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

[MIKA27]

New Robocop Trailer:

I personally love Sci-fi so will watch it. Unsure if it will be brilliant but you never know. It seems to have a pretty big cast of well knowns....

[MIKA27]

Montague Paratrooper Bike

While you definitely don't need to jump out of the back of a plane to use a Montague Paratrooper Folding Bike ($775-$850), you'd look a lot more badass if you did. These are the same bikes used by American military paratroopers, so you know they're built to handle punishment, while retaining the ability to collapse into a small, portable package. This makes them ideal for stashing in the trunk of your car, boat, RV, or plane — any vehicle where space is at a premium — and then quickly deploy them with no need for tools.

[MIKA27]

Buffalo Trace Stagg Jr Bourbon

When it comes to big, barrel-proof bourbons, there aren't many that are in the same class as George T. Stagg.

After waiting for it to properly mature, Buffalo Trace is releasing a younger version of their award winning bourbon, named Stagg Jr. ($50).

The son of Stagg is another beastly entry, clocking in at 134.4 proof, and also happens to be another incredibly inviting spirit. It's unrestrained and unapologetic, with strong oak, vanilla and even some smoky brown sugar flavors that should satisfy even the most hardcore bourbon fanatic. This young buck is poised to grab your attention, and might even challenge his old man for the spotlight.

[MIKA27]

Russia mocks Britain, the little island

Russia mocked Britain today as “a small island no one listens to”, sparking a diplomatic spat with David Cameron.

The Prime Minister insisted that Britain remained a major world power.

Tensions surrounding the Syrian crisis boiled over at a G20 summit in St Petersburg. Mr Cameron has backed calls for military intervention in Syria after the Assad regime allegedly used chemical weapons.

Mr Putin has opposed intervention and questioned Western claims about the attack. Britain has faced questions about its role and influence in the world since Mr Cameron was embarrassed by last week’s Commons vote to rule out a military strike against Syria.

Dmitry Peskov, Mr Putin’s official spokesman, is said to have highlighted that embarrassment, telling Russian journalists that Britain was now diplomatically irrelevant.

Britain is “just a small island … no one pays any attention to them”, Mr Peskov is reported to have said. The blunt remarks appeared to realise British fears that the Russians would use the St Petersburg summit to upstage Mr Cameron over his criticism of Syria, Russia’s closest Middle Eastern ally.

The Russian official is also said to have joked about Russian “oligarchs” buying up large parts of Chelsea and other upmarket London districts.

The remarks, which were reported by the BBC, could not be verified, but were apparently accepted as genuine by the Prime Minister in a BBC interview.

In the interview, Mr Cameron angrily rejected the Russian dismissal of British influence. “I don’t accept that for a moment,” he said, insisting that Britain remained a power in world affairs.

“Britain will be one of the leaders in bringing forward plans for a peace process for Syria,” he said. “Britain will be leading the argument across the globe for continuing to respond strongly on chemical weapons.”

A No 10 source expressed irritation at the Russian comments.

“As host of guests from the world’s leading countries, I’m sure the Russians will want to clarify these reported remarks, particularly at a G20 where it’s a very British agenda on trade and tax.”

Despite Mr Cameron’s defence of Britain, the Russian jibe follows concerns among Tory MPs that the failure to follow through on promises of action in Syria has left the country diminished.

The Prime Minister had helped push Barack Obama towards US intervention in Syria. The US president and Mr Cameron are not holding formal meetings in St Petersburg, leading to speculation that their relationship is strained.

[MIKA27]

Oradour-sur-Glane, France: moments of Nazi massacre frozen in time

Anthony Peregrine finds a visit to Oradour-sur-Glane a confronting experience, just as the German president did earlier this week.

It is inconceivable that any images of Oradour-sur-Glane – the French village wiped out by the Waffen SS in June 1944 – could be anything other than moving. But those from Wednesday this week were notably significant.

German President Joachim Gauck – the first German leader to visit the scene of the Nazis’ worst atrocity in western Europe – stood hand in hand with French President François Hollande in the roofless village church where 240 women and 205 children were massacred. They listened as Robert Hébras – one of only six people to survive the slaughter, one of two still alive – explained how the womenfolk and young had been variously asphyxiated, machine-gunned and burnt alive. They certainly saw the flattened pushchair, left in place where it had been found before the altar.

Then they took 88-year-old Hébras by the shoulder and hand, turned and walked away, with undertakers’ solemnity. As they made clear beforehand, the present-day families of the victims weren’t looking for apologies – just the recognition and regret that President Gauck brought with him. Afterwards, the other living survivor, Jean-Marcel Darthout, said: “I’ve only got one thing to say – bravo, thank you, and at last.”

Oradour had been waiting for this moment, frozen in time for 69 years. After the war, it was decided neither to demolish nor rebuild the village 15 miles north west of Limoges. It was to be left as it was after a unit of the 2nd SS Panzer Division Das Reich roared through, killing and torching. Seven decades on, the jagged ruins still cry the desperation of a little rural spot violated beyond belief.

Here, deep in the Limousin countryside of amenable hills, lakes, forests and pastures full of russet cattle, a peaceful community lived, farmed, went fishing, drank in 12 cafés and were as unaffected by the war as a village could be.

Then, at two o’clock on the warm Saturday afternoon of June 10 1944, the war showed up with scarcely believable savagery; 642 villagers were massacred. Since 1999, a stunningly effective Centre de la Mémoire has been trying to explain how things came to this. Set back from the devastated village, it slots into a warp in the landscape, its glass reflecting surrounding bucolic tranquillity, the peace ruptured by slashes of steel plate tearing the air at the entry. Within, brilliantly presented films, testimonials, exhibits and texts interweave Oradour’s story with that of Nazism and the war in general.

The three collided in the immediate aftermath of D-Day. Based in south-west France, the elite Das Reich division was among German forces ordered north to Normandy. En route, they were to clear up Resistance forces who, pumped up by the landings, were growing increasingly audacious. The Das Reich troops had recently arrived in France from the Eastern Front – and had brought Eastern Front methods with them. On June 9, they hanged 99 Resistants from buildings in Tulle (coincidentally, François Hollande’s electoral fief).

Similar exactions were perpetrated in nearby towns and villages. Then, on June 10, 200 of them encircled Oradour. No one yet knows why this unassuming settlement was chosen for the ultimate horror. Theories that it was in reprisal for the shooting of a popular SS officer, or that the Nazis were fearful for gold they’d looted in Russia, remain controversial. The most likely explanation is that Das Reich was keen to make an example of a French community – and Oradour was the next one along. In any event, most historians agree that this was a premeditated action, rather than in-the-heat-of-battle fury.

Oradour villagers were rounded up to the Champ de Foire main square, convinced they were going to be subject to a simple ID check. The men were separated from women and children, and taken to six barns. “We were laughing,” says survivor Darthout. “We weren’t afraid. We were thinking of the next day’s soccer match.” Then they were machine-gunned, and the masses of bodies – many still alive – were set alight. Darthout, and four others, survived by covering themselves with the corpses of their neighbours.

