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

[MIKA27]

'Time traveller' predicts world war in 2015

Nice post Steve.

I've heard of this story before as I love conspiracy theories and the like, there's alot of information on this topic. I guess we'll have to see in 2015 if it's for real or not, 3 billion people dead doesn't sound good at all and the hope lies in an IBM 5100!!

Let's start looking for one!!!!

[MIKA27]

Trade Your Swiss Army Knife For This Multi-Function iPhone Case

Your smartphone has already replaced everything from your digital camera to your alarm clock, so why not the pocket knife clipped to your keyring too? The creators of the IN1 feel you should demand more from your iPhone case than just a way to protect it from falls, and so have packed theirs with a multitude of removable tools sure to make any wannabe MacGyver happy.

The IN1′s polycarbonate casing includes a pop-up kickstand for easier hands-free viewing, but that pales in comparison to its built-in tool chest that boasts pens, screwdrivers, files, tweezers, scissors, and even a toothpick.

And before you start decrying this case as a good way to miss your flight, the lack of a sharp blade means the IN1′s actually designed to be completely TSA compliant. So you don’t have to worry about security making you toss your iPhone case and being out $US45.

[MIKA27]

This Amazing Chinese Mansion Is Abandoned Because It's Haunted

This expansive stone mansion — known Chaonei No. 81 — is an architectural anomaly in Beijing. Once a church, then a home, today the building stands out for its ornate Baroque style, yet it lies in decay. Why? Because it’s probably haunted, and no one wants to go near it.

The New York Times has the scary story of a place cloaked in legend and deep disrepair. Built around 1900 as a gift to British colonists, by the end of the civil war in 1949 the manse was home to a high-ranking nationalist official. As the communists were marching through the city to declare victory, he fled to Taiwan leaving behind his wife (or maybe concubine), who, in despair, hung herself from the rafters of the opulent mansion.

Chaonei No. 81 has been riddled by rumours of paranormal activity ever since, and with the exception of local daredevils who have snuck in to photograph it, the place is repellent to nearly everyone who encounters it. In fact, members of the Red Army who took up residence there during the Cultural Revolution fled, and locals still won’t set foot inside. According to one ghost forum, the government tried to raze the place some years back, but halted the project after some construction workers mysteriously disappeared.

Perhaps in an admission of defeat, the home is now listed on the historic register, so it can’t be demolished. But nothing is being done to preserve it either. Money isn’t the problem here — there’s new construction going up all over Beijing. Again, the problem is obviously local ghost lore:

It has led some to suspect that the derelict state of the home has more to do with ghosts, or at least the belief in ghosts, than with costs. Potential tenants might be shunning the home, some say, because of a tendency among many Chinese to avoid all things related to death. The superstition is so pervasive in Chinese culture that mobile numbers or apartments with addresses that contain the number 4 are often automatically devalued, since the word for four in Chinese sounds like the word for death.

The only signs of recent life at the house? Graffiti, which warns people to stay the hell away, and beer bottles from the (clearly drunk) people brave enough to sneak in. But according to one film website, there’s currently a horror movie being made about the house — which is bound to complete its transformation from local to international legend.

[MIKA27]

Scientists Create New Form Of Matter, And It's Like A Lightsabre

The latest science news out of Harvard and MIT sounds like a joke, but it’s not. A team of physicists were fooling around with photons when they managed to get the particles to clump together to form a molecule, one that’s unlike any other matter. And it behaves, they say, just like a lightsabre.

That’s right. Lasers were used to discover a new form of matter that’s straight out of a Star Wars film. Credit for the experiment goes to Harvard physics professor Mikhail Lukin and MIT physics professor Vladan Vuletic, who blasted photons through a cloud of rubidium atoms. When they sent more than one photon at once, they noticed that the particles clung to each other to form a molecule.

“It’s not an in-apt analogy to compare this to lightsabre,” said Lukin (Skywalker?) in a press release. “When these photons interact with each other, they’re pushing against and deflect each other. The physics of what’s happening in these molecules is similar to what we see in the movies.”

In fact, what the scientists were witnessing is known as the Rydberg blockade. This rule states that atoms neighbouring an atom that’s been excited — say, by a passing photon — cannot be excited to the same degree as the initial atom. When multiple photons pass through a cloud of atoms, this creates a push-pull force between them, which is what binds the resultant molecule.

Don’t let your imagination get too carried away though. The physicists aren’t planning to build futuristic weapons with the new form of matter. Rather they hope it will help them make progress in building efficient quantum computers. Which frankly are futuristic enough in their own right.

[MIKA27]

Need For Speed Movie Trailer Is Here

The Need For Speed video game franchise is finally being turned into a movie, and the first trailer of the action epic starring Breaking Bad‘s Aaron Paul is finally here.

The trailer is so moody! Aaron Paul plays Tobey Marshall; a guy fresh out of prison racing across the country. That’s pretty much all you need to know.

What’s really interesting is the range of cars the movie will show off.

The Fast & Furious franchise has a passion for Japanese imports and tuned American muscle. This Need For Speed movie is trying to do things different by filling the trailer (at least) with Euro supercar-goodness. Just in this brief clip, we see offerings from Bugatti, Pagani and McLaren racing across the screen. So much car porn. So. Much. Win.

From a story perspective, it’s interesting to watch Aaron Paul channel his inner-Bryan Cranston rather than just another street-racing bro a la Paul Walker in The Fast & The Furious.

The synopsis from IMDB is as follows:

Fresh from prison, a street racer who was framed by a wealthy business associate joins a cross country race with revenge in mind. His ex-partner, learning of the plan, places a massive bounty on his head as the race begins.

Need For Speed races onto screens in March.

[MIKA27]

Qatar's Reportedly Using Slave Labour To Prepare For The 2022 World Cup

Grim news has emerged from Qatar, where preparations for the 2022 World Cup are underway. Even though construction on the stadiums has yet to begin, The Guardian reports that the working environment for Nepalese migrants amounts to slave labour. And it’s probably going to get worse.

The trouble can be traced to Lusail City development, a $US45 billion town being built from scratch that will eventually be home to a 90,000-seat stadium. There, countless Nepalese men have been working in 48C heat for days at a time without access to free drinking water and without being paid. Incredibly, it is estimated that one worker per day died during the summer work season.

The Guardian investigation also found that the contractor failed to provide workers with ID cards, relegating them to the status of illegal aliens, and forced them to live 12 to a room in conditions so squalid that illness has rapidly spread. The situation is so bad that at least 60 workers have fled to the Nepalese embassy in Qatar in order to escape.

The real trouble is that there’s really no escape, and with the bulk of the World Cup construction still to come, there’s a decent chance we’ll hear about more malfeasance. “We’d like to leave, but the company won’t let us,” one worker told The Guardian. “If we run away, we become illegal and that makes it hard to find another job. The police could catch us at any time and send us back home. We can’t get a resident permit if we leave.”

