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

[MIKA27]

Would You Eat This Cheese Made From Human Armpit Sweat?

Folks often shy away from fancy cheese because it smells like feet. But what if the cheese was actually madefrom feet — or, rather, the bacteria that makes your feet stink? A couple of bio-hacker artists decided to explore that possibility. And it sounds really gross.

On Friday, Christina Agapakis and Sissel Tolaas will showcase their stinky human cheese project at a new exhibition called Grow Your Own… Life After Nature, hosted by Trinity College in Dublin. Their installation is literally a bunch of cheese wheels, each of which was made from bacterial samples pulled from the feet and armpits of different people. The artists hint at our society’s obsession with antiscepsis and explain that the “intersection of our interests in smell and microbial communities led us to focus on cheese as a ‘model organism.’” It’s unclear if samples of the human armpit cheese will be available for the public to sample.

Believe it or not, the cheese display is hardly the weirdest installation at “Grow Your Own.” The show’s focus on synthetic biology means that the featured projects run the gamut from “Frankenstein-esque hybrid organs” to portraits made from analysing human DNA found on things like discarded cigarette butts.

And how could we not mention the project suggesting that humans incubate and give birth to dolphins so that we can eat them?

That one’s called “I Wanna Deliver a Dolphin…”

It’s important to understand that the ideas being tossed around at this show are pretty conceptual and certainly arty. In a way, many of the projects highlight the absurd and even grotesque things made possible by the latest advances in biology and technology.

“Synthetic biology is a new approach to genetic modification, applying engineering ideals to the complexity of living systems,” says lead curator, Alexandra Daisy Ginsberg. “It’s both an evolution and revolution as biology could be transformed into a design material unlike one that we have ever known before: a self-replicating technology that is everything from hardware to software, the factory and product too.”

This is all to say that you probably won’t find human bacteria cheese in your local grocery store anytime soon. (No, not even at Whole Foods!) But some of the show’s other off-the-wall projects might be closer to reality than you think. If we already have artificial hearts, for instance, why not build a hybrid heart out of electric eel DNA that works like a built-in defibrillator?

[MIKA27]

Absurd Creature of the Week: Burrowing Botfly Grows Huge Feasting on Your Flesh

Nota bene: This week’s creature is a spine-covered parasitic larva that burrows into living human beings, feeding on their flesh and growing positively plump. Some descriptions here might be hard to stomach, and the squeamish should not under any circumstances watch the videos of the extraction process. Unless the circumstance is someone tricking you into it, which would be pretty funny.

When insect taxonomist Chris Carlton of Louisiana State University went on a collecting trip in Belize, he did what many travelers do: He picked up a souvenir. It was even free, which was pretty sweet. After spending a month in Central America, he returned home and unwrapped his gift to himself.

Unfortunately, the unwrapping happened on the top of his noggin. Carlton’s scalp had become home to a human botfly larva, a spiny parasitic maggot that digs into living human flesh, feeds on the inflamed tissue surrounding it, and grows to more than an inch long.

“I began to notice a sort of discomfort exactly in the very top of my head,” Carlton told WIRED, recalling his horrifying experience in 1997, “and I didn’t think much of it.” He’d known about botflies, what with being an entomologist and all. But he didn’t draw the connection until an intense pain hit him every 15 to 20 minutes. That’s when he remembered that when the larvae reach a certain size, they “rotate in their little burrows in your skin, and this creates this sort of intense shooting periodic pain. So at that point the typical reaction is that you know you have a maggot in your body, and you must get it out.”

Enlisting the help of colleague Victoria Bayless, who curates the Louisiana State Arthropod Museum and whose job description likely doesn’t say anything about the surgical removal of parasitic larvae, Carlton applied fingernail polish to the area. Its breathing hole sealed, the botfly perished, and the surgical assistant yanked the spiky fiend out with forceps. This, Carlton said quite measuredly, felt like “like losing a bit of skin very suddenly.”

Carlton is far from alone among unfortunate travelers to the fly’s turf in South and Central America, who often only realize they’ve been infested long after returning home and telling everyone that their trip was surprisingly complication-free and that no, they’ve never heard of the botfly before.

“It’s an alarming thing to happen to you,” said Carlton, “especially probably if you’re not an entomologist. Entomologists tend to be a lot more tolerant of these things than the normal population.”

Perhaps it’s because these scientists are privy to the bumblebee-sized human botfly’s incredible life cycle, which just so happens to come at the expense of our physical and psychological comfort. It all begins with a carrier, usually a mosquito, which the adult botfly grabs in midair, according to medical entomologist C. Roxanne Connelly of the University of Florida. Next the fly will attach several eggs on the underside of the mosquito with glue-like substance in what could be the world’s most nightmarish arts and crafts session.

When the mosquito flies away and finds a human or other mammal to feed on, “the warmth of the body she’s approaching will cause those botfly eggs to hatch” and fall out of their egg case, Connelly said. “They can either enter the human body through the wound that the mosquito has made with her mouth parts, or they can go in through hair follicles or other cuts.”

The larva dives in head-first, excavating flesh with hooked mouthparts that look like fangs. The opposite end barely pokes out of the skin, allowing the larva to breathe and keeping the host from healing the wound, which is nice because the only thing worse than a living botfly in your body is a rotting one sealed inside. Here it will stay for up to three months, eating and growing and molting, effecting what Carlton describes as a “chronic, low-level, itchy burning sensation.”

It feeds on the body’s reaction to it, known as exudate: “Basically just proteins and debris that fall off of skin when you have a inflammation — dead blood cells, things like that,” said Connelly. (She relates the story of a young girl who had complained to her mother of hearing crunching sounds when she herself was not chewing. The cause? A botfly larva feeding behind her ear — which is probably the closest anyone has ever come to getting the burrowing Ceti eel treatment from Khan.) And with this food it continuously grows, going through three instars — the stages between molts. But unlike, say, a cicada, whose molted shell is quite hard, the botfly larva’s is soft, and likely gets mixed in the exudate and consumed, according to Connelly.

When the larva is at last ready to pupate, it widens the breathing hole and backs out into the light of day. “Apparently when that happens,” said Connelly, “people who have had it and have let it go the whole time, they don’t feel it backing out or falling out. And it does kind of fall off, and then it will crawl off and find a place to pupate, which is typically under some soil.”

This begs the question: If you knew you were host to a freeloading parasitic larva and didn’t want to go through the agony/awkwardness of having a friend rip it from your person, would you let it develop and drop out? (I for one might feel some sort of attachment to it. Is that weird? We would have just shared so much, you know.) A complicating factor: Could it grow up and lead to the botfly infestation of your homeland?

Nope on that last bit, said Connelly. “If [you’re] bringing back one fly, and that fly actually finishes that life cycle and turns into an adult fly, it’s got to have something to mate with. So it’s not likely we’re going to be seeing these establishing in the U.S.”

Such a highly sophisticated system of reproduction is thus hamstrung by nature’s very basic demand: If you can’t get busy, your genes don’t get passed along. But why would the botfly evolve this bizarre life cycle in the first place?

“For one thing,” said Connelly, “you don’t have a lot of competition. If you’re a female fly and you can get your offspring to a warm body … you’ve got a nice food source out there that you really don’t have a lot of competition for. And because [the larva] stays right there in one area, it’s not moving around. It’s not really exposed to predators.”

Except, of course, humans who prefer to interrupt its stay in their flesh. Carlton in particular is getting quite good at this. Eleven years after adopting his botfly, he went on another collecting trip, this time to Ecuador. And after returning to the U.S. he got a funny feeling.

“I noticed the same thing,” Carlton said. “And I was like, ‘No this can’t really be happening. It can’t really be another one of these things in exactly the same spot, right at the top of my head.’”

It was indeed happening, and once again he enlisted the help of his trusty surgical assistant. They smothered the larva with a mixture of ethanol and ethyl acetate, this one being “much more stubborn than the previous one about dying,” and yanked it out.

One man’s nightmare, it seems, is a simply another entomologist’s adventure. And it all really could have been much lousier for Carlton.

“There are worse places on your body to get a botfly,” he said, “than the top of your head.”

[MIKA27]

The Exclusive Inside Story of the Boston Bomb Squad’s Defining Day

Boston bomb squad sergeant Chris Connolly was one of a dozen techs stationed near the finish line of the Boston Marathon.

TWO EXPLOSIONS. HUNDREDS OF INJURIES. A SEA OF BACKPACKS TO BE SEARCHED BY HAND. THE WORST DAY IN THE LIFE OF THE BOSTON BOMB SQUAD.

On the morning of April 15, 2013, Chris Connolly, a sergeant with the Boston police bomb squad, completed a ritual he had performed annually for the past eight years. It started after dawn at the corner of Boylston and Dartmouth in the city’s tony Back Bay neighborhood. There Connolly and his teammates peered inside trash cans, peeked into car and store windows, and inspected flower planters.

In the post-9/11 world, this was standard operating procedure, a precaution practiced by civilian bomb squads around the country.

Later that morning half a million spectators would watch nearly 25,000 athletes run the Boston Marathon, and security experts have considered major sporting events to be potential terrorist targets since the bombing at the Atlanta Olympics in 1996. Even at this early hour, revelers were starting to gather, most ignoring the techs methodically working their way around bars and restaurants and postrace recovery areas.

Connolly himself looks more like a weight lifter than a jogger, a stocky P90X devotee with military-short salt-and-blond hair. With his blue eyes and thick accent, he is a cliche of the Boston Irish cop. His father was even a longshoreman. He started his career as an average patrolman and worked his way up to sergeant and night-shift supervisor after years of chasing gangs and drugs. After 9/11 he volunteered for the FBI’s challenging Hazardous Devices School—it was all volunteers, nobody gets coerced into working with explosives—and then became a member of the city’s 17-man bomb squad in 2004.

Once the Back Bay sweep was done and the route declared clear, Connolly returned to his post near Copley Square, the hub for medical staff and exhausted runners just past the finish line. The forecast called for cool weather. “Good,” Connolly thought, “fewer heat victims for the docs.”

Other bomb techs took up positions elsewhere along the route, but each knew that the finish line—the maximum concentration of bystanders and media—was the most likely place for an incident to occur. For now, they stood by, ready to respond to a suspicious car or an untended bag discovered by a K-9 patrol.

Members of the Boston PD bomb squad, from left: Hector Cabrera, Paul Boddy, Paul Wright, Christopher Connolly, Richard Diaz, David Cardinal, Todd Brown, James Parker, Stephen Chin, William Knecht.

A sweep and a long wait: This was the life of an urban bomb squad. The hardest part, as Connolly knew, was staying alert. It’s difficult to maintain vigilance in the face of overwhelming statistical evidence that nothing is going to happen. Soon runners started coming in—the swift ones first, but gradually the slower ones, in greater numbers and more celebratory.

