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

[MIKA27]

Apple Just Gave iOS 8 A Few New Tricks

We’ve long known that iOS 8 was a powerful (mostly under-the-hood) upgrade. But on its official launch day, Apple announced a few new features that really take the operating system to the next level. And you won’t even have to hunt very hard to find them!

ApplePay

The most significant new thing coming to iOS 8 is a mobile payments system called ApplePay. For iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 Plus users, ApplePay will let you place your phone near a beacon and confirm your identity with Touch ID in order to make a purchase. The system stores all of your payment information in Passbook, but it does not store your credit card numbers. Instead, it creates unique device IDs for each card, including the cards you already have on file with the iTunes Store.

For other iPhone users, ApplePay’s functionality will be more limited. While the device hardware won’t allow for NFC-powered payments, you can use the ApplePay system to make one touch payments in a whole host of apps and locations, from Disney to Whole Foods to the Apple Store itself. If you lose your phone, you can also disable ApplePay with Find My iPhone.

New Navigation Features

With the larger screen sizes of the iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 Plus, Apple is introducing a number of new features that make it easier to find your way around iOS 8. The most noticeable will surely be the horizontal mode which allows you to navigate the device more seamlessly. The iPhone Plus will also allow for two-pane navigation, and it will get some tiny design tweaks, like showing avatars next to texts in the Messages app.

Apple is also introducing a new gesture called Reachability. It’s dead simple. If you just double tap the Home button, the whole screen slides down so that you can reach the content on the top of the screen without using two hands.

HealthKit

The new M8 motion coprocessor and barometer mean that the iPhone 6 can collect more data about your movements, namely distance. That means that the iPhone 6 will know how far you’ve walked as well as how much elevation you’ve cleared. The technology also knows if you’re running or cycling or climbing stairs or whatever. More data!

Of course, since the new hardware is specific to the iPhone 6, users with older iPhones won’t get to enjoy it.

[MIKA27]

'High-Energy Objects' Colliding With Flight MH17 Caused It To Explode

A preliminary report by the Dutch Safety Board into what caused the devastating crash of Malaysia Airlines flight MH17 has confirmed what many already feared. The report explains that the plane was downed by “a large number of high-energy objects that penetrated the aircraft from outside”, causing it to explode in mid-air. All 298 passengers and crew aboard the flight were tragically killed.

The report doesn’t go as far as attributing the cause of the crash to a missile launch, but the findings certainly point that way. Flying over war-torn rebel-held territory in Eastern Ukraine when it was destroyed on July 17, many parties believe a surface-to-air missile fired by pro-Russia separatists caused the disaster. Russia denies any involvement, instead blaming local government forces for the crash.

“There are no indications that the MH17 crash was caused by a technical fault or by actions of the crew,” says the Dutch Safety Board report, easing the pressure on the beleaguered Malaysia Airlines. Interestingly, the report details just how easily two other craft could instead have shared MH17′s doomed fate — air traffic controllers were directing two other craft in the vicinity at the time. MH17, likely due to weather conditions, couldn’t comply with a request to reach a higher altitude, which could have put it out of range of whatever projectiles hit it.

[MIKA27]

Atmospheric CO2 Increases Have Hit A 30-Year High

Don’t panic (you should panic), but the rate at which the levels of CO2 in the atmosphere are rising just hit a 30-year high. If rates don’t slow down, we’ll soon breach the levels that experts claim are safe.

The levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide rose faster between 2012-2013 than they have done since 1984. If the rate of accumulation doesn’t slow, then the levels of CO2 in the atmosphere will reach 400 parts per million in the next two years. Just for your information, that’s above the threshold of 350ppm that most climate scientists believe to be tolerable.

Why the dramatic rates of increase? Well, the World Meteorological Organisation points out that the seas have long been swallowing carbon and, as they do so, acidifying. The only problem with that otherwise useful process — for our atmosphere, at least, not necessarily the contents of the oceans — is that with increased acidity comes a reduction in their capacity to take on more carbon. The Organisation points out that the “current rate of ocean acidification appears unprecedented at least over the last 300 million years”, and as a result our atmosphere is shouldering the burden.

With a stream of UN reports laying the rise of carbon emissions at human kind’s feet and the knock-on effect of large-scale climatic shifts now being inevitable, then today is a fine day indeed to panic. Or, you know, actually do something to save the planet.

[MIKA27]

New Sci-Fi TV Series Zona Looks Like A Must-Watch

If the new TV series Zona is half as cool, weird and intriguing as the concept art by Alex Andreev, it will sure be a must watch. Based on a short sci-fi novel by brothers Arkady and Boris Strugatsky, Zona is scheduled to launch in Russia in 2015.

Alex Andreev lives in St. Petersburg, Russia. He’s been drawing, painting and doing graphic design over last 20 years. He works as an art-director in an advertising agency and as a senior concept artist for movie and game productions.

