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

[MIKA27]

Local Officials Investigate Gnome Sightings:

Local officials are investigating a number of “Gnome Sightings” in the Graubünden canton of Switzerland after a local farmer photographed something that some people are claiming “proves that Gnomes are real.” The farmer, who wishes to stay anonymous, setup a hidden motion activated camera after the vegetables in his garden began disappearing. Expecting to catch an unscrupulous neighbor or possibly a rodent, he was shocked by what he saw while reviewing the pictures the next morning.

“I couldn’t believe what I was seeing. It was just like people had described.” said the man. Although very dark, the images he captured do contain what some people are calling the “Graubünden Gnome.” This follows a rash of reports by locals villagers throughout Graubünden over the last 18 months of “tiny human-like creatures with pointy ears and sharp teeth.”I wanted people to be aware because I don’t know if these things are dangerous” said the farmer. “I have nothing to gain from this. Only ridicule from my neighbors.”

The word Gnome comes from Renaissance Latin gnomus, which first appears in the works of 16th century Swiss alchemist Paracelsus where he perhaps derived the term from Latin gēnomos (itself representing a Greek γη-νομος, literally “earth-dweller”). Some villages in Graubünden have a history of nome sightings that date back more than 500 years.

Architect David Bianchi was visiting friends in Arosa when he encountered what he describes as a “tiny human-like creature with pointy ears and sharp teeth.” “I grabbed a light and went outside to investigate a strange noise I heard by the garden.” said Bianchi.

“I could see a small figure of no more than 30 centimeters moving in the plants.” I thought maybe it was an animal or a small child but when I shined my light on it I could see it was neither.” “It had wrinkles like an old person but it was no person. It had sharp ears and teeth and you could see veins through it’s skin. I froze briefly until it hissed and ran away.” Binachi was at first hesitant to discuss the encounter with anyone. “I grew up in Meiringen where many people claimed to see river monsters in the Arre River and I always thought they were crazy.”

The photos are being investigated by James Moore of the Gnome Society which claims to be the largest “gnomologic community” in the world. “We are running extensive tests on these photos to determine their authenticity but everything so far leads us to believe that these are genuine.” Mr. Moore expects the tests to be completed within two weeks. In the meantime, many villages in Graubünden are recommending that small children don’t go outside after dark.

[MIKA27]

PENNY LANE: SECRET CIA GUANTANAMO FACILITY TRAINED PRISONERS TO BE DOUBLE AGENTS

WASHINGTON (AP) - In the early years after 9/11, the CIA turned some Guantanamo Bay prisoners into double agents then sent them home to help the U.S. kill terrorists, current and former U.S. officials said.

The CIA promised the prisoners freedom, safety for their families and millions of dollars from the agency's secret accounts.

It was a risky gamble. Officials knew there was a chance that some prisoners might quickly spurn their deal and kill Americans.

For the CIA, that was an acceptable risk in a dangerous business. For the American public, which was never told, the program was one of the many secret trade-offs the government made on its behalf. At the same time the government used the risk of terrorism to justify imprisoning people indefinitely, it was releasing dangerous people from prison to work for the CIA.

The program was carried out in a secret facility built a few hundred yards from the administrative offices of the prison in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. The eight small cottages were hidden behind a ridge covered in thick scrub and cactus.

The program and the handful of men who passed through these cottages had various official CIA code names.

But those who were aware of the cluster of cottages knew it best by its sobriquet: Penny Lane.

It was a nod to the classic Beatles song and a riff on the CIA's other secret facility at Guantanamo Bay, a prison known as Strawberry Fields.

Nearly a dozen current and former U.S officials described aspects of the program to The Associated Press. All spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the secret program publicly by name, even though it ended in about 2006.

Some of the men who passed through Penny Lane helped the CIA find and kill many top al-Qaida operatives, current and former U.S. officials said. Others stopped providing useful information and the CIA lost touch with them.

When prisoners began streaming into Guantanamo Bay in January 2002, the CIA recognized it as an unprecedented opportunity to identify sources. That year, 632 detainees arrived at the detention center. The following year 117 more arrived.

"Of course that would be an objective," said Emile Nakhleh, a former top CIA analyst who spent time in 2002 assessing detainees but who did not discuss Penny Lane. "It's the job of intelligence to recruit sources."

By early 2003, Penny Lane was open for business.

Candidates were ushered from the confines of prison to Penny Lane's relative hominess, officials said. The cottages had private kitchens, showers and televisions. Each had a small patio.

Some prisoners asked for and received pornography. One official said the biggest luxury in each cottage was the bed - not a military-issued cot but a real bed with a mattress.

The cottages were designed to feel more like hotel rooms than prison cells, and some CIA officials jokingly referred to them collectively as the Marriott.

Current and former officials said dozens of prisoners were evaluated but only a handful, from a variety of countries, were turned into spies who signed agreements to work for the CIA.

CIA spokesman Dean Boyd declined to comment.

The U.S. government says it has confirmed that about 16 percent of former Guantanamo Bay detainees rejoined the fight against America. Officials suspect but have not confirmed that 12 percent more rejoined.

It's not clear whether the men from Penny Lane are included in those figures. But because only a small number of people went through the program, it would not likely change the figures significantly either way. None of the officials interviewed by the AP knew of an instance in which any double agent killed Americans.

Though the number of double agents recruited through Penny Lane was small, the program was significant enough to draw keen attention from President George W. Bush, one former official said. Bush personally interviewed a junior CIA case officer who had just returned home from Afghanistan, where the agency typically met with the agents.

President Barack Obama took an interest the program for a different reason. Shortly after taking office in 2009, he ordered a review of the former detainees working as double agents because they were providing information used in Predator drone strikes, one of the officials said.

Infiltrating al-Qaida has been one of the CIA's most sought-after but difficult goals, something that other foreign intelligence services have only occasionally accomplished. Candidates for Penny Lane needed legitimate terrorist connections. To be valuable to the CIA, the men had to be able to reconnect with al-Qaida.

From the Bush administration descriptions of Guantanamo Bay prisoners at the time, the CIA would have seemingly had a large pool to draw from. Vice President **** Cheney called the prisoners "the worst of a very bad lot." Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld said they were "among the most dangerous, best trained, vicious killers on the face of the Earth."

In reality, many were held on flimsy evidence and were of little use to the CIA.

While the agency looked for viable candidates, those with no terrorism ties sat in limbo. It would take years before the majority of detainees were set free, having never been charged. Of the 779 people who were taken to Guantanamo Bay, more than three-fourths have been released, mostly during the Bush administration.

Many others remain at Guantanamo Bay, having been cleared for release by the military but with no hope for freedom in sight.

"I do see the irony on the surface of letting some really very bad guys go," said David Remes, an American lawyer who has represented about a dozen Yemeni detainees at Guantanamo.

But Remes, who was not aware of Penny Lane, said he understands its attraction.

"The men we were sending back as agents were thought to be able to provide value to us," he said.

Prisoners agreed to cooperate for a variety of reasons, officials said. Some received assurances that the U.S. would resettle their families. Another thought al-Qaida had perverted Islam and believed it was his duty as a Muslim to help the CIA destroy it. One detainee agreed to cooperate after the CIA insinuated it would harm his children, a former official said, similar to the threats interrogators had made to admitted 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed.

All were promised money. Exactly how much each was paid remains unclear. But altogether, the government paid millions of dollars for their services, officials said. The money came from a secret CIA account, codenamed Pledge, that's used to pay informants, officials said.

The arrangement led to strategic discussions inside the CIA: If the agency's drones had a shot at Osama bin Laden or his deputy, Ayman al-Zawahri, would officials take the shot if it meant killing a double agent on the American payroll?

It never came to that.

The biggest fear, former officials involved with the program recalled, was that a former detainee would attack Americans then publicly announce that he had been on the CIA payroll.

Al-Qaida suspected the CIA would attempt a program like this and its operatives have been very suspicious of former Guantanamo Bay detainees, intelligence officials and experts said.

In one case, a former official recalled, al-Qaida came close to discovering one of the double agents in its midst.

The U.S. government had such high hopes for Penny Lane that one former intelligence official recalled discussions about whether to secretly release a pair of Pakistani men into the United States on student or business visas. The hope was that they would connect with al-Qaida and lead authorities to members of a U.S. cell.

Another former senior intelligence official said that never happened.

Officials said the program ended in 2006, as the flow of detainees to Guantanamo Bay slowed to a trickle. The last prisoner arrived there in 2008.

Penny Lane still stands and can be seen in satellite photos. A dirt road winds its way to a clearing. The special detachment of Marines that once provided security is gone. The complex is surrounded by two fences and hidden among the trees and shrubs of Guantanamo Bay.

It has long been abandoned.

[MIKA27]

The internet mystery that has the world baffled

For the past two years, a mysterious online organisation has been setting the world's finest code-breakers a series of seemingly unsolveable problems. But to what end? Welcome to the world of Cicada 3301

One evening in January last year, Joel Eriksson, a 34-year-old computer analyst from Uppsala in Sweden, was trawling the web, looking for distraction, when he came across a message on an internet forum. The message was in stark white type, against a black background.

“Hello,” it said. “We are looking for highly intelligent individuals. To find them, we have devised a test. There is a message hidden in this image. Find it, and it will lead you on the road to finding us. We look forward to meeting the few that will make it all the way through. Good luck.”

The message was signed: "3301”.

A self-confessed IT security "freak” and a skilled cryptographer, Eriksson’s interest was immediately piqued. This was – he knew – an example of digital steganography: the concealment of secret information within a digital file. Most often seen in conjunction with image files, a recipient who can work out the code – for example, to alter the colour of every 100th pixel – can retrieve an entirely different image from the randomised background "noise”.

It’s a technique more commonly associated with nefarious ends, such as concealing child pornography. In 2002 it was suggested that al-Qaeda operatives had planned the September 11 attacks via the auction site eBay, by encrypting messages inside digital photographs.

Sleepily – it was late, and he had work in the morning – Eriksson thought he’d try his luck decoding the message from "3301”.