Meanwhile, women and children were herded into the church, into which the Germans threw incendiary grenades. Only one woman survived. The attackers then fired the entire village.

Oradour now stands as it did when the Nazi blaze went out. It looks appallingly like a 20th-century Pompeii. Crumbling façades, their windows like sightless eyes, front wrecked shops and homes – rendered unbearably poignant by the rusting detail. In houses there are fire-twisted lamps, sewing machines and pans. Pipes and wires still hang, ruptured, ripped and useless. Tram tracks run everywhere and, now, nowhere. The car from which the village mayor was hauled and shot slumps in the road. The butcher’s shop retains more pans, scales and meathooks.

And in the church there is that pushchair. It is the accumulation of both destruction and survivals of very ordinary existence that smacks the senses. There are streets full of both. Stop, listen and you may hear the echoes of life. Here was a functioning village like thousands of others – with its butchers, cobblers and bakery (see the plaques) – and it was obliterated.

Signs, all the more effective for being Fifties originals, point out spots where killings happened. They also bid, a bit superfluously, “Silence!” and “Remember!” Some people have likened contemporary Oradour to a film set, but it would only look like that if you arrived quite ignorant of the story. The site is intolerably real, and the feelings generated go beyond words.

Though, of course, Oradour still generates words by the million. The involvement of Alsacien soldiers enrolled in the German Army against their wishes – the Malgré Nous – continues to cause ill feeling within France. Meanwhile, German authorities are considering reopening cases against six surviving ex-SS men allegedly present at Oradour. The release of Stasi files brought to the fore fresh evidence against them. And there rumbles on a revisionist claim that Resistance men had their share of the blame for the atrocity.

But that’s what you learn afterwards. While there, you stagger from the site, stunned. The modern little town of Oradour – built next door in a neat, anonymous Fifties manner – will provide you with coffee or lunch. You may, though, need to get farther away. So head north for the Monts de Blond hills. The tiny road snakes up densely wooded slopes, past dark lagoons and through hamlets alive with flowers. By the time you arrive in Mortemart, a lovely, Cotswold-style village, your spirits may be stilled. Against the odds, there is some good in the world.

[MIKA27]

This Parody Video Shows How Apple Will Announce The Next iPhone

You already know what’s going to happen. Tim Cook will get on stage next week, Jony Ive will wax poetic about chamfered edges, Phil Schiller will be his jolly self and a new iPhone will be announced to the world. It will look a lot like the iPhone we already know but Apple will find some way to make it seem as if it will change everything.

The video puts it best: “…to create the new iPhone, we started with a design we really loved and then… stopped.”

So remember this little parody video/truth nugget when the iPhone gets announced next week, it’s basically saying everything Apple will say between the lines.

[MIKA27]

Can Mexico's Drug War Memorial Honour Both Victims And Criminals?

Since 2006, there have been 60,000 people killed in drug-related violence in Mexico. That’s actually a conservative estimate. Some think it’s closer to 70,000. And that may not include the missing, up to 10,000 more Mexicans who have simply vanished. In fact, if the new Memorial of the Victims of the Violence in Mexico listed the names of those killed in its drug war, there would be at least as many names there as are found on the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington DC.

But at this memorial, there are no names. While many of the dead include law enforcement officials, border patrol agents, and innocent bystanders, a large number of the deceased are convicted killers, gang members, organised crime kingpins. Victims also, perhaps, of a corrupt government? And with no clear way to define who the victims of the drug war are, adding names becomes problematic. Activist Isabel Miranda de Wallace, whose son was kidnapped and killed, articulated the issue to the Los Angeles Times: She would not want her son’s name alongside that of a cartel hit man.

According to the architects, the memorial — which was paid for with money seized from cartels — seeks not to enumerate the lives lost, but to become a conversation about the violence the country has suffered.

The memorial, which was designed by Gaeta Springall Arquitectos, is made from 70 pieces of weathered of Corten steel, some raw, some with mirrors on their sides. Concrete walkways meander through the panels, past benches, swatches of grass and pools of water. It’s much like a fragmented Richard Serra sculpture, although here, visitors are able to interact with the slowly rusting monoliths. A message on one of the slabs encourages visitors to “Pinta lo que sientes … expresa lo que piensas”: “Paint what you feel … express what you think.” So among the (permanent) quotes from writers and thinkers on peace like Gandhi and Octavio Paz are inscriptions left in chalk or paint or etched into the steel from whoever has something to say.

Although it’s been open since April, the memorial has not yet been overrun by graffiti, as one might expect. But as a recent story in the New York Times notes, like any open comment thread, the messages are still not completely on-topic. The story lists some of the audience contributions, which range from political commentary, to personal memories of the slain by family and friends, to a groundskeeper who likes to draw Gene Simmons when he gets bored. While the etchings stick around, the chalk fades slowly away over time, leaving haunting, ghostly images.

Memorials don’t always name or enumerate the deceased, of course: the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe honours millions anonymously with 2711 concrete slabs (a number that doesn’t stand for anything; even architect Peter Eisenman has offered several different explanations). But in this case, it’s not only a matter of not knowing all the names of the dead or missing, it’s that so many details about these deaths are never reported. The relatives of victims don’t want their family names to be associated with crime sprees.

Mexican cities and states don’t want to be known as dangerous places. Plus, the government believes that the media sensationalizes the violence, so coverage is often purposely suppressed.

Maybe that’s why the memorial is tucked away in a corner of Chapultapec Park, according to Alec Perkins, who writes about the memorial at Archinect, “where unless you know where to look for it, you are unlikely to stumble across it.” The memorial is also adjacent to a polo field where, he notes, your quiet contemplation may be disrupted by the crackling voice of the announcer or the wafting scent of horse excrement. The placement almost makes it seem like the memorial is supposed to be hidden from view. Some victims’ organisations refuse to acknowledge this site entirely, preferring a more prominent memorial named the Tower of Light.

But this part of the park actually belonged to Mexico’s Ministry of Defence for years, so what was government land has now been returned to the people as more than three-and-a-half acres of public space. And according to the architects, that was a key part of the memorial’s strategy to acknowledge violence, what they call “the big and open wound” for Mexico. “In response to this, we propose an open project in the site, open to the city and open to the approbation by the citizens,” says principal Julio Gaeta. “The recuperation of the public space as well as the remembrance of the victims of violence are the essence of the project.”

The design of the memorial — tall, imposing, sobering dark walls, which can almost feel like gravestones — is not unlike the Vietnam Veterans Memorial. But visiting the Vietnam memorial is a cold, almost sterile experience: it doesn’t invite you to linger, and it doesn’t afford any privacy. Here, the site makes all the difference. Sitting in the forest, among the shadows of the panels, is a much more intimate, physical way to commemorate lives. Even if the memorial doesn’t list names, by allowing expression on the walls it acknowledges that the violence is a very personal pain, and creates a way for Mexico’s citizens to express their uncensored feelings about about the national crisis.

