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

[MIKA27]

The Last USB Sync Cable You May Ever Need

With connections for microUSB, Apple’s old Dock Connector, and its new Lightning option, the CrossLink cable by Id America can sync or charge pretty much any modern smartphone or tablet you can get your hands on. And if the Crosslink’s flat cable anti-tangle design isn’t enough, it’s also available in six different colours that will perfectly complement your iPhone 5c.

It will set you back just $18.

[MIKA27]

Bowers & Wilkins P7 Headphones: Over-Ear Excellence, Over-The-Top Price

Bowers and Wilkins has been making excellent on-ear headphones for a while now. However, with the P7s, it’s offering up its first-ever over-ear cans — for a price.

The company’s $US300 P5s were a revelation; its cheaper P3s were high on sound quality if a little lower on build, at $US200. The news P7s are richer still, costing $US400.

But for that you do seem to get some nice touches. B&W has designed a new set of audio drivers, which it claims are designed more like “traditional audiophile speaker” than a pair of premium headphones. And dripping in leather and aluminium, they look super sleek.

If you can stomach the price tag, the cans will be available from the end of September.

[MIKA27]

This 100-Year-Old Infographic Maps The Entire American Civil War

Back in the 1930s, the infographic scene was already humming with crazy products like the Histomap and its 4000 years of visualised history. But the roots of infographics go back even further. This intense visual recollection of the Civil War dates back to the 1800s.

The “History of the Civil War in the United States, 1860-1865″ was published by The Comparative Synoptical Chart Company back in 1897. And while its gloriously complex form has been preserved by the Library of Congress in great detail, instructions on exactly how to read it properly seem to have been lost to time.

Along the sides you’ll notice a few columns that keep track of the value of a confederate dollar until it eventually plummets to nothing, but the frenetic linear orgy in the centre there is a little harder to make heads or tails of. But it’s still damned impressive.

You can take a closer look at a larger version below, or an insanely huge version over at the Library of Congress. Maybe you’ll learn something! If that’s you’re goal, Wikipedia might be a better option.

[MIKA27]

Inside The Pentagon's Trillion Dollar F-35 Embarrassment

It’s not news that the Pentagon’s fated F-35 program is riddled with dilemmas. For more than a decade, it’s bumped into roadblock after roadblock. When the planes aren’t grounded, they’re forbidden to fly in bad weather, combat missions or at night. Vanity Fair just published a lengthy look at just how bad a mess it is.

It’s a frustrating read as it catalogues problem after problem with the program and the complicated politics that dictate its future. Perhaps refreshingly, the challenges laid out seem to stem not from corruption but the overwhelmingly complex task of making the Air Force, Marines and Navy happy while also doling out capital to as many congressional districts as possible, through spending on contractors.

Again, we already knew there were problems. But that doesn’t make the specifics any easier to swallow.Vanity Fair‘s Adam Ciralsky walks through the challenges one-at-a-time. Problem number one: these planes are friggin’ expensive:

According to the Government Accountability Office (G.A.O.), which is relatively independent, the price tag for each F-35 was supposed to be $US81 million when the program began in October 2001. Since that time, the price per plane has basically doubled, to $US161 million. Full-rate production of the F-35, which was supposed to start in 2012, will not start until 2019. The Joint Program Office, which oversees the project, disagrees with the G.A.O.’s assessment, arguing that it does not break out the F-35 by variant and does not take into account what they contend is a learning curve that will drive prices down over time. They say a more realistic figure is $US120 million a copy, which will go down with each production batch. Critics, like Winslow Wheeler, from the Project on Government Oversight and a longtime G.A.O.

official, argue the opposite: “The true cost of the aeroplane — when you cast aside all the bulls**t — is $US219 million or more a copy, and that number is likely to go up.”

A lot of that money is supposed to go towards innovative new technology. Which brings us to problem number two: the innovative new technology doesn’t work. Ciralsky goes over the fancy helmet-mounted displays that purportedly give the pilots x-ray vision:

Pierre Sprey… contends that, even if designers can deal with latency and jitter, the resolution of the video is “fatally inferior” compared with the human eye when it comes to confronting enemy aircraft. “Right from the start, they should have known there would be a huge computation problem and a huge resolution problem,” says Sprey. “Why do drones shoot up wedding parties in Afghanistan? Because the resolution is so poor. That was knowable before the helmet was built.” The helmet-mounted display, says Sprey, is “a total *Moderated* from start to finish.”

When they were lining everything up a decade ago, the government didn’t spread out responsibility very well. Problem number three: the government’s getting stuck with the bill again and again. Ciralsky quotes Gen. Christopher Bogdan who heads the Joint Strike Fighter program:

“Most of the risk on this program when we signed this contract in early 2001 was on the government squarely. Cost risk. Technical risk. Perfect example: in the development program, we pay Lockheed Martin whatever it costs them to do a particular task. And if they fail at that task, then we pay them to fix it. And they don’t lose anything.”

To be fair, the planes do fly, but they’re far from combat ready. The F-35s have been on the disabled list for years, despite the $US1.5 trillion dollars that’s being invested in the program. It’s just one problem after another after another.

It’s not just the generals running the program that are responsible, either. The politicians who approved funding for the fleet did their best to spread the Defence Department dollars around the country. Problem number four: politically minded spending does not build good aircraft. In fact, Ciralsky says it’s quite the opposite:

The political process that keeps the Joint Strike Fighter airborne has never stalled. The program was designed to spread money so far and so wide — at last count, among some 1400 separate subcontractors, strategically dispersed among key congressional districts — that no matter how many cost overruns, blown deadlines or serious design flaws, it would be immune to termination. It was, as bureaucrats say, “politically engineered”.

Now time will tell whether the F-35 will become the fighter jet for America’s future — they really are neat when they work! — or just another political boondoggle. The Marines say they’ll have their fleet combat ready by 2015, while the Air Force and Navy need a few more years. Then again, it wasn’t long ago that they were saying the same thing about 2012.

[MIKA27]

Hong Kong's Infamous Kowloon Walled City Rebuilt As Amusement Park

When Hong Kong’s Kowloon Walled City was razed in the late 1980s, it was an infamously untouchable haven for drugs, crime, and prostitution — a place few locals would dare to visit. Now, a theme park outside of Tokyo is selling tickets to explore a painstakingly modelled replica of the Walled City — right down to its trash, which was imported from Hong Kong.

I've reported about the history of the Walled City before — it would’ve been 20 this year — but here’s a brief primer.

After changing hands between the UK, China and Japan for nearly a century, the site became a kind of squatter’s haven in the 1960s, when several hundred makeshift towers slowly coalesced into a single structure, knit together by makeshift walkways and plumbing. At its peak, it was home to almost 33,000 people, boasting everything from butchers and dentists to daycare centres and casinos.

There’s disagreement about the legacy of the Walled City — some argue it was a functioning community where citizens collaborated to keep each other safe, while others claim it was a haven for crime. In reality, it was probably a bit of both — but either way, it was permanently inscribed into the collective consciousness by authors like William Gibson and video games like Kowloon’s Gate. And the pinnacle (or nadir) of that obsession? Anata no Warehouse, an arcade and amusement park located between located just between Tokyo and Yokohama, which boasts an amazingly realistic recreation of the Walled City.

Inside this eight-story warehouse, which was opened in 2009, visitors are treated to a recreation of the Walled City that borders on obsessive. The designers based their work on the few photos that exist of the real Walled City. Each sign was hand-lettered and checked by a Hong Kong native, while each storefront is based on the ones seen in this rare video footage (Below) of the real Walled City.

There’s even a faux-brothel, where a nude mannequin lies inside a red-lit room.

Every detail — right down to the trash — was the subject of an exacting vetting process. Taishiro Hoshino, a set designer that worked on the project, writes that the team sent away to Hong Kong for authentic tin mailboxes and garbage. “The garbage left on the butcher’s tent and the tin roofs are also indispensable in reproducing Kowloon Walled City,” he says. “I insisted on using the genuine article and asked my friend and her family in Hong Kong to send a box of their house garbage all the way to Japan.”

