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

[MIKA27]

I know it could be unbelievable but I've heard this story about 20 years ago, especially the guy that died on his motorcycle. When I was in High School the Warrens did a paranormal investigation for a friend of mine and they even had a news station there to record everything.

I didnt know this about my friend until one day Him and I and another mutal friend where at his house and we talked/joked about ghosts and things like that, he told me about them coming to his house and said we can watch the video of when they were here from the news station. My curiosity was peaked and I said sure , they then warned me that afterward if anything was to happen not to freak out or anything like that.......at that moment I was a little freaked before even watching the video.

So we started watching and of course they're going through the very house I was sitting in and going around the house and talking about what they saw and different things that have happened. It wasnt long after that I saw on the wall a small plate collection my friends mother had. A few started to rattle on the wall, one started to slowly spin and fell off the wall. My bud said I told you something may happen, please to be freaked out. I of course was but was my first paranormal experience ever.

I've never been to their museum which I believe is in southern/western Connecticut but I have visited many of the places they wrote about in their books here in CT.

Wow, cool. Thanks for sharing your insight and experience.

[MIKA27]

This Colourful Satellite Image Shows How The World Is Being Torn Apart

Don’t be fooled by the bright, jovial colours of this satellite image, because it’s hiding a darker truth: the world is being wrenched apart at its seams.

Where the equator runs through Lake George in western Uganda, the the Somali tectonic plate is drifting away from the rest of the African continent, creating the Albertine Rift in the process. This composite satellite images — made up of three radar images taken by the European Space Agency’s Envisat satellite — shows changes of water level in a rainbow of colour. The rift, which forms a valley delivering waters from Lake George in the upper-right-hand corner into Lake Edward, is visible as the bright red streak.

[MIKA27]

Woman with ‘Syndrome X’ dies at 20 but still looks like a toddler

A woman who died last week at the age of 20 never aged.

Brooke Greenberg, of Reisterstown, Md., puzzled medical professionals for years because she still looked and acted like a toddler. Doctors eventually dubbed her extremely rare condition "Syndrome X."

“While the outside world may have noticed Brooke’s physical stature and been puzzled by her unique development state, she brought joy and love to her family,” Rabi Andrew Busch, who delievered the eulogy at the funeral, told the Daily News Monday.

“Her parents, three sisters and extended family showered her with love and respected her dignity throughout her entire life.”

In the womb, Brooke would not develop one month and play catch-up the next but that stopped around the age of 5 when all development stopped, her parents said to NBC News

"Brooke was a little on the small side, but nothing abnormal," Brooke's father, Howard Greenberg, told the station. "I mean you couldn't really tell until you witnessed the birth and you saw Brooke."

Brooke arrived one month early at just four pounds with a rare condition anterior hip dislocation. She needed surgery because her dislocated hips pushed forward and put her legs in an awkward position, pediatrician Lawrence Pakula explained.

The family realized something was wrong as Brooke's younger sister aged past her, so they brought her to see many different specialists in search of answers. But her condition baffled all of them.

Doctors told the Greenbergs to prepare for Brooke's death several times. They even picked out a casket and clothing for her funeral years ago.

"The older she gets, the more unbelievable it gets," her mother, Melanie Greenberg, told WBAL back in 2005.

Scientists studied Brooke's DNA in hopes to learn more about human aging and extending youth, the local NBC affiliate reported.

"She literally is the fountain of youth if you think about it," Howard Greenberg added. "She's shown me that as hard as it gets sometimes, the next day it can only get better."

Brooke reportedly developed a strong sense of individual identity later in life, enjoyed hugs, and loved her parents and sisters. She also grew rebellious in her teens and liked the Baltimore Ravens, her family said.

Brooke's funeral was held 10 a.m. Sunday at Levinson Chapel in Pikesville. She was buried at Baltimore Hebrew Cemetery.

[MIKA27]

Watch The New “47 Ronin” Theatrical Trailer Because It’s Awesome

We’ve already gotten a taste of 47 Ronin, but now the new theatrical trailer for the movie starring Keanu Reeves has debuted and it looks amazing.

Reeves plays the leader of 47 samurai who are seeking vengeance on an overlord who killed their master and then had them banished. There are swords and plenty of samurai and a woman turns into a dragon and, just, wow. 47 Ronin hits theaters on Christmas Day.

MIKA: Looks brilliant!

[MIKA27]

China Says Goodbye To Its Mysterious, Illegal High-Rise Fortress

The luxurious “mountain villa” built atop a Beijing high-rise is being torn down. The $US4 million penthouse was built by a Chinese health care entrepreneur named Zhang Lin on the roof of an existing apartment building earlier this year, much to the chagrin of its party-pooper occupants.

To build his totally unregulated shangri-la, Lin’s construction team had installed extra steel beams along the facade of the existing building — theoretically offsetting the extra weight. But tenants below complained of burst pipes and cracked walls, and back in August, officials demanded that Lin demolish the structure. “Now I realise it was a huge mistake,” a forlorn Lin told the New York Times.

A mistake, maybe, but a glorious one.

[MIKA27]

PHANTOM 2 VISION | BY DJI

The new Phantom 2 Vision by DJI is one cool toy! it allows you to capture the world around you and share these moments like never before. The flying camera streams real time live-view on your mobile device, allowing you to take take photos and videos from a completely new perspective. The integrated high end camera includes a 4GB micro SD card, takes 14 megapixel photos and records video full HD video at 1080/30p or 1080/60i with a 140 ° wide-angle f/2.8 lens. You can even tilt the camera, adjust camera settings, ISO settings, exposure compensation, white balance, RAW or JPEG format…all remotely via the App! The Phantom 2 Vision also offers an integrated GPS auto-pilot system, for "position holding” so you can focus on getting the shots, and "Return-to-Home” feature which will automatically fly it back and safely land at its takeoff point. It has 25 minutes of flight time and can fly to a distance of 300m.

If you own a GoPro camera, DJI also sell the Phantom with a GoPro mount

[MIKA27]

Syria conflict: Israel 'carries out Latakia air strike'

Israeli aircraft have carried out a strike near the Syrian coastal city of Latakia, a US official says.

The official said the strike targeted Russian-made missiles intended for the Lebanese militant group Hezbollah.

Latakia is a stronghold of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, an important port city where the Alawite community to which he belongs is concentrated.

Israel is widely reported to have carried out at least three air strikes in Syria so far this year.

Reports of the strike came as the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) said all Syria's declared equipment for making chemical weapons had been destroyed, one day before a deadline.

Action by the OPCW was agreed following allegations, denied by the Syrian government, that its forces had used chemical weapons in civilian areas - and after the US and France threatened military intervention.

Delicate moment

A US official said the Israeli strike took place overnight from Wednesday into Thursday.

Reports circulated on Thursday of explosions near Latakia, but the cause was not clear.

"Several explosions were heard in an air defence base in the Snubar Jableh area," said the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a UK-based activist network.

Neither Israel nor Syria have commented on the reports.

One unnamed US official told the Associated Press that the missiles targeted by Israel were Russian-made SA-125s.

Israel has repeatedly said it would act if it felt Syrian weapons, conventional or chemical, were being transferred to militant groups in the region, especially Hezbollah.

The BBC's Jim Muir in Beirut says the reports come at a delicate moment, with the Russians - who apparently made the weapons that Israel is said to have targeted - working closely with the US to get a peace conference on Syria off the ground.