It happened at 2:50 pm. Connolly didn’t see the first explosion; he felt it. By the time his brain registered what it was, he felt another. The Boston Public Library and a mass of exhausted runners blocked his view. But slowly a cloud of smoke began to rise above the rooflines.

Connolly pushed his way through the dazed crowd, running toward the finish line. He saw nothing but confusion and pain. It smelled like burning hair. An acrid haze hung like smog. People were sprawled everywhere on the pavement, some with limbs at impossible angles. His mind raced. A bomb? Two? Smaller than a car bomb, for sure. But still stout, maybe 10 pounds, and easy to hide.

Panicked runners were fleeing past him. Several people were trying furiously to make calls on their cell phones. To initiate another device? How many more bombs were there? Was this going to be another Madrid? Mumbai?

Connolly surveyed the scene for lone packages and backpacks—anything that could hide another similar device.

He saw bags everywhere.

With no other options, he pulled out his knife, grabbed a bag, and cut into it.

Ripping open potential explosive devices with a knife is not standard procedure. Bomb squads are loaded with sophisticated equipment, and techs normally inspect suspicious packages with a robot, an x-ray machine, or a remotely detonated explosive tool.

A so-called hand entry—that Hollywood-style search for the red wire—is almost never done, unless there is no other way to quickly save a life. But that is exactly the situation Connolly and his fellow bomb squad colleagues faced in Boston.

I was an explosive-ordnance-disposal officer in the US Air Force, and I have been disarming bombs or training military and civilian squads for more than a decade. I deployed twice to Iraq, where I dismantled car bombs and investigated suicide attacks. I’ve witnessed the worst that humans can do to each other. But I have never experienced anything like what the Boston bomb squad went through in April.

Bomb work is usually highly methodical. In an average operation, a team of bomb techs will spend an hour or two disassembling a single device—and that’s if it proves to be a hoax. If it is live, it takes longer. Safety is foremost. As a military officer, fighting a war overseas, I was trained that no bomb was worth my life or the lives of the men and women under me. None of us ever made a blind hand entry. We worked bombs the right way, or we didn’t work them at all.

In Boston the rules changed. This attack wasn’t on the battlefield but on American soil, in the middle of a massive public event, and that forced the bomb techs to work in ways they never had before. They knew they could die but had a job to do: protect people from being killed by another device. Suspected explosives needed to be eliminated in seconds. The primary tool became a knife.

Every single suspicious package needed to be checked.

One of the legacies of the Boston bombing will be that it officially ushered the United States into the modern epoch of Betty Crocker explosives: Follow a recipe in Inspire, al Qaeda’s online magazine, to whip up a pressure cooker packed with nails. It’s a reality that other nations know well; four suicide bombs detonated on trains and a bus in London, 10 backpack bombs discharged on trains in Madrid, three devices exploded in Bali, coordinated time-bomb attacks aimed at civilians in Mumbai hotels and taxis. And while American bomb squads were aware of these events, of course, and had even trained for them, none had seen the chaos, confusion, and enormous risks up close. No one was quite prepared for this.

MCCORMICK SAW BODY PARTS. THEN HE SAW IT — TWISTED METAL AND A BATTERY THAT WERE CLEARLY OUT OF PLACE.

When he heard the first boom, Mitch McCormick thought, “They must have shot off a celebratory cannon. That’s new.” But when the BPD bomb squad veteran felt the second crack deep in his chest, heard it echo down the Boylston Street channel, he knew, just knew, what it was. “Those are bombs!” he shouted at his partner, and jumped in the truck.

When he arrived at the second blast site, he saw “a girl with no legs,” he says. She was a grisly mess yet somehow already had tourniquets on both limbs. McCormick didn’t stop; he was a bomb tech, not a medic, and he knew that right now his job was to keep another device from going off.

Blood and cash and food were strewn everywhere. McCormick could see frightened forms huddling in a restaurant, behind a wall of glass. If there was another bomb on the patio …

He stepped inside and yelled, “If another bomb goes off, the glass will fragment into you!” The place emptied immediately. It worked so well he went next door and said the same thing.

In training, McCormick had heard that the head and feet of a suicide bomber remain intact after a blast while the rest of their body disintegrates, but he had never actually had a chance to test that rumor. Truth was, his total “live” experience was typical of most civilian bomb techs: three pipe bombs and a smattering of old hand grenades found in veterans’ attics.

He didn’t see any severed heads, but he did see other body parts. Then he saw it—the twisted sheet metal and a battery. The jagged shards were so obviously out of place among the discarded shoes and jackets and water bottles of the runners and victims.

He realized it most likely had been hidden in a backpack, and he was surrounded by those, abandoned on the streets and sidewalks.

“Well, now I know what I’m looking for,” he thought, and then took a breath to steel himself. “Mitch,” he told himself, “this is American history in the making, and you’re smack-dab in the middle of it. Now don’t **** this up, ’cause you’d rather be dead than have another one of these go off.”

“If two, why not three?” Connolly thought as he tore into a bag. He avoided the zipper, which could be a trigger, and cut into the base of the pack as he’d been taught. Nothing. If three, why not four? He cut into the next backpack, nearly slipped on the blood-slicked sidewalk, and tore the bag in two. Nothing. There would be a third bomb for sure, he reasoned, to kill the cops and medics.

He reached for another bag.

“I’m gonna ******* die,” he thought. “One of these is gonna be real. But that’s OK. If it goes, it goes. That’s just the way it’s going to be today.”

Connolly cut through several more bags before he realized he couldn’t clear them all himself. He needed more techs. He tried his cell phone first but couldn’t get through. He reached for his handheld radio on his belt and pushed the transmit button.

“I need every available bomb tech at Boylston and Exeter. Boylston and Exeter. Now!”

Todd Brown and his partner Hector Cabrera hadn’t needed the prompt—they’d headed to the scene immediately after the blasts. As they dismounted from their response truck, Connolly appeared through the smoke, waved them down, pointed at each man, and actually crossed his arms in front of his chest, like something out of a Looney Tunes cartoon, directing them to different suspicious packages. Brown and Cabrera nearly ran into each other complying.

Brown surveyed the scene, seeing backpacks, limbs, and blood, and a continuous stream of oblivious runners still pouring into the site like cattle from a chute. Cops in fluorescent traffic-control vests were trying to evacuate pedestrians. They pointed out bags to Brown and had the look of men who have suddenly realized they’re halfway into a minefield and don’t know how to get out.

Brown is a big man, with long arms and a loping step. As it happened, his unit had recently conducted intensive counterterrorism training with a retired Israeli bomb technician who taught them how to quickly assess and cut into suspicious packages found near victims at a still-warm blast scene. During the simulation, the dozen bags that needed to be cleared looked overwhelming. Now there were hundreds.

Brown knew he had to check the bags, and he knew he couldn’t just unzip them, because that might set off a booby trap. He had only the knife in his pocket, a cheap blade branded with the ATF logo, given to him free for attending some seminar or another.

James Parker has served on the Boston bomb squad for 10 years.

It would have to do. He ran up to a backpack in the thick of the crowd, placed his body between the bag and a victim prone on the ground, felt for wires, felt for a pipe bomb. He thought, “thisis****ingreal thisis****ingreal thisis****ingreal,” but he cut anyway, found nothing, and moved to the next bag, cut, keep moving, moving, moving, to the next bag, to the next bag, hoping to get to the end of the row without another detonation.

The tension of repeated hand entries was quickly getting to McCormick. After clearing the second blast scene he returned to his truck, strapped on a bomb suit—80 pounds of armored Kevlar and fire-resistant Nomex—and slowly worked his way east, cutting every bag on the way to the finish line. There he found his teammate James Parker, who had turned his attention to a large, pristine bag sitting upright next to the initial blast site. The crowd had mostly dispersed, and it looked so suspicious, he hadn’t cut into it.

Instead, Parker put on a bomb suit of his own and broke out the Logos XR200—a portable x-ray unit powered by a Dewalt battery from a cordless drill. He put a thin imaging plate next to the bag and shot it with the x-ray source. He then developed the plate in the Logos Imaging system, “the breadmaker,” a gray appliance in a portable case. Parker shot two x-rays. The image they revealed was textbook: a heavy metal tube with wiring throughout.

With so many other potential bombs littering Boylston Street, McCormick decided there was no more time to investigate this one. The techs built a disruptive tool, a water bottle with an explosive charge down the center axis, and placed it carefully next to the clean bag. The area was clear, so the techs called their superiors to let them know he was going to crank it off. Within minutes, every national cable news outlet announced that the Boston bomb squad was about to conduct a controlled blast.

McCormick detonated the device and walked over to inspect his handiwork. He had just blown up a camera bag.

For the next hour, up and down Boylston Street, more than a dozen bomb technicians from the Boston police, FBI, and state police were working the scene. All of them cutting into bags.

Eventually, the initial game of Whac-A-Mole came to an end without any further explosions. As the tide of adrenaline passed, Connolly organized one final methodical search for the day, one last clearance before the whole street morphed from crisis zone to crime scene. Eight bomb technicians and eight bomb-sniffing-dog handlers started at Hereford Street and swept the five long blocks to Copley Square.

It was relatively silent now, except for the distant chop of a helicopter and the eerie ringing of fire alarms, an atonal symphony along the length of Boylston Street. Three people were dead and 264 injured. The deceased were still there on the sidewalk, and the searchers worked around them, watching their footing, imagining it was their own family member lying there. Fortunately it was a cool evening, so the pools of blood weren’t cooking on the black pavement.

It was after dark by the time the team returned to the impromptu command center that Connolly had set up in the Lenox Hotel at Boylston and Exeter, the center of the crime scene. Brown, McCormick, and the others soon found themselves in a conference room packed with bomb techs—from the Massachusetts State Police, from the Cambridge squad, from the Army National Guard at Camp Edwards, Navy guys from Rhode Island, guys from Suffolk County on Long Island, and state police from New Hampshire, New York, and Connecticut. In all, 45 bomb techs and 40 K-9 handlers had answered the request for assistance issued by Boston police hours earlier. In the days ahead, they would need them all.

The calls from around the city started within a half hour of the bombings. While some techs continued to work the investigation on Boylston Street, most pulled grueling 16-hour shifts to keep up with the reports of suspicious packages. The teams used photos of the marathon bombs to help them identify similar devices.

They found everything but. Eight propane tanks in a small car two blocks from the finish line. Another car full of fuel canisters in the parking garage below the One Financial tower. An aluminum catering tray full of tossed salad, forgotten near a restaurant’s back door. A homemade toy bomb, complete with cardboard tubes of dynamite and wires and bright red lights.

Connolly made his base the Lenox Hotel, took his meals there, and slept an hour or two when he could. “But why bother sleeping?”

he said later. “There’s just going to be another call.” Eventually Connolly ran home briefly to put on a clean shirt.

Everyone was worn out from lack of sleep and an unending barrage of calls. Still, three days after the marathon, things had started to wind down, the surge of suspicious-package calls gradually trailing off in a predictable logarithmic decay. The story seemed to be reaching its conclusion.

