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

[MIKA27]

New shape-shifting metals discovered

A new shape-changing metal crystal is reported in the journal Nature, by scientists at University of Minnesota.

It is the prototype of a new family of smart materials that could be used in applications ranging from space vehicles to electronics to jet engines.

Called a "martensite", the crystal has two different arrangements of atoms, switching seamlessly between them.

It can change shape tens of thousands of times when heated and cooled without degrading, unlike existing technology.

Currently, martensite metals are made of an alloyed mixture of nickel and titanium.

They have the remarkable ability to "remember" their shape and even after being bent will return to their original form. For this, they are called "shape memory" metals.

They have been used in spectacle frames and brassiere wires, but also in surgery as frameworks for shaping healing bones, and as "stents" for holding heart arteries open.

Martensite metals change shape when heated or cooled through a certain temperature, when the atoms that make up their structure rearrange themselves in a sudden transformation.

Shape-changing smart metal for the chevrons at the rear of a Dreamliner engine could make it run more quietly

Some call this a "military transformation" because the rows of atoms that make up the metal crystal click into their new shape in an orderly manner.

The transformation means that martensite can be used in smart mechanisms that respond to temperature change.

Examples include automatic windows-openers in glasshouses, a means for automatically guiding solar panels to point at the Sun on the Hubble Space Telescope, and, very recently, a proposed use in the Boeing 787 Dreamliner to morph the trailing edge of the engine cowling, making it quieter when it runs hot on take-off."

The pitfall of current martensites is that after repeated shape changes, they build up stresses inside that degrade them and eventually break them apart. The new alloy, made of a mixture of zinc, gold and copper, changes back and forth almost indefinitely with little internal damage, opening up a new range of applications for these types of "active materials".

The aim is now to apply the lessons learned from the new metal to make a family of ceramic solids that can also be shape-switched back and forth.

"The real advance is to make the transformations reversible that could be applied in many situations" explains Prof Richard James, one of the authors of the study.

"You could make devices that convert heat to electricity directly. They could use the waste heat from computers and cell phones to recharge the battery and make them more efficient."

As the material cycles through its different atomic arrangements, crystals can be seen at its surface in ever-changing patterns, looking like microscopic rivers.

The structures fit together without any stress layers between them, and this seems to be the key to their longevity and potential.

The new materials could also be used in improved and efficient microelectromechanical systems - energy harvesting devices, in which small vibrations can be converted directly into power.

These sorts of gizmos are already used in tyre pressure-monitoring systems in cars to power the electronics in the sensors.

[MIKA27]

Of Course This Australian Driver Filmed His Own Police Chase

http://youtu.be/5p-7XoVgNtA

There’s knowing and exercising your rights, and then there’s being an idiot. Guess which one this guy will identify as, after leading police on a merry chase and recording it on his phone.

It all started, reportedly, when the man refused a breathalyser test and instead decided to take off with his mate in the passenger seat.

The whole time, the two men are having a laugh as the driver records the experience on his phone.

That led police on a merry chase at what looks like speeds of 80km/h, until the man was eventually cut off in the middle of an intersection.

It all came to an end, though, when police smashed open his window to the driver’s cries of “I don’t consent!”. Oh dear.

MIKA: It's d**k heads like this that need to be punished harsher. Cops here in Oz have no respect from the public and that's partly the governments fault for pretty much tying their hands.

This wouldn't happen anywhere else with such a simple infringement having 3-4 cops "Asking" such an A-Grade idiot to open his door/window. They'd just smash it open and or ram his car off the road.

[MIKA27]

Meet The Suburban Dad Who Built His Own DeLorean Time Machine

Some people are movie fans. Others are fanatics. And then there’s Lenny Hochteil, the man who built a DeLorean time machine just like the one in Back to the Future. It’s got a flux capacitor, gullwing doors and ground effects. And, yes, he does dress up like Doc Brown when he drives it.

Believe it or not, Hochteil is hardly the only person to convert a DMC DeLorean into a very expensive movie prop.

Similar replicas pop up on the internet from time-to-time, including a few years ago when this spot-on reproduction that appeared on ebay. Or this one that’s randomly listed on a car site that looks like it might’ve been built when the original DeLorean came out. But Hochteil might be the only guy to own not one but two DeLoreans.

He’s also the only one to star in his own charming little documentary.

[MIKA27]

Drone Pilot Fights for Right to Profit in the Unmanned Skies

http://youtu.be/43amzd0mOMQ

On June 30, 1956, two airliners flying over the Grand Canyon collided. All 128 passengers and crew aboard the planes perished. It was the first U.S. air disaster with more than 100 fatalities. The accident made clear that the nation’s burgeoning air-travel industry needed better safety oversight. Citing the “tragic losses of human life,” President Dwight D. Eisenhower signed legislation creating the Federal Aviation Administration in 1958.

Six decades and a zillion regulations later, the agency that supervises everything from air-worthiness to passenger gadget use has taken legal action for the first time against an on-ground pilot — an operator of a styrofoam, 4.5-pound Ritewing Zephyr-powered glider. The $10,000 levy (.pdf) invokes the same code section that governs the conduct of actual airline-passenger pilots, charging modeler Raphael Pirker with illegally operating a drone for commercial purposes and flying it “in a careless or reckless manner so as to endanger the life or property of another.”

Pirker is fighting the citation before the National Transportation Safety Board, challenging the FAA’s assertion that it has the power to supervise the use of unmanned drones. If Pirker prevails, the FAA’s 2007 ban on the commercial use of unmanned drones — a thriving overseas business — may be nullified.

Pirker’s legal battle throws a spotlight on a commercial drone scene in the United States operating in a grey area. The FAA has issued dozens of cease-and-desist letters to operators of commercial model aircraft, forcing some companies to shut down. Others, however, are performing their aerial filming and crop and real estate surveying businesses underground — or sometimes right in the open.

The agency is working on a set of regulations for the budding industry, but those rules won’t be unveiled until as early as 2015. Meanwhile, uncertainty reigns.

Pirker’s lawyer maintains that the 2007 ban on commercial drones is invalid because the FAA failed to hold public hearings before issuing the rule. “There is no enforceable federal regulation concerning the operation of a model airplane,” says the attorney, Brendan Schulman of New York.

The term drone — appropriated from the military’s unmanned aerial vehicles — is relatively new, but model air-planing has a long history. Just 20 years after the Wright brothers’ first flight, the nation’s first National Aeromodeling Championships were held in 1923. The American Academy of Model Aeronautics, of Muncie, Indiana, boasts some 170,000 members today.

“The first time you fly one of these things, you’re whole body thinks it’s flying,” says Pirker, who runs TBS Avionics, a Hong Kong-based drone parts supplier.

Pirker, 28, has captured dramatic footage over Rio De Janeiro, the Golden Gate Bridge and the Statue of Liberty, among dozens of other famous and not-so-famous locations.

His FAA legal troubles began when he was on the job for the public relations firm Lewis Communications in 2011. His assignment: Capture images over the University of Virginia. The resulting video takes viewers on a wild ride, and the FAA’s citation says that it amounts to a series of violations — flying too low over vehicles, buildings, people, streets and structures, and even aiming the craft at a person.

That was his spotter, Pirker says.

Raphael Pirker.

Laura Brown, an FAA spokeswoman, declined comment but forwarded a February “Fact Sheet,” that cites safety as a main reason for barring the commercial use of what it calls Unmanned Aircraft Systems. The rules don’t apply to hobbyists, even if they’re using the very same planes.

To Pirker, that makes no sense.

“How come the flight is less dangerous if you’re not receiving any compensation for it?” Pirker asks.

Until 2007, the industry and hobbyists were operating under a 1981 FAA “Advisory Circular” (.pdf) that did not distinguish between hobbyists and the commercial use of what the government at the time called “model aircraft.”