Russia has been a key backer of President Assad's, continuing to supply his government with weapons during the conflict in Syria.

Mr Assad had promised to respond to any future strikes by Israel.

'Constructive partner'

On ThursdayI, the OPCW said in a statement that its teams had inspected 21 of the 23 chemical weapons sites in Syria.

It said two sites were too dangerous to visit, but equipment from those sites had already been moved to places where it could be inspected.

Syria's Deputy Foreign Minister Faisal Mekdad told the BBC that his government was co-operating, and was making a contribution to freeing the Middle East of weapons of mass destruction.

"I hope those who have always thought of us negatively will change their minds and understand that Syria was, is, and will be always a constructive partner," Mr Mekdad said.

Syria's next deadline is mid-November, by which time the OPCW and the Syrians must agree a detailed plan to destroy the country's chemical weapons stockpile.

Syria has until mid-2014 to destroy the chemical weapons themselves.

Syria's arsenal is believed to include more than 1,000 tonnes of the nerve gas sarin, the blister agent sulphur mustard and other banned chemicals, stored at dozens of sites.

The uprising against Mr Assad began in 2011. More than 100,000 people have been killed and more than two million people have fled the country, according to the UN.

[MIKA27]

Bang & Olufsen Beolab 18 Speakers:

If you're the kind of guy whose deep pockets are matched only by his desire to listen to music exactly as the artist intended, then these Bang & Olufsen Beolab 18 Speakers($6,600) are an obvious necessity. As is typical of products from the Danish speaker company, these towers are a work of modern art, with stunning curves, gorgeous woodwork, and an unbelievable attention to detail evident in every inch. They operate on a 24-bit wireless frequency even an audiophile would approve of, letting you say goodbye to those unsightly speaker wires. Twin four-inch midrange drivers powered by separate 160-watt amplifiers and acoustic lens tweeters complete the package.

[MIKA27]

Nadit9 Nero MKII Motorcycle:

One of the most attractive parts of riding a motorcycle is standing out from the pack of minivans, subcompacts, and SUVs that dominate the roads — you want to look original, different, independent. And you'd be hard-pressed to find anything on two wheels that looks as distinct as the Bandit9 Nero MKII Motorcycle ($TBA).

This completely custom ride is one of just nine models available, and looks so unique most people won't even understand what they're seeing. With a custom gas tank, rear cowl, handlebars, fork, and foot pegs, as well as the curved dual exhausts, exposed suspension, and completely matte black paint job, you're definitely bound to turn a few heads (and get a few jealous stares)

[MIKA27]

The Mummy Everyone Forgot Was Real:

The flat green field of the Summit View Cemetery in Guthrie, Oklahoma, is scattered with the low granite monuments of the recently deceased and the rough concrete tombstones handmade by pioneers who roamed into this first state capital before it got stolen away by Oklahoma City. Yet there's one curious tombstone that hovers between the new and the old Wild West. Chunks of its grey stone have been chipped away from its edges by visitors, and its curious epitaph reads:

ELMER MCCURDY

Shot by Sheriff's Posse

in Osage Hills.

On Oct. 7, 1911

Returned to Guthrie, Okla.

From Los Angeles County.

Calif.

For burial Apr. 22, 1977

The story of those over six decades of posthumous wandering is a strange one, ending with a sideshow mummy that everyone had forgotten was real, until a careless person broke off its fluorescent-painted arm and was horrified to see an unmistakably human bone jutting from the shriveled flesh.

Even though he'd claimed to have killed a man, Elmer McCurdy was a lousy outlaw, having only been arrested once for being drunk. Then he tried his hand at train robbing. The first attempt was in March of 1911 near Lenapah, Oklahoma. Although the train was carrying a substantial amount of silver, he pretty much melted it all with the explosives he employed to blast open the safe. He later made the exact same mistake in a Chautauqua, Kansas, bank.

Then there was another go at it that October, where he joined a group attempting to rob a train near Okesa, Oklahoma, that they believed was laden with the Osage tribal payments, but they got the timetables wrong and hit a passenger train instead, making off with just over $40 and a few jugs of whiskey. McCurdy seemed to take it in stride, or at least take kindly to the whiskey, and he was found imbibing in a barn near Bartlesville by law enforcement. Perhaps it was the liquid courage that made him declare he wouldn't be taken alive, and he was subsequently obliged in the shoot out.

But what notoriety he hadn't achieved as an outlaw, he was about to get as a corpse. The funeral director in Pawhuska preserved him in arsenic fluid until proper identification by authorities, after which he waited for any relatives. None showed, but the director didn't seem to bothered, gleefully posing McCurdy in his shop in suspenders, a broad hat, and a gun slung in his lifeless hands. Visitors could pay a nickel to see the dead train robber, and one of the more whimsical local recollections even asserts that the funeral director put him on roller skates so the mummified McCurdy could suddenly lunge out of a corner, surely much to the delight of anyone visiting a funeral home.

In 1916, some relatives finally did turn up, or at least that's who they claimed to be. In fact, they were carnival owners who began displaying McCurdy themselves around the country as the outlaw who never gave up. Later he made it into a wax museum, and this is where people started to forget that this waxy character actually had a real life before his display. After a bit part creeping in the background of the schlocky 1967 horror film She Freak, McCurdy lurked his way into the Nu-Pike Amusement Park in Long Beach, California, where he was displayed dressed as a cowboy (at least by coincidence his distant identity had somehow lingered in his clothes), and was hanging from a noose. He was coated in grotesque neon paint, and by then all memory that this mummy was actually a real mummy had totally faded.

That's why, in late 1976 during the filming of an episode of The Six Million Dollar Man, a crew member got such a sickening shock to see how the accidentally broken arm showed a real skeletal fracture.

Through forensics that turned up curious clues like a ticket to the Los Angeles Museum of Crime and a penny from 1924 in his dry mouth, his story was eventually traced back to Oklahoma. He was soon shipped back to the state where he met his demise, and a hearse that hadn't been used since 1913 was dusted off and hitched to two white horses for a procession to Summit View Cemetery. There he was finally put to rest, and then a concrete truck standing by filled in his grave so that the mummy of Elmer McCurdy could go wandering no more.

[MIKA27]

Monster Machines: There's No Escaping These Pack-Hunting Soviet Assault Choppers

Sure, the MI-24 Hind packs a wallop, but it’s big, heavy and cumbersome to fly. So, to penetrate enemy territory, Russia designed and built the agile and deadly Black Shark assault chopper. All it’s missing is a frickin’ laser.

The Kamov Ka-50 “Black Shark” grew out of the Soviet V-80Sh-1 project in the late 1980s as a single-seat attack helicopter. The unique design — attack choppers usually have a two-man crew, a pilot and a gunner — is the work of the the Kamov design bureau, which has produced dozens of rotorcraft designs since the 1920s. By 1990, the helicopter began production in 1990 and, by 1995, had entered service in the Russian Army which utilises it as a heavily-armed scout helicopter.

Lacking the bulk and weight of the larger HINDs heavy armour, the Ka-50 relies primarily on its small stature, agility, and speed to survive enemy encounters. Measuring 16m long and 5m tall, the Black Sharkweighs just 9525kg when fully loaded with fuel and weapons. A pair of Klimov TV3-117VK 2200 shp turboshafts power the helicopter’s trademark double three-blade rotors and provide the aircraft with a top speed of 315km/h and a range of about 547km/h.

