a stage of the distilling process which the House of Hennessy defines as the percentage of cognac that evaporates from the cellars – like an offering to the gods.

It was Kilian’s unique heritage and understanding of this cognac-making process that would eventually lead him down the path of perfumery.

By Kilian the luxury fragrance was eventually born, and today in every bottle there carries Kilian’s childhood memory of the sugar in the alcohol and the wood of the cognac barrels.

It was the beginning of the marriage between two fine artforms – a relationship that only Kilian Hennessy could bring to life. This is the story of how he does it.

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Every bottle carries Kilian’s childhood memory of the sugar in the alcohol and the wood of the cognac barrels.

A Luxury Fragrance Like No Other

“My scents are very autobiographical,” says Kilian Hennessy.

“They are created with the utmost sincerity. I absolutely love when people really get what emotion I’m trying to express.”

The amount of fragrances out there are staggering, but to truly stand out in the game you need an ace up the sleeve. Kilian’s is both formulaic and unashamedly provocative. His scents are unique because of the money and freedom he allows his perfumers to work with.

Crack open any premium fragrance from two competing labels these days and you’re guaranteed a significant chance they’ll smell exactly the same. Why?

“Everyone’s scents are being copied over and over,” explains Kilian.

“You’ll never see scents like Straight to Heaven or Good Girl Gone Bad copied. That’s because of the quality of essential oils we choose and the overdose of them in our scents.”

Complementing this is the fact that Kilian only works with a single perfumer for every scent he produces. There’s no team to back him up in the creation process, evaluation phase or fancy endorsements. It’s a move that allows Kilian to focus solely on his greatest goal – to tell a story purely through the sense of smell.

“A great perfume is always a great story first. Like every great movie has a script first, so do perfumes.”

The perfect analogy of this is how a director would choose their actors or actresses to best perform the roles the script demands. Kilian chooses a different perfumer to work with depending on the script and emotion he’s trying to express within that single fragrance.

It’s painstaking work but it’s how Kilian has built its reputation amongst the mediocre.

“When I started my brand, I wanted to go back to the old way of writing perfume, with 50, 60 or even 70 percent of the formula in dry down notes.”

“In order to achieve that, I work with woods, resins and vanilla notes that really allow the perfume to stay longer on the skin.”

An Absolute of Jasmine or Rose will always be more expensive than their synthetic replacement. The result however is a fragrance which lingers on the skin even till the next day.

“This is exactly what I wanted to achieve,” says Kilian.

Crafting Bottles To Last A Lifetime

Finally, we come to the most visually appealing aspect of any fragrance: the bottle. Every fragrance bottle must evoke the identity of its contents. It’s the first thing a user sees alongside the first thing they smell, so bottling is just as important as the scent creation.

At Kilian, this task is perceived more as a fine art that dates back to the early 1900s. A good example is where perfumer and chemist Jacques Guerlain asked Georges Chevalier at Baccarat to design his bottle in 1912. It’s this tradition that Kilian holds highly in its sights today through the inclusion of exquisite bottles and coffrets.

“We live in a world where what isn’t visible does not exist. So making perfume visible has always been a fantasy of mine,” he explains.

“The flacon (bottle) has always been a decisive element of a perfume.”

To bring this element into the present, Kilian kept the craftsmanship to a high standard so that the bottles could be treasured and reused, an eco-luxe concept that is almost unheard of in today’s perfume industry.

Explore the world of extreme luxury fragrances at Kilian now

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Exclusive ‘The Amityville Murders’ Trailer Warns You Not to Listen to the Voices

One of America’s most enduring horror stories has found new life onscreen again in The Amityville Murders. The latest in the long list of films inspired by the Amityville haunting, The Amityville Murders goes back to the start, telling the story that proceeded the one detailed in the iconic 1979 horror movie The Amityville Horror. The film is inspired by the true story of Ronald “Butch” DeFeo Jr., who murdered his entire family with a high-powered riffle while they slept, later stating he heard voices that ordered him to kill.

The Amityville story has been done a lot, so it’s hard to do something new with the material and going back to the true-life tragedy is certainly a bold move. It looks like The Amityville Murders will still lean into the paranormal angle, so we’ll see if the film can balance the weight of that tragedy with the haunted house genre. The DeFeo story was also more or less covered in The Amityville Horror II: The Possession, but it looks like this one is hewing a little closer to authentic details in some regards (using the real names, etc.)

Written and directed by Daniel Farrands, The Amityville Murders stars John Robinson, Chelsea Ricketts, Diane Franklin, and Paul Ben-Victor. Skyline Films will release the film in theaters, on VOD and Digital HD on February 8, 2019. 

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On New Year’s Day, a spacecraft will zoom by the most distant object humanity has ever visited

Just after midnight on January 1st, a NASA spacecraft will whiz past the most distant space rock that’s ever been visited in our Solar System. This remote interplanetary flyby will be over in a blink. But if successful, the event could tell us a whole lot about the objects that dominate the far reaches of our cosmic neighborhood.

The robotic spacecraft making this daring visit is called New Horizons, and it’s been traveling through space for the last 13 years. You may remember this famous bot: it was the first human-made object to ever visit Pluto in the summer of 2015. Ever since that flyby, New Horizons has been plunging farther into the Solar System. Three years later, it’s ready to meet up with another faraway target, a rock nicknamed Ultima Thule located 1 billion miles beyond Pluto. That’s 4.1 billion miles from Earth.

This new rock is unlike anything we’ve ever visited before. It’s a tiny frigid object about the size of New York City, orbiting in an area of the Solar System known as the Kuiper Belt. This region of space, located beyond the orbit of Neptune, is filled with possibly millions of small frozen objects. It’s a bit like a super distant Asteroid Belt. Except the bodies in the Kuiper Belt are thought to be incredibly primitive — leftover remnants from the birth of the Solar System. When the planets first formed 4.5 billion years ago, the materials in the Kuiper Belt region didn’t join together to form new worlds but instead remained as tiny fragments. And they’ve mostly stayed the same ever since.

