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

[MIKA27]

SeaRAM Outfits The US Navy's Favourite Gatling Gun With Homing Missiles

Shockingly, there are some instances where the US Navy’s Phalanx Close-In Weapons System’s (CIWS) red hot wall of 20mm tungsten isn’t enough to neutralise incoming threats — like against fast moving anti-ship cruise missiles. For times like those, America’s Navy relies on the Phalanx’s bigger, badder, rocket-propelled brother: the SeaRAM.

First deployed in the early 1990s, the SeaRAM is, essentially, a modified Phalanx system. As the US Navy’s product page explains, “The SeaRAM CIWS is a complete combat weapon system that automatically detects, evaluates, tracks, engages and performs kill assessment against ASM and high speed aircraft threats in an extended self defence battle space envelope around the ship.

It utilises the same frame, occupies the same footprint, and draws the same amount of power as the Phalanx. However, rather than firing 20 mm rounds, the SeaRAM fires the RIM-116 Rolling Airframe Missile (RAM). These self-guided missiles are equipped with tri-band passive radio and active IR seekers as well as 11kg frag warheads. They’re designed to intercept ground, air and sea-launched threats up to 9km out while moving at Mach 2. Each SeaRAM can hold up to 11 of these $US998,000 missiles.

Per Raytheon:

The SeaRAM Anti-Ship Missile Defence System is a spiral development of key attributes of the Phalanx Close-In Weapon System and the Rolling Airframe Missile (RAM) Guided Weapon System. SeaRAM is designed to extend the inner layer battlespace and enable the ship to effectively engage multiple high-performance, supersonic and subsonic threats.

An 11-missile RAM launcher assembly replaces Phalanx’s 20 mm gun. SeaRAM combines RAM’s superior accuracy, extended range and high manoeuvrability with the Phalanx Block 1B’s high resolution search-and-track sensor systems and reliable quick-response capability.

“No one has monolithic navy sea battles on the open waters anymore,” Rick McDonnell, Raytheon’s program director for close-in defence solutions, said in a press release. “Now navies need smaller, more affordable ships to defend shorelines and navigate around conflict regions.”

As such, the SeaRAM system has been installed on two of the navy’s new fleet of littoral combat ships, the USS Independence and USS Coronado.

[MIKA27]

A Gorgeous Look At The Open World Of The Witcher 3

Just in case you forgot about The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt, CD Projekt Red has released a brand new developer diary to remind you how glorious it looks.

I’m getting caught up in the hype for this one, and I’ve barely even played previous games in the series. I’m just loving the sense of scale, the look and the art. The weird thing is that The Witcher 3 doesn’t quite look like an RPG. When I watch it in action it looks more like Assassin’s Creed or Red Dead Redemption than say… Skyrim. But it appears to have the depth of an environment like that. I just love the focus on details, and it seems like the fiction and the lore of the game is actually intriguing.

[MIKA27]

Han & Chewie Figures Look Real Enough To Pull The Ears Off A Gundark

Look at Chewie long enough and you start imagining him flicking his arms around in slow-mo, like the universe’s coolest shampoo commercial. Look at Han long enough and, well, you’ll get those same feelings you always get when you stare too deeply into his cheeky scowl.

This Chewie figure is by Hoy Toys, and is one of the most ridiculous large-scale figures I’ve ever seen. Mostly because he’s covered not in moulded plastic, but with “brown fabric hair”, which instantly make this one of the most realistic figures the company has ever released.

And OK, so maybe that’s all they had to do, since he doesn’t really have an outfit (or even a detailed face), but that’s not Chewie’s fault.

Joining him will be Han Solo, who despite an absence of actual Harrison Ford hair sprouting from every figure also looks fantastic.

[MIKA27]

Shellshock: 'Deadly serious' new vulnerability found

A "deadly serious" bug potentially affecting hundreds of millions of computers, servers and devices has been discovered.

The flaw has been found in a software component known as Bash, which is a part of many Linux systems as well as Apple's Mac operating system.

The bug, dubbed Shellshock, can be used to remotely take control of almost any system using Bash, researchers said.

Some experts said it was more serious than Heartbleed, discovered in April.

"Whereas something like Heartbleed was all about sniffing what was going on, this was about giving you direct access to the system," Prof Alan Woodward, a security researcher from the University of Surrey, told the BBC.

"The door's wide open."

Some 500,000 machines worldwide were thought to have been vulnerable to Heartbleed. But early estimates, which experts said were conservative, suggest that Shellshock could hit at least 500 million machines.

The problem is particularly serious given that many web servers are run using the Apache system, software which includes the Bash component.

Patch immediately

Bash - which stands for Bourne-Again SHell - is a command prompt on many Unix computers. Unix is an operating system on which many others are built, such as Linux and Mac OS.

The US Computer Emergency Readiness Team (US-Cert) issued a warning about the bug, urging system administrators to apply patches.

However, other security researchers warned that the patches were "incomplete" and would not fully secure systems.

Of particular concern to security experts is the simplicity of carrying out attacks that make use of the bug.

Shellshock rates a 10 on the scale of vulnerabilities. As bugs go, it's about as bad as it gets.

Except that the last big bad bug, Heartbleed, rated an 11, according to one expert.

That should mean Shellshock isn't as bad. Right?

Maybe. It's too early to tell.

With Heartbleed, more work had been done by the folks that found it so it was easier to estimate who was at risk. There were lots of big targets, many of which had large user populations.

With Shellshock, the sheer number of potential victims is higher. And we do know that an exploit has been produced and some folks are scanning sites to see which are vulnerable to attacks based around that code.