Mexico’s new president, Enrique Peña Nieto, gave his first state of the nation speech this week, six months after he was elected on a platform which vowed to change the country’s strategy on drug violence. It’s estimated that homicides associated with organised crime have plummeted by almost 20 per cent since he took office, and in July, he successfully captured the head of the brutally violent Zetas cartel, a big win for his administration. But many Mexicans think they’re seeing more of the same.

During the 2012 US presidential election, much was made about the fact that the candidates rarely discussed Mexico’s drug policy, a trend that’s continued during President Obama’s trip to Mexico this year. Perhaps speaking more openly about the drug war might be the first step in reversing a trend that’s paralysed the country for the past decade. At this memorial, the writing will quite literally be on the wall about the suffering the drug war has already created — in a way that the government will hopefully be unable to ignore.

[MIKA27]

Monster Machines: This Kamikaze Drone Makes The Skies Way Less Friendly

Nothing excavates a dug-in enemy infantry position like a little artillery fire, but that’s not always available. Sure, you could squeeze off a Javelin round or two but at $100,000 per shot, that’s a pricey and cumbersome option. Instead, the US military has developed an ingenious firefight drone that can spot, reconnoiter and prosecute targets within seconds of taking to the air.

The Switchblade UAV is a platoon-level ISR/attack drone developed by Aerovironment. Classified as a Lethal Miniature Aerial Munition System (LMAMS), the Switchblade has been in limited deployment in Afghanistan since late 2012, acting as both a reconnaissance drone and guided munition for American soldiers.

The Switchblade measures 60cm long and weighs just under 3kg including its carrying case and tube launcher, making it svelte enough for a single soldier to carry. Its 10-minute loiter time detracts from the Switchblade’s usefulness as a forward scout, but its colour camera and GPS locating is more than sufficient to identify and track human and vehicle-sized targets up to 10km away in the middle of a firefight.

The Switchblade is most useful, however, as a guided munition. It carries an explosive charge equivalent to a 40mm grenade, allowing it to target lightly armoured vehicles and embedded (or otherwise inaccessible) infantry positions, such as on rooftops or ridge lines. What’s more, the Switchblade’s electric propulsion system and small stature make is a sneaky little bastard, difficult to track and able to glide silently in a window before detonating.

Like Aerovironment’s other UAVs — the RQ-11 Raven, RQ-20 Puma and Wasp — the Switchblade uses AV’s Ground Control Station, which means that a squad can launch a Switchblade and Raven together, one for recon, the other for blowing stuff up. And if the situation changes after the Switchblade has been launched, the operator can cancel the strike and bring the UAV back for use later.

As Aerovironment’s Steve Gitlin told Gannett’s Marine Corps Times:

Think about it — pairing switchblade aerial munitions with a Raven, Wasp or Puma [mini-UAV] — a small team with those tools can know what is going on around them within about 15 klicks. Once they identify a threat, Switchblade lets them engage that threat immediately.

Even more promising is the Switchblade’s precision. Instead of calling in an airstrike in a densely populated urban area to clear out dug-in enemy positions, which would surely result in numerous civilian casualties, forces can strike with pinpoint accuracy.

“Soldiers and leaders have readily embraced it as an invaluable tool,” a US Army official told The Army Times. “The ability to wave off a target after launch is unique to this weapon over almost all other weapons. Operators can abort a mission if the situation changes after launch, engage a secondary target or safely destroy it without inflicting casualties or collateral damage to property.”

The Switchblade is in limited deployment but certainly isn’t the only such UAV. Textron’s BattleHawk and Prioria Robotics’ Maveric UAV’s both aim to compete with the Switchblade for an upcoming Army development contract in 2016

[MIKA27]

The New Chip That Will Help Beam Displays Right At Your Eyes

Back at CES, Texas Instruments announced a new chip architecture for portable projectors. Now it’s rolling out its first chip with that tech built-in. What’s that mean for you? Better pictures to beam into your eyes.

The new hotness is the DLP (Data Light Processing) 0.2-inch TRP (Tilt and Roll Pixel) chipset, but it’s not the acronyms that are important. What matters is that this new chip can beam pixels that are 1/20th of the width of a human hair at 100 per cent of the brightness of current chips, while drawing only 50 per cent of the power. And it’s small enough to fit in phones, tablets, and even wearables.

Theorectically you could use this to build (better) Pico projectors into tablets or smartphones, but the real potential is for beaming things into your eyes.

Google Glass Explorer Editions sport a Texas Instruments brain — a dual-core OMAP 4430 CPU that TI put out for smartphones back in 2011. And Vuzix, makers of a Google Glass knockoff, are already singing the chip’s praises; maybe it can help improve its severely disappointing screen.

Naturally, it’ll be while until we see the fruits of this tech showing up anywhere; eye-projection HUDs are rare enough as it is. But even if they don’t get more popular any time soon, at least they’ll get a whole lot better.

[MIKA27]

This Tiny Implantable Sponge Could Help Cure Skin Cancer

It almost sounds too good to be true: Researchers have developed a tiny sponge that can reprogram immune cells to attack cancer. The treatment is less invasive than surgery and potentially more effective too. And with human trials beginning this week, there’s a chance it will soon be available for everyone.

This impressive-sounding scenario is very much a real thing. A team of Harvard scientists are currently perfecting an innovative new treatment for melanoma, the deadly skin cancer. Unlike similar approaches that require patients’ immune cells to be taken out of the body and reprogrammed to fight cancer cells, this treatment implants a small sponge — about the size of a fingernail — under a patient’s skin. The sponge instructs the immune cells to seek and destroy cancer cells, and it works. In one study, about half of the mice treated with the vaccine were tumour-free after 25 days. Now it’s time to see if it works as well on humans.

Vaccines for melanoma specifically have proven difficult to perfect. Earlier this week, a melanoma vaccine produced by GlaxoSmithKline fell short of expectations and immediately raised doubts about whether it would ever make it to market.

Nevertheless, scientists remain hopeful that the immunotherapy approach — that is, training the immune system to kill cancer cells — will be the path forward. One immunotherapy approach unveiled last year was shown to reduce or cure all different types of cancer, and researchers think this new sponge treatment could do the same.

The new melanoma vaccine moved from testing on mice to a human trial remarkably fast. In fact, it seems like the momentum behind all kinds of immunotherapy treatments, and the approaches are getting pretty futuristic. That is, if you consider lasers and nanoparticles to be futuristic.

[MIKA27]

Monster Machines: America's Omnidirectional Landmines Are (Somehow) Totally Legal

15,000 to 20,000 people — predominantly women, children and the elderly — die from landmines every year. These explosive man-traps have been used in every major military conflict since 1938 and some 110 million mines are still spread over 78 countries worldwide. What’s more, they remain functional decades after a conflict has ended and civilians return to the area. The results are dismemberment if you’re lucky, death if you’re not.