For what it’s worth, the Lusail Real Estate Company overseeing the project is looking into allegations of poor labour conditions highlighted by The Guardian and says it “will take appropriate action against any individual or company who has found to have broken the law or contract with us.” But this is just one subcontractor among many, and there’s nearly a decade before the big event. Human rights advocates are not optimistic about what’s to come.

[MIKA27]

The Intricate Makeshift Money Germans Relied On Between World Wars

State-issued currency is the scaffolding upon which capitalism was built, but it’s always been prone to mayhem. For instance in 1920s Germany, extreme inflation forced German businesses to actually print millions of their own customised paper bills. Now largely forgotten, this notgeld, or “emergency money”, was once ubiquitous — amounting to an ornately-decorated I.O.U. in Weimar Germany.

Notgeld was a catch-all name for private currency, printed between World War I and World War II in Germany and Austria. There are hundreds — maybe thousands — of unique bills, each created for a specific amount of gold, cash, or even corn and grain.

Each printer created (or commissioned) its own design, which ranged from beautiful turn-of-the-century engravings to modernist Bauhaus-inspired typography. The most complete collection of notgeld online comes courtesy of Brooklynite Miguel Oks, whose German ancestors began archiving the bills in the 1930s — thousands of which you can see on his Flickr.

So what sparked this proliferation of wildly decorative — and often quite beautiful — emergency currency?

There’s a long version and a short version, the latter of which began during World War I, with incredibly rapid inflation spurred by the cost of war. Compounding the problem, the demand for metals used to make weapons and ammunition caused the value of traditional coinage to skyrocket — and soon, banks were printing more and more paper money to make up for the disappearing coins.

Even after the Great War ended, strict reparations and a subsequent depression made for even more inflation — this was Mack the Knife-era Weimar, where hunger and unemployment were the norm. Companies were often forced to issue specialised notgeld to pay their employees, simply because the state-run mints couldn’t print enough money to satisfy the demand for bills. So instead, businesses and organisations made their own — and according to Oks, it was often even more stable than conventional bills, since it was tied to gold or another tangible resource.

Fascinatingly, there was also a financial logic to the elaborate decorations that grace many of these bills. Miguel Oks explains:

They made it very pretty on purpose: many people collected the bills, and the debt would never have to be paid. Many were specifically made for collecting, they were called “Serienscheine”, and special albums were sold for the specific purpose of organising and displaying them. They were printed on all kinds of materials: leather, fabric, porcelain, silk, tin foil…

So the decorations on notgeld bills weren’t just “of their time.” They were actually calculated attempts to create collector’s items — which would thus never be turned in for actual compensation.

Of course, financial instability — and all the social ills that came with it — would play a huge role in the rise of National Socialism. If you look closely, the designs on some of these bills speak to the earliest inklings of Nazi ideology, too, from wounded German soldiers to Germanic mythological figures — innocuous signals of darker times ahead. But they also offer a fascinating glimpse into the life and times of this hard-fought era. Check out some of the voluminous collection below.

[MIKA27]

US Air Force Plans To Convert Old F-16s Into Fleet Of Drones

An awkward thing happens late in the life of a fighter jet. It becomes too decrepit for combat but too functional for the junkyard. Don’t worry though. The US Air Force has a plan: convert them all into drones in order to offer fighter pilots in training more realistic target practice.

The latest fleet to get the drone treatment is the famous but fading F-16. Outside of combat, this Cold War-era jet is perhaps best known for being the plane of choice for the Air Force Thunderbirds air show team. Those days are numbered, so Boeing is on deck to convert as many as 126 F-16s into so-called QF-16s, unmanned “aerial targets”. So far, Boeing says, the aircraft are capable of “a series of simulated maneuvers, reaching supersonic speeds, returning to base and landing, all without a pilot in the cockpit.”

This is hardly the first fighter jet to be converted into drones for target practice, though. Before the F-16s became QF-16s, the Vietnam-era F-4 became the QF-4. And before that, pilots took aim at converted jets like the PQF-102 Delta Dagger, the QF-100 Super Saber and the QF-106 Delta Dart. The Air Force prefers the drone approach because nothing simulates actual combat fighting like a full-sized fighter jet pulling real-world manoeuvres in the sky, and the lack of a pilot (somewhat ironically) lets them test the lethality of their weapons systems. Now that the supply of QF4s and other converted jets is dwindling, it’s time for the F-16 to meet its maker.

[MIKA27]

You Need To Hit Two Million Kilometres Per Hour To Exit The Milky Way

If this entire planet, solar system and galaxy just doesn’t hold enough excitement for you, be prepared to pick up some speed — because scientists have worked out that you need to be travelling at a staggering two million kilometres per hour to exit the Milky Way.

A team of researchers from the Leibniz Institute for Astrophysics in Potsdam, Germany, have used data from the Radial Velocity Experiment (RAVE) survey to work out the exit velocity required to leave our home galaxy. By analysing the motion of 90 high-velocity stars and using a series of complex theoretical models of the galaxy’s mass calculate, they were able to calculate the speed at which objects can exit the Milky Way.

Their results suggest that a spaceship would need to hit 537km/s — that’s 0.2 per cent of the speed of light — to escape the gravitational pull of our galaxy. For context, a rocket needs to reach 11.2km/s to escape Earth’s gravity.

Is that ever going to be possible? Well, while current rockets would never make it, astronomer Joss Bland-Hawthorn explained to New Scientist that there’s another way:

“I know it’s a crazy idea, but if you had lots of matter and lots of antimatter, you could power a spaceship out of the galaxy.”

Sounds like a challenge.

[Habana Mike]

You Need To Hit Two Million Kilometres Per Hour To Exit The Milky Way

A few more horsepower and torque in my car and I'm outta here!!!!!!!!!!!!

[MIKA27]

The First Cygnus Spacecraft Successfully Docked With The ISS

The Cygnus spacecraft, which launched from Wallops Island Flight Facility in Virginia on September 18, successfully docked with the International Space Station this morning after astronauts aboard the ISS nabbed it with the station’s robotic arm. Built by private aerospace group Orbital Sciences Corp., Cygnus was carrying almost 600kg of supplies.

The spacecraft was supposed to meet the ISS last Sunday, but NASA and Orbital delayed that docking attempt because of a problem with data formatting. There was also crew turnover on the ISS on Wednesday which pushed Cygnus back on the schedule. But once the docking attempt was underway everything apparently went smoothly.