So far, what's keeping servers safe is the fact that cyber thieves are lazy and tend to copy what has already worked. Finding exploits is specialised, hard work so they only tend to pile in once that appears. With that code already in circulation, the early news about Shellshock may just be the first tremor of a much bigger quake.

Cybersecurity specialists Rapid7 rated the Bash bug as 10 out of 10 for severity, but "low" on complexity - a relatively easy vulnerability for hackers to capitalise on.

"Using this vulnerability, attackers can potentially take over the operating system, access confidential information, make changes, et cetera," said Tod Beardsley, a Rapid7 engineer.

"Anybody with systems using Bash needs to deploy the patch immediately."

Security firms have suggested that there is evidence Shellshock is being used by hackers.

"The vulnerability has already been used for malicious intentions - infecting vulnerable web servers with malware, and also in hacker attacks," said Kaspersky Labs.

"Our researchers are constantly gathering new samples and indications of infections based on this vulnerability."

For general home users worried about security, Prof Woodward suggested simply keeping an eye on manufacturer websites for updates - particularly for hardware such as broadband routers.

Free questions

The new bug has turned the spotlight, once again, onto the reliance the technology industry has on products built and maintained by small teams often made up of volunteers.

Heartbleed was a bug related to open source cryptographic software OpenSSL. After the bug became public, major tech firms moved to donate large sums of money to the team responsible for maintaining the software.

Similarly, the responsibility for Bash lies with just one person - Chet Ramey, a developer based at Case Western Reserve University in Ohio.

That such key parts of everyday technology are maintained in this way is a cause for concern, said Tony Dyhouse from the UK's Trustworthy Security Initiative.

"To achieve a more stable and secure technology environment in which businesses and individuals can feel truly safe, we have to peel back the layers, start at the bottom and work up," he said.

"This is utterly symptomatic of the historic neglect we have seen for the development of a dependable and trustworthy baseline upon which to develop a software infrastructure for the UK.

"Ultimately, this is a lifecycle problem. It's here because people are making mistakes whilst writing code and making further mistakes when patching the original problems."

[MIKA27]

Virgin's Richard Branson offers staff unlimited holiday

The boss of Virgin Group, Sir Richard Branson, is offering his personal staff as much holiday as they want.

On his website, he said that his staff of 170 could "take off whenever they want for as long as they want".

He added that there was no need to ask for approval, nor say when they planned to return, the assumption being that the absence would not damage the firm.

Mr Branson said he was inspired by his daughter, who read about a similar plan at the online TV firm Netflix.

"It is left to the employee alone to decide if and when he or she feels like taking a few hours, a day, a week or a month off," wrote the billionaire.

"The assumption being that they are only going to do it when they feel 100% comfortable that they and their team are up to date on every project and that their absence will not in any way damage the business - or, for that matter, their careers!"

He added that he had introduced the policy in the UK and the US "where vacation policies can be particularly draconian". If it goes well there, Mr Branson said he would encourage subsidiaries to follow suit.

"We should focus on what people get done, not on how many hours or days worked. Just as we don't have a nine-to-five policy, we don't need a vacation policy," he wrote.

The blog is an excerpt from a forthcoming book.

Virgin Group employs more than 50,000 people around the world and operates in more than 50 countries.

Mr Branson started the company in 1970 and it has gone from a mail order record company to having businesses in telecoms, travel and financial services.

[MIKA27]

The World War II Campaign to Bring Organ Meats to the Dinner Table

As pork and beef were shipped overseas to feed the soldiers, the U.S. government enlisted Margaret Mead and a team of anthropologists make hearts, livers, and kidneys a mainstream part of American dining. They succeeded, sort of.

In January 1943, just over a year into the United States’ involvement in World War II, former president Herbert Hoover took to the pages of the now-defunct magazine What’s New in Foods and Nutrition to deliver a part-pep talk, part-warning about the state of the American meat supply.

“Meats and fats are just as much munitions in this war as are tanks and aeroplanes,” wrote Hoover, who led the U.S. Food Administration during World War I (and pioneered the slogan “Food will win the war,” as well as the first Meatless Mondays). “The problem will loom larger and larger in the United States as the war goes on … Ships are too scarce to carry much of such supplies from the Southern Hemisphere; our farms are short of labor to care for livestock; and on top of it all we must furnish supplies to the British and the Russians.”

“We should not wait for official rationing to begin to conserve,” he continued. “The same spirit in the household that we had in the last war can solve this problem.”

Hoover knew of what he spoke. Just two months later, meat would join butter and cheese as a rationed food item, as growing quantities of beef and pork were shipped overseas to feed American and Allied troops.

But meat rationing represented a harsh blow to the American diet, which considered it a staple. As Lizzie Collingham wrote in her book The Taste of War, “Red meat, preferably beef, was highly valued as a prime source of energy, especially for the working man, and its presence on a plate helped to define the food as a proper meal.” As a result,

The black market was most active in the meat trade. During the war a large number of small slaughterhouses sprang up, which traded locally and were able to evade the inspectors from the Office of Price Administration [the agency that oversaw food rationing]. They would buy livestock for slaughter above the ceiling price and then sell it on to black-market distributors. Butchers would sell favored customers high-quality steaks in the guise of ‘pre-ground’ hamburger, which used up fewer ration points.