Among other things, the circular “encourages voluntary compliance” with safety standards. Among them, the circular recommends flying below 400 feet — to avoid flying in the proximity of “full-scale aircraft” — and using “observers to help if possible.” The guidelines also suggest selecting flying locations “away from noise-sensitive areas such as parks, schools, hospitals, churches, etc.”

The circular does not define model aircraft, but the 2007 Federal Register entry does — with a definition so broad as to border on meaninglessness.

“They range in size from a wingspan of 6 inches to 246 feet; and can weigh from approximately 4 ounces to over 25,600 pounds.

The one thing they have in common is that their numbers and uses are growing dramatically,” the Federal Register states.

The FAA has blessed a number of law enforcement and public safety uses for drones, from fire suppression efforts to border security to search-and-rescue missions.

Schulman says the FAA cannot simply declare a regulation without having a public notice-and-comment period. His argument goes like this: Congress has delegated to its bureaucracy the authority to make rules, but when new regulations have a substantial impact on the general public, the government must have hearings and take comments.

That didn’t happen in this instance, Schulman says. That means the government is wrongly enforcing a ban on the commercial use of drones in the United States, and the $10,000 fine against Pirker cannot, therefore, be enforced, he says.

Schulman is running up against an area of federal law known as the Administrative Procedures Act, which is designed to put a check on the vast powers Congress has granted to federal agencies.

Among the last times the bureaucracy was dinged for breaching the Administrative Procedures Act was in 2011, when a federal appeals court said the Department of Homeland Security broke the law with its 2009 decision to make “nude” body scanners the “primary” security apparatus at the nation’s airports.

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit ordered the TSA to have public hearings and to take public comments about the rule change. But the court allowed the TSA to continue using the scanners anyway, all in the name of the war on terror. If such hearings end up being held regarding commercial drones, the public comments (and the agency’s answers to them) will be reviewable by a court, which could open the FAA up to even more legal challenges.

Meanwhile, big money is on the line.

The Association for Unmanned Vehicle Systems International, an industry lobby, says the United States is losing billions in revenue and thousands of jobs because of the ban.

According to its March report, “The Economic Impact of Unmanned Systems Integration in the United States,” the commercialization of drones would add 34,000 manufacturing jobs in the next three years and 70,000 new jobs overall in the same time period. The overall economic impact equates to $82.1 billion between 2015-2025, according to the report.

“The main inhibitor of U.S. commercial and civil deployment of the UAS is the lack of a regulatory structure,” the report notes.

The National Football League has been lobbying for legalization, and the Motion Picture Association of America says that the ban is crimping film production in the U.S., and even making production more dangerous.

“Unmanned aerial devices — essentially remote-controlled helicopters — offer an innovative, safer and much less expensive option for shooting scenes than renting a full-scale manned helicopter,” spokeswoman Kate Bedingfield says. “They allow for creative aerial shots without putting anyone at risk and are frequently used on film sets overseas. We are hopeful that we can work with the FAA to implement their safe commercial use in the United States in the near future.”

Chris Anderson, WIRED’s former editor who now runs drone-maker 3DRobotics of California, says he has sold thousands of fixed-wing and multicopters to hobbyists across the globe. He says his biggest commercial clients are in Europe, Australia and Latin America.

“We didn’t get into this to be a hobby,” he said. “We think it’s the future of aviation.”

Much of the commercial work is being done overseas by farmers who are surveying their crops and soil, a practice Anderson calls “precision agriculture.”

“Today, with big ag, it’s too big,” he said. “Farmers just don’t know what’s going on in the field.”

Several companies advertising the commercial use of drones in the U.S. declined to speak on the record with WIRED.

However, Charles Eide, who owns Minnesota-based commercial filming venture EideCom, says the FAA recently called him, demanding that he stop performing commercial services with unmanned aircraft and to quit advertising about it.

He’s invested some $70,000 into 10 drones. In a creative workaround, he maintains that he’s not actually offering commercial unmanned aircraft services.

“Instead of charging, we will simply include it pro bono for working with us,” he said. “It’s just another benefit of working with our company.”

[MIKA27]

How to Survive the Middle Ages

The Medieval period isn’t exactly known for its good food, easy living or successful amputations.

Thanks to some vaguely interesting history lessons and a decent dose of Monty Python, it’s likely that the first things that spring to mind when you hear the words ‘middle’ and ‘ages’ are terrifyingly rusty torture implements and piles of mud. This impression isn’t entirely inaccurate- there was definitely lots of mud- but for a decent chunk of the time not everyone was writhing around covered in pus-filled sores whilst being burnt with a branding iron. Some people actually didn’t die horrific, agonising deaths at the hands of nature or the law, usually because they used their common sense rather than listening to their local barber-turned-surgeon. So just in case you find yourself travelling back in time to this most foul-smelling of eras, here is how they did it:

#5: Following monks’ orders

At the start of the Middle Ages, the role of surgeon or doctor in European towns was usually taken by monks. This wasn’t as absurd or dangerous as it might sound, as they made up the small percentage of the population who could actually read and had access to medical literature, which was written by Arabic scholars. They even performed surgeries occasionally, rather than using prayer and meditation to cure the illness, which was common practice.

One of the monks’ favourite surgeries was called trepanning, which involved cutting through the scalp and drilling a hole in the skull.

As the dentist-style electric drills we all know and dread today were yet to be invented, this process took a long time, was incredibly dangerous and caused a huge amount of pain. Trepanning was used to treat epilepsy, mental disorders and head injuries and, contrary to common sense, is thought to have actually worked in some cases. The remains of one peasant man, dating back to around 1100, showed that he had been struck on the head by a heavy, blunt object, causing part of his skull to shatter. Trepanning surgery in this case had relieved pressure on the brain and allowed smashed bone fragments to be removed, saving the man’s life. If only temporarily.

#4: Bathing with the neighbours

The monk-as-doctor set up worked quite well until 1215, when the Pope ordered monks to stop practicing as doctors and to instruct peasants to take over their roles. This resulted in a great deal of farmers moonlighting as surgeons, mainly because they had some experience in treating the ailments of their livestock. As a result, by the time the Black Death rolled round about a century later, most European towns and villages housed an illiterate farmer-doctor with almost no medical training. It’s worth pointing out at this point that, contrary to popular belief, Middle Age dwellers had impeccable hygiene standards. They washed their hands before and after meals and frequently bathed with their friends and family, so it must have been a bit annoying when the doctors and authorities told them that bathing would give them the plague.

The theory behind this was that warm water opened the pores and allowed the disease to enter the body, a logic that the masses somehow bought despite their love for bubble baths with the neighbours. As a result of following what was probably the worst advice in history, almost the entirety of Europe stopped bathing and started dying from the air-borne rat disease. Good job, doc.

#3: Taking the pain

After the monk surgeons disbanded, many surgeries were performed by barbers or farmers, without anaesthesia. Some forms of pain relief had been developed, often using hemlock or opium, but these were difficult to come by in poorer, rural areas. As a result, surgery was only used as a last resort for serious cases such as gangrene, cancers and cataracts. As antibiotics weren’t developed until the 1800s, patients were in just as much danger after the operation as they were during, and infections were common. The sporadic nature of surgeries was probably a good thing, taking into account that the ones doing the cutting, scraping and sewing were used to dealing with much furrier patients and were likely to be illiterate.

To help them figure out how to hack off a particular bit of the body, they had helpful illustrations such as ‘Wound Man’, which showed them the injuries an incredibly bored soldier wearing only a thong might suffer on the battlefield.

Whilst having an ice pick ripped from your shoulder or a clam removed from your elbow without pain relief might not be an attractive idea, it could be safer than using Medieval anaesthetics. One popular medicine to put patients to sleep consisted of lettuce, gall from a castrated boar, opium, henbane and hemlock juice, which could have caused addiction due to the opium or, slightly worse, death from hemlock.