That’s because they’re so small and so far from the Sun. Kuiper Belt objects are incredibly cold — just 35 degrees Kelvin above absolute zero. At this temperature, the objects don’t change very much on the surface. They’ve essentially been frozen in time over billions of years. Plus they’re so small that they don’t evolve much inside either. Bigger worlds like Neptune or Uranus ultimately form internal engines, where materials deep inside the objects reshape under the forces of pressure and heat over millions of years. But the Kuiper Belt objects just aren’t big enough to do that. That means they’re like tiny time capsules, providing snapshots of what materials lurked about when our planetary system first came into being. “We’ve never been to anything like this that’s been kept in such a deep freeze so long,” Alan Stern, principal investigator for the New Horizons mission, tells The Verge. “Anything so perfectly preserved from the early days of the Solar System.”

Successfully passing by Ultima Thule is going to be an incredibly challenging task. Because it’s so small and so far away, the object is hard to see and track from Earth. And the New Horizons team only has one chance to get this flyby right. The spacecraft is currently traveling through space at 32,000 miles per hour. If something gets botched, there’s no way to turn New Horizons around and try again. “Like Pluto, it’s a one shot,” says Stern. “We don’t have a second spacecraft coming by a week later. And because it’s a very complex enterprise to do one of these flybys, there are literally hundreds of variables that all have to choreograph perfectly.”

New Horizons wasn’t always guaranteed a visit to an object like Ultima Thule. The vehicle’s primary mission was to fly by Pluto, with the possibility of passing by a second Kuiper Belt object later. But when the spacecraft first launched from Earth in January 2006, astronomers didn’t even know if there was an object close enough to Pluto that New Horizons could target. All the objects we knew about at the time were out of reach. So while the New Horizons team prepped for Pluto, they also searched the sky for the spacecraft’s second destination. Finally in 2014, they found a target using NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope: a Kuiper Belt object named 2014 MU69.

MU69, now nicknamed Ultima Thule, was ideally placed on New Horizons’ path out of the Solar System. The spacecraft still carried enough fuel to fire its thrusters and reach the object. So in October and November of 2015, before NASA had even officially approved of New Horizons’ new mission, the team operating the spacecraft did a few course correction maneuvers, putting the vehicle on track to meet up with Ultima Thule.

Since then, New Horizons has gradually closed in on the rock, guided by the team back on Earth. It’s also observed other distant objects in the Kuiper Belt, snapping some of the most distant pictures ever taken by a robot. But for many months at a time, New Horizons has slipped in and out of hibernation, a mode in which most of its instruments are turned off. It’s a way to prevent unneeded wear and tear on the vehicle while it travels. It’s also a bit like autopilot — a time when the spacecraft mostly just travels and doesn’t need as much oversight from the mission team on the ground.

Ultima Thule, as seen by New Horizons’ onboard camera LORRI on Christmas Eve

In the meantime, the New Horizons team had the daunting task of trying to learn as much as they can about Ultima Thule. Thought to be about 20 miles across, it’s too small and faint to visualize with any of the telescopes we have at our disposal here at Earth. That’s why the team has had to get creative. In 2017, New Horizons scientists were able to observe Ultima Thule as it passed in front of a background star. It was a momentary eclipse, known as an occultation, in which Ultima Thule briefly blocked out the star’s light. From that split-second crossing, the scientists were able to get a better understanding of the rock’s shape.

All indications point to this rock being weird. In fact, it may not even be a single rock. The occultation revealed that Ultima Thule is either shaped like a rubber duck, looking a bit like two mounds squashed together. Or it could be two separate rocks orbiting super close to one another. We really won’t know for sure until just a day or two before New Horizons reaches Ultima Thule. The tiny object is 100 times smaller than Pluto, making it harder to see in advance with New Horizons’ onboard cameras. The best pictures won’t come until New Horizons is more or less on top of the object. “This is a dot in the distance until the last minute, and then you snap your fingers, and you go from a point to a world in literally a 48-hour period,” says Stern.

That’s if everything goes according to plan. And Stern argues that this flyby is even more challenging than the one at Pluto, when New Horizons came within 7,750 miles of the dwarf planet’s surface. At that time, radio communication from Earth took 4.5 hours to reach New Horizons. But now that the spacecraft is farther away, it takes even longer — six hours — to get a signal to the vehicle. That, coupled with the small size and faintness of Ultima Thule, creates an even more complex trial for the scientists and engineers to overcome.

And the smallest unforeseen detail can muck something up at the last minute. Just last month, for instance, the New Horizons team averted a potentially big problem when they realized that the spacecraft had gone slightly off course. They eventually realized that each time the vehicle had reoriented itself to observe a far-off object in the Kuiper Belt, the movement slightly pushed New Horizons off track. Fortunately, the team caught this early enough so that they could correct the spacecraft’s trajectory and decided to sacrifice some upcoming observations to be extra careful. “That was a late catch, but the guy that discovered it is my hero,” says Stern.

An artistic rendering of New Horizons’ encounter at Ultima Thule, if the object turns out to be a pair of objects 

But now, there’s nothing left to be done. The final commands for the flyby sequence were uploaded to the spacecraft on Christmas Day, and those cannot be changed. New Horizons must do what it’s been designed to do: execute a series of pre-planned tasks when it flies by Ultima Thule on January 1st at 12:33AM ET, coming within 2,200 miles of the rock’s surface. It will snap pictures, map the object’s surface, look for moons and an atmosphere, and take the body’s temperature. Basically, it will try to learn all it can about Ultima Thule in a matter of a few seconds.

It’ll be a short wait before we get those first tantalizing up-close images, though. Four hours after the flyby, New Horizons will send a signal back to Earth to let the mission team know if the encounter was a success. And since radio communication takes six hours to reach our planet, we won’t know for 10 hours if the flyby went as planned. Then a few hours after that first signal, New Horizons will start the long process of sending back all of the data its collected, including the first high-resolution pictures.

Getting all of this data back to Earth will take up to two years. New Horizons will collect about 50 gigabits of data, which is the storage capacity you might find on a small flash drive. But because of the spacecraft’s low processing power, it’ll take up to 20 months to downlink everything to Earth. So new surprises and pictures will keep coming in throughout 2019 and 2020.