After only a few minutes work he’d got somewhere: a reference to "Tiberius Claudius Caesar” and a line of meaningless letters. Joel deduced it might be an embedded "Caesar cipher” – an encryption technique named after Julius Caesar, who used it in private correspondence. It replaces characters by a letter a certain number of positions down the alphabet. As Claudius was the fourth emperor, it suggested "four” might be important – and lo, within minutes, Eriksson found another web address buried in the image’s code.

Feeling satisfied, he clicked the link.

It was a picture of a duck with the message: "Woops! Just decoys this way. Looks like you can’t guess how to get the message out.”

"If something is too easy or too routine, I quickly lose interest,” says Eriksson. "But it seemed like the challenge was a bit harder than a Caesar cipher after all. I was hooked.”

Eriksson didn’t realise it then, but he was embarking on one of the internet’s most enduring puzzles; a scavenger hunt that has led thousands of competitors across the web, down telephone lines, out to several physical locations around the globe, and into unchartered areas of the "darknet”. So far, the hunt has required a knowledge of number theory, philosophy and classical music. An interest in both cyberpunk literature and the Victorian occult has also come in handy as has an understanding of Mayan numerology.

It has also featured a poem, a tuneless guitar ditty, a femme fatale called "Wind” who may, or may not, exist in real life, and a clue on a lamp post in Hawaii. Only one thing is certain: as it stands, no one is entirely sure what the challenge – known as Cicada 3301 – is all about or who is behind it. Depending on who you listen to, it’s either a mysterious secret society, a statement by a new political think tank, or an arcane recruitment drive by some quasi-military body. Which means, of course, everyone thinks it’s the CIA.

For some, it’s just a fun game, like a more complicated Sudoku; for others, it has become an obsession. Almost two years on, Eriksson is still trying to work out what it means for him. "It is, ultimately, a battle of the brains,” he says. "And I have always had a hard time resisting a challenge.”

On the night of January 5 2012, after reading the "decoy” message from the duck, Eriksson began to tinker with other variables.

Taking the duck’s mockery as a literal clue, Eriksson decided to run it through a decryption program called OutGuess. Success: another hidden message, this time linking to another messageboard on the massively popular news forum Reddit. Here, encrypted lines from a book were being posted every few hours. But there were also strange symbols comprising of several lines and dots – Mayan numbers, Eriksson realised. And duly translated, they led to another cipher.

Up until now, Eriksson would admit, none of the puzzles had really required any advanced skills, or suggested anything other than a single anonymous riddle-poser having some fun. "But then it all changed,” says Eriksson. "And things started getting interesting.”

Suddenly, the encryption techniques jumped up a gear. And the puzzles themselves mutated in several different directions: hexadecimal characters, reverse-engineering, prime numbers. Pictures of the cicada insect – reminiscent of the moth imagery in Thomas Harris’s The Silence of the Lambs – became a common motif.

"I knew cicadas only emerge every prime number of years – 13, or 17 – to avoid synchronising with the life cycles of their predators,” says Eriksson. "It was all starting to fit together.” The references became more arcane too. The book, for example, turned out to be "The Lady of the Fountain”, a poem about King Arthur taken from The Mabinogion, a collection of pre-Christian medieval Welsh manuscripts.

Later, the puzzle would lead him to the cyberpunk writer William Gibson – specifically his 1992 poem "Agrippa” (a book of the dead), infamous for the fact that it was only published on a 3.5in floppy disk, and was programmed to erase itself after being read once. But as word spread across the web, thousands of amateur codebreakers joined the hunt for clues. Armies of users of 4chan, the anarchic internet forum where the first Cicada message is thought to have appeared, pooled their collective intelligence – and endless free time – to crack the puzzles.

Within hours they’d decoded "The Lady of the Fountain”. The new message, however, was another surprise: "Call us,” it read, "at telephone number 214-390-9608”. By this point, only a few days after the original image was posted, Eriksson had taken time off work to join the pursuit full time.

"This was definitely an unexpected turn,” he recalls. "And the first hint that this might not just be the work of a random internet troll.” Although now disconnected, the phone line was based in Texas, and led to an answering machine. There, a robotic voice told them to find the prime numbers in the original image. By multiplying them together, the solvers found a new prime and a new website: 845145127.com. A countdown clock and a huge picture of a cicada confirmed they were on the right path.

"It was thrilling, breathtaking by now,” says Eriksson. "This shared feeling of discovery was immense. But the plot was about to thicken even more.” Once the countdown reached zero, at 5pm GMT on January 9, it showed 14 GPS coordinates around the world: locations in Warsaw, Paris, Seattle, Seoul, Arizona, California, New Orleans, Miami, Hawaii and Sydney. Sat in Sweden, Eriksson waited as, around the globe, amateur solvers left their apartments to investigate. And, one by one reported what they’d found: a poster, attached to a lamp post, bearing the cicada image and a QR code (the black-and-white bar code often seen on adverts these days and designed to take you to a website via your smartphone).

"It was exhilarating,” said Eriksson. "I was suddenly aware of how much effort they must have been putting into creating this kind of challenge.” For the growing Cicada community, it was explosive – proof this wasn’t merely some clever neckbeard in a basement winding people up, but actually a global organisation of talented people. But who?

Speculation had been rife since the image first appeared. Some thought Cicada might merely be a PR stunt; a particularly labyrinthine Alternate Reality Game (ARG) built by a corporation to ultimately – and disappointingly – promote a new movie or car.

Microsoft, for example, had enjoyed huge success with their critically acclaimed "I Love Bees” ARG campaign. Designed to promote the Xbox game Halo 2 in 2004, it used random payphones worldwide to broadcast a War of the Worlds-style radio drama that players would have to solve.

But there were complicating factors to Cicada. For one, the organisers were actively working against the participants. One "solver”, a female known only as Wind from Michigan, contributed to the quest on several messageboards before the community spotted she was deliberately disseminating false clues. Other interference was more pointed. One long, cautionary diatribe, left anonymously on the website Pastebin, claimed to be from an ex-Cicada member – a non-English military officer recruited to the organisation "by a superior”. Cicada, he said, "was a Left-Hand Path religion disguised as a progressive scientific organisation” – comprising of "military officers, diplomats, and academics who were dissatisfied with the direction of the world”. Their plan, the writer claimed, was to transform humanity into the Nietzschen Übermensch.

"This is a dangerous organisation,” he concluded, "their ways are nefarious.” With no other clues, it was also asssumed by many to be a recruitment drive by the CIA, MI6 or America’s National Security Agency (NSA), as part of a search for highly talented cryptologists. It wouldn’t have been the first time such tactics had been used.

Back in 2010, for example, Air Force Cyber Command – the United States’ hacking defence force, based at Fort Meade in Maryland – secretly embedded a complex hexadecimal code in their new logo. Cybercom head Lt Gen Keith Alexander then challenged the world’s amateur analysts to crack it (it took them three hours). And in September this year, GCHQ launched the "Can You Find It?” initiative – a series of cryptic codes designed to root out the best British cryptographers. As GCHQ’s head of resourcing Jane Jones said at the time, "It’s a puzzle but it’s also a serious test – the jobs on offer here are vital to protecting national security.”

Dr Jim Gillogly, former president of the American Cryptogram Association, has been cracking similar codes for years and says it’s a tried and tested recruitment tactic.

"During the Second World War, the top-secret Government Code and Cypher School used crossword puzzles printed in The Daily Telegraph to identify good candidates for Bletchley Park,” he says. "But I’m not sure the CIA or NSA is behind Cicada. Both are careful with security, the recent Snowden case notwithstanding. And starting the puzzle on [the anarchic internet forum] 4chan might attract people with less respect for authority than they would want working inside.”

But that doesn’t rule out other organisations. "Computer and data security is more important than ever today,” says Dr Gillogly. The proliferation of wireless devices, mobile telephones, e-commerce websites like Amazon and chip-and-pin machines, means the demand for cryptologists has never been higher. (Something the UK government acknowledged last year when it announced it was setting up 11 academic "centres of excellence” in cyber security research.)

"One of the more important components of security systems is the efficacy of the cryptography being used,” says Dr Gillogly. "Which means cryptanalysts are in higher demand than ever before - no longer just with the intelligence services. It could just as easily be a bank or software company [behind Cicada].”

Eriksson himself agrees. As a regular speaker at Black Hat Briefings – the secretive computer security conferences where government agencies and corporations get advice from hackers – he knows certain organisations occasionally go "fishing” for new recruits like this. But to him the signs point to a recruitment drive by a hacker group like Anonymous.

"I can’t help but notice,” he says, "that the locations in question are all places with some of the most talented hackers and IT security researchers in the world.” Either way, their identity would prove irrelevant. When the QR codes left on the lamp posts were decoded, a hidden message pointed the solvers towards a TOR address. TOR, short for The Onion Router, is an obscure routing network that allows anonymous access to the "darknet” – the vast, murky portion of the internet that cannot be indexed by standard search engines. Estimated to be 5,000 times larger that the "surface" web, it’s in these recesses where you’ll find human-trafficking rings, black market drug markets and terrorist networks. And it’s here where the Cicada path ended.

After a designated number of solvers visited the address, the website shut down with a terse message: "We want the best, not the followers." The chosen few received personal emails – detailing what, none have said, although one solver heard they were now being asked to solve puzzles in private. Eriksson, however, was not among them. "It was my biggest anticlimax – when I was too late to register my email at the TOR hidden service," he says. "If my sleep-wake cycle had been different, I believe I would have been among the first." Regardless, a few weeks later, a new message from Cicada was posted on Reddit. It read: "Hello. We have now found the individuals we sought. Thus our month-long journey ends. For now." All too abruptly for thousands of intrigued solvers, it had gone quiet.

Except no. On January 4 this year, something new. A fresh image, with a new message in the same white text: "Hello again. Our search for intelligent individuals now continues." Analysis of the image would reveal another poem – this time from the book Liber Al Vel Legis, a religious doctrine by the English occultist and magician Aleister Crowley. From there, the solvers downloaded a 130Mb file containing thousands of prime numbers. And also an MP3 file: a song called The Instar Emergence by the artist 3301, which begins with the sound of – guess what – cicadas.