That’s not to say the Black Shark will run from a fight — quite the opposite actually — this assault helicopter is bristling with weapons. In addition to its nose-mounted 2A42 30mm auto-cannon (replete with 460 HE, incendiary and armour-piercing rounds), the Ka-50 can carry up to 900kg of ordnance on its four wing-stub hardpoints. These can include almost any combination of 80 S-8 or 20 S-13 rockets; 12 laser-guided Vikhr anti-tank (as well as other air-to-air or air-to-ground) missiles; and up to four 250kg bombs. Plus the pod at the tip of each wing-stub dispenses chaff, flares and other countermeasures.

To get around the difficulties of simultaneously flying and fighting, Black Sharks will often hunt in packs of four, sharing fire control data among themselves as well as forward operating ground troops. This allows one Ka-50 to engage enemies spotted by another, lending well to ambush and asymmetric tactics that further improve the group’s ability to survive.

During the late 1990s, Kamov updated the Ka-50 design, adding a second tandem seat and naming the new model the Ka-52 “Alligator”. An experimental Alligator prototype, the Ka-52k, fell out of the sky on Wednesday, landing in a residential Moscow neighbourhood. While the two pilots were able to bail out safely, the prototype was a total loss. Russia’s Defence Ministry is currently examining the aircraft’s black box to figure out why the helicopter failed.

[MIKA27]

I Can't Stop Watching This Awesome Battlefield 4 Gameplay

I’ll admit it, I’m a fan of big dumb games like Battlefield. There’s something about the awesome multiplayer that has me enthralled and swearing at my TV for hours. Here’s an incredible gameplay video that gets me hyped to play it as soon as I get home, even though I prefer Call Of Duty.

Now, do I blow off my Friday plans to play Battlefield 4 or do I be a normal human? Decisions, decisions.

What are you playing this weekend?

[MIKA27]

The Moon May Have Been Made Of 'Magma Mush' For Millions Of Years

We’re used to thinking of the moon as a cold and unassuming lump of rock — but new research suggests that it could have been made of a strange magma mush for hundreds of millions of years before it solidified into the object we now see every night.

Professor Sara Russell, head of the mineral and planetary sciences division at the Natural History Museum in London, thinks that previous suggestions of how the moon formed are biassed, reports Space. Based on a samples of rock — 380kg in total — brought back from the moon by the Apollo missions, the current theory suggests that the moon was completely molten right after its formation, 4.5 billion years ago. This ‘magma ocean’, so the theory goes, then cooled and solidified.

But those samples came from a relatively small area of the moon’s near side, and Russell has long suspected that an alternative formation theory may be more appropriate. She explains to Space:

“The traditional view of the evolution of the moon is quite simplistic — that it was molten and then it solidified. But we’re saying it’s not really true, and that the moon was always a very complicated geological object.”

Russell and her team have analysed numerous lunar meteorites, and her observations suggest that the moon didn’t crystallize from the same pool of molten rock. She explains:

“Rocks we see on the surface of the moon now are not products of a magma ocean, so we don’t know if there was one [a magma ocean], as we don’t have any rocks from that time. But there has been a lot of volcanism on the moon, a lot of messing about of the rocks — and maybe extensive volcanism that was overlaying more volcanism could have been responsible for forming some of these anorthosites.”

So, instead of being completely molten, Russell believes that the satellite was in fact made up of a ‘magma mush’: a mixture of semisolid and liquid, with a solid crust. The centre, she believes, remained hot, causing constant volcanic activity, spewing lava over the moon’s surface, and in turn slowly building new layers of rock, one on top of the other.

Not everyone believes she’s right though. “Certainly it looks like the formation of the lunar crust was more complex than once thought,” explained Ian Crawford, a professor of planetary science and astrobiology at Birkbeck College, University of London to Space. “But it is too soon to ditch the magma ocean hypothesis, as it explains a lot.”

The way to settle it? More, less biased samples from the moon. Get a move on, NASA.

[MIKA27]

There's Over Twice As Much Magma Under Yellowstone Than We Thought

Everyone knows that Yellowstone is home to a super-volcano — but it turns out that the magma reservoir it sits atop is at least 2.5 times larger than we previously thought.

Most of the magma which fuels Yellowstone’s geysers and hot springs sits a few kilometers beneath the Earth’s surface. Now, researchers at the University of Utah, have mapped the pool of molten rock more accurately than ever, by analysing data taken from over 4500 earthquakes.

By looking at the way seismic waves — the energy that travels through the planet following a volcanic eruption or earthquake — propagated through the Earth’s structure, they were able to identify exactly where the reservoir was beneath the surface, and how much magma it contained. That’s possible because the waves travel more slowly through molten rock than through solid, and the team has data with enough detail to pinpoint exactly where those changes in speed occur.

The results suggest that Yellowstone’s reservoir is about 80 kilometers long and 20 kilometers across — a 4000 cubic kilometre “underground sponge,” as Nature refers to it — which is around 6-8 per cent filled with magma. That means that there’s at least 2.5 times more molten rock sat beneath the National Park than previous estimates suggested.

The work, which was presented on October 27 at the annual meeting of the Geological Society of America in Denver, Colorado, perhaps goes some way to explaining why volcanic events at Yellowstone are so severe. Let’s just hope it’s a while until the next one.

[MIKA27]

The Rise of 'The Walking Dead'

The tortured history of TV's goriest show

Rick Grimes is having yet another very bad day. Not a wake-up-from-a-coma-to-find-the-world's-been-overrun-by-zombies bad day or even a my-son-just-shot-my-wife-­after-she-gave-birth-to-a-child-that-may-have-been-fathered-by-my-former-best-friend sort of day, but still pretty awful. There's dirt smeared on his face, a gash over his left eye and a soiled white bandage wrapped loosely around one hand. He's gasping for breath as he trudges up a hill outside the prison he and the band of survivors he's leading call home. He looks like he might collapse.

Director Ernest Dickerson has yelled "Cut!" and some craft-services staff are handing out fruit cups to the cast and crew. But sweating hard under the hot August sun, Andrew Lincoln needs a little more than a small plastic dish filled with an assortment of cherries and grapefruit to shed the heavy burden of portraying Rick Grimes, ex-Georgia sheriff's deputy and the last great hope for humanity against the zombie apocalypse in AMC's monster hit The Walking Dead.

A few hours ago, Lincoln was walking out of his home in the trendy Atlanta neighborhood of Inman Park. At that moment, he was an unfailingly gracious 40-year-old British actor who until 2010 was best known in his native country for his roles in lighthearted romantic comedies and virtually unknown in this one. After an hourlong drive to Raleigh Studios near the small town of Senoia, where he trades his precise British accent for a rolling Georgia drawl, another hour in makeup, and plenty of time in the sticky morning heat, alternately rehearsing and listening intently to his iPod, he's ready to be Rick Grimes. Or almost ready.

"Action! Andy! Action!"

Lincoln is on all fours now, hands and knees in the dirt, and though he sounds like he's moaning in pain, he's actually singing along to his iPod, momentarily oblivious to the TV show waiting to be made all around him. A production assistant jars him from his trance. Lincoln hands over his music and runs through the scene once, then again. It's a short scene, mostly just Lincoln walking toward the camera and uttering a single line, but the actor isn't happy with how it's going.

"Again. Again. Again," he says, shaking his head and staring fixedly at the ground as he paces back toward the spot on the hill where he started. One more time through, but still something is off. Lincoln emits a guttural wail of dissatisfaction.