#2: Not having children

Childbirth in the Middle Ages was one of the most dangerous experiences in a woman’s life. Expectant mothers were told by priests to prepare their shrouds and confess their sins before they went into labour, as more than one in three adult women died during their child-bearing years. No men were present during the birth and doctors were only allowed to enter the room in an emergency, as most Medieval societies did not consider childbirth to be a medical matter.

Due to the fact that rural dwellers would be lucky to have a midwife present, and the labouring woman was in all likelihood tripping on opiates, emergencies were relatively common and not at all pretty. If the baby was in an abnormal position, the attending women would shake the bed in an attempt to turn the baby, because apparently giving birth in what feels like an earthquake is an absolute breeze. Events could take a more gruesome turn if the baby died before being delivered, at which point it would be dismembered in the womb with sharp instruments and removed. It’s tough to decide whether the most disturbing part of this scenario is the chopped up baby or the razor-sharp tools being shoved up someone’s womb. Either way, Medieval spinsterhood is starting to look like a pretty smart option.

#1: Staying on the right side of the law

There were no police in the Middle Ages, which meant that the task of judging punishments often fell to the Church. This might explain why so many people were executed for following a religion that differed from the country’s officially sanctioned faith. The Church was incredibly powerful at this time, but also included in its teachings a duty to be merciful and just, so it should follow that punishments were fair and relatively non-violent. Unfortunately, the Church’s main tactic for preventing crime was to dole out sentences so unnecessarily shocking that they would terrify the rest of the population into being model citizens.

The death penalty was common in England before the 15th century, possibly because murder made up 18.2% of all crimes, and all convicted murderers were sentenced to death. The punishment of death by hanging also extended to perpetrators of arson, forgery and robbery of goods valued at more than one shilling. A staggering 73.5% of all offences at this time were thefts, and one shilling wasn’t a lot of money, so hangings were very common. If convicts wanted to make their path to the gallows even more eventful, they could opt for a trial by battle, which gave them the chance to fight their accuser to prove their innocence. This wasn’t likely to end well though, as the accused would either lose the fight and be found guilty, or win the fight and be punished for assaulting, or killing, their accuser.

[MIKA27]

Harrison Ford 'happy' to do Blade Runner sequel

Actor Harrison Ford says he has been talking to director Sir Ridley Scott about appearing in a sequel to cult sci-fi movie Blade Runner.

The Indiana Jones star told a games and entertainment website that he and British film-maker Scott had "been chatting about it".

"I truly admire Ridley as a man and as a director," he told IGN.com.

"I would be very happy to engage again with him in the further telling of this story," added the 71-year-old star.

Two years ago, producers announced that Sir Ridley was planning a follow-up to his mysterious 1982 tale, which blended sci-fi and noir detective novels.

Alcon Entertainment said the film would be a prequel or sequel, rather than a remake of the original movie - which was based on Philip K ****'s novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?

Ford played Rick Deckard, a police officer who hunts down genetically engineered lifelike robots, known as replicants. It co-starred Sean Young, Rutger Hauer and Daryl Hannah.

At the time, producer Andrew Kosove said it was unlikely Ford would return in his role as Rick Deckard.

"In no way do I speak for Ridley Scott, but if you're asking me will this movie have anything to do with Harrison Ford? The answer is no.

"This is a total reinvention, and in my mind that means doing everything fresh, including casting."

Despite receiving two Oscar nominations for special effects, the original Blade Runner was a sleeper hit - it received lukewarm reviews at the time of its release but flourished on home video.

In 1993, the film was selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry by the Library of Congress as being "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant".

[MIKA27]

DUCATI 1199 PANIGALE S SENNA

Ducati presented the Ducati 1199 Panigale S Senna Limited Edition at the Brazilian Motorcycle Show, the limited edition mark´s the 20th anniversary of the death of legendary Formula One Grand Prix star Ayrton Senna. The colors of the bike were chosen by Senna himself when he visited Italian manufacturer a few weeks before the ill-fated Imola Grand Prix in 1994. The production is limited to 161, in honor to the number of F1 races Senna raced in. The exclusive version will be available from June 2014.

[MIKA27]

Meet the Armys tricked out Super fast Stealth Choppers of 2030

In the not-so-distant future, U.S. special operators, like those who used scuba gear boats and SUVs to go after terrorists this weekend, may be carried into combat by quiet, ultra-fast helicopters that bear only a passing resemblance to today's models.

The Army is trying to revolutionize a chopper fleet that hasn't changed all that much in the last 30 years. Four companies are trotting out designs to make it happen. One proposed aircraft looks like a minivan with rotors; another, like a V-22 Osprey tiltrotor on steroids. There's also sleek, stealthy-looking chopper. And the last resembles an awkward cross between a UH-60 Black Hawk and a V-22.

The Army last week signed "technology investment agreements" with the four firms -- a Bell-Lockheed Martin team, a Boeing-Sikorsky team, Karem Aircraft and AVX aviation -- to develop prototypes that will compete to be the basis for the ground service's light and medium-sized helicopters of the 21st Century.

For years, Army aviation leaders have been lamenting the fact that the service has not purchased a brand new helicopter design since the introduction of the AH-64 Apache in the 1980s. Besides the V-22 -- the aircraft that flies like an airplane but takes off and lands like a helicopter by pivoting its giant engines skyward -- almost all of the choppers used by the U.S. military today are based on designs from the 1950s, ‘60s and ‘70s. Service officials will tell you that this has led to a sort of stagnation in the state of military helicopter technology, especially when compared to the giant leaps ahead in technology the Air Force and Navy have seen with the advent of revolutionary stealth jets and drones.

To remedy this, the service has kicked off a long-term project called Joint Multirole (JMR) aimed at developing a radically new crop of choppers all based on a similar design that do everything from hunt bad guys to haul troops and cargo. The new choppers must be able to fly at least 265 miles per hour -- double the top speed of your average helicopter. They also have to be able to hover at altitudes of up to 6,000-feet in 95 degree temperature; a difficult feat for many helicopters. The choppers must also be quieter than today's helicopters. All four companies have nine months to flesh out their designs, after which, the Army will select two to be built and flying by 2018. The Army wants the new aircraft in service by 2030 or so.

Here's a look at each of the designs.

Karem's proposal, the TR36TD Optimum Speed Tiltrotor (OSTR), strongly resembles a beefed up V-22. Karem claims the OSTR will be able to fly at speeds of up to 414 miles-per-hour and climb and hover higher and fly longer than other rotorcraft. (Karem was founded by Abe Karem, the man who designed the MQ-1 Predator drone.) For now, these are just claims since Karem doesn't have a single aircraft built.

Then there's the startup company AVX Aircraft. They are offering a helicopter (also shown at the top of the article) with a fuselage shaped like a minivan powered by a stack of two main rotors on top and two fan-like propellers in the back of the chopper designed to push it to speed the Army needs, all this for a "very attractive price." While the three year old company is staffed by a number of chopper industry veterans, AVX, like Karem, has yet to build an aircraft.

Next up is the Bell Helicopter-Lockheed Martin team's proposed V-280 Valor tiltrotor. While both of these companies have a ton of experience building aircraft -- Bell actually builds with wing and engines for the V-22 -- they don't have a prototype of the Valor. The "3rd Generation Tiltrotor" will apparently "deliver twice the speed and range, with enhanced safety margins and hover performance at altitude," according to Bell's marketing material for the awkward-looking craft.

Finally, there's the Sikorsky Boeing team that's competing with a design based on its experimental X-2, which is the world's fastest helicopter, flying at speeds up to 290 miles per hour. Sikorsky's concept calls for a sleek craft with two rotors sitting on top of the fuselage and one large propellor at the tail that will push the chopper along. It's unclear whether the aircraft will include technology found on the stealth versions of Sikorsky's MH-60 Black Hawks used by the U.S. Army.

