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Laser-Scanning Hundreds Of Artificial Caves Beneath Nottingham

There are more than 450 artificial caves excavated from sandstone beneath the streets and buildings of Nottingham, England — including, legendarily, the old dungeon that once held Robin Hood. Not all of these caves are known even today, let alone mapped or studied.

The city sits atop a labyrinth of human-carved spaces — some of them huge — and it will quite simply never be certain if archaeologists and historians have found them all.

Laser scans courtesy of the Nottingham Caves Survey show Castle Rock and the Mortimer’s Hole tunnel, including, in the bottom image, the Trip to Jerusalem Pub where we met archaeologist David Strange-Walker; images like this imply an exhilarating and almost psychedelic portrait of the city, invisibly connected behind the scenes by an umbilical network of caves and tunnels.

I had the pleasure last summer of tagging along with archaeologist David Strange-Walker of the Nottingham Caves Survey to learn more about the organisation’s ambitious subterranean laser-scanning project, visiting many of the caves in person.

The purpose of the Nottingham Caves Survey, as their website explains, is “to assess the archaeological importance of Nottingham’s caves. Some are currently scheduled monuments and are of great local and national importance. Some are pub cellars and may seem less vital to the history of the City.” Others, I was soon to learn, have been bricked off, taken apart, filled in, or forgotten.

“All caves that can be physically accessed will be surveyed with a 3D laser scanner,” the Survey adds, “producing a full measured record of the caves in three dimensions. This ‘point cloud’ of millions of individual survey points can be cut and sliced into plans and sections, ‘flown through’ in short videos, and examined in great detail on the web.”

“Even back in Saxon times, Nottingham was known for its caves,” local historian Tony Waltham writes in his helpful guide Sandstone Caves of Nottingham, “though the great majority of those which survive today were cut much more recently.” From malt kilns to pub cellars, “gentlemen’s lounges” to jails, and wells to cisterns, these caves form an almost entirely privately-owned lacework of voids beneath the city.

Map of only the known caves in Nottingham, and only in Nottingham’s city centre; map by Tony Waltham, from Sandstone Caves of Nottingham.

As Waltham explains, “Nottingham has so many caves quite simply because the physical properties of the bedrock sandstone are ideal for its excavation.” The sandstone “is easily excavated with only hand tools, yet will safely stand as an unsupported arch of low profile.”

In a sense, Nottingham is the Cappadocia of the British Isles.

The extraordinary caves at 8 Castle Gate; scan courtesy of the Nottingham Caves Survey.

On a short visit to England last year, I got in touch with Strange-Walker, the project’s manager, and arranged for a visit up to Nottingham to learn more about the project. Best of all, David generously organised an entire day’s worth of explorations, going down into many of the city’s underground spaces with David himself as our guide.

We met the likeable and energetic David — who was dressed for a full day of activity, complete with a well-weathered backpack that we’d later learn contained hard hats and floodlights for each of us — outside Nottingham’s Trip to Jerusalem pub.

Rather than kicking off our visit with a pint, however, we simply walked inside to see how the pub had been partially built — that is, expanded through deliberate excavation — into the sandstone cliffside.

The building is thus more like a facade wrapped around and disguising the artificial caves behind it; walking in past the bar, for instance, you soon notice ventilation shafts and strange half-stairways, curved walls and unpredictable acoustics, as the “network of caves” that actually constitutes the pub interior begins to reveal itself.

Laser scan showing the umbilical connection of Mortimer’s Hole, courtesy of the Nottingham Caves Survey.

My mind was already somewhat blown by this, to be honest, though it was only the barest indication of extraordinary spatial experiences yet to come.

We headed back outside, where afternoon rain had begun to blow in, and David introduced us to the sandstone cliff itself, pointing out both natural and artificially enlarged pores pockmarking the outside.

The sandstone formations or “rock units” beneath the city, as Tony Waltham explains, “were formed as flash flood sediments in desert basins during Triassic times, about 240 million years ago, when Britain was part of a hot and dry continental interior close to the equator. Subsequent eons of plate tectonic movements have brought Britain to its present position; and during the same time, the desert sediments have been buried, compressed and cemented to form moderately strong sedimentary rocks.”

The city is thus built atop a kind of frozen Sahara, deep into which we were about to go walking.

Outside here in the cliff face, small openings led within to medieval tunnels and stairs — including the infamous Mortimer’s Hole — that themselves curled up to the top of the plateau; doors in the rock further up from the Trip to Jerusalem opened onto what were now private shooting ranges, of all things; and, with a laugh, David pointed out shotcrete cosmetic work that had been applied to the outer stone surface.

We headed from there — walking a brisk pace uphill into the town center — with David casually narrating the various basements, cellars, tunnels, and other urban perforations that lay under the buildings around us, as if we were travelling through town with a human x-ray machine for whom the city was an archaeologically rich cobweb of underground loops and dead-ends.

We soon ended up at the old jails of the Galleries of Justice. A well-known tourist destination, complete with costumed re-enactors, the building sits atop several levels of artificial caves that are well worth exploring.

Scan of the Guildhall caves,

We were joined at this point by the site’s director, who generously took time out of his schedule to lead us down into parts of the underground complex that are not normally open to the general public.

Heading downward — at first by elevator — we eventually unlocked a door, stepped into a tiny room beneath even the jail cells, crouching over so as not to bang our heads on the low ceiling, and we leaned against banded brick pillars that had been added to help support all the architecture groaning above us.

Avoiding each other’s flashlight beams, we listened as our two guides talked about the discovery — and, sadly, the willful reburial — of caves throughout central Nottingham.

We learned, for instance, that, elsewhere in the city, there had once been a vacuum shop with a cave beneath it; if I remember this story correctly, the shop’s owners had the habit of simply discarding broken and unsold vacuum cleaners into the cave, inadvertently creating a kind of museum of obsolete vacuum parts. Discontinued models sat in the darkness — a void full of vacuums — as the shop went out of business.

We heard, as well, about a nearby site where caves had been discovered beneath a bank during a recent process of renovation and expansion — but, fearing discovery of anything that might slow down the bank’s architectural plans, the caves were simply walled up and left unexplored. They’re thus still down there, underneath and behind the bank, their contents unknown, their extent unmapped — a fate, it seems, shared by many of the caves of Nottingham.

Rather than being greeted by the subterranean and historical wonder that such structures deserve — and I would argue that essentially all of subterranean Nottingham should be declared a UNESCO World Heritage Site — the caves are too often treated as little more than annoying construction setbacks or anomalous ground conditions, suitable only for bricking up, filling with concrete, or forgetting. If the public thinks about them at all, in seems, it is only long enough to consider them threats to building safety or negative influences on property value.

In any case, on our way out of the Galleries of Justice, we lifted up a ventilation grill in the floor and looked down into a small vertical shaft, too narrow and contorted even for Ellis to navigate, and we learned that there are urban legends that this particular shaft leads down to a larger room in which Robin Hood himself was once held… But we had only enough time to shine our flashlights down and wonder.