But the war had its home front, too, and the desire for meat consumption didn’t start and end with the families who now used ration stamps to buy it—the government also had a vested interest in making sure Americans stayed well-fed. At the time, public health—and, by extension, nutrition—were considered matters of national security. (Combining these interests under one agency, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt established the Office of Defense, Health, and Welfare Services in 1941. Two years later, the office was disbanded in a bout of government reshuffling and its powers were absorbed by the Federal Security Agency, the predecessor to the modern-day Department of Health and Human Services.)

In 1940, at the behest of the Department of Defense, the National Research Council assembled a team of the country’s leading social scientists to create the Committee on Food Habits. Its mission was twofold: First, they needed to launch an in-depth study of Americans’ eating habits—who in a household decided what would be served? What made a meal a meal? What was the ideal balance of familiarity versus novelty? And second, once it understood the factors that influenced those answers, the committee needed to change them in ways that benefitted the war effort.

To head the committee, the NRC recruited anthropologist Margaret Mead, along with German-born psychologist Kurt Lewin (considered to be one of the founders of social psychology). At the top of their agenda: addressing the looming meat shortage. More specifically, they needed to devise a way to convince Americans to abandon their steaks, pork chops, and other familiar cuts in favor of the meats that the soldiers wouldn’t eat—the hearts, livers, and other organs that remained plentiful stateside.

The committee members had their work cut out for them. Organ meats at the time were largely shunned by all but the poorest Americans, considered a marker of low social status or a rural, unsophisticated upbringing—and of all the social taboos, those related to food are among the most difficult to dispel, said Barrett Brenton, a nutritional anthropologist at St. John’s University.

“When you think of cultural identity, the last thing to go—even after language—is ideas about food,” he explained. “It’s one of the most deeply culturally rooted sets of ideas that anyone could have, the relationship to food itself.”

Up until that point, food-related war propaganda—as with World War I’s “Food will win this war”—had largely pinned its messages to ideas of patriotism, encouraging the public to use vegetables from their Victory Gardens, Can for Victory, or otherwise do their part in the kitchen to support the men on the front lines.

Mead and Lewin, though, had other ideas. Using patriotism as an incentive was all well and good, they argued, but it wasn’t the most effective means of steering eating behavior. A better method, they believed, was to focus on barriers over incentives—the question at hand wasn’t “What would convince you to eat organ meats?” but rather “Why don’t you eat them in the first place?”

One of the major reasons, they soon found through their research, was organs’ unfamiliarity—people balked at the idea of serving something without knowing its taste or even how best to prepare it. In response, the committee urged the government to produce materials that couched the new meats in more comfortable terms.

“One of the first interesting things they found was, you don’t go to people and say, ‘Look, eat beef brains every day,’” said Brian Wansink, a professor of consumer behavior at Cornell University, in his 2002 paper “Changing Eating Habits on the Home Front: Lost Lessons from World War II Research.” “The first thing they did was say, ‘Let’s have a much smaller ask. Let’s ask people to occasionally try an organ meat. Insert organ meat into your meal planning.’ What was very clever about the way they did this, is they said, ‘Just try it for variety.’”

And thus, “variety meats” were born. Butchers, who already sold organ meats for fewer ration points than premium cuts, were encouraged to adopt the new term with their customers; so were reporters with their readers.

“Variety meats: They are good, abundant, highly nutritious,” chirped an article in the January 1943 issue of LIFE magazine:

For no good reason most Americans wrinkle their noses at the idea of any of the functional organs of otherwise edible animals. Yet tripe, kidneys, tongue, heart, liver, and the other “variety meats” shown on the following pages are not only rich in nutritive value but, when properly prepared, are among the tastiest dishes known.

Community groups held “variety” cooking classes; publishers released cookbooks instructing people how to make hearts filled with stuffing and chicken and how to prepare kidneys for meat and vegetable stew. Slowly, organs became, if not enthusiastically embraced, than begrudgingly accepted into the mainstream diet—and as their ubiquity grew, their stigma began to fade.

“Social norms to eat organ meats were dramatically influenced by the mere presence of these foods on the family dinner table,” Wansink wrote in his 2002 paper. “Organ meats soon became foods that ‘patriots’ ate, not necessarily foods that ‘poor people’ ate.”

The effect, though, lasted barely longer than the war itself.

In part, the timing was to blame. The Committee on Food Habits was prolific, conducting hundreds of studies over its few years in existence, but using the information they gleaned to overhaul social norms was a much slower process, and victory arrived before lasting changes to the American diet had a chance to take hold.

And in part, the propaganda was to blame, too.

“They pushed these organ meats in [propaganda] literature and pamphlets, but when it came to the visual propaganda, it still featured steaks, roasts, chops—these really high-valued cuts of meat,” said Amy Bentley, a professor of food studies at New York University and the author of Eating for Victory: Food Rationing and the Politics of Domesticity. “So in a sense, they were sending two messages.”

In other words, even the government didn’t fully embrace its own message that variety could become the new normal. Organ meats would do for wartime—but the satisfaction of a well-cooked steak was still a formidable foe.

[MIKA27]

THE RIVER HOUSE IN SERBIA

Just one glance at the aptly titled River House, and there’s absolutely no question where this little cottage gained its name. Located on the Drina River in Serbia, this home was originally built over 45 years ago.

The house is situated upon a rock in the middle of the river, and gained fame on the web just a few short years ago when National Geographic published the amazing photo seen above. Back in 1968, a small group of young boys decided that their sunbathing rock needed a comfortable place to relax, using boats and kayaks to transport boards from a nearby ruined shed to build this beauty. Over the past few decades, the house has been destroyed multiple times in floods, but just like that it gets built right back up.