It's important to note that Sikorsky is the only company that has a prototype flying. The rest of these crazy designs haven't left the engineers' computers. This may give the Connecticut-based company a leg up in the contest.

The Army has set out a pretty ambitious timeline for buying a revolutionary class of new choppers given the fact that it took nearly 30 years, 36 lives, and billions more dollars than expected to get the Pentagon's last brand new rotorcraft design, the V-22, into service. With budgets tightening, it may be incredibly difficult for the ground service to find the cash to justify building a brand new class of chopper, especially when it's been successfully using upgraded versions of old models for decades.

[MIKA27]

13 Places On Earth people believed were the entrances to hell:

Photo of diorama from Fengdu

While in some belief systems, the afterlife can only be accessed by spiritual means, in others, the underworld could be accessed directly from the Earth. Here are 13 real spots that people have thought (and in a few cases, still do) lead straight to the lands of the dead.

Some of these involve the Christian concept of Hell, while others were supposed to lead to other (sometimes not unpleasant) afterlives. And there are plenty of other spots that have hellish names, including Hells Gate in British Columbia, the flaming Door to Hell in Derweze, Turkmenistan, and the southern pit of Erta Ale in Ethiopia, which is called the "gateway to Hell."

Just a quick note: This piece was inspired by an Atlas Obscura piece about the beautiful Cenote Xkeken. In the course of researching this piece, I realized that Atlas Obscura had recently posted their own piece, "Go to Hell: 11 Ways to Enter the Underworld." I avoided reading the piece so as to avoid overlap, and while there is some, Atlas Obscura has a few underworld hot spots that aren't mentioned here—plus, they . I highly recommend checking out their list (with some gorgeous photos) and also following Atlas Obscura in general, because it's an incredible site.

Photo of burial site in Hierapolis

The Ploutonion at Hierapolis: The ancient city of Hierapolis, near modern-day Pamukkale in Turkey was once home to a site considered sacred to Pluto, the god of the dead. Although the site was rediscovered in 1965, it was just this year that archaeologists announced the otherworldly significance of this holy spot. The same gases that heat the famous hot springs of Pamukkale originate from a cave beneath the Ploutonion, and because the vapors are toxic, the people of Hierapolis believed that they had been sent from Pluto himself and the site was treated as a ritual entrance to the underworld. Pilgrims would travel from all over the classical world to make sacrifices to Pluto; animals led into the cave would drop dead from the toxic fumes, while acolytes of Pluto would prove their devotion to the god by entering the cave and emerging alive (perhaps thanks to their knowledge of pockets of breathable air within the cave).

Photo of Ming Shan

Fengdu, China: The 2,000-year-old City of Ghosts, located in Chongqing municipality, has long been thought to be the place the dead stopped on their way to the afterlife, though it seems to have gotten this reputation in a roundabout way. A legend from the Han Dynasty tells of two imperial officials, Wang Fangping and Yin Changsheng, who forsook the court life to practice Taoism in Fengdu and became immortal. Their names combined sounded like "King of Hell," and so Ming Shan, the hill that overlooks Fengdu, became known as the abode of Tianzi, the King of Hell. The city is filled with Buddhist and Taoist temples, said to be filled with immortal spirits that judge and torment the dead. A freshly dead soul, it was said, must first cross the Bridges of Helplessness to have their virtue judged, then face the Mirror of Retribution at the Ghost Torturing Pass and either become immediately reincarnated or face a series of torments before reaching the Wheel of Rebirth. Living visitors can reach the city by boat (the lower portion was flooded after the construction of the Three Gorges dam along the Yangtze River) and walk the bridges, face the demons who guard the spirit world, view sometimes gruesome dioramas of the afterlife, and gaze upon the 138-meter-high statue of the Ghost King, the largest sculptured carved onto a rock. While Fengdu is centuries old, some its symbolic structures were created rather recently. For example, the Last Glance at Home Tower, the final sight ghosts will see of the living world, was constructed in 1985.

Photo of Masaya crater

Masaya Volcano: The Aboriginal people of Masaya in modern-day Nicaragua did not believe that the mouth of their caldera was a gateway to the afterlife, but there was a local tradition that the volcano was a god and that a sorceress lived inside its fiery pit. But it was the Spanish explorers who arrived in the 16th century—and had little familiarity with volcanos—who associated with volcano with diabolic activity.

In 1529, Mercedarian Fray Francisco de Bobadilla hauled a cross up the volcano, hoping to exorcise what he believed was the Mouth of Hell. And he wasn't alone; Friar Toribio Benavente wrote in 1541 that the volcano's persistent activity must have a supernatural cause and that it must be, "the place from which the condemned are thrown by the demons.”

Various religious figures pointed to the volcano as evidence of the horrors that would await sinners in Hell. Not all Spanish friars felt the same way, however. Friar Blas del Castillo led the first Spanish expedition inside the volcanic crater in 1538 to search for gold and silver. And, while debates as to the nature of the volcano raged through the 16th and 17th centuries, Friar Juan de Torquemada published a theological analysis of Masaya and other volcanos in 1615, asserting that it was ridiculous to view any volcano as an entrance to Hell. Among his arguments was that since souls are incorporeal, Hell has no need of physical mouths.

The Seven Gates of Hell: A local legend claims that in the woods off Trout Run Road in Hellam Township, Pennsylvania, sit the Seven Gates of Hell. According to popular fiction, the gates appear near the site of a tragic asylum fire, and if you step through all seven gates, you land straight in Hell. (Of course, that same fiction claims that no one has ever made it past the fifth gate, so how would anyone know?) There are a couple of problems with this story, even aside from the whole going-to-Hell thing. One is that, according to the Hellam Township website, there never was such an asylum on that spot. Also, there's only one gate, a rather ordinary-looking thing a local doctor installed to keep people off his property. (Weird US explains that the other six gates are supposed to be invisible during the day.) That hasn't kept curious trespassers from sneaking onto the property, however, in search of a direct route to Hell. Hellam Township isn't the only place in the US rumored to host a gateway to Hell; urban legends claim that the devil can be found in the Gates of Hell, a collection of drains in Clifton, New Jersey, and in the Stull Cemetery in Stull, Kansas.

And some voodoo practitioners claim that the Seven Gates of Guinee, which lead to the afterlife of the voodoo traditions, can be found in various parts of New Orleans. (Read about the Gates of Guinee on Atlas Obscura.)

Photo of Lacus Curtius

Lacus Curtius: Today, this pit in the Roman Forum doesn't look like much, but in a legend told by the Roman historian Livy, it was once a wide chasm. Livy tells the story of Marcus Curtius, who may have given the pit its name. According to Livy's account, the chasm appeared in the middle of Rome, and nothing could fill it. An oracle prophesied that the chasm would not close and the Roman Republic would be destroyed unless the city sacrificed that which had made it strong. Marcus Curtius realized that Rome's strength lied in the weapons and bravery of its citizens and so, fully armed and armored, he rode his horse into the chasm and straight into the underworld. The chasm closed and the city was saved. It may well be this legend that classed Lacus Curtius as a mundus, a place where one could easily commune with the underworld. It was also a conduit for buying off the gods of death; during the reign of Augustus, Roman citizens would toss coins into the lacus to pray for the Emperor's safety.

Photo of Station Island

St. Patrick's Purgatory: One legend about the Irish Saint Patrick involves Station Island, a speck in Ireland's Lough Derg.

According to the legend, after Patrick had become frustrated with his doubting followers, the Christ appeared to him and guided him to a cave on Station Island. Inside the cave was a pit, which was the gateway to Purgatory, where the souls of the dead must endure punishments for their sins before entering Heaven. While there, Patrick also received visions of the torments of Hell. From the 12th century on, Station Island has attracted Catholic pilgrims looking to sit close to Purgatory. In 1632, the lords justices of Ireland ordered the cave closed and most of the records of pilgrimages prior to that year were destroyed, but we do know that the pilgrims would fast and pray for days before spending a full day shut inside the cave. Despite the cave being shut, the pilgrimages continued unbroken; modern pilgrims can still visit Station Island for three-day pilgrimages, during which they must keep a 24-hour vigil while fasting on the island.