Analysis of that has since led to a Twitter account pumping out random numbers, which in turn produced a "gematria": an ancient Hebrew code table, but this time based on Anglo-Saxon runes. This pointed the solvers back into the darknet, where they found seven new physical locations, from Dallas to Moscow to Okinawa, and more clues. But that’s where, once again, the trail has gone cold. Another select group of "first solvers" have been accepted into a new "private" puzzle – this time, say reports, a kind of Myers-Briggs multiple-choice personality test.

But still, we are no closer to knowing the source, or fundamental purpose, of Cicada 3301. "That’s the beauty of it though," says Eriksson. "It is impossible to know for sure until you have solved it all." That is why for him, and thousands of other hooked enthusiasts, January 4 2014 is so important: that’s when the next set of riddles is due to begin again. "Maybe all will be revealed then," he grins. "But somehow, I doubt it."

[polarbear]

The internet mystery that has the world baffled

For the past two years, a mysterious online organisation has been setting the world's finest code-breakers a series of seemingly unsolveable problems. But to what end? Welcome to the world of Cicada 3301

One evening in January last year, Joel Eriksson, a 34-year-old computer analyst from Uppsala in Sweden, was trawling the web, looking for distraction, when he came across a message on an internet forum. The message was in stark white type, against a black background.

“Hello,” it said. “We are looking for highly intelligent individuals. To find them, we have devised a test. There is a message hidden in this image. Find it, and it will lead you on the road to finding us. We look forward to meeting the few that will make it all the way through. Good luck.”

The message was signed: "3301”.

A self-confessed IT security "freak” and a skilled cryptographer, Eriksson’s interest was immediately piqued. This was – he knew – an example of digital steganography: the concealment of secret information within a digital file. Most often seen in conjunction with image files, a recipient who can work out the code – for example, to alter the colour of every 100th pixel – can retrieve an entirely different image from the randomised background "noise”.

It’s a technique more commonly associated with nefarious ends, such as concealing child pornography. In 2002 it was suggested that al-Qaeda operatives had planned the September 11 attacks via the auction site eBay, by encrypting messages inside digital photographs.

Sleepily – it was late, and he had work in the morning – Eriksson thought he’d try his luck decoding the message from "3301”.

After only a few minutes work he’d got somewhere: a reference to "Tiberius Claudius Caesar” and a line of meaningless letters. Joel deduced it might be an embedded "Caesar cipher” – an encryption technique named after Julius Caesar, who used it in private correspondence. It replaces characters by a letter a certain number of positions down the alphabet. As Claudius was the fourth emperor, it suggested "four” might be important – and lo, within minutes, Eriksson found another web address buried in the image’s code.

Feeling satisfied, he clicked the link.

It was a picture of a duck with the message: "Woops! Just decoys this way. Looks like you can’t guess how to get the message out.”

"If something is too easy or too routine, I quickly lose interest,” says Eriksson. "But it seemed like the challenge was a bit harder than a Caesar cipher after all. I was hooked.”

Eriksson didn’t realise it then, but he was embarking on one of the internet’s most enduring puzzles; a scavenger hunt that has led thousands of competitors across the web, down telephone lines, out to several physical locations around the globe, and into unchartered areas of the "darknet”. So far, the hunt has required a knowledge of number theory, philosophy and classical music. An interest in both cyberpunk literature and the Victorian occult has also come in handy as has an understanding of Mayan numerology.

It has also featured a poem, a tuneless guitar ditty, a femme fatale called "Wind” who may, or may not, exist in real life, and a clue on a lamp post in Hawaii. Only one thing is certain: as it stands, no one is entirely sure what the challenge – known as Cicada 3301 – is all about or who is behind it. Depending on who you listen to, it’s either a mysterious secret society, a statement by a new political think tank, or an arcane recruitment drive by some quasi-military body. Which means, of course, everyone thinks it’s the CIA.

For some, it’s just a fun game, like a more complicated Sudoku; for others, it has become an obsession. Almost two years on, Eriksson is still trying to work out what it means for him. "It is, ultimately, a battle of the brains,” he says. "And I have always had a hard time resisting a challenge.”

On the night of January 5 2012, after reading the "decoy” message from the duck, Eriksson began to tinker with other variables.

Taking the duck’s mockery as a literal clue, Eriksson decided to run it through a decryption program called OutGuess. Success: another hidden message, this time linking to another messageboard on the massively popular news forum Reddit. Here, encrypted lines from a book were being posted every few hours. But there were also strange symbols comprising of several lines and dots – Mayan numbers, Eriksson realised. And duly translated, they led to another cipher.

Up until now, Eriksson would admit, none of the puzzles had really required any advanced skills, or suggested anything other than a single anonymous riddle-poser having some fun. "But then it all changed,” says Eriksson. "And things started getting interesting.”

Suddenly, the encryption techniques jumped up a gear. And the puzzles themselves mutated in several different directions: hexadecimal characters, reverse-engineering, prime numbers. Pictures of the cicada insect – reminiscent of the moth imagery in Thomas Harris’s The Silence of the Lambs – became a common motif.

"I knew cicadas only emerge every prime number of years – 13, or 17 – to avoid synchronising with the life cycles of their predators,” says Eriksson. "It was all starting to fit together.” The references became more arcane too. The book, for example, turned out to be "The Lady of the Fountain”, a poem about King Arthur taken from The Mabinogion, a collection of pre-Christian medieval Welsh manuscripts.

Later, the puzzle would lead him to the cyberpunk writer William Gibson – specifically his 1992 poem "Agrippa” (a book of the dead), infamous for the fact that it was only published on a 3.5in floppy disk, and was programmed to erase itself after being read once. But as word spread across the web, thousands of amateur codebreakers joined the hunt for clues. Armies of users of 4chan, the anarchic internet forum where the first Cicada message is thought to have appeared, pooled their collective intelligence – and endless free time – to crack the puzzles.

Within hours they’d decoded "The Lady of the Fountain”. The new message, however, was another surprise: "Call us,” it read, "at telephone number 214-390-9608”. By this point, only a few days after the original image was posted, Eriksson had taken time off work to join the pursuit full time.

"This was definitely an unexpected turn,” he recalls. "And the first hint that this might not just be the work of a random internet troll.” Although now disconnected, the phone line was based in Texas, and led to an answering machine. There, a robotic voice told them to find the prime numbers in the original image. By multiplying them together, the solvers found a new prime and a new website: 845145127.com. A countdown clock and a huge picture of a cicada confirmed they were on the right path.

"It was thrilling, breathtaking by now,” says Eriksson. "This shared feeling of discovery was immense. But the plot was about to thicken even more.” Once the countdown reached zero, at 5pm GMT on January 9, it showed 14 GPS coordinates around the world: locations in Warsaw, Paris, Seattle, Seoul, Arizona, California, New Orleans, Miami, Hawaii and Sydney. Sat in Sweden, Eriksson waited as, around the globe, amateur solvers left their apartments to investigate. And, one by one reported what they’d found: a poster, attached to a lamp post, bearing the cicada image and a QR code (the black-and-white bar code often seen on adverts these days and designed to take you to a website via your smartphone).

"It was exhilarating,” said Eriksson. "I was suddenly aware of how much effort they must have been putting into creating this kind of challenge.” For the growing Cicada community, it was explosive – proof this wasn’t merely some clever neckbeard in a basement winding people up, but actually a global organisation of talented people. But who?

Speculation had been rife since the image first appeared. Some thought Cicada might merely be a PR stunt; a particularly labyrinthine Alternate Reality Game (ARG) built by a corporation to ultimately – and disappointingly – promote a new movie or car.

Microsoft, for example, had enjoyed huge success with their critically acclaimed "I Love Bees” ARG campaign. Designed to promote the Xbox game Halo 2 in 2004, it used random payphones worldwide to broadcast a War of the Worlds-style radio drama that players would have to solve.

But there were complicating factors to Cicada. For one, the organisers were actively working against the participants. One "solver”, a female known only as Wind from Michigan, contributed to the quest on several messageboards before the community spotted she was deliberately disseminating false clues. Other interference was more pointed. One long, cautionary diatribe, left anonymously on the website Pastebin, claimed to be from an ex-Cicada member – a non-English military officer recruited to the organisation "by a superior”. Cicada, he said, "was a Left-Hand Path religion disguised as a progressive scientific organisation” – comprising of "military officers, diplomats, and academics who were dissatisfied with the direction of the world”. Their plan, the writer claimed, was to transform humanity into the Nietzschen Übermensch.

"This is a dangerous organisation,” he concluded, "their ways are nefarious.” With no other clues, it was also asssumed by many to be a recruitment drive by the CIA, MI6 or America’s National Security Agency (NSA), as part of a search for highly talented cryptologists. It wouldn’t have been the first time such tactics had been used.

Back in 2010, for example, Air Force Cyber Command – the United States’ hacking defence force, based at Fort Meade in Maryland – secretly embedded a complex hexadecimal code in their new logo. Cybercom head Lt Gen Keith Alexander then challenged the world’s amateur analysts to crack it (it took them three hours). And in September this year, GCHQ launched the "Can You Find It?” initiative – a series of cryptic codes designed to root out the best British cryptographers. As GCHQ’s head of resourcing Jane Jones said at the time, "It’s a puzzle but it’s also a serious test – the jobs on offer here are vital to protecting national security.”

Dr Jim Gillogly, former president of the American Cryptogram Association, has been cracking similar codes for years and says it’s a tried and tested recruitment tactic.

"During the Second World War, the top-secret Government Code and Cypher School used crossword puzzles printed in The Daily Telegraph to identify good candidates for Bletchley Park,” he says. "But I’m not sure the CIA or NSA is behind Cicada. Both are careful with security, the recent Snowden case notwithstanding. And starting the puzzle on [the anarchic internet forum] 4chan might attract people with less respect for authority than they would want working inside.”

But that doesn’t rule out other organisations. "Computer and data security is more important than ever today,” says Dr Gillogly. The proliferation of wireless devices, mobile telephones, e-commerce websites like Amazon and chip-and-pin machines, means the demand for cryptologists has never been higher. (Something the UK government acknowledged last year when it announced it was setting up 11 academic "centres of excellence” in cyber security research.)