NASA Administrator Charles Bolden said in a statement that:

Today, with the successful berthing of the Orbital Sciences Cygnus cargo module to the ISS, we have expanded America’s capability for reliably transporting cargo to low-Earth orbit . . . As commercial partners demonstrate their new systems for reaching the Station, we at NASA continue to focus on the technologies to reach an asteroid and Mars.

Space X was the first private company to deliver cargo to the ISS in May 2012, and now that Orbital has also done it, we may start to really see how the competitive market is going to evolve for aerospace companies. NASA partnerships are clearly still a factor, Orbital and NASA have a $US1.9 billion agreement for eight cargo deliveries from Cygnus spacecrafts, and it’s worth noting that Orbital received $US288 million in early funding from NASA to develop the Cygnus project.

Cygnus, a 17-foot-long silver cylinder that can carry up to 4,409 pounds of supplies, will stay docked until October 22, at which point it will fall toward Earth. It is designed to burn up in the atmosphere.

[MIKA27]

Valve Steam Controller Hands-On: Unusually Promising

Game creators who have tried Valve’s unusual new game controller are saying that the new device holds a lot of promise, but make no mistake, they also say it feels pretty different from what we’re used to.

“We’ve been at Valve this week and only used it briefly, however, you immediately notice its increased responsiveness.,” Sega’s VP of PC digital distribution in the US and Europe John Clark told me in an email late Friday.

Clark is just one of a group of game creators from studios big and small who went to the house of Half-Life,DOTA 2 and Steam and tried the third piece in Valve’s three-part announcement of SteamOS, Steam Machine and Steam Controller. All three components will combine to present Valve’s push into living room gaming where they and the library of PC-based Steam games will presumably bump into the likes of Sony, Microsoft and Nintendo.

The controller is key, of course. And while Valve says it is hackable, it will likely be defined by certain core features that set it apart from both mouse-and-keyboard and traditional controllers like that of the Xbox 360. It eschews twin control sticks for circular trackpads that are equipped to deliver some haptic (force) feedback. It moves the traditional AXBY face buttons to the center of the controller, all four surrounding a small touchscreen. Beta controllers, including the one pictured at the top of this post in a photo supplied by Clark, don’t include the touch screen and have temporary face buttons in the screen’s place.

Clark and his colleague, Jurgen Post, COO and president of Sega Europe had recently visited Valve to try the controller and stuck around for a couple of days with teams of Sega developers from real-time-strategy studios Relic (Company of Heroes) and Creative Assembly (Total War).

Here’s Post testing out the controller:

Indie developer Ichiro Lambe of Dejobaan Games also tried the controller and gamely tried to explain to me (and you) what the device’s trackpads feel like.

“It’s tough to grok the touch feedback until you try it out,” he said in an e-mail. “You pick it up, and, for the first few minutes, you’re mostly just moving your thumbs over the trackpads and marveling at what you’re feeling.”

Lambe had played a first-person shooter with Valve’s new device. It seems that the haptic feedback of the trackpads made a big impression. The idea of that feedback is that it’s supposed to create the feeling that the trackpad has edges on it, perhaps the outlines of buttons, if that’s how it is programmed for a specific game. Those trackpads are sensitive to movement and pressure.

“This sounds weird, but it’s almost like rolling two weighted trackballs that are too large to actually fit into the controller,” Lambe said as he tried to explain what it’s like to have one’s thumbs on those two trackpads. “For camera controls, slide one thumb to the right, and you’ll feel this ticking, like you’re turning a physical control. Flick your thumb quickly, and this imaginary physical thing reacts like something with weight to it — the ‘trackball’ continues to roll for a bit, eventually coming to a rest. And since it’s all controlled through the software, the same trackpad then becomes more like a mouse or a laptop trackpad when you’re navigating through menus. Dynamic!”

I received similar positive impressions of the controller’s haptic feedback from Klei‘s Jamie Cheng who had not gone hands-on with the controller but whose colleague had. “He told us that the controller haptic feedback was uncanny,” Cheng said, “and that using the trackpad really did feel like pressing buttons.”

I had asked Lambe how the Steam controller felt compared to traditional game controllers. He replied: “It’s familiar enough to be accessible (I believe they tried less conventional designs before they went with a form factor similar to existing gamepads), but much more precise for (say) anything WASD+mouselook.”

Valve’s Steam controller, Lambe added, “makes FPS gaming more comfortable in a gamepad form factor, and translates other genres (anything where you’d need precise mouse control for gameplay or user interface) to the living room.”

If Lambe was a good tester for first-person games, Team Meat‘s Tommy Refenes was an ideal candidate for seeing how responsive the Valve controller was to classic 2D action games. Refenes tried his and Edmund McMillen’s own Super Meat Boy along with Mossmouth’s Spelunky with the new controller. Refenes blogged about his experiences, summarizing them thusly: “TL;DR; Great Start, needs some improvements, but I could play any game I wanted with it just fine.” He had said as much to me over e-mail: “I went into it as ‘I’m going to play this like an Xbox and see how it does.’ In that way it did pretty well.”

Refenes’ whole post about trying the new gamepad is a must-read. It doesn’t just describe the feel of the controller but conveys the vibe at Valve regarding the controller. The company’s engineers seem prepared to make changes on the fly — fitting as the controller’s entering into a beta. Regarding how the games he played controlled, Refenes writes:

I was able to play Meat Boy the way Meat Boy can be played on an advanced level (and I’m rusty at it). The right circle button was the jump button and we had both Triggers mapped to the Run button just like a regular Xbox 360 controller. We also had the Run button mapped to the back trigger buttons I mentioned before that can be pressed with your fingers on the back of the pad. This worked great but did lead to a bit of hand cramping. I think this is due more to the way you use the run button in Meat Boy and not the design of the controller or the buttons.

And…

Spelunky requires Whip, Jump, Bomb, and Rope buttons. We configured the controller to play like an Xbox controller. So the left circle pad was once again used for the directional buttons, and the right circle pad was used as A, B, X, Y buttons in the orientation that you find on an Xbox Controller….I played through Spelunky and the controller worked great. As I was playing I was describing to the engineers the twitch movements that go into Spelunky… The Steam controller handled this just fine.

Refenes said he found himself yearning for a little more physical feedback from the trackpads and discussed an idea with Valve’s engineers involving adding physical nubs to the pads “that would be noticeable enough where your thumbs would find them, but not so abrasive that the circle pads couldn’t comfortably used in mouse / trackpad mode came.” He seemed to think that the idea, already considered by Valve, might be tested with newer iterations of the controller.

Refenes said he still prefers the Xbox 360 controller for now, somewhat due to familiarity, but said he could be happy gaming just on the Steam controller. He won’t be the only person, though, who will consider the controller in comparison to the traditional twinstick 360 or even PS3 gamepad. Dejobaan’s Lambe expressed some warmth for the familiar as well.”There’s something satisfying about moving a physical stick or depressing a button with some resistance and throw,” he said. “The immediate feedback that an analogue stick gives you when you reach the extreme of a direction is useful. But how much of that is just a matter of what we’re used to?”