"Let's do it again!" Now he's shouting. "****! **** that! ****!"

His earbuds go back in and he's on all fours again. A final take goes well. Or well enough to move on.

"There's something in me that's definitely masochistic," Lincoln tells me later. "If I don't feel it's true, the crew understands and goes, 'Keep rolling.'" This maso­chism sets an indelible tone on The Walking Dead, which shoots largely during the hot Georgia summers, frequently outside. The cast and crew brave the heat, dodge the rain, navigate woods and grasslands teeming with hungry ticks, chiggers and mosquitoes, and endure the punishing schedule required to make a high-concept, action-packed, effects-heavy 43-minute film in eight days, and do this 16 times between May and November.

"It's a tough job," says Norman Reedus, who plays the crossbow-toting reformed redneck Daryl Dixon. "We're out here running, getting bruised, with the heat and bugs. We've had people come do the show and halfway through, they're like, '**** this! It's 120 degrees outside.'"

Lincoln's role here is beyond lead actor: He's a de facto producer, drama teacher, big brother and cheerleader. He frequently watches and comments on scenes he's not in. Others follow his lead. "Andy is what drives the show," says Steven Yeun, who plays Glenn, a resourceful ex­pizza-delivery guy. "Think about the conditions we're shooting in: You're asking people to be there for 12-hour days for seven months. You'd be like, 'I'm not doing that ****!' But there's a grace Andy comes in with where it's like, 'I'm number one on the call sheet, but I'm in early, staying late, watching other people's takes, taking this seriously.' That bleeds into the crew and cast."

The result is the hottest show on television and probably the industry's most surprising success story of the past dec­ade. Born from Robert Kirkman's popular comic-book series of the same name – which in 10 years has risen from an upstart independent title to outselling offerings from industry giants DC and Marvel, turning Kirkman himself into something of a comics-world deity – The Walking Dead spent years going nowhere as a TV project, rejected by pretty much every major network, before AMC ordered the six-episode first season that aired in 2010. In doing so, the network plunged a show about the last survivors in a world taken over by zombies – known only as "walkers" – into a television universe that had shown little interest in anything undead that wasn't a vampire. Since then, The Walking Dead has racked up a body count behind the camera that almost matches the one in front of it, enduring, among other things, the not-at-all-amicable dismissal of its first showrunner, Frank Darabont, acclaimed director of The Shawshank Redemption, and the less contentious departure of his replacement, Glen Mazzara.

Online brouhahas have flared over the show's wavering fidelity to both Kirkman's comic and Darabont's original vision, characters' demises have been mourned and celebrated by fans in a way unseen since the first season of Survivor, and the show itself has occasionally struggled to balance Shakespearean plotlines, high-minded political philosophy and the indescribable pleasure of watching a shuffling zombie get shot in the face. Through it all, ratings have continued to soar – the series is the most-watched drama in basic-cable history, with a record-shattering Season Three finale, and AMC recently announced a spinoff coming in 2015 that will follow different characters through the same end-of-days hellscape. The Walking Dead has come to resemble the fictional zombie plague it documents: relentless, bloody and always getting bigger.

Kirkman still writes the comic – issue No. 100 was the bestselling comic of 2012 – while also working as an executive producer and writer for the show. He believes The Walking Dead owes some of its success to the world's misfortunes. "Apocalyptic storytelling is appealing when people have apocalyptic thoughts. With the global economic problems and everything else, a lot of people feel we're heading into dark times. As bad as it is for society," he says with a laugh, "I'm benefiting greatly."

A few days earlier, when I first meet Lincoln in a funky coffee shop in the aggressively bohemian enclave of Little Five Points, he's sitting at a table toward the back, doing his best to blend in. His curly hair, brown with streaks of gray, is mostly tucked under a green John Deere baseball hat, and he's got a couple of days' worth of salt-and-pepper stubble on his face. Lincoln lives nearby, and most of the people who stop by the table actually know him, at least vaguely, as a regular here. For those who don't, he seems to shift from his English diction toward a molasses twang, as he collects their compliments – "Oh, thank you, ma'am" – fearing perhaps the discovery that Rick is a Brit could puncture The Walking Dead's peculiar magic for them.

In person, Lincoln is polite and self-deprecating, almost to a fault. His tendency to lean in, lock on you with his piercing blue eyes and look fascinated as you babble whatever nonsense you're babbling about your life seems like it must be an act, but he either does it so well you can't help but go along with it, or it's not.

Lincoln spent his early years in the north of England, near Hull ("Voted the worst place in the United Kingdom," he says), with the considerably less leading-man-friendly last name Clutterbuck, but moved as a young child to Bath, in southwestern Britain. He got his start as an actor on the rugby pitch, where, as a teenager, a teacher spotted him and decided he was the guy to play the Artful Dodger in the school's production of Oliver! He took to acting immediately, thriving, he says, off the "live buzz."

Nine months after graduating from the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, Lincoln landed a starring role in the TV show This Life, a romantic dramedy about twenty-somethings in London that captured the generational zeitgeist in mid-Nineties England. This led to subsequent British film and TV roles, including a hit comedy series, Teachers, in which he starred and met his future wife, Gael Anderson, a production assistant who is also the daughter of Jethro Tull frontman Ian Anderson.

"I didn't know who Jethro Tull was," he says, as if admitting a terrible secret. "Then one weekend she said, 'Come back to my parents' place.' That's when I realized he was a rock star. We hit it off. He's a rare breed."

Lincoln's career was humming along nicely in England, and after a sizable role in the film Love Actually, he was antsy to try his luck in the U.S. But the scripts sent his way were dispiriting.

"I didn't want to do more romantic comedies," he says. "I was very interested in working in America, but I didn't want to be Hugh Grant." He was desperate to break from his niche. When he read the script for the Walking Dead pilot, he seemed an unlikely choice to play a Georgia lawman, but the producers were looking for a fresh face, so his failure to cross over in America was suddenly an asset.

Rick Grimes is a complex character. He's not a brooding male antihero à la Tony Soprano, Don Draper or Walter White, but an old-fashioned Gary Cooper type, albeit with a twist – a good man forced to make awful and violent choices. To play him, says Gale Anne Hurd, an executive producer pivotal to the show's development, they needed "someone who could get away with doing brutal things. You had to really buy, at the core, he was an honorable man thrust into these incredibly brutal times."

Jon Bernthal, who was already cast as Shane, Rick's best-friend-turned-nemesis, says when Lincoln walked into series showrunner Frank Darabont's office, "he was so clearly the guy."

With a new baby at home, though, Lincoln and his wife were reluctant to uproot for a role that hardly looked like a great bet. He loved AMC's Mad Men, but mostly he trusted that if anyone could turn a story of murderous rotting corpses overtaking the Earth into a tale about our collective humanity, it was Darabont.

"Frank talked us into getting on that plane," he says.

It's almost impossible to look at Robert Kirkman and not think that this is what The Simpsons' Comic Book Guy would've looked like if he'd had a little less bitterness and a little more can-do spirit. Kirkman, 34, is an affable guy with a sandy-brown beard and a bulky physique. His only real ambition growing up was to be a successful comic-book writer, and when I meet him in his small office on set, he seems like a guy still surprised at how far that goal has taken him. Sure, he's a writer and producer on the show, but he admits when it comes to the nuts and bolts of TV, "I'm learning."