That’s when the alleged bombers resurfaced and started a shootout.

It was Thursday night, and Todd Brown was waiting for a call at the Lenox Hotel when radio traffic came in that a cop had lost his gun. The story changed several times: a 7-Eleven was robbed. A Cambridge cop was shot. No, he was an MIT cop, the same one whose gun had gone missing, but he’d be fine. Then finally: No, he was dead. Brown was sure it was the bombers. He grabbed Dave Cardinal, another Boston bomb tech, and they hopped into a truck and headed west.

Along the way, the radio reported that two young men who identified themselves as the Boston Marathon bombers had carjacked a Mercedes. Authorities soon tracked the car to Watertown, and within minutes half of the law enforcement personnel in New England were on the Mass Turnpike, following the stolen Mercedes and a Honda Civic that was, unknown to police at the time, registered to one of the alleged bombers.

Brown and Cardinal tried to keep up with the stream of troopers. The radio issued a constant barrage of terrifying updates: “They’re shooting at us! They are throwing grenades at us! They threw a bomb at us out a window!” Cardinal exited and made his way into a dense neighborhood in East Watertown.

They reached the corner of Laurel and Dexter just after the shooting stopped. One bomber and the Mercedes were gone, but the Honda Civic remained in the street. Nearby, the second suspect was being worked on by medical personnel, one wounded police officer was on his way to the hospital, and metal fragments littered the street. Brown and Cardinal immediately approached Boston PD superintendent-in-chief Daniel Linskey.

“Where are the IEDs, Super?” Cardinal asked, getting out of the truck.

Fifteen feet away lay two pipe bombs that had been thrown at the cops but failed to detonate, 2-inch cast-iron elbows primed with hobby fuses, faithfully executed versions of explosives detailed in Inspire magazine.

Brown pulled out a Talon robot to inspect the pipe bombs. The Talon is the workhorse of the modern bomb squad, a squat all-black rig with rugged tank treads and a flexible arm to carry tools or rip into devices. Meanwhile, Cardinal investigated on foot along the row of houses where the shootout had occurred. He found a crumb-line of weapons and frag scattered in the chaos of the gun battle, a sort of terrorist-fetish striptease: a switchblade, then BBs and scrap from a marathon-type bomb, an empty 9-mm magazine, a handgun with an extended magazine, a second handgun, and finally a Kangol hat. “It looked like a crime scene they laid out for us in school,” he says.

Brown noticed scorched pavement where at least three other elbow pipe bombs had detonated. He walked down a nearby driveway and was astonished to find most of a pressure cooker lodged in the door of a parked car. In ordnance lingo, it had low-ordered, failing to completely detonate and mechanically scattering. The weapon had turned into a missile and launched down the driveway.

By now more and more bomb technicians were arriving. A robot placed the two pipe bombs into the Cambridge Police Department’s Total Containment Vessel, a dive bubble on wheels designed to safely stifle any accidental explosion locked in its sealed chamber.

Parker used another Talon robot to investigate the green Honda the bombers had abandoned. He discovered a malign treasure trove including a computer bag containing ball bearings and components similar to those from the initial bombings.

How big was this plot? Was there a team of bombers wearing suicide vests? The contained frenetic energy of such a dense concentration of police was suddenly released in a wave of house-to-house searches. Bomb technicians from a host of agencies paired off with SWAT teams, and for hours they knocked on doors and searched apartments, sheds, houses, and garages.

In the dining room of one such home, bomb technician Billy Farwell of the Massachusetts Army National Guard was alerted to a large plastic box. Sheathed in bubble wrap, it had a wire leading from it, and there were holes cut in the top. As the SWAT team backed off, Farwell carefully shined his flashlight in. He met the eyes of an enormous boa constrictor.

The next afternoon, Brown and Cardinal got word that the suspect, now identified as Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, had been spotted, and bomb squad support was needed. When they arrived at the scene, they found Tsarnaev hunkered down in a boat in someone’s backyard, with police firing warning shots and popping off the occasional flash-bang grenade to try to scare him out. But before the bomb techs could start to check the boat and surrounding area for bombs, Tsarnaev surrendered.

It’s hard to overstate how intense those last few days were. In Kirkuk in 2006, a bloody time in a bloody place, my military unit completed 900 missions in five months. In the week of the Boston Marathon bombings, the Boston bomb squad and their partners went on 196 calls in five days, a pace to rival the worst of the Surge in Baghdad.

“Calls are down, but sweeps are up,” Connolly says, as we walk Boylston Street weeks after the marathon attack. He has had time to sleep, finally, but the pace of preventative work is unrelenting and expanding. “Now we go out for every road race and festival,” he says, shaking his head. “The Dorchester Day Parade is this coming Sunday.” This on top of a slate of much larger events: the first lady visiting the bombing victims, the Bruins in the playoffs, Harvard commencement week, and the Sox coming back to Fenway.

Life returned to normal on Boylston a while ago, but Connolly doesn’t seem to realize it as he gives me a walking tour of bombing landmarks: the locations of the medical tents where he and his team were set up to respond, the Lenox Hotel, each surveillance camera that recorded the Tsarnaev brothers and their backpacks.

A Talon robot that the Boston bomb squad uses to examine possible explosives.

The marathon finish line is still painted across the street, and tourists duck out in the small gaps between traffic to take photos.

Connolly points to a rooftop where they found one of the lids to a pressure cooker. He points to where a piece of frag tore a restaurant’s fabric awning, the jagged hole still circled in investigator’s chalk. He points at the concrete; we have arrived at the site of the first blast.

There is no memorial or marker, but scored into the cement is a circular impression 8 inches in diameter. A hundred faint scratches emanate from it like the rays of the sun in a child’s drawing.

What happened here will, without a doubt, fundamentally change bomb tech work in the United States.

American civilian bomb squads have long focused on coping with the single bomb, the truck bomb, the next Oklahoma City or 9/11.

But the events in Boston showed the limitations in this thinking. In a mass bombing, there is an added burden besides simply disarming the devices found by others. Now we know that the bomb squad will be called to prevent further detonations in the very midst of the attack, slashing through chaos and terror by hand, while coping with the deluge of false alarms.

Some progressive units have already adjusted. Pittsburgh held its marathon, three weeks after Boston’s. “We had more teams working that race than we did when the G20 came to town in 2009,” Dave Tritinger, a Pittsburgh police bomb squad technician told me. “We have the PGA Championship here this week,” said David Gutzmer, commander of the Monroe County Sheriff’s Office bomb squad in Rochester, New York, when I spoke with him in August. “We have really beefed up our presence. “

“THEY’RE SHOOTING AT US! THEY ARE THROWING GRENADES AT US! THEY THREW A BOMB OUT THE WINDOW!”

Several years after 9/11, I conducted training with a military bomb unit charged with guarding Washington, DC. Our final exam was a nightmare scenario—a homemade nuke at the Super Bowl. Our job was to defuse it while the fans were still in the stands, there being no way to quickly and safely clear out 80,000 people. That scenario made two fundamental assumptions that are no longer valid: that there would be one large device and that we would find it before it detonated.

Boston showed that there’s another threat, one that looks a lot different. “We used to train for one box in a doorway. We went into a slower and less aggressive mode, meticulous, surgical. Now we’re transitioning to a high-speed attack, more maneuverable gear, no bomb suit until the situation has stabilized,” Gutzmer says. “We’re not looking for one bomber who places a device and leaves.

We’re looking for an active bomber with multiple bombs, and we need to attack fast.”

A post-Boston final exam will soon look a lot different. Instead of a nuke at the Super Bowl, how about this: Six small bombs have already detonated, and now your job is to find seven more—among thousands of bags—while the bomber hides among a crowd of the fleeing, responding, wounded, and dead. Meanwhile the entire city overwhelms your backup with false alarms. Welcome to the new era of bomb work.

There are some things no training can prepare you for. The week after the marathon, Connolly met with the police commissioner to review the bomb squad’s performance. Connolly feared they had somehow missed the pressure cookers during that morning’s sweep of Boylston Street. But they hadn’t, the police commissioner assured Connolly. Surveillance videos proved the bombs were planted well after their sweeps.

It was a relief, but not a big one. Any pride the bomb techs felt about their performance was far outstripped by a sense of failure.

“Bombs went off in our city,” McCormick says. “We’re the bomb squad. I wish we could have prevented it.”

Back at the Boston station house, the emotional fallout from the event weighs just as heavily on Connolly. “You don’t even know what to say to the victims,” he says. “If I was anybody else but a bomb tech, it would be a lot easier to go up and say, ‘We’re with you. We’re behind you.’”

“We’re supposed to stop an attack,” Cardinal says.

“Exactly,” Connolly says. “Recently I was working a Bruins game in the handicapped area, and the girl, the dancer who lost her foot, she was in front, and she was in good spirits,” he says. “She was having a Sam Adams, she was talking and laughing, and I just couldn’t bring myself to walk up and say anything to her. She sees this on your shirt, Boston police bomb squad. ‘Where were you?’

Is that what she’s thinking? Maybe. I’m afraid that’s what she’s thinking.”

“The one time I need you, you weren’t there,” Cardinal says, and then both men go quiet.

[MIKA27]

‘Spy Rocks’ Could Be the Military’s New Secret Weapon

Warfare technology has come a long way since the days of throwing stones, but that won’t keep the military from incorporating rocks into their arsenal of weapons.

This week at the annual AUSA Army meeting in Washington, D.C., Lockheed Martin showcased developments in their surveillance technology called SPAN (Self-Powered Ad-hoc Network), a “covert, perpetually self-powered wireless sensor network” that can provide “unobtrusive, continuous surveillance” in units so small they can fit in a rock.

SPAN is a mesh network of self-organizing sensors that, when triggered, can cue a camera or an unmanned aerial vehicle to further study an area, or summon an engineer when a pipeline or bridge structure is in danger or fractured. It uses proprietary algorithms to reduce false alarms.

Lockheed touts the “field-and-forget” technology as providing maximum coverage at minimal costs, claiming that the sensors can remain in the field for years at a time without maintenance, powered by solar technology.

The defense contractor is hoping to sell its spy rocks for surveillance, border protection, pipeline monitoring and bridge security, among other things.

The SPAN system was originally introduced last year, but this isn’t the company’s first attempt at making smart rocks.

Earlier this year, a former Lockheed Martin subcontractor made headlines for attempting to sell on eBay for $10 million an early 2000s prototype of the surveillance rock before Lockheed pulled the plug on the project. Included in the package were hundreds of pages of detailed development instructions, two years of emails with Lockheed and some hardware — but no rock.

“Selling this collection of information is an attempt at recouping all or a portion of my investment of time, effort, personal monies, and sweat equity,” Gregory Perry told Mother Jones. The auction ended with no bids.

And although Lockheed claims that SPAN’s inconspicuous sensors “reduce the likelihood of discovery and tampering,” it’s a safe bet that British intelligence didn’t think a rock would be the cause of a diplomatic row.