A Valve rep indicated to me that other developers have also tried the controller, including indie PC strategy game publisher Paradox Interactive and Hitman studio IO Interactive. The diversity of developers indicates that Valve expects its unusual new controller to be versatile. Consider, after all, that the Sega guys who checked out the controller specialize in mouse-and-keyboard strategy games.

“We’d really like to see how the developers experiment with PC RTS titles [with the new controller] and will value their feedback throughout the beta,” Sega’s Post told me over e-mail. “Games such as Company of Heroes 2 and Rome II are core for Sega and of course, you would define them as mouse & keyboard games. I’m personally intrigued to see how these games could work with the controller.”

Valve’s hardware beta for its controller and its Steam Machine gaming devices will begin soon, with an expected release to consumers next year. The controller will raise plenty more questions in the months to come.

[MIKA27]

NASA's Psychedelic Space Plane Is Glowing With Pure Science

So much of real science is publishing articles and peer-reviewed studies, so it’s always great to see that crazy, fluorescent, glowing space-plane, movie-type science is really out there too. And NASA is doing it with the best of them.

First NASA scientists took a 5.8 per cent scale prototype space plane and covered in a ton of glowing, fluorescent oil. Then, they stuck it in a wind tunnel to put its aerodynamics to the test. There’s plenty you can learn from a wind tunnel test and your naked eyes, but the glowing oil helps to showcase the more minute details of how the air blasts by, making it easier to tweak the design to modify lift, thrust, and whathaveyou.

Also it just looks freaking awesome. We should cover and all space planes in fluorescent oil all the time. You know, for science.

[MIKA27]

8 Future US Spaceports: Gateway To The Stars

We are so, so close to commercial orbital tourism. We sit on the cusp of a new space age — an age of convenience rather than exploration, where anybody — really, anybody — can become an astronaut.

To date, only eight non-governmental facilities in the entire country have received FAA licensing approval to operate as spaceports.

These spaceports have grown largely from former military and NASA installations — because why build a multi-million dollar launch facility when you can just buy one? But space travel (not unlike pimpin’) ain’t easy, and it ain’t cheap — yet. This handful of pioneering spaceports aim to change that.

Mid-Atlantic Regional Spaceport (MARS)

NASA’s Wallops Flight Facility, located on Virginia’s eastern shore, was established in 1945 as an aerodynamics test-bed and orbital launch facility. In the 68 years since, more than 16,000 rockets have taken off from Wallops, including early prototypes for the Mercury Project and LADEE. These days, in addition to acting as one of NASA’s two remaining launch pads, Wallops is also home to the Mid-Atlantic Regional Spaceport (MARS).

Governed by the Virginia Commercial Space Flight Authority, MARS utilises a pair of launchpads: Pad 0A, which is licensed by the FAA for delivering payloads up 11,100 pounds into Lower Earth Orbit, and Pad 0B, which supports 8,400 pound payloads and is more suited to smaller vehicles like the Minotaur IV or Minuteman rockets. It also accommodates both liquid and hybrid fuel vehicles in addition to the more conventional solid-fuels.

MARS recently hosted the inaugural launch of Orbital Sciences Corps’ autonomous Cygnus cargo logistics spacecraft, aboard the company’s Antares rocket. The Cygnus, a competitor to Elon Musk’s Dragon Capsule, successfully launched on September 18th, 2013. Four days later it reached the ISS, docked, and delivered 1,500 pounds of supplies.

The California Spaceport

In operation since 1999, the California Spaceport at Vandenberg Air Force Base in Lompoc, CA is the oldest licensed “Commercial Space Launch Site Operator” in America. What’s more, it’s the only fully commercialised facility in the country — it operates entirely without government funding.

The “Space Launch Complex 8″ or SLC-8 (the area with the orange construction crane, above) is the primary launch site. It’s capable of supporting both polar and ballistic launch trajectories using smaller Minotaur class boosters, but as of 2011, had only hosted a total of nine launches.

Tucked away in the middle of Oklahoma’s nowhere resides one of the longest runways in North America — the 4115m main drag at the Oklahoma Spaceport. That much tarmac, combined with the virtually plane-free Oklahoma skies — it’s the first inland spaceport to completely avoid military and restricted airspace — this spaceport is ideally suited as a commercial facility for HTOL (Horizontal Take Off and Landing) vehicles. The Oklahoma spaceport is also home to Armadillo Aerospace, even though its lunar lander prototype is strictly a VTOL. Best of all, the OK Spaceport even features a nine-hole golf course.

Cape Canaveral Spaceport

In addition to Wallops Island in Virginia, NASA also maintains its flight facilities in Cape Canaveral, Florida. But since the demise of the shuttle program, both the Cape Canaveral Air Force Station (CCAFS) and Kennedy Space Center (KSC) have been opened up to additional commercial endeavours. Together, these facilities feature three active launch pads and two active runways for horizontal launches between them.

Launch Complex 46 and Launch Complex 20 are Cape Canaveral’s primary launch platforms. LC 46 is designed to accommodate medium class rockets like the Lockheed Athena or Orbital Sciences Corp.’s Taurus class as well as ballistic missiles like the Trident II and Minuteman rockets. LC 20 on the other hand is built to handle small, suborbital launch systems such as the LiteStar, Terrier, Orion and ASAS rockets.

Cecil Spaceport

America’s newest spaceport is located at Cecil Airport in Jacksonville, Florida — at the site of the decommissioned Naval Air Station Cecil Field. Cecil Spaceport has only been licensed since 2010, but already operates the necessary facilities for supporting horizontally launched recoverable vehicles. The spaceport has 3810m, 2438m and 1219m long runways already and is currently developing additional taxiways and spaceport-specific facilities. The improvements should be complete by the end of the decade.

Mojave Air & Space Port

Built at a decommissioned Navy airfield and WWII gunnery training range, the Mojave Air and Space Port has become one of the country’s premiere test sites for private space vehicles. Beginning with the rotary rocket program in the early 1990′s the Mojave facility has hosted some of the biggest names in commercial space travel including SpaceShipOne, which won the Ansari X Prize in 2004, XCOR Aerospace, Masten Space Systems, and Orbital Science Corp.

Spaceport America

Located in the Jornada del Muerto desert basin of New Mexico, Spaceport America is billed as “the world’s first purpose-built commercial spaceport” and is home to private space luminaries such as Virgin Galactic, SpaceX, UP Aerospace and Armadillo Aerospace.