You can follow him on his site and on Facebook.

[MIKA27]

This Giant Sixth-Scale BTTF DeLorean Looks As Detailed As The Film Prop

Next to the lightsabers from Star Wars, the time-travelling DeLorean from the Back to the Future trilogy has to be one of the most recognisable film props ever created. Countless die-hard fans have even gone as far as to buy and modify real-life DeLoreans to look like the one seen in the films, but Sideshow Collectibles has a slightly cheaper way to get your own — but just barely.

This massive model measures in at just shy of 30 inches in length, and will set real BTTF fans apart from less-devoted enthusiasts with a hefty $US690 price tag. But it comes with endless features and details that help justify the cost — even if this thing can’t travel through time.

The glowing flux capacitor is there, the gullwing doors, the time display showing when it is, when it’s been, and when it’s going is mounted to the dashboard, and all of the cabling and wiring details inside and out will make people wonder if you stole this model from Industrial Light & Magic’s archives. The best part, though, is that you don’t need a garage to store it, just an empty shelf, or half your work desk so you can spend your days actually playing around with it. [ Sideshow Collectibles ]

[MIKA27]

Helsinki Blasted Out An Underground Lake To Water-Cool Its Buildings

If you’ve visited Helsinki, you’ve probably spent time in its leafy Esplanade Park at the center of the city. Now Helsinki has turned the ground below the park into a subterranean lake which can keep buildings and other civic operations cool as part of a growing network that replaces traditional air conditioning systems.

Like the way many cities harness geothermal heat, Helsinki’s system utilizes the plentiful amounts of cold lake water which surround the city (as well as, you know, the icy Baltic Sea). The tank, which was blasted out 100 yards below the park, is 100 yards long and can hold up to nine million gallons of cold water, which is pumped out into the city during the day to cool the city at its hottest and most active hours. The water then then returns to the tank at night to cool for the next day.

Helsinki’s solution is smart because it allows buildings and organisations to share resources at the city-scale: Instead of mandating renewable cooling methods building-by-building, and requiring that developers pay extra money to execute them, the city is providing the infrastructure so the network can continue to grow and expand to reach more buildings.

The city says that compared to the environmental impact from conventional air conditioning systems needed to cool the same number of buildings, their centralized cooling system is emitting about 80 per cent less carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases. Based on energy demand, the city also estimates that the overall energy efficiency is about five times that of a building-specific cooling systems.

While some singular buildings have similar, enclosed systems that use cisterns of water to cool various mechanical processes, these “district cooling” systems which cool large portions of cities are a bit more rare. Toronto’s system, which uses water from Lake Ontario, is probably the most famous, and there are also systems in Sweden, The Netherlands, and even Cornell University in Ithaca, NY.

But Helsinki’s is not only extremely comprehensive, it’s also part of a larger cooling and heating system. They city already claims the world’s largest underground heat pump station, named Katri Vala, which uses “district heating” — absorbing thermal energy from wastewater to warm people’s homes.

While this exact system wouldn’t work everywhere — Helsinki isn’t known for being a particularly hot place for most of the year — even hotter countries can adapt their own versions of district cooling, like Qatar’s well-branded Qatar Cool. Even though the water there needs to be chilled with refrigeration plants during much of the year, it’s still a more efficient system then having every building in downtown Doha running its own AC.

While Helsinki’s model does offer a great example for many other cities that want to move away from expensive, energy-sucking conventional air conditioning systems, it also makes for a great use of space. We should have natural underground air conditioners under all of our parks.

[MIKA27]

Sir John Franklin: Fabled Arctic ship found

One of two British explorer ships that vanished in the Arctic more than 160 years ago has been found, Canada's prime minister says.

Stephen Harper said it was unclear which ship had been found, but photo evidence confirmed it was one of them.

Sir John Franklin led the two ships and 129 men in 1845 to chart the Northwest Passage in the Canadian Arctic.

The expedition's disappearance shortly after became one of the great mysteries of the age of Victorian exploration.

The Canadian government began searching for Franklin's ships in 2008 as part of a strategy to assert Canada's sovereignty over the Northwest Passage, which has recently become accessible to shipping because of melting Arctic ice.

Expedition sonar images from the waters of Victoria Strait, just off King William Island, clearly show the wreckage of a ship on the ocean floor.

"I am delighted to announce that this year's Victoria Strait expedition has solved one of Canada's greatest mysteries, with the discovery of one of the two ships belonging to the Franklin Expedition," Prime Minister Stephen Harper said in a statement.

"Finding the first vessel will no doubt provide the momentum - or wind in our sails - necessary to locate its sister ship and find out even more about what happened to the Franklin Expedition's crew."

HMS Erebus and HMS Terror, as they appeared in Illustrated London News

The find has been described as "the biggest archaeological discovery the world has seen since the opening of Tutankhamun's tomb almost 100 years ago" by a British archaeologist, William Battersby, who has written extensively about the Franklin expedition.