[MIKA27]

BEES KNEES SPICY HONEY

Add a kick to your morning routine with Bees Knees Spicy Honey. Handmade in Brooklyn using raw honey from the Hudson Valley and a combination of chili peppers, each batch is carefully cool-infused, so it retains all the benefits of pure, unprocessed honey while offering just the right blend of flavors. It comes in 8 oz. bottles, pairs well with a surprisingly large number of foods, and comes with a Sting-Free guarantee: if you don't like it, they'll take care of you, and not in a scary mobster kind of way.

[MIKA27]

Is that a hippo swimming in the Chicago River?

Could a hippopotamus really make its home in the Chicago River? At least one person seems to think so.

In a video uploaded to YouTube by Chris O., you can see something near a boat in the river that possibly resembles a hippo but it’s hard to tell.

According to The Blaze, the Chicago Police Department has not received any “reports of wild animals roaming the streets or the rivers of Chicago.”

A representative with the Brookfield Zoo also told The Blaze that it was unlikely that a hippo would be able to survive in the river, especially given Chicago’s harsh winters.

[MIKA27]

iOS 8.0.2 Is Already Out For Your iPhone

Burned by the Cellular-killing iOS 8.0.1 update yesterday? Good news: Apple called everyone in and has already issued a fix. Meet iOS 8.0.2.

The new software update “contains improvements and bug fixes” for devices running iOS 8.

Here are the full patch notes:

• Fixes an issue in iOS 9.0.1 that impacted cellular network connectivity and Touch ID on iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 Plus
• Fixes a bug so HealthKit apps can now be made available on the App Store
• Addresses an issue where 3rd party keyboards could become deselected where users entered their passcode
• Fixes an issue that prevented some apps from accessing photos from the Photo Library
• Improves the reliability of the Reachability feature on iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 Plus
• Fixes an issue that could cause unexpected cellular data usage when receiving SMS/MMS messages
• Better support of Ask To Buy for Family Sharing for In-App Purchases
• Fixes an issue where ringtones were sometimes not restored from iCloud backups
• Fixes a bug that prevented uploading photos and videos from Safari.

[MIKA27]

The Walking Dead Is Even Better And Way Funnier With Bad Lip Reading

I'm a huge fan of the Walking Dead and if you enjoy a good laugh or watch The Walking Dead or ever wondered what zombies are saying through all that clawing and moaning, the Bad Lip Reading guys have got you covered in their latest take on The Walking Dead. It’s pretty damn funny.

Instead of worrying about zombies, they’re dis-inviting people from a turtle’s birthday and making music videos that make the walkers sing.

[MIKA27]

In Blackhat, The Fate Of The World Hangs On The Shoulders Of One Hacker

http://youtu.be/tKyuDgygvqc

In the upcoming Michael Mann thriller Blackhat, everything is about to go to hell in a handbag when global computer systems are compromised by high-level hackers. And the only person that can save the world is a convicted criminal hacker mastermind. Welcome to the action flick of the digital age.

The trailer makes Blackhat look like just that, with Chris Hemsworth playing a brainy Jason Bourne-I-can-save-the-world-with-one-hand type hero who fights with computers but also apparently can actually throw a punch. Maybe the brawniest hacker I’ve ever seen on screen. As far as how realistic the movie is, well, just watch the trailer. Blackhat hits theatres January 16.

[MIKA27]

The Many Ways We're Using Mutant Mosquitos To Eradicate Disease

Mosquitos suck. It’s not just because of those itchy red bites we all get in the summer, either. Mosquitos suck because they’re the deadliest animals on the planet, and none of our classic strategies from combatting the threat seem to be working. That’s why we’re turning the mosquitos against themselves.

In recent years, scientists have studied a number of methods that involve genetically modifying or otherwise mutating mosquitos in order to stop the spread of disease. This makes sense because the powers of 21st century human science can surely defeat any demon. (Right?) But it’s also a little bit controversial because people tend to clam up when the destruction of a species is under consideration.

Regardless of ethics, you’d probably be willing to try anything in order to stop your children from dying of malaria or dengue fever. So how are we actually trying to save lives with these mutant insects? Let me count the ways.

Releasing good mosquitos to kill the bad mosquitos

The latest science-driven strategy for wiping out diseased skeeters is being unleashed right now in Brazil, Australia, Vietnam and Indonesia. Tens of thousands of mosquitos that have been infected with Wolbachia, a special bacteria that suppresses dengue fever, will be released in specific communities every month for the next four months. The idea is that these infected mosquitos will mate with dengue-carrying mosquitos, the Aedes aegypti species.

The Wolbachia bacteria acts like a vaccine for infected mosquitos, but it also acts like birth control. If an infected male fertilises an uninfected female, the eggs do not turn to larvae. Eventually, scientists hope that the bacteria will become widespread and prevent the spread of dengue. Since it doesn’t affect humans, this is a pretty good solution for eradicating the disease without committing mosquito genocide.

Using mutant mosquitos to commit mosquito genocide

The other popular option on the table does indeed involve committing mosquito genocide. A few years ago, researchers in Brazil started genetically modifying the Aedes aegypti species, so that when the male mosquitos mated with females in the wild, the offspring would die young. Well, more specifically, the mosquito larvae would die before they could bite anyone and infect them with dengue fever.

Killing mosquitos sounds mean. But dengue fever, a potentially deadly disease that threatens over 40-per cent of the world’s population, is a serious problem. The genocide approach is also very effective. A few months after beginning an experiment with the genetically modified mosquitos, over 84-per cent of the mosquito population in one community in Brazil carried the gene. However, similar experiments have been put on hold in the United States, where scientists are cautious about the effect on the local ecosystem — not to mention humans.