However, after years of campaigning by NGOs and individuals, the 161 UN member states adopted the Ottawa Treaty, effectively outlawing the use of persistent mines in all future conflicts. The US is not a member of the Ottawa Treaty but has instead enacted a similar domestic policy called the 2004 National Landmine Policy which prohibits the use of “any persistent landmines — neither anti-personnel nor anti-vehicle — anywhere after 2010.” That’s not to say all landmines are right out, the XM-7 Spider smart mine conveniently works cleanly around the Pentagon’s directives.

The Spider system is actually quite ingenious, effectively and automatically disarming itself once a conflict subsides while remaining uber-lethal for the duration of the engagement. What’s more, it can be loaded with lethal or non-lethal charges and will not detonate unless it receives confirmation from a human soldier.

Developed by Alliant Techsystems (ATK) in conjunction with Textron Systems, it’s based on the earlier Matrix prototype used in the first Iraq war, which integrated into existing M18 Claymores, and sister to the now defunct XM1100 Scorpion smart anti-tank mine.

The Spider works much like a traditional mine as an area denial munition. Each XM-7 system consists of 63 Munition Control Units (MCUs), plug-and-play adapters that enable modern smart weapon features to be easily integrated into legacy technology. The central green unit in the top art is the MCU. The six blue canisters are swappable charges that each cover a 60-degree arc and can spray either lethal shrapnel or non-lethal rounds, entrapment gels, or crazy purple knockout gas. The XM-7 can even integrate six Claymore mines (much like the earlier Matrix did) using a special adaptor unit.

The mine is first positioned where it will provide the greatest coverage (either offensively or defensively), then a tripwire container automatically fires off a set of six trip-wires, one for each charge. The human operator controls the MCU (or all 63 of them) on a single ruggedised laptop up to 2.4 miles away. When one the the trip-wires is disturbed, the MCU sends an alert to the operator who then issues the actual fire command, setting off a single charge, all six on the MCU, or multiple individual charges on multiple MCUs.

http://youtu.be/xzxe1Rv26sw

Each MCU will operate for up to 30 days on a single, replaceable battery pack. While the mine is active, it continually transmits its encrypted position via a GPS chip, allowing operators to know exactly where they’ve left the $US5,000 devices. This enables the military to quickly find and recover any unspent munitions. What’s more, as soon as the unit’s battery dies, the MCU will automatically deactivate, meaning that even if the military never recovers it, the XM-7 won’t pose a threat to the civilian population.

[MIKA27]

Watch A Virgin Galactic Test Flight From Onboard The Engine

This is what a Virgin Galactic supersonic flight with the SpaceShipTwo looks like, up close and personal. It’s not quite space, but it’s still damn gorgeous to watch.

Virgin Galactic conducted its second supersonic test flight over the Mojave desert. After being released from the WhiteKnightTwo mothership at 12,800m, SpaceShipTwo fired a column of flames from the engine before reaching an altitude of 21,000m. And they got the whole thing on tape.

This second test bodes well for Richard Branson’s little startup that could. The hybrid engine burned for 20 full seconds, four more than the lasts test flight, and everything went smoothly as it tilted its wings up into “feather mode” for the descent back to Earth. The spacecraft ultimately reached a top speed of Mach 1.6, the fastest yet. Branson couldn’t be more excited. “This is a giant step,” the billionaire wrote on his blog. “Our spaceship is now the highest commercial winged vehicle in history!”

At this point, Virgin Galactic is on track to start taking the 500-odd wannabe astronauts into space by 2014, slightly later than the original launch date of December 2012. There’s no huge rush though. These planes go to space. Taking a few extra test flights is probably a good idea.

[MIKA27]

Japan’s Levitating Train Hits 310 MPH in Trials

It’s currently the world’s longest and fastest stretch of maglev train, reaching speeds as high as 310 mph in a demonstration last week. But Japan’s L-Zero only lives on 26 miles1 of test track, and we’re still more than a decade away from completion.

After five years of trials, plus some starts and stops, Central Japan Railway Co. is finally starting construction on a maglev line between Nagoya and Tokyo, a 177-mile trip that will be cut from 95 minutes on today’s high-speed trains to just 40 minutes with maglev by 2027. To put that kind of speed in perspective, Amtrak’s Acela takes about 3 hours and 40 minutes to go about 210 miles. A trip from Boston to New York on maglev would take under an hour.

By 2045, JR Central hopes to extend the line to Osaka, which will cut the number of passengers on the frequent flights between the two cities. When built, the maglev will join an airport line in Shanghai and a low-speed train in Nagoya, among other rail systems that use magnets to float rail cars above a track to reduce friction and increase stability.

While Japan’s maglev promises to be an impressive technical feat, there’s some worry that Japan’s population won’t be big enough to sustain it. The Nagoya extension alone is expected to cost anywhere from $52 billion to as much as $90 billion, 2 thanks to the difficulty of tunneling through cities and mountains to make a straight track.

According to Bloomberg, there’s a good chance that the construction will face significant delays. If demographic trends continue, that means Japan’s population may fall low enough to significantly reduce demand for the train once it’s built.

Luckily, JR Central is a hugely profitable company with a history of high profits from its current bullet trains. Last fiscal year, the company had a cash flow of $2.95 billion dollars. Along with loans and bonds, that money can easily pay for a major infrastructure project.

That kind of confidence was on display as journalists, railway executives and other VIPs rode the test track. Even though it beat a world speed record and accelerated to more than four times highway speed limits, those on board were merely pleased — not necessarily impressed.

“Compared with the bullet train, there was a slightly noticeable feeling of speed,” Transport Minister Akihiro Ohta told Bloomberg.

[Fuzz]

Monster Machines: America's Omnidirectional Landmines Are (Somehow) Totally Legal

What’s more, as soon as the unit’s battery dies, the MCU will automatically deactivate, meaning that even if the military never recovers it, the XM-7 won’t pose a threat to the civilian population.

And leaving it available for people to dig up and reuse the blue munitions canisters in IEDs.

[MIKA27]

What The Strange Slot In Your Old Car's Dashboard Is Really For

Someone was did an amazing job of predicting the future when they put that strange slot in the centre of your dash. Spooky.

[MIKA27]

The iPhone 5S Home Button Ring Could Look Like HAL 2013

While it seems pretty certain that the next iPhone will come with a fingerprint scanner, what it will look like remains an open question. A “silver ring” around the home button (see below) is the prevailing theory;

Sure, these are just renders. But they’re an excellent hint at what the Eye of Sauron Siri will look like in practice. And it’s likely to be just about the only difference you’ll notice between the iPhone 5S and the one that came before it.

[MIKA27]

When Does Radiation Become Bad For Your Health?