"From the images it is clear that a huge amount of evidence will be preserved from the expedition, possibly even including the remains of the men and maybe, just possibly, some of their photographs," he said.

The loss of HMS Erebus and HMS Terror, which was built in Topsham, Devon, prompted one of largest searches in history, running from 1848 to 1859.

The mystery has gripped people for generations, in part because no one knows for sure exactly what happened to the crew.

Experts believe the ships were lost when they became locked in the ice near King William Island and that the crews abandoned them in a hopeless bid to reach safety.

Reports at the time from local Inuits say the men, desperate for food, resorted to cannibalism before they died.

Sir John Franklin's wife spearheaded an attempt to find him, launching five ships in search of her husband and even leaving cans of food on the ice in the desperate hope he would find them.

A neighbourhood in Winnipeg, Canada, is named Sir John Franklin

In total more than 50 expeditions joined the search.

Three bodies discovered over a century later in the 1980s were found to have a high lead content and to this day, many people believe the 129 crew members were poisoned by leaking lead in their poorly soldered tin cans.

More recent research suggests the canned food supplied to Franklin was not acidic enough for that to happen and the lead was more likely to have come from the internal pipe system on the ships.

The search resulted in the discovery of the Northwest Passage, which runs from the Atlantic to the Pacific through the Arctic archipelago.

The discovery of Franklin's vessels is considered one of the most sought-after prizes in marine archaeology.

A team of Canadian divers and archaeologists has been trying to find the ships since 2008.

HMCS Kingston has been involved in the search

Prime Minister Stephen Harper is looking to assert Canadian sovereignty over the northwest passage

[MIKA27]

MICROSHINER MAGAZINE

MicroShiner Magazine is a relatively new quarterly magazine dedicated to craft distilleries and low volume spirits – as you may have noticed, the name is a play on the terms “Micro Distiller” and “Moon Shiner”.

I have a fondness for small batch spirits, particularly bourbons, but it can be hard to track down new boutique distilleries as they usually don’t have much of an advertising budget and up until MicroShiner Magazine came along in 2013 there was no publication dedicated to finding and publishing them and their stories.

If you’d like to read MicroShiner Magazine you can here, if you’d like to subscribe you can click here.

Is that Smithy!?

[MIKA27]

The Dangerous Truth about Orgone

It’s not uncommon for fringe scientists to be persecuted by the authorities, particularly if they happen to be working on hitherto-unknown forms of energy. But the persecution is usually done in a subtle way, so that only the victim is aware of it. That certainly wasn’t the case with Wilhelm Reich, the man who introduced the world to orgone energy. He was persecuted in a brutal, systematic and very public way. His books were burned, his apparatus was destroyed, his ideas were reviled and he was thrown into prison.

What dangerous truth had Reich stumbled across, to warrant such heavy-handed treatment?

Wilhelm Reich began his career as a psychoanalyst in the Freudian tradition, but Reich went much further than Freud in linking psychology to sex. He believed that orgasm was the ultimate key to physical and mental health, and that conditions such as schizophrenia originated from an inability to achieve orgasm. According to Reich, the effect of an orgasm is to generate large quantities of a special form of energy called orgone. Although the idea was new to western science when he proposed it in the 1930s, orgone can trace its roots to the Kundalini energy of ancient India or the Qi of traditional Chinese medicine.

Reich came to believe that orgone could be collected and stored in the same way that electrical energy can be stored in a battery. He invented a device for this purpose called an orgone accumulator – a wooden booth lined with metal foil that would collect the orgone of whoever was seated inside. Convinced that he had discovered a previously unknown form of energy, Reich even persuaded Einstein – the most famous physicist of the day – to take an interest in the orgone accumulator. Einstein carried out various tests, but after two weeks concluded there was no physical basis to Reich’s orgone theory.

Orgone accumulator

While orgone was dismissed by the scientific establishment, it became the in-thing with America’s avant-garde subculture. All the radical literary figures of the day – Norman Mailer, J.D. Salinger, Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, William S. Burroughs – became enthusiastic devotees of the orgone accumulator. For conservatives, on the other hand, orgone came to represent “the new cult of sex and anarchy”, as Harper’s Magazine put it in April 1947.

Reich soon became Public Enemy Number One. By 1954, the Federal authorities had issued a declaration banning orgone accumulators and all associated literature. Reich was fined $10,000 – a lot of money in those days – and sentenced to two years in jail. The judge ordered that all orgone accumulators should be destroyed, and that all copies of Reich’s books were to be burned. The ensuing wholesale destruction is described by the Encyclopaedia Britannica as “one of the most blatant examples of censorship in U.S. history”.