Despite the exacting faithfulness to history, there are some tells, too — like air conditioning, for one thing. And, according to Randomwire‘s David Gilbert, some very modern Japanese bathrooms hidden beneath a carefully detailed veneer of rust. “The juxtaposition of a high-tech Japanese toilet in an authentically grimy bathroom has to be seen to be believed,” he writes.

So why would visitors — even those who are fans of the fictional version of Kowloon — visit such a place? In fact, the main attraction is a gaming center that offers all manner of betting and arcade games, plus an internet cafe. The historical Kowloon replica, it seems, is just an appetizer for the modern main course.

[MIKA27]

A Watch With A Gaping Hole Where The Dial And Hands Should Be

A circle is pretty much the only thing the EOTS watch from Germany’s Yesign has in common with a traditional analogue watch. Where you’d normally find a circular face ringed with numbers, the EOTS features a round hole ringed with LEDs that light up to tick off the minutes and hours.

Originally designed as a concept, Yesign actually created a production run of the EOTS but weren’t completely happy with the results. So it collected the 100 best pieces and is selling them to collectors who like something unique strapped to their wrists for just $112. But remember, there are no refunds, no returns, and no warranty. If it breaks, you’re left with nothing but a marginally stylish bracelet, and a better understanding of why more concepts don’t become a reality.

[MIKA27]

Ben Affleck Reads Comments About Batman Casting, Learns Not to Read Comments

“Don’t read the comments” has become something of an internet truism, advice typically given by friends and loved ones (and occasionally, blogs and Twitter accounts). But according to Affleck, it was advice he received from Warner Bros after he was cast as Batman — and unwisely ignored.

Ben Affleck thought that he could handle the internet’s response to the news that he had been named the new Dark Knight. Ben Affleck was very, very wrong.

Appearing on Late Night with Jimmy Fallon last night, Affleck talked about what happened after he signed on to play the Caped Crusader in 2015′s follow-up to Man of Steel. According to the actor, the studio warned him about the potential for internet backlash to his casting as the iconic superhero.

“They said, ‘Listen, we want to talk to you. People go through this process and it can be trying. We want to show you some of the reactions that past people who’ve been cast have gotten on the internet.’ So they send me [examples of] people who were in these movies who did a great job. These [comments] were like, ‘Kill him!’ And he was amazing! You can’t say that before the movie comes out. It doesn’t matter what people think then; it matters what you think when you see the movie, obviously.”

Warner Bros staff went a step further, advising Affleck to unplug around the time of his announcement. “They said, ‘Just don’t use the internet for a few days,’ but I handle ****,” Affleck said, adding that his mindset at the time was that “I can handle any snub. I can handle anything.” Or so he thought. When the online backlash against his casting began, Affleck unwisely decided to scroll down on an article announcing the news to the comment section. “I looked at the first comment and it says ‘NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!’ And I was done! We’re going to be Luddites for a while.”

Although Affleck hasn’t completely unplugged — his Twitter account has been active since the casting announcement — it’s more interesting that Warner Bros felt the need to warn even a veteran performer like Affleck to stay off the internet after he took on the role. Yes, he played a leading superhero before in 2003′s Daredevil, but stepping into the shoes of the Caped Crusader is a whole other ballgame. Batman is one of the most well-known superheroes in the world — the most popular on YouTube, at least — an role that comes with far more intense fan expectations than Marvel’s comparably cult-favorite blind attorney-turned-vigilante.

Also, the size of the superhero movie audience has grown exponentially in the decade-plus separating the two roles, as have online reactions to casting decisions and announcements. Add that vocal sense of fan entitlement to a decision as high-profile as the (re)casting of the Dark Knight for the character’s first big-screen meeting with Superman in his 75-year history, and the advice to take a step back from the internet when you step into the Batman suit starts to look downright sensible — even for experienced actors who think they can “handle anything.”

[MIKA27]

Peloton Cycle:

Going to the gym these days can be a real mess. Dodging muscle bound bros, sweaty dudes that scream while they workout, and dealing with unreliable equipment makes even showing up a difficult decision. The Peloton Cycle ($1,190) makes those issues a thing of the past, and could keep you out of the gym permanently. The bike features a near-silent belt drive system, a magnetic resistance flywheel, and a sweat resistant 21.5" Full HD, multitouch console that connects to your home wi-fi. Watch an instructional cycling video, or something that has nothing to do with your ride at all and feel the calories, and those gym membership fees, melt away.

[MIKA27]

'Man who couldn't catch Aids' takes his own life, say family

A man whose genetic defect helped to further medical understanding of HIV, the virus that causes Aids, has died, his family said.

Stephen Crohn, 66, who was once called "The man who can't catch Aids," committed suicide in New York.

His sister Amy Crohn Santagata told the New York Times: "My brother saw all his friends around him dying, and he didn't die.

"He went through a tremendous amount of survivor guilt about that and said to himself 'There's got to be a reason.' He was quite extraordinary."

Mr Crohn, an artist and freelance travel editor, was the great-nephew of gastroenterologist Burrill B Crohn, who was among the first to describe Crohn's disease.

He had begun caring for his partner Jerry Green in 1978 as his health deteriorated. Mr Green went on to be one of the first to die from the disease that became known as Aids.

But Mr Crohn never became ill, despite continuing to be sexually active.

Doctors studied him and eventually established that his white blood cells had a rare defect which meant they would not allow the HIV virus in.

Dr Bruce Walker, of the Ragon Institute, told the New York Times: "What he contributed to medical knowledge is really quite extraordinary.

"This is a classic case of medical science learning from patients. You take the extreme examples and try to see how those people are different from the average person with the disease."

[MIKA27]

Cass Lake, Minn., woman takes photo of translucent, circular, unidentifiable object zooming across sky

Allison Barta saw something. It was in the sky, translucent, circular, disc-like and most certainly, positively and identifiably unidentifiable. It was also an object that was flying.

BEMIDJI, Minn. -- Allison Barta saw something.

It was in the sky, translucent, circular, disc-like and most certainly, positively and identifiably unidentifiable. It was also an object that was flying.

"For the moment, we were pretty dumbfounded," she said of her and her friend, Neil Peterson. "The two of us are watching it zoom across the sky, and I'm trying to get another picture of it, but I couldn't catch it."

The lone image she did capture, however, might be enough to whet the appetites of UFO enthusiasts, believers, identifiers, or whatever they prefer to be called.

The object is. ... something.

Barta was taking pictures of pelicans outside her rural Cass Lake home in northern Minnesota on Sept. 2. That's when she saw the saucer, which spanned the horizon in just a few seconds at an incredible speed, she said. The pelicans are in the photo. The object is, too.

"Was it a drone? Was it somebody who actually created something and they were flying it? Was it a real UFO from another planet?" she said. "It's not an aircraft known to this planet. I don't really know what it is."

Barta, a science teacher at the Bug O Nay Ge Shig school, has spent plenty of time looking at the sky. In fact, a few years back, she spent an entire summer gazing upward, mapping stellar bodies for a program called "Star Watch." She urged her students to do the same.

But in all those nights, there was never anything so obviously unidentifiable.

"I'm kind of thrilled I saw it," she said.

Barta is not concerned with the tinfoil-hat implications of walking around and showing off a picture of a UFO. She said the majority of people she's approached have expressed interest in viewing the photo.

"The reactions are amazing," Barta said. "There's only been very few people that just walked away and don't want to see it. I'm not standing there and going 'Oh, it's aliens.' But it's definitely not a lens flare, cause we saw it with the naked eye."

Barta considers herself fairly handy with a camera, but after initially catching the object in her lens, she couldn't catch up with it again. There is only the one shot. She compared it to winning the lottery.