From here, we headed over to our final tourist-y site of the day, which is the awesomely surreal City of Caves exhibition, located in Nottingham’s Broad Marsh shopping mall.

You literally take an escalator down into an indoor mall, where, amidst clothing outlets and food courts, there is an otherwise totally mundane sign pointing simply to “Caves.”

If you didn’t know about Nottingham’s extensive sub-city, this would surely be one of the most inexplicable way-finding messages in mall history.

Here, where we picked our copy of Tony Waltham’s Sandstone Caves of Nottingham pamphlet, from which I’ve been quoting, we learned quite a bit more about how the city has grown, how the caves themselves have often been uncovered (for example, during building expansions and renovations), and what role Nottingham’s underground spaces served during the Nazi bombings of WWII.

The specific underground complex beneath the shopping mall offers an interesting mix of old tanning operations and other semi-industrial, pre-modern work rooms, now overlapping with 20th-century living and basement spaces that were sliced open during the construction of the Broad Marsh mall.

That these caves were preserved at all is testament to the power of local conservationists, as the historically rich and spatially intricate rooms and corridors would have been gutted and erased entirely during post-War reconstruction without their intervention.

As it now stands, the mall is perched above the caves on concrete pillars, with the effect that curious shoppers can wander down into the caves through an entrance that could just as easily lead to a local branch of Accessorize.

Again, we were fortunate to be taken down into some off-limits areas, stepping over lights and electric wires and peering ahead into larger rooms not on the tourist route.

This included stepping outside at one point to wander through an overgrown alleyway behind the mall. Small openings even back here stretched beneath and seemingly into the backs of shops; one doorway, a short scramble up a hill of weed-covered rubble, appeared to contain a half-collapsed spiral staircase installed inside a brick-lined sandstone opening.

At this point, we began to joke about the ease with which it seemed you could plan a sort of speleological super-heist, breaking into shops from below, as an entire dimension of the city seemed to lie unwatched and unprotected.

Nottingham, it appeared, is a city of nothing but doors and openings, holes, pores, and connections, complexly layered knots of space coiling beneath one building after another, sometimes cutting all the way down to the water table.

Incredibly, the day only continued to build in interest, reaching near-impossible urban sights, from catacombs in the local graveyard to a mind-bending sand mine that whirled and looped around like smoke rings beneath an otherwise quiet residential neighbourhood.

Leaving the mall behind, and maintaining a brisk pace, David took us further into the city, where our next stop was the Old Angel Inn, another pub with an extensive cellar of caves, in this case accessed through a deceptively workaday door next to an arcade game.

The Old Angel Inn (top), including the door inside the pub that leads down to the caves below; photos by Nicola Twilley.

Once again, it can hardly be exaggerated how easy it would be to visit or even live in Nottingham and have absolutely no idea that underground spaces such as this can be found almost anywhere.

As Tony Waltham points out, “It would be a fair assumption that every building or site within the old city limits either has or had some form of cave beneath it. About 500 caves are now known, and this may be only half the total number that have been excavated under Nottingham.”

The caves of the Old Angel Inn, courtesy of the Nottingham Caves Survey.

In any case, “Although the Old Angel is a ‘modern’ brick building,” as the Nottingham Caves Survey describes the pub on its website, “an investigation of the caves below reveals stone walls belonging to an earlier incarnation. It is likely that there were buildings on this site as far back as the Anglo-Saxon period. Whether the caves beneath are also this old cannot be demonstrated definitively.”

Typical, as well, for these types of pub caves, we found ventilation and delivery tunnels leading back up to the surface, and the walls themselves are lined with long benches, perfect for sitting below ground and, provided you have candles or a flashlight along with you, enjoying a smoke and a pint of beer. As Tony Waltham explains, pub cellars often include “perimeter thralls,” or “low ledges cut in the rock,” normally used for storing kegs and barrels of beer but quite easily repurposed for a quick sit-down.

But I sense I’m going on way too long about all this, especially because the two most memorable details of the entire day were yet to come.

Jumping forward a bit, we left the Old Angel and followed some twists and turns in the street to find ourselves standing outside a nightclub called Propaganda.

Here, David revealed that he has been working on what, in my opinion, will easily be one of the must-have apps of the year. In a nutshell, David has managed to make the subterranean 3D laser-scans of the Nottingham Caves Survey accessible by location, such that, holding up his iPod Touch, he demonstrated that you could, in effect, scan the courtyard we were standing in to see the caves, tunnels, stairways, cellars, vents, storage rooms, and more that lay hidden in the ground around us.

Ideally, once the Survey’s extensive catalogue of 3D visualizations and laser point-clouds has been made available and the app is ready for public download, you will be able to walk through the city of Nottingham, smartphone in hand, revealing in all of their serpentine complexity the underground spaces of the city core.

For anyone who has ever dreamt of putting on x-ray glasses and using them to explore architectural space, this app promises to be a thrilling and vertiginous way to experience exactly that — peering right through the city to see its most ancient foundations.

I’ll wind up this already quite long post with just a few more highlights.

Nottingham’s Rock Cemetery, north from the center of town along the Mansfield Road, contains, among other things, the collapsed remains of a sand mine. Three of the mine’s old entrances are now gated alcoves surrounded by graves, like something out of Dante. They “are the only surviving remnants of the mine,” Waltham writes in his pamphlet.

However, an ambitious plan to carve sizable catacombs, inspired by Paris and Rome, through the sandstone beds of the ancient desert here resulted in the never-completed Catacomb Caves, “probably done in 1859-63,” Waltham suggests. These long arched tunnels, accessible through one of the gates described above, eventually lead to a radial terminus from which branch the unused proto-catacombs.

The air there is cloudy with sand — leading me, several days later, to experience an absurd attack of hypochondria, worried about developing silicosis — the walls are graffiti’d, and years of trash are piled on the sides of the sandy floor (which has since taken on the characteristics of a dune sea in places, as 150 years of footfall and a collapsing ceiling have led to the appearance of drifts).

What was so extraordinary here, among many other things, was that, for most of this walk through the catacombs, we were actually walking below the graves, meaning that people were buried above us in the earth.

It was like becoming aware of a different type of constellation, with bodies — and all the stories their lives could tell — held above us in a terrestrial sky, new legends and heroes in the darkness, our own contemporary versions of Orion and Cassiopeia, as we looked up at the vault, flashlights in hand. An x-ray view of the ceiling would have looked like a classical star map: a planetarium of bodies arching over us everywhere we walked.

But the best site of all was next.

Serving as something of the ultimate proof that Nottingham is a city of overlooked doors that lead into the underworld, there were two locked doors — one of which (the black door, near the sidewalk) appears in the photo, above, another of which, on a street nearby, leads down into the Peel Street Caves — simply sitting there on the sidewalk that, if opened, will take you down into extensive and now defunct sand mines.