A lot of words have been written about Wilhelm Reich, many of them focusing on whether orgone is “real” or not – in other words, whether it is science or pseudoscience. This misses the point. In fields like psychiatry and alternative medicine, the important thing isn’t whether a theory is “true” or “false”, but whether patients can benefit from it. Orgone is no less scientific than Freudian psychoanalysis, and no more pseudoscientific than countless complementary therapies that are practiced without the persecution Reich suffered. There must have been something in the orgone accumulator, because people like Norman Mailer and Allen Ginsberg weren’t fools.

In any case, the authorities wouldn’t have gone to such extreme lengths simply to suppress something that “doesn’t work”. It would have been a waste of resources. If they objected to orgone accumulators because they believed they didn’t work, why couldn’t they just ignore them and let the public make up its own mind?

So the mystery remains – what did Wilhelm Reich do to warrant such uniquely heavy-handed treatment? Some people will automatically assume that he tapped into a real, physical, energy source that the government wants to keep secret. That’s always a possibility, of course. Then again, it may simply have been mid-twentieth-century America’s horrified reaction to “the new cult of sex and anarchy”. Cynic that I am, I tend to believe the latter – but others may disagree.

Wilhelm Reich’s criminal record card

[MIKA27]

Minority Report TV show will star a female lead

Fox has secured the rights to the long-rumoured Minority ReportTV show, with the new series set to feature a female lead.

According to THR, the studio has already tapped Godzilla writer Max Borenstein to write the script, while Steven Spielberg has also been involved in the development of the project so far.

The series will pick up with one of the three Pre-Cogs (mutated humans capable of seeing into the future), and will follow his attempts at a normal life after the Pre-Crime initiative has been shut down.

However, his visions are still as vivid and frequent as ever, and the heroine of the piece is only too happy to channel them in what she believes is the right direction.

According to the report, Spielberg is keen to recruit a big-name actor for the lead role, so expect the rumour mill to grind into gear over the coming weeks, as potential air dates and plot details are confirmed…

[MIKA27]

Scientists Find Mysterious Species In Australia That Defy All Classifications Of Life

Marine biologists from the University of Copenhagen have discovered two new species that “defy all existing classifications of life”. They are rather cute and pretty — like some monsters from a Mario Bros. game.

Found in the sea southeast of Australia, the research paper published in PLOS ONE describes two asymmetrical mushroom shaped beings found at a depth of 400 to 1000 meters:

A new genus, Dendrogramma, with two new species of multicellular, non-bilaterian, mesogleal animals with some bilateral aspects, D. enigmatica and D. discoides, are described from the south-east Australian bathyal (400 and 1000 metres depth). A new family, Dendrogrammatidae, is established for Dendrogramma.

A new genus, Dendrogramma, with two new species of multicellular, non-bilaterian, mesogleal animals with some bilateral aspects, D. enigmatica and D. discoides, are described from the south-east Australian bathyal (400 and 1000 metres depth). A new family, Dendrogrammatidae, is established for Dendrogramma.

The enigmatic beings have scientists puzzled because they don’t fit in the current classification of life. The paper’s abstract says that their relation to other species is a “question still under debate,” so they have left their classification as incertae sedis. The scientists who made the discovery say that new specimens should be recover to make molecular analysis to find the relation with other existing species — if any.

The other question still under debate is this: Can I eat them, perhaps fried in some butter, garlic and parsley?

[Habana Mike]

Scientists Find Mysterious Species In Australia That Defy All Classifications Of Life

The enigmatic beings have scientists puzzled because they don’t fit in the current classification of life. The paper’s abstract says that their relation to other species is a “question still under debate,” so they have left their classification as incertae sedis. The scientists who made the discovery say that new specimens should be recover to make molecular analysis to find the relation with other existing species — if any.

The other question still under debate is this: Can I eat them, perhaps fried in some butter, garlic and parsley?

Proof of aliens visiting the planet I tell you.

Jellyshrooms anyone?

[MIKA27]

New Batmobile Revealed?

According to Slashfilm, these are NEW images of the new Batmobile to be featured in Batman v Superman. They seem to match the teaser from director Zack Snyder, but they feel a bit computer generated to me. It may be the low light conditions of the shot, supposedly taken during film in in Detroit.

Here’s the original teaser image by Snyder for comparison:

Another image allegedly leaked by Instagram user amacro13:

Slashfilm writes:

These shots are unverified for now, and don’t entirely seem to line up with the official tease above — this vehicle seems like it isn’t as long, primarily. The fins seen in the “up” position above could be laying down in the pics below, and in general this could be a different mode for the vehicle. This does look quite a lot like the Arkham Knight batmobile, too. As more shots arrive we’ll get a better idea.

Yesterday, another Instagram user — mole6674 — took this foto from his window showing someone sitting in the cockpit of the Batmobile checking his phone.

[MIKA27]

Underground Mapping Near Stonehenge Reveals A New 'Super Henge'

The mysteries of Stonehenge are revealed sometimes by unusual methods — forgetting to water its grass or whacking its stones with quartz. In this case, it just took four years of staring at the ground. A new underground survey reveals a vast complex of unknown Neolithic monuments near Stonehenge, including a huge stone “super henge”.