Detail of map of Iceland by Abraham Ortelius

Mount Hekla: Iceland's particularly active volcano developed a reputation as a gateway to Hell in the 12th century, after its 1104 eruption. Benedeit's 1120 Anglo-Norman poem Voyage of St. Brendan mentions the volcano as the prison of Judas, the apostle who betrayed Jesus. That reputation continued with further eruptions; after the 1341 eruption, there was a report that people saw birds flying amidst the fire—birds, some thought, that must really be swarming souls. Even in more recent times, Hekla has maintained its diabolic status, as some superstitious folk have claimed that it's a spot where witches meet with the devil.

Photo of the Acheron

Acheron: The Acheron is a real river that flows through northwest Greece, but it also figures prominently in classical mythology. In Homer's Odyssey, Circe directs Odysseus to the underworld, telling him that he must find the point where the Acheron meets the Pyriphlegethon and of a branch of Styx. The poet Vergil mentions also Acheron in the Aeneid, identifying it as the river from which the Styx and Cocytus rivers flow. The ferryman Charon was supposed to transport newly dead souls across the river into the afterlife, something he even does in the pages of Dante's Inferno. In Dante's poem, the souls of the Uncommitted, who chose neither good nor evil, find their eternal home on the banks of the Acheron, not condemned in Hell, but still forever punished for their indecision.

Entrance to the cave of the Sibyl at Cumae

Lake Avernus: While the Acheron is in Greece, in the Aeneid Aeneas enters the underworld through the Avernus crater near Cumae in Italy. The crater lake was sacred to the Cumaean Sibyl, and according to myth, she could lead a living traveler into the underworld. It name offers some hints as to why it might have been deemed such a deadly portal. Avernus comes from the Greek word αϝορνος, meaning "birdless," which links to the belief that birds flying over the lake would die due to the toxic fumes the lake emitted. It's unclear how much truth there is to this belief; in modern times, birds are quite happy to fly about the lake.

Cape Matapan: If you don't want to deal with Charon the ferryman, you could enter the classical underworld of Tartarus through the back door. In Book Ten of Ovid's Metamorphoses, Orpheus enters the underworld not via Acheron, but reached the Styx through the gate of Taenarus, located in Cape Tainaron (also known as Cape Tenaro or Cape Matapan) on the southernmost tip of Greece on the Peloponnese.

Photo of Cenote Xkeken, Yucatán

The Mayan Cenotes: The Maya certainly had some of the most picturesque entrances to the underworld. These natural underground waterways, located in Mexico and Central America, were thought to be the home of the rain god Chaak and portals to Xibalba, the afterlife. Caves were often seen as gateways to the afterlife in the Mayan worldview, literal passageways between the living world above and the realm below. Archaeologists have found Mayan temples and human remains in the cenotes of the Yucatan peninsula, a possible legendary site of Xibalba, while other traditions put entrances in Cobán, Guatemala, or Actun Tunichil Muknal in Belize. These days, the cenotes are seen more as tourist destinations than the entrances to the mythical "place of fear."

Photo of Osore-zan, Honshu

Mount Osore: The Europeans were hardly the only folks to believe that volcanos marked the entrance to the underworld. Mount Osore, region filled with volcanic cauldrons located on the remote Shimokita Peninsula of Japan's Honshu island, is literally named "Fear Mountain." And with its barren, gray landscape, bubbling waters, and persistent smell of sulfur, it's easy to see how it got its macabre reputation. Like Acheron and the River Styx, the Sanzu River, which runs through the region is said to be a spot souls must cross to pass into the afterlife.

Photo of Hrad Houska

Houska Castle: According to folklore, Houska Castle, located in Blatce, north of Prague in the Czech Republic, is built over a "bottomless" hole that leads to Hell. One legend claims that in the 13th century, King Ottokar II of Bohemia (or else a nobleman of the Dubá clan) offered a pardon to any condemned prisoner who consented to be lowered into the pit and report what he saw. The first prisoner lasted only a few seconds before he began screaming. When he was pulled back up, the story goes, his hair had turned white and it seemed he'd aged 30 years—and he babbled incoherently about half-human creatures who flapped through the darkness of grotesque wings. The castle was built, likely on Ottokar II's orders, over this supposed hell-hole, without proper fortifications, a water source, or kitchens. The myth asserts that this was because the castle was meant not for human habitation, but to capture demons. (The chapel was supposed to be actual portion of the fortress erected directly over the Gate of Hell.) The fortress was, however, used as an administrative building, has been used as an aristocratic residence at various points in its history, and was renovated and expanded during the Renaissance. The castle's current owners trade on the building's hellish reputation, setting it up as a spooky tourist attraction.

[MIKA27]

E-Hell On Earth: Where The West's Electronics Go To Die

While Western consumers clamour for the latest and greatest in consumer electronics, our older digital devices are inundating and poisoning a generation of children in Ghana. Colorado Springs Gazette photographer Michael Ciaglo recently visited the largest e-waste processing site in the African nation and returned with some very damning images. That new iPhone 5s of yours had better be worth it.

The site is called Agbogbloshie, an illegal settlement/landfill outside of Ghana’s capitol city of Accra. Roughly four acres in size and home to more than 40,000 migrants and refugees, Agbogbloshie has become one of the world’s foremost “digital dumping grounds”. It’s a major destination for the developed world’s electronic waste, processing millions of tonnes of unwanted electronics every year.

Most of this “processing” work is performed by young men and children who burn electronics to extract the valuable copper that they contain for pennies on the dollar. A “good haul” reportedly earns workers less than $4 a day, while releasing hordes of toxic chemicals into the environment. This deadly chemical cocktail poisons the surrounding land, air, water and workers — stunting their mental and physical development.

Of course, there are international conventions in place to prevent this sort of thing from happening, the Basel Convention specifically.

But like Haiti and Afghanistan, the US has refused to ratify it and many firms from signatory countries, including the UK and Japan, have found workarounds. See, in the early 1990s, Western countries began exporting second-hand electronics to Africa as a means of bridging the digital divide — and it worked. Ghanaians could finally afford personal electronics — which cost a tenth of what new equipment would — but the “donations” quickly putrefied into illegal dumping and export schemes under the guise of aide.

It’s far more profitable for unscrupulous e-waste recycling companies to simply ship off their junk to distant African shores than to actually process the electronics themselves. And it’s not like first world consumers have any control over what happens to their electronics after they trade them in — nor have they shown an particular interest in knowing.

As the pace of consumer electronic production exploded at the turn of the 21st century, the pace of illegal electronics exports to third world countries has become a torrent. And while the Ghanaian government instituted some protective measures in the 2000s, such as the Korle Lagoon Ecological Restoration Project (KLERP) to restore Agbogbloshie’s former wetland, there is little the government can do about the atrocious living conditions endured by the region’s residents — and the situation doesn’t look like it will be improving any time soon.

[Fuzz]

Of Course This Australian Driver Filmed His Own Police Chase

MIKA: It's d**k heads like this that need to be punished harsher. Cops here in Oz have no respect from the public and that's partly the governments fault for pretty much tying their hands.

This wouldn't happen anywhere else with such a simple infringement having 3-4 cops "Asking" such an A-Grade idiot to open his door/window. They'd just smash it open and or ram his car off the road.

Aww, no fair. The vid cut off just before the beating.

Seriously, there is no such thing in Australia as refusing to consent to a breathalyser. You must provide a breath sample if asked by a police officer. There are only a few exemptions to this law, and saying I refuse to consent ain't one of them.