"One of the more important components of security systems is the efficacy of the cryptography being used,” says Dr Gillogly. "Which means cryptanalysts are in higher demand than ever before - no longer just with the intelligence services. It could just as easily be a bank or software company [behind Cicada].”

Eriksson himself agrees. As a regular speaker at Black Hat Briefings – the secretive computer security conferences where government agencies and corporations get advice from hackers – he knows certain organisations occasionally go "fishing” for new recruits like this. But to him the signs point to a recruitment drive by a hacker group like Anonymous.

"I can’t help but notice,” he says, "that the locations in question are all places with some of the most talented hackers and IT security researchers in the world.” Either way, their identity would prove irrelevant. When the QR codes left on the lamp posts were decoded, a hidden message pointed the solvers towards a TOR address. TOR, short for The Onion Router, is an obscure routing network that allows anonymous access to the "darknet” – the vast, murky portion of the internet that cannot be indexed by standard search engines. Estimated to be 5,000 times larger that the "surface" web, it’s in these recesses where you’ll find human-trafficking rings, black market drug markets and terrorist networks. And it’s here where the Cicada path ended.

After a designated number of solvers visited the address, the website shut down with a terse message: "We want the best, not the followers." The chosen few received personal emails – detailing what, none have said, although one solver heard they were now being asked to solve puzzles in private. Eriksson, however, was not among them. "It was my biggest anticlimax – when I was too late to register my email at the TOR hidden service," he says. "If my sleep-wake cycle had been different, I believe I would have been among the first." Regardless, a few weeks later, a new message from Cicada was posted on Reddit. It read: "Hello. We have now found the individuals we sought. Thus our month-long journey ends. For now." All too abruptly for thousands of intrigued solvers, it had gone quiet.

Except no. On January 4 this year, something new. A fresh image, with a new message in the same white text: "Hello again. Our search for intelligent individuals now continues." Analysis of the image would reveal another poem – this time from the book Liber Al Vel Legis, a religious doctrine by the English occultist and magician Aleister Crowley. From there, the solvers downloaded a 130Mb file containing thousands of prime numbers. And also an MP3 file: a song called The Instar Emergence by the artist 3301, which begins with the sound of – guess what – cicadas.

Analysis of that has since led to a Twitter account pumping out random numbers, which in turn produced a "gematria": an ancient Hebrew code table, but this time based on Anglo-Saxon runes. This pointed the solvers back into the darknet, where they found seven new physical locations, from Dallas to Moscow to Okinawa, and more clues. But that’s where, once again, the trail has gone cold. Another select group of "first solvers" have been accepted into a new "private" puzzle – this time, say reports, a kind of Myers-Briggs multiple-choice personality test.

But still, we are no closer to knowing the source, or fundamental purpose, of Cicada 3301. "That’s the beauty of it though," says Eriksson. "It is impossible to know for sure until you have solved it all." That is why for him, and thousands of other hooked enthusiasts, January 4 2014 is so important: that’s when the next set of riddles is due to begin again. "Maybe all will be revealed then," he grins. "But somehow, I doubt it."

It sounds like the plot of a Dan Brown Novel

I'm intrigued

[MIKA27]

The 'Highway Of Light' That Guided Early Planes Across America

The dusty landscape of the American West is dotted with enormous concrete arrows. They look like cryptic messages from a primitive civilisation — a civilisation that was obsessed with westward expansion. And that assessment wouldn’t be altogether wrong. But these enormous arrows pointing west tell only part of the story. Because at the dawn of aviation, they were part of America’s highway of light — a high-tech system of lighthouses showing pilots how to get from New York City all the way to San Francisco.

“[Airmail is an] impractical sort of fad and has no place in the serious job of postal transportation.” – Second Assistant U.S. Postmaster General Paul Henderson in 1922

When the U.S. Postal Service opened up airmail routes during the early 1920s, many people saw it as a frivolous novelty. What good was sending mail by air? Sure, planes could travel faster than trains. But aeroplanes could only operate safely during the daytime, whereas trains could run all night.

As a result, early transcontinental airmail delivery was a hybrid system. In 1922, letters sent by airmail would have to leapfrog the country, travelling by air during the day and by train at night. Using this process, a letter moving at its absolute fastest might take about 83 hours to get from New York to San Francisco.

The few pilots who did try to travel at night during this time were taking their lives in their hands. Nearly 1 in 10 early airmail pilots died during the early days of the postal service’s airmail initiative, and emergency landings were common. There had to be a safer way.

Enter the highway of light — a system of airmail beacons that spanned the country.

Built by the U.S. government, the airmail beacons of the mid-1920s helped pilots find their way much more safely — whether it was day or night. Spaced out every few miles, from New York to San Francisco, each site consisted of a revolving motor-driven light which sat at the top of a 60-foot tower. The 1931 illustration above from the FAA archives shows how the light tower sat in between a concrete arrow on the ground and a building that contained a generator, which powered the entire thing.

Originally approved by Congress in 1921, the light beacon system was planned to cross the entire United States by mid-decade.

Unfortunately, President Warren G. Harding slashed funding and the issue wouldn’t gain steam again until the mid-1920s.

Previously, the most reliable method of navigation for pilots was to use their old fashioned rivals as a guide; following the railroad routes ensured that they were staying on track. But this new system of towers — inland lighthouses with gigantic concrete arrows pointing the way — allowed air pilots to navigate without depending solely on yesterday’s infrastructure.

Once the new lighted airway was in place, that same letter that used to take 83 hours took just 33 hours to get from New York to San Francisco. By 1926, the Transcontinental Airway System’s light beacons were brought under the authority of the Bureau of Lighthouses and crossing the country by air (day or night) was considered much safer.

These advancements also made the country feel that much smaller, as evidenced by the undated (circa 1925), map below which showed the size of the U.S. in relation to how mail was shipped during different eras.

Upon completion of the system in 1933, there were about 1,550 light beacons stretching across 18,000 miles, guiding the way and pushing America into a new era of communication. Long distance telephony was expensive. And even though radio was all the rage — and fast becoming a coast-to-coast experience — sending a letter was still the most economical way to deliver any message among private citizens.

On April 17, 1926 the mayor of Los Angeles sent the mayor of New York City an oversized letter proudly stating that it would cross the country in just 30 hours. Such a letter wouldn’t have been possible without the new lighted airway system.

Maintaining a network of light stations across the U.S. wasn’t cheap. The October 1928 issue of Popular Aviation magazine laid out the enormous costs by looking at what it took to keep just one light station in proper working order.

The beacon light (not including the tower it rested on) was $US475, the automatic lamp changer was $US50, the lamps were $US6.50 (and only lasted for about 60 hours, tops), electricity to run it ranged from $US50-$80 per month, $US5 per month was spent for someone to maintain the station, and renting the land (usually from a farmer) was $US5 per year.

By Popular Aviation‘s estimates, it cost about $US110 per month (about $US1,500 adjusted for inflation) just to keep a single station in operation. With about 1,550 stations, that worked out to a budget of about $US2.32 million (in 2013 dollars) per month.

As planes got bigger and technology allowed for safer travel, the highway of light would become a relic. New air travel records were getting knocked down left and right. And the postwar explosion in aviation made city-jumping old hat.

Today, the system’s towers and generators are largely gone, leaving gigantic concrete arrows for bewildered backpackers to find. But these concrete ghosts — Jazz Age residue that lightly stains the American landscape — are a mere hint of the marvellous highway of light that guided daredevil postmen nearly a century earlier.

[MIKA27]

The Predictions Of Aldous Huxley On The 50th Anniversary Of His Death

Aldous Huxley, author of the novel Brave New World, died 50 years ago last week. Let’s use this auspicious milestone to take a look back at his predictions for the year 2000, made in 1950.

There seems to be two occasions when people most enjoy making predictions: anniversaries (think the American Bicentennial, New Year’s, etc) and dates that include round numbers (any year ending in zero). Such was the case in 1950 when many people halfway through the 20th century enjoyed predicting what life would be like in the year 2000 — obviously the roundest numbered year of our modern age.

The January 1950 issue of Redbook magazine asked, “What will the world of 2000 A.D. be like? Will the machine replace man? How will our children and grandchildren spend their leisure? How, indeed, will they look?” The mag asked four experts — curiously all men, given that Redbook was and is a magazine aimed at women — about what the world may look like 50 years hence.

Aldous Huxley, author of the 1931 dystopian novel Brave New World, looked at working life in the year 2000. Specifically, how people might work in the home, in the laboratory, in the office, in the factory and on the farm.

Aldous Huxley began his article by describing the major challenges that would confront the world at the dawn of the 21st century. He predicted that the global population would swell to 3 billion people — a figure less than half of the 6.1 billion that would prove to be a reality by 2000.

During the next 50 years mankind will face three great problems: the problem of avoiding war; the problem of feeding and clothing a population of two and a quarter billions which, by 2000 A.D., will have grown to upward of three billions, and the problem of supplying these billions without ruining the planet’s irreplaceable resources.

Let us assume — and unhappily it is a large assumption — that the nations can agree to live in peace. In this event mankind will be free to devote all its energy and skill to the solution of its other major problems.

Huxley’s predictions for food production in the year 2000 are largely a call for the conservation of resources. He correctly points out that meat production can be far less efficient than using agricultural lands for crops. Moreover, he discusses the growing importance of synthetic materials (a reality we take for granted in so many ways today). His description of synthetics was incredibly prescient, if not very surprising, coming from a man whose most famous novel imagined a high-tech world built on mass production.

By 2000, let us hope, the peoples of the world will have adopted a program to increase the planet’s output of food and other necessities, while conserving its resources. Because all available land will be needed for food production, concerted efforts will be made to derive all the fibres used for textiles from inorganic materials or vegetable wastes.