The Stonehenge Hidden Landscape Project has spent the past four years sweeping the area around Stonehenge with ground-penetrating radar and GPS-guided magnetometers. Without ever picking up a shovel, archeologists have mapped the ground up to two miles deep in extraordinary detail. It’s staring at the ground — but with high-tech tools.

Among the hundreds of features that were mapped are 17 newly discovered Neolithic monuments, all dating to the same period as Stonehenge about 5000 years ago. These pits and ditches, marked by post holes, often seem to be astronomically important.

There is the Cursus, for instance, a rectangular enclosure which is under two miles wide and over 60 miles long. Two pits inside the Cursus appears to be aligned with the rising and setting sun on the summer solstice when seen from the Stonehenge’s heel stone. Taken together, the monuments suggest Stonehenge is the most obvious remainder of a large complex of structures with ritual importance.

The survey also revealed surprising facts about known structures, like the Durrington Walls, a dirt bank that encircles a circumference of a mile. Underneath one section of the dirt, archeologists found more than 50 huge stones, each 10 feet long, forming a “super henge”. “That’s a big prehistoric monument which we never knew anything about,” the co-director of the investigation, Professor Vince Gaffney, told Nature. The structure, which faces the River Avon, could have a ritual connection with the water.

The BBC is a devoting a two-part TV series to the Stonehenge Hidden Landscape Project. For the more immediately curious, Smithsonian Magazine also visited the scene of the survey, where tractors pushed ground-penetrating radars “like high-powered lawn mowers” and all-terrain vehicles “dragged the magnetometer sensors on long strings.” This is what modern archeology looks like: no shovels, lots of gizmos, and big data.

[MIKA27]

An Incredible Photo From The Time When Nazis Walked Freely On US Soil

This is the LZ 129 Hindenburg being moved into a hangar in Lakehurst, New Jersey, on May 9, 1936. A year later — on May 6, 1937 — it would be destroyed by fire in one of the most famous air accidents in history.

It just seems fascinating to me that Nazis could freely prance around the world like that — even while it was clear that it was a military regime shrouded in racist and imperialist propaganda. But then, that didn’t stop Time Magazine from giving Hitler the Man of the Year award in 1938 — one year before the war started and after the German involvement in the Spanish Civil War.

MIKA: The world needs to value historians more highly. Before the 2nd World War both the US and UK both came within a hair's breadth of voting into power fascist governments. Australia missed by about 2%, which was a tiny bit wider than the other 2 but pretty damn close anyway. People like Henry Ford and Charles Lindbergh admired Hitler and his government. And you need to remember that Hitler came to power legally.

Here's a few other horrible facts you'd never think were true (horrible only with what you now know )

Saddam Hussein in 1980 received the Key to the City of Detroit. This was prior to him being declared an enemy of the United States of course.

In the 1980s in Afghanistan, Russia was fighting the locals, a young upstart, Osama Bin Laden, was aided by the CIA against them.

Fidel Castro at the Bronx Zoo, four months after he overthrew the former government in a major coup.

These aren't conspiracy theories, there's no 'dodgy' claims or big grand 'the government is against us' ideals, just interesting glimpses back at history and how times change, much like this original article. How former allies, associates and even friends can end up turning against us. Not that they were all ever 'allies' but it's an interesting look none the less.

How times change huh?

[MIKA27]

The Dark, Glamorous World Of One Of New York City's Real-Life Mad Men

New York in the years after World War II was a city more prosperous and more modern than anything the world had seen — and it spawned a whole culture unto itself, distributed in newspapers, magazines, and advertisements. This was the era of Madison Avenue Men, and Mac Conner was their illustrator.

Conner is the subject of a new show at the Museum of the City of New York opening tomorrow, that looks at the images Conner created to articulate not only the joie de vivre of New York in the 1950s and 60s, but also crime, the humour, and the kinds of moments the modern women who read the fashion magazines Conner worked for wanted to avoid. Appearing in everything from Good Housekeeping to Cosmo, these drawings were half Norman Rockwell and half film noir — a perfect mix of the competing desires of modern Americans after the War.

Check out Mac Conner: A New York Life beginning on September 10th — it’s on until January 19th of next year.

Killer in the Club Car in This Week magazine, 1954.

Let’s Take a Trip Up the Nile, published in This Week magazine, 1950.

Hold On Tight, published in Redbook, 1958

There’s Death For Remembrance, for This Week magazine, 1953

The Girl Who Was Crazy About Jimmy Durante” in Woman’s Day, 1953.

We Won’t Be Any Trouble, Collier’s, 1953.

All The Good Guys Died, printed in Cosmopolitan, 1951.

Don’t Be Like Me, in Collier’s, 1953

Strictly Respectable, printed in Redbook, 1953

Where’s Mary Smith?, published in Good Housekeeping, 1950.