Police cannot ask for a breath sample from somebody who hasn't been driving their vehicle for over 2 hours (each state has a different time limit), or if you are at home. If you think that that last one is a get out of jail for free ticket by leading the cops all the way home instead of pulling over, think again. There are special circumstances where the police can book you if they suspect you have been driving under the influence, especially if you have just tried to escape from an RBT.

Furthermore, the police can ask for a breath sample from a passenger, if they have reason to believe that they were the driver of the vehicle (eg after an accident, a semi-sober passenger tells the police he was the driver, instead of the actual intoxicated driver).

[ramon_cojones]

more like the tons of outdated androids that come out every month

[MIKA27]

Scientists Find Remains Of Water-Covered Earth-Like Planet

A team of astrophysicists have made an exciting however complex discovery a mere 170 light years away. In their own words, it’s “the first evidence of a water-rich rocky planetary body” outside of our own solar system to have evidence of water. It’s the “rocky” bit that makes it Earth-like.

Hey, that’s pretty exciting! An Earth-like planet covered in water just a few clicks across the galaxy — what a day! Well, it’s a little more complicated than that. Scientists didn’t actually find the planet itself but rather “its shattered remains”. The debris used to be a tiny planet composed of 26 per cent water, but about 200 million years ago, the star that it was orbiting — creatively named GD 61 — started to die. Before becoming a white dwarf, GD 61 devoured the water-covered planet and any other bodies in the system.

So you’re not going swimming in the GD 61 system anytime soon (or ever). However, we now know that it’s possible for water to exist on Earth-like planets outside of our solar system. It was previously believed that Earth’s water might have come from the dwarf planet Ceres which orbits our sun near the asteroid belt. That would’ve meant that water is not unique to Earth but might be a phenomenon that’s unique to our solar system. Not so, we now know.

This is just one of a string of exciting discoveries in the past year or so suggesting that the temperate, water-covered rock we call Earth (and home) is not so one-of-a-kind. Last December, scientists spotted Tau Ceti, an Earth-like and possibly habitable planet just 12 light years away. Then, a few months later, they found two more some 1200 light-years that they identified as the two exoplanets most perfect for life. And around the same time, researchers said that there could be as many as 100 billion of these Earth-like planets in the Milky Way Galaxy alone!

That’s a lot of Earth-like planets, but we won’t know if they’re habitable until we know. And it’s going to take time and lots of little discoveries like the remains GD 61′s once water-covered planet. Until then, Mars is looking better and better.

[MIKA27]

This Insane Ancient Tomb Has Been Restored To Its Prehistoric Glory

You’re looking at the Soto dolmen in Trigueros, Spain — and you’re right to be amazed. This prehistoric tomb has been home to rituals of life and death since 4200 BC, and now after nine years it’s been restored to its prehistoric glory.

Measuring 60 metres in diameter and 3.5 metres high, visitors troop down the 21-metre passageway into the central chamber, basked with sunlight which pours in through the doorway. The largest of over 200 megalithic tombs that dot the Huelva province, New Scientists explains its origins:

The stones that support the Soto dolmen’s interior were originally arranged as a Neolithic stone circle similar to Stonehenge, before being repurposed in this structure. When Don Armando de Soto uncovered it in 1922, he found eight bodies inside, posed in crouching positions near the wall and surrounded by stone utensils, pottery and decorative items.

Don’t worry if it made you think of the X-Files though. That’s a perfectly natural reaction.

[MIKA27]

Monster Machines: With Video Walls This Huge, You'll Forget You're On A Cruise Ship

Luxury liners are getting bigger and more grandiose every year. Royal Caribbean’s newest cruise ships, for example, are the size of a small town. And, rather than simply stare out at the ocean, revellers aboard these boats will be treated to a visual experience like none before thanks to an array of cutting-edge robotic displays.

As the first of three new ships, Royal Caribbean’s $US936 million Quantum of the Seas will be overflowing with attractions. These include a skydiving simulator, an enclosed crow’s nest offering 360-degree panoramic views 100 metres above the deck called North Star, and a massive onboard sports and recreation complex — including bumper cars, roller skating and a circus school — dubbed Seaplex.

Most impressive however, is the 4180-passenger ship’s extensive display integration. Traditionally, cabins on the inside of the ship (those without a view of the ocean) have been considered far less desirable than those facing out. But the Quantum of the Seas has panoramic “virtual balconies” in every interior cabin and state room, which will display real-time images of the surrounding seas.

What’s more, the Quantum’s main entertainment venue will feature the Two70 system, which consists of a 270-degree three-deck tall panoramic glass walls. During the day, they provide unparalleled views of the ocean. At night, images are projected onto the glass to create an immersive entertainment experience. “We are doing something that has never been done before,” RCI Executive Entertainment Producer Bob Kerns says in the video below.

And at the height of the evening’s performance, the Quantum’s crew will reveal another surprise when a cadre of six robotic arms — each holding a 100-inch flat-panel display — will descend from the ceiling. These robotic arms are programmed to coordinate their movements to further enhance the onscreen action. Sounds magical.

[MIKA27]

Next Generation Antibiotics Could Be Turned On And Off Using Light

As we continue fighting the most dastardly pathogens with new and improved antibiotics, the list of antibiotic-resistant bacterial strains only grows longer — leaving us somewhat helpless against the threat of superbugs.

Americans are lucky to have CDC staffers back to help weather the current salmonella outbreak over there, but it’s about time to find a more permanent solution — so they don’t get stuck with a whole lot of stubborn bacteria and nowhere to run.

Scientists at the University of Groningen in the Netherlands have been working on a technique that, with a few tweaks, could prove to be viable. The idea, in a nutshell, is to create a “smart” antibiotic that can respond to both light and heat. That way, it could be turned on and off as needed, both to protect healthy bacteria from unnecessary damage and deactivate residual antibiotics that could encourage resistance.

Some antibiotics are designed to stick to and inhibit the enzymes that help keep those bacteria alive. This means that they have to be a specific shape in order to bind effectively — altering the shape even the slightest bit could render it useless. The antibiotics used by the researchers are called quinolones, which are usually shaped like the letter C. When tagged with light-sensitive molecule azobenzene and blasted with light or heat, they morph into the letter Z. And with that, they become waste products, no use to bacteria looking to bulk up against antibiotics.

So now what? Turns out you can’t shoot just any old light into someone’s body (well, without worrying about pesky side effects). The researchers’ next steps will involve coaxing the antibiotics to respond to ultraviolet and infrared light. Here’s hoping that happens before the superbugs take over.

[MIKA27]

Fukushima Workers Accidentally Douse Themselves In Toxic Water

In case you weren’t already concerned enough about the wacky (re: highly dangerous) antics going over at the Fukushima power plant, maybe this will do the trick. Six workers attempting to clean up the increasingly unruly mess have accidentally doused themselves with highly radioactive water.

While working in on the plant’s partial water treatment units, the workers removed the wrong pipe, covering both themselves and the entire floor in a deluge of toxic water. Only six of the 11-member team ended up getting splashed by the radioactive shower, and those six were, thankfully, wearing protective hazmat suits. So while we have every reason to hope that any effects/gained superpowers will be minor, the incident is still under investigation.

Of course, this isn’t the first time TEPCO’s spilled some of their radioactive sauce — this has happened many, many, many times before. And with every new bit of news, it becomes increasingly more questionable whether anyone has any idea what they’re doing over there — which would be hilarious if it wasn’t so terrifying.

[MIKA27]

Put A Porsche On Your Keychain Without Taking Out A Loan

Flash drives are given away at trade shows like breath mints. But unless you like waiting hours to slowly back up your files, you’re going to want to spend some money on a drive with a little more speed and capacity. Looks don’t hurt either, which is why you’ll want to consider LaCie and Porsche Design’s latest sleek collaboration.