Zapping mosquitos right on the nose

Hey look, a happy solution! Last year, a team of American scientists announced a method for genetically modifying mosquitos so that they lacked certain receptor molecules that helped them smell. The mutant mosquitos were so smell-dumb that they couldn’t distinguish the smell of human body odour — that’s their favourite — from other animals. Since body odor is how mosquitos seek out humans, this spells good news for lessening the spread of disease.

“It’s sort of like a game show where the mosquitoes are released into a box and we ask them to choose door number one, where there’s a human arm, or door number two, where there are our beloved guinea pigs,” Leslie Vosshall, a neurobiogist who helped with the research, told Nature. While the genetic modification certainly helps, it wouldn’t necessarily mean the end of mosquito bites. That’s why scientists are now focusing on using the breakthrough to make a next generation mosquito repellant. After all, we don’t even know how DEET works, and it’s potentially dangerous.

Clipping mosquitos’ wings

Turns out it’s pretty effecting to straight up screw with mosquitos’ mobility. One American molecular biologist has been perfecting a method for altering mosquito genes so that the females are born without wings. Since the female mosquitos are the ones that bite, this should be an effective way to keep them from spreading disease. But here’s the kicker: The genetically modified males are born with wings, so that they can still mate with normal females and produce offspring that carry the modified gene.

Obviously, this approach faces some of the same ethical hurdles that the genocide approach does. If enough generations of wingless females were born, the population of mosquitos would be greatly reduced and perhaps even eliminated. The eradication of malaria might be worth the risk, though. Over 207 million people worldwide contracted malaria in 2012 and an estimated 627,000 of them died. It’s a big problem.

Making malaria self-destruct

Finally, some scientists think that the best approach to fighting disease is not to target the mosquitos themselves. They want to make the mosquitos target the disease. A microbiologist in California is working on an approach that takes advantage of the fact that malaria parasites are host specific. The types of malaria that make humans since, for instance, do not make mice sick.

So researchers are trying to isolate the trait in mice that makes them resistant to human malaria and genetically modify mosquitos to carry the same trait. In theory, human malaria would self destruct in these mosquitos, and they would no longer be a threat — for malaria, at least. Of course, we’d also have to figure out a way to get these mutant mosquitos to breed more than regular mosquitos. Wait, why don’t we just kill them all, again?

Because this is a hard problem. Mosquitos are incredibly resilient creatures, and they do play a role in the larger ecosystem. Even genetic modification could even have consequences that we won’t know about for years to come. But hey, by then we could be living in a world free of dengue fever and malaria, and maybe the trade-off would be worth it.

[MIKA27]

This Mobile Dialysis Machine Will Clean Your Blood On The Go

The days of hemodialysis patients spending hours upon hours sitting in a hospital lounge while waiting for their blood to be cleaned could soon be a thing of the past — assuming, of course, that the world’s first wearable artificial kidney passes FDA muster later this year.

Dubbed the Wearable Artificial Kidney (the WAK), this device is the result of more than a decade of development by teams at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center, Los Angeles, and the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA, led by Victor Gura. It is, quite simply, a miniaturised dialysis machine small enough to wear on a toolbelt, simple enough to port in with a standard catheter, and light enough to wear all day. It works just like a conventional dialysis machine — dirty blood is sucked out of your body, pressed through a series of molecular filters to sieve out the waste, then pumped back in — and on the same schedule as a conventional dialysis machine — three four-hour sessions every week — except instead of weighing 90kg and resembling a filing cabinet, the WAK weighs 4.5kg and fits around your waist.

The system will be put to the test as part of the FDA’s Innovation Pathway program — one designed to fast-track promising medical technologies — later this year in Seattle. This will be the WAK’s third set of human trials (limited studies have been performed in the UK and Italy) and the first held in the US. Should it gain FDA approval, Gura’s team plans to further streamline the unit’s physical features as well as stretch the cleaning cycle out to 24 hours so it behaves like more like a real kidney. And, best of all, it gives you a decent argument for calling yourself a cyborg while you wear it.

[MIKA27]

The Alleged Story Of The Cosmonaut Who Burned In Space

The brothers Achille and Giovanni Judica-Cordiglia claim they recorded the voice of a Russian cosmonaut as her capsule burned in re-entry on November 1963. This short film contains that recording and dramatises the events. No matter if it’s true or not, the short film is terrifying.

http://youtu.be/e3XcVy4S4Og

This is the translation of the audio allegedly captured by the brothers:

five…four…three …two…one…one

two…three…four…five…

come in… come in… come in…

LISTEN…LISTEN! …COME IN!

COME IN… COME IN… TALK TO ME!

TALK TO ME!… I AM HOT!… I AM HOT!

WHAT?… FORTYFIVE?… WHAT?…

FORTYFIVE?… FIFTY?…

YES…YES…YES… BREATHING…

BREATHING… OXYGEN…

OXYGEN… I AM HOT… (THIS)

ISN’T THIS DANGEROUS?… IT’S ALL…

ISN’T THIS DANGEROUS?… IT’S ALL…

YES…YES…YES… HOW IS THIS?