Last year, Tony Blair’s former chief of staff, Jonathan Powell, admitted that British secret service agency MI6 had planted a spy rock in a Moscow park to communicate with secret agents in 2006 (as depicted below by Taiwanese animators). Powell said that the “embarrassing” discovery by Russian officials caused a severe diplomatic strain between the two countries, despite the UK’s best efforts to laugh off the accusations as absurd Russian propaganda.

[MIKA27]

SHARD KEYCHAIN | BY GERBER

The Shard keychain tool by Gerber is perhaps the most simply designed and versatile tool on the planet. The lightweight, compact, airline-safe tool has seven useful functions: small flat driver, medium flat driver, cross driver, pry bar, wire stripper, lanyard hole, and bottle opener. The Shard is made of stainless steel with a titanium coating, and it measures 2.75 inches.

You can get it in Europe here

[MIKA27]

Sylvester Stallone artwork on show in Russia

A collection of paintings by Hollywood action star Sylvester Stallone have gone on show at The Russian Museum in St Petersburg.

The exhibition, titled: Sylvester Stallone. Art. 1975-2013, is a selection of works produced by the 67-year-old over the past four decades.

At the show's opening the star said, if he had the choice, he would spend his life drawing instead of acting.

"I think I'm a much better painter than an actor," he said.

"It's much more personal and I'm allowed to just do what I want to do. Quite often in acting you have to play a certain part, you cannot speak as much as you want to speak. I suppose the heroes don't talk much, you have to be very stoic."

Oscar-nominated Stallone studied art before his film career took off and has also had shows in Switzerland and Miami.

The show's opening attracted about 1,000 visitors who lined up to view the paintings

Sylvester Stallone told journalists: 'I hope you will like my pictures'

The actor said he never expected his works would be shown at the museum

'Real artist'

The museum's website described Stallone's works as "comments on the events in his creative and personal life" that focused on the use of bright colours.

Museum director Vladimir Gusev said Stallone's paintings "show the character of a passionate man" and were not simply "the work of an amateur".

"This is a real artist," he told journalists. "The Russian museum does not show weak artists."

However the state museum - which is heavily focused on Russian art - has received criticism for exhibiting works by the star.

"If my visit is a challenge for somebody, let it be so," Stallone said when asked what he thought of the critics who thought showing his artwork was a travesty.

Curators defended the exhibition, arguing the show was on display at one of its branches of the museum - which boasts a modern art collection including works by Western artists like Andy Warhol - rather than its main building.

Stallone's artworks will be on display for a month.

[MIKA27]

Doner kebab 'inventor' Kadir Nurman dies in Berlin

The Turkish immigrant credited with inventing the doner kebab has died in Berlin aged 80.

Kadir Nurman set up a stall in West Berlin in 1972, selling grilled meat and salad inside a flat bread.

He had noticed the fast pace of city life and thought busy Berliners might like a meal they could carry with them.

While there are other possible "doner inventors," Mr Nurman's contribution was recognised by the Association of Turkish Doner Manufacturers in 2011.

The combination of juicy meat, sliced from a rotating skewer, with all the trimmings and optional chilli sauce, has since become a firm fast-food favourite in Germany, and elsewhere.

According to the Berlin-based Association of Turkish Doner Manufacturers in Europe, there are now 16,000 doner outlets in Germany.

More than 1,000 exist in Berlin to tempt peckish late-night revellers on the capital's streets.

German companies producing the meat and the machinery for grilling supply 80% of the EU market, the BBC's Steve Evans reports from Berlin.

Mr Nurman, who emigrated to Germany in 1960, did not patent his invention, and thus did not particularly profit from the doner's subsequent success.

But in a 2011 interview with the Frankfurter Rundschau, he expressed little bitterness.

He was happy that so many Turkish people were able to make a living from doners, he said, and that millions of people ate them.

[MIKA27]

Incredible Lost World Discovered With Never-Before-Seen Species In Australia

For the past few millennia, the dewy rainforests of Australia’s Cape Melville have remained totally isolated from human interference.

That is, until a team of scientists from James Cook University took humanity’s first steps into a land untouched by time. What they found there was almost beyond belief.

Calling the unprecedented discovery a “lost world”, the scientists were only able to reach the roughly 5sqkm patch of land by helicopter thanks to the “monstrous wall” of “millions of giant, piled up boulders the size of houses and cars”. And if that’s not enough of a challenge for you, this impassable monument to nature’s prehistoric processes extends for a grand total of nine miles.

How, then, did Dr Conrad Hoskin, one of the leaders of the expedition, find this discovery of a lifetime? The same way we find anything these days: Google.

Dr Hoskin had known about the range for more than a decade, but the seemingly insurmountable obstacles to reaching it had limited scientists to doing research in the range’s lowlands. With the advent of Google Earth, though, and its revelation of the lush tiny patch of green atop piles of monstrous black granite boulders, he was inspired to take a second look. But no satellite imagery could prepare him for what he was about to see.

The Lost World

The second the team of NatGeo-funded scientists stepped of their helicopter, they quickly realised they were stepping down into a land actually frozen in time, the kind of stuff we’ve only ever been able to see in movies. The “incredible rainforest”, “good earth” and “clear, flowing streams” weren’t even the exciting part. The truly amazing part were the incredible creatures that had been “isolated from their closest cousins for millions of years.” As Dr. Hoskin told The Telegraph:

We’re talking about animals that are ancient — they would have been around in the rainforest of Gondwana… rainforest that’s been there for all time. I was just walking around along the ridge line and there was this small lizard, a skink, that was something completely new.

Modern skinks generally scurry around in beds of leaves, keeping close to the ground where its safest for them. This evolutionary ancestor jumps from damp, mossy boulder to mossy boulder on its hunt for insects.

The second groundbreaking discovery was something that Dr Hoskin had spotted transiently before but hadn’t been able to identify until now — a “beautifully blotched frog with orange in [its] legs.”

Hoskins dubbed the incredible new amphibian the Blotched Boulder-frog for obvious reasons, and one of the most interesting things about this creature compared to its more evolved cousins is the fact that it doesn’t need a pond to reproduce. This frog species needs only the moist cracks of the rocks that make up its home to lay eggs. Because there’s no protective body of water, the tadpoles develop into fully formed froglets before they even start hatching.

But the biggest moment of the brief trip didn’t come until sunset.

And then, coming back by night, we saw an incredible leaf-tailed gecko. This thing was mind-blowing, completely bizarre. It’s really big, around eight inches with long spindly legs and huge eyes.

That this gecko was hidden away in a small patch of rainforest on top of Cape Melville is truly remarkable. What makes it even more remarkable is that two other totally new vertebrates were found at the same time.

Even Patrick Couper, the Curator of Reptiles and Frogs at the Queensland Museum and a collaborator on the gecko’s description, called what’s now been dubbed the Cape Melville Leaf-tailed Gecko the “strangest new species to come across my desk in 26 years working as a professional herpetologist.”

According to Dr Hoskin, the unusually long legs of the gecko allow it to move quickly through such an uncommonly rocky landscape, and its big, bulging eyes allow it to better navigate between the boulders’ deep, dark crevices.

What Lies Ahead?

And the really exciting part? We’ve only just begun uncovering this spectacularly unknown land. As Dr Hoskin told The Telegraph, they’ve only documented about a tenth of the area, and many more new species “including, perhaps, birds mammals, plants, and more invertebrates” could be just on the horizon.

And though this isn’t the first time we’ve uncovered a part of Earth untouched by the passage of time, Dr Hoskin believes that if anything’s likely to “harbor something amazing,” it’s going to be right there in that incredible patch of green atop a rocky throne.

So to anyone still holding out dreams for a real-life Jurassic Park, give thanks to Google Earth. Because this is likely as close as we’re ever going to get.

[MIKA27]

Self-Filling Petrol Station Pumps: Welcome To The Lazy Future

The full-service pump at your local petrol station is always a tempting option, particularly on cold mornings. But what if every pump was automatic? Husky and a company called Fuelmatics are developing robotic gas pumps that automatically fill your vehicle when you pull up. What a wonderful world.

At the moment the system requires a vehicle with a capless gas tank; it can’t handle unscrewing and not losing an old-school cap.

But more and more vehicles are coming standard with that option. After that, the pump carrying your selected type of fuel is inserted and your tank is automatically filled, while a vacuum shut-off system minimises any spillage.

Besides saving the driver from having to leave their vehicle or have awkward small talk with an attendant, the self-filling system is also claimed to reduce pump times by up to 30 per cent, which should help reduce lineups. So that settles the ease of pumping fuel; now if only someone would take care of the price.

[MIKA27]

Watch This Never-Before-Seen Star WarsBlooper Reel While You Still Can

http://youtu.be/OgLl0_mqLtc

Star Wars fans at San Diego Comic Con this summer were treated to a rare, delightful thing: a two-and-a-half minute composite video of never-before-seen bloopers from the original trilogy, discovered by Lucasfilm editor and author J.W Rinzler while digging through the films’ archives for a new making-of collection. So of course, it was only a matter of time before someone posted it to Reddit.

Uploaded last night, the reel is partially muted, but if we’re being honest, the stuff that’s soundless (the first 0:48, in particular) is actually way funnier than Harrison Ford eating his headset, in a hyper-surrealist sort of way. Now let’s just pray that the Lucasfilm gods let this YouTube clip live.

[MIKA27]

New Instant-Fix Fabric Is 100x Stronger Than Duct Tape

It’s joked that duct tape can be used to fix almost anything. But a new product called FiberFix might very well be the only tool you’ll ever need for emergency repairs. And the secret is its special resin adhesive that hardens stronger than steel as it cures.

Unlike duct tape, which is just a peel and stick affair, you first need to soak the FiberFix material in water to activate it, and then wring out the excess liquid. From there you’ve only got about 10 minutes to apply the material before it begins to set and harden like steel. And while it takes about 24 hours to completely dry and harden, it’s ready for emergency use within minutes of being applied.

It is more expensive than duct tape though. Just 102cm of 2.5cm wide FiberFix will cost you $US6, and it’s available in wider and more expensive lengths too. But the real catch is that while it’s non-toxic, you’ll want to avoid getting that resin on your skin or clothes, because it’s not coming off easily. So for kidnappings and hostage situations, duct tape is definitely still the way to go.

[MIKA27]

X-Men: Days Of Future Past Has A Gripping First Trailer

“Please. We need you to hope again…”

X-Men: Days Of Future Past finally has a full-length first trailer that sees worlds collide as Wolverine is sent back in time to stop a war before it begins.

Everyone’s here to fight the fight for mutant-kind, too: Michael Fassbender, James McAvoy and Jennifer Lawrence are all back reprising their roles from X-Men: First Class as young Magneto, Xavier and Mystique. Sir Ian McKellen and Patrick Stewart are back also reprising the older Magneto and Xavier parts. Anna Paquin is back as Rogue and Ellen Page is kicking about playing Kitty Pryde.