Radiation is everywhere. We catch it from the sun’s rays in the sky, and from the rocks beneath our feet. It comes from television sets, radios and mobile phones. We absorb it from certain fruits, vegetables and nuts

But not all radiation is equal. Electromagnetic radiation, including radiowaves, microwave, visible and infrared light is known as nonionising radiation, and is largely harmless. On the other hand ionising radiation, from wavelengths shorter than ultraviolet light through the electromagnetic spectrum to X-rays and gamma rays, can cause disease and death.

These effects are from its ability to ionise (that is, separate the positively and negatively charged ions) in bodily tissues. Broadly speaking the risk of damaging health effects is proportional, in a rather complex way, to the extent of the ionisation induced in the body. This is called the dose. How ionising radiation is measured and defined has changed over the decades as we learn more about this relatively young science.

Measuring radiation dose and risk

Dose was originally measured in air by the unit of Roentgens (R, named after the discoverer of X-rays, Wilhelm Roentgens). As ionisation cannot be measured in tissue it was necessary to convert air dose to absorbed tissue dose, originally measured in rads, where 1 R = ~0.8 rad. With the introduction of metric units the basic unit of absorbed dose became the Gray (Gy), which represents an absorbed dose of 1 Joule of energy per kilogramme.

Unfortunately absorbed dose is not very convenient for radiological protection purposes because 1Gy of the different radiations — gamma and X-rays, beta particles, neutrons and alpha particles — is not equally damaging to tissue. Consequently a “hybrid” unit, the Sievert (Sv) was introduced. Hybrid, because it is really not a unit of radiation dose but a unit of risk. Thus, we talk of the equivalent dose of 1Sv as carrying the same risk, for example, as 1Gy for X and gamma rays, or 0.05Gy for the more densely ionising, but less penetrating alpha particles.

But there is a further complication, as not all tissues in the body are equally sensitive. Bone marrow and a child’s thyroid are much more sensitive than muscle tissue, for example. So the term effective dose which incorporates the correction for equivalent dose and is also measured in Sv, is used. This way, if only part of the body is irradiated the risk can be presented in terms of an effective risk to the person. This allows risks from different exposures to be added together. The unit Sv should not be used for large doses (greater than 1Sv) to the whole body.

Low doses are common

Typically, everybody is exposed to two milliseiverts (mSv) per year throughout our lives from natural background radiation. We might receive a dose of up 10-20mSv from diagnostic radiology — say 10mSv for a CT chest scan. The firefighters and plant workers at the Chernobyl accident received doses of several Gy and these doses led to deaths from acute radiation sickness within about 60 days. Typically 4-5Gy received over a short period of hours will be lethal, but can be tolerated if delivered over a much longer period.

Recommendations from the International Committee on Radiological Protection limit radiation workers to 20mSv per year or in exceptional cases higher annual doses, limited by 100mSv over five years. Doses to members of the public from discharges from nuclear power plants and laboratories or leakage from, for example, medical radiation sources at hospitals should be limited to 1mSv per year.

Extreme radiation events

Clearly, in the case of accidents such as at Chernobyl and Fukushima the situation is much less well controlled. Doses of around 30mSv were received by the 115,000 people living in settlements close to Chernobyl before the 30km-radius exclusion zone was evacuated days later. In the case of Fukushima evacuation up to 20km from the power plants was much faster. Much higher doses (up to 250mSv) were received by some clean-up workers after Chernobyl, and little is known yet about doses to clean-up workers at Fukushima. If recent reports of doses up to 2.2 Sv/hour from leaking tanks on the site are true and if this dose is from gamma rays, then it may soon become too dangerous to work on the site.

To cause death within hours of exposure to radiation, the dose needs to be very high, 10Gy or higher, while 4-5Gy will kill within 60 days, and less than 1.5-2Gy will not be lethal in the short term. However all doses, no matter how small, carry a finite risk of cancer and other diseases.

A very approximate rule of thumb is that 1Sv carries a risk of a 10 per cent increase in lifetime risk of cancer. This cancer risk may persist for the remainder of life but is unlikely to appear before at least 10-20 years after exposure. So, exposure from accumulated natural background radiation up to the age of 50 years (=100mSv) increases the ~30 per cent lifetime risk of cancer to ~31 per cent and mortality from ~25 per cent to ~26 per cent. On this basis some 30,000 to 60,000 cancer deaths worldwide, but mainly in Europe, will have been caused by the Chernobyl accident, and many still remain to occur.

Much discussion is made of the so-called low dose problem. Effects from doses of less than 50mSv are difficult to assess directly due to the high background of spontaneous (naturally occurring) cancer, so it has been necessary to extrapolate down from measurements of effects at higher doses. The question is whether there is a dose threshold below which there is no effect. From what we know that threshold must be below 10mSv and by the age of ten everybody has received at least 10mSv natural background radiation from natural background sources, so there is no argument for a threshold — all doses of radiation, no matter how small, entail a finite risk.

Keith Baverstock is Docent in the Department of Environmental Science at University of Eastern Finland. He does not work for, consult to, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has no relevant affiliations.

This article was originally published at The Conversation. Read the original article.

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The Man Who Would Build a Computer the Size of the Entire Internet

Solomon Hykes, the driving force behind Docker, an open source project that seeks to recast the internet as one giant computer.

Google runs its web empire on computers the size of warehouses.

Inside the massive data centers that drive things like Google Search and Gmail and Google Maps, you’ll find tens of thousands of machines — each small enough to hold in your arms — but thanks to a new breed of software that spans this sea of servers, the entire data center operates like a single system, one giant computer that runs any application the company throws at it.

A Google application like Gmail doesn’t run on a particular server or even a select group of servers. It runs on the data center, grabbing computing power from any machine than can spare it. Google calls this “warehouse-scale computing,” and for some, it’s an idea so large, they have trouble wrapping their heads around it.

Solomon Hykes isn’t one of them. He aims for something even bigger. With a new open-source software project known as Docker, he wants to build a computer the size of the internet.

A central cooling plant in Google’s Douglas County, Georgia, data center.

Sitting in his company’s offices, on the 16th floor of a high-rise in downtown San Francisco, Hykes is wearing a t-shirt with a whale on it. This is a whale of the cartoon variety. It’s grinning slightly as it floats on a wavy blue sea, and on its back, it carries a stack of shipping containers — the sort you’d see towering over the docks in Oakland, across the bay from San Francisco, or on the train cars heading north towards Sacramento.

That may seem a little odd. But the whale is a metaphor for the way Hykes hopes to remodel the internet. Just as, in the 1950s, shipping containers reinvented the way we move goods across the globe — giving us a standard means of shifting massive amounts of stuff from boat to train to truck and into stores and factories — Hykes wants to create a standard means of moving software applications across the internet and the world’s private company networks, from machine to machine to machine.

That cartoon whale is the logo for Docker, which Hykes and his 18-person company, dotCloud, unveiled earlier this year. Docker is a way of packaging software applications into their own shipping containers, so you can readily load them and run them on any machine equipped with any flavor of Linux, the open-source operating system that now drives so many of the servers that underpin the internet.