David’s laser-scans of these for the Nottingham Caves Survey are absolutely gorgeous, as you can see, below.

The Peel Street Caves sand mine, courtesy of the Nottingham Caves Survey.

For a variety of reasons, I am going to avoid being too specific about some of the details here, but, aside from that, I can only enthuse about the experience of donning our hard hats and heading down several flights of comparatively new concrete steps into a coiling and vast artificial cavern from the 19th century, one we spent nearly an hour exploring.

Getting lost down there would be so absurdly easy that it is frightening even to contemplate, and, in case the group of us somehow got split up or our batteries ran out of juice, we joked about — if only we could remember them — the easy techniques for navigating a labyrinth offered in Umberto Eco’s novel The Name of the Rose.

Indeed, many of the existing way-finding signs are actually incorrect, David explained, and seem to have been painted as a kind of sick joke by someone several years ago.

Avoiding falling prey to this misdirection, we found men’s and women’s latrines; we popped our heads through holes allowing glimpse of other levels; and we cracked our helmets loudly against the low and rough roof more times than I could count.

Inside the sand mine; all photos by Nicola Twilley.

And even that doesn’t complete the day. From here, heading back out onto the street through a nondescript steel door, as if we had been doing nothing more than watching football in someone’s basement, we went on to eat pie and chips in a restaurant built partially into a cave; we walked back across town, returning to where we started, talking about the future and seemingly obvious possibility of Nottingham’s caves being declared a UNESCO World Heritage Site and thus saved from their all but inevitable destruction (it’s easy to imagine a future in which a tour like the one David gave us will be impossible for lack of caves to see); and we all said goodbye beneath an evening sky cleared of clouds as a late-day breeze began to cut through town.

On our way out of the city, we passed through our final “underground” space of the day: the magnificent Park Tunnel, where the banded strata clearly visible in the walls show how the tunnel was carved through the dunes of an ancient desert.

David proved to be a heroic guide that day. His energy never flagged throughout the tour, and he never once appeared impatient with or exhausted by any of our often ridiculous questions — not to mention our tourists’ insistence on pausing every three or four steps to take photographs — and he remained always willing to stay underground far longer than he had originally planned, all this despite having never met any of us before in person and only communicating with me briefly via a flurry of emails the week before.

Meeting David left me far more convinced than I already was that the Nottingham Caves Survey fully deserves the financial support of individuals and institutions, so that it can complete its ambitious and historically valuable work of cataloging Nottingham’s underground spaces and making that knowledge freely accessible to the general public.

Weirdly, England has within its very heart a region deserving comparison to Turkish Cappadocia — yet very few people even seem to know that this subterranean world exists. There very well could be more than 1,000 artificial caves beneath the city, many of them fantastically elaborate, complete with fine carvings of lions and ornate stairwells, and it is actually somewhat disconcerting to think that people remain so globally unaware of Nottingham’s underground heritage.

With any luck, the work of David Strange-Walker, Trent & Peak Archaeology, and the Nottingham Caves Survey will help bring this extraordinary region of the earth the attention — and, importantly, the focused conservation — it is due.

[MIKA27]

Scientists Create Disk That Can Store Data For One Million Years

Magnetic disk drive storage was born in the 1950s — thanks IBM! — but while storage density and power efficiency have rocketed, the lifetime for which data can be stored has remained about the same, at around a decade. That could soon change.

A team of researchers from the University of Twente in the Netherlands has designed and built a disk capable of storing data for, so they claim, over one million years. Perhaps even longer. Wow.

To manage that, they first delved into the theory of how information ages. For data to last, it must be stored in such a way that that one bit of data is distinct from another. Technology Review explains:

This is based on the idea that data must be stored in an energy minimum that is separated from other minima by an energy barrier. So to corrupt data by converting a 0 to a 1, for example, requires enough energy to overcome this barrier… Some straightforward calculations reveal that to last a million years, the required energy barrier is 63 KBT or 70 KBT to last a billion years.

The researchers realised that was very much in the realms of what’s possible right now — so they decided to build a disk that would do it. The result is a thin tungsten disk etched with a series of fine lines, coated in protective layer of silicon nitride.

Then came the fun bit: they heated the disks at various temperatures to see how much abuse the data could take. Turns out that, according to Arrhenius law, a disk capable of surviving a million years would have to survive one hour at 445 Kelvin. The researchers’ disk survived that with ease, and even withstood temperatures up to 848 Kelvin, though with some significant data loss at that extreme.

The results suggest that we could easily preserve data for future civilisations, though there are of course caveats. The theory used to make the disk applies to a very specific set of circumstances; it might not, for instance, be able to stand a dramatic event like a meteor strike. But, hey, what would?

[MIKA27]

Army’s Amazing Exoskeleton Restores Power to Injured Legs

After surgery, military personnel whose legs have been crushed or blasted can end up with a limb that looks healthy but is debilitated by pain and weakness. Some patients even ask for amputations. The Army solution is a sort of scaffold for intact but malfunctioning legs called the Intrepid Dynamic Exoskeletal Orthosis, and now, thanks to a company called Hangar, it’s going to be available to civilians too.

Basically, the IDEO is a carbon-fiber exoskeleton that attaches below the knee and connects to a foot plate that fits into a shoe. Taking a step and pushing off the plate loads the IDEO with energy just like a prosthetic running blade. Then it releases, providing auxiliary power to the leg. More than 500 people have gotten IDEOs since late 2009; about 60 of them even returned to combat.

“Some of those blast injuries were pretty horrific,” says Ryan Blanck, who invented the IDEO as a prosthetist at Brooke Army Medical Center in San Antonio. But the loss of functionality from those wounds isn’t that different from problems caused by nerve disorders or car crashes.

Blanck will be heading up Hangar’s program in the Seattle area, and several dozen people are already waiting to be fitted. When that happens, their legs won’t stand in the way of them getting back on their feet.

[MIKA27]

Iran minister says 'no need' to hang criminal again

An Iranian gallows. Iran has one of the highest rates of execution in the world

Iran's justice minister says there is "no need" for a man who survived a hanging to be hanged a second time.

Lawyers want the head of the judiciary to stop a repeat hanging after the man was found alive in a morgue.

Justice Minister Mostafa Pourmohammadi said executing the man would have repercussions against Iran's image, the ISNA news agency reported.

The government has no direct control over the judiciary which has to decide whether a second execution takes place.

Iran has one of the highest rates of execution in the world.

The 37-year-old convicted drug smuggler, named as Alireza M, was found alive in a morgue after being hanged at a jail in the north-eastern city of Bojnord last week.

He had been left to hang for 12 minutes after which a doctor declared him dead, reports said.

But when the prisoner's family went to collect his body from the prison morgue the next day, they found he was still breathing.