The LEED Gold-certified facility covers approximately 62,245 square metres in total and includes a pair of 4366 square metre double-height hangars as well as an on-site mission control centre. The spaceport is accessible via a short shuttle ride from the nearby town of Truth Or Consequences, NM.

Kodiak Launch Complex

The 3700 acre Kodiak Launch Complex is the only high altitude, full service spaceport in the country. Located on the 54th latitude at Narrow Cape, Kodiak Island, the KLC specialises in polar launches — those commonly used for putting satellites into orbit. The state-of-the-art facility includes dual launch pads (one for orbital launches, the other sub-orbital), a 17-storey rocket assembly building, and a clean room for preparing satellites. The KLC is currently building a third pad that will allow an incredibly tight launch schedule — less than 24 hours from go-ahead to liftoff.

[MIKA27]

This Vampiric Vacuum Vants To Suck Your Blood (And Save Your Life)

Normally, when you suffer from a pulmonary embolism — a blood clot blocking the flow to your lungs or heart — you’ve only have two options; undergo chest-cracking open-heart surgery, or die. But thanks to an ingenious new blood filter system, doctors will be able to save lives without destroying sternums or requiring weeks of recovery.

If you combined a Dyson vacuum with a dialysis machine, you’d have a rough equivalent to the AngioVac system from Angio Dynamics, a New York-based purveyor of bleeding edge medical equipment. The system essentially hoovers out your blood, filters it for clots and pumps the cleansed blood back into your body, minimising the need for transfusions.

The system consists of a cannula and circuit, designed by Angio Dynamics, as well as a number of third-party components like the pump and filter. The cannula is serves as the outgoing pipe. It’s inserted into the carotid artery and is threaded through your vascular system into position on one side of the clot. The other end of the cannula is attached to a powerful fluid pump via an inline filter. The pump is switched on, sucking the patient’s blood through the cannula, then the filer, then through the Angiovac circuit that is inserted into the femoral artery and back into the patient’s body. This effectively bypasses the circulatory system and is known as an extra-corporeal bypass.

The AngioVac has already been credited with saving at least two lives. Todd Dunlap, a 62-year-old Southern California resident became the first person in the state to successfully undergo the procedure on August 8 when a medical team from Ronald Reagan UCLA Medical Center sucked out a 61cm clot that stretched from his legs into his heart.

The team, guided by an oesophageal camera, inserted the cannula into Dunlap’s neck and positioned it next to the clot in his still-beating heart. They then slid the circuit into his femoral vein and turned the suction on. Just three hours later, the clot had been fully exorcised. Dunlap was out of intensive care within three days and discharged completely within the week. Had doctors cracked his chest and performed open heart surgery, he would have been looking at six hours under the knife, weeks in the hospital (barring any secondary infections), and months of recovery. “Retrieving a clot from within the heart used to require open-heart surgery, resulting in longer hospitalization, recovery and rehabilitation times compared to the minimally invasive approach provided by the AngioVac system,” said Dr. Murray Kwon, a UCLA cardiothoracic surgeon who collaborated on Dunlap’s procedure, in a press statement.

Similarly, Detroit-area doctors were recently able to remove a massive clot straddling Mary Murphy’s lungs. “Last week’s successful deployment of the new AngioVac Cannula [catheter] at the DMC marks a major step forward for patients who are struggling with pulmonary embolisms [blood clots in the lungs] and other types of cardiovascular blockages,” said Theodore L. Schreiber, M.D., the President of the DMC Cardiovascular Institute (CVI), said in a press statement.

Specifically, Murphy had suffered a “saddle pulmonary embolism,” wherein the blood clot balances on either side of where the pulmonary artery splits into two branches, one for each lung. But like Dunlap, doctors quickly and easily positioned the cannula next to the clot and removed it in less than an hour.

Hopefully continued successes like these will entice cardiology departments around the country to employ this lifesaving procedure.

[MIKA27]

How Mercedes Benz Uses Cameras To Stabilise The Road While You Drive

The newest Mercedes Benz S-Class has a new Magic Body Control feature that basically stabilizes the road you drive on. Mercedes is cleverly using a chicken’s self-stabilizing head to popularise the feature but explains how it works in more detail in the video above.

You’ll never feel a bump again. Hopefully.

The magic in the, um, Magic is the combination of stereo cameras on the windshield and an adaptive suspension system. The cameras can scan a road’s surface 50 feet ahead in real time while going 80mph to analyse the condition of the surface. It then passes on its measurement data of the road onto the suspension system which adjusts itself right as the car is driving over the uneven road. It supposedly prevents oscillating and reduces vibration. Smooth sailing. Or driving.

The system can recognises ‘obstacles’ at 3mm or better so it gets pretty damn detailed. From the looks of the video (which is put out by Mercedes), there seems to be a legit difference when a car is equipped with the Magic Body Control and when it’s not. Who knows what that’s like in real life (only rich people will know)

[MIKA27]

Monster Machines: This Handheld Radar Will Track Disaster Victims By Their Heartbeats

Building collapses are a tragic and overwhelmingly fatal occurrence in the developing world. But that could soon change once NASA and the DH’s revolutionary, handheld radar unit comes to fruition. It scans for and identifies buried building collapse victims based solely on their breathing patterns and heartbeats.

Dubbed the FINDER (Finding Individuals for Disaster and Emergency Response), this miniaturised radar system is based on a remote-sensing system originally developed by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory to find extraterrestrial life on potentially habitable exo-planets. It is also routinely used in NASA’s Deep Space Network to calculate the distances between spacecraft and analyse the internal structure of Saturn. It works by bouncing microwaves off of an object — a pile of debris, a planet or what have you — and analysing the echoed signal. Sophisticated algorithms developed at the JPL then isolate even the weakest pulse and shallowest breath from the cacophony of background noise.

“Detecting small motions from the victim’s heartbeat and breathing from a distance uses the same kind of signal processing as detecting the small changes in motion of spacecraft like Cassini as it orbits Saturn,” said James Lux, task manager for FINDER at JPL, said in a press statement. In fact, the system is so sensitive, it can track a heartbeat through nine metres of crushed materials, six metres of solid concrete, or from 30 metres in open spaces.

The FINDER must still undergo rigorous testing before being adopted by FEMA for use in the field but those trials should be completed by the end of next year. “The ultimate goal of FINDER is to help emergency responders efficiently rescue victims of disasters,” said John Price, program manager for the First Responders Group in Homeland Security’s Science and Technology Directorate, in a press statement. “The technology has the potential to quickly identify the presence of living victims, allowing rescue workers to more precisely deploy their limited resources.”

Indeed, this technology easily lends itself to a huge number of search and rescue, law enforcement, conservation, and recreational uses. NASA even hopes to adapt it for future space missions as a means of wirelessly monitoring astronauts’ vital signs.