"What are the chances of getting that picture?" she said. "You need to not be afraid to share, so I'm sharing it. We all live on this Earth and we should look out for each other."

[MIKA27]

'I've never found so much gold in my life': Archaeologist discovers hoard of Byzantine treasure at Temple Mount in Jerusalem

A rare and ancient trove of coins and jewellery has been found buried near Temple Mount in Jerusalem dating back to the 7th Century.

The haul includes a total of 36 gold coins etched with images of Byzantine emperors and a 10cm medallion etched with a Menorah, Shofar made from a ram's horn, and a Torah scroll.

Among the unprecedented find, made by Dr Eilat Mazar of Jerusalem's Hebrew University, was also a 3,000-year-old earthenware jug inscribed with what is believed to be the earliest example of written text ever discovered in the region.

A rare and ancient trove of gold has been found buried near Temple Mount in Jerusalem, thought to date back to the 7th Century. The haul included a 10cm medallion etched with a Menorah, Shofar made from a ram's horn, and a Torah scroll, pictured

A total of 36 gold coins etched with images of Byzantine emperors, pictured, were also found in the Ophel region between the City of David and Temple Mount. Many of the coins featured emperors ranging across a 250-year period including Constantine II to Mauricius

The Ophel treasure was found by archaeologist Eilat Mazar, pictured, from Hebrew University

Dr Mazar told the Times of Israel: 'I have never found so much gold in my life! I was frozen. It was unexpected.'

The discovery was made in the ruins of a Byzantine public structure located in the Ophel region - between the city of David and around 50 metres from the southern wall of the First Temple.

Temple Mount is considered one of the most religious sites in Jerusalem and is where two biblical Jewish temples once stood.

It is also a site of Muslim interest site known as the Haram as-Sharif, or Noble Sanctuary.

This area is thought to be part of an ancient city wall in Jerusalem dating back to the 10th century BC, possibly built by King Solomon.

The trove was found in a section of this wall that is 70 yards long and six yards high.

The discovery was made in the ruins of a Byzantine public structure located in the Ophel region between the city of David and the southern wall of the First Temple, pictured. This area is thought to be part of an ancient city wall of Jerusalem dating back to the 10th century BC, possibly built by King Solomon

Mazar uncovered the section in 2010.

She found an inner gatehouse for access into the royal quarter of the city, a royal structure adjacent to the gatehouse, and a corner tower that overlooks a substantial section of the adjacent Kidron valley.

Many of the coins found featured emperors ranging across a 250-year including Constantine II to Mauricius.

As well as the Byzantine gold, pottery discovered at the site is believed to date back to the 10th Century, around the time of King David.

There were six ceramic jugs found in total and one had an ancient inscription engraved onto the side believed to be the earliest written text ever found in Jerusalem - predating the existing earliest engraving by around 250 years.

Uncovered in the city wall complex, pictured, was an inner gatehouse for access into the royal quarter of the city, a royal structure adjacent to the gatehouse, and a corner tower that overlooks a substantial section of the adjacent Kidron valley

The inscription is written in an ancient language called Canaanite - originally spoken by a group of Biblical people before they were conquered by the Israelites in 1000BC.

The language was later revived among certain groups living in the region.

It consists of a letters that appear to translate to m, q, p, h, and n.

Although the meaning and full translation has not been carried out yet, Mazar believes the inscription could be the name of the jar's owner.

Mazar told the Times of Israel she believed the artefacts formed part of a 'communal treasure meant to help the sparse Jewish community survive hard times or rebuild what the Jews hoped would be a free community under Persian rule.'

[rckymtn22]

10 Crazy Things People Use To Make Booze

Well now you include the stomach:

Beer belly: Texas man gets drunk on alcohol brewed in his gut.

Texas man's recent emergency visit revealed he had a beer belly unlike most others — doctors determined his body was brewing alcohol within his gut.

National Public Radio's blog The Salt reported the case of a 61-year-old man who complained to doctors he was dizzy. He felt drunk, he looked drunk and doctors found he had a blood alcohol concentration of 0.37 per cent, about 4.6 times the limit for driving in Ontario.

However, the man said he hadn't been drinking.

"The physicians were not aware of any way that a person could be intoxicated without ingesting alcohol and therefore believed he must be a 'closet drinker,'" reads the study published in the International Journal of Clinical Medicine this summer.

However, when the man spent 24 hours in hospital, with no access to alcohol but meals with plenty of carbohydrates, his blood alcohol concentration rose once again.

This man was operating the world's tiniest micro-brewery.

The study's authors, Barbara Cordell and Dr. Justin McCarthy, wrote they believed the patient had "Auto-Brewery Syndrome," meaning an infection that gave him too much yeast in his stomach, so that when he ate starchy foods, such as bread, they broke down and fermented into ethanol, making him drunk from the inside out.

The abstract says doctors reduced the carbohydrates in his diet and treated him with antifungals to resolve the problem.

Researchers have documented a handful of other cases, including one involving a 13-year-old girl who doctors suspected of abusing alcohol, according to a case study published in the Journal of Pediatric Gastroenterology & Nutrition in 2001.

Cordell and Dr. McCarthy wrote researchers should investigate the illness further, and maybe listen a little more closely the next time a patient says, "Honest, doc, I haven't touched a drop!"

[Habana Mike]

Well now you include the stomach:

Beer belly: Texas man gets drunk on alcohol brewed in his gut.

Texas man's recent emergency visit revealed he had a beer belly unlike most others — doctors determined his body was brewing alcohol within his gut.

National Public Radio's blog The Salt reported the case of a 61-year-old man who complained to doctors he was dizzy. He felt drunk,

The study's authors wrote they believed the patient had "Auto-Brewery Syndrome," meaning an infection that gave him too much yeast in his stomach, so that when he ate starchy foods, such as bread, they broke down and fermented into ethanol, making him drunk from the inside out.

Where can I get some of this stuff? Would save tons of money!

Probably very marketable too.....

[MIKA27]

Well now you include the stomach:

Beer belly: Texas man gets drunk on alcohol brewed in his gut.

Texas man's recent emergency visit revealed he had a beer belly unlike most others — doctors determined his body was brewing alcohol within his gut.

National Public Radio's blog The Salt reported the case of a 61-year-old man who complained to doctors he was dizzy. He felt drunk, he looked drunk and doctors found he had a blood alcohol concentration of 0.37 per cent, about 4.6 times the limit for driving in Ontario.

However, the man said he hadn't been drinking.

"The physicians were not aware of any way that a person could be intoxicated without ingesting alcohol and therefore believed he must be a 'closet drinker,'" reads the study published in the International Journal of Clinical Medicine this summer.

However, when the man spent 24 hours in hospital, with no access to alcohol but meals with plenty of carbohydrates, his blood alcohol concentration rose once again.

This man was operating the world's tiniest micro-brewery.

The study's authors, Barbara Cordell and Dr. Justin McCarthy, wrote they believed the patient had "Auto-Brewery Syndrome," meaning an infection that gave him too much yeast in his stomach, so that when he ate starchy foods, such as bread, they broke down and fermented into ethanol, making him drunk from the inside out.

The abstract says doctors reduced the carbohydrates in his diet and treated him with antifungals to resolve the problem.

Researchers have documented a handful of other cases, including one involving a 13-year-old girl who doctors suspected of abusing alcohol, according to a case study published in the Journal of Pediatric Gastroenterology & Nutrition in 2001.

Cordell and Dr. McCarthy wrote researchers should investigate the illness further, and maybe listen a little more closely the next time a patient says, "Honest, doc, I haven't touched a drop!"

WOW, who would have thought!?

Talk about being pickled!!

Thanks for posting

[MIKA27]

NASA Probe Found Han Solo On Mercury's Surface

Not at all long ago, in our galaxy just two planets away, NASA’s Messenger probe discovered what appears to be a raised human shape in the surface of Mercury — and it bears a striking resemblance to Star Wars‘ Han Solo.