Food crops will be cultivated on the land now devoted to cotton, flax, hemp and jute, and, since wool will no longer be used, the huge flocks of sheep which now menace Australian and North American watersheds will be greatly diminished. Because of the need to give overworked soil a rest and to extract the greatest possible number of calories from every acre under cultivation, meat production, which is fantastically wasteful of land, will be cut down, and increasing attention will be given to the products, vegetable no less than animal, of the ocean. Landlocked inlets, lakes, ponds and swamps will be scientifically farmed.

In many parts of the world forests are being recklessly destroyed. To conserve them we shall have to develop new types of synthetic building materials and new sources for paper. That the production of a comic supplement should entail the death of thousands of magnificent trees is a scandal which cannot much longer be tolerated.

How will individuals be affected by all this? For many farmers the changes will mean a shift from one kind of production to another. For many others they will entail a transfer to the chemical industry. For the chemical industry is bound to grow more important as world erosion compels us, for the sake of the land, to rely increasingly on synthetics derived from practically inexhaustible inorganic materials.

The world of 2000 A.D. was seen by many to be one of increased leisure. But Huxley sees that potential for better working conditions and increased standards of living as obtainable only through a sustained peace. These same predictions of a leisure-oriented society, by Huxley and others living mid-century, would inspire the push-button cliche later parodied in the 1962 TV show “The Jetsons.”

Perhaps Huxley’s most inaccurate prediction is his assumption that an increase in productivity will mean an increase in wages for the average worker. As we’ve seen over the last half a century, increased worker productivity has not led to a dramatic increase in wages.

That enormous technological advances will be recorded during the next 50 years is certain. But to the worker as a worker, such advances will not necessarily be of great significance. It makes very little difference to the textile worker whether the stuff he handles is the product of a worm, a plant, a mammal or a chemical laboratory. Work is work, and what matters to the worker is neither the product nor the technical process, but the pay, the hours, the attitude of the boss, the physical environment. To most office and factory workers in 2000 the application of nuclear fission to industry will mean very little. What they will care about is what their fathers and mothers care about today — improvement in the conditions of labour.

Given peace, it should be possible, within the next 50 years, to improve working conditions very considerably. Better equipped, workers will produce more and therefore earn more. Meanwhile most of the hideous relics of the industrial Middle Ages will have been replaced by new factories, offices and homes. More and more factories and offices will be relocated in small country communities, where life is cheaper, pleasanter and more genuinely human than in those breeding-grounds of mass neurosis, the great metropolitan centres of today. Decentralization may help to check that march toward the asylum, which is a threat to our civilisation hardly less grave than that of erosion and A-bomb.

Huxley rightly predicts that the world would have to face the challenges that go along with having an ageing population. Huxley himself would only live to see the year 1963, but he acknowledged what life would be like for young people reading his article.

If the finished product means little to the worker, it means much to the housewife. New synthetic building materials will be easier to keep clean. New solar heating systems will be cheaper and less messy. Electronics in the kitchen will greatly simplify the task of the cook. In a word, by 2000 the business of living should have become decidedly less arduous than it is at present. But, though less arduous, it will last on the average a good deal longer.

In 2000 there will be more elderly people in the world than at any previous time. In many countries the citizens of 60-five and over will outnumber the boys and girls of fifteen and under. Pensions and a pointless leisure offer no solution to the problems of an ageing population. In 2000 the younger readers of this article, who will then be in their seventies, will probably be inhabiting a world in which the old are provided with opportunities for using their experience and remaining strength in ways satisfactory to themselves, and valuable to the community.

All in all, I’d say that Huxley’s predictions were fairly accurate in spirit. Like so many prominent people of mid-century, he fails to predict or consider the dramatic social changes that would occur which had a direct impact on the 21st century workforce. But his idea that “work is work” and people simply want to find the best work they can with the best conditions and pay seems to be a timeless observation.

[MIKA27]

Nuclear Launch Code At US Silos Was 00000000 For 20 Years

Today I found out that during the height of the Cold War, the US military put such an emphasis on a rapid response to an attack on American soil, that to minimise any foreseeable delay in launching a nuclear missile, for nearly two decades they intentionally set the launch codes at every silo in the US to eight zeroes.

We guess the first thing we need to address is how this even came to be in the first place. Well, in 1962 JFK signed the National Security Action Memorandum 160, which was supposed to ensure that every nuclear weapon the US had be fitted with a Permissive Action Link (PAL), basically a small device that ensured that the missile could only be launched with the right code and with the right authority.

There was particularly a concern that the nuclear missiles the United States had stationed in other countries, some of which with somewhat unstable leadership, could potentially be seized by those governments and launched. With the PAL system, this became much less of a problem.

Beyond foreign seizure, there was also simply the problem that many U.S. commanders had the ability to launch nukes under their control at any time. Just one commanding officer who wasn’t quite right in the head and World War III begins. As U.S. General Horace M. Wade stated about General Thomas Power:

I used to worry about General Power. I used to worry that General Power was not stable. I used to worry about the fact that he had control over so many weapons and weapon systems and could, under certain conditions, launch the force. Back in the days before we had real positive control [i.e., PAL locks], SAC had the power to do a lot of things, and it was in his hands, and he knew it.

To give you an idea of how secure the PAL system was at this time, bypassing one was once described as being “about as complex as performing a tonsillectomy while entering the patient from the wrong end.” This system was supposed to be essentially hot-wire proof, making sure only people with the correct codes could activate the nuclear weapons and launch the missiles.

However, though the devices were supposed to be fitted on every nuclear missile after JFK issued his memorandum, the military continually dragged its heels on the matter. In fact, it was noted that a full 20 years after JFK had order PALs be fitted to every nuclear device, half of the missiles in Europe were still protected by simple mechanical locks. Most that did have the new system in place weren’t even activated until 1977.

Those in the US that had been fitted with the devices, such as ones in the Minuteman Silos, were installed under the close scrutiny of Robert McNamara, JFK’s Secretary of Defence. However, The Strategic Air Command greatly resented McNamara’s presence and almost as soon as he left, the code to launch the missile’s, all 50 of them, was set to 00000000.

Oh, and in case you actually did forget the code, it was handily written down on a checklist handed out to the soldiers. As Dr Bruce G. Blair, who was once a Minuteman launch officer, stated:

Our launch checklist in fact instructed us, the firing crew, to double-check the locking panel in our underground launch bunker to ensure that no digits other than zero had been inadvertently dialed into the panel.

This ensured that there was no need to wait for Presidential confirmation that would have just wasted valuable Russian nuking time. To be fair, there was also the possibility that command centres or communication lines could be wiped out, so having a bunch of nuclear missiles sitting around un-launchable because nobody had the code was seen as a greater risk by the military brass than a few soldiers simply deciding to launch the missiles without proper authorization.

Dr Blair, whose resume to date is far to long to write out here, is the one who broke this “8 zeros” news to the world in his 2004 article “Keeping Presidents in the Nuclear Dark.” He also outlined the significant disconnect between the nation’s elected leaders and the military when it came to nuclear weapons during the Cold War.

Dr Blair had previously made waves in 1977 when he wrote another article entitled “The Terrorist Threat to World Nuclear Programs“. He had first attempted to communicate the serious security problems at the nuclear silos to congressmen starting around 1973. When that information fell on mostly deaf ears, he decided to outline it for the public in this 1977 article where he described how just four people acting in tandem could easily activate a nuclear launch in the silos he had worked in. Further, amongst other things, the PAL system McNamara had touted was barely in operation and thus launches could be authorised by anyone without Presidential authority. He also noted how virtually anyone who asked for permission to tour the launch facility was granted it with little to no background checks performed. It is, perhaps, not coincidence that the PAL systems were all activated and the codes changed the same year this article was published.

So to recap, for around 20 years, the Strategic Air Command went out of there way to make launching a nuclear missile as easy, and quick, as possible. To be fair, they had their reasons, such as the fact that the soldiers in the silos in the case of a real nuclear war may have needed to be able to launch the missiles without being able to contact anyone on the outside. That said, their actions were in direct violation of the orders of the Commander-in-Chief, the President of the United States, during a time of extreme nuclear tension. Further, not activating this safeguard and lax security ensured that with very little planning, someone with three friends who had a mind to, could have started World War III.

We don’t even think that could pass for a bad conspiracy theory film plot, but history is so often stranger than fiction!

Bonus Facts:

• Amazingly, if we were actually able to convert matter perfectly to energy with 1kg of matter being completely annihilated, the energy produced from just that small amount of matter is about 42.95 mega tons of TNT. So an adult male weighing in at around 200 pounds (90kg) has somewhere in the vicinity of 4000 megatons of TNT potential in their matter if completely annihilated.
  
• This is about 80 times more energy than was produced by the largest ever detonated nuclear bomb, the Tzar Bomba, which itself produced a blast about 1400 times more powerful than the combined explosions of the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
  
• To further illustrate, one megaton of TNT, when converted to kilowatt hours, makes enough electricity to power an average American home for about 100,000 years. It is also enough to power the entire United States for a little over three days. So 1kg of some matter being completely annihilated would be able to power the entire United States for about four months. One average adult male then, when completely annihilated, would produce enough energy to power the US for about 30 years. Energy crisis solved.
  
• On a completely baffling scale, a typical supernova explosion will give off about 10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 megatons of TNT. *cowers in the corner*
  
• This coded PAL system was actually proposed long before JFK issued his memorandum on the subject, back in 1953, where it was suggested they be fitted on Polaris submarines, an idea that was never implemented.
  
• Today the PAL system has been significantly upgraded using the “Code Management System”, which was fully implemented in 2004 and supposedly overcomes many of the time efficiency problems inherent in the earlier system, while still maintaining the security that is what such a system is all about in the first place.
  

[MIKA27]

This Massive Steel Structure Will Entomb Chernobyl's Reactor 4

When an unexpected power surge sparked the world’s worst nuclear accident in Chernobyl, nearly a quarter of a million construction workers risked their lives to build an ad hoc “sarcophagus” of concrete around the stricken reactor. It was a stop-gap measure — and now, almost 30 years later, one of the biggest engineering projects in history is underway to protect it.