During earlier seasons, "I would be in meetings, but I wouldn't really know what we're doing or why we're doing these meetings," he says. "Now I'm much more attuned to what makes a television show."

Kirkman grew up in Richmond, Kentucky. When he first became serious about writing and publishing comics, he didn't have the nerve to tell his parents he'd quit his job at Kentucky Lighting & Supply. For about a year afterward, he maintained the fiction that he still had a day job. Even after his mother called and discovered he no longer worked there, he didn't come clean.

"I was like, 'Oh, yeah, now I work at UPS,'" he says, shaking his head at the memory. It was at least two years of these charades – during which time Kirkman was writing his own comics and freelancing for Marvel – before he finally brought a box of his comics to his parents' house and fessed up. "They just thought I was weird."

Secrecy is kind of a thing for Kirkman. He kept his marriage from his parents for a while, too. "The month we got engaged, my parents decided to get a divorce," he says. "It didn't feel right to go, 'Oh, you're getting a divorce? That's funny, I'm getting married.' So we didn't tell them."

At around 14, Kirkman first saw George A. Romero's 1968 film Night of the Living Dead. Although zombie stories had existed for centuries, Romero's film established the modern archetype – the shambling, single-minded corpses that spread their virus by biting the living and could only be dispatched with a shot to the head. To watch it now, despite the low production values, is to see the template for what Kirkman, and later Darabont, would do with The Walking Dead.

"A story about vampires or werewolves is a story about people going through that transformation," says Kirkman. "But zombie stories are about human beings doing relatable things: protecting your family, finding food, building shelter." Zombies, too, provide a handy metaphor – for the brain-dead masses forever hungry to feed their selfish appetites; for the relentless pressures of the world weighing down on us; for nearly anything beyond our control that scares us to death.

Max Brooks, author of The Zombie Survival Guide and World War Z, says Night of the Living Dead and later Romero films like Dawn of the Dead introduced a philosophy that underpins most good zombie fiction.

"Zombies are a mirror for our own weaknesses," he says. "When zombies are slow, stupid and easy to kill, how do they win? Their inherent weakness exposes our stupidity, our greed, our panic. It's like Hurricane Katrina. It was just water. But the story of Hurricane Katrina is a story of unbelievable human mistakes, and that's what an interesting zombie story is."

Kirkman loved zombie films, but had one problem with most: their endings. After 90 minutes or so of struggle and bloodshed, a couple of characters survive and walk off into the sunset. To him, that didn't feel like the end of the story, it felt like the beginning. "I started to think, 'What if one of those stories continued indefinitely?'" he says.

That question spawned The Walking Dead, the first issue of which appeared in 2003. The comic became an underground hit, and soon Kirkman was meeting with people interested in adapting it for film. None looked promising until Darabont called in 2005.

"He understood the comics," says Kirkman. "They weren't about gore or zombie scares. It was a realistic survival story about human beings."

Darabont – who declined to be interviewed for this story – wrote a pilot and spent several years trying to drum up interest. NBC signed on for a spell but never put the pilot into production. Other broadcast networks felt it was too violent. Premium cable passed. Darabont had basically given up on the project by the time Hurd – who'd gotten her start working for B-movie titan Roger Corman and later co-produced The Terminator and Aliens – called about it. Together they brought the show to AMC, which greenlighted it in 2009.

Expectations were modest. AMC was concerned about it getting pigeonholed as a genre piece. Early promos and ads emphasized Darabont's résumé, AMC's reputation for serialized dramas and that it wasn't really about zombies.

They needn't have worried. The pilot, which Darabont directed, is a gorgeous, warped, 67-minute fever dream that resembled nothing else on television. It premiered on Halloween 2010, with ratings that immediately made it AMC's most-watched show, besting the network's twin totems, Mad Men and Breaking Bad. From there, the phenomenon has only grown. Most of the cast and crew I spoke to explain the show's appeal by talking about the way the audience sees itself in the characters while also identifying with the broader feeling these days that societal breakdown isn't so far-fetched. That, and the nonstop action, suspense and well-executed gore. But there's also a sense that in stripping away civilization's niceties, The Walking Dead is tapping into its viewers' worst fears:

Am I a shitty parent? Is my wife sleeping with my best friend? Do I value my own life more than that of those close to me? What does it mean to be human? And can I figure this all out before that gnarly-looking zombie sinks its teeth into my neck?

The show's relationship to Kirkman's comic makes for a particularly complex web of intrigue. While the TV version isn't married to the comic's plot, it employs many of the same characters and frequently follows the same basic outline. But some characters that have survived in the comic have already been offed on the show; others who succumbed quite quickly on the page have had longer runs on T V. The comic offers a detailed road map (not to mention storyboards) for the Walking Dead writers, but it's a road map they're free to throw out the window. So everyone on set lives in fear of leaking spoilers. During multiple scenes I watched being filmed, an assistant director mandated that the dozens of crew members put away their phones before filming could start.

"I watched Shane's death get spoiled," Kirkman says. "Two weeks before the show aired, photos of him in zombie makeup were all over the Internet." But like many seeming catastrophes with The Walking Dead, the impact was negligible.

"People were freaking out, like, 'It's going to ruin the show!'" Kirkman continues. "Ratings went up."

The Walking Dead is a story about survival, but in releasing a ravenous horde with purposefully unexplained origins on the human race, Kirkman was offering an implicit commentary on the world he was destroying. "A hundred years ago, we were living in houses we built, growing food we ate, interacting with our families," he says. "That's a life that makes sense. Now, we're doing jobs we don't enjoy to buy stuff we don't need. We've screwed things up.

"It's fun to look at The Walking Dead and see those things taken away," he adds. "A lot of people think the show is bleak and depressing, but I can see where it's going in the next 10 years, and I think about it optimistically. Maybe it's going to make us better people by the end of it."

Orman Reedus answers his trailer door at the studio's base camp, gripping a switchblade and wearing his Daryl Dixon uniform: dark, dirty, sleeveless button-down shirt, brown pants. Daryl was a backwoods survivalist before the zombie apocalypse, and, as such, a pretty useful guy to have around when civilization crumbled. Fan drawings of him paper Reedus' trailer walls, and on the desk is a gelatinous breast implant one woman sent. Reedus uses it as a phone cradle. He shows me a letter and accompanying nude crotch shot that arrived recently.

"I just read it. It's basically like, 'I love you. I'll wait for you. I'm doing anything to find you.'" He shakes his head. "Holy f**k."

The show engenders serious fanaticism, the most intense of which focuses on Reedus. He thinks people identify with Daryl as an underdog who needed the apocalypse to become his best self. Reedus plays Daryl with a brooding smokiness that seems to attract the unhinged. The week before, a 32-year-old Mississippi woman dragged her three kids on a road trip to find Reedus. She made it to Georgia, where she ran out of gas, was placed in a shelter with her family, ditched the kids, broke into a nearby house and was eventually arrested.

"I've been followed home over half a dozen times," he says, tossing his knife into the wood floor. "I've had somebody break into my backyard. A guy from the FBI is coming down here to talk about security."

There's a knock on the trailer door.

"Yo! Reedus, you've got visitors!"

It's Lincoln with Melissa McBride, who plays Carol, the steely widow who lost her daughter in Season Two. The three are the show's diminished old guard. Besides them, the only principals that remain from Season One are Yeun and Chandler Riggs – Rick's son Carl.

