When we imagine what will power human civilization in the future, say, 100 years down the line or beyond, we tend to go big and utopian—gleaming fusion power, thorium nuke plants, sparkling solar arrays that stretch across the desert. Course, the dystopia-envisioning cynics do the opposite, and go dingy and desperate—sputtering Mad Max diesel generators, survivalist home solar panels, if anything at all.

Obviously, the reality of our future energy mix is going to look a lot different than both, and is probably going to land somewhere in the middle, and may very well look like nothing we’ve ever imagined. It might, for instance, look like a bunch of perpetually spinning solar cones that dot our cities.

See, a company called V3 has recently announced that it has built and tested solar technology that’s cheaper than coal. If they’re right, that’s it, that’s the big one—coal is the cheapest power source for most of the world right now, though natural gas has edged out here in the U.S. If solar can beat either on cost, sans subsidies, that’s game over for fossil fuels.

So what’s the secret? How does V3 plan on beating out a bevy of solar aspirants who’ve been working steadily at grinding the cost of panels down for decades?

Shape ‘em like a cone, and make ‘em spin. That’s pretty much it.

V3 gave CleanTechnica the exclusive on its new tech, which boils down to this:

Traditional solar panels are only collecting the optimum amount of sunlight for a small period of time during the day—when the sun is shining head-on to the panels. Some manufacturers have built mechanical trackers to tackle this, but that, of course, demands energy be sucked down in the name of absorbing more sub. Simply shaping panels into cones is a simpler, cheaper, more energy efficient answer—the V3s will collect more sunlight.

But the big breakthrough is this: they spin. Grist’s David Roberts explains why this is such a big deal:

“Solar panels produce much more energy if sunlight is concentrated by a lens before it hits the solar cell; however, concentrating the light also creates immense amounts of heat, which means that concentrating solar panels (CPV) require expensive, specialized, heat-resistant solar cell materials.

The Spin Cell concentrates sunlight on plain old (cheap) silicon PV, but keeps it cool by spinning it.”

As a result, the company says its panels can produce power for 8 cents per kw/h. The average rate for electricity consumers in the U.S. is 12 cents per kw/h.

If these panels pan out—and the company claims their cost projections have been verified by independent solar specialists—they will become the single most attractive energy source currently available. With no pollution or emissions generated, no giant, centralized plants in need of construction—these things can be dropped down anywhere there’s room for a meter-wide traffic cone—the V3 solar spinners will be the belle of the clean energy ball.

If. If, if, if. Neat-looking, safe and clever technologies have a habit of not panning out as planned, and energy tech is no different (see Solyndra, thorium, etc). But it might indeed, and that’s beyond enticing--especially considering that the company says it's got orders for 4 GW worth of the cones already lined up. That's enough to power about 3 million homes. 3 million. So, yeah--the future may yet look closer to something like this:

BlackBerry's new Z10, also known as its Hail Mary.

Some people are calling today the most important day in BlackBerry's company history. Or, in The New York Times's view of things, it's at least the biggest day "since 1996, when its founders showed investors a small block of wood and promised that a wireless e-mail device shaped like that would change business forever."

What's the big deal? Well, after months of delays and lots of "they'd better get this right" blog posts, the company released its new BlackBerry 10 operating a system, a very iPhone-like device called the Z10, and a more run-of-the-mill clicky keyboard BlackBerry called the Q10. Nobody seems to really care about the Q10, but David Pogue calls the Z10 "BlackBerry’s Hail Mary pass, its bet-the-farm phone." Like virtually every other smartphone on the market now, it has a touchscreen, multitasking and a decent camera.

Meanwhile, BlackBerry maker Research in Motion clearly wanted to peg this as a turnaround moment, and even went so far