The man was then moved to a hospital where he was being kept under armed guard.

His condition is not known although the IRNA news agency reported on Monday that he had fallen into a coma.

Last week, Amnesty International urged Iran not to go ahead with a repeat execution.

It also called for a moratorium on all executions in Iran.

[MIKA27]

OMEGA Seamaster Bullhead Chronograph Watch:

Just because you can't get your hands on the original, doesn't mean you shouldn't pick up the limited edition re-imagining of the Omega Seamaster Bullhead Chronograph Watch($TBA).

Taking its design cues from the vintage 1969 Seamaster Bullhead — including its asymmetrical shield-shaped case and unique configuration of the chronograph pushers at the top and bottom — this watch is a refined version of the original. It features a brushed and polished case, flat pushers (making it distinct from the original), a sapphire crystal, and a rotating bezel on a 24-hour scale. It comes on a brown leather strap, is water resistant down to 500 feet, and limited to just 669 pieces.

[MIKA27]

The Kraken Black Spiced Rum:

Being named after a fierce mythical cephalopod might come with a lot of pressure, but The Kraken Black Spiced Rum packs more than enough punch to live up to the moniker.

The base rum used in Kraken is from Trinidad and Tobago, distilled from molasses made from local sugar cane. The rum is then aged 12 - 24 months and spiced with a mixture of cinnamon, ginger and clove. It's a taste you'll want to add to your bar — and that beautiful bottle will fit right in, too.

[MIKA27]

Was Jack The Ripper An American?

A controversial man makes for a controversial suspect.

2013 marks the 125th Anniversary of the Autumn of Terror. From August 1888 to November of the same year, the five canonical Whitechapel Murders horrified the world, and to this day the identity of Jack the Ripper remains a mystery. Suspects include doctors, authors, a painter, a barrister, Queen Victoria’s grandson Prince Albert, and some even thought it was a woman, dubbing her Jill the Ripper. However one lesser-known and viable suspect was a larger than life Irish American “doctor” by the name of Francis Tumblety.

Born the youngest of 11 children in Canada or Ireland around 1833 — the exact date and location are still in question — Tumblety’s parents immigrated to the Unites States when Francis was a child and settled in Rochester, New York. As was a common occurrence at the time, their surname was documented with various spellings including Tumblety, Twomblety, and Tumuelty in census and other records.

As a youth, Tumblety sold pornographic materials to canal boat workers and performed menial tasks at a highly disreputable medical clinic in Rochester. Tumblety then spent his adult years traveling throughout the US and Canada, building his reputation and wealth as a flamboyant and self-aggrandizing “Indian Herbs Doctor,” and was often in legal trouble. The most serious charges, but no convictions, were the sale of aborting agents to a prostitute and the poisoning death of a male patient in two separate Canadian cities, as well as complicity in the assassination of Abraham Lincoln.

Tumblety was purportedly known by many to be a rabid misogynist, loathing all women, but prostitutes in particular. His stated reason was his early marriage to a woman whom he discovered was an active prostitute when he followed her to a brothel. In addition, it was reported by a Colonel Dunham that Tumblety collected “the matrices [uteri] of every class of women” and proudly presented them in glass specimen jars to an all-male dinner party at his home in Washington, DC. However, Dunham's own questionable reputation casts a shadow of doubt on this claim. A known confidence man and always on the take, Dunham did not make this claim until after Tumblety was already suspected in the killings. Therefore whether the story was valid or simply a ploy for attention and compensation is anyone's guess, since no other men from this supposed event ever came forward to corroborate.

Tumblety traveled frequently to London and often stayed in the posh West End hotels. However, despite his wealth, he was known to often “slum” in the unsavory East End. On November 7, 1888 he was arrested and charged with eight counts of gross indecency (homosexual activities) with four other men, and released on bail. Then on November 12 he was arrested on suspicion of the Whitechapel murders. He posted bail again on November 16 and fled under the alias Frank Townsend to France where he boarded a steamer ship and returned to New York City. An investigator from Scotland Yard was sent to New York and Tumblety was hounded by the American press, but no conclusive evidence against him was found regarding Whitechapel, and the gross indecency charges were insufficient cause for extradition back to England. Later, investigators scoffed at his being a likely suspect

At the time, the entire investigation was in shambles and the beleaguered Scotland Yard was under the world’s and Queen Victoria's scrutiny. It is theorized by some that in order to save face after letting The Ripper slip out of their grasp, Scotland Yard simply disqualified him as a suspect. However, there are many tantalizing bits of evidence to consider. In addition to his reputation as a woman-hater with some medical knowledge, there is the following:

• He was in Whitechapel at the time of the murders and they ended after he fled.
  
• Stewart P. Evans, a former English police officer turned leading crime historian and author, has been chasing Jack the Ripper since he was a teenager. He was the historical adviser to the film From Hell, and has made countless appearances on television about Whitechapel and other crimes. In 1993 he discovered a letter written in 1888 by Chief Inspector John Littlechild. In response to a query from a journalist regarding a possible suspect by the name of "Doctor D." Littlechild says he knows nothing of a suspect by that name, but “. . . amongst the suspects, and to my mind a very likely one, was a Dr. T. . . . He was an American quack named Tumblety..." After discovery of the letter and years of research, Evans is convinced that Tumblety was indeed Jack the Ripper. He has co-authored a book and his theories were the basis for a television documentary .
  
• At the time of the murders, the owner of a boarding house on Batty Street, in the heart of the area where the slayings occurred, contacted the police and reported that a very odd American gentleman, possibly a doctor, had vacated his room leaving behind a blood-soaked shirt, which she gave to the investigators. There is evidence to suggest that Tumblety was the mysterious Batty Street Lodger.
  
• Analysis of handwriting samples from the letters Jack sent to Scotland Yard, are said by some experts to match samples of Tumblety’s.
  
• Finally, and perhaps most compelling of all: In May 1903 Tumblety, gravely ill with an undiagnosed ailment and sensing his own imminent death, checked into a St. Louis hospital where his personal possessions were inventoried. The ledger lists quite an assortment of expensive pieces of jewelry, including diamond rings and a gold pocket watch, as well as a very peculiar entry: two cheap, imitation gold rings. Similar rings were reported missing from the body of the Ripper’s second victim, Annie Chapman.
  

If Tumblety was indeed Jack the Ripper, he took the secret with him to his grave. He never left the hospital, succumbing to heart disease on May 28, 1903. He is buried in his family’s plot at Holy Sepulchre Cemetery in Rochester, New York.

[MIKA27]

Divers discover Second World War Allied warship

A warship sunk by a U-boat attack during the Second World War has been found in the seabed off Northern Ireland.

A team of divers led by underwater explorer and maritime historian Ian Lawler located HMS Hurst Castle while filming BBC One series Dive WW2: Our Secret History.