Touted as being one of the smallest USB 3.0 compatible flash drives currently on the market, the LaCie Porsche Design USB Key boasts read and write speeds up to 95MB/s, and is available now in 16GB and 32GB capacities. And while the scratch-resistant steel drives were crafted by Porsche’s product design division, they don’t come with a hefty price tag like their namesake vehicles.

The flash drives start at just $39.95 in Australia for the 16GB version, making them the cheapest way to put a Porsche key in your pocket.

[MIKA27]

90% Of America's Nuclear Regulators Forced To Take Leave Of Absence

That US government shutdown is still causing all kinds of problems, and this one’s a doozy. Starting tomorrow, some 90 per cent of the workers who watch over America’s 100 nuclear reactors will be furloughed. Since these guys are sort of the first line of defence in a nuclear disaster, that’s really bad news.

Thankfully, a few of the nation’s nuclear regulators will stick around to sound the alarms if something bad happens. To be exact, 300 “resident inspectors” from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission will remain on the job to keep an eye on the 63 different nuclear power plants across the country. That is very much a skeleton crew, however, considering that 3600 employees will not be going to work. They will call in more employees if there’s an emergency, but it’s unclear how many.

The NRC wants you to know that everything’s going to be OK though. “We are going to make sure that we continue our oversight of the plants because the resident inspectors will be on duty, and we are prepared to respond to an emergency on short notice,” NRC spokesman Eliot Brenner told the press. NRC chairman Allison Macfarlane expressed a similar sentiment in a blog post saying that the agency “must… err on the side of safety and security.” No duh.

But obviously people get a little shaken up when it comes to messing around with nuclear power. Ed Lyman with the Union of Concerned Scientists said it best: “Yes, I am worried.” Then again, those guys are always worried.

[MIKA27]

China Accidentally Built A Housing Complex In The Middle Of A Highway

There’s no denying that China doesn’t have the best record when it comes to urban planning and development, particularly in regards to real estate — and their most recent blunder is a doozy. Thanks to some poor planning and (presumably poor) communication, China accidentally built a brand new set of modern apartments right in the middle of an eight-lane highway. Your very own permanent, honking sound soother.

The whole thing started when a block of residents in Xi’an, Shaanxi province in western China were uprooted to make room for a soon-to-be-constructed public park. In exchange for the inconvenience, tenants were promised a brand new, block of modern apartments — it’s just too bad city planners forgot about that little eight-lane superhighway they were going to build in the exact same place. Whoops.

The previously-relocated residents got a few months of peace and quiet in their new homes before the council came a-knockin’ and politely asked if they would move out of their brand new homes, please. As you can imagine, these involuntary nomads weren’t happy. Plus, after all that park and highway and fancy apartment construction, council funds were running low. And since it could barely offer any reasonable amount of compensation, the tenants refused to accept what little it did.

Left with no other options, the council just built the highway around the new building, bringing an eight-lane highway to four. And everything considered, the tenants actually seem to be taking it pretty well. As one resident, Shing Su, told The Daily Mail:

We don’t exactly like being stuck out in the middle of a 60metre-wide highway, but you get used to it. If they make a decent offer most would move, but it’s hard as it seems we had only settled here when we were asked to move.

But the best/saddest part of the story? The highway hasn’t done anything to help the horrible rush-hour congestion — the whole reason it was built in the first place. It was all done for nothing.

[MIKA27]

Australia Is Burning, And Scientists Know It's About To Get Hotter

Feeling warm today, Sydney? I’m not surprised. It’s set to be 39 degrees Celsius out there today: a new record temperature for October. Scientists are starting to wise up, however, realising that these records are becoming a little too frequent. It’s not consistently record-breaking weather anymore, it’s the climate we live in: it’s dramatically shifting.

Scientists have used new climate research to predict when the moment will pass that the climate is no longer record-breaking, it’s just status quo.

According to the Sydney Morning Herald, Sydney’s climate is set to dramatically shift in 2038, while Melbourne would shift at 2045. That’s if current rates of green house gas emissions continue unabated between now and then.

So what does a “climate shift” mean?

In short, it means that the average climate will push outside of the records previously experienced, so that no matter the ups and downs, the lowest monthly temperatures would be higher than anything we have experienced before.

It’s about to get hot, folks. Read the full report on SMH.

[MIKA27]

These Striking Before & After GIFs Show The Impact of many Years of Aging

Aging isn’t a topic our youth-obsessed culture takes to very well. Using everything from makeup to digital manipulation in Photoshop, many try to hold the signs of aging at bay for as long as possible.

But one photographer decided to take aging head on in a video turned GIF series that shows just how much of an impact time has on our appearance. Fair warning, if you’re squeamish about aging, you might want pass on this one.

The original video surfaced at Dogva, and is simply titled “Aging Face Transformation.” It shows as ten photos of people in the prime of their youth are slowly replaced by photos of the same people many years later.

Each of the 10 transformations was then taken from the video and turned into a GIF by GifCraft. The rest, as they say, is viral history:

Some of the transformations are quite shocking, and it almost seems like the before and after show completely different people. Others are obviously the same person, just with a lot more wrinkles and a larger nose and ears (the body parts that never stop growing).

[MIKA27]

GE’s Radical Software Helps Jet Engines Fix Themselves

Predix is a new software platform that will eventually bring all of GE's industrial machines onto one contextually-aware, cloud-connected system.

A few years back, after an internal audit of their vast and various business holdings, the folks at General Electric made something of a discovery: Their company was roughly the fourteenth biggest software maker in the world. They’d never really thought of themselves as a software company–all that coding was being done by developers hidden in silos within other silos in the corporate structure–but they figured maybe it was time to start. So in June 2011, the company hired designer Greg Petroff and put him in charge of user experience for the whole shebang.

His first project was an ambitious one: creating a system that will bring all of GE’s industrial machines, from wind turbines to hospital hardware to jet engines, onto one cloud-connected, contextually-aware, super-efficient platform.

The effort is being lead by designer Greg Petroff, who took the reins as the company's head of UX in 2011.

Since 2011, the company’s Software Center, located in San Ramon, California, has grown from four people to some 700 and counting. In that time, Petroff’s team there has built the foundation for Predix, a flexible software platform intended to dramatically streamline the monitoring and maintenance for all the industrial technologies GE provides. Whereas field engineers currently wrestle with idiosyncratic systems and separate interfaces for all the different hardware they service–sometimes armed with little more than a briefcase full of paper manuals–Predix and its card-based UI will gradually become the interface for all those machines.

But the software’s promise goes beyond cohesiveness and convenience. The real vision is to link all these diverse machines to the cloud, quantifying their performance and benchmarking them against each other–all in the name of eliminating the number one bugaboo of all these industries: unscheduled down time. Imagine an engineer walking up to a wind turbine with tablet in hand, and the turbine telling him that a fuse should be replaced not because it’s broken but because it will give out in three weeks time. That’s the future GE’s really looking toward.

The first phase of Predix will give field engineers simple, cohesive tools for servicing and monitoring machines like jet engines, wind turbines, and MRIs.

Keeping things running smoothly is obviously good for business. The aim for Predix is a 1 percent increase in performance, per industry. That might not seem like much, but when you’re the sixth biggest company in the U.S., with properties in all sorts of massive, society-driving industries like power, water, transportation and energy management, a single percent can translate into a huge amount savings. Hitting that goal in aviation, Petroff says, could mean something in the ballpark of $15 billion saved in jet fuel and other costs over just a handful of years.

But while the Predix system will undoubtedly make life easier for GE’s engineers and their many customers, it’s also an interesting case study for designers. Why? Because instead of resorting to esoteric controls and device-specific applications, Predix embraces a few key design trends that we’re already seeing shape the next generation of consumer user experiences on smartphones and tablets. In other words, the software GE’s rolling out for its massive industrial hardware offers a glimpse of some things you’ll be seeing more and more on your own devices in apps and updates to come. Here are some of the principles that guided Predix.