How Do You Love Me, for Woman’s Home Companion, 1950.

[MIKA27]

Bond villain actor Kiel dies aged 74

Actor Richard Kiel - who played steel-toothed villain Jaws in two James Bond films - has died in California aged 74.

The towering American star, who appeared in The Spy Who Loved Me in 1977 and Moonraker in 1979, died in hospital in Fresno on Wednesday.

A spokeswoman for Saint Agnes Medical Center confirmed Kiel's death, but did not reveal the cause.

The 7ft 2in (2.18m) actor also appeared in the sports comedy Happy Gilmore, starring Adam Sandler, in 1996.

Kiel made his name as cable-chomping henchman Jaws opposite Roger Moore as 007.

He was a guest on BBC's Radio 4 programme The Reunion, which aired on Sunday, along with Moore and Bond actress Britt Ekland, recalling their parts in the spy series.

During the programme, he said he initially thought playing Jaws - a man who killed people with his teeth - could appear "over the top".

'Monster part'

"I was very put off by the description of the character and I thought, well they don't really need an actor, he's more a monster part," he said.

"So I tried to change that view of it... I said if I were to play the part, I want to give the character some human characteristics, like perseverance, frustration."

Kiel, pictured with fellow Bond villains Christopher Lee, Rick Yune and Toby Stephens, was 7ft 2in tall

Born in Detroit, Michigan, Kiel had the hormonal condition acromegaly, which was said to have contributed to his height.

His first break came in 1959 when he played the alien Kanamit in Twilight Zone.

He published an autobiography in 2002, called Making It Big In The Movies.

His other acting roles included deadly assistant Voltaire in The Wild, Wild West opposite Will Smith and as Eli Weaver in The Giant of Thunder Mountain.

[MIKA27]

Dutch boy turns his dead rat into flying rodent

When grieving the death of a family pet, people have been known to hold a ceremony in the back garden, perhaps putting an 'RIP Fluffy' plaque in the shrubs.

Some take it a step further, and have their beloved animal stuffed when they pass on.

But one Dutch schoolboy has really raised the bar. Following the death of his pet rat, Pepeijn Bruins had the animal turned into a flying rodent.

Yes that's right, he made a rat-copter.

The 13-year-old was heartbroken when his pet Ratjetoe, which is Dutch for ratatouille, was stricken with cancer and he had to have him put down.

Pepeijn said: "I loved him very much. He always liked to be cuddled and he would run up my clothes and hide."

Keen to keep his pet's memory alive Pepeijn looked at ways of holding onto Ratjetoe.

Luckily, if that's how you want to put it, Dutch inventors Arjen Beltman and Bart Jansen were on hand to help him achieve his goal.

The duo were naturally Pepeijn's first port of call after seeing their previous work, which includes producing the world's first stuffed, radio-controlled flying cat.

They've also made a dead ostrich take flight and their next project has the working title of turbo shark - you can guess the rest of that one.

Their work is being showcased in a Channel 4 documentary called All Creatures Great and Stuffed at 10pm on 10 September.

MIKA: WTF!? A bit twisted IMO

[MIKA27]

Film Company Looking For Loch Morar Monster Spotters

Everyone has heard of the Loch Ness monster and the list of people claiming to have seen it just as their smartphone batteries ran out gets longer every day. On the other hand, few know that there’s another monster allegedly lurking in a loch. If you’re someone who has witnessed Morag, the Loch Morar Monster, a film company is looking to make you a star … or at least famous among your friends

Loch Morar, 70 miles from Loch Ness, is the fifth-largest loch in Scotland and, with a depth of 310 meters (1,017 feet), the deepest freshwater body in Great Britain. While the area has been inhabited since at least the 12th century, the first recorded sighting of a Morar monster was in 1887. Texts at the University of Edinburgh library written by folklore collector Alexander Carmichael give accounts from late 19th century witnesses:

There is a creature in Loch Morar and she is called Morag. She is never seen save when one of the hereditary people of the place dies. The Morag is peculiar to Loch Morar. She is seen in broad daylight and by many persons, including church persons. She appears in a black heap or ball slowing and deliberately rising in the water and moving along like a boat water-logged. The Morag is much disliked and is called by many uncomplimentary terms.

There were 31 sightings by 1981, including nine people on a boat in 1948 who claimed they saw “peculiar, serpent-like creature about 20 feet long.” In 1969, Duncan McDonnel and William Simpson claimed they hit Morag with their speedboat, describing it as a brown creature with three humps and a head a foot wide that was 20 inches above the water. In 2013, Doug and Charlotte Christie claimed they it saw three times in two days and took the above photograph. The Loch Ness Investigation Bureau included Loch Morar in 1970.

CMJ Productions in Montreal is looking for Morag information for a documentary. A crew will be at Loch Morar September 25-27. “Eyewitnesses, believers, sceptics, historians” should contact researcher Elizabeth Grenier at [email protected].