As for what we’ll find at Ultima Thule, the mission team is reluctant to speculate. The rock is truly in a new category of Solar System object, and there’s just no precedent for what we might find. But Stern is optimistic that we’ll see something amazing. “I don’t make predictions,” says Stern. “The only prediction I made at Pluto is we’d find something wonderful, and we did. I think the fun of this is we don’t know what we’re going to see.”

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‘Us’ Official Trailer

If you thought Kevin McAllister had it bad when his family abandoned him around Christmas, then clearly you didn’t see the Us trailer that premiered on Christmas. Jordan Peele’s follow up to Get Out focuses on a suburban family having a holiday from hell when four masked strangers–that appear to be evil versions of the family members–show up to their beach house to terrorize them. It continues to get creepier and more terrifying as the trailer goes on and the ensemble cast of award-winning talent put in some pretty fantastic performances. Even if horror movies aren’t your jam, one thing’s for sure–you’re never going to be able to listen to Luniz’s “I Got 5 on It” the same way ever again. Us hits theaters (and starts giving people nightmares) on March 15, 2019.

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NYPD Will Use Drone Technology In First For New Year's Eve Security

Thousands upon thousands of people are expected to pack into New York’s Times Square for the annual New Year’s Eve ball drop, as they have for more than a century. But this year will mark the first that the city’s officials will deploy drone technology as part of its increased security.

The measure will be part of a counter-terror initiative that also incorporates “counter-drone technology,” Bloomberg reported Friday, noting there was no known credible threat ahead of Monday’s event. Deputy Commissioner of Intelligence and Counterterrorism John Miller said during a press briefing this week that drones would work alongside other security measures and technology, including 1,225 portable and stationary cameras.

“What’s different this year is the counter-drone technology and the drone factor,” Miller said. “We’ll be deploying NYPD drones for overwatch. We haven’t done that before, but that’s going to give us a visual aid and a flexibility of being able to move a camera to a certain spot with great rapidity through a tremendous crowd.”

According to the New York Post, at least one of the NYPD’s drones “will be tethered to the top of a building to prevent potential attacks.” NBC News reported that this precaution was also in place to protect the crowd below in case of a malfunction.

Citing Police Commissioner James P. O’Neill, Bloomberg reported that thousands of NYPD officers on duty during New Year’s Eve will mean that nobody “will be more than 3.05m away from a uniformed or undercover plain clothes officer.” Helicopters, blocker vehicles, and bomb-sniffing police dogs will reportedly also be part of the NYPD’s boosted security, according to NBC News.

“The NYPD routinely does a great job of planning and securing large-scale events around New York City,” O’Neill said in a statement about this year’s security measures. “Nothing in our profession is done alone, however, and our members work hand-in-hand with our law-enforcement partners—including the FBI, the New York State Police, the MTA Police, and many others — all throughout the year in preparation.”

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Kids Of The 1980s Imagined The Year 2020 With Robot Butlers, Bubble-top Cities, And Nuclear War

Earlier this month we looked at predictions from kids at the turn of the 20th century. But what about more recently? Say, from the 1980s? Well, you’re in luck, because today we have predictions about the future from kids in 1984. And some of them are as dark and terrifying as you might guess for kids who were experiencing ever-present anxiety about the Cold War.

The Billings Gazette of October 24, 1984 devoted an entire section to Billings in the year 2020. And while it’s not quite 2020 yet (we’re getting very close!) it’s probably safe to take a peek and see how these kids did.

Some kids seem to be channeling George Jetson and his cartoon show that got just one original season in 1962 that was played on repeats forever until the 1985 reboot. The kids write about robot butlers and advances in medicine that produce lifespans of 150 years or more. But others, including the first two kids here, seem to be imagining a more fat, lazy, and apocalyptic vision of tomorrow. Some kids even predicted full-on nuclear war.

Robots and Computers

“Everybody will get fat and lazy because computers and robots do all the work,’’ Kim Vonlloklt, age 14, ninth grader, Lincoln Junior High

“The person’s micro chip, which has his history, birthday, etc., will be slipped under the skin in the palm.” Randy Stone, age 13, eighth grader, Castlerock Junior High

“Cameras will be all over the city for the computer to see. If the computers saw robbers or vandals the computer would eliminate them.” Joe Garcia, eighth grader, Castlerock Junior High

“The robots would cook us supper, make our beds, curl our hair, brush our teeth, and put on our clothes.” Stacy Roller, seventh grader, Castlerock Junior High

“Humans are no longer in charge of anything. They do what they are told. If they don’t, the robots kill them. There will be robots every-where watching to make sure humans don’t mess up.” Tracy Maroney, 406 Laurie Lane, eighth grader, Castlerock Junior High

Medicine

“I think there will be new medical breakthroughs, such as a cure for the common cold, saving many more people from cancer, and hair-growing formulas.” Allyson O’Loughlln, age 14, ninth grader, Lincoln Junior High

“Look for 150 years of long life and a pill to cure alcoholism. Diseases cured by gene-splicing will be staggering.” Judith Bradley

“Medical facilities and growth will double the current size to handle the ageing population and cosmetic and genetic advancements.” John Zavalney, Helena

Sports

“The Mustangs would have a robot for the coach. The umpire would be a robot so the people could not argue with the ump.” Shane Martinez, age 13, sixth grader, Garfield Elementary School

“There would be video sports where we could go jump into the TV and sing with the video stars.” Trista Borchardt, age 11, sixth grader, Garfield Elementary School

Government

“People with big investments will have more say in governing the city through big-time politics.” Brent Huseby, Red Lodge

“The sport that will be around is bobsledding like In the Olympics, but the track will be in space and will be made of forceshields.” Mike Christie, seventh grader, Castlerock Junior High

“The governor will be a wild and crazy old man with a robot to enforce all of his laws and a computer to control all human thoughts.” Kelvin Gebhardt, eighth grader, Castlerock Junior High

“I don’t even think we will have a government the way people get away with things now,” Aviil Uecker, age 11, fifth grader, Garfield Elementary School