The BBC reports on the $US2 billion project to protect the decaying metal sarcophagus, using an even larger metal shield called the New Safe Confinement, or NSC. In simple terms, the NSC is a massive steel archway that is designed to protect the surrounding region if the 27-year-old sarcophagus eventually collapses. The design was proposed back in 1992 by a team of British engineers, but planning has taken more than a decade — the project is now halfway complete, with a target date of 2015 for final completion.

There are myriad reasons it’s taken so long to get the NSC up and running, the first being the sheer scale of this 100m tall protective shield. Since it will cover the existing sarcophagus, the arch is big enough to house the Statue of Liberty and wide enough to accommodate a soccer field. It’s being built by thousands of workers and engineers from all over the world, each of whom has a monthly and yearly exposure limit based on where, and for how long, they work on the site.

But it isn’t just the scale that’s extraordinary — it’s the unusual way in which it must be built, since the sarcophagus is still too radioactive for sustained human presence. The crux of the plan — the reason why it was chosen in 1992 — is the fact that would be built off-site and then slid over the current sarcophagus using railroad ties.

The 26,000-tonne structure is taking shape several hundred metres away from Reactor 4, helping to limit the radiation exposure of workers.

It’s not quite as simple as putting a cap on a pen, though. The biggest complication is a tall metal chimney above Reactor 4, which must be removed before the archway can slide into place. Workers can only spend a few hours at the reactor site before they reach the maximum radioactive exposure limit, and work is thus progressing at a snail’s pace:

Work has started removing sections weighing up to 55 tons each. They must be cut off with a plasma cutter by teams of two men and removed by crane — a nerve-wracking process. If a crane fails, or an operator miscalculates, and a section falls into the reactor, this too could release a new cloud of radioactive dust into the atmosphere.

Despite the incredible lengths required to build the structure, it’s still only a band-aid: Designed to last for roughly 100 years, it is a more sophisticated solution to a problem scientists still don’t know how to solve. The hope is that, within the next century, we’ll have the technology to extract the reactor and the spilled fuel and deposit them — maybe in glass — somewhere safe.

[MIKA27]

The Rubber Band Macro Lens Is Now Stackable For Greater Magnification

When the original version was first revealed, we were amazed at how brilliantly easy the rubber band Easy-Macro made adding an extra lens to any smartphone. But somehow the new version manages to further improve the original design with a better lens that helps protect it from scratches and allows it to be stacked for increased magnification.

Thanks to a raised plastic lip surrounding the lens element, there’s less of a chance of it getting scratched when left sitting face down on a flat surface. And because the Easy-Macro is secured using an elastic band, multiple lenses can be stacked boosting your smartphone camera’s magnification again and again. The only limitation is the thickness of your device and how far the rubber bands can stretch.

The updated version of the Easy-Macro lens started life as a Kickstarter project, but it more than reached its funding goal and will actually be available for purchase by anyone — not just those who donated — starting December 5. Just in time to be a cheap, but incredibly useful, stocking stuffer.

[MIKA27]

Monster Machines: This Rolls-Royce Tanker Is A School Bus For Salmon

Fish tends to spoil fast, even when kept on ice. So to ensure that farm-raised salmon remain at peak of their freshness (read: still swimming) for whole trip to back to shore for processing, Rolls-Royce is building the world’s largest mobile aquarium/meat wagon.

Aquaculture, especially the open-water variety, is quickly gaining traction as a sustainable alternative to traditional fisheries. But the further off-shore these fish farms move, the longer it takes to get them back to shore for processing and the greater chance there is for spoilage. Sure, you could put the fish on ice for the trip but with individual harvests topping 400 tonnes of ichthyoid, keeping them cool for that long gets expensive fast. Instead, the new Rolls-Royce type NVC 386 tanker will keep its charges alive during transport, storing them in massive below-deck pens.

The $US9.4 million 76m long, 16m wide vessel is currently being constructed at the Tersan shipyard in Turkey and is on schedule for delivery to the Bakkafrost fish farming company in May 2015. It has a roughly 3000 cubic metre carrying capacity, enough to pack in 400 tonnes of salmon into a trio of closed circuit, water-recirculating, lice-filtering holding tanks. Loading and unloading the fish is accomplished by hoovering them en mass out of their off-shore pens through 60cm wide plastic tubes, then spewing them back out once the ship reaches shore.

The crew’s time aboard will be a bit more dignified. They’ll enjoy seven single cabins, a saloon with a separate dining area, a fitness centre and even a sauna. It’s just that everything, everything, will smell like fish

[MIKA27]

A New And Aggressive Strain Of HIV Is Spreading Across West Africa

A newly discovered strain of HIV is spreading across West Africa. What’s worse is that it’s particularly aggressive — and causes significantly faster progression to AIDS than other strains.

Called A3/02, the strain of HIV was first observed in 2011. But now, reports Al Jazeera, researchers at Sweden’s Lund University have found that it’s spreading across the West African country of Guinea-Bissau. A3/02 forms when two of the most common strains in the region fuse together — and the result is potent. Angelica Palm, one of the scientists involved in the study, explains:

“Individuals who are infected with the new recombinant form develop AIDS within five years. That’s about two to two-and-a-half years faster than one of the parent [strains].”

The research backs up previous studies which have suggested that recombinant strains of HIV — where different DNA combines to form a new strain — are potentially more dangerous. Perhaps even more concerning is that the researchers point out that, while their work is conducted in West Africa, different recombinant strains are likely forming across Europe and the US due to high levels of immigration. Gulp.

There is, however, some good news. As far as scientists are aware, the medication and treatments currently available for HIV are “equally functional on all different subtypes of variants” according to Palm. And, fortunately, we’re making great progress when it comes to beating the virus.

[MIKA27]

US Air Force Fighter Jets Will Have Laser Weapons By 2030

A new request by the Air Force Research Lab reveals that the USAF is planning to have laser weapons built in the next generation of fighters by 2030, the US Naval Institute reports. The new jet fighters will be equipped with both defensive and offensive lasers. I’m glad we’re getting ready for the incoming alien invasion.

They want three types of laser weapons. The first will be used to blind enemy planes’ sensors. A second one — with a higher wattage — will be used as a defence against missiles. And lastly, they want an offensive laser weapon to take down other planes.

According to the proposal, these “laser and beam control systems are being investigated independent of platform in the flight regime from altitudes Sea Level to 65,000 feet and speeds from Mach 0.6 to 2.5.”

By October 2014, the AFRL wants to have readiness level four equipment, solid enough to work in a lab. They want to have level five gear by 2022, which means that it would be tested under simulated real world conditions. By 2030, the equipment should be ready to deploy in their next-generation air superiority fighter.

Let the real Star Wars begin!

[MIKA27]

These Insane Ice Climbers Make Spider-Man Look Like A Wimpy Amateur

Maybe you saw photographer Thomas Senf’s work with a bunch of crazy ice climbers in the Frost Giants, Norway. I never saw the video showing the true extend of their insanity. Just watching them jumping upside down onto ice curtains that can break makes my heartbeat rise.

[MIKA27]

Glow-in-the-Dark Shark Makes Cookies Out of Flesh

Marathon swimmer Mike Spalding was 10 hours into an epic 33-mile voyage between Maui and the Big Island when his escort boat lost sight of him. Being the middle of the night and all, the captain was forced to fire up his lights to reestablish contact with the kayaker at Spalding’s side.

This, ironically enough, is the absolute last resort when you get lost swimming in the darkness. With the kayak’s light now blazing as well, the creatures of the nighttime sea began to take notice. Squid amassed around Spalding as he slogged on, forming a slowly moving bait ball. He took a hit from one, and then another and another. After the fourth bump, Spalding felt a sharp pain in his chest.

It was the first bite, albeit just a nibble. The 62-year-old (that’s not a typo) Spalding broke for the kayak.

“As I was eggbeatering to get into the kayak with my legs perpendicular to the surface of the water, I felt this sharp hit on my leg,” he told WIRED. “It wasn’t painful, but it was like you got punched or something. And so I ran my fingers down my calf and I felt this hole.

“It’s a bigass hole.”

Spalding had earned the dubious title of first living human confirmed to have been attacked by a cookiecutter shark, which gored a 3-inch-wide crater in his leg. At no more than two feet long, this diminutive terror nevertheless packs a set of teeth that are bigger than any other shark relative to body size, according to George Burgess, an ichthyologist and director of the Florida Program for Shark Research at the Florida Museum of Natural History. It’s a glow-in-the-dark evolutionary marvel of the open ocean that takes on beasts hundreds of times its size, including submarines. And it almost always wins.

The cookiecutter shark doesn’t set out to kill its prey. Instead, it makes sneak attacks, using its fleshy lips to suction like a Nerf dart onto a whale or tuna or pretty much any other large critter. Its saw-like teeth easily tear through flesh as it “rotates its body in a 360-degree fashion around and around and around like a drill,” said Burgess. “And as it’s digging in, it gradually closes its jaw little by little, thereby making the crater wound as opposed to just a cylinder.”

Burgess, who authored a paper on Spalding’s attack, likens the action to using a melon baller, and in so doing has forever ruined melon for me. It all happens in no more than a second or two, and just like that, the cookiecutter is gone. It’s an ambush predator of the highest order.

The creature’s lower teeth are exceedingly sharp, even for a shark, and thus excavate very clean wounds. They’ve evolved to fuse together into what looks like a white picket fence of grave bodily injury, but like any other shark, the cookiecutter will lose these in its day-to-day gougings, perhaps as often as every two weeks, according to Burgess. But waiting in that jaw are row after row of beautiful new chompers.

In addition to such handy hunting tools as electroreceptors and a good sense of smell that come with being a shark, the cookiecutter has enormous eyes and a green bioluminescent glow, suggesting the creature is primarily a nighttime hunter.

This bioluminescence comes from light-emitting organs in its skin called photophores, Burgess says. “The control over showing or not showing the light is done by use of little cells called melanophores that are sort of masking organs,” he said. “And so they use these dark-colored cells to go over the top of the light or move away from the light.” In this way the cookiecutter can flash like a strobe, perhaps to communicate with its own species.