The goal is to foster a world where anyone can treat any pool of machines in much the same way Google treats its private data centers. If you wrap your software in Docker containers, you can readily spread them not only across the machines in your own data centers, but onto popular cloud services such as Amazon Web Services — and back again.

“It all starts with something simple and unimportant. A container is just a box,” says Hykes, dotCloud’s founder and chief technology officer. “But with this box, you can package up so many software products and platforms and systems that each have their own way of doing things, and in the end, these containers are everywhere, and you can move them anywhere.”

The Docker project is only months old. But it’s based on technologies that have long been used on Linux and other server operating systems, including the Solaris operating system built by Sun Microsystems, and because it repackages these technologies into something that’s far easier to use, it has quite suddenly caught the attention of software developers across Silicon Valley.

eBay, the web’s online auction house, is now using Docker containers as a means of testing new software inside its data centers.

San Francisco startup MemSQL is doing much the same in testing the database software it sells to other businesses, a database that runs across dozens of machines. And another startup, CoreOS, offers a new Linux operating system specifically designed for use with Docker containers.

“Docker is the tool kit you need to get this idea right,” says eBay engineer Ted Dziuba. “It makes it incredibly easy to take an application — any process that runs on a computer — and stick it in its own container.”

This idea is particularly appealing because so many of today’s software applications no longer run on standalone machines. Like Google’s web services, they run across dozens upon dozens servers, and Docker provides a means of quickly spreading software across such an enormous collection of systems — and onto new systems as time goes on.

“These days, software developers have thousands of languages and frameworks to choose from, and they’re looking to deploy across larger numbers of servers and larger numbers of environments, whether it’s inside their four walls, or outside their four walls,” says dotCloud CEO Ben Golub. “If you picture all of the languages and applications as rows, and all the environments as columns, you have this huge matrix that is always expanding.

“With Docker, we’re trying to make that matrix go away, letting developers just worry about putting whatever they need into containers — and letting the people who run the servers worry about nothing but moving containers around.”

Engineer Jerome Petazzoni, inside the dotCloud jungle.

Hykes and the rest of the dotCloud team work in an open office space that looks like a jungle. Inside this 16th floor space, the desks and the laptops and the massive flat-screen displays are all but hidden by the ferns and the green bamboo and the rest of the plant life that stretches nearly from floor to ceiling. If you peek through a hole in this jungle, you might even see a small turtle munching on yet another piece of green.

At first, the motif seems all wrong. Solomon Hykes and his cohorts are software engineers intent on rethinking the fundamental tools we use to build and run the massive web services that have come to define our modern world, and here they are camped out in a place that reminds us what our world was like before the rise of the machines.

Even Hykes struggles to explain why his tech startup is teeming with plants and animals. “We’re an engineering shop, so we like having something that gives a sense of privacy,” says Hykes, with the faintest hint French accent that lets you know where he grew up and first launched dotCloud. “But we didn’t want walls or plastic separators, and plants seemed like a good compromise.”

But as he describes Docker, you begin to realize the plants and the animals are completely appropriate. The shipping container metaphor laid out on his t-shirt goes a long towards explaining what Docker is all about, but you may need another metaphor to take you the rest of the way. You can also think of Docker as an effort rebuild the internet so that it behaves more like a living organism.

Just as plants and animals are made up of millions of cells that each perform their own function yet seamlessly communicate with each other, Docker divides software into cells of code.

A Docker container holds not only a software application but just about everything else that application needs to operate, all the software libraries and other application-related code normally included with an operating system. These additional software libraries are known, in developer parlance, as “dependencies.”

Basically, this means a Docker application doesn’t rely all that much on code that’s tied to the operating system. All the OS provides are simple hooks into the Docker containers, and that means a machine — or, better yet, a collection of machines — can behave more like an organism, where cells operate on their own but also in tandem with each other.

This is — quite simply — the right way to build software. It means you can easily add new cells to the whole, and it means that individual cells can die without bringing down the entire operation.

At the famed Xerox PARC research center in the 1970s, Alan Kay pioneered this approach with a programming language he called SmallTalk. Rather than build software as a monolithic piece of code, Kay divided tasks into cells, or objects, that could talk to each other. With this object-oriented programming, he could expand an application by adding new objects, and mix and match objects as he saw fit.

Since then, this same idea has gradually spread across the entire software ecosystem, from programming languages to operating systems and beyond. In many ways, the history of computing is about a progression towards software that behaves more and more like biological systems. With Docker, Solomon Hykes wants to expand this idea across the software that drives the internet — not to mention the world’s private networks.

“In what we’re trying to do, there is DNA — legacy — from the efforts of people like Alan Kay,” says Hykes. “Each Docker container is a ‘cell’ in the planet-sized organism that is the internet. The physical machines, cables, routers, and hard drives — those are simply vessels for the cells to compute, store, and exchange messages.”

Gordon, the turtle that lives in the dotCloud jungle.

Remember the days when installing software on your PC was such a pain? When it was so difficult for one PC to read files created on another? Over the past 20 years, we’ve solved these problems, and that’s thanks to Alan Kay’s biological paradigm.

When you install software on an Apple Macintosh, you simply drag and drop an icon into a folder and it runs. That’s because the application is packaged up with all its dependencies, and it communicates with the operating system through the thinnest of interfaces — much like a cell.

“The application includes everything it needs to run,” says Alex Polvi, the founder of CoreOS, the operating system created with Docker in mind. “You don’t have to run some fancy installer. You just use it. It’s ready to go.” In much the same way, you can easily install new software on your iPhone or your Android tablet.

Docker then takes these ideas and applies them to computer servers. Hykes and crew want to provide tools that let engineers install and run server software as easily as you and I install and run software on our phones.

Google does much the same thing inside its own operation, with a tool called Borg. And at Twitter, engineers use a similar, open source creation called Mesos. “We can run services inside a container, and then we can move the services across multiple machines, replicate them across multiple machines, and not worry about the interactions between containers,” says Raffi Krikorian, a vice president of engineering at Twitter.

But Borg and Mesos are incredibly complex systems, built and maintained by some of the planet’s brightest computer science minds. Hykes wants to give any company the tools it needed to setup and run the same type of operation — even if the company lacks the engineering savvy of a Google or a Twitter.

Originally, Hykes’ company offered a cloud service along the lines of Microsoft Azure or Google App Engine or Heroku — an online service where software developers could build and host applications. It created Docker as a better way of running this cloud service, and somewhere along the way, Hykes and crew, including CEO Ben Golub, a veteran of the open source game, realized it was something that could help any online business.

This spring, as they planned to open source the technology, word leaked to Hacker News, the preeminent online hangout for Silicon Valley engineers, and the idea immediately caught fire. Today, after five months in the wild, the Docker software has been downloaded 60,000 times, 80,000 people a month are visiting the project’s website, and according to Golub, over 150 other projects are already using the software, including cloud services Flynn and Dokku.