After Nuclear War

“Downtown, skyscrapers laid sprawled on top of lessor buildings or were a mass of twisted steel. There was no living thing. The charred bodies of humans, dogs, cats, and birds lay everywhere, and the streets were littered with coins from the casinos. I proceeded northward to the Rims for a better view. A blackened church steeple leaned precariously, and from it a cross swayed in the wind. My hands and face were blistering; I knew I was dying. On a pad I wrote the date, and from memory I wrote Jeremiah:51 37, and below that I wrote ‘Lord, how hard it is for a rich man to die’” Aaron Iams

Jobs

“By the year 2020, Eastern Montana will be populated by 250,000 people and only about one-third of these people will have sufficient employment. Work will be mostly computer and high tech machines with a few maintainence [sic], food service and health care Jobs. Almost all employees will have to know something about computer control and many people will be starving because of in- sufficient education.” Frances J. Propstein

“Teenagers will not find much work because the computers take control of every fast-food chain and gas station job in the world.” Annette Sannon, eighth grader, Castlerock Junior High

City Life

“Automobiles will be silent and geared to flow smoothly from start to high speeds, eliminating screeching tires and thunderous mufflers. Atomic powered perhaps or by solar energy gathered in the entire outer material and becoming the propelling force through advanced technology. The fun vehicles will be a thing of the past and recognised via education as a means of non-sensate transportation, (no longer a play thing).” S. Stuart Johnson, Sheridan, Wyoming

“One giant air-filtering bubble will extend over our huge Metropolis, filtering our air day and night. Billings is its own huge production and manufacturing world, doing everything on its own. If anything or anyone is exposed to the raw air outside the bubble without special protection, they will become contaminated with pollution, and most likely die... Nature is almost totally destroyed, except for the weather, which will be produced on a daily basis, according to the wants of the people.” Suzanne Gahagan

Education

“There are no schools because we voted against it, so all you have to know is how to talk.” Ronda Young, seventh grader

“Picture a personal computer at every desk. Each computer will be connected to the main computer in the school office The computers will grade the homework and tests instantly. They will even be used to take daily attendance. One advantage of using computers in education is a reduced school staff. There will be one teacher for each department to program the lessons. A few people will work In the main computer room, and aides will watch the television monitors posted in each room to prevent discipline problems “ Mark Allen, Castlerock Junior High

How do you think they did? The year 2020 (or, at least the year 2019) isn’t that different from 1984 in many ways. At least things haven’t changed quite dramatically as these kids imagined they would. And that’s definitely a good thing when you’ve got kids who imagine schools closing down and nature being completely destroyed.
What other things do you have to tell us, Young Nostradamus from Montana? Who wins the Super Bowl this year? 

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Enormous 18th-Century Ice House Re-Discovered Under London Street

Archaeologists in London have re-discovered a subterranean ice house near Regent’s Park. Dating back to the 1780s, the egg-shaped cavern was used to store ice, which was imported from as far away as Norway.

Made from brick, the structure would have been one of the largest of its kind at the time, according to the Museum of London Archaeology (MOLA). The egg-shaped chamber measures 25 feet (7.5 meters) wide and 31 feet (9.5 meters) deep. Archaeologists with MOLA found the ice house, also known as an ice well, along with its entrance chamber and vaulted ante-chamber, during preparations for the development of the Regent’s Crescent residential project.

A MOLA archaeologist brushes off the exterior of the ice house.

MOLA said the ice house is in remarkable condition, given that buildings directly above it were destroyed during the London Blitz of the Second World War, and that a subway line runs about 32 feet (10 meters) underneath, as the Guardian reports.

It’s hard to believe that a structure as large as this could have gone missing, but the entrance was buried during clean-up operations after the Blitz.

“There was always an understanding that there was an ice house here somewhere, but we weren’t sure where,” David Sorapure, the head of Built Heritage at MOLA, told the Guardian. “Even after we discovered where the entrance was, we weren’t quite sure how big it was, or how you got in.”

MOLA is working at the site on behalf of Great Marlborough Estates, which is currently redeveloping Regent’s Crescent, which once boasted elaborate stucco terraces designed by architect John Nash, who also designed Buckingham Palace. The ice well was built underneath the terraces in the 1780s by Samuel Dash, who had ties to the brewing industry. By the 1820s, ice-merchant and confectioner William Leftwich was using the Ice House to store and supply ice for wealthy Londoners, according to MOLA.

While modern refrigeration had yet to be invented, that didn’t deter Englanders from wanting easy access to ice. It wasn’t possible back then to create ice artificially, so it had to be gathered from local waterways and stored in subterranean ice houses, of which there were thousands in London alone (though much smaller than the newly discovered ice house).

As the Guardian reports, workers at the ice house would descend into the chamber to collect pieces of ice when needed. The ice would have been delivered to customers, including restaurants and potentially doctors and dentists, via a horse-drawn cart.

Norwegian ice cutters handle blocks of ice harvested from frozen lakes, circa 1900.

While we may take access to ice for granted today, the frozen stuff was in high demand in Leftwich’s day. According to a MOLA press release:

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Leftwich was one of first people to recognise the potential for profit in imported ice: in 1822, following a very mild winter, he chartered a vessel to make the 2000km round trip from Great Yarmouth to Norway to collect 300 tonnes of ice harvested from crystal-clear frozen lakes, an example of “the extraordinary the lengths gone to at this time to serve up luxury fashionable frozen treats and furnish food traders and retailers with ice” (as put by David Sorapure, our Head of Built Heritage). The venture was not without risk: previous imports had been lost at sea, or melted whilst baffled customs officials dithered over how to tax such novel cargo.

The newly re-discovered ice house has now been designated a Scheduled Monument by Historic England. Restoration work is planned for the structure, along with the construction of a viewing corridor to allow public access.

As a fun, final fact: the first commercial ice-making machine was invented in 1854.