The photo was actually captured back in July of 2011, although it hadn’t seen public eyes until just last week. And, in commendable nerd form, the scientists offered this fantastic quote in the release:

A portion of the terrain surrounding the northern margin of the Caloris basin hosts an elevated block in the shape of a certain carbonite-encased smuggler who can make the Kessel Run in less than 12 parsecs.

If there are two things you should remember, it’s not to cross a Hutt, and that Mercury’s surface can throw up all kinds of surprises. This block may be part of the original surface that pre-dates the formation of Caloris, which was shaped by material ejected during the basin-forming event.

Of course, the scientists are chalking all this up to “pareidolia”, the phenomenon in which humans frequently see other human-like shapes floating around space. But we know a scruffy-looking Nerfherder when we see one.

[MIKA27]

DARPA Wants A Spacejet That Makes Drones Look Like Paper Planes

Putting satellites into orbit is no easy task, especially with the demise of the Space Shuttle program. Which is why DARPA’s going to make itself a spacejet.

Current satellite launch methods require massive, multi-month lead times prior to take-off and are astronomically expensive to undertake — we’re talking hundreds of millions of dollars per flight. A spacejet, though? That’s a whole other story.

“We want to build off of proven technologies to create a reliable, cost-effective space delivery system with one-day turnaround,”said Jess Sponable, DARPA program manager heading XS-1, the foundling program, in a press release. “How it’s configured, how it gets up and how it gets back are pretty much all on the table — we’re looking for the most creative yet practical solutions possible.” To that end, DARPA is holding an open forum on Monday, October 7 wherein prospective designers can pitch their ideas on what the vehicle could look like and how it might function.

Specifically, DARPA is looking for the following metrics:

Key XS-1 technical goals include flying 10 times in 10 days, achieving speeds of Mach 10+ at least once and launching a representative payload to orbit. The program also seeks to reduce the cost of access to space for small (3,000- to 5,000-pound) payloads by at least a factor of 10, to less than $US5 million per flight.

That’s not to say that the XS-1 program is starting from a completely blank slate. The program’s engineers have already envisioned one potential iteration as a two-piece design: A first-stage motor would accelerate the vehicle to hypersonic speeds and suborbital heights, whereupon the second stage would detach from the first and fire the package into an accurate orbit around the planet. The first stage would then be brought back to land, be refueled and reloaded for an immediate relaunch. And yes, the entire takeoff, flight, and landing will be completely autonomous — now do you see why DARPA spent all that effort developing the X-47B?

The XS-1 program is years, probably decades away from fielding a working prototype system. And there are plenty of DARPA pipe dreams that have never come to pass. But given the breakneck pace of UAV development these days, cheap and easy access orbtial access might be upon us sooner than we think.

[MIKA27]

The Tiny Model Jets At This RC Air Show Are Still Incredibly Thrilling

Putting those cheap RC toys you can find at a department store — and even the model kits from a hobby shop — to shame, these incredibly detailed scale model fighter jets look almost as intense to fly as the real thing. In fact, racing through the skies they’re almost impossible to distinguish from the real thing too.

This footage comes from the Jet World Masters competition held in Switzerland this year, where the world’s best RC builders and pilots gather to show off their creations and routines. What’s particularly impressive is the level of detail and accuracy that goes into each scale model plane, including miniature animated pilots that even scan the skies while they fly.

And you were worried about crashing and breaking that $US40 toy you bought. Downing one of these would wipe out years of work, and untold investments. Better to be an observer.

[MIKA27]

A Mad Scientist Designing Organs That Could Give You Superpowers

Michael McAlpine’s 3-D printed bionic ear enables superhuman hearing, but you’re on your own for a cape.

Acquiring a superpower usually requires a bite from a radioactive insect, an uncomfortable dose of cosmic radiation, or the discovery of extraterrestrial parentage, but scientist Michael McAlpine hopes to make the process as simple as purchasing aspirin at the pharmacy. So far, he’s invented a “tattoo” for teeth that can detect cavities—not exactly the stuff of Hollywood blockbusters—although his latest project, a 3-D printed bionic ear that enables superhuman hearing, could be.

McAlpine earned his Ph.D. in chemistry at Harvard and now is an assistant professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering at Princeton, where he leads a nine-person research group. “I was corrupted to being more of an engineer than a scientist,” says McAlpine. “I like to do stuff that’s a little more applied.”

His first papers in 2003 focused on putting silicon nanowires on flexible substrates. It was an astonishing technical achievement for his time, but unfortunately it came at a point when iPods could only be controlled through a click wheel and Mark Zuckerberg was getting ready for his senior prom. Despite its scientific importance, the market wasn’t ready and McAlpine started looking for other research topics, when he asked, “Instead of trying to put nanowires on plastic substrates, why not put them on the body?”

An early example of McAlpine’s flexible electronics.

His latest project, a synthetic ear made with a 3-D bioprinter, is a realization of that vision. The complex biomechanical structure was fabricated by depositing live cells and conductive silver in layers. It started as an exploration of material properties, but commercial applications started to appear rapidly. He discovered that cochlear implants, a leading treatment for those with some hearing impairment, are made by hand in a slow and laborious process with costs to match.

But McAlpine’s vision is much bigger than simply automating a manual process—he wants to create superhumans. “Repairing lost hearing is an incredibly noble goal,” says McAlpine, “but what we made was a coil it receives electromagnetic signals and formed a direct connection with your brain.” A phone-brain interface sounds uncanny, but according to McAlpine it’s just optimizing the existing process. Tiny hairs in our ears interpret audio signals and transform them into electrical signals that can be decoded by the brain. McAlpine’s innovation cuts out the acoustical middle man and pumps the electronic signal right into your medula and brings us one step closer to a world where we can learn kung fu by plugging into a computer.

“We evolved in a world where we needed to hear lions,” he says. “But today it makes sense for one of our senses to talk directly to our brain, electrically.” It would also give us the ability to hear outside of our normal 20-20,000hz spectrum, giving us the ability to hear what bats or dolphins hear.

Why the ear? “The ear was a great proof of concept for combining biological and electrical,” says McAlpine. “It’s one of the simpler organs with no vasculature, it’s pure cartilage.” McAlpine sees this successful experiment as the first of many upgradeable body parts. “What I’m most excited about is using these 3-D printers, interwoven with advances in material science, and adding biology to them—not just taking the ear to the next level.”

Despite his desire to create more superheros than Stan Lee, McAlpine isn’t inspired by sci-fi, citing origami and music as bigger influences. “I have to be honest, I was never ever one of those people that watched Star Trek or Star Wars,” he says. “I was a musician, I went to the same high school as John Mayer and we’d play at the same venue. He was much better.” John Mayer might have sung about your body being a wonderland, but McAlpine is making it a reality.

A decade ago, McAlpine was developing electronics that could function on flexible substrates, but no one saw a commercial application. Today, rumors of smart watches featuring advanced circuits won’t stop. Now, he’s betting the next big wave of consumer electronics will bring us even closer to our smartphones and tablets. “It will just be considered normal that you have electronics embedded in your body,” he says. “You won’t think its weird that a door will just open up as you walk towards it. We will become cyborgs and it will be seen as just a normal thing.”

[MIKA27]

A Skyscraper That Can Disappear Using High-Tech Camouflage

If you’re one of those people who usually think new skyscrapers are ostentatious eyesores, the Infinity Tower, a 1,500-foot entertainment complex proposed for Cheongna, Korea, will offer a little bit of solace: It will only be an eyesore some of the time. Using a sophisticated system of cameras and LEDs, the building is designed to disappear with the push of a button.