WHAT?… TALK TO ME!… HOW SHOULD I

TRANSMIT? YES…YES…YES…

WHAT? OUR TRANSMISSION BEGINS NOW…

FORTYONE… THIS WAY… OUR

TRANSMISSION BEGINS NOW…

FORTYONE… THIS WAY… OUR

TRANSMISSION BEGINS NOW…

FORTYONE… YES… I FEEL HOT…

I FEEL HOT… IT’S ALL… IT’S HOT…

I FEEL HOT… I FEEL HOT… I FEEL HOT…

… I CAN SEE A FLAME!… WHAT?…

I CAN SEE A FLAME!… I CAN SEE A

FLAME!…

I FEEL HOT… I FEEL HOT… THIRTYTWO…

THIRTYTWO… FORTYONE… FORTYONE

AM I GOING TO CRASH?… YES…YES… I FEEL HOT!…

I FEEL HOT!… I WILL REENTER!… I WILL REENTER…

I AM LISTENING!… I FEEL HOT!…

While it sounds real, there’s no proof that any of this is true. The brothers claim they recorded several Soviet space missions from their radio station at Torre Bert, which are part of the Lost Cosmonauts conspiracy theory — the idea that the Soviet Union had several fatal manned mission failures that were suppressed during the Cold War years to avoid bad publicity.

I don’t care if it’s true or not. It’s a terrifying thing to watch and listen to either way.

[MIKA27]

Brace Yourselves For The New Jupiter Ascending Because It's Amazing

I don’t know if Jupiter Ascending — the new movie from the creators of The Matrix — is going to be incredibly good or impossibly bad, but one thing is sure: The amount of sci-fi visual porn in this trailer alone has sent my brain into overdrive. The design seems phenomenal. I’m really hoping for the movie to be as good as it looks in these trailers.

[MIKA27]

Only A Russian Billionaire Could Come Up With This Hospital Design

Vasily Klyukin is the Monaco-based Russian co-owner of Sovcombank, a Russian commercial bank. He is also, if these sketches of his latest architecture project are anything to go by, a little insane.

The White Sails hospital concept is a design for a hospital and spa, to be built in the budding Tunisia Economic City. The idea is to make a building that’s more friendly and welcoming than traditional hospitals. But honestly, I’m not sure that a four-skyscraper design, situated on its own little island, is the most practical solution for a hospital.

The idea was apparently born from Klyukin’s own personal experience of going to hospitals to be checked for his upcoming ride on Virgin Galactic:

“I will fly into Space next year. My health condition has to be checked every six months. That is why I know this feeling very well, every time I’m approaching the white building of the clinic, I don’t feel any joy. But I would like to show you the hospital, where there is no room for fear. And so that my son could ask about this hospital: ‘Daddy, when will we visit the ship again?”

In either case, apart from concept sketches on Klyukin’s website, there’s no other details about when, where, and for how much this project would go ahead, so no need to dig your sailor costume out of retirement just yet.

[MIKA27]

Sierra Nevada Corporation Files Legal Challenge Against NASA

Sierra Nevada Corporation, which was beaten to NASA’s multi-billion dollar contract recently, has just filed a legal challenge against NASA, claiming that their mini-space shuttle proposal was significantly cheaper. This comes a day after Sierra Nevada laid off 100 staff who were working on the (appropriately-named) Dream Chaser project.

[MIKA27]

Meet The Rocketman Who Made Jet Fighters And Car Crashes Survivable

In the early jet fighter days, nobody knew how much G-force the human body could withstand. Testing the limits of survivability came down to human testing. Today, we owe much of that knowledge to Col. John Paul Stapp, who strapped himself into a crazy rocket sled to see just what the human body could endure.

Col. Stapp was a physician and US Air Force flight surgeon interested in figuring out how to make jet fighter crashes and ejector seats more survivable. In 1947, Col. Stapp began a series of now-legendary rocket sled tests, personally subjecting himself to deceleration forces no human had ever before experienced, to help find the limit of what the human body could take.

That’s precisely as crazy as it sounds: Col. Stapp strapped himself into a pilot’s ejector seat mounted to a rocket sled at Muroc (now Edwards) Air Force Base. Behind him, six rockets producing 12,246kg of thrust. In front of him, 610m of track culminating in a water pool. A scoop at the front of the sled would hit the pool, instantly slamming the 678km/h rocket ride to a halt. The wild ride produced 22 G of deceleration. Col. Stapp survived.

This led to more powerful rockets, higher speeds, and even more crushing G-forces. Col. Stapp continued subjecting himself to these outrageous tests, culminating in a 1954 nine-rocket run. The 18,144kg thrust blasted Col. Stapp to 1017km/h, or Mach 0.9, in just five seconds. But as astounding as that acceleration was, the deceleration was even more enormous: At the end of the track, the sled splashed to a halt in just 1.4 seconds, subjecting Col. Stapp to more than 40 G of deceleration.

The test broke Col. Stapp’s wrists, cracked his ribs and rendered him temporarily blind from the rupture of the blood vessels in his eyes. But he survived.

The test earned Col. Stapp the honour of the highest G forces voluntarily experienced by any human. It also shut down the rocket sled program — the Air Force realised Col. Stapp’s medical and scientific research into the limits of human performance were too valuable to risk on another rocket sled run. Col. Stapp’s sled was shut down before he could achieve his greatest goal: A supersonic 1609km/h run.

Col. Stapp’s research career was far from over. After human testing on the rocket sled was halted, Col. Stapp began studying the other dangers that killed pilots. He realised that the Air Force lost nearly as many pilots to car crashes as they did to mishaps in the air; for the rest of his life, Col. Stapp pushed for greater crash safety in car design, eventually becoming permanent chairman of what would be later named the Stapp Car Crash Conference.