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COCKTAIL CODEX: FUNDAMENTALS, FORMULAS, EVOLUTIONS

For those not in the know, Death & Co. is both a world-renowned craft cocktail bar located in NYC and Denver, as well as the name of a definitive spirit-mixing book containing over 500 recipes — helmed and written, respectively, by Alex Day, Nick Fauchald, and David Kaplan. Needless to say, they know a thing or two about alcohol. While their first written work is a monolithic tome of information, their second, Cocktail Codex, elegantly pares down their expertise into something a bit more digestible.

According to the trio of liquor mavens, “There are only six cocktails.” That is to say, every cocktail that exists (or likely will ever exist) can be classified into one of six different families: the daiquiri, flip, martini, old-fashioned, sidecar, and whiskey highball. Everything else is just a permutation therein. This book breaks down each of those six root beverages — through flowcharts, family trees, informational charts, and more — to help mixologists everywhere understand the how, why, and when of each drink. It also offers tips and tricks like ingredient substitutions and omissions to improve the overall bartending skills of the reader. The mixologist’s equivalent to Darwin’s On the Origin of Species, this $26 hardcover should be on the coffee table of every cocktail enthusiast. $26.00

 

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BOOKER'S 30TH ANNIVERSARY BOURBON

Booker Noe was a pioneer in the small batch bourbon movement, and his name has adorned bottles of one of the best barrel-strength bourbons for the past three decades. This 30th-anniversary edition honors his legacy once again, blending 9-year-old and 16-year-old bourbon that is uncut and unfiltered. The special edition is bottled at 125.8 proof and topped with a silver wax before being packaged in a box made from reclaimed wood from the same rickhouses where Booker himself once roamed. $200

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Scientists Just Melted A Hole Through 3,500 Feet Of Ice To Reach A Mysterious Antarctic Lake

While you were baking cookies and binging Netflix shows over Christmas, a team of about 50 scientists, drillers, and support staff was attempting to punch through nearly 1,219.20m of ice to access an Antarctic subglacial lake for just the second time in human history. And folks, they did it.

Recently, the Subglacial Antarctic Lakes Scientific Access (SALSA) team announced they’d reached Lake Mercer after melting their way through an enormous frozen river with a high-pressure, hot-water drill. The multi-year effort to tap into the subglacial lake—one of approximately 400 scientists have detected across Antarctica—offers a rare opportunity to study the biology and chemistry of the most isolated ecosystems on Earth.

The only other subglacial lake humans have drilled into—nearby Lake Whillans, sampled in 2013—demonstrated that these extreme environments can play host to diverse microbial life. Naturally, scientists are stoked to see what they’ll find lurking in Lake Mercer’s icy waters.

“We don’t know what we’ll find,” John Priscu, a biogeochemist at Montana State University and chief scientist for SALSA, told Earther via satellite phone from the SALSA drill camp on the Whillans Ice Plain. “We’re just learning, it’s only the second time that this has been done.”

Priscu, along with two other members of the SALSA science team, three drillers, and two marine technicians, flew into the camp located 1,046km from McMurdo station on December 18. The rest of the science team arrived the following day with 3,629kg of cargo in tow—some of the final supplies the team required after ice tractors pulled out a million pounds of drilling equipment, makeshift laboratories, and camp structures last December.

According to the latest SALSA blog post, the team began drilling its main borehole on the evening of December 23. (A secondary borehole that acts as a well, its water back-pumped into the main hole after being filtered and sterilized, was started a night earlier, Priscu told Earther.) Things apparently proceeded smoothly, with the team reaching the 54-square-mile lake on the evening of December 26 after drilling to a depth of 3,556 feet (1,084 meters).

Now that the lake is open, the real fun has begun. The SALSA team is deploying a suite of instruments to study the lake, including a CTD (Conductivity, Temperature, Depth) probe that will assess temperature and provide details on the structure of the water column, and a remotely operated vehicle to take similar measurements away from the borehole and capture 4k video. Researchers will collect samples of water and microbial DNA, as well as ice from the top of the lake and sediment from the bottom.

 

While much of the initial analysis of these samples will be done on-site, the samples and data collected through this endeavour will likely keep scientists busy for years to come.

In addition to possibly discovering life forms that haven’t seen the Sun in centuries, subglacial Lake Mercer offers an opportunity to better understand the local hydrology, including how lakes like this one affect the flow of the massive ice streams they’re buried beneath. Studying subglacial Lake Mercer’s sediments could also help determine whether it, like Lake Whillans located closer to the sea, was once a marine environment, thus filling an important gap in our understanding of Antarctic history, Priscu said.

 

For Siegfried, who leads a four-person geophysics team that’s spent the last 5+ weeks in the region servicing a long-term GPS array and installing electromagnetic instruments to map subglacial water, being at the SALSA camp has been “extraordinary.” The team arrived last week just as the drillers were pulling their hose out of the borehole after breaking through to the lake, Siegfried wrote Earther via satellite internet. Having spent over a month camping out alone on the ice, it’s felt like being in a giant city.

“We’re knee-deep right [now] sampling the deepest standing water body humans have ever accessed beneath Antarctica,” Siegfried wrote. 

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THE DEAD RABBIT MIXOLOGY & MAYHEM

Already known as one of the best cocktail bars in the world, The Dead Rabbit decided to head in a totally new direction after the success of The Dead Rabbit Drinks Manual in 2015. The lower Manhattan bar made their entire menu into a six-part, serialized graphic novel, which is reborn for the masses via this hardbound book. It features 90 cocktail recipes, one on every other page next to a narrative featuring the bar's "hybrid man-rabbit anti-hero" who plays the role of real-life Irish gang leader John Morrissey who died in 1878 in New York City. $18.00

 

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New Horizons Scientists Double Down On 'Ultima Thule' Nickname Despite Nazi Associations

The isle of Thule as it appears on an old map

The excitement around NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft arriving at its latest target, an oddly shaped object called (486958) 2014 MU69, has dredged up a fact that often goes unstated—the object’s nickname, “Ultima Thule,” carries links to Nazism.

Though most people haven’t heard of the term’s unsavoury use by the Nazis, the New Horizons team was aware of it and went with the name anyway, science reporter Meghan Bartels reported for Newsweek in March 2018.

The New Horizons team continues to defend the term today.