If you get picked for the film, try not to use any uncomplimentary terms.

[MIKA27]

America’s Jack The Ripper: The Servant Girl Annihilator

A 125-year-old mystery may have finally been solved according to one self-described “arm-chair sleuth”. How many times have you read this headline over the last few days?

While I haven’t been able to preview the forthcoming book by Russell Edwards, “Naming Jack The Ripper” (which appears in print today in the UK), I remain skeptical until more definitive proof of these new claims is forthcoming.

Yet even before the appearance of London’s most blood-curdling murders, Stateside there had been a series of events that were remarkably similar, and which like the Ripper murders, went unsolved. Though the murderer never gave himself a name as Jack had apparently done, famous fiction writer O. Henry once made passing reference to the killings in a correspondence, and the name he inspired in reference to the crime, that of a “Servant Girl Annihilator,” appeared to stick.

The story unfolded in the spring of 1885, nearly three years prior to Jack the Ripper’s frightening London debut, in the city of Austin, Texas. Clara Strand and Christine Martenson were two servant women who were first reported injured on the evening of March 19, 1885, although an earlier casualty –the earliest known that is still believed to be linked directly with the same series of crimes– was that of Mollie Smith, a twenty-five-year old servant girl who was found murdered on Christmas night, 1884. The second actual murder in the string of attacks wouldn’t take place until the night of May 6th, 1885, when a young woman named Eliza Shelly was found dead. Subsequent attacks followed later that month on the 22nd, resulting in a knife attack that killed a woman named Irene Cross.

The killer seemed to lay dormant for a period after Cross’s death, before emerging on the scene again in August of that year. A woman named Clara **** might have been his presumed target, but she managed survive, though she was badly injured during the nighttime assault of her mysterious attacker who, in nearly every instance, had been focused on the “annihilation” of servant girls while sleeping in their beds. Within days, a child named Mary Ramey was killed in an attack that reportedly occurred in her family home; her mother, Rebecca (and presumably the target of this particular attack) was also injured, but ultimately survived the gruesome attack.

The next victim, Gracie Vance, was killed on September 28th, during an attack where her companion (at that moment), Orange Washington, was also killed. While other injuries were reported in conjunction with the attack that led to the death of Gracie Vance, the final two murders would occur on Christmas Eve, marking one day shy of the anniversary of Mollie Smith’s murder, with the deaths of Susan Hancock and Eula Phillips, whose husband was also injured during the nighttime attack.

There appeared to be no prejudices between race of the victims, though the killer obviously had targeted women, with male victims occasionally caught in the proverbial crossfire of the attacks. Several of the women were killed in their homes, while others, presumably still alive after the initial stabbings, were dragged outside their homes and mutilated, which often included having some sharp object inserted into their ears.

There were a number of suspects that were considered, as it was believed that the Monster of Austin had been a man of equal care and cunning. But most curious of all, an item that would later appear in the Kansas-based Atchison Daily Globe three years later — coinciding with the eventual murders attributed to London’s Jack the Ripper — drew parallels not only between the killings, but a presumed suspect as well; one of these, an individual described as “a Malay cook” that was purportedly sailing from country to country, had been named as a suspect in both the Austin and London cases:

…[A] Malay cook calling himself Maurice had been employed at the [Pearl House] in 1885… left some time in January 1886. It will be remembered that the last of the series of Austin women murders was the killing of Mrs. Hancock and Mrs. Eula Phillips, the former occurring on Christmas eve 1885, just before the Malay departed, and that the series then ended. A strong presumption that the Malay was the murderer of the Austin women was created by the fact that all of them except two or three resided in the immediate neighborhood of the Pearl House.

Granted, the connection between the two sets of murders is somewhat tenuous, let alone the idea that the killers were indeed one and of the same. A more plausible scenario for the actual culprit in the Austin “annihilations” may have been revealed earlier this year on a program called History Detectives, which submitted that a 19-year-old African American chef named Nathan Elgin was the most likely suspect, having been caught and shot in the act of attacking a woman with a knife in the early months of 1886.

The looming problem with such cases is that when the suspects have been killed, it becomes increasingly difficult to confirm their involvement in such mass-murder sprees. Truth be known, we may never know who Austin’s “Servant Girl Annihilator” really was, or whether there may have been any legitimate connections between the killings that occurred there, and the man who arguably became one of the most famous serial killers ever to darken the murky streets of the Victorian London night.

[MIKA27]

Will the Higgs Boson Destroy the Universe?

In the preface to an upcoming book, Stephen Hawking remarked that humanity might—at some point in the distant future—be capable of accidentally destroying the universe itself by disrupting the Higgs field:

“The Higgs potential has the worrisome feature that it might become metastable at energies above 100bn gigaelectronvolts (GeV). This could mean that the universe could undergo catastrophic vacuum decay, with a bubble of the true vacuum expanding at the speed of light. This could happen at any time and we wouldn’t see it coming, [but] …[a] particle accelerator that reaches 100bn GeV would be larger than Earth, and is unlikely to be funded in the present economic climate.”