Comic spoilers beyond this point!

The Days Of Future Past arc in the Uncanny X-Men universe centres around a dystopian future where mutants are held prisoner in internment camps, before Kitty Pryde has her mind transferred into her younger body to compel the X-Men of the past to intervene in a moment in history to stop the horrible future from happening. In the film version, however, it looks like Wolverine is being sent back.

The Sentinels are going to play a much bigger role in this film than their brief appearance in X-Men: The Last Stand.

Great to see Bryan Singer back at his mutant-directing best!

Also, can we put a moratorium on trailers lazily using the climactic theme from Sunshine? That’d be great.

Days Of Future Past lands on May 23 next year.

[MIKA27]

Scientists Smash Li-Fi Data Record, Achieve 10Gbit/s Speeds

If the hype is to believed, Li-Fi could be the next Wi-Fi. If that’s the case, then we’re excited — because a team of researchers has just smashed the record for visible light data transmission, pushing it to a staggering 10Gbit/s.

A team of researchers from the universities of Edinburgh, St Andrews, Strathclyde, Oxford and Cambridge, all in the UK, have used a micro-LED light bulb to transmit 3.5Gbit/s across each of the three primary colours, red, green and blue. Add that up and it means that they can transfer 10Gbit/s across the three channels.

The LED bulbs, developed at the University of Strathclyde, allow streams of light to be beamed in parallel,reports the BBC. Each beam carries a separate data stream, each one encoded using digital modulation —Orthogonal Frequency Divisional Multiplexing for the true nerds — to produce millions of changes in light intensity per second. It’s like hitting the on-off switch very, very fast to transfer binary data.

And, clearly, it works. In fact it beats the 150mbps boasted by the recent Chinese Li-Fi initiative, and even the record of 1Gbit/s previously held by Germany’s Fraunhofer Heinrich Hertz Institute. Of course, how useful Li-Fi will ever be is up for debate: it’s fast and cheap, sure, but walls are not its friend. Still, it’s super-cool that the technology is developing at such a rapid pace.

[MIKA27]

US Cops Test GPS Bullets To Track Cars They're Chasing

http://youtu.be/qXCi_na80wQ

It sounds like something straight out of Batman or James Bond’s arsenal, but police officers in St Petersburg, Florida, are testing a vehicle-based cannon that fires GPS tracking devices at cars. The idea is that instead of continuing a dangerous high-speed pursuit, they’d just tag a vehicle they’re chasing and then track its location from a safe distance.

The system, known as Starchase, features an air cannon mounted to the front grill of a police car that fires GPS tracking units covered in a soft adhesive substance so they immediately stick to their target. Once a pursued vehicle has been tagged, the police can stop their high-speed chase and fall back to a safe distance without losing tabs on the car. It also means the driver being pursued will slow down if they think they’ve lost the police.

All around it’s a safer alternative to car chases, even if initially it requires a police car to get close enough to a suspect to target them for tracking. And while it does mean there’s a greater chance of the vehicle in question being ditched and the driver escaping on foot, if it help prevents even a single deadly accident there’s no reason every police department shouldn’t consider this technology.

[MIKA27]

A Lifejacket That Stops You From Drowning And Freezing

Being in a plane or boat that goes down in the ocean is a terrifying image that no one really ever wants to think about. But thankfully Kieran Normoyle, a final year design student, has given it some thought — lots of thought, actually — and he’s come up with a better inflatable life jacket design that protects against shock and hypothermia from freezing temperatures.

His creation is known as Hydros and is actually more of a life jacket system made up of three different components. At its core is a t-shirt featuring manually activated gel heat packs over the heart, carotid arteries, jugular veins, and other vital areas that help keep the wearer’s blood warm as it’s pumped towards the brain. The heat packs can maintain a temperature of 60C for up to eight hours, helping to fend off the effects of hypothermia.

Further protecting the wearer against frigid ocean temperatures is a waterproof jacket that works like a wet suit to trap body heat and provide extra insulation. And finally the Hydros of course includes a zip-up inflatable life vest with an innovative offset design that serves to keep the wearer face up — and can even automatically flip someone over to help prevent secondary drowning where liquid in the lungs can be fatal.

The catch, of course, is that the Hyrdos seems better suited to disaster situations where passengers and crew have enough time to properly put the life jacket system on. It’s all but impossible for it to be used in the event of a plane crash at sea, but for cruise ships or shipping vessels this could without a doubt help save lives in the event of a disaster.

[MIKA27]

LAMPOCICLO ELECTRIC BICYCLES

Lampociclo builds beautiful electric bikes inspired by 1920s motorcycles.

The Italian manufacturer combines the latest technology with styling cues of the timeless retro motorbikes design. Each Lampociclo bike is handcrafted and custom built in Verona, you can choose from different gearbox, saddle, grips, wheels and handlebar options, as well as add accessories like baskets and racks, and choose the frame size and colors.

The bikes are equipped with up-to-date e-bike technology, the standard engine is a 250-watt, 3-speed system model, providing speeds up to 15.5 mph (25 km/h) and enough battery power for 43 miles (70 km) of range. Larger 350- and 500-watt options are also available

[MIKA27]

BAY OF MANY COVES | NEW ZEALAND

Bay of Many Coves is a 5-star luxury resort in New Zealand’s spectacular Marlborough Sounds.

If you enjoy adventure but also want to relax, this is the perfect place, secluded in a pristine natural environment. The Marlborough Sounds is an adventurer’s paradise, you can enjoy several activities such as swimming with dolphins, kayaking, fishing trips, bird watching, trekking, mountain biking, and many more new things you’ve always dreamed of doing. When back at the resort, you can enjoy 5-star dining and soak in the cedar hot tub or heated outdoor pool whilst admiring the breathtaking natural environment.

[MIKA27]

America's Newest And Deadliest Destroyer Has Finally Set Sail

Reports of the USS Zumwalt‘s christening being delayed until next spring have been greatly exaggerated. In a surprise move, the US Navy instead launched the next-generation destroyer from its berth in Bath, Maine early this morning.

“This is the largest ship Bath Iron Works has ever constructed and the Navy’s largest destroyer. The launch was unprecedented in both its size and complexity,” said Capt. Jim Downey, the Zumwalt-class program manager for the Navy’s Program Executive Office, Ships in a press release disseminated this morning. “Due to meticulous planning and execution, the operation went very smoothly. I’m extremely pleased with the results and applaud the combined efforts of the Navy-industry team.”

The ship is expected to reach operational capacity — that is, acquire a full crew compliment, teach them the ins and outs of the vessel, and prepare them for combat operations — by early 2016.

And given that the Zumwalt can produce power on the magnitude of 78 MW, there’s a solid chance that this littoral Destroyer could also play test bed to the Navy’s top secret railgun prototype system — capable of firing a projectile at seven times the speed of sound — which has been undergoing feverish development over the past few years.

[MIKA27]

How To Destroy Annoying Kids At Birthday Parties

Some kids are complete bastards. This is something every parent can agree on (just not about their own. ) And yet, social etiquette often requires you to invite these mischief-making terrors to your own child’s birthday party. Here’s a simple pass-the-parcel hack that will destroy their very soul…

In today’s mollycoddling PC climate, most games of pass-the-parcel involve placing a small gift behind each and every wrapping. This is a bad idea for several reasons. Firstly, it eliminates suspense from the game and any element of chance. Secondly, it forces you to buy ten to 20 crappy trinkets that the kids don’t want anyway. And finally, it causes each kid to get distracted and stop playing the moment they’ve unwrapped their own prize.

Back in the early 1980s, the unfurling of each layer acted as a nail-biting countdown to a single, ultimate treasure. Only one child would reign triumphant. There could be no second prize. It was a harsh but ultimately more fulfilling time and children grew up all the better for it.

We think parents should return to the single prize tradition, but with a significant twist — keep the final box completely empty, and rig the music so it lands on a kid you hate.

This way, instead of one happy kid and a bunch of disappointed ones, you’ll have the reverse! As an added bonus, the kid left holding the empty box will deserve everything he gets. That’ll teach you to mess with my limited-edition video games, buster!

Honestly, it’s a wonder I haven’t been nominated for parent of the year or something.

[MIKA27]

Step Inside An American Psychiatric Unit For The Mentally Ill

The confronting work of photographer Jenn Ackerman shines a light on the conditions and realities for some of societies most marginalised and forgotten individuals – America’s mentally ill.

In her alarming and powerful photographic series ‘Trapped’ she was given unique access to document the inner workings of the Correctional Psychiatric Treatment Unit of the Kentucky State Reformatory. Her gritty black and white images portray an institution that is filled with as much sadness as it is misdirected anger and total chaos.

As funding for health facilities has decreased to record lows, individuals who suffer from severe mental illness have been placed in State penitentiaries – the only places safe enough to keep them from harming themselves or the public. But in terms of helping treat their condition or reforming them, these institutions fall well short. Clinical studies have revealed that prolonged isolation actually exacerbates mental illness – that’s a troubling statistic when some detainees are held in a cell for 23hrs at a time.

See more harrowing images from the project via Ackerman’s official site

Reality has never been so bleak for so many.

[MIKA27]

Meet The Man Who Lives Without Any Form Of Money

Mark Boyle was once just like you and me. He had a bank account, lived in a house, had access to electricity, clean water and a virtually continuous supply of food.

But one day, after watching the movie Gandhi and hearing the inspirational line “Be the change you want to see in the world” – he did just that, totally altering his impact on the planet along with his entire lifestyle.

Today the Irishman lives without any form of money (despite once having a substantial amount), this his is candid account of his new lease on life:

If someone told me seven years ago, in my final year of a business and economics degree, that I’d now be living without money, I’d have probably choked on my microwaved ready meal. The plan back then was to get a ‘good’ job, make as much money as possible, and buy the stuff that would show society I was successful.

For a while I did it – I had a fantastic job managing a big organic food company; had myself a yacht on the harbour. If it hadn’t been for the chance purchase of a video called Gandhi, I’d still be doing it today. Instead, for the last fifteen months, I haven’t spent or received a single penny. Zilch.

The change in life path came one evening on the yacht whilst philosophising with a friend over a glass of merlot. Whilst I had been significantly influenced by the Mahatma’s quote “be the change you want to see in the world”, I had no idea what that change was up until then. We began talking about all major issues in the world – environmental destruction, resource wars, factory farms, sweatshop labour – and wondering which of these we would be best devoting our time to. Not that we felt we could make any difference, being two small drops in a highly polluted ocean.

But that evening I had a realisation. These issues weren’t as unrelated as I had previously thought – they had a common root cause. I believe the fact that we no longer see the direct repercussions our purchases have on the people, environment and animals they affect is the factor that unites these problems.

The degrees of separation between the consumer and the consumed have increased so much that it now means we’re completely unaware of the levels of destruction and suffering embodied in the ‘stuff’ we buy.