Ultima Thule was one of 37 monikers that people nominated and was a “relatively common suggestion,” though not common enough to suggest ballot-stuffing by trolls or other bad actors, according to Bartels’ reporting.

The name dates back to the Roman empire, when it was used to describe some far, icy land, and even appeared on maps. The New Horizons team thought it was an apt term for MU69, the spacecraft’s next target beyond Pluto.

But just looking at the Wikipedia page for “Thule” reveals that according to far-right German mythology, this place was the original origin of the “Aryan race.” According to Bartels’ reporting, the term acquired this connotation in the 19th century and was used by the Nazi party.

NASA and the New Horizons team considered the alternate meaning and included it in the vote anyway, since this wasn’t the “primary association,” Mark Showalter, an astronomer on the New Horizons team, told Bartels. The name didn’t get the most votes from the public, but NASA decided that it was the best fit for the object.

Though Bartels’ story came out in March 2018, it resurfaced on Twitter this week in conjunction with New Horizons’ arrival at the object. New Horizons principal investigator Alan Stern responded to concerns over the term’s alternate meaning at a press conference on Wednesday.

“The term ‘Ultima Thule’ was many centuries old... and is a wonderful name for exploration. That’s why we chose it. Just because some bad guys once liked that term, we’re not going to let them hijack it,” Stern said.

He did not address why the team decided on the name despite already knowing about the negative connotations. Plenty of symbols, like eagles and lighting bolts, have gained secondary, nefarious meanings due to Nazi associations—but “Ultima Thule” was selected despite the secondary meaning still used today by neo-Nazis and members of the alt-right, and at a time where Nazism is on the rise in the United States.

Nevertheless, Ultima Thule isn’t the object’s official name - a formal name will need to be proposed to the International Astronomical Union.

I get it: It’s a cool name, and no one wants to be called a Nazi. But it’s a bummer that the New Horizons team is doubling down on the name, despite already knowing about its nefarious second meaning.

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How The Soviet Union Once Built The Noisiest Airliner In The World Out Of A Nuclear Bomber

It’s the 1950s, and you’re the Soviet Union. Your deepest rivals, the Americans and their corporations, are all preparing the latest and greatest jet airliners to fly them all over the world. And you’ve got... pretty much nothing. But you do have a huge bomber ready to deliver the apocalypse.

The Tupolev Tu-95 was just that bomber, ready to fly from Arctic bases in the Soviet Union to drop a huge nuke or 10 on all the big and shiny American cities we all love. With its eight contra-rotating propeller blades approaching the speed of sound, it was so loud it could make your bones rattle. But more importantly, it existed. And it had the range. So the Soviets decided to adapt it into an airliner to rival planes like the Boeing 707, as you’ll learn in this extremely cromulent video.

Of course, “rival” is relative. The Tupolev Tu-114, as it became known, had some pretty significant drawbacks. Even though it’s one of the fastest propeller-powered planes of all time, it still wasn’t a jet. Plus, those noisy engines weren’t exactly quieted for civilian use, with decibel levels roughly equivalent to a car horn blaring in your face for hours on end.

But hey, at least it was reliable.

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10 MOST ILLEGAL PLACES TO TRAVEL IN THE WORLD

The world may be your oyster, but there are some pearls you’ll never see. Amongst the planet’s many wonders are places that are too dangerous, too protected or too secretive to visit. Only a select few will ever experience these exclusive spots, sometimes at the risk of injury or death.

If you’re planning your next holiday, cross these 10 illegal travel destinations off your bucket list. They’re beautiful and mysterious, but totally forbidden to travellers.

Poveglia | Italy

Remember Shutter Island? Poveglia [Pictured above] is a real-life version. The small isle, located between Venice and Lido in Northern Italy, was once home to a mental institution that allegedly tortured and experimented upon its patients. Prior to its stint with the mentally ill, Poveglia was used as a quarantine colony where the dead and dying, some of whom were mistaken for corpses, were burned on giant pyres during times of plague. Today the island is widely considered to be haunted, and both locals and tourists are banned from visiting.

North Sentinel Island | Andaman Islands, India

In the Bay of Bengal is North Sentinel Island, home to the indigenous Sentinelese people – and no one else. Not only is the island difficult to reach thanks to the surrounding coral reefs, it’s also almost impossible to visit due to the hostility of its native population. The Sentinelese reject contact with all other peoples, and will use force to ensure they remain untouched by modern civilisation. The Indian government has declared the entire island an exclusion zone, and unless an arrow in the leg is your idea of a good time, it’s best to steer clear.

Area 51 | Nevada, USA

No list of forbidden travel is complete without Area 51, a hush-hush military base in Southern Nevada. The site wasn’t officially acknowledged until 2013, when released CIA documents confirmed its existence. What happens there is similarly shrouded in mystery. It’s most likely used for the development and testing of aircraft and weapons for the US military, but conspiracy theorists believe its real purpose is extraterrestrial research. Alien enthusiasts frequently visit the surrounding territory, but Area 51 itself is strictly prohibited.

Ilha da Queimada Grande | Brazil

Ilha da Queimada Grande sounds like somewhere you’d stretch out on a beach, tropical cocktail in hand, and sunbathe to the sound of azure waves gently lapping the shore. Until you hear its nickname: Snake Island. The inhospitable isle is home to no humans, only thousands of golden lancehead pit vipers – one of the deadliest species of snake in the world. The Brazilian government has outlawed any visitors from attempting to visit the island, barring the occasional scientist.

Lascaux Caves | France

The labyrinthine Lascaux Caves are home to one of the most celebrated examples of Palaeolithic cave paintings ever discovered. The ancient artwork, which primarily depicts large animals, is believed to be more than 17,500 years old. Unfortunately, you’ll never see it. The caves were once open to the public, but were closed when the carbon dioxide, heat, humidity and other contaminants produced by visitors began to damage the art. Today the UNESCO World Heritage Site is rarely entered by anyone other than a security guard, who only visits once a week for a few minutes at a time.