The technological premise is the same one you see trotted out every so often for prototype invisibility cloaks: Cameras on one side of the building will project an image to screens on the other. Through careful consideration of viewing angles, the folks at GDS Architects think they’ve worked out how to create the most dramatic effect possible for pedestrians while remaining in the bounds of architectural and fiduciary reality. In a statement, GDS president Charles Wee said, “Instead of symbolizing prominence as another of the world’s tallest and best towers, our solution aims to provide the world’s first invisible tower.” It will also have the world’s third highest observation deck.

South Korea recently granted construction permits for the Infinity Tower, a proposed skyscraper that can disappear with the push of a button.

The design, which beat out 140 others in a 2008 and recently received construction permits from the Korean government, calls for 16 weatherproof cameras distributed at three different heights on the skyscraper’s skin. The images they capture will then be digitally processed to account for the structure’s shape and beamed out the other side across 1,500 LED strips. The facade was designed with pedestrians in mind–the arrangement of the cameras and LEDs is based on the precise angles from various viewing points around Incheon’s Cheongna district, about 20 miles west of Seoul, where the building will sit. The effect would only be activated for a few hours a day, when weather conditions permitted–the lights inside the 450-meter tall tower make after-hours invisibility impossible.

16 weatherproof cameras positioned at 3 different levels on the building beam an image to 1500 LED strips on the opposite side.

There are other hurdles. Tests on the technology still have to be conducted. While the permits have been issued, more funding needs to be secured. Also potentially complicating the idea of a gigantic invisible glass tower: The site’s just a few miles from the Incheon International Airport.

The effect? From certain places on the ground, the tower would effectively disappear into the horizon.

And yet, we dare to dream. It makes sense, in a way, that a building might be easier to cloak than, say, a tank–the surfaces are bigger and broader and easier to cover with screens. Of course, it’s worth mentioning that the technology here is double-edged sword.

The interior lights and the glass facade would make it harder to disappear at night.

In a brief on the building’s unusual design, GDS points out that the same technology allowing the tower to melt away into the horizon will also allow it to function as a “450-meter-tall billboard screen.” Hopefully they won’t have to resort to that to find their funding.

[MIKA27]

Lost Spanish lotto ticket handed in to clear conscience

A man who found a multi million-euro winning lottery ticket in La Coruna, Spain said he would not have been able to sleep if he had claimed the prize.

Manuel Reija Gonzalez's discovery of the 4.7m-euro (£4m; $6.3m) ticket has prompted a search for the real winner.

"I never for a moment thought about keeping it because I wanted to be able to sleep well at night with a clear conscience," he told the BBC.

If the ticket's owner cannot be found, the money will go to Mr Reija Gonzalez.

Authorities are not revealing exactly when or where in the north-western Spanish city the ticket for the 30 June 2012 draw was bought, so they can test the claims of people coming forward.

Reija Gonzalez, whose brother, father and grandfather worked for the Spanish lottery, according to local media, said he empathised with the person who lost it.

"Because here was somebody who had a problem forgetting his ticket and I put myself in his shoes, and it's the sort of thing I could have done. I thought the best thing to do was just to return the ticket," he told the BBC World Service programme Newsday.

He said he would be happy if the real winner was identified during the search, which could last up to two years.

"We're still in a phase where it's all just been made public in La Coruna so really what will be will be and I can't really tell you how I feel," he added.

"Here we have a phrase: it's God's will."

The ticket has now been advertised on the lost-and-found section of the city website - usually dominated by notices about mobile phones, keys and wallets.

MIKA: .... I could sleep just fine!

[MIKA27]

How The Arctic Seed Vault And Apocalypse Entwine With Climate Change

Since 2007, the Svalbard Global Seed Vault has maintained a repository of the world’s agricultural heritage. A series of tunnels bored into the side of a mountain, this vault is climate-controlled, secure against tectonic activity or sea-level rise, and designed to hold up to 4.5 million different seed varieties for centuries to come.

Built 900km north of Europe in Svalbard, a barren archipelago in Norway, it sits on the edge of the Arctic Ocean, containing duplicate specimens from other seed vaults scattered throughout the world. There are more than 1000 crop diversity collections worldwide, but the Global Seed Vault in Svalbard was built away from civilisation because it is the fail-safe, the insurance policy, the last resort.

Since its inception, the Svalbard Global Seed Vault has repeatedly evoked a sense of the apocalypse. Everyone from Fox News to Wired magazine has used the unofficial nickname ‘doomsday seed vault’ to refer to the project, and it is routinely described as a last haven and refuge for plant biodiversity should some global catastrophe destroy the world’s crops. ‘The “doomsday” vault is designed to keep millions of seed samples safe from natural and unnatural disasters: global warming, asteroid strikes, plant diseases, nuclear warfare, and even earthquakes,’National Geographic reported in 2008. Wired, in 2011, referred to it as ‘the world’s insurance policy against botanical holocaust’.

Cary Fowler, the former executive director of the Global Crop Diversity Trust, which helped to establish the seed vault, has neither coined nor entirely disavowed, the term ‘doomsday’ as it applies to the Svalbard Global Seed Vault: ‘We believe that in the case of a regional or global catastrophe that this seed vault would prove to be very, very useful,’ he told The Washington Post in 2008.

‘However, it wasn’t primarily with that in mind that we started the planning of this facility.’

Along with the language of catastrophe comes a very specific articulation of time. We think of our relationship to the environment in the immediate. Global warming, we’re told, will decimate all life within our lifetimes, or in our children’s lifetimes. In this way, environmental discourse resembles the ranting of religious millenarians, who stubbornly maintain that the apocalypse will happen on their watch. As of 2010, 41 per cent of Americans say that they expect Jesus to return to Earth by 2050. This obsession with impending disaster suggests that we see nature on a particularly human, individual scale. When we think of environmental damage and the human impact on the ecosystem, we think almost exclusively in the short term. The millennium, be it religious or environmental, is always coming the day after tomorrow.

Standing opposed to this narrow band of apocalyptic time is ‘deep time’, a sense of scale rooted in geology rather than humanity. The concept of deep time originated with the 18th-century Scottish geologist James Hutton, and was popularised by the American writer John McPhee in his book Basin and Range (1981). For McPhee, the chief attraction of deep time is its ability to move us out of short-term thinking: ‘If you free yourself from the conventional reaction to a quantity like a million years, you free yourself a bit from the boundaries of human time,’ he wrote. ‘And then in a way you do not live at all, but in another way you live forever.’

The workings of deep time are evident everywhere in Svalbard. In the days prior to my visit to the seed vault, I was out on the open seas with two dozen other artists and writers, travelling around the edge of Svalbard in a three-masted tall ship. We’d worked our way up the western coast of Spitsbergen, the archipelago’s largest island, dipping into the northern fjords before heading back.

Again and again, I was impressed by the sheer stillness of the world around us. Aside from a few failed attempts by whalers, there were no permanent human settlements in Svalbard before the late 19th century, and there is no indigenous population here, save the reindeer and the bears. We sailed around Svalbard’s edge at the height of the tourist season, and we sometimes went for days without seeing another ship.

Though we were safe from from immediate harm, it was less clear whether there was a longer-term menace in all that floating ice.

Svalbard contains less than three per cent of the planet’s glaciers, but those glaciers are getting 60-70 mm thinner each year, and annually they add 13 cubic km of icemelt to the ocean, raising it by .035mm per year. None of this is trivial, but neither is it particularly visible or dramatic. When I returned home, a few people asked me if I’d seen evidence of global warming. It was a well-meaning question, but one that made little sense. What would evidence of change look like to a person who’d just arrived in a foreign place? How could I tell what was regular snowmelt, and what was some subtle clue of a catastrophic ecosystem failure?

Anyone expecting an on-demand Hollywood apocalypse will be disappointed up here.

‘A glacier is an archivist and historian,’ Gretel Ehrlich wrote in The Future of Ice (2004). ‘It saves everything no matter how small or big, including pollen, dust, heavy metals, bugs, bones, and minerals. It registers every fluctuation of weather… A glacier is time incarnate.’ The time incarnated by a glacier operates on a very different scale, doled out in measurements far too small for humans to witness.