A Castle-class corvette, HMS Hurst Castle served as a convoy escort during the Second World War. She played a part in the battle of the Atlantic for the Allies, before being sunk by the German submarine U482 on 1 September 1944 with the loss of 17 crew.

Lawler’s divers suspected they had found the warship in October 2011, as a result of a unique map compiled by the historian which he believes charts the locations of many of the lost wrecks of the battle of the Atlantic.

The team carried out two dives, in late 2011 and summer 2012, and the wreck has now been confirmed as that of HMS Hurst Castle.

In Sunday’s episode of Dive WW2: Our Secret History, the divers revealed how the flattened warship was discovered 50 miles north-west of Derry.

She is located 90 metres underwater and rises only 1.5 metres off the seabed. Her stern is missing due to the effects of the torpedo strike, but her main armament, a three-barrelled mortar that fired charges ahead of the ship, a so-called ‘squid launcher’, remains intact.

Lawler told historyextra: “HMS Hurst Castle is the missing piece of the first patrol of U482, one of the most successful by a U-boat late in the war.

“You are trying to explore the history of what happened in that period, and you know the ship has to be out there, so it’s just magic to find her.

“As divers you never know what you are going to find, and you learn not to expect or presuppose what might be down there.

“You could spend lots of time looking for something, but really you are more likely to stumble upon it by just being methodical.”

The BBC One series Dive WW2: Our Secret History sees Lawler’s team of deep-water divers search the seabed off Northern Ireland for the lost wrecks of the battle of the Atlantic.

The battle was one of the longest naval campaigns in history – 100,000 men died and 4,000 ships were sunk.

Presented by historian Jules Hudson, the programme follows the team as they discover the vital role played by the city of Derry in securing Allied victory.

The second and final episode next Sunday will see the team explore the wrecks of three deadly U-boats that once prowled the shipping lanes off Northern Ireland.

The human cost of the battle will also be revealed, when local ex-nurse Lexi Edgar shares a logbook detailing the more than 3,000 injured men he and his colleagues treated in the city.

[Habana Mike]

Skull of Homo erectus throws story of human evolution into disarray

A haul of fossils found in Georgia suggests that half a dozen species of early human ancestor were actually all Homo erectus

The spectacular fossilised skull of an ancient human ancestor that died nearly two million years ago has forced scientists to rethink the story of early human evolution.

Anthropologists unearthed the skull at a site in Dmanisi, a small town in southern Georgia, where other remains of human ancestors, simple stone tools and long-extinct animals have been dated to 1.8m years old.

Experts believe the skull is one of the most important fossil finds to date, but it has proved as controversial as it is stunning. Analysis of the skull and other remains at Dmanisi suggests that scientists have been too ready to name separate species of human ancestors in Africa. Many of those species may now have to be wiped from the textbooks.

The latest fossil is the only intact skull ever found of a human ancestor that lived in the early Pleistocene, when our predecessors first walked out of Africa. The skull adds to a haul of bones recovered from Dmanisi that belong to five individuals, most likely an elderly male, two other adult males, a young female and a juvenile of unknown sex.

The site was a busy watering hole that human ancestors shared with giant extinct cheetahs, sabre-toothed cats and other beasts. The remains of the individuals were found in collapsed dens where carnivores had apparently dragged the carcasses to eat. They are thought to have died within a few hundred years of one another.

"Nobody has ever seen such a well-preserved skull from this period," said Christoph Zollikofer, a professor at Zurich University's Anthropological Institute, who worked on the remains. "This is the first complete skull of an adult early Homo. They simply did not exist before," he said. Homo is the genus of great apes that emerged around 2.4m years ago and includes modern humans.

Other researchers said the fossil was an extraordinary discovery. "The significance is difficult to overstate. It is stunning in its completeness. This is going to be one of the real classics in paleoanthropology," said Tim White, an expert on human evolution at the University of California, Berkeley.

But while the skull itself is spectacular, it is the implications of the discovery that have caused scientists in the field to draw breath. Over decades excavating sites in Africa, researchers have named half a dozen different species of early human ancestor, but most, if not all, are now on shaky ground.

The most recently unearthed individual had a long face and big teeth, but the smallest braincase of all five H erectus skulls found at the site. Photograph: Georgian National Museum

The remains at Dmanisi are thought to be early forms of Homo erectus, the first of our relatives to have body proportions like a modern human. The species arose in Africa around 1.8m years ago and may have been the first to harness fire and cook food. The Dmanisi fossils show that H erectus migrated as far as Asia soon after arising in Africa.

The latest skull discovered in Dmanisi belonged to an adult male and was the largest of the haul. It had a long face and big, chunky teeth. But at just under 550 cubic centimetres, it also had the smallest braincase of all the individuals found at the site. The dimensions were so strange that one scientist at the site joked that they should leave it in the ground.

The odd dimensions of the fossil prompted the team to look at normal skull variation, both in modern humans and chimps, to see how they compared. They found that while the Dmanisi skulls looked different to one another, the variations were no greater than those seen among modern people and among chimps.

The scientists went on to compare the Dmanisi remains with those of supposedly different species of human ancestor that lived in Africa at the time. They concluded that the variation among them was no greater than that seen at Dmanisi. Rather than being separate species, the human ancestors found in Africa from the same period may simply be normal variants of H erectus.

"Everything that lived at the time of the Dmanisi was probably just Homo erectus," said Prof Zollikofer. "We are not saying that palaeoanthropologists did things wrong in Africa, but they didn't have the reference we have.

Part of the community will like it, but for another part it will be shocking news."

Reconstruction of the early human ancestor Homo erectus from the latest skull found at Dmanisi in Georgia.

David Lordkipanidze at the Georgian National Museum, who leads the Dmanisi excavations, said: "If you found the Dmanisi skulls at isolated sites in Africa, some people would give them different species names. But one population can have all this variation. We are using five or six names, but they could all be from one lineage."

If the scientists are right, it would trim the base of the human evolutionary tree and spell the end for names such as H rudolfensis, H gautengensis,H ergaster and possibly H habilis.

The fossil is described in the latest issue of Science.

"Some palaeontologists see minor differences in fossils and give them labels, and that has resulted in the family tree accumulating a lot of branches," said White. "The Dmanisi fossils give us a new yardstick, and when you apply that yardstick to the African fossils, a lot of that extra wood in the tree is dead wood. It's arm-waving."

"I think they will be proved right that some of those early African fossils can reasonably join a variable Homo erectus species,"said Chris Stringer, head of human origins at the Natural History Museum in London.

"But Africa is a huge continent with a deep record of the earliest stages of human evolution, and there certainly seems to have been species-level diversity there prior to two million years ago. So I still doubt that all of the 'early Homo' fossils can reasonably be lumped into an evolving Homo erectus lineage. We need similarly complete African fossils from two to 2.5m years ago to test that idea properly."