1. Context Is Everything

The overriding design principle for Predix was to embrace context. The idea for the platform goes far beyond giving engineers a touchscreen manual for repairs. It’s really about creating a resource that knows exactly what needs to be done to optimize any machine at any moment. Eventually, Predix will make sure everything’s on the same page, from the machine in question to the enterprise software in the cloud to the the device carried by the engineer. At that point, the software won’t just tell an engineer what needs to be done to fix an MRI machine, it will tell her specifically what she needs to do to fix the MRI machine sitting in front of her.

But the vision is to connect all these machines and more to the cloud, allowing for predictive service and wide-reaching benchmarking.

On the machine side, that involves a high level of situational awareness. All the hardware and software involved needs to be in perfect sync–Predix needs to know how long a particular turbine’s been installed, how hard it’s been running and in what environment, and all sorts of other variables. But what that contextual knowledge affords is the ability to give the humans involved a precise picture of what’s wrong–or soon to be wrong–with those machines. When a field engineer arrives on site to service a machine, Petroff says, “all the right information, and only the right information, he needs to be successful is available to him.” Predix isn’t just a dumb storehouse of GE’s machine knowledge–it’s the ultimate assistant for working with the industrial internet.

If that sounds a little bit familiar, here’s why: It’s precisely the philosophy that’s driving software like Google Now, the clever service that surfaces information before you even search for it. In the case of the GE engineer, Predix will zero in on necessary maintenance and service automatically. “I don’t even need to know,” Petroff says, assuming the role of field engineer. “I just show up, and the things I need to do just kind of miraculously and magically appear.” That happens to be the express goal of Google Now, which aims to miraculously and magically surface reservations, driving directions, sports scores and other tidbits of data just by gleaning what you’ll need in certain situations. Apple just bought the email-scraping app Cue for upwards of $40 million, ostensibly in an effort to stay competitive in the predictive, context-based game. The big idea is that we’re reaching a point, in both consumer and enterprise software, where the task of figuring out what matters is being offloaded from people to computers.

2. Software as Media

It's all in the name of efficiency--the aim is 1% per industry per year.

Predix gets its industry-spanning flexibility by leveraging one of the most popular trends in UI design: cards. Instead of creating a suite of different, specialized apps, the Predix Reader, as the user-facing app is called, serves as a container for an extensive, dynamic library of “micro-apps,” each dedicated to some aspect of monitoring or maintaining a piece of GE hardware. A field engineer sent out to fix a jet engine, for example, would tote a tablet preloaded with a collection of cards related to that call. One might show him the maintenance history of that particular unit; the next might show how that unit benchmarks against others elsewhere in the country; a third might delineate a check-list of common problems; a fourth might show a table of projections for how much various repairs could yield in savings down the line.

As we run up against the limitations of single-purpose mobile apps, the card-based UI is something we’ll see more and more. “The notion behind it is to get rid of monolithic software and build bite-size software,” Petroff says. In both Predix and Google Now, cards offer a way to bring disparate data streams into one unified interface. But with Predix, the philosophy goes beyond shrinking data down to bite-size. By adhering to a principle of treating software like media, Predix has some interesting implications for the way all those cards are consumed and created.

The card-based UI and focus on contextual smarts make comparisons to Google Now a no-brainer.

On a basic level, treating software like media means letting users organize it to their own tastes. Different engineers might want to see different cards in different situations, and Predix will give them the chance to organize their own collections based on how they like to work. But Predix also looks forward to a point where cards could become interrelated components of more complex workflows. Google Now mainly uses cards to deliver discrete packets of data–instead of checking your ESPN app to see the score of the game and your calendar app for your next appointment, Now pulls them into the same stream. Predix looks beyond that, to a future where cards could be linked and co-dependent.

“We think of the card as sort of a song,” Petroff says. “And a workflow is called a collection–they’re really like the playlist you put together to go to the gym or to cook with.” The same thinking applies to the creation side of the software; cards can be developed using a simple HTML 5 framework, a tool that effectively turns GE’s formidable army of developers into ad-hoc designers. “This notion of software as media breaks software into these small, small chunks, and we believe that we can scale them really fast,” Petroff says.

3. Right Device, Right Moment

With its focus on context and cards, Predix is right in step with the trends we’re seeing on our own smartphones and tablets. But in other ways, GE’s new software is ahead of the consumer curve. One big one is the idea that smart software needs to work across devices–not just in the sense that it shares data through the cloud but rather by offering a truly seamless user experience from screen to screen.

“We don’t really talk about mobile anymore–we talk about ‘right device, right place, right moment,’” Petroff says. Scaling the card paradigm to different screen sizes is something that’s been part of the effort from the start. The cards Predix relies on can be accessed via desktops, and Petroff’s team is already looking at ways to share them seamlessly between devices. Imagine, for example, an engineer being able to slide a card from his tablet up onto a power plant’s wall-sized control center screen. Petroff’s designers are also keeping an eye on nascent technologies, considering how cards might work in the context of devices like augmented reality glasses (things that might still be a ways from real-world adoption but have very real benefits in some industrial hardware scenarios).

In the realm of “right device, right moment,” Google and Apple have plenty to learn. Just consider how stubbornly ignorant your smartphone, tablet, desktop and TV are of one another–and one another’s content–when they’re all in the same room, or even within arm’s reach. We may be living in the post-desktop era, but that doesn’t mean we’ve forsaken the things entirely, and next-generation software will be most effective if it accounts for the fact that we spend hours at a time sitting in front of PCs. Cloud-based document storage and web apps have offered some linkage in our own personal hardware ecosystems, but consumer gadgets still have a ways to go until they’ll let us flick a picture effortlessly from our tablets to some other big screen. If GE has their way, the people at the power plants might get that type of functionality before we do.

[MIKA27]

Ariel Castro May Have Accidentally Choked to Death While Masturbating

A new investigation into kidnapper Ariel Castro’s death suggests prison guards may have falsified information regarding his supervision before his death, and that the actual cause may have been something known as auto-erotic asphyxiation, not suicide.

The investigation arose from allegations of prison guard misconduct surrounding the death of Castro, who pleaded guilty to keeping three women hostage in his Cleveland home for years, the Columbus Dispatch reports. Prison guards allegedly didn’t complete their supervision rounds and faked logs and records surrounding the infamous kidnapper’s death.

Investigators from the Ohio Department of Rehabilitation and Correction noted that Castro was found hanging from prison a window hinge with his pants and underwear at his ankles on Sept. 3. They are now considering the possibility that Castro died from auto-erotic asphyxiation, a masturbation technique involving self-strangulation. Commonly known as AEA, the practice involves cutting off oxygen to the brain in order to intensify orgasms during masturbation or sex.

AEA deaths are often confused with suicide, and initial reports suggested that Castro’s death was also a suicide. But officials noted that Castro displayed no suicidal tendencies and did not write a suicide note.

Castro pleaded guilty to nearly 1,000 counts of kidnapping, rape, aggravated murder (forcing his victims to miscarry) and other crimes. He was sentenced to life without parole, plus 1,000 years, but had only served four weeks of his sentence at the time of his death.

MIKA: A real Jerk to the very end...

[MIKA27]

Audodromo Prototipo Chronograph Watch

In case you've forgotten, at one point watches actually served a purpose beyond status symbol or menswear accessory — people actually used them to keep track of time. The Audodromo Prototipo Chronograph Watch ($625-$775) pays homage to an era when the wristwatch was a tool that made the difference between winning and losing, the era of prototype sports car racing (think 24 Hours of LeMans or Daytona). These watches feature the sorts of tools race drivers need: with subregisters on the right and left to measure seconds and hours up to 24, a tachymeter to determine average speed, and a pulsometer to calculate heart rate.

Perforated watch bands, styling suggesting the curves of a race car, and color schemes commemorating motorsports legends (on the limited edition Vic Elford variant) complete the package.