The cast members all talk repeatedly about "the culture of The Walking Dead," which is to say, the tight-knit atmosphere and no-bullshit attitude on set. Lincoln, Bernthal, Sarah Wayne Callies – who played Rick's wife, Lori – and others worked deliberately to develop this culture from Day One, but some of it's just down to the peculiar alchemy that happened when Darabont cast the show and set them to work on a story that dictated most of them wouldn't be around to see its conclusion. McBride says she actually got the call last season from then-showrunner Mazzara that Carol was to be killed.

"I said, 'It's really a shame because there's a lot to her,'" she says. She then explained to him what Carol still had to offer this hellish world. "I never heard words come out of my mouth so fast and so sure. I was defending my life. "I don't know if that had any impact on the decision to keep her alive," she continues, but she's still here.

The idea that nobody is safe binds the actors together in the same way it does the characters. Bernthal, who, as Shane, was killed in a Season Two showdown with Rick, says his final scene reinforced how special this job was.

"At the end of the night, the entire cast just held each other," he says. "I ain't gonna bullshit you, I was crying my eyes out. I told them, 'Stay strong. Keep squeezing all the bullshit out of this thing.'"

While it may be true The Walking Dead isn't only about zombies, at 5:45 a.m., in the makeup trailer on set, it kind of is. Bethany Murphy sits in a chair waiting to be transformed from an attractive young actress into a ghastly bag of molting flesh, or in the show's parlance for featured zombies, a hero. Murphy has played numerous walkers on the show, going back to the pilot: When Rick shuffles down the hospital hallway toward the double doors that read don't open/dead inside, those are Murphy's gnarled hands reaching through the doors toward him.

"I am on Walking Dead trading card Number 1," she says.

Murphy is one of three actors going through this morning's nearly two-hour makeup session, which requires a foam latex mask, rotting false teeth, an assortment of paints and glues, and – for Murphy – the "zombie conditioning treatment," i.e., globs of TRESemmé conditioner worked into her dark hair until it looks appropriately awful. Hands and legs are also painted, but the costume department generally keeps walkers from exposing too much skin to cut down on turnaround time (hence the predominance of long sleeves among the show's undead). Today, there are 16 heroes to cycle through, plus a handful of midground walkers who get elaborate paint jobs but no prosthetics, and several deep-background zombies, who only require a light dusting of death.

Occasionally, the script will specify something about a walker's appearance, but often the makeup artist just looks at the actor sitting in the chair and wings it. The zombies look horrifying, no doubt, but the real horror comes from the fact that even with the most gruesome of them, you can still clearly see the outlines of the humans they used to be. These are not simply monsters; these were once our neighbors, our friends and our family – a point driven home in Season Three by the otherwise sociopathic Governor, who hides away his zombie daughter and hopes for a cure that never comes.

A little before seven, Greg Nicotero bounds into the trailer, wearing a gray shirt with a picture of a zombie fighting a shark on it, a tribute to the obscure Italian film Zombi 2. Nicotero, an executive producer in charge of makeup, examines the three heroes and makes adjustments.

"As the show progresses, the zombies are decaying more and more," he says. "We always do the rotted-away lips because I've done research in terms of cadavers and corpses, and when the skin tightens, it pulls away. I always think about that stuff."

Nicotero grew up in Pittsburgh and got his start working with fellow Pittsburgh resident Romero on 1985's Day of the Dead. Since then, he's become an icon in his field, working on films like Pulp Fiction and Boogie Nights. When Darabont was pitching AMC, the network's executives were concerned the scale of what he was attempting with the zombies wasn't financially feasible. Nicotero, who'd worked with Darabont on The Green Mile and 2007's The Mist, was his ace in the hole. Still, there's been an intermittent tug of war over the show's budget – which has made Nicotero's job a challenge.

"Would I love 10 more makeup artists?" he asks. "Hell, yeah! Would I love another unit that could just shoot close-ups of zombies?

Sometimes we have that. But we've found a way of making a great show within the parameters of the money we have."

Budgets were undoubtedly a factor in Darabont's departure, but it was hardly the only tumult during his tenure. Just before Season One's finale aired, Darabont reportedly fired most of the writing staff, save Mazzara. (Producers at AMC contend they left of their own accord.) Darabont had written, co-written or rewritten every script to that point; several people told me most words uttered that season were his. Jeffrey DeMunn, who played the aging RV owner Dale, says some of the initial scripts "needed a lot of help. But then I would get the rewrite and it was extraordinary."

Despite great Season One ratings, AMC cut the budget-per-episode for Season Two by about $500,000, according to a former staffer. Kirkman says that the budget wasn't an issue, pointing out it was still "30 percent higher than most shows on television" – though allegedly less than half of the rumored cost of HBO's Game of Thrones. AMC president Charlie Collier has asserted that pilot episodes usually cost more money and the Season Two cuts were just the normal course of business. But according to Gregory Melton, the production designer for the first two seasons of the show and a longtime associate of Darabont's, these economic decisions had significant impact. Darabont had planned to open Season Two with a backstory explaining how Atlanta was overrun by walkers.

"It was going to be like Black Hawk Down, following an Army Ranger unit as the city succumbs to the zombie plague," says Melton.

"That was thrown out due to cost," and instead, by Episode Two, the survivors are camped at Hershel's farm. Another former staffer on the show says the decision to keep the group at one location for most of the season was at least partly financial.

AMC has maintained that budget decisions were made with an eye on the show's long-term fiscal health, but Darabont wasn't buying it.

"Frank would just say that they're greedy bastards," says Melton. "They just wanted to keep the money. They felt they could save this money and the show would still perform at the level they wanted."

Still, most assumed the tension between Darabont and AMC wasn't irreconcilable. In July 2011, Darabont and the cast broke from filming Season Two to make an appearance at San Diego's Comic-Con. Darabont returned to Los Angeles Sunday afternoon. On Monday, AMC fired him.

The cast and crew were stunned, as was Darabont. According to Melton, the cast had to be dissuaded from quitting en masse, partially by Darabont himself. Several people made it clear he wanted the show to go on. No real explanation was offered for Darabont's termination, and many are still unsure why it happened.

"I asked and got some pretty vapid answers," says DeMunn, who has a long relationship with Darabont that runs from The Shawshank Redemption to his upcoming TNT show, Mob City. "I became acerbic but could get very little information. I have a theory that there are no grown-ups, and people got in a pissing contest."

Melton says Darabont could be abrasive, which didn't help. "I heard Frank was being very difficult and there were inappropriate e-mails," he says. "He's good at writing a pretty rough e-mail. I just think certain people at AMC wanted him out of the way."

AMC's Collier didn't discuss the reasons behind Darabont's firing, saying only that "we've made every decision with an eye on keeping the story as relevant as possible."

In a move that mirrored the lonely moral stance his character Dale took on the show, DeMunn declared he wanted off The Walking Dead.

"Frank and I have been friends for over 20 years," he says. "I had no respect for the way the whole thing was handled. I try to conduct my life in a way that if you have disagreements, you work them out. If not, bring in a mediator. I don't regret my decision to tell them to get rid of me."

DeMunn got his wish. Closing out a Season Two episode, DeMunn's character is bitten by a walker and then – in a moment of art imitating life – he leans his head toward Daryl's gun, as if asking to be put out of his misery. Just as in the show, the rest of the cast carried on.