The analysis by Lordkipanidze also casts doubt on claims that a creature called Australopithecus sediba that lived in what is now South Africa around 1.9m years ago was a direct ancestor of modern humans. The species was discovered by Lee Berger at the University of Witwatersrand. He argued that it was premature to dismiss his finding and criticised the authors for failing to compare their fossils with the remains of A sediba.

"This is a fantastic and important discovery, but I don't think the evidence they have lives up to this broad claim they are making.

They say this falsifies that Australopithecus sediba is the ancestor of Homo. The very simple response is, no it doesn't."

"What all this screams out for is more and better specimens. We need skeletons, more complete material, so we can look at them from head to toe," he added. "Any time a scientist says 'we've got this figured out' they are probably wrong. It's not the end of the story."

Lots of south Georgia good ole' boys still resemble that guy, he just needs a mullet

[Habana Mike]

The Kraken Black Spiced Rum:

Being named after a fierce mythical cephalopod might come with a lot of pressure, but The Kraken Black Spiced Rum packs more than enough punch to live up to the moniker.

The base rum used in Kraken is from Trinidad and Tobago, distilled from molasses made from local sugar cane. The rum is then aged 12 - 24 months and spiced with a mixture of cinnamon, ginger and clove. It's a taste you'll want to add to your bar — and that beautiful bottle will fit right in, too.

Horrible stuff, at least to my taste....

Was heading down the Florida Keys a few years back and stopped in a bottleshop for some supplies. The proprietor (and local distributor of the stuff), upon finding I was in the market for some rum, suggested I absolutely had to try this.

So, easily swayed as I am, I purchase a bottle.

Get to Key West, check in, go to room, throw stuff on the floor, open balcony, mix drink, clip and light cigar, take sip, and spew 50 feet!

While I'll occasionally partake in a Cap'n and Coke at the Gasparilla Festival (Tampa pirate thing, Prez would love it!), I am not a spiced rum guy so please don't take offense if that's your cup of grog.....

Thinking about it, we should try to get an FOH get-together going in Tampa next year - January 25th in one of the best cigar cities in North America

http://gasparillapiratefest.com/index_event.shtml

[Habana Mike]

Was Jack The Ripper An American?

And I've commented enough on this thread tonight. Great work as always Mika.

Spoiler: Tumblety did it.

[MIKA27]

And I've commented enough on this thread tonight. Great work as always Mika.

Spoiler: Tumblety did it.

Thanks Mike as always for reading and contributing.

Damn I love your avatar!

[MIKA27]

Stick-On Speaker Uses Your Windows To Silence Noises Outside

That suspiciously cheap apartment you just moved into? Turns out to be right next to a deafening hourly commuter train — and since you signed a one-year lease, you’re looking at either 12 months wearing noise-cancelling headphones. Or desperately hoping Rudolf Stefanich’s Sono noise cancelling window device comes to fruition.

We’ve probably all seen those vibrating devices that can turn flat surfaces like tables or windows into speakers. Well, Stefanich takes that idea one step further with the Sono. Noise-cancelling headphones feature tiny microphones that can pick up and cancel out ambient sounds, and that’s exactly what the Sono would do. Except that it would counter-vibrate the window it was stuck to, turning it into a giant noise-cancelling speaker that silences any sound coming from outside.

And while Stefanich’s proposed device is only just a finalist for a James Dyson Award at this point, there’s no reason to believe the technology and approach wouldn’t work as intended. Furthermore, it’s reasonable to say that eventually, the electronics in the Sono could be integrated into window frames directly — taking soundproofing to a whole new level. [James Dyson Award via PSKF]

[MIKA27]

Would You Pay $75,000 To Ride This Spectacular Balloon To Space?

Space tourism sounds exciting and unforgettable and all, but with a single trip costing as much as a small house, it’s simply out of reach for the average person. A company called Paragon Space Development Corp is hoping to change that with a new, more affordable ticket to space. It’ll cost as much as a slightly smallerhouse.

Paragon’s new project is called World View. It will carry passengers as high as 100,000 feet (or about 30km) above the Earth using a giant balloon that’s not unlike the one that Felix Baumgartner used for his historic jump last year. Now, this altitude isn’t quite high enough for zero gravity, and it’s not extreme enough to require space suits or air masks. But that’s part of the charm. “You can be sitting up there having your beverage of choice watching this extraordinary spectacle of the Earth below you and the blackness of space,” Paragon president Jane Poynter told Discovery News. “It really is very gentle.”

The best part? It only costs $US75,000 per person. That’s still a lot of money, but it’s a bargain compared to tickets on Richard Branson’s Virgin Galactic, which go for $US250,000 (though that bird also flies 100km higher). Paragon’s CEO and co-founder Taber MacCallum says the project’s goal is “bringing space to the masses.” The view, he added, will be high enough to see “a curved Earth with its thin blue atmosphere against the blackness of space.” Of course, some would argue that this is not quite “space,” but it may be close enough for some.

It’s hard to imagine the proletariat lining up to drop 75 large ones on a balloon ride. But the mere existence of a little competition in the space tourism industry is bound to be a good thing. World View’s first liftoff is slated for 2016. [WSJ]

The best part? It only costs $US75,000 per person. That’s still a lot of money, but it’s a bargain compared to tickets on Richard Branson’s Virgin Galactic, which go for $US250,000 (though that bird also flies 100km higher). Paragon’s CEO and co-founder Taber MacCallum says the project’s goal is “bringing space to the masses.” The view, he added, will be high enough to see “a curved Earth with its thin blue atmosphere against the blackness of space.” Of course, some would argue that this is not quite “space,” but it may be close enough for some.

It’s hard to imagine the proletariat lining up to drop 75 large ones on a balloon ride. But the mere existence of a little competition in the space tourism industry is bound to be a good thing. World View’s first liftoff is slated for 2016. [WSJ]

[MIKA27]

Monster Machines: This Vacuum Detonator Blows Deadly Chemical Weapons To Smithereens

Disposing of the world’s chemical weapon stockpiles is far easier said than done. It’s not like the good old days prior to WWII when we could just dump extraneous supplies of mustard gas and other chemical weapons into the open ocean or under Delaware roadways or just big pits at the Redstone Arsenal in Alabama — no, no, now we have to dispose of it in a responsible manner.

That’s why Army crews now rely on an ingenious explosive vacuum chamber to burn these deadly weapons to harmless ash.

Dubbed the DAVINCH (Detonation of Ammunition in a Vacuum-Integrated Chamber) and developed by Kobe Steel of Kobe, Japan, this system is an example of Explosive Destruction Technology (EDT) that employs explosive charges or heat to burn out chemical weapons rather than require EOD specialists to delicately (and unbearably slowly) disassemble and disarm chemical munitions.

This double-walled steel vacuum detonation chamber, and supplemental off-gas system, is built to detonate some of humanity’s most deadly biological weapons harmlessly. The device itself is comprised of a pair of nestled chambers — together weighing over 72,574kg — capped with a 13,607kg airtight blast door.