Very few people actually want to cause suffering to others; most just don’t have any idea that they directly are. The tool that has enabled this separation is money, especially in its globalised format.

Take this for an example: if we grew our own food, we wouldn’t waste a third of it as we do today.

If we made our own tables and chairs, we wouldn’t throw them out the moment we changed the interior décor.

If we had to clean our own drinking water, we probably wouldn’t **** in it.

So to be the change I wanted to see in the world, it unfortunately meant I was going to have to give up money, which I decided to do for a year initially. So I made a list of the basics I’d need to survive. I adore food, so it was at the top.

There are four legs to the food-for-free table: foraging wild food, growing your own, bartering and using waste grub, of which there far too much.

On my first day I fed 150 people a three course meal with waste and foraged food. Most of the year I ate my own crops though and waste only made up about five per cent my diet. I cooked outside – rain or shine – on a rocket stove.

Next up was shelter. So I got myself a caravan from Freecycle, parked it on an organic farm I was volunteering with, and kitted it out to be off the electricity grid. I’d use wood I either coppiced or scavenged to heat my humble abode in a wood burner made from an old gas bottle, and I had a compost loo to make ‘humanure’ for my veggies.

I bathed in a river, and for toothpaste I used washed up cuttlefish bone with wild fennel seeds, an oddity for a vegan.

For loo roll I’d relieve the local newsagents of its papers (I once wiped my arse with a story about myself); it wasn’t double quilted but it quickly became normal. To get around I had a bike and trailer, and the 55 km commute to the city doubled up as my gym subscription. For lighting I’d use beeswax candles.

Many people label me an anti-capitalist. Whilst I do believe capitalism is fundamentally flawed, requiring infinite growth on a finite planet, I am not anti anything. I am pro-nature, pro-community and pro-happiness. And that’s the thing I don’t get – if all this consumerism and environmental destruction brought happiness, it would make some sense. But all the key indicators of unhappiness – depression, crime, mental illness, obesity, suicide and so on are on the increase. More money it seems, does not equate to more happiness.

Ironically, I have found this year to be the happiest of my life. I’ve more friends in my community than ever, I haven’t been ill since I began, and I’ve never been fitter. I’ve found that friendship, not money, is real security. That most western poverty is spiritual. And that independence is really interdependence.

Could we all live like this tomorrow? No. It would be a catastrophe, we are too addicted to both it and cheap energy, and have managed to build an entire global infrastructure around the abundance of both. But if we devolved decision making and re-localised down to communities of no larger than 150 people, then why not? For over 90 per cent of our time on this planet, a period when we lived much more ecologically, we lived without money. Now we are the only species to use it, probably because we are the species most out of touch with nature.

People now often ask me what is missing compared to my old world of lucre and business. Stress. Traffic-jams. Bank statements. Utility bills. Oh yeah, and the odd pint of organic ale with my mates down the local.

Will Mark’s words inspire you to do the same?

[MIKA27]

Awe-inspiring Invention Could Clean World’s Oceans In 5 years

Every year we produce over 300 million tonnes of plastic. Of this, over 7.25 million tonnes of it ends up in our oceans in the form of top-level floating debris – that’s 4.8 million medium-sized cars or 51 billion iPods floating around the ocean. This plastic breaks down into smaller pieces each year, poisoning the food chain and ultimately affecting the food we eat.

The most disturbing culmination of this waste is known as the “Trash Vortex” of the North Pacific Ocean – last measured, it was the size of TEXAS. And this is only 1 of 5 giant vortexes around the globe. It’s some scary, overwhelming stuff.

Enter Boyan Slat, a charismatic 19 year old visionary with a passion for our oceans’ health and sustainability. Awarded the Best Technical Design at the Delft University of Technology, Boyan’s invention could see the worlds oceans cleaned up significantly within 5 years (a dramatic reduction on the originally estimated 79,000 years).

Titled The Ocean Cleanup Project , Boyan’s vision includes a manta ray shaped machine that acts as a giant sieve, sifting through the oceans debris – a device so advanced, it is able to separate plastic particles from plankton.

And in case you were wondering, he’s got the environmental, transportation and financial costs covered – powered by the sun and sea currents, The Ocean Cleanup project only requires 24 platforms to clean the entire ocean. The collected plastic could then be recycled and sold for over US $500 million, outweighing project costs and making it a profitable venture.

Even though it’s in the preliminary stage of research, Boyan’s team of around 50 engineers, modellers, students and external experts are making good progress and expect to have a final concept and feasible solution by the end of 2014.

[MIKA27]

The La Brea Tar Pits Remind Us That Los Angeles Is An Ancient City

Conventional wisdom designates Los Angeles as a young, capricious metropolis — an underage drinker in the geopolitical nightclub — but it’s simply not true. Los Angeles is actually an ancient city, and the proof is bubbling right up to the surface at the La Brea Tar Pits, one of the richest paleontological sites in the world and the only one being actively excavated in an urban setting.

When the Spanish arrived in the 1700s, settlers quickly discovered the region’s sticky, smelly pools of asphaltum and named the area Rancho La Brea after the Spanish word for tar. In 1769, Spanish missionary Father Juan Crespi decided there must be volcanoes in the area. As he wrote in his journal:

This afternoon we felt new earthquakes, the continuation of which astonishes us. We judge that in the mountains that run to the west in front of us there are some volcanoes, for there are many signs on the road which stretches between the Porciuncula River and the Spring of the Alders, for the explorers saw some large marshes of a certain substance like pitch; they were boiling and bubbling, and the pitch came out mixed with an abundance of water. They noticed that the water runs to one side and the pitch to the other, and that there is such an abundance of it that it would serve to caulk many ships.

In the 1870s, the area was acquired by Henry Hancock for the Union Oil Company due to its resource-rich land (remember, this was when LA was dotted with oil derricks). Union Oil’s exploration geologists began to discover a number of bones and carcasses preserved in the tar.

In 1913, Hancock allowed the fledgling Los Angeles County Museum to begin excavating the site, and, this week, LA’s Natural History Museum is celebrating 100 years of paleontological discoveries at the La Brea Tar Pits.

During the past century, over 5.5 million fossils have been found in the asphalt sludge — including saber-toothed tigers, camels, mammoths, dire wolves and mastodons — all preserved during the vast span of the Ice Age, 40,000 to 10,000 years ago.

There’s also evidence of human remains discovered at the site: a twentysomething female who lived 10,000 years ago was named La Brea Woman. Fossilised remains of her dog — a domesticated cross between a fox and a terrier — were also found nearby. And discoveries are still being made right in the middle of the city, just off one of LA’s busiest streets, Wilshire Boulevard, only a few blocks from a Rite-Aid pharmacy and catty-corner to the offices of the Hollywood Reporter.

Not only is LA a city where the Pleistocene Epoch collides with the present day along a major thoroughfare, but the tar pits also prove LA was a hotbed of ancient innovation. The earliest residents used the pitch to seal their roofs, waterproof their boats and fuel their campfires. The presence of these deposits helped local tribes like the Chumash and Tongva, to design and build incredibly efficient boats.

Using these boats, the Chumash and Tongva were able to fish and collect resources that bolstered their trading power, and allowed them to explore the California coast and escape Spanish predators. In their large villages, the concept of specialised labour was introduced to produce the boats. The tar may have also introduced adverse health problems, possibly shrinking their heads.

The official start of excavation at the La Brea Tar Pits has actually been disputed by local historian Nathan Masters, and rightly so. Masters claims that John C. Merriman made the first excavations in 1906, after being tipped to the deposits by geologist William Orcutt when he found a fossilized ground sloth there in 1901. And it’s likely that the Chumash and Tongva people also made their own fossil discoveries in the pits.

Incidentally, the rights for the former Los Angeles County Museum to excavate the site 100 years ago have now become fraught with controversy. The expansion plans for the museum, now named LACMA, have come under fire recently because the Peter Zumthor-designed proposal — which references the tar pits — has been deemed potentially destructive to the sensitive site.

As recently as 2009, when unearthing a new parking garage for LACMA, a new site named Project 23 yielded so many fossils that they will likely double the museum’s collection, including a nearly intact mammoth.

[MIKA27]

Five Ancient Cannons Rescued From Blackbeard's Sunken Ship

Looking like something straight off Davy Jones’s ship in the Pirates of the Caribbean, five cannons saw air for the very first time in almost 300 years yesterday as they were lifted from what’s believed to be legendary pirate Blackbeard’s sunken ship.

The capsized vessel in question, Queen Anne’s Revenge, is recorded to have gone down as early as July 12, 1718, but it wasn’t until 1996 that archaeologists were actually able to locate it along the ocean floor. And though we’ve been bringing up tens of thousands of rotten, mouldy and totally awesome pirate artefacts from the wreck for years, today’s haul is the largest cannon cache yet.

Prior to yesterday’s haul, project director Billy Ray Morris released the following statement about the coming expedition:

We think the largest of the four cannons may be of Swedish origin since the only other recovered gun this size was made in Sweden. We also hope to recover two large concretions each the size of a twin bed. They may contain barrel hoops, cannon balls and other treasures.

And just how big might that single Swedish one be? No less than a whopping 1360kg of cast-iron capable of sending 3kg cannonballs soaring around 3km. The remaining four cannons weighed in at a (relatively) measly 900kg each. And this is only a quarter of the total haul, which now adds up to 20 recovered cannons in all.

As PopSci notes, this impressive mess of firepower is what allowed Blackbeard to blockade the port at Charleston, South Carolina, for nearly a week before his baby sank for good in 1718. Just six months later, now without his precious Queen Anne’s Revenge, a tag-team attack by the colonies of North Carolina and Virginia was finally able to do Blackbeard in for good. Three-hundred years later, though, his legacy still lives on, and you can even check out this awesome interactive map of the shipwreck created by a North Carolina museum dedicated to the legend itself.

[MIKA27]

Annabelle: The True Story of a Demonic Doll

The smash hit motion picture “The Conjuring” — based on the harrowing story of the Perron family’s encounter with an evil entity and how they were saved by controversial demonologists, Ed and Lorraine Warren — has earned tens of millions of dollars and spawned as many nightmares worldwide. But while the core story of possession and witchcraft may have propelled the plot forward, it is the allegedly true story of a demonic doll named Annabelle that has left a lingering shadow on the memories of moviegoers across the globe; transforming this arguably inanimate (and ostensibly cursed) object into a surprise pop-culture phenomenon.

Let me be frank right from the outset: “I hate dolls.” Always have.

It started with a dotty old great-aunt, who (of course) lived in a dusty, labyrinthine manor full of long corridors, peeling wallpaper, the lingering scent of mothballs and rooms that all seemed to have at least one porcelain doll with a cracked face that leered menacingly down at me from whatever perch it had made home.

As my beard began to transform from random Klingon-like patches into a cohesive whole and my school days drifted farther and farther into my past, I began to dismiss those childhood fears. I convinced myself that fearing inanimate objects was foolish, but I still harbored an intuitive distaste for dolls; especially old ones.