The idea that humanity might one day be able to destroy the universe by disrupting the Higgs field with some unimaginably powerful kind of supercollider is based on some very speculative science, but the idea of a natural Higgs-based apocalypse is more widely accepted. CERN’s Gian Giudice, one of the world’s leading particle physicists, explains that the Higgs field appears to be resting on a precipice—and that quantum tunneling, and the conversion of the Higgs field to an unmanageable state, could unfold in the distant future:

“Our calculation shows that quantum tunneling of the Higgs field is not likely to occur in the next 10¹⁰⁰ years … So it is really unlikely that we will be around to see the Higgs field collapse.”

This natural apocalypse scenario, and Hawking’s accidental apocalypse scenario, may both fall apart as CERN’s experiments continue:

“Most scientists … expect that the [Large Hadron Collider] will find other particles in due course. Then, new calculations could indicate that the universe has more stability … ‘The top quark strongly affects the vacuum by its quantum fluctuations because it is so heavy,’ [Cambridge physicist Benjamin] Allanach says. ‘If the Higgs mass were really 127 GeV and the top mass were a little lower than its most likely value, then actually the universe would be completely stable and the vacuum would be in the true minimum.’”

But supposing it does turn out that the Higgs field apocalypse is a real danger, and supposing it seems imminent on a future human scale, our descendants may be able to predict—and, ultimately, prevent—it using a surgical application of exactly the sort of Higgs-warping technology Hawking describes above. And if that sounds laughably optimistic, remember: we just spotted our first asteroid in 1801, and we’ll be ready to deflect one in seven years. I like our odds.

[MIKA27]

Burger King's New All-Black Burger Has Black Buns, Cheese, And Sauce

This is the new all black burger at Burger King Japan, a sandwich with black buns, black sauce, and black cheese darker than a black hole (seriously, the cheese is extremely black.) It looks kind of gross — but I really want to try it. How is this black cheese so dark, you ask?

It isn’t plastic — although it looks like it.

It’s made smoking it using bamboo charcoal. It probably tastes delicious. The buns are also smoked with bamboo charcoal* and, according to Ashcraft, the sauce is made with onion, garlic, and squid ink (which sounds rather delicious.) The beef patties made also contain black pepper.

MIKA: Kind of reminds me of my wifes cooking and how her food turns out...

[MIKA27]

AEROMOBIL FLYING CAR

Drumroll, please. OK, you’ve wondered about it, wished for it, and whined about not having it for years, but now it’s here… the flying car! Are there a few catches, sure, it’s still in the prototype stage, but come on, it’s a flying car—the Aeromobil Flying Car, to be exact.

Tired of watching reruns of The Jetsons, Slovakian Engineer Štefan Klein rolled up his sleeves and created the first prototype of the Aeromobil in the 90s, and has been slaving away at the project ever since. At this point, he’s calling it the Aeromobil 2.5, and it features a 19-foot long body, Rotax 912 engine, carbon-coated steel frame, and collapsible wings. With room for two, the vehicle can reach a top speed of 124 mph and take off and land. There’s no word on whether Klein will market his invention, but the deep-pocketed thrill seekers among us eagerly await his decision. Check out the video below.

[MIKA27]

NIKE CONCEPT PLANE CABIN FOR PRO ATHLETES

You know who needs a cushier ride from city to city? Pro athletes. OK, maybe not, but Nike isn’t going to spend money on a private jet concept for Joe 6-pack; they’re going to invest in their moneymakers.

The stats say athletes who cross more than three time zones end up with a 60 percent chance of losing their games, so Nike and Seattle-based design firm Teague have teamed up to create this sensational and sci-fi-like concept cabin for a hypothetical NBA team. The plane features specialized zones for sitting, sleeping, socializing, recovery, and nutrition. Wearable sensors embedded into the players’ clothing can collect data on their physiology and send the info to on-board computers. No overhead bins means 7-footers won’t need to duck, and there’s self-serve meal zones for the hungry point guard who’s tired of dishing out to other people.

[MIKA27]

MERCEDES BENZ AMG GT

After many spy shots and months of speculations, the spectacular Mercedes-AMG GT has finally be presented. After saying goodbye to the SLS model with a final edition, about a year ago, Mercedes-Benz now presents the brand new AMG GT, with a longer front and a slightly wider rear than its predecessor. Powered by an impressive AMG 4.0-liter V8 biturbo engine, this beast comes with 462 hp, and can go from zero to 60 mph in a mere 4 seconds, and hit a top speed of 189mph. The top of the line S model, features 510 hp, and goes from zero to 60mph in 3.8 seconds, and will reach a top speed of 193mph.