As a Board on Army Science and Technology report explains:

The [DAVINCH] process uses a detonation chamber in which chemical munitions are destroyed when donor charges surrounding the munitions are detonated. Offgases are produced that require secondary treatment…The offgases resulting from agent destruction in the DAVINCH vessel are filtered to remove particulates and, with oxygen from an external supply, are pumped into the cold plasma oxidizer, which oxidizes CO to CO2. Condensate water is then recovered from the exhaust gas; the gas is passed through activated carbon and exhausted to the atmosphere.

The DAVINCH system is already hard at work at the Deseret Chemical Depot, a US Army chemical weapons incinerator in Tooele County, Utah. Over the past 15 years, the facility has destroyed more than 1.1 million explosive weapons containing toxic chemical agents primarily by cutting the bombs open, draining the agents, and burning the contents. But for more than 300 corroded and rotting munitions containing mustard gas, that method was simply too risky to attempt. Instead, the Army installed the DAVINCH in 2011 to handle the task , which it did commendably before the Depot closed in June of this year.

Additionally, four such DAVINCH systems have already been installed at sites in Japan, Belgium, as well as a pair in China. So why are UN teams are attacking President Assad’s chemical weapon stockpiles with “cutting torches and angle grinders”, as noted in a news release from the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons on Sunday? That’s just asking for trouble.

[MIKA27]

US Air Force Officers Keep Leaving Nuclear Missile Doors Open

Not to scare you or anything, but US Air Force officers have left the blast doors to nuclear-tipped missiles open at least twice in the past year. These are the guys who help guard the launch codes who are also tasked with watching over the arsenal. Leaving the missiles available and unattended is a very, very big no-no.

Unnamed officials recently broke the news about the blast doors to the Associated Press, adding that the doors were probably left open many more times even though officers were only caught twice. These officers aren’t supposed to make any mistakes. The fact that they did is a big problem, because those doors are there to keep bad people like terrorists from gaining access to these incredibly deadly weapons. In the AP’s own words, “The blast door violations are another sign of serious trouble in the handling of the nation’s nuclear arsenal.”

For now, four US Air Force officers have been disciplined for their negligence. And again, not to scare you, but this is just the negligence that we know about. The military’s mistakes — like that drone that crashed by a highway in Florida for example — are scary enough when they’re revealed to the public. What’s kept secret is undoubtedly much more frightening.

[MIKA27]

Haunting Aerial Photographs Of Drowned Villages In Canada

Louis Helbig is cataloging aerial photographs of Canadian villages drowned by the construction of the St Lawrence Seaway on his website Sunken Villages. The photos are haunting and gorgeous, almost emerald-like, but often difficult to read. Outlines of houses and roads barely emerge from the silt like scenes from a dream by J.G. Ballard, or flooded stage sets in the water that, in some photos, are lazily criss-crossed by boats.

The shot seen above, featuring a “barn with octagonal silo“, or the photo simply described as two buildings in Riverside Heights — an overly optimistic name for a town that now finds itself underwater — exemplify the dreamlike nature of the scenes.

Some of the lost architectural features of the region are now SCUBA-diving attractions, Helbig explains.

“Two Buildings Riverside Heights”

Helbig relays the extraordinary history of these villages on his site, including a brief introduction to the dispersed former residents who still refer to things like “Inundation Day” as a perverse local anniversary

Down Altsville East to West”

“The St. Lawrence Seaway was the largest industrial project of its time,” he writes. “A feat of unprecedented industrial accomplishment, it eliminated the powerful Long Sault Rapids and opened the Great Lakes to the ocean-going vessels of its era. In the rapids’ place, Lake St. Lawrence became the headwater for a massive hydroelectric dam.”

Doran Point Buildings in May”

The project began purely by accident, while flying over a body of water and looking down, spotting the outlines of architecture in the shallows below:

The first path began in the air in late 2009 when, flying over the St. Lawrence River, I spotted, quite by chance, a rectangular outline in the clear, blue-green water. At first I didn’t quite believe what I thought I was seeing — I had never heard of such a thing as houses, let alone whole communities, under water in Canada and the United States. A few turns later, I found a road and some more foundations; the entire thing snapped into place with a sidelong glance at the dam in the distance between Cornwall, Ontario, Canada and Massena, New York, USA.

Deciding both to memorialize and, in a sense, to warn others about the experience of loss these artificial floods have led to, Helbig’s project is both abstract and documentarian — and, even better, it is currently on display at the Marianne van Silfhout Gallery at St. Lawrence College, so you can see the photos in person. The show closes on November 2.

“Downtown Aultsville”

[MIKA27]

OUYA GAME CONSOLE

OUYA is another impressive kickstarter success story, it raised $8.5 million and became the website´s second-highest-earning project in its history(first is pebble watch with $10 million). The Android powered game console is beautifully designed and is about the size of a Rubik’s cube, it uses an nVIDIA quad-core CPU and outputs via HDMI at up to a stunning 1080p resolution. An exclusive Ouya store features applications and games designed specifically for the Ouya platform, but all systems can be used as development kits, allowing any Ouya owner and gamer to also be a developer, without the need for licensing fees.

[MIKA27]

See who’s bringing Cuban cigar-smuggling pigeons to the United States

Thanks to New York artist Duke Riley, the U.S. surveillance apparatus faces a new airborne foe: the homing pigeon.

Riley trained pigeons to smuggle Cuban cigars from Havana, Cuba, to Key West, Fla., while other birds filmed the 160-kilometre journey with custom-made cameras. The pigeons and their videos will be on display in Riley’s solo show, which opens Nov. 1 at the Magnan Metz gallery in New York.

Riley, 41, said he came up with the project at least in part to challenge the idea that the spying capabilities of the U.S. government have become all-encompassing.

He started with 50 birds – tagging half of them as smugglers and the other half as documentarians.

“A lot of the work I do seeks to create some sense of possibility or empowerment, in a humorous and romanticized way, using the simplest means possible,” Riley said.

It was also Riley’s way of protesting the 51-year-old U.S. embargo against Cuba. Under the 1917 Trading with the Enemy Act, the United States has enforced economic sanctions against Cuba since 1962.

More recently, Americans with permission to travel to Cuba were allowed to bring back $100 worth of goods, but the Bush administration ratcheted up sanctions in 2004, imposing a total ban.

Riley’s cigar project aims for more than just subversion.

“I don’t want to – can I say it? – be pigeonholed,” said Riley, who has been around pigeons since he was a child. He spent years researching their role in carrying information for the military -– more recently for the U.S. Navy during the Vietnam War.