Sometimes what seems like a panicked gasp for breath is something else entirely. The lessons of Svalbard are more complex than the simple, immediate apocalypse intimated by the hype surrounding the seed vault. Cary Fowler, its former director, has hinted that the vault’s real work will be more prosaic than the dominant narrative might lead you to believe.

[MIKA27]

Australians Help Preserve The Tower Of Pisa With Detailed 3D Scan

A team of Australian researchers recently climbed the Leaning Tower of Pisa with a 3D scanner and came back with the most detailed map of the building ever. At first you might think that the beautiful results were meant for a museum, but this detailed scan will help scientists protect it from ruin.

This first-of-its-kind 3D scan comes at a time when the Leaning Tower of Pisa is actually straightening itself out. Not by a lot — the tower’s recovered roughly an inch of its vertical incline since 2001. And while researchers don’t think the building will lose its lean completely in the next century or two, they’re certainly keeping a very, very close eye on it. That’s part of why this new super detailed map of the building will come in handy.

http://youtu.be/xBZNAsrAJsI

A 3D scan of the Leaning Tower of Pisa hasn’t been possible until now, mostly because the technology wasn’t good enough for the tower’s tight stairs and complex architecture. However, the Australian team brought out a new kind of scanner called Zebedee that was developed in partnership with Australia’s national space agency CSIRO. “This technology is ideal for cultural heritage mapping, which is usually very time consuming and labour intensive,” said CISRO’s Dr Jonathan Roberts in a press release. “It can often take a whole research team a number of days or weeks to map a site with the accuracy and detail of what we can produce in a few hours.” It took this team just 20 minutes.

Architecture fans worldwide can rest a little easier now that such a comprehensive picture of the tower is complete. The same technology will travel to other world heritage sites to immortalise them in a 3D scan. In case there’s ever a catastrophic earthquake or fire, these scans could be used to recover the historical landmarks. But in the meantime, researchers are indeed thinking of putting these scans in museums so that those who can’t make it to the real thing can get idea of its glory.

[MIKA27]

Monster Machines: India's New Long-Range Missile Can Reach Beijing, Europe And Beyond

India and China are the epitome of frenemies. Their relationship isn’t outright antagonistic, as India’s is with neighbouring Pakistan, but has remained prickly since an ongoing border dispute over Tibet that began in the 1960s. Which is why it could be a bit disconcerting that India’s newest missile can reach Beijing — not to mention deep into Europe.

The primary difference between the China and India’s missile programs has historically been a matter of range. China’s Dongfeng class of ICBMs, with a maximum range 3,000 km to more than 10,000 km, have long been able to penetrate the breadth of India’s airspace, while India’s short-range ballistic missiles have barely been able to get beyond Lhasa. And irradiating the capital city of the region you’re fighting over is rather counterproductive. But the advent of the new Agni-V ICBM, China’s cultural and economic centres are suddenly within India’s reach.

The Agni-V missile is the latest iteration of India’s ICBM line and has been developed by India’s Defence Research and Development Organisation (DRDO). The original Agni (“fire”) I and II ICBMs were short range units designed specifically to ruin Pakistan’s week. The medium range Agni III extended India’s nuclear strike range into Western China while the new Agni V (Agni-III* and Agni-IV were rolled into this model) can reach all the way to the Yellow Sea and into Europe.

The missile measures 57 feet in length by 6.5 feet in diameter, weighs 50 tons, and can carry a 3,300 pound nuclear warhead. Its three-stage solid fuel engine will generate 330 to 440 tons of thrust to boost the system into the upper atmosphere and back down again at speeds topping mach 24 with a maximum range of 5,500 km (1,500 km more than the Agni-IV). And while the current version can only carry a single warhead, future iterations will reportedly be armed with MIRVs (Multiple independently targetable reentry vehicles) which will carry multiple warheads that can split off from the main missile and target other cities.

The Agni-V also differs from its predecessors in that it is canister-launched and is designed to be easily manoeuvrable by truck or by rail. This eliminates the need for expensive, easilytargeted missile silos.

“The Agni-5 is specially tailored for road-mobility,” explained Avinash Chander, Director of the Advanced Systems Laboratory (ASL) in Hyderabad, to Rediff News. “With the canister having been successfully developed, all India’s future land-based strategic missiles will be canisterised as well.” In all, the Agni-V has cost a total of just 25 billion rupees ($383 million) to develop.

News of the Agni-V’s development first broke in 2007. By April 2012, an Agni-V prototype had successfully completed a 90 second test firing, the first of five test series the missile must pass before entering production by 2016. And in January of this year, the Indian government rolled out a reportedly operational unit for its annual Republic Day, along with a reminder to Pakistan not to take their friendship “for granted.” Yeah, real friendly.

Last week, India performed a second successful test-firing of the missile. “The test was successful,” Ravi Kumar Gupta, spokesman for the DRDO, said in a press statement Sunday. “It hit the target in a predefined trajectory. It met all the mission objectives.”

Now whether the regional security balance will be upset by the imminent production of this new ICBM remains to be seen. On one hand, this system merely incrementally augments India’s nuclear deterrent capability, it doesn’t impart any huge new tactical advantage.

“The existence of the Agni-V does not change the weapons requirements of any of India’s potential foes,” Christopher Clary, a former country director for South Asian affairs in the Office of the Secretary of Defence, told the Global Security Newswire. “China already has long-range missiles and Pakistan can credibly threaten Indian commercial and political centres with its existing systems. “

On the other hand, this development could well inflame Pakistan and India’s nearly seven decade-long tensions and potentially accelerate the arms race between the two nuclear-powered nations. Even worse, it could lead to even greater instability in an already unstable region. So, there’s that. But at least it looks impressive in a parade.

[MIKA27]

NASA’s Plutonium Problem Could End Deep-Space Exploration

In 1977, the Voyager 1 spacecraft left Earth on a five-year mission to explore Jupiter and Saturn. Thirty-six years later, the car-size probe is still exploring, still sending its findings home. It has now put more than 19 billion kilometers between itself and the sun. Last week NASA announced that Voyager 1 had become the first man-made object to reach interstellar space.

The distance this craft has covered is almost incomprehensible. It’s so far away that it takes more than 17 hours for its signals to reach Earth. Along the way, Voyager 1 gave scientists their first close-up looks at Saturn, took the first images of Jupiter’s rings, discovered many of the moons circling those planets and revealed that Jupiter’s moon Io has active volcanoes. Now the spacecraft is discovering what the edge of the solar system is like, piercing the heliosheath where the last vestiges of the sun’s influence are felt and traversing the heliopause where cosmic currents overcome the solar wind. Voyager 1 is expected to keep working until 2025 when it will finally run out of power.

None of this would be possible without the spacecraft’s three batteries filled with plutonium-238. In fact, Most of what humanity knows about the outer planets came back to Earth on plutonium power. Cassini’s ongoing exploration of Saturn, Galileo’s trip to Jupiter, Curiosity’s exploration of the surface of Mars, and the 2015 flyby of Pluto by the New Horizons spacecraft are all fueled by the stuff. The characteristics of this metal’s radioactive decay make it a super-fuel. More importantly, there is no other viable option.

Solar power is too weak, chemical batteries don’t last, nuclear fission systems are too heavy. So, we depend on plutonium-238, a fuel largely acquired as by-product of making nuclear weapons.

But there’s a problem: We’ve almost run out.

“We’ve got enough to last to the end of this decade. That’s it,” said Steve Johnson, a nuclear chemist at Idaho National Laboratory. And it’s not just the U.S. reserves that are in jeopardy. The entire planet’s stores are nearly depleted.