[MIKA27]

This Bear Was An Official Member Of Poland's WWII Army

After being invaded by Germany in the west and later by Soviet Russia in the east, the Polish government fled Warsaw but continued to fight from abroad. After Germany attacked Russia, the Russians decided to release their Polish prisoners of war, who then began re-forming into an army.

In April 1942, several of these Polish units landed in Persia and began a trek through a mountainous area heading toward Egypt and Palestine to re-group under the direction of the British Army.

While in the mountains, the story goes that a group of soldiers happened on an Iranian shepherd boy who had found an orphaned Syrian brown bear cub. (Supposedly the mother had been shot and killed.) Food was scarce, so the boy agreed to trade the cub to the soldiers for some canned meat.

Whether that’s actually how it happened or not, the soldiers did acquire a bear cub during their journey. They named him Wojtek, pronounced “Voytek”, meaning “he who enjoys war” or “smiling warrior”.

The bear quickly became something of a mascot for the soldiers, and then much more. As the author ofVoytek the Soldier Bear, Garry Paulin, stated:

The Polish soldiers had come from nothing, had lost everything during the war. The bear became so much more than just a mascot to them. He was a real boost to their moral.

At this point, Wojtek became an unofficial member of the 22nd Transport Company, Artillery Division, Polish II Corp. When the company relocated to Iraq, then Syria, Palestine and Egypt, Wojtek moved with it.

While Wojtek was young, the soldiers nursed him with condensed milk placed in empty vodka bottles, then fed him fruit, honey and syrup until he was able to eat more solid foods. Knowing little about the care and feeding of bears, they eventually treated him as if he were just another solider, including giving him beer rations, which quickly became his favourite beverage. He also developed other vices over the years like smoking and eating cigarettes.

Despite his smoking habit and seemingly a lack of proper nutrition for a bear, Wojtek grew to be a nice sized brown bear standing in at about 6 feet (180cm) tall and weighing around 485 pounds (220kg). His favourite pastime was wrestling his comrades, though he also enjoyed a good game of tug of war.

Besides these activities, Wojtek enjoyed playing with other animals. He was best friends with a Dalmatian belonging to a British liaison officer. The two animals would play and wrestle together. Not all animals were open to befriending the bear though. Wojtek at one point approached a horse in a field and was kicked in the head and neck several times. He reportedly stayed away from horses and mules after that.

In Palestine, Wojtek inadvertently helped capture a thief who broke into an ammunition compound. To the thief’s surprise, besides ammunition, he found Wojtek, who often slept in there. Upon seeing the bear, the would-be thief made quite a commotion, which alerted the soldiers who then arrested the man. Wojtek was rewarded with a bottle of beer.

As the Polish Army came closer to entering the war zone in Italy in 1943, the soldiers pondered the problem of Wojtek’s status, in that if he was to continue to accompany them, they’d be bringing him to the front line. This problem came to a head in 1944 in Egypt when the soldiers were headed to Naples. The port authorities refused to let the bear board the ship.

They solved the problem by giving Wojtek his own paybook, rank and serial number. They even taught him how to salute like a proper soldier. After the paperwork was filed, he was officially a member of the Polish Army in the 22nd Artillery Supply Company of the Polish II Corps, and he was now allowed on the ship.

In Naples, it was British Courier Archibald Brown’s job to help process Polish soldiers that had just arrived from Egypt to advance with British soldiers against German and Italian forces. But when he called Wojtek’s name, no one answered.

“We looked at the roster, and there was only one person, Corporal Wojtek, who had not appeared,” Brown said in an interview years later. So he asked the other soldiers why Wojtek didn’t come forward. An amused soldier replied: “Well, he only understands Polish and Persian.” To his great surprise, Brown was led to a cage holding a full-grown bear.

Wojtek soon proved he was more than just a mascot when, during the series of assaults known as the Battle of Monte Cassino, he put his strength to good use after being trained to carry heavy crates filled with mortar shells from the supply trucks, delivering them to the men operating the large guns on the front line.

After the battle, a likeness of Wojtek holding a shell became the official badge of the 22nd Transport Company. The image was put on vehicles, flags and uniforms.

At the end of the war, about 3,000 Polish soldiers and their bear ended up being stationed in Berwickshire, Scotland for nearly two years. As the soldiers were demobilised in 1947 and sent home, they said some heart wrenching goodbyes to Wojtek.

For his part, Wojtek found a home in the Edinburgh Zoo where he became a popular attraction. Many of his Polish servicemen friends visited him at the zoo over the years. As one of the zookeepers there said,

…his old friends would come and visit and occasionally they would jump the fence and give him a cuddle or a bottle of beer. If he heard the Polish language spoken, he would often perk up.

In the wild, Syrian brown bears typically live to about 20-30 years old. However, in captivity they can potentially live as long as 48 years, but it was not to be for Wojtek. He died in December of 1963 at the age of just 22.

Bonus Facts:

• Over the years, Wojtek became a symbol of solidarity between Poland and Scotland. In 2009, Scottish Parliament held a reception in Wojtek’s honour and in 2011, a parade through Edinburgh included a eulogy, in Polish, to the bear-soldier. Donations from people all over the world paid for a large bronze statue of Wojtek in Edinburgh which was officially approved by the Kraków council on April 25, 2013.
  
• As you might expect, once he was full grown, fewer and fewer of the soldiers would challenge Wojtek to wrestling matches as he was, well, a bear. However, he learned that if he was too rough with them, they wouldn’t wrestle anymore and so was generally very gentle and even would let an occasional soldier win a match.
  

[MIKA27]

Man Forced To Grow New Nose on Forehead After Traffic Accident

So you’ve been in a nasty traffic accident and smashed all your face in. The good news is, doctors can sort you out a new one. The bad news? You’ve got to grow it on your forehead first.

That’s the fate that befell a man called Xiaolian hailing from China’s Fuzhou, Fujian province. Like all “proper blokes” he shrugged off some major damage to his nose and, after several months of neglect, ended up with an infection so bad as to render his actual nose useless.

It’s messed up, no doubt about that, but equally just as incredible as a medical marvel. Doctors pulled off the feat by placing a skin tissue expander on Xiaolian’s forehead, before shaping it into a nose using some cartilage from his ribs. They plan to transfer the new nose to its proper position within a few months using a similarly mind-blowing procedure, leaving Xiaolian with both the figurative and literal headache of dealing with a gaping gap on his forehead.

[MIKA27]

Samsung Building 'Galaxy F' Range to Beat its own Galaxy S Models?

Rumours suggest Samsung may be preparing another flagship smartphone range, with the possibly metal-body ‘Galaxy F’ model series being floated as a new high-end line to run alongside — or even replace — the successful Galaxy S phones.