Despite his many wild rides on the madcap rocket sled, and the shocking forces it exerted on his body, Col. Stapp lived to be 89 years old. His legend lives on in every fighter pilot who survives an ejector seat trip, and every civilian who walks away from a forceful car crash. Many of us walk around today owing our lives to the cowboy doctor who strapped himself into a rocket sled that could very well have killed him.

[MIKA27]

A Belgian Brewery Will Tap Its Own Underground Beer Pipeline

The famed De Halve Maan brewery in Bruges, Belgium has been cranking out tasty drafts for more than five centuries — all from the same historic building. But with its fleet of beer trucks now tying up traffic getting to a new processing plant 3km away, the brewery is taking the only logical course of action: It’s installing an underground beer pipe.

The De Halve Maan brewery doesn’t just produce award-winning ‘Brugse Zot’ suds, its 500-year-old brewing facility is a tourist attraction in its own right, pulling in 100,000 visitors annually. So it’s not like DHM could very well just pick up and move shop simply to be closer to its modern filtering and bottling plant a few kilometres down the road.

The firm’s initial solution was to build up a fleet of 500 tanker trucks to transport the booze overland, on city streets. Unfortunately, Bruges’ infrastructure isn’t built to handle that sort of load, which has resulted in heaps of road congestion, wasted fuel and increased truck maintenance costs.

The new plan, however, takes an entirely different tack: They want to pump the beer underground in food-safe polyethylene plastic from the original brewery to the newer facility on the Waggelwater industrial estate. When complete, the pipeline should push more than 6000L of beer every hour (the trip takes about 15 minutes from end to end) and take all 500 of those tankers off the road (as well as reap the benefits of lower pollution outputs and lighter operating costs).

There’s no word on how much the project will cost when it gets underway early next year but given that DHM is footing the entire bill — for both the pipeline’s installation and its maintenance — it certainly won’t cost the Belgian taxpayers a dime. Heck, its installation won’t even disrupt morning commutes as the entire pipeline will be carved out using computer-guided drills so as not to tear up the roads.

“In time, this innovative investment plan would reduce the amount of transport by heavy goods vehicles by 85 per cent,” Franky Demon, Bruges’ Alderman for Spatial Planning, told Sky News. “It is a win-win situation for everyone.” Especially for the city’s enterprising drinkers, once they arm themselves with shovels and pickaxes.

[MIKA27]

A Wearable Camera That Would Turn Into A Drone And Fly Off Your Wrist

Meet Nixie, a wearable camera concept that flies off your wrist and turns into a remote-controlled quadcopter. It’s the bizarre-yet-appealing wearable camera drone nobody asked for… and now I kind of want it.

Intel is holding a competition to encourage new wearable technology ideas, and the Nixie is one of the finalists. So far, it’s still in development, so the flying wristlet camera is rough around the edges. Team captain Christoph Kohstall eventually wants you to be able to send the the Nixie flying with a gesture. It would recognise where you’re standing, snap a picture, then return to the wrist, like a futuristic paparazzi boomerang.

If sticking your arm out to capture photos makes you feel like a lo-tech peasant, you’re probably Nixie’s target demographic.

All of that seems to be a long way off still; they’re going to have to make the Nixie extremely consistent to make it worthwhile. After all, getting one of those GoPro stick mounts to take a farther-away shot might not be as convenient of simply flinging a camera off your wrist, but it’s also a lot less complicated. In a crowded area, I’d guess it’d be hard for the Nixie to tell which person it was meant to fly back towards.

The Nixie team has a lot of work to do, but if they can polish their prototype, this is a weird wearable worth watching.

[MIKA27]

The Evolution Of Batman Music Epically Recreated With A Piano And Cello

http://youtu.be/yFfjUMinFPk

The Piano Guys made this epic video that traces the 50-year history of music in Batman using a piano and a cello. Oh and of course three different Batmobiles. What’s awesome is how much each era they go through musically looks like the Batman movie of its time.

The shot at the end with all the Batmobiles together made me swoon. The Piano Guys write:

Holy hemiola, Batman! 50 years of music and film all rolled together in front of the cars that have become icons of super hero history. This is one of those projects we’ve wanted to do from the very beginning of The Piano Guys. We love super heroes, the dramatic music that has brought them to life, and the vivid films that have made them legends. We used piano, cello, handheld cameras, a radio controlled helicopter, and some scrappy special effect techniques in the most creative ways possible to emulate the three epic eras of one of the greatest super heroes ever created: BATMAN!

[MIKA27]

The Tale Of A 13-Year-Old Drug Mule Across The Deadly Desert

This is the story of Manny, a 13-year-old boy from Tijuana who has to pay the bills for his family. Weak, poor, desperate, Manny is ripe prey for the merciless Mexican drug lords who sent him into the Arizona desert as a mule. But things are not what they seem. The reality is even worse than that.

MIKA: Posting this video really makes me feel rather ill about posting stuff on latest technology, good food, wine, beer, spirits, holidays and the like. I know life goes on and we can't solve all the worlds problems on our own, but when watching this, it makes you appreciate the good fortune and life that we have.

[MIKA27]

This Spectacular Shot Was Not Grabbed From Some New Movie

It’s hard to believe, but this spectacular shot was not grabbed from some brand new Hollywood movie. This Army Air Corps Apache took part in this dramatic display at the Royal International Air Tattoo at Royal Air Force air base, Fairford, UK.

[MIKA27]

The Woman With the Bionic Eye

Fran Fulton is 66, and she’s been fully blind for about 10 years. A few weeks ago, all that changed.