As CoreOS founder Alex Polvi points out, Docker is hardly a mature technology, but the project has taken off like few others, and it’s now a big part of a trend towards massive online systems that operate without server virtualization, an older means of separating applications from an underlying system and readily moving them from machine to machine.

Docker containers are less complex than server virtualization and require less software. They provide the convenience of virtual machines without a lot of the overhead, which means they can potentially run applications at greater speed — and with fewer servers. According to eBay’s Dziuba, Docker containers can be launched far much more quickly that virtual machines, or VMs.

“To me, working with Docker containers is so much easier than working with virtual machines,” says Dziuba. “If you believe that what makes life easier for developers is where things are moving, then this containerization thing is where things are moving.”

Virtualization will serve a need for years to come. It’s a mainstay on most cloud services, including Amazon Web Services, and inside so many businesses. “The VM has been proven as a good architectural mechanism,” says Pat Gelsinger, the CEO of virtualization kingpin VMware. “Maybe some of the greatest criticism of the VM has been the performance overhead, but what do we focus on?

Whacking down that performance overhead with each new generation.”

But tools like Borg and Mesos and Docker will feed a new wave online applications — applications that operate on such a large number of machines, they need every bit of extra efficiency they can grab. Google sees this. And Twitter. And so does Solomon Hykes.

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NSA Revelations Cast Doubt on the Entire Tech Industry

Six years ago, two Microsoft cryptography researchers discovered some weirdness in an obscure cryptography standard authored by the National Security Agency. There was a bug in a government-standard random number generator that could be used to encrypt data.

The researchers, Dan Shumow and Niels Ferguson, found that the number generator appeared to have been built with a backdoor — it came with a secret numeric key that could allow a third party to decrypt code that it helped generate.

According to Thursday’s reports by the ProPublica, the Guardian, and The New York Times, classified documents leaked by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden appear to confirm what everyone suspected: that the backdoor was engineered by the NSA. Worse still, a top-secret NSA document published with the reports says that the NSA has worked with industry partners to “covertly influence” technology products.

That sounds bad, but so far, there’s not much hard evidence about what exactly has been compromised. No company is named in the new allegations. The details of the reported modifications are murky. So while much of the internet’s security systems appear to be broken, it’s unclear where the problems lie.

The result is that the trustworthiness of the systems we used to communicate on the internet is in doubt. “I think all companies have a little bit of taint after this,” says Christopher Soghoian, a technologist with the American Civil Liberties Union.

The latest documents show that the NSA has vast crypto-cracking resources, a database of secretly held encryption keys used to decrypt private communications, and an ability to crack cryptography in certain VPN encryption chips. Its goal: to crack in a widespread way the internet’s security tools and protocols.

David Dampier, the director of the Center for Computer Security Research at Mississippi State University, says it’s “wrong” for companies to add backdoors. But he added that the latest revelations of the government’s alleged decryption capabilities aren’t surprising.

“I think that no encryption created by anyone is going to protect you from everyone. The stronger the encryption the harder they are going to work to decrypt it,” he said. “I don’t care what company is selling you encryption software. Whatever they are going to sell you, it can be decrypted. There’s nothing that is infallible.”

The reports talk about the NSA’s attempts to exploit software bugs, break codes and accumulate encryption keys — this is all stuff that most security experts expected the surveillance agency to be doing. But here’s the most unsettling part: A leaked excerpt from the agency’s 2013 budget request talks about the NSA working with “US and foreign IT industries to covertly influence and/or overtly leverage their commercial products designs.” The document explicitly says: “These design changes make the systems in question exploitable.”

Daniel Castro, a senior analyst with the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation, calls the latest leaks disturbing. “We went through this debate with the Clipper Chip, and it was clear where public opinion stood,” he says, referring to a backdoor technology the NSA wanted to install in all encryption two decades ago.

“If these claims are true, and the NSA introduced backdoors into global security standards, this seems like a clear perversion of democracy,” Castro added. “This just further erodes the competitiveness of U.S. tech companies. In particular, I think this enlarges the scope of companies that will suffer backlash since cryptographic standards are often embedded in hardware.”

Castro wrote a report last month predicting that Snowden’s PRISM revelations could cost the U.S. cloud-computing industry as much as $35 billion over the next three years as companies shied away from U.S. internet service providers, which are said to be providing government access to their servers.

You’ll hear much the same from Dave Jevans, the founder of Marble Security, an enterprise mobile security provider and the former chief executive of IronKey, He says that it “would be extremely bad” for a tech company to give the government a backdoor.

“It may not be the death knell,” he added, referring to Crypto AG, a Swiss encryption companies alleged to have rigged their machines for the NSA in the 1990s. ”They’re still around, but barely.”

But not everyone thinks that U.S. competitiveness will be hit. The documents talk about the NSA working with foreign companies too. “I don’t think there’s going to be any direct major impact because there aren’t any other countries that are cherubs in all this either,” says Paul Kocher, president of Cryptography Research.

The number generator found in 2007 — called Dual_EC_RNG — was hardly a technical triumph. It was clumsy and slow and never widely used, but it is supported in Microsoft’s Windows operating system.

Microsoft has said in the past that it does not provide the government with “direct and unfettered” access to customer data, and it says much the same today. “We have significant concerns about the allegations of government activity reported yesterday and will be pressing the government for an explanation,” the company said Friday.

But the doubt is still there. And that’s the problem.

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STEVE MCQUEEN RANCH FOR SALE

Once owned by legendary Hollywood actor Steve McQueen, the Pioneer Moon Ranch is an outdoorsman’s mecca, and it’s for sale!

The Great Escape star´s former home is as epic as you would imagine, spread over 500 acres of land in Hailey, Idaho, the property sits at the foot of the Pioneer Mountains and is defined by the Big Wood River that flows the length of the property for a mile and a half. Plenty of water and green surround the property, you´ll also find an array of wild life including moose, elk and deer roaming freely around the property.

Composed by a main house and a guest house the property has plenty of room for you and your guests, that´s if you have $7.4 Mil to fork out.

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Harman Kardon Onyx Speaker:

Your music doesn't live on just one device anymore, so you need an audio solution that takes the portability of your media library seriously — something like the Harman Kardon Onyx Speaker ($500).

This wireless speaker system was made with connectivity in mind, including Bluetooth with NFC, Airplay for Mac and iOS, DLNA for Android, Windows, and other Harman Kardon devices, as well as an auxiliary input for less capable devices. With two three-inch woofers and two three-quarter-inch tweeters, wireless audio doesn't mean you end up with sub-par sound.

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Nissan's Biometric Smartwatch Monitors The Health Of You And Your Car

Car maker Nissan has joined the burgeoning smartwatch scene, announcing that it’s created a biometric reader to combine personal health stats with those of your… car. So you can track man and machine from the same device.