Interestingly, though, whereas the deep-sea anglerfish attracts smaller prey with its glowing lure, the cookiecutter may use a riskier strategy: luring big predators that could easily swallow it whole, only to juke around at the last second and torpedo their flanks.

This behavior might seem … really, really dumb. But animals obviously don’t evolve to die prematurely. Genes that aid in survival get passed along. Those that don’t will end up dissolving in the stomachs of predators. So if the cookiecutter is indeed playing chicken of the sea, it’s been doing it right for a real long time.

A cookiecutter shark gets ready for its first day of school.

“I’ve never seen a cookiecutter in the stomach of any other animal,” said Burgess. “Which means that they’re pretty wily, and they must be pretty fast and reclusive at the same time.”

Burgess reckons that like a lot of marine creatures, the cookiecutter patrols near the surface in the evening, then retreats deeper during the day, a behavior called diel vertical migration, diel being a fancy 10-dollar word meaning 24 hours. Its hunting tactics have never been observed, apart from poor Spalding observing the hole in his leg, but Burgess notes that the cookiecutter is often associated with bioluminescent squid, which also flash flamboyantly.

“We think that probably they simply stay close to these other critters,” he said, “and wait for predators to come in who are cognizant of the flashing pattern usually meaning a good meal at the other side. And when the animal, the larger fish, comes in to grab the prey items, out from the abyss or the darkness comes the cookiecutter to make a sneak grab and bite on the side of the animals.”

It’s also widely believed that the cookiecutter may be essentially cloaking itself to mimic a smaller prey item. Seen from below, the glow of its underside matches the light filtering down from the surface, so the cookiecutter would seem to disappear — save for a non-luminescent band around its neck that makes it a dead giveaway to predators.

But despite that popular view, the collar does in fact glow, Burgess says. And he suggests that by flashing, the band may help draw would-be predators to the “business end” of the shark. Plus, attracting big nasty teeth specifically from below is probably a silly idea, as the lady from the Jaws poster would no doubt tell you if she hadn’t been eaten by a shark or was even real in the first place.

Mike Spalding, luckily, has fared much better. He’s made a full recovery.

“When people [swim] channels, nobody has ever identified a cookiecutter as a threat. Now they do,” says the man who attempted yet another swim between Maui and the Big Island just a year after the attack.

He finished it in 19.5 hours. The cookiecutters, perhaps out of reverence, let him pass unmolested.

[MIKA27]

SONY SMARTPHONE ATTACHABLE LENS-STYLE CAMERA

Now available for purchase, is the Sony QX100 Lens-style Camera, it is the perfect compliment for your Android or iOS smartphone, instantly transforming it into a power-packed camera. The QX100 wirelessly connects to your smartphone using it as the viewfinder, settings panel and shutter release, you can clip it on to your phone or use the lens independently(the phone sees what the lens sees!). The Sony Smart Lens offers all the DSLR advantages such as shallow depth of field, manual zoom, a 20.2 megapixel sensor (4x bigger than your iPhone!) and up to f/1.8 aperture. It allows you to save every shot online automatically and works with most smartphones.

http://youtu.be/HKGEEPIAPys

[MIKA27]

Black Hole Discovered Which Emits Brilliant Light

When a recently-discovered black hole was discovered which emits brilliant light, scientists were baffled, and scrambled to explain how a black hole could shine with such brilliance. According to a new study, the black-hole system called ULX-1 in the nearby Pinwheel Galaxy is twice as bright as astronomers had believed one could ever be.

The Pinwheel Galaxy (or M101) is 22 million light-years from Earth. The amazing brightness of the black hole there might force astronomers to rethink theories about black holes and how they radiate energy.

According to the study’s coauthor, Joel Bregman of the University of Michigan, the black hole “is an extremely luminous one that is shining as brightly as it possibly can.”

The black-hole system in the Pinwheel Galaxy is made up of a star and a black hole which orbit each other. ULX stands for “ultraluminous X-ray source.” The black hole generates a massive amount of extremely bright x-ray light. The light comes from material that the black hole is consuming, as it spirals down into its depths.

The black hole is behaving somewhat like an intermediate black hole, but intermediate black holes are between 100-1,000 times the mass of the sun. However, the new study, which appears in the journal Nature, suggests that the black hole is just 20 times the mass of the sun.This mass would put it on rather the small side for a black hole, yet it consumes matter at the rate a larger one would.

Jifeng Lui of the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Beijing led the research team which studied ULX-1. They used two NASA spacecraft, the chandra X-ray Observatory and the Hubble Space Telescope, and the Gemini Observatory in Hawaii to conduct their research.

By knowing through spectroscopic analysis using the Gemini Multi-Object Spectrograph in Hawaii that the companion star in the ULX-1 black hole system is a large, hot type of star known as a Wolf-Rayet, the research team was able to infer the mass of the star from its luminosity. They inferred that it was 19 times the sun’s mass.

Lui and his team learned that the black hole and the Wolf-Rayet star orbited each other every 8.2 days. This fact enabled the research team to estimate that the mass of the black hole was somewhere between 20-30 times the sun’s mass.

The low mass of the black hole caused Lui and the other researchers to theorize that the black hole was a stellar one. Stellar black holes form after a star dies and collapses in upon itself. A middleweight black hole has yet to be definitely discovered, though it’s theorized that they exist at the heart of most — and possibly all — galaxies.

Ultraluminous X-ray sources have often been taken to be evidence of intermediate-sized black holes, but Lui said in a statement that their findings might “turn the trend” of this assumption by many astronomers occurring so much in the future.

How is the black hole in ULX-1 system emitting so much light?

Lui and his research team theorize that the black hole is emitting light from the stellar wind (stream of charged particles) that it’s consuming from its companion star.

In concluding that the black hole in the ULX-1 system is a stellar one, Lui and his team has demonstrated that “our understanding of the black hole radiation mechanism is incomplete and needs revision.”

According to another member of the research team, Stephen Justham — also of the National Astronomical Observatories of China — low mass black holes like the one in the ULX-1 system must consume energy at close to the theoretical limits that are possible in order for it to release as much energy as has been detected.

Theoretical models of how matter falls into and is consumed by black holes which radiate forth energy show that soft X-rays come mostly from what’s known the “accretion disk a disk which encircles the black hole).” Hard X-rays, on the other hand, are emitted by a high-energy corona which is around the disk.

One of the many puzzling aspects about ULX-1 is that, based upon the size of the black hole, that the region around it should be marked by hard X-rays and be more complex in its structure — but, that isn’t the case with the black hole in the ULX-1 system.

According to Jifeng Lui, current theories don’t adequately explain how the black hole in the ULX-1 system is behaving. Mechanisms mentioned in these theories that “allow such low-mass black holes to eat this quickly and shine this brightly” also “leave signatures in the emitted X-ray spectrum.” But, these sorts of signatures aren’t displayed by the black hole in ULX-1.

The study’s coauthor, Paul Crowther of the Univerity of Sheffield in the UK, said that as it takes so long for us to get light and images from a galaxy as far away as the Pinwheel Galaxy, the Wolf-Rayet star is also probably dead, “so this system is now likely a double black hole binary.”

[MIKA27]

Pobiti Kamani: Bulgaria’s Ancient Stone Forest

The rock formation known as Pobiti Kamani is situated close to the city of Varna, on the eastern coast of Bulgaria. Rising out of the sand roughly 20km from the Black Sea in an area known as Pashovi, the stone columns of Pobiti Kamani have looked out over the landscape for as long as humans have occupied this area… and longer still.

The name ‘Pobiti Kamani’ translates into English as ‘Hammered Stones’; a literal description of these pillars which seem to have been driven into the ground as if with a hammer. More often though, the name will be transliterated as the ‘Stone Forest’.

The stones are hollow cylinders clustered together in groups, many reaching five, six, even seven metres in height. In width they range from one third of a metre to three metres across. The site known as Pobiti Kamani covers an area of desert measuring seven square kilometres, with the most notable formations grouped together over a space of one kilometre.

In the early days of the Bulgarian Empire, the stones were believed to be a sacred place, imbued with powerful supernatural forces.

The arrangement of the pillars seems far from natural, some of them lined up in rows that almost give the appearance of a temple, or acropolis. The shape of these hollow pillars seems so deliberate as to suggest a purpose or design of some kind – and so early settlers here attributed the work to powerful gods or giants.

Numerous legends have arisen over time to explain the stone forest. One tells of giants who were employed to build the city of Pliska, which stood as the capital of the Bulgar Kingdom from 681 to 893 AD. The giants carried the massive stones from far and wide, until the king declared the city complete, ordering his labourers to cease their work. The giants simply dropped the stones where they stood, forming Pobiti Kamani in the process. Another myth suggests that these pillars had formed the colonnades of Poseidon’s temple in Atlantis, itself once located here on the Black Sea Coast.

A range of simulacra appear around the site, seemingly human faces peering down from stone pillars or gazing impassively from the rock walls that border the area. Individual stones were given names, often describing their appearance in terms of human characteristics. The ‘Soldier’, for example, stands tall above the rest and keeps guard over Pobiti Kamani.

One of the stones leans against its neighbour, creating a natural archway. An ancient tradition tells that ducking through this arch as you pass around the stone will bring good fortune… and many visitors to the site, even today, will still enact this ritual.

It wasn’t until 1828 that the first scientific study was made of Pobiti Kamani, commissioned by the Russian General Dibich. Later, in 1854, Pobiti Kamani was visited by the British geologist William Hamilton. Hamilton was the first to hypothesise a marine origin for the stones; suggesting that perhaps they were in fact, “the work of the sea.” In 1855 a geological survey of the area reinforced this theory, showing that the whole region had once been covered by the Black Sea. It was the first step towards answering a riddle that had remained unsolved since the earliest civilizations settled in Europe.

A full explanation would come later on, courtesy of two brothers – the Bulgarian geologists Peter and Stefan Bonchev Gochev. They dated the columns at 50 million years old, formed in the Cenozoic Era. At this stage much of Bulgaria and neighbouring Romania had been at the bottom of the sea, and over long periods of time the sediment on the seabed was compressed to form limestone layers. Gases were released during the process, and these would rise through the layers of sludge as bubbles. As the sludge hardened to a crust these bubbles would force their way up through flues in the layers of sediment, and over a period of millions of years these eventually created a series of stone ‘chimneys’.