In the wake of the firing, Mazzara, who'd been Darabont's second-in-command, stepped into an almost impossible situation, but Season Two finished strongly, with ratings continuing to climb. By the second half of Season Three, though, more problems were arising.

David Boyd, the show's cinematographer during most of the first season and part of the second, as well as a director of several episodes, including one late in Season Three, says there were problems with the scripts. "During the episode I was doing, production was shut down for a week, I think to get the scripts in order. It was well-known AMC was unhappy with where things were going." There were other reports of production delays and disagreements over how the season should end. One former staffer suggests Kirkman may have been bristling about his scripts being so heavily rewritten.

Nonetheless, after breaking records for viewership, Mazzara seemed on strong footing. But shortly after shooting wrapped, AMC announced Mazzara was out as showrunner, to be replaced by Scott Gimple, a writer since Season Two. Both parties called the split amicable, citing creative differences and declining to elaborate. But within weeks, the rumor was that Kirkman had orchestrated Mazzara's exit, an opinion fanned by Sons of Anarchy creator Kurt Sutter, who'd worked with Mazzara on FX's The Shield. In a YouTube video, Sutter contended AMC was letting Kirkman control the creative process because he owns The Walking Dead's rights. "The reins keep going back to him . . . and he doesn't know how to run a show."

Kirkman denies this.

"It's unfortunate when someone of his stature starts saying stuff because it seems like they're in the know, but they're really not," he says. "It's definitely awkward because it wasn't like I had someone fired."

When I spoke to Mazzara in March, three months after his departure, he emphasized that there wasn't one specific reason for his exit. "I can't say I wanted to do this, they wanted to do that," he says. "It's just an accumulation of differences in tone, approach, storytelling. There wasn't any common ground. It was better to split amicably."

Collier is vague on the details behind Mazzara's departure, but insists that, as with AMC's other hits, the goal with The Walking Dead has always been to honor the intent of its auteur. "The creator of Mad Men is Matt Weiner, the creator of Breaking Bad is Vince Gilligan and the creator of The Walking Dead is Robert Kirkman, so I do think we've remained true to the core of this show, and that's what's in the DNA of the comic book, which is Robert's vision."

Mazzara's exit was less seismic than Darabont's. Danai Gurira, who was cast as the glowering, sword-wielding Micchone, says, "At this point, there's a confidence in the show's ability to keep moving."

With Gimple, a longtime fan of the Walking Dead comic and a former editor for Matt Groening's Bongo Comics, the show seems to be realigning itself more closely with Kirkman's vision after some complained it had jagged too far away from it last season. Gimple admits when he got the nod "it was a little scary," but describes his role now as "viewer-in-chief." As he's steered Season Four, he's had occasional differences of opinion with Kirkman, but not the ones many might assume.

"He's been more about diverging from the comics and I've been more about being faithful to them," Gimple says. In the end, story lines from the comic are being applied in new contexts to different characters or altered enough to keep hardcore fans guessing. "It's a bit of a remix."

Two weeks after our initial meeting, Lincoln invites me to play golf with him one morning. Just before he lines up a putt on the fourth hole, he tells me, "The most daunting part of leading this thing is that we lose so many key members that established the culture of the show. It's terrible when you lose people." He's talking about his co-stars – Callies, Bernthal, DeMunn and others who've fallen victim to The Walking Dead's apocalyptic universe – but clearly, the thought extends to Darabont and Mazzara, too. "It feels somber while we're shooting now," he says. "Which is right! This is what it's about. Everybody hunkers together, somebody else joins the family, and we get through it." He sinks his putt.

If history's a guide, The Walking Dead will roll through its latest changes without losing a step. There's a sense that, at this point, it's a force of nature and the most important thing its handlers can do – whether it's Gimple, Kirkman, Lincoln, AMC or anyone else – is not screw it up.

On the next hole, Lincoln crushes a tee shot that lands in the center of the fairway. He's a good golfer – "There's something about hitting a ball that's meditative," he says – and plays with the same sort of grace he seems to do everything else with. He looks toward the hole, about 150 yards away, and grabs an eight-iron.

"An eight is a bit short, but I'm going to try to whack it. We'll see what happens."

His backswing is perfect, and then he leans into the ball, tops it, and hits his worst shot of the day. The ball skitters along the slick grass toward a bunker.

"Oh, you son of a *****," he says. "Stop!" For a moment, it seems as though Rick Grimes might bubble to the surface, but then Lincoln laughs.

"There you go! That's what happens when you try to whack it."

[MIKA27]

MEET SR-72, THE MOST ASTONISHING AIRPLANE YOU'LL EVER SEE

THE SR-71 BLACKBIRD WAS THE MOST ASTONISHING AIRPLANE EVER MADE. NOW IT'S BEING BESTED.

If you're anything of an aircraft enthusiast you'll know all about the SR-71 spy plane--it really was the most ridiculously advanced piece of flying technology, a legend in its own lifetime. If you're not an aircraft enthusiast, then read on because you'll still be impressed. Now is the moment to meet the SR-72, the future successor to the Blackbird--faster, higher, and more astonishing.

Revealed exclusively to AviationWeek by manufacturer Lockheed itself, the

SR-72 is also called Blackbird, and it's being developed to fill a gap in the military and intelligence gathering networks that satellites can't fix: Fast, safe, high-altitude surveillance that can flit to a danger spot anywhere on the planet in a jiffy. Or with a huge thundercrack of hypersonic booms actually, because the SR-72 is said to have innovative engines so it can fly at Mach 6, twice its predecessor's limit. Oh, and as well as all sorts of typical optical, radar, electronic, and other sensors it'll also carry weapons. The SR-72 could fly as a technology demonstrator as soon as 2018.

And if you're wondering what all the fuss is about, then watch the video of the SR-71 below. This aircraft was made with new materials that hadn't been worked into an airframe before, and it pushed the boundaries of manufacturing tech in ways that will have subtly influenced many pieces of consumer gear. It was the first slightly "stealthy" plane. It navigated by spotting stars and flew so fast it could outrun bullets and missiles. At top speed it could take a whole country's length to slow down.

[MIKA27]

Taiwan's New Special Forces Uniforms Are Wearable Nightmare Fuel

Like the Samurai’s mempo, the uniforms of many of today’s Special Forces units play dual roles. Not only do they protect the wearer’s face and conceal his identity, they terrify the pants off of the enemy. Take the newly unveiled uniforms of Taiwan’s Special Forces for example. They look like something out of Army of Two.

Here’s a close-up of the Casey Jones-style face mask:

These Kevlar ballistics masks measure 11.2-inches long by 7.2-inches wide and weight about 2.5 pounds. Rated at Threat Level II, the mask can stop anything up to a .357 Magnum slug, though we don’t recommend trying.

[MIKA27]

The Latest Weapon Against Terrorists: Sewage-Sniffing Bomb Sensors

Bad guys can’t just close their window shades to hide from the law any more. A European research group has developed a high-tech way to detect bomb makers and illegal drug labs — by sniffing what they flush down the toilet.

The Emphasis project, led by an analytical chemist with Sweden’s Defence Research Agency and presented at last month’s International Symposium on the Analysis and Detection of Explosives, puts a series of 10.2cm-long sensors in the stream of a city’s sewage infrastructure.

Bomb or drug ingredients dumped down the drain trigger a voltage change in the sensors, indicating that something other than the normal ones-and-twos is flowing into the labyrinth of pipes below the city. Similar sensors sniffing above-ground for tell-tale vapours help pinpoint exactly where production is going on.