Fulton suffers from retinitis pigmentosa—a degenerative eye disease that slowly causes light-sensitive cells in the retina to die off. Over the course of several years she lost her sight, and for the past 10 years she hasn’t been able to see anything at all. But in late July, Fulton was outfitted with a system called the Argus II. A pair of camera-equipped glasses are hooked up to electrodes implanted in her eyeball, which feed her brain visual information. Using the system, she can now see the world again. What’s the experience like?

“When they ‘turned me on’ so to speak it was absolutely the most breathtaking experience,” she says. “I was just so overwhelmed and so excited, my heart started beating so fast I had to put my hand on my chest because I thought it was going to pop.”

As both cameras and our understanding of the visual system improve, new techniques to restore sight to the blind are progressing too. Devices like the Argus II are able to bypass damaged eyes to restore some vision to those who have lost it. It’s not the same as fully restored vision, and it’s still in its early days—there are only six people in the U.S. with the Argus II—but researchers hope that as they learn more about vision they can help those who’ve lost it get it back

Electrode on the retina.

The Argus II system is made up of three parts: a pair of glasses, a converter box, and an electrode array. The glasses aren’t corrective, they are simply a vehicle for the camera—and that camera is no more complicated than the versions found in modern smart phones. The image from the camera is then transmitted down into a converter box that can be carried in a purse or pocket. This box sends signals to the electrode array implanted onto the patient’s retina. Essentially, what the Argus II does is skip over the cells that retinitis pigmentosa has killed to get visual signals to the brain.

Robert Greenberg, the president and CEO of Second Sight, the company that developed Argus II, explains that the eye is like a multi-layer cake. On one layer are the light-sensitive cells, called “rods” and “cones,” that sighted people rely on to take in light and turn that into visual information. But for those with retinitis pigmentosa, those cells are dead. “We’re bypassing those dead cells and going to the next layer of the cake,” Greenberg explains.

This means that Argus II has to convert the information from the camera into signals that the electrodes implanted in the eye can use, and that the brain can interpret. Figuring out how to achieve that was the focus of Greenberg’s PhD thesis. But there was a bigger hurdle to come, he says: working out a way to implant electrodes onto the paper-thin retina inside the eye.

“The retina is like one-ply toilet paper,” he says. “Developing something that can sit on the surface of the retina without damaging it is really difficult. That was tougher than figuring out the algorithms.”

For patients, though, the whole thing is remarkably simple. The surgery to implant the electrodes takes just a few hours and patients go home the same day with an implant that wraps around one of their eyes and is secured by a tiny tack the size of a human hair. After about a week to heal, the patient returns to get the glasses, to have their new electrodes tuned, and to train them on how to use the system. On the converter box there are knobs that let users increase or decrease things like the brightness and contrast. Then they go home with their new pair of eyes.

Surgeons working on Fulton

So what do people using Argus II actually see? Greenberg says it’s best imagined as looking like a pixelated image, or staring at a digital scoreboard held just in front of your eyes. There are regions of light and dark that collectively the brain recognizes as an image.

Fulton, however, says it’s difficult to describe exactly what she sees. “People say you’ll see shapes,” she says. “Well yeah, but it’s the electrical impulses, and it’s about learning how to interpret them. It’s not that it’s hard, it’s just a learning curve. It’s something that I’m learning.”

Fulton says that mostly what she can see is areas of light and dark. She recently had dinner with friends. When they were leaving the restaurant she was able to hone in on a person’s light shirt. “I didn’t need to use a sighted guide, they were in front of me and I just followed them out,” she says. Other patients report that things like fireworks and Christmas trees are especially visible. “I can’t wait for something to happen that I can go to fireworks, I haven’t seen fireworks in a very long time and I am looking forward to that,” Fran says.

Many patients, Fulton included, continue doing vision therapy to improve their sight and train their brain to better interpret the signals.

For Fulton, who works as a disability advocate, getting around now is so much easier. “The first time I left work with it—I work on the third floor and there are three elevators, and I heard the bell to go down. I lined myself up in front of the door and I walked straight in. I didn’t bump my left shoulder, didn’t bump my right shoulder, I didn’t have to use my cane to check. Every day it’s very exciting, and never in my lifetime did I ever think something like this could happen.”

Fulton has long used a cane to detect obstacles in her way, but now her awareness of her surroundings is much more detailed. “I am able to now identify doorways and objects on the street. I can’t tell you whether it’s a flowerpot or a homeless person collecting money, but I can tell you there’s an object there.”

The Fulton family, Fran in blue

Argus II isn’t perfect: It’s only black and white, for starters. And it’s not like you’re feeding a full image to the brain: Users can’t read signs, or recognise faces, or identify objects—at least, not usually. “I’ve been quite successful at identifying a triangle versus a circle and a square,” Fran boasts.

It’s also important to note that this is not a system that all blind people can use—they have to have an intact retina for the implant to work. Those who lost their site to things like diabetes, glaucoma, or infection and who have damage to the retina can’t use the Argus II system.

Greenberg says Second Sight is working on a new implant that bypasses even the retinal layer, and implants electrodes directly onto the visual region of the brain.

But for those who have been blind for years, simply seeing shapes again is pretty exciting. “I’m very much looking forward to being able to see my grandchildren,” Fulton says. “I won’t be able to see their faces, but I know they’ll have great fun standing in a room and say ‘grandma find me!’ and I’ll be able to tell the difference between the four-year-old and the seven-year-old.”