According to ETNews, industry sources suggest the ‘Galaxy F’ range would arrive alongside the Galaxy S, and may offer an even higher-spec alternative for people who have no limits when it comes to buying their mobiles.

The sources quoted by the site suggest the first Samsung Galaxy F series model could arrive in March of 2014, powered by an eight-core Samsung chipset with a 16-Megapixel camera, plus the potential high-spec Galaxy F may be where that rumoured all-new metal case is heading.

[MIKA27]

Inside The Intriguing Ancient Underground City Of Derinkuyu

Long ago, in the region surrounding Nevsehir and Kayseri, in central Turkey, an ancient people built, or rather dug, over 200 underground cities. The deepest of these, under the present day town of Derinkuyu, delves over 250 feet below the Earth’s surface, and boasts numerous tunnels, halls, meeting rooms, wells and passages.

Because the city was carved from existing caves and underground structures that had first formed naturally, there is no way to discern, with traditional archaeological methods of dating, when exactly Derinkuyu was built. As such, and with ties to the Hittites, Phrygians and Persians, Derinkuyu presents a fascinating riddle for ancient mystery enthusiasts.

The Region

Derinkuyu is located in the Cappadocia region of Turkey, a place renowned for its unique geology. At the dawn of time, volcanoes in the area covered it with a thick layer of ash. Over the years, this ash transformed into a soft rock that itself eroded over the eons, leaving an exotic landscape of pocked spires, columns and rough pyramids, referred to by the locals as castles. Perhaps inspired by their surroundings, ancient people began to carve the soft ash rock into tunnels and rooms to be used as residences, storage, stables and religious temples.

Cappadocia boasts a number of fascinating carved sites including the churches and refectories at Goreme, the Roman-made castle at Uchisar and the largest underground city in the region, Kaymakli. The latter has been inhabited continuously since its construction, and people today still use it for storage and even stables.

Derinkuyu seems to attract the most attention of all the underground cities because, until 1963, modern people were unaware that this deepest of the underground cities even existed.

Derinkuyu Complex

The underground city at Derinkuyu has 18 storeys that descend far into the Earth. Sophisticated shafts, some as long as 55 metres, provide ventilation to the complex’s multitude of residences, communal rooms, tunnels, wine cellars, oil presses, stables and chapels.

The city also has numerous wells to provide fresh water. So many, that most scholars agree that Derinkuyu could have easily supported as many as 20,000 people.

It is widely presumed that the city was part of a larger complex; in support of this, many point to a commonly-believed rumour that a tunnel extends from Derinkuyu to its sister underground city, Kaymakli, some three miles away. Conventional wisdom holds that these cities were built for the same reasons other people built citadels and castles — to protect the populace during invasion. Some of the strongest evidence to support this theory includes the self-contained fresh water supply, as well as the enormous stone, circular doors, weighing up to 500 kilograms, that could seal off passageways from invaders.

Derinkuyu had been lost to time until, during renovations on a modern home, an opening to a cave passage was revealed. Although visitors have been allowed in the underground city since 1965, many passages and rooms still remain inaccessible.

Inhabitants

There is no consensus on who built Derinkuyu or when construction first began.

Hittites

Some suggest that the earliest construction started with the Hittites in the 15th century BC. The Anatolian Hittites, distinct from the group described in the Christian Bible, controlled a large portion of Asia Minor extending from the Black Sea to the Levant.

Cappadocia, and Derinkuyu, were smack in the middle of their territory.

Throughout their history, the Hittites faced a variety of enemies including the Egyptians, the Assyrians and the Thracians (a group of loosely affiliated tribes from southeastern Europe). In the 12th century BC, the Thracians destroyed the Hittites’ main city of Hattusa, and many believe the Hitties used Derinkuyu as a shelter during that onslaught. They support this theory with a small number of Hittite-related artifacts, including a statute of a lion, found on the site.

Phrygians

Others are not convinced of a Hittite origin and point instead to the Phrygians. One of the Thracian tribes that sacked Hattusa around 1180 BC, the Phrygians controlled the region until approximately the 6th century BC when they were conquered by the Persian host under Cyrus the Great.

Archaeologists consider Phrygian’s architects among the finest of the Iron Age, and they were known to have engaged in large, complex construction projects. One of their most well known works was the sophisticated great citadel at Gordion, built between 950 and 800 BC. Because they are known to have possessed the necessary architectural skills, and inhabited the region for such a long time, many credit the Phrygians with creating Derinkuyu; these experts place the first construction on the complex to sometime between the 10th and 7th centuries BC.

Persians

The second chapter of the Vendidad, a section of the Zoroastrian book Avesta, includes the story of how the great and mythical Persian king Yima created places underground to house “flocks, herds and men“. Relying on this, some opine that Derinkuyu was built by ancient Persians; since the Avesta dates to the founding of Zoroastrianism (1500-1200 BC), Persian construction on the site would have to have pre-dated any construction done by the Hittites. Although intriguing, because the Vendidad makes no clear link with Derinkuyu, this theory has little mainstream support.

Christians

Regardless of who built it, later generations have inhabited it. Many believe early Christians used the underground cities of Cappadocia, including Derinkuyu, as a place to hide from Roman persecution. In support of this claim, they point to the fact that Saint Gregory and Saint Basil had both presided in Cappadocia during the 4th century AD.

Underground Cities in the Modern Era

Surprisingly, the ancient people of Anatolia weren’t alone in their love of underground living. Like the Hittites and Christians hiding from their enemies, the people of Moose Jaw, Saskatchewan built a network of tunnels and residences to hide the town’s Chinese immigrants from persecution in the early 20th century. Later, smugglers reportedly used the underground city during Prohibition to hide their illicit wares from law enforcement.

In France, the last inhabitants of the Village troglodytique de Barry, an underground community that dated back to the 6th century AD, were forced to abandon their homes just a few years ago when their houses began to fall down around them. According to reports, a few people died before the last inhabitants were convinced to leave.

Today in Montreal, Quebec, an entire complex of underground trains and tunnels, connects residents and visitors to shopping centres, exhibition halls, office towers, movies theatres and even an indoor ice rink.

[MIKA27]

Samalas in Indonesia Identified as Source of the 1257 A.D. ‘Missing’ Eruption

The source of one of the most enigmatic eruptions over the last 10,000 years may have been conclusively identified. An eruption that occurred in 1257 or 1258 A.D. left one of the largest climate signals in the past few thousands years, producing significant sulfate spikes in the ice caps in 1258-59 and evidence from around the world of dramatic weather shifts for years afterwards. These effects looked to be on par with Tambora in 1815, but the source of such a large climate signal has been enigmatic. How do you hide an eruption that was as large as Tambora and happened less than 1000 years ago? I tried to tackle this mystery, looking at some potential sources for this massive climate signal captured in the ice cores. There were suspects, but none of them really matched perfectly. Then, in 2012, Franck Lavigne said at an American Geophysical Union Chapman Meeting of Volcanoes and the Atmosphere that a source had been identified, but didn’t reveal which volcano. I did some sleuthing and made the guess that Rinjani was the volcano that was being implicated. Since then, the mystery of the 1257-58 A.D. eruption source remained.