While looking for curios in old thrift stores and junk shops, I would always grow uneasy when I would catch a figurine or (God forbid) a marionette unmistakably staring at me with its glassy, dead eyes and a bio-electric chill would ripple up my neck. Oh, I’d act cool (especially if I was with my girlfriend) and chuckle and tell myself that it was all in my head, but a part of me knew better… and that’s how I knew, when I hunkered down to watch the aforementioned film, “The Conjuring”, that I had been right all along.

The Original Devil Doll

Like all cinematic depictions of purportedly factual stories, the filmmakers responsible for “The Conjuring” have taken some liberties with the source material. The bizarre case of Annabelle is no exception, as the pig tailed, rosy cheeked, ghastly apparition from the movie was, in actuality, a run of the mill Raggedy Ann doll.

Now, for the seven of you out there who might not know what that is, Raggedy Ann is an adorable rag doll with a triangle nose and a mop of red yarn for hair. The character was created by writer (and marketing genius) Johnny Gruelle when his daughter brought him an old doll and he drew a face on it. Gruelle would go on to feature the character in a series of children’s books he wrote and, following the tragic death of his daughter, as the symbol for a virulent anti-vaccination campaign. On September 7, 1915, he received a U.S. Patent for his Raggedy Ann doll and with it a toy legend was born.

The Birthday Gift

The particular doll in question, the one which would serve as the inspiration for James Wan’s disturbing plaything in “The Conjuring”, was first purchased in an antique shop in 1970, by a woman looking for a unique birthday present for her daughter, Donna.

The woman, who’s name (much like the ark from “Raiders”) has evidently been lost somewhere in the annals of paranormal research, must have concluded that the antiquated, child-sized rag doll would be the perfect gift for her daughter who was just about to graduate from nursing school. Apparently she was correct in her assumption and, even though Donna was not known to be a collector of dolls, she happily brought the object into to the apartment that she shared with another nursing student, Angie. Once there the Raggedy Ann doll was tossed on the bed and promptly forgotten about… for the first few days anyway.

At initial the signs that something was amiss were subtle. From time to time, Donna would notice that the toy seemed to have changed position slightly, but simply attributed it to a jostling of the bed or something equally mundane. As the weeks passed, however, the doll’s erratic movements became more troubling and both Donna and Angie became genuinely alarmed when they returned home to find the rag doll standing upright and leaning against a chair in the dining room, as if it had frozen mid-step when it heard the door open.

It was then that Donna and Angie realized that there was something truly bizarre about the doll. Donna would later describe the unsettling situation to renowned paranormal investigators, Ed and Lorraine Warren. According to Donna:

“I put it on my bed each morning after the bed was made. The arms would be off to its sides and its legs would be straight out — just like it’s sitting there now. But when we’d come home at night, the arms and legs would be positioned in different gestures. For instance, its legs would be crossed at the ankles, or its arms would be folded in its lap. After a week or so, this made us suspicious. So to test it, I purposely crossed its arms and legs in the morning to see if it really was moving. And sure enough, every night when we’d come back home, the arms and legs would be uncrossed and the thing would be sitting there in any of a dozen different postures.”

At times Donna would leave the doll on the bed only to find that it had mysteriously migrated to the living room and was now sitting on the couch with its arms and legs crossed almost indignantly. In other instances, Donna would leave the doll on the couch only to return home to discover that it was now in her bedroom — with the door latched shut! Angie shed some more light on this odd increase in apparently paranormal activity:

“The doll also changed rooms by itself. We came home one night and the Annabelle doll was sitting in a chair by the front door. It was kneeling! The funny thing about it was, when we tried to make the doll kneel, it’d just fall over. It couldn’t kneel. Other times we’d find it sitting on the sofa, although when we left the apartment in the morning it’d be in Donna’s room with the door closed!”

Messages from Beyond

The girls, becoming more and more perturbed by this strange turn of events, decided to confide in a male friend that the Warrens’ chronicle only as “Lou”. Lou claimed that he realized that something about the doll was evil the moment he laid eyes on it. Donna and Angie, though made anxious by the toy’s clandestine mobility, were not prepared to believe that anything insidious was afoot.

That was when curious notes began to appear around the apartment. Donna and Angie both found strips of parchment paper upon which would be scrawled the words “HELP US” or “HELP LOU” in a conspicuously child-like fashion, although in the movie the filmmakers apparently decided that “MISS ME?” would be for unnerving. This startling development perplexed Donna:

“It would leave us little notes and messages. The handwriting looked to be that of a small child… Lou wasn’t in any kind of jeopardy at the time. And who ‘us’ was we didn’t know. Still, the thing that was weird was that the notes would be written in pencil, but when we tried to find one, there was not one pencil in the apartment! And the paper it wrote on was parchment. I tore the apartment apart, looking for parchment paper, but again neither of us had any such thing.”

Lou became convinced that these notes were from the doll, which was attempting to communicate with its human hosts. But the nurses, being women of science, began to wonder if someone they knew might not have come across a door key and decided to have some fun at their expense by playing an elaborate hoax on them.

To that end, Donna and Angie became amateur sleuths and began marking windows and arranging carpets against the doors to reveal if they had any intruders in their absence. Much to their chagrin their traps lay unmoved while the doll continued to have it’s run of the apartment.

Still, the roommates took solace from that fact that while they might have a “living doll” sharing their home, it seemed not to have any nefarious intentions. In fact, according to Donna, that Christmas the odd being even seemed to offer them a small present:

“Christmas, we found a little chocolate boot on the stereo that none of us had bought. Presumably it came from Annabelle.”

Sadly, the state of affairs with the entity living in their home would not remain harmonious for long. Angie recalled another seemingly supernatural occurrence in the apartment:

“One time a statue lifted up across the room, then it tumbled in the air and fell on the floor. None of us were near the statue; it was on the other side of the room. That incident frightened us totally.”

Things would only get worse from that moment on.

The Bleeding Doll

Less than two months after these bizarre events began, Donna and Angie returned home, weary after a long day of school.

Of course, neither of the women were particularly surprised to find that the doll had managed to make its way from the living room back into Donna’s bed, but this time Donna claimed that she suddenly was struck by a feeling that something was wrong and that the doll seemed to have a ominous aura about it.

Hesitantly, the women approached the doll and that was when they noticed that the inanimate object was oozing blood from its hands and chest. Angie described the scene:

“The Annabelle doll was sitting on Donna’s bed, as was usual. When we came home one night, there was blood on the back of its hand, and there were three drops of blood on its chest!”

Added Donna: “God, that really scared us!”

The now terrified roommates decided that they would have to seek the help of someone more experienced in paranormal activity than themselves. It was then that they decided to call in…

The Medium

Following the “bleeding doll” incident, the roommates resolved to find out just what it was that they were sharing their apartment with.

To that end, Donna and Angie decided to contact a medium in order to conjure up and communicate with whatever was inhabiting the doll.

The unidentified medium agreed to perform a séance in the nurses’ apartment. In Donna’s own words:

“So Angie and I got in touch with a woman who’s a medium. That was about a month, or maybe six weeks after all this stuff started to happen.”

The medium wasted no time in entering a trance and before long she was weaving a heartbreaking tale of a young girl named Annabelle Higgins, whose body was discovered in the field upon which their apartment complex had been constructed. According to Donna:

“We learned that a little girl died on this property, She was seven years-old and her name was Annabelle Higgins. The Annabelle spirit said she played in the fields long ago before these apartments were built. They were happy times for her. She told us.”

The medium was unable to ascertain the details of the girl’s death, but in telling Annabelle’s story, she had inadvertently tugged at the heartstrings of these compassionate, young women. Donna continued to detail Annabelle’s plight as heard through the medium:

“Because everyone around here was grown-up, and only concerned with their jobs, there was no one she (Annabelle) could relate to, except us. Annabelle felt that we would be able to understand her. That’s why she began moving the rag doll. All Annabelle wanted was to be loved, and so she asked if she could stay with us and move into the doll. What could we do? So we said yes.”

Angie would explain the logic behind their decision: “It seemed harmless enough. We’re nurses, you know, we see suffering every day. We had compassion. Anyway, we called the doll Annabelle from that time on.”

There is no way that these kind women could have imagined at the time just how terrible a mistake inviting this apparently innocent apparition to live inside the rag doll would prove to be.

The Nightmare Begins

As things between the newly christened Annabelle and her roommates seemed to be entering a new phase of détente, Lou maintained that he sensed something dangerous about the itinerant doll and admonished Donna to get rid of it.

She refused his request, feeling that getting rid of the doll would be the equivalent of abandoning a child. But even though Annabelle was not removed, it seems apparent that she was not pleased by Lou’s interference.

Lou understood that there was something fundamentally wrong with the doll, but was not prepared for the hellish encounter he would have when it followed him home. The Warrens related the experience Lou had not long after turning in for the night:

“Lou awoke one night from a deep sleep and in panic. Once again he had a reoccurring bad dream. Only this time somehow, something seemed different. It was as though he was awake but couldn’t move. He looked around the room but couldn’t discern anything out of the ordinary and then it happened. Looking down toward his feet he saw the doll, Annabelle.”

Lou continued to recount his petrifying experience:

“While I was lying there, I saw myself wake up. Something seemed wrong to me. I looked around the room, but nothing was out of place. But then when I looked down toward my feet, I saw the rag doll, Annabelle. It was slowly gliding up my body. It moved over my chest and stopped. Than it put its arms out. One arm touched one side of my neck, the other touched the other side like it was making an electrical connection. Then I saw myself being strangled. I might as well have been pushing on a wall, because it wouldn’t move. It was literally strangling me to death, I couldn’t help myself, no matter how hard I tried.”

The Warrens concluded the harrowing tale:

“Paralyzed and gasping for breath Lou, at the point of asphyxiation, blacked out. Lou awoke the next morning, certain it wasn’t a dream. Lou was determined to rid himself of that doll and the spirit that possessed it.”

Lou felt as if whatever was animating the doll was warning him to mind his own business, but out of concern for his friends, he refused to be deterred. It would be back at Donna and Angie’s apartment that Annabelle would strike again.

The following evening, while preparing for a road trip, Lou and Angie were alone, studying maps in in the living room just before 11 pm. Without warning, the pair heard an odd shuffling sound emanating from Donna’s room. Angie was concerned that someone might have broken into the apartment, but Lou feared that it might be something much worse.

Lou, summoning a courage that I’m not sure I could replicate, crept toward Donna’s bedroom door. He paused outside the entrance until the sounds abated, then eased the door open and anxiously flipped on the light switch.

The room was empty, save for Annabelle, which seemed to have been haphazardly thrown into the corner of the room. Lou entered the space and apprehensively approached the crumpled rag doll. It was then that he claimed to have felt a tingling sensation on the back of his neck, as if he was being watched from behind. Lou explained the feeling in an interview with the Warrens:

“But as I got close to the doll, I got the distinct impression that somebody was behind me. I swung around instantly and, well….”