Surtsey | Iceland

Surtsey, a volcanic island situated off the southern coast of Iceland, is one of the youngest places on the planet. The island emerged from the Atlantic following an extended volcanic eruption in the 1960s. Only a few scientists have ever been allowed to set foot on Surtsey, making it one of the world’s most, if not the most, pristine natural environments. Researchers stay in the island’s only construction, a tiny hut with a few bunk beds, and must erase all traces of their existence when they leave. The purity of the environment is so closely guarded that visiting scientists once had to dig up potatoes a group of pranksters planted as a joke.

Mezhgorye | Russia

What happens in Russia, stays in Russia. Mezhgorye is a mysterious, closed town in the Republic of Bashkortostan, Russia. Its residents are said to be working on a secret program related to nearby Mount Yamantaw, most likely a nuclear facility or bunker. When questioned about Mezhgorye, the Russian government has given a variety of inconclusive answers ranging from a coal warehouse, to a food storage area, to a repository of national treasures. One thing’s for sure: this illegal travel destination won’t be the site of your next spa holiday.

Bhangarh Fort | India

Located in the Indian state of Rajasthan, the Bhangarh Fort is a 17th-century structure steeped in mystery, myth and rumour. Legends about the fort involve curses, occult magicians, ghastly paranormal encounters and fatal accidents involving unsuspecting tourists. Today, Bhangarh Fort is considered one the most haunted places in India and the government has imposed strict regulations for entry. While you’re welcome to explore the ruins during the day, visitors are forbidden from entering the grounds between sunset and sunrise. Locals say those who ignore the rule are never seen again.

Mount Weather Emergency Operations Center | Virginia, USA

Unless you belong to the most elite echelons of US politicians and military personnel, you will never see this secretive facility. Mount Weather is designed to be the safest place on the planet, where high-ranking government officials can take shelter in case of a national disaster or global crisis. The massive complex is equipped with everything from power plants and hospitals, to police and fire departments, to dining and recreation areas, to a sewage plant and a mass transit system, to its own leaders and laws. Good luck getting past the chain link fences, razor wire and armed guards on doomsday.

Svalbard Global Seed Vault | Norway

A virtual tour is the closest you’ll get to visiting the Svalbard Seed Vault, which houses over 980,000 varieties of the world’s crops in a vast subterranean facility built 400 feet into a mountainside on the Norwegian island of Spitsbergen. Almost every country in the world has deposited specimens into the seed bank. If a devastating natural or manmade disaster occurs, governments will be able to request seeds from the vault to restart their agricultural production. Employees of the facility are the only people allowed inside, but it’s for the best – in the event of the apocalypse, you don’t want to be the guy who accidentally destroyed the only hope of restoring the world’s food supply, do you?

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New ‘Kingdom’ Trailer Teases Netflix’s South Korean Zombie Series

Like the dead, Netflix never sleeps and the streaming giant will continue to roll out even more exciting international series in 2019, on the heels of hit’s like the German-language hit Dark and the Danish YA apocalypse drama The Rain. Now, they’re dipping a severed toe into the zombie genre with the South Korean period drama Kingdom. Set in an ancient kingdom riddled with corruption and death, Kingdom follows the crown prince on a suicide mission to save the kingdom when a zombie plague sweeps the countryside after reports of the king’s death.

“Kingdom captured our imaginations from the moment we read the script with its visual feast of historical drama blended with supernatural fantasy,” said Netflix’s VP of international originals, Erik Barmack, when the project was announced. “We are incredibly honored by this rare opportunity of pairing two premier creative minds in Korea – film director Kim Seong-hun and television writer Kim Eun-hee.”.

The six-episode series, and stars a familiar face in the Netflix familly, Sense8’s Bae Doona, alongside Ju Ji-Hoon, Ryu Seung-Ryong, Kim Sangho, Heo Joon-Ho, and Jeon Seok-Ho. Kingdom debuts on Netflix at the end of this month, and the streaming outlet must have some mighty confidence in it, because they’ve already renewed the big-budget series for a second season, which is expected to go into production in February 2019. It’s easy to see why — the trailer teases cinematic and intense zombie action with the novelty of a period setting. This could definitely be a huge hit for the company.

Kingdom premieres on Netflix on Friday, January 25th.

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We went on a fake Mars mission in Hawaii

Before we can send humans to Mars, we’ll need to select people who can live and work together in an extreme and distant environment. So how do we figure that out? One way is to re-create Mars here on Earth.

That’s where HI-SEAS comes in. It’s a fake interplanetary habitat located on an active volcano on Hawaii’s Big Island. From 2013 to 2018, the University of Hawaii operated simulated Martian missions inside the habitat. For months at a time, people would live inside HI-SEAS, re-creating the conditions they might experience during a Mars mission. That meant conserving water, eating preserved foods, and simulating the delay in radio communications between Earth and Mars. They also couldn’t go outside of the habitat unless they were wearing a full suit.

The University of Hawaii ran five successful simulations with HI-SEAS. However, its sixth mission was cut short early in 2018 after a crew member was injured when trying to turn on a backup generator. Now, HI-SEAS is in a state of transition. The owner of the habitat decided to repurpose the structure to do simulated Moon missions since NASA has recently refocused its attention on sending humans to the lunar surface again. However, it’s possible that HI-SEAS may host simulated Mars missions in the future, too, possibly as soon as 2020.

Either way, simulating human missions to Mars will be critical before we do the real thing, and habitats like HI-SEAS could tell us a lot about the people who may be right for the trip.

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MARVELOCITY: THE MARVEL COMICS ART OF ALEX ROSS

While Marvel’s cinematic universe is certainly at the forefront of everyone’s minds this year, thanks in no small part to the overwhelming success of Infinity War, it’s important we remember that the franchise wouldn’t exist without the source material: comic books. Now, one of the names that put the brand in the spotlight (and perhaps the greatest comic artist of all time), Alex Ross, is getting a book dedicated to his work in the franchise.

Put together by the same team that previously collected his work with DC in Mythology: The DC Comics Art of Alex Ross, this 312-page tome is loaded from cover to cover with full-color art spanning the entirety of his prolific career, as well as photos and stories from his childhood. Detailing his humble beginnings to his meteoric rise and everything in between, this is the ultimate coffee table book for lovers of art, graphic novels, and anyone who remembers what it was like to be a little kid with a dream. Get it now for $25.