Map showing the location of Samalas in the Rinjani complex on Lombok, along with directions of pyroclastic flows during the 1257 A.D. eruption.

However, the study by Franck Lavigne and a legion of others (open access PDF) that implicates the Rinjani Volcanic Complex has finally been released in PNAS. Turns out, I was both right and wrong — the eruption was from the modern Rinjani area, but the evidence points to an ancestral volcano that Lavigne and others calls Samalas (much like Mazama precedes Crater Lake), part of Rinjani volcanic complex on Lombok (see right). The current active cone of the modern Rinjani complex is Barujari cone within the caldera, a small cinder cone within the Segara Anak caldera. Lavigne and others point to an eruption from Samalas, a volcano that would sit where the modern 6.5 by 8 kilometer caldera (see above) is now as the source of the large sulfate spike, weather phenomena in 1257-59 A.D and the caldera itself.

So, what evidence points to Samalas being the culprit? Lavigne and others mapped ash deposits on Lombok and neighboring islands, and by looking at the distribution of ash (with knowledge of local wind patterns), they were able to point back to the Rinjani complex as the source of the large ash fall and pyroclastic flow units in the region. By sampling logs and other vegetation in the deposits, a minimum age of the ash and debris could be determined, which all correlate with these materials being older than the 1257-58 A.D. eruption (* Further work by Clive Oppenheimer on the record of this eruption in the ice cores suggests that the date of the eruption should be 1257 A.D. +/- 1 year. So, I’ll start calling it the 1257 A.D. eruption from here on in.) Most interestingly, historical chronicles in Indonesia suggest a catalysmic eruption that buried the capital city of Lombok’s kingdom at the time (Pamatan) before the end of the 13th century, which would time perfectly with a massive eruption of Rinjani.

All this evidence is somewhat circumstantial, but Lavigne and others also break out geochemical evidence that suggests that glass shards in ice cores that correlate temporally with the 1257 eruption. Glass shards can be found in ice cores and by comparing those ash chards to material collected near the suspected volcano, you can determine if the ash is a close match compositionally. It is a little like matching fingerprints, but with volcanic ash, it is like matching partial prints from different fingers — likely you can’t say that it MUST be a certain volcano (as much magma from volcanoes that have massive eruptions is broadly similar in composition), but you can assign a likelihood. Volcanologists have spent a lot of time defining criteria for what constitutes a match between ash from ice cores (or any far away location) and source from the source. Right now, if the match is with 1-2 percent in silica and alumina and <5-10 percent for all other major elements (like Fe, Mg, Na, K, Ca), then you can be pretty confident that the distal ash and the one from the source are the same (see below). In this case, it looks like the ash sampled from polar ice cores and the ash sampled from Samalas deposits are well within those ranges, so another piece of evidence implicated this long-lost volcano.

Silica versus sodium + potassium (Na + K) for ash found in ice cores that date to ~1258-59 sulfate spike and ash collected near Samalas in Indonesia. Overall, the two ash match within defined criteria, supporting Samalas as the source of the polar ash and sulfates.

Put that all together, and it appears Samalas is the source of the 1257 eruption — one that was very sulfur rich and possibly close to the size of the Tambora eruption. Looking at deposits, total volume of magma erupted close to 35-40 km3, making it roughly a magnitude 7 (correlates to ~VEI 7) — definitely putting it in the same class as Tambora, Crater Lake, White River, Taupo. Levigne and others estimate that the eruption produced a 20-30 km eruption plume that lasted a little less than a day, and within that day, 4-6 hours worth of an ultraplinian phase with a plume topped 40 km. It moves the eruption into the same class as that massive ultraplinian eruption at Taupo in 186 A.D. Pyroclastic flow deposits from this eruption can be traced for tens of kilometers from the vent and even at 25 km distance, they are as thick as 35 meters. All in all, this was an eruption the likes of which we have not seen since the Katmai eruption in Alaska in 1912 (yes, even dwarfing Pinatubo in 1991).

What I find most remarkable that it took so long to identify the source. This is similar to one eruption I’ve been working on, the White River Tephra in Alaska, where a massive eruption in 803 A.D. that spread ash across much of eastern Alaska and the Yukon (and is claimed to be the largest plinian eruption of the last 10,000 years) is still not conclusively matched to a source vent. The sources of large eruptions, even in the geologically recent past, can be very mysterious, so to find where these monsters are hiding, you need to do exactly what Lavigne and others did for Samalas: careful combinations of historical, geological and atmospheric research. Now, we can examine the magmas erupted by Samalas in 1257 (and earlier) to determine why it made such a profound impact on the global weather and climate systems. The 1257 A.D. eruption has been linked to mass burials in London, the ease which kings conquered the region in Indonesia not long after the eruption, and even potentially a buried capital city. Finding the source of this eruption will allow us to starting testing to see if the hypotheses of these connections stands true with more refined ages. This also emphasizes how feet-on-the-ground geology is needed to identify the sources of more of these missing monsters, because we still have a number of monsters to slay to understand the sources of the eruptions captured in the global climate record.

[MIKA27]

Jagermeister Shotmeister

Pour ice-cold shots of your favorite anise-flavored liqueur just like they do out at the bar with the Jagermeister Shotmeister ($200).

This tap machine houses a single 750 milliliter or one-liter bottle, dispensing perfectly-portioned shots of Jagermeister chilled down to below zero degrees. It's also small enough to fit under the average kitchen cabinet, so it won't occupy too much space in your home bar or kitchen. It's energy efficient — using as much power as a home lightbulb — and requires no assembly, so you can start drinking right away.

[MIKA27]

Johnnie Walker Platinum Edition Scotch Whisky

When it comes to Scotch whiskies, Johnnie Walker sits in the company of the most well known and best distributed in the world. To fit this description, they have a nice collection of options. Johnnie Walker Platinum ($110) falls in between Blue and Gold in their line, and is the latest release from the Scottish master blenders. Platinum was inspired by the Walker family's tradition of crafting private blends for company directors and special occasions. It was crafted from single malt and grain whiskies and is an incredibly smooth sipper with the subtle addition of the trademark Johnnie Walker smokiness. At 18 years old, it's a mature, exceptional blend worthy of your next significant event.

[Fuzz]

Monster Machines: This Handheld Radar Will Track Disaster Victims By Their Heartbeats

It'd be really cool if this thing made the same sound as the motion detectors from "Aliens".