Many ages later the surrounding area would break the surface, in time drying to form a barren, sandy landscape. Much of the limestone was eroded away, leaving only the appearance of solitary stone chimneys rising out of the desert.

As the stones became better known in Europe there were numerous challengers to the mineral theory laid down by the Gochev brothers; some experts choosing instead to explain the stones by way of organic coral activity, or as the result of Eocene bubbling reefs.

The Stone Forest has now been subjected to countless field observations, in addition to petrographic and stable isotope geochemical studies. In general, the results support the above theory of ‘paleo-hydrocarbon seep.’ It’s a rare phenomenon, and only a handful of examples have been noted in the world. For that reason the stones at Pobiti Kamani pose a site of great interest amongst European geologists, and remain the subject of an ongoing research project at the Varna Institute of Oceanology… in association with researchers from the Geobiology Lab of the University of Goettingen, the Catholic University of Leuven and the University of Bologna. Some of Europe’s top geological researchers are now working towards a dynamic reconstruction of the process: the final piece in the puzzle of Pobiti Kamani.

In 1937, the site was recognised as a natural landmark, receiving protection from the state on account of its unique status. The surrounding area is largely uninhabited and attracts a wealth of wildlife, including some 21 bird species and more than 240 varieties of plant – numbering amongst them some very rare specimens. The stones themselves have also provided numerous unusual fossil discoveries, including petrified mussels, giant snails and nummulite.

Pobiti Kamani is easy to visit if you’re in Bulgaria, located 18km from the coastal city of Varna on the old road to the capital, Sofia.

There’s a certain unnatural stillness about the site which, combined with the appearance of the imposing stone pillars, imbues the area with an otherworldly, somehow alien atmosphere… it isn’t hard to see why early settlers attributed supernatural energies to this peculiar forest of stones.

[MIKA27]

The 1930s Mechanical Man Who Tried To Start A Robot Uprising

Back in 1932, the world was awash in newspaper stories about a robot that had done the unthinkable: a mechanical man had shot its inventor.

As you can imagine, the stories were a bit… shall we say, exaggerated. But, at a time when robots represented something fearful — a potent symbol of runaway automation and job loss — it’s easy to understand why so many people were quick to believe it.

According to Virginia Postrel’s new book, about 25% of jobless Americans thought automation was to blame for their unemployment by the end of the Great Depression.

But the robot of this era wasn’t content to just take your job — it was going to hunt you down and start a full-fledged robot uprising. We’ve covered these bizarre tales of 1930s gunslinging robots before, but I recently came across some new (to me, anyway) photos of the robot that started it all. The pictures were taken in 1935 and show Alpha the robot, along with an unnamed man (probably inventor Harry May) who doesn’t seem at all concerned about that, in retrospect, quite ominous pistol.

Alpha and his gun made an appearance at the 1935 California Pacific International Exposition in San Diego — a World’s Fair that doesn’t get as much respect as, say, those in New York (1939 and 1964) or Chicago (1893 and 1933).

The robot didn’t become a serial killer! But one has to wonder why a gun-toting robot alone couldn’t be enough to get historians looking anew at this overlooked Fair.

[MIKA27]

Back When We Wanted To Weaponise The Weather

Palm trees and lower heating bills in Chicago? Bikinis and orange blossoms in Duluth? Back in 1958 these miracles were the promise of tomorrow, thanks to the hot new science of weather control. And once we learned to harness these forces that were once thought beyond humankind’s reach, there was only one question left: would these powers act as a “deadly weapon or a magic wand?”

On November 13, 1946 researchers at a GE lab in New York created the world’s first manmade snowstorm. Ever since this modest step, we’ve grappled with big questions about what we should do with our scientific knowledge of weather control. There are potentially countless consequences to playing around with the weather, as we’ve seen today with the early devastating effects of human-influenced climate change. But the questions of unintended consequences became even more acute at the height of the Cold War, when both the United States and Soviet Union looked at global weather control as a possible weapon.

The June 22, 1958 edition of “Closer Than We Think” — a Sunday comic strip by Arthur Radebaugh — imagined this futuristic world of weather control. But in true Radebaugh fashion, the implications of the science are just under the pulpy surface. Even with Cold War rhetoric heating up on the front page, there were no overt signs in the comics section this particular Sunday that weather control would become a weapon of war in the battles of the future.

From “Closer Than We Think”:

In years to come, there will be satellite equipment for forecasting — as well as controlling — the weather. The effects of air and humidity masses can be calculated more precisely from above. Sunspots, solar rays and other space disturbances will be more easily observed and studied. And sensitive sighting and analysis devices will make long-range predictions highly accurate. Control of weather is the next step. In the words of Dr. I. M. Levitt, Director of the Fels Planetarium at the Franklin Institute: “In time, huge solar mirrors five or more miles in diameter may be used to reflect radiation of the sun to specific areas on earth to increase evaporation and to prevent crop-killing frosts.”

Of course, the part that Dr. Levitt didn’t mention — and perhaps didn’t know much about — was that this vision of weather control in the future was being discussed at length in every corner of the Department of Defence.

Technically speaking, we’ve had a treaty that bans weather control as a means of waging war since 1978. But during the first couple decades of the Cold War, everything was on the table. So thank goodness the policy got ahead of the technology. At least for the time being.

[MIKA27]

The Beauty Of Japan's Abandoned Ruins

Japan’s “haikyo” (廃墟), or “ruins”, are fascinating. They provide a look into a world which time forgot, but French photographer Jordy Meow hasn’t.

Meow has been cataloging haikyo across Japan — from a deserted love hotel in Chiba to an abandoned theme park in Nara.

The photos, courtesy of DailyGeekShow, are hauntingly beautiful:

[MIKA27]

Bang, Zoom, Straight To The Moon: China Launches Its First Lunar Rover

Just a decade after entering the space race, China is headed to the moon. With the successful launch of a Long March rocket carrying the Chang’e 3 lunar lander earlier this morning, China is attempting to become the third nation in history to land (rather than crash) a spacecraft on the lunar surface.

Named for the mythical Chinese goddess of the moon, the Chang’e lunar probe marks China’s first attempt at an extra-terrestrial “soft landing” — a feat so far only accomplished by the US and the former Soviet Union. If all goes as planned, China will be the first nation to land on the moon since 1976.

The probe is expected to arrive at the moon’s Bay of Rainbows by mid-December and, following a successful landing, the Chang’e 3 will deploy a six-wheeled, solar-powered rover dubbed the “Yutu” (or “Jade Rabbit”). The Yutu will spend three months traversing the lunar landscape, studying the geological makeup of the moon’s crust using ground-penetrating radar as well as setting up a telescope to study the Earth’s little-understood plasmasphere.

Though China is relatively new to the space exploration game, its military-backed space program has progressed rapidly over the past decade. Barring any catastrophes with the Chang’e 3 mission, China plans to launch another lunar probe by the end of the decade — this time to gather soil samples — before a potential manned mission in the early 2020s.

[MIKA27]

Derailed Metro-North Train Was Traveling 82 MPH in 30 MPH Zone

Still no word on whether human error or equipment failure was to blame

The Metro-North train that derailed in New York on Sunday morning was traveling at 82 miles per hour while heading into the 30 mph zone before the fatal event, National Transit Security Board officials said Monday.

Though the information is a breakthrough in the investigation of the deadly crashed that killed four and injured over 60 people in the Bronx, NTSB Board member Earl Weener said at a press conference on Monday it is unclear if human error or equipment failure caused the crash.

“For a train to be going 82 miles an hour around that curve is just a frightening thought,” said New York Senator Charles Schumer at the NTSB press conference. Connecticut Senator Richard Blumenthal joined the chorus of officials demanding answers after the crash, saying, “That train was going way too fast and certainly speed was a contributing factor.”

This crash was the latest in a slew of incidents that have plagued the Metro-North line this year, including a collision in Connecticut that injured more than 70 people in May. Over the summer, a freight train derailed along the same curve that killed four on Monday. The investigation on the crash is still ongoing.

[MIKA27]

Fast & Furious 7 in Limbo Following Death of Paul Walker

Many expensive action sequences appear to already have been shot with film originally due for July release

The tragic death of Hollywood star Paul Walker on Saturday has shocked cinema fans around the globe and leaves a major hole in one of the world’s most successful movie franchises.

The seventh installment of Universal’s Fast & Furious series had already been shooting in Los Angeles and Atlanta and was scheduled for release on July 11. But following Walker’s death in an auto-wreck over the weekend aged 40, director James Wan has held a meeting with studio bigwigs to discuss the future of the project, reports Variety.

Judging by photos posted on social media by cast and crew, it appears many expensive action sequences have already been shot, raising questions about what creative solutions may be employed for Walker’s character, former Los Angeles police officer Brian O’Conner.

[MIKA27]

CABANAS NO RIO | COMPORTA PORTUGAL

On the Portuguese coast (about an hour south of Lisbon) lies a hidden piece of paradise...Comporta.

This beautiful region is known for the magnificent white sandy beaches, the wine, fresh fish and the beautiful rice paddies. Cabanas no Rio is a project by architect Manuel Aires Mateus, the same guy behind the "Casas na Areia”.

The romantic hideaway is ideal to relax, recharge batteries and simply enjoy nature. The two recovered old fisherman huts have in total only 28 square meters of space, but are equipped with all you need for a unique stay: kitchen, a bathroom, two armchairs to relax, a comfortable four-poster bed, a terrace overlooking the Sado river and private small pontoon over the water with a canoe that is provided for guests. There is also free wi-fi and a iPod dock. You can stay at this idyllic place with a breathtaking view for $270 p/night.

[MIKA27]

KILLSPENCER ATHLETICS COLLECTION

Killspencer are mostly know for their bags and accessories, but they have recently presented the "Athletics Collection”, a beautiful line of vintage inspired products for sports such as boxing, football, soccer and baseball. The luxurious collection of beautifully handcrafted goods is now available at the Killspencer online store.