So far, the stalwart (and probably very stinky) sensors have proven successful in lab testing. New Scientistreports they will be tested in real sewers next year — and we’re grateful, because presumably no one will ever complain about technology stealing this job.

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Monster Machines: The First Flight Of This Mini-Shuttle Could Have Gone Much Better

So the post-Space Shuttle era isn’t going quite as splendidly as we’d initially hoped it would back when we retired the fleet back in 2011. Sure we can still deliver supplies to the ISS thanks to privately developed modules like the Dragon Capsule, but getting crews up there is still only possible with the the Russian Space Agency’s increasingly exorbitant launch assistance.

To fill that people-moving gap, NASA has again turned to private industry. Among the front runners is the seven-passenger Dream Chaser.

Developed by Sierra Nevade Corp Space Systems, the Dream Chaser is a manned, vertical-takeoff, horizontal-landing (VTHL) lifting-body spaceplane. Modelled after NASA’s earlier M2-F2 prototype from the 1960s (and what Lee Majors was driving just before he became the Six Million Dollar Man), as well as the HL-20, the Dream Chaser looks and flies much like a miniaturised space shuttle.

It’s designed to launch vertically atop an Atlas 5 rocket but can operate in both the sub-orbital atmosphere and Low Earth Orbit, relying on its entire fuselage — not just its wings — to generate lift and cruise in for horizontal landings at conventional air strips.

The forces experienced on reentry are a fraction of what Space Shuttle-era astronauts endured, typically only about 1.5g.

Built primarily from composite materials, the Dream Chaser measures 10m long with a 7m wide wingspan and weighs just over 11,340kg. It’s powered by a pair of hybrid rocket engines running on hydroxyl-terminated polybutadiene (HTPB) and nitrous oxide.

These non-toxic fuels were chosen, like virtually every element of the Dream Chaser’s design, with safety in mind. What’s more, the reaction control system thrusters run on ethanol and can be turned on and off at will, unlike a solid rocket booster that simply burns until its fuel supply is exhausted. The entire system can even operate autonomously if need be.

The spaceplane is currently in competition with module platforms from both SpaceX and Boeing for the lucrative NASA Commercial Crew Program contract. As of the end of last year, the Dream Chaser has undergone more than a decade of development, including over 300 simulated engine test firings. Its first test flight on October 26 went swimmingly, save for a heavy impact upon landing on account of a stuck left landing gear. Undaunted, SNC plans to perform an orbital flight demo in 2016 with crewed orbital missions the following year. If the program can avoid further catastrophic losses everything from ISS resupply runs to space tourism to free-flying scientific missions could all be borne atop a fleet of Dream Chasers.

[MIKA27]

Watch A Designer Turn Aluminium Cans Into Stools On A São Paulo Street

It’s one thing to make a product using aluminium or plastic recycled at a plant. But recycling cans into chairs — on the same street they were found — is something else. That’s exactly what the resourceful designers at Studio Swine did on a recent trip to São Paulo.

The London-based designers call their project Can City. It was inspired by São Paulo’s informal recycling system, which is powered by catadores — independent collectors who gather aluminium and cast-offs in their handmade carts. The Swine team created a small, impromptu furniture production facility using little more than local tools and secondhand “waste” materials.

Here’s how it worked. The design duo created a makeshift foundry fuelled by vegetable oil from local cafes; once up and running, these were strong enough to melt down crushed cans — which were then poured into molds using sand from nearby construction sites.

The resulting collection of stools was created using the forms of items found at food markets (where there were also intended for use), resulting in a new kind of seating vernacular. While this “cast on demand” system might cut into the profits reaped by these catadores, and thus it’s tough to imagine them catching on in a large scale, it’s still amazing to see it in-action.

The idea of rethinking the way we treat our rubbish is one that Studio Swine has mastered; most notably, perhaps, with their Sea Chair (which they subsequently open-sourced), a stool made from plastic trash sourced from the ocean. But the duo also take cues from other eras, like the Brazilian Tropicalia movement — the basis for this unique wood and blown-bottle series. It’s quite a range of references for a duo based in England.

We’re excited to see where their travels take them next.

[MIKA27]

Buggy Or Plane? The SkyRunner Is Both

http://youtu.be/ksIpOQgDCUA

Sick of standing outside the buggy and light-wing aircraft stores — conveniently located side-by-side — pondering which mechanical fun device is more worthy of your dollars? Yeah, I haven’t done that recently either, but if the conundrum ever does present itself, you won’t have to compromise: just pick yourself up a SkyRunner.

At first glance, the 420kg vehicle looks mostly like a buggy. It’s only when you do the full 360-degree tour that the rear propeller becomes clearly evident and if you’re particularly observant, you may notice the small wing-like structures on either side of the chassis.

Speaking of the body, it’s constructed of a glass and carbon fibre composite and houses a one-litre, V4 “EcoBoost” engine with an output of 92kW @ 6000rpm. On land, the SkyRunner’s maximum speed is 185km/h, while in the air it can manage 88.5km/h (wind permitting), though you’ll need to hit 59.5km/h before you can actually take off. It can get up to 15,000 feet (4.57km), but you might have trouble breathing unassisted at that altitude.

Those worried about running into trouble while airborne need not worry, a parachute is built into the buggy so you can float safety to the ground.

All this, including the potential for oxygen deprivation, will set you back $US119,000 and you’ll need to wait until 2014 to see the thing. This, however, isn’t so much of a problem as it’s not mentioned on the website if they’ll even ship it to Australia.

[MIKA27]

THE ROCKSTAR WHISKY BAR

The Rockstar Whiskey Bar by Buster + Punch is one cool piece of furniture. The classy, high-end booze shrine and dispensary is hand made to order in the UK from either American Black Walnut or Blackened Ash, as for the quilted back panel you have the option of sumptuous Grey Berry silk or rockstar Black Leather. The mid-century modern cocktail bar also features a brass light with a snake’s heat cage for protection, and is finished with solid brass detailing. Rock on!

[MIKA27]

Firefly Trailer:

Not everyone needs (or even wants) a full-fledged RV when they take to the road, and for some, even a small towable trailer is overkill. For the guy who doesn't need much, but still wants the comfort and security of an enclosed space to rest his head, there's the Firefly Trailer ($TBA).

Designed and built by a former NASA architect who specializes in small habitats (and being sold by the company behind the unique Cricket Trailer) , this lightweight aluminum living space drops easily into the bed of a pickup truck. It features a folding couch perfect for sleeping and sitting, plenty of storage space to hold your essentials, and lunar-lander-like legs to keep it safely off the ground.

[polarbear]

Firefly Trailer:

Not the "Firefly" I thought it was when i read the title

I thought all my Nathan Fillion/Joss Whedon dreams had come true...

*sigh* back to re-runs I guess...

[MIKA27]

Does Anyone Understand Why Megan Fox Is In This Call Of Duty: Ghosts Ad?

Don’t get me wrong, I’m as much a fan of weird cameos as the next guy. The more random the better, but I don’t really understand the Megan Fox cameo in the latest ad for Call Of Duty: Ghosts.

I mean, it’s not like it’s offensive or anything, it just straight-up makes no sense.

I guess Infinity Ward and Activision want to pitch this game at bros who love bro-ing out in Vegas and on their bro-tastic video games before bro-perving on Megan Fox?