Still, Riley has long courted trouble with his artistic interventions. In 2007, he was arrested by the U.S. Coast Guard for approaching the Red Hook-berthed Queen Mary II cruise liner in a makeshift wooden Revolutionary War-era submarine. Riley called that project commentary on the Bush administration’s “war on terror” and the gentrification of the Brooklyn waterfront, where he works as a tattoo artist.

In 2009, Riley hopped freight trains on his way to Cleveland and infiltrated the city’s sewer system to emulate the hobo lifestyle of migrant workers during Cleveland’s Depression-era.

If some of that artistry bordered on illegality, the latest project, four years in the making, dives straight in. Normally outspoken – “If you’re an artist and not taking risks, you’re really just masturbating” – Riley became more guarded when discussing how the pigeons got to and from Cuba.

Less than half of the original number of his trainees took part in the mission. Of the 23 birds that embarked on it, only 11 made it back – toting six Cohibas. Those cigars are now cast in resin and also on display.

A 12th bird, D. Ruggero Deodato, nose-dived into Havana harbor under uncertain circumstances. The bird survived and made its way back to the United States without any cargo.

“I imagine Cuban authorities would be sensitive to American pigeons flying over with cameras – that that would cause some alarm,” Riley said, grinning. “But I’m just speculating.”

Some of the pigeons are now awaiting exhibition in a bird loft at the Magnan Metz Gallery, surrounded by portraits of each of the 50 participants painted on tin shingles. The loft, installed on Monday, is decorated with parts of two shipwrecks Riley scavenged along with Key West objects like street signs and lobster traps.

The pigeons are already breeding. What are the artist’s plans for the offspring? “Train them to smuggle more cigars,” Riley said with a laugh. “Or cocaine from Colombia.”

Joking aside, the United States will be watching.

A spokeswoman for the Joint Interagency Taskforce South, which monitors such activity, said:

“If we had some intel that the pigeons are involved in drugs, or in international crime, or illicit trafficking, we would use whatever assets we have to obtain that information.”

[MIKA27]

Deep Space Exploration Trials Sure Look Boring

In order to prepare for the human exploration of the furthest reaches of our solar system, space agencies often run experiments to see how our bodies can cope with long periods of sedentary behaviour. And, my, it looks boring.

The latest of the European Space Agency’s such tests have just come to a close. The Agency explains:

When astronauts return from a long flight they can need days for their bodies to recuperate from the effects of living in weightlessness. Bedrest studies recreate some aspects of spaceflight to allow scientists to probe how their bodies react and test methods for keeping future astronauts fit and healthy.

Resting in bed and getting paid for it might sound like an ideal job, but bedrest puts a huge strain on the participants as they submit themselves to days of monotony, constant tests and a strict diet without being allowed to get up for a walk, fresh air, a shower or even the toilet.

Indeed, it really doesn’t sound much fun, at least according to Marc Marenco, one of the participants. “The first days of each session were the worst,” he explained. “The body needs to adapt and I had migraines and backaches.” Anybody fancy a stroll?

[MIKA27]

Anchorman 2: The Legend Continues Gets A New Trailer

The most quoted movie on the internet is getting a sequel, and that sequel now has its own full-length trailer.

This trailer is full of all the classic gags you expect from an Anchorman movie, including a few unfortunate jokes about sex and homosexuality.

There’s also a scorpion going into someone’s mouth. So, yeah.

Are you keen to see this?

[MIKA27]

Forget It, This Toddler Just Won Halloween

We hope you didn’t spend the last six months designing and building an elaborate over-the-top Halloween costume with which you hope to win over the internet next week. Because nothing is ever going to top this adorable toddler’s wonderful LED stick figure costume.

Even better, hopefully it will put a pre-emptive stop to the millions of Miley Cyrus costumes people are planning, because who would want to even try to compete with this?

[MIKA27]

Long Lost LaserDisc Found, Features Behind-The-Scenes Star Wars Footage

“Through the Force, things you will see. The future, the past, old friends long gone.” Someone has just found a disc full of behind the scenes, never before seen footage from Return of the Jedi. Two clips were uploaded to a Facebook page yesterday: a silent 59 seconds of R2-D2 repairing Luke’s X-Wing on Dagobah, and a minute of Frank Oz getting fed lines and doing Yoda like only he can (which, in the end, sounds like quite a strain on the ol’ vocal cords).

There’s apparently a full half hour of raw, unedited material where these came from, which will be rationed out in bits and pieces. EditDroid, the LaserDisc-based system developed by Lucasfilm used here, is now (somewhat predictably) defunct — though it was a a key first step in the evolution of digital editing tools like Avid and Final Cut Pro — so the whole thing is an artifact of epic proportions. See these, you must.

[MIKA27]

Quake rumours over new beached 'sea serpent' in US

Social media has lit up with earthquake rumours after a giant oarfish washed up on a California beach - the second such discovery in several days.

The 4.3m (14ft) dead snake-like fish was found in the city of Oceanside - five days after another and larger specimen (5.5m) had been found.

Reports on social media recall an ancient Japanese myth linking extremely rare oarfish sightings to tremors.

But scientists remain sceptical of any link to increased tectonic activity.

The fish was brought to the Scripps Institution of Oceanography at the University of California, San Diego

They remain puzzled, however, by the two discoveries of this rare deepwater fish near the beach.

The larger specimen, found on Santa Catalina island, has now been dissected and it appears well-fed, healthy and with little sign of disease.

"It looks good enough to eat - if you have a 13ft pan," biologist Ruff Zetter said.

Tests are also being done for radiation, following Japan's Fukushima nuclear leak on the other side of the Pacific.

But it is also a rare chance to gather information about a little-known species that hovers vertically in the ocean and grazes on passing proteins.

The elusive fish - which can grow up to 15m - dives to depth of up to 1,000m and is found in all temperate to tropical waters.

[MIKA27]

Cabasse Stream 1: This Weird Oyster Sounds Fantastic

French audio company Cabasse is back with its Stream range, this time updating the range to feature better sound than ever.

Meet the Stream 1. It’s an active wireless speaker shaped like a fashionable oyster. It’s a three-way system that orients in three different positions: wall-mounted, free-standing or resting flat on its feet. You’ve got a tweeter, mid-range speaker and woofer under the base all packed into a new, slimmer design to make it all work acoustically.

The speaker design throws sound out across 360-degrees, and it has been designed so that no matter where you put it in the room, it sounds textured and deep.

It’s packing a bunch of connectivity options, including Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, DLNA, NFC and USB. Cabasse wanted to make DLNA more accessible to people who have no freaking idea what it is with this new model, so it’s turning pretty much every input into a DLNA server when connected. Everything from your mobile device through to a USB stick plugged into the rear becomes a DLNA server. There are also step-by-step guides on set-up so you can figure out how to get the best sound out of it, even if you don’t know what that sounds like.

It’s designed to be multi-room compatible with other Cabasse products, and the app for that one is coming out in November.

The Cabasse Stream 1 will cost $999 and it will be distributed by International Dynamics.