The Nismo Watch has been created to work in conjunction with the systems inside its sporty Nismo series cars, with the smartwatch able to display speed, fuel consumption and performance data once connected to a car’s onboard computer via Bluetooth LE. It’ll combine these stats with biometric data of the driver pulled out via a heart rate monitor.

There’s also a rather grim social aspect to it all, with Nissan claiming the watch will also rate your “social performance” across many key social networks via a tool Nissan calls its Social Speed software — and you will receive “tailored car messages from Nissan” while using it.

The more we read, the more it sounds like a fairly redundant novelty toy for the rich.

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5 Crazy New Man-Made Materials That Will Shape The Future

Forget Mother Nature: when it comes to all matters matter, the sheer ingenuity of the human mind can give rise to some of the most insane — and useful — new materials you’ve ever encountered. Here are five crazy new man-made materials whose uses could be practically limitless.

Aluminium Bubble Wrap

Imagine your favourite packing-based stress reliever — made of metal. OK, metallic bubble wrap might not be quite as easy to pop, but it could be a hell of a lot more useful. A team of engineers from North Carolina State University have developed a new form of aluminium bubble wrap, which they claim could revolutionise packaging and protective equipment.

The scientists take a thin sheet of aluminium, then use a studded roller to form small indents in the sheet. Unlike its polyethylene counterpart, these voids are then filled with a foamed material like calcium carbonate, before being sealed with another flat sheet of metal. The result: a series of bubbles that absorb masses of energy, weigh 30 per cent less than regular sheet metal, and yet are nearly 50 times stronger. It’s easy to make, not too expensive — and could soon be used in everything from shipping containers for fragile goods to bike helmets. Just don’t be tempted to try and pop it.

Titanium Foam

Forget expanded polystyrene and spongey elastomers: the foam you want to get your hands on is made out of titanium. By saturating a humble polyurethane foam with a solution of titanium powder and binding agents, it’s possible to force the metal to cling to the shape of the simple foam and then vaporise the underlying structure away. The result is a titanium lattice in the shape of the original foam, which can be heat-treated to tweak its material properties.

The exact properties depend on the porosity of the foam, but the results are strong and — most importantly — incredibly light. In fact, the material is just perfect for replacing bone: it has incredibly similar mechanical properties and, because it’s porous, new bone can grow and around its structure, truly integrating the implant within the skeleton. Anything that gets us that much closer to a real-life Wolverine is ok in our book.

Graphene Aerogel

If the phrase graphene aerogel sounds to you like someone combined the two buzziest of materials buzzwords then… you wouldn’t be far wrong. In fact, this graphene aerogel snatched the title of the world’s lightest material just a few of months ago — with a density lower than that of helium and just twice that of hydrogen at 0.16 mg/cm3. This stuff practically floats.

The material was actually created using a new technique which involves freeze-drying solutions of carbon nanotubes and graphene to create a kind of carbon sponge. The resulting material is both strong and elastic, as well as incredibly light; it can even absorb up to 900 times its own weight in oil. When — or if — it becomes affordable, that means it could be used to mop up massive oil spills with ease, or even as an incredibly efficient version of humble old insulation.

Artificial Spider Silk

Silk is Nature’s very own homespun wonder material but it’s tough to make in bulk — which is why a Japanese startup called Spiber has been working out how to produce it synthetically. It’s managed to decode the gene responsible for the production of fibroin in spiders, which is they key protein used to create the super-strong strands of silk.

Having cracked that key component, the company has gone on to create bioengineered bacteria that can make silk extremely quickly — and the company can create a new type of silk in just 10 days, from scratch to to finished product. The bacteria feed on sugar, salt and other micronutrients, and quickly produce the silk protein — which is turned into a fine powder, spun and processed to create fibres, composites, solid block… anything. A single gram of fibroin produces 5.6 miles of silk, and by 2015 the company hopes to be produce 10 metric tons of the stuff. That’s a lot of silk, without a spider in sight.

Molecular Superglue

If you’ve ever stuck your fingers together with superglue, you know pain — but imagine sticking them together with glue that bonds materials at the molecular level: that’s real pain. In fact, a team of researchers from the University of Oxford has created a molecular glue inspired by Streptococcus pyogenes — the flesh-eating bacteria.

They considered a single protein from the bacterium — the one it uses to bind to human cells — and from there developed a molecular glue which forms covenant bonds when it comes into contact with a partner protein. The bonds it forms are so strong that, when researchers tested a sample, the equipment used to measure the strength broke before the glue did. All that remains is to develop ways of incorporating the proteins into other molecular structures in order to create insanely strong, selective glues.

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How Your Big Balls Lead To Bad Parenting

According to new scientific research, the size of a man’s testicles can indicate how involved he is as a parent — the bigger the pair, the greater the drop in emotional responsiveness and infant care. In other words, being told you’re a good father is now a backhanded compliment and an affront to your manhood.

US researchers from Emory University in Atlanta investigated the link between testes size and parenting investment among men in a bid to shed light on Life History Theory, which examines potential trade-offs between mating and parenting (testes volume is associated with sperm production and testosterone levels).

To test their theory, the research team measured the testes volume of 70 biological fathers with children aged between one and two. The subjects then had their brain activity monitered via MRI scans in a region implicated in parental motivation as they viewed photographs of their child.

The men’s partners also filled out a questionnaire that queried the fathers’ involvement as a parent in common tasks such as taking children to health care visits or attending to children at night.

The study found that men with smaller testes were more emotionally responsive to their child’s face and more involved in infant care:

In response to viewing pictures of one’s own child, activity in the ventral tegmental area — a key component of the mesolimbic dopamine reward and motivation system — predicted paternal care giving and was negatively related to testes volume.

Our results suggest that the biology of human males reflects a trade-off between mating effort and parenting effort, as indexed by testicular size and nurturing-related brain function, respectively.

The report concludes that a fathers’ testicular volume and testosterone levels were inversely related to parental investment and testes volume was inversely correlated with nurturing-related brain activity when viewing pictures of their own child.

The authors acknowledge the possible influence of outside factors, such as fathers who experienced stressful and unpredictable childhoods growing up. Nevertheless, you may want to reconsider that “World’s Greatest Dad” T-shirt next Father’s Day.

Testicular volume is inversely correlated with nurturing-related brain activity in human fathers [PNAS]

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007 ‘Submarine Car’ Sells for $865,000

(LONDON) — A car that transformed into a submarine in the James Bond movie “The Spy Who Loved Me” has been sold at a London auction for 550,000 pounds ($865,000).

The distinctively-shaped white Lotus Esprit, designed for an underwater scene in the 1977 film starring Roger Moore, was sold at RM Auctions on Monday.

The sale price was below the auction house’s initial estimate price of 650,000 to 950,000 pounds — perhaps because the vehicle cannot be driven on the road, although it is said to be a fully operational submarine.

In the film, Moore and Bond girl Barbara Bach escape a helicopter attack by driving the Esprit off a pier into the sea.