 

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Klipsch's New Wireless Earbuds Are Wooing Me With A Zippo-Like Charging Case

Apple’s AirPods paved the way for decent wireless earbuds, but the lump of white plastic that serves as their charging case leaves something to be aesthetically desired. Limited battery life means you’ll have to carry some way to recharge wireless earbuds, though, and Klipsch is seriously wooing me with a battery case that looks like an iconic Zippo lighter.

The company’s new T5 True Wireless Headphones won’t hit North America until June at the earliest, at which point there will be no shortage of wireless earbuds to choose from, as you can expect countless more to be revealed at CES 2019 next week.

Battery life is pegged at eight hours on a full charge, but that can be boosted to nearly 24 hours with occasional dockings in the T5's lovely, stainless steel battery case.

At $US199 ($287) they’re more expensive than Apple’s $US159 ($229) AirPods, and won’t have all the extra features Apple offers when these are paired to an iOS device. There’s also no way to tell how these will sound in comparison until we get a chance to try them out in person—which might happen much later than CES.

But if that battery case makes the same satisfying clink-clank sound when you open and close the lid like a Zippo lighter does, I might be already reaching for my wallet.

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China Successfully Touches Down Chang'e 4, First Soft-Landed Craft On The Far Side Of The Moon

The China National Space Administration (CNSA) has landed the Chang’e 4 lunar probe on the far side of the Moon, Chinese media reported on Wednesday night (Eastern Time)—marking the first time that any known spacecraft has made a soft landing on the Moon’s more distant half.

According to the Xinhua News Agency (a state media network), the Chang’e 4 probe launched from Xichang Satellite Launch Center in Sichuan Province on a Long March-3B carrier rocket on Dec. 8, 2018, and has orbited the Moon since Dec. 12. It delivered both a lander and a rover, while its Queqiao (Magpie Bridge) relay satellite “is operating in the halo orbit around the second Lagrangian (L2) point of the Earth-Moon system,” Xinhua added.

The state-owned CGTN network posted a photo it said was the world’s first close shot of [the] moon’s far side” on Twitter.

There appears to have been some earlier confusion about whether the landing actually occurred, as the state-run China Daily and CGTN deleted tweets celebrating the accomplishment earlier this evening. However, other Chinese media including the state-run China Central Television and the Communist Party of China-owned Global Times later confirmed Chang’e 4 had touched down on the lunar surface, per the Guardian.

The Moon is locked such that its orbit around the Earth is synchronised with its rotational speed—meaning that the far side is always pointing away from the planet. Contrary to its popular nickname, the far side of the Moon is not dark, and receives as much sunlight as its Earth-facing side. According to National Geographic, though CNSA is secretive, previous reports indicated it was targeting the Von Kármán crater located in the Moon’s South Pole-Aitken basin, the latter of which is “a low-lying feature more than 2,414km across that covers nearly a quarter of the Moon’s surface,” in addition to one of the largest known impact craters in the Solar System.

Priorities for the craft and its Earth-based control team include experiments on lunar low-frequency radio, low-gravity plant growth, and the relationship between solar winds and the Moon’s surface, as well as to determine “whether there is water or other resources at the poles,” according to CNN. Signals cannot pass through the Moon to the landing site, meaning the relay satellite is the only communication method—though this makes it ideal for a number of interesting experiments and may pave the way for future Chinese missions, CNN wrote:

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“Since the far side of the moon is shielded from electromagnetic interference from the Earth, it’s an ideal place to research the space environment and solar bursts, and the probe can ‘listen’ to the deeper reaches of the cosmos,” said Tongjie Liu, deputy director of the Lunar Exploration and Space Program Center for the China National Space Administration.

... “It is highly likely that with the success of Chang’e — and the concurrent success of the human spaceflight Shenzhou program — the two programs will eventually be combined toward a Chinese human spaceflight program to the Moon,” [U.S. Naval War College professor Joan Johnson-Freese] added. “Odds of the next voice transmission from the Moon being in Mandarin are high.”

 

As CNN noted, the Chinese space program’s last lander, Yutu (Jade Rabbit), went out of operation in 2016 after making history as the first spacecraft from a nation other than the U.S. or Russia to make a lunar landing. (Other artificial objects have crash-landed on the Moon, such as defunct orbiters.)

The chief designer of China’s lunar probe program, Wu Weiren, said that mission provided valuable insights for the design of Chang’e 4, according to CNN. Several of the instruments aboard Chang’e 4 were previously used in the Yutu lander.

“It’s really a historic time, and I am very very excited!” China University of Geosciences planetary geoscientist Long Xiao wrote in an email to National Geographic. “With the successful landing and taking pictures by both the lander and rover soon, I am looking forward to see the real face of the far side!”

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New Trailer For ‘The Prodigy’ 

The Prodigy opens in theaters on February 8th, 2019.

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First Trailer for Netflix’s ‘Close’ Sees Noomi Rapace Doing Work as a Bodyguard

It’s a rare thing to watch a trailer for an action-thriller with a female lead, though luckily these days it’s becoming more and more common. Films like Lucy, Widows, and Atomic Blonde have picked up where contemporary classics like Aliens and Terminator 2 left off. Now, continuing that trend on the worldwide phenom that is Netflix, is Close, an action-thriller that stars Noomi Rapace in a role that could as easily have been written for Liam Neeson or [insert male action-thriller lead here.]

And yet, the first trailer for Close shows off just what sort of tone (physically and mood-wise) Rapace brings to the role. Writer-director Vicky Jewson (Born of War) shepherds this female-driven flick that centers on Rapace’s hardened and highly competent security expert who is tasked with protecting a young, rich heiress (Sophie Nelisse). When the plan goes awry, as they often tend to do in these movies, they’ll have to unravel a mysterious conspiracy if they hope to survive. The plot may sound familiar, but Close, available to stream on Netflix starting January 18th, promises to be worth a watch for Rapace’s performance and to see what women both in front of and behind the camera can bring to the genre.