At this point Angie interjected:

“He won’t talk about that part. When Lou turned around there wasn’t anybody there, but he suddenly yelled and grabbed for his chest. He was doubled over, cut and bleeding when I got to him. Blood was all over his shirt. Lou was shaking and scared and we went back out into the living room. We then opened his shirt and there on his chest was what looked to be a sort of claw mark!”

On his chest were seven slices. Four were horizontal and three vertical. Both the Warrens, Donna and Angie confirmed that the wounds existed, but unfortunately no one bothered to take any photographs. Oddly, the Marks (which Lou claimed burned horribly and actually radiated heat) were all but gone the next day and completely vanished a mere forty-eight hours later.

Enter the Warrens

Not sure where else to turn — and now realizing that they were dealing with something much worse than the benign spirit of a lonely child — the trio decided to contact a someone in the clergy. The first man they got a hold of was an Episcopalian priest named Father Hegan. Hegan went to the apartment and allowed the witnesses to explain their dire predicament.

Hegan understood the gravity of their situation, but felt that he was not qualified to deal with it himself, so he referred them to one of his superiors, Father Cooke. It would be Cooke who would contact the most experienced demonologists he knew of — the now legendary husband and wife team of Ed and Lorraine Warren, who were also part of the Amityville Horror investigation — and put them on the case.

The Warrens wasted no time in contacting the group and upon interviewing the three witnesses, Ed Warren (a devout Catholic as well as paranormal investigator) seemed astounded that these young adults were so quick to trust the words of the ghost as spoken through the medium. Ed Warren summed up the situation thusly during his interview with Donna, Angie and Lou:

”To begin with, there is no Annabelle! There never was. You were duped. However, we are dealing with a spirit here. The teleportation of the doll while you were out of the apartment, the appearance of notes written on parchment, the manifestation of three symbolic drops of blood, plus the gestures the doll made are all meaningful. They tell me there was intent, which means there was an intelligence behind the activity. But ghosts, human spirits, plain and simply can’t bring on phenomena of this nature and intensity. They don’t have the power.”

At about this point Lou interjected: “It’s a damn voodoo doll, that’s what it is… I told them about that thing a long time ago. The doll was just taking advantage of them.”

Nevertheless, Donna defended the position that she and Angie had previously assumed in protecting Annabelle:

“It was the spirit of Annabelle we cared about! How were we to know anything? But looking back on it now, maybe we shouldn’t have given the doll so much credence. But really, we saw the thing as being no more than a harmless mascot. It never hurt anything… at least until the other day.”

After completing the interview, inspecting the rag doll, checking Lou’s wounds and confirming that none of the eyewitnesses ever saw the specter of the child in the apartment, the Warrens came to the startling conclusion that it was not a ghost that they were dealing with, but an actual demon.

Even more chillingly, the Warrens postulated that the doll itself was not actually possessed by an evil entity, but that the doll was a conduit between the earthly realm and hell itself.

They also affirmed that the medium had been manipulated in order to gain the trust of the people in the apartment, leading to what they called an “infestation” of the home.

The Warrens further claimed that the “inhuman demonic spirit,“ had preyed upon the nursing students’ intrinsic compassion by pretending it was a lost child. According to Ed Warren:

“…what has happened is something inhuman has taken over here. Demonic. Ordinarily people aren’t bothered by inhuman demonic spirits, unless they do something to bring the force into their lives. Your first mistake was to give the doll recognition, that is the reason why the spirit moved into the doll to draw attention to itself. Once it had your attention, it exploited you, it simply brought you fear and even injury. Inhuman spirits, enjoy inflicting pain, it’s negative. Your next mistake was calling in a medium, The demonic has to somehow get your permission to interfere in your life. Unfortunately, through your own free will, you gave it that permission.”

Adding to the shock that the three friends were no doubt experiencing at that moment, the Warrens went on to insist that following Lou’s attack, the demon’s next movie would be to exit Annabelle and enter one them for the purpose of “complete human possession” followed, almost inevitably, by murder. According to Ed Warren:

“Spirits don’t possess things, spirits possess people. Instead, the spirits simply moved the doll around and gave it the illusion of being alive. Now, what happened to Lou earlier this week was bound to occur sooner or later. In fact, you all were in jeopardy of coming under possession by this spirit, this is what the thing was really after. But Lou didn’t believe in the charade, so he was an ongoing threat to the entity. There was bound to be a showdown. Had the spirit been given another week or two, you might have been killed.”

This, according to the Warrens, left student nurses with just one recourse…

The Rite of Exorcism

The Warrens then decided that the best course of action would be to invoke the power of an exorcism blessing to banish the malevolent monstrosity from the doll.

They contacted an Episcopal priest named Father Cooke who was at first reluctant to get involved with this case, but eventually yielded after the Warrens explained just how dire the situation had become.

Ed Warren explained how the Episcopalian blessing differed from the more famous Catholic rite of exorcism:

“The Episcopal blessing of the home is a wordy, seven page document that is distinctly positive in nature. Rather than specifically expelling evil entities from the dwelling, the emphasis is instead directed toward filling the home with the power of the positive and of God.”

Unlike most cinematic versions of an exorcism, the ritual occurred without much commotion from the demonic doll. Following the sacred ceremony, Father Cooke extended the blessing to Donna, Angie, Lou and the Warrens, then (in what I hope was his best Zelda Rubenstein voice) declared that the demon was no longer going to be able to harm them… The Warrens weren’t so sure.

The Aftermath

Following Father Cooke’s exorcism, Ed and Lorraine — still doubtful that the demon had actually been banished from the potentially homicidal Annabelle — suggested they remove the doll from the home. Donna, eager to be rid of the nightmarish entity, readily consented to their request.

Ed then cautiously picked up the hateful doll and handed it to Lorraine, whereupon Father Cooke (who was evidently not completely convinced of the exorcism’s effectiveness either) warned Ed not to drive home on the interstate, lest the inhuman entity managed to linger within the doll and tried to influence the car.

Lorraine then placed the doll into the backseat of his car, buckled up, Ed started the engine and — in what must have been one of the most stressful late night drives in human history — they began their lengthy journey home. Ed took the priest’s advice and stuck to the winding back roads, where few other drivers would be jeopardized by their diabolical passenger… it would turn out to be a wise decision.

According to the Warrens, whenever they approached a sharp curve, their vehicle would inevitably stall, causing the brakes and power steering to fail simultaneously and sending them perilously close to driving off the road. They also had more than one near collision with a passing car. Finally Ed had had enough and he reached into his black bag, removed a vile of holy water and doused the rag doll with the sign of the cross. The doll would behave normally for the rest of the ride.

Once home, Ed (inexplicably) placed the doll into a chair adjacent to his desk. He reported that the doll levitated on more than one occasion, then seemed to fall in an lifeless state. This hiatus lasted only a few weeks and before long, Annabelle was up to her old tricks.

The Warrens claimed that they had locked Annabelle in the outer office building before setting out on a trip, but when they returned home and opened the front door they discovered that the doll was facing them, perched contentedly on Ed’s easy chair, as if mocking their efforts to contain it.

The doll would also, much like in her previous home, randomly appear in different rooms of the house, startling the Warrens.

Finally the Warrens had enough of Annabelle’s unnatural antics and they decided to bring in the big guns; a Catholic priest and exorcist by the name of Father Jason Bradford. By all accounts, Father Bradford did not take to kindly to being called in to deal with this alleged “devil doll.”

According to reports of the encounter, Father Bradford brashly approached the then inert doll and ripped it up from its seat, screaming: “Your just a rag doll Annabelle, you can’t hurt anyone!” At which point he threw the doll back down on the chair. Ed blanched at his vitriolic demeanor and stated: “That’s one thing you better not say.”

Lorraine was also disturbed by Father Bradford’s dismissive behavior and begged the priest to be careful while driving and to call her when he got back to the rectory. The call did not come until late in the evening when the shaken priest told Lorraine that his brakes had given out just as he had approached a hectic intersection. His car was demolished and he and the others involved barely survived the accident.

It was then that the Warrens decided that Annabelle was simply too dangerous to be exposed to the world, so they had a specially sealed case built for the doll — a sort of glass coffin — plastered with a sign which read: “WARNING, POSITIVELY DO NOT OPEN.”

The case, which the demon doll inhabits to this day, was placed in a room full of supposedly cursed objects that the Warrens had taken out of circulation and the door was locked.

Eventually, the Warrens turned their terrifying collection into an “Occult Museum,” which is open to the public. The now incarcerated Annabelle seems to be unable to move, but that does not mean that her nefarious powers have diminished.

Arguably the most disturbing tale associated with this malicious rag doll involves a young couple who were touring the museum with Ed as a guide. After Ed had explained the background story of Annabelle, the young man — full of the hubris of youth and no doubt trying to impress his innamorata — pounded on the glass case and challenged the doll to rise up and scratch him.

Ed wasted no time escorting the couple out of the museum stating: “son you need to leave.” Ed watched as the couple drove off on the young beau’s motorcycle and was, sadly, one of the last people to ever seem him alive.

According to his girlfriend, just after they left the museum, they were laughing about the silly stories surrounding the doll when the man abruptly lost control of his motorcycle and crashed into a tree. He was killed instantly and his girlfriend required over a year of hospitalization. While many skeptics would insist that this was nothing more than a sorrowful coincidence, the Warrens were convinced that they had incurred the wrath of Annabelle.

Ed Warren passed away in 2006, and Lorraine, now in her eighties, remains a thoroughly dedicated paranormal investigator. She claims that while Annabelle has not been able to break out from her case, she still manages to shift positions and, on occasion, has even been known to growl at unwary and no doubt terrified visitors.

Conclusion

There’s so much to consider in terms of the legitimacy of this case…

Are we talking about genuine demonic possession or diabolical manipulation? A misunderstood haunting? A bizarre series of events embellished by media darling demonologists? Or one of the most elaborate paranormal hoaxes ever pulled off; resulting in a legend of a possessed doll so terrifying that it makes Chucky from “Child’s Play” look like a Cabbage Patch kid?

The truth, such as it is, remains buried in the memories of just a handful of individuals and is likely never to see the light of day. And while I remain skeptical about this (and most) possession cases, I feel obliged to admit that if I am ever invited to peruse the shelves of the Warren’s Occult Museum and come face to face with Annabelle. I will graciously offer said invitee the chance to “piss off.”

Because no matter how rational I may be sitting in front of this keyboard with the sunlight pouring over my shoulders and a cold brew mere inches from my hand, in my heart of hearts I know that dolls are pure, unrefined, one-hundred percent evil… and no once can convince me otherwise.

And, putting all rationality aside, I shudder to think that the Warrens actually were right and Annabelle (or whatever is inside if her) might just be biding her time, waiting for her caretaker to expire, so that it can be unleashed by less responsible hands onto an unsuspecting world…

In the meantime, I might never go into a toy store again.