The country’s scientific stockpile has dwindled to around 36 pounds. To put that in perspective, the battery that powers NASA’s Curiosity rover, which is currently studying the surface of Mars, contains roughly 10 pounds of plutonium, and what’s left has already been spoken for and then some. The implications for space exploration are dire: No more plutonium-238 means not exploring perhaps 99 percent of the solar system. In effect, much of NASA’s $1.5 billion-a-year (and shrinking) planetary science program is running out of time. The nuclear crisis is so bad that affected researchers know it simply as “The Problem.”

But it doesn’t have to be that way. The required materials, reactors, and infrastructure are all in place to create plutonium-238 (which, unlike plutonium-239, is practically impossible to use for a nuclear bomb). In fact, the U.S. government recently approved spending about $10 million a year to reconstitute production capabilities the nation shuttered almost two decades ago. In March, the DOE even produced a tiny amount of fresh plutonium inside a nuclear reactor in Tennessee.

It’s a good start, but the crisis is far from solved. Political ignorance and shortsighted squabbling, along with false promises from Russia, and penny-wise management of NASA’s ever-thinning budget still stand in the way of a robust plutonium-238 production system. The result: Meaningful exploration of the solar system has been pushed to a cliff’s edge. One ambitious space mission could deplete remaining plutonium stockpiles, and any hiccup in a future supply chain could undermine future missions.

A radiation-shielded glove box at Savannah River Site. In chambers like these during the cold war, the government assembled plutonium-238 fuel for use in spacecraft such as Galileo and Ulysses.

The only natural supplies of plutonium-238 vanished eons before the Earth formed some 4.6 billion years ago. Exploding stars forge the silvery metal, but its half-life, or time required for 50 percent to disappear through decay, is just under 88 years.

Fortunately, we figured out how to produce it ourselves — and to harness it to create a remarkably persistent source of energy.

Like other radioactive materials, plutonium-238 decays because its atomic structure is unstable. When an atom’s nucleus spontaneously decays, it fires off a helium core at high speed while leaving behind a uranium atom. These helium bullets, called alpha radiation, collide en masse with nearby atoms within a lump of plutonium — a material twice as dense as lead. The energy can cook a puck of plutonium-238 to nearly 1,260 degrees Celsius. To turn that into usable power, you wrap the puck with thermoelectrics that convert heat to electricity. Voila: You’ve got a battery that can power a spacecraft for decades.

“It’s like a magic isotope. It’s just right,” said Jim Adams, NASA’s deputy chief technologist and former deputy director of the space agency’s planetary science division.

U.S. production came primarily from two nuclear laboratories that created plutonium-238 as a byproduct of making bomb-grade plutonium-239. The Hanford Site in Washington state left the plutonium-238 mixed into a cocktail of nuclear wastes. The Savannah River Site in South Carolina, however, extracted and refined more than 360 pounds during the Cold War to power espionage tools, spy satellites, and dozens of NASA’s pluckiest spacecraft.

By 1988, with the Iron Curtain full of holes, the U.S. and Russia began to dismantle wartime nuclear facilities. Hanford and Savannah River no longer produced any plutonium-238. But Russia continued to harvest the material by processing nuclear reactor fuel at a nuclear industrial complex called Mayak. The Russians sold their first batch, weighing 36 pounds, to the U.S. in 1993 for more than $45,000 per ounce. Russia had become the planet’s sole supplier, but it soon fell behind on orders. In 2009, it reneged on a deal to sell 22 pounds to the U.S.

Whether or not Russia has any material left or can still create some is uncertain. “What we do know is that they’re not willing to sell it anymore,” said Alan Newhouse, a retired nuclear space consultant who spearheaded the first purchase of Russian plutonium-238. “One story I’ve heard … is that they don’t have anything left to sell.”

By 2005, according a Department of Energy report, the U.S. government owned 87 pounds, of which roughly two-thirds was designated for national security projects, likely to power deep-sea espionage hardware. The DOE would not disclose to WIRED what is left today, but scientists close to the issue say just 36 pounds remain earmarked for NASA.

That’s enough for the space agency to launch a few small deep-space missions before 2020. A twin of the Curiosity rover is planned to lift off for Mars in 2020 and will require nearly a third of the stockpile. After that, NASA’s interstellar exploration program is left staring into a void — especially for high-profile, plutonium-hungry missions, like the proposed Jupiter Europa Orbiter. To seek signs of life around Jupiter’s icy moon Europa, such a spacecraft could require more than 47 pounds of plutonium.

“The supply situation is already impacting mission planning,” said Alice Caponiti, a nuclear engineer who leads the DOE’s efforts to restart plutonium-238 production. “If you’re planning a mission that’s going to take eight years to plan, the first thing you’re going to want to know is if you have power.”

Many of the eight deep-space robotic missions that NASA had envisioned over the next 15 years have already been delayed or canceled. Even more missions — some not yet even formally proposed — are silent casualties of NASA’s plutonium poverty. Since 1994, scientists have pleaded with lawmakers for the money to restart production. The DOE believes a relatively modest $10 to 20 million in funding each year through 2020 could yield an operation capable of making between 3.3 and 11 pounds of plutonium-238 annually — plenty to keep a steady stream of spacecraft in business.

In 2012, a line item in NASA’s $17-billion budget fed $10 million in funding toward an experiment to create a tiny amount of plutonium-238. The goals: gauge how much could be made, estimate full-scale production costs, and simply prove the U.S. could pull it off again. It was half of the money requested by NASA and the DOE, the space agency’s partner in the endeavor (the Atomic Energy Act forbids NASA to manufacture plutonium-238). The experiment may last seven more years and cost between $85 and $125 million.

At Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee, nuclear scientists have used the High Flux Isotope Reactor to produce a few micrograms of plutonium-238. A fully reconstituted plutonium program described in the DOE’s latest plan, released this week, would also utilize a second reactor west of Idaho Falls, called the Advanced Test Reactor.

That facility is located on the 890-square-mile nuclear ranch of Idaho National Laboratory. The scrub of the high desert rolls past early morning visitors as the sun crests the Teton Range. Armed guards stop and inspect vehicles at a roadside outpost, waving those with the proper credentials toward a reactor complex fringed with barbed wire and electrified fences.

The Advanced Test reactor’s unique four—leaf—clover core design. (Idaho National Laboratory)

Beyond the last security checkpoint is a warehouse-sized, concrete-floored room. Yellow lines painted on the floor cordon off what resembles an aboveground swimming pool capped with a metal lid. A bird’s-eye view reveals four huge, retractable metal slabs; jump through one and you’d plunge into 36 feet of water that absorbs radiation. Halfway to the bottom is the reactor’s 4-foot-tall core, its four-leaf clover shape dictated by slender, wedge-shaped bars of uranium. “That’s where you’d stick your neptunium,” nuclear chemist Steve Johnson said, pointing to a diagram of the radioactive clover.

Neptunium, a direct neighbor to plutonium on the periodic table and a stable byproduct of Cold War-era nuclear reactors, is the material from which plutonium-238 is most easily made. In Johnson’s arrangement, engineers pack tubes with neptunium-237 and slip them into the reactor core. Every so often an atom of neptunium-237 absorbs a neutron emitted by the core’s decaying uranium, later shedding an electron to become plutonium-238. A year or two later — after harmful isotopes vanish — technicians could dissolve the tubes in acid, remove the plutonium, and recycle the neptunium into new targets.

The inescapable pace of radioactive decay and limited reactor space mean it may take five to seven years to create 3.3 pounds of battery-ready plutonium. Even if full production reaches that rate, NASA needs to squeeze every last watt out of what will inevitably always be a rather small stockpile.

The standard-issue power source, called a multi-mission thermoelectric generator — the kind that now powers the Curiosity rover — won’t cut it for space exploration’s future. “They’re trustworthy, but they use a heck of a lot of plutonium,” Johnson said.

In other words, NASA doesn’t just need new plutonium. It needs a new battery.

In a cluttered basement at NASA Glenn Research Center in Cleveland, metal cages and transparent plastic boxes house a menagerie of humming devices. Many look like stainless-steel barbells about a meter long and riddled with wires; others resemble white crates the size of two-drawer filing cabinets.

The unpretentious machines are prototypes of NASA’s next-generation nuclear power system, called the Advanced Stirling Radioisotope Generator. It’s shaping up to be a radically different, more efficient nuclear battery than any before it.

On the outside, the machines are motionless. Inside is a flurry of heat-powered motion driven by the Stirling cycle, developed in 1816 by the Scottish clergyman Robert Stirling. Gasoline engines burn fuel to rapidly expand air that pushes pistons, but Stirling converters need only a heat gradient. The greater the difference between a Stirling engine’s hot and cold parts, the faster its pistons hum. When heat warms one end of a sealed chamber containing helium, the gas expands, pushing a magnet-laden piston through a tube of coiled wire to generate electricity. The displaced, cooling gas then moves back to the hot side, sucking the piston backward to restart the cycle.

“Nothing is touching anything. That’s the whole beauty of the converter,” said Lee Mason, one of several NASA engineers crowded into the basement. Their pistons float like air hockey pucks on the cycling helium gas.

For every 100 watts of heat generated, the Stirling generator converts more than 30 watts into electricity. That’s nearly five times better than the nuclear battery powering Curiosity. In effect, the generator can use one-fourth of the plutonium while boosting electrical output by at least 25 percent. Less plutonium also means these motors weigh two-thirds less than Curiosity’s 99-pound battery — a big difference for spacecraft on 100 million-mile-or-more journeys. Curiosity was the biggest, heaviest spacecraft NASA could send to Mars at the time, with a vast majority of its mass dedicated to a safe landing — not science. Reducing weight expands the possibilities for advanced instruments on future missions.

But the Stirling generator’s relatively complicated technology, while crucial to the design, worries some space scientists. “There are people who are very concerned that this unit has moving parts,” said John Hamley, manager of NASA Glenn’s nuclear battery program. The concern is that the motion might interfere with spacecraft instruments that must be sensitive enough to map gravity fields, electromagnetism, and other subtle phenomena in space.

As a workaround, each generator uses two Stirling converters sitting opposite each other. An onboard computer constantly synchronizes their movements to cancel out troublesome vibrations. To detect and correct design flaws, engineers have abused their generator prototypes in vacuum chambers, assaulted them on shaking tables, and barraged them with powerful blasts of radiation and magnetism.

But NASA typically requires new technologies to be tested for one and a half expected lifetimes before flying them in space. For the Stirling generator, that would take 25 years. Earnest testing began in 2001, cutting the delay to 13 years – but that’s longer than NASA can wait: In 2008, only one of 10 nuclear-powered missions called for the device. By 2010, seven of eight deep-space missions planned through 2027 required them.

To speed things up, Hamley and his team run a dozen different units at a time. The oldest device has operated almost continuously for nearly 10 years while the newest design has churned since 2009. The combined data on the Stirling generators totals more than 50 years, enough for simulations to reliably fast-forward a model’s wear-and-tear. So far, so good. “Nothing right now is a show-stopper,” Hamley said. His team is currently building two flight-worthy units, plus a third for testing on the ground (Hamley expects Johnson’s team in Idaho to fuel it sometime next year).

For all of the technology’s promise, however, it “won’t solve this problem,” Johnson said. Even if the Stirling generator is used, plutonium-238 supplies will only stretch through 2022.

An early ASRG prototype. Its 10,016 hours of use has contributed to decades of combined data on the performance of NASA’s revolutionary nuclear battery.

Any hiccups in funding for plutonium-238 production could put planetary science into a tailspin and delay, strip down, or smother nuclear-powered missions. The outlook among scientists is simultaneously optimistic and rattled.

The reason: It took countless scientists and their lobbyists more than 15 years just to get lawmakers’ attention. A dire 2009 reportabout “The Problem,” authored by more than five dozen researchers, ultimately helped slip the first earnest funding request into the national budget in 2009. Congressional committees squabbled over if and how to spend $20 million of taxpayers’ money — it took them three years to make up their minds.

“There isn’t a day that goes by that I don’t think about plutonium-238,” said Jim Adams, the former deputy boss of NASA’s planetary science division.

At the National Air and Space Museum in Washington, D.C., Adams stares through the glass at the nuclear wonder that powered his generation’s space exploration. Amid the fake moon dust sits a model of SNAP-27, a plutonium-238-fueled battery that every lunar landing after Apollo 11 to power its science experiments. “My father worked on the Lunar Excursion Model, which that thing was stored on, and it’s still up there making power,” Adams said.

Just a few steps away is a model of the first Viking Lander, which touched down on Mars in 1976 and began digging for water and life. It found neither. “We didn’t dig deep enough,” Adams said. “Just 4 centimeters below the depth that Viking dug was a layer of pristine ice.”

One floor up, a model of a Voyager spacecraft hangs from the ceiling. The three nuclear power supplies aboard the real spacecraft are what allow Voyager 1 and its twin, Voyager 2, to contact the Earth after 36 years. Any other type of power system would have expired decades ago.

The same technology fuels the Cassini spacecraft, which continues to survey Saturn, sending a priceless stream of data and almost-too-fantastic-to believe images of that planet and its many moons. New Horizons’ upcoming flyby of Pluto — nine and a half years in the making — wouldn’t be possible without a reliable source of nuclear fuel.

The Viking lander needed to dig deeper. Now we do, too.

[MIKA27]

Hiroshi Yamauchi, Man Who Built Nintendo’s Gaming Empire, Dies at 85

Hiroshi Yamauchi, who transformed Nintendo from a maker of playing cards and board games into a global videogame giant, has died at 85.

The Associated Press reported that Yamauchi passed away of pneumonia on Thursday in a hospital in central Tokyo.

“The entire Nintendo group will carry on the spirit of Mr. Yamauchi by honoring, in our approach to entertainment, the sense of value he has taught us — that there is merit in doing what is different — and at the same time, by changing Nintendo in accordance with changing times,” said Nintendo president Satoru Iwata in a statement.

Yamauchi took over the company in 1949, when he was just 22 years old. Nintendo was founded in 1889 by his grandfather Fusajiro Yamauchi as a maker of hanafuda, traditional Japanese playing cards with images of flowers on their faces. Yamauchi dropped out of Waseda University to lead Nintendo.

“It would be a lie if I said I was enthusiastic about taking over Nintendo,” Yamauchi said in 1986, as quoted in the 2010 book A History of Nintendo. “I was young and I had mixed feelings, but in front of me I had a family business with no head and all its employees waiting to know what was going to happen to them.”

In Game Over, a 1993 book about the rise of Nintendo, writer David Sheff reported that Nintendo’s employees “resented [Yamauchi's] youth and inexperience,” and in response, Yamauchi fired “every manager… left over from his grandfather’s reign.”

Only the third president that Nintendo ever had, Yamauchi ran the company until 2002. Although the company was the premier maker of hanafuda cards, Yamauchi dreamed much bigger. In the 1950′s, he began to sell western playing cards and struck a deal with Disney to produce licensed cards with Mickey Mouse and other characters; these were a huge hit. In the 1960′s he launched Nintendo’s IPO. When sales of playing cards dropped, Yamauchi embarked on several money-losing ventures into food, taxis, even “love hotels.” When all of these failed, he re-centered Nintendo on the gaming business, introducing a line of board games. When these became popular, he expanded the company into electronic games in the 1970′s, which led to its entry into the videogame market.

In 1992, Yamauchi purchased the Seattle Mariners baseball team, a controversial move at the time.

“In Nintendo’s newest game, Hiroshi the billionaire must negotiate his way through a hostile country, avoiding the venomous Jingos and skiing past the antagonistic Moguls so that he can rescue Ken Griffey Jr. from the clutches of the Tampa Bay Baseball Task Force and save the day for the beleaguered Rain People,” Sports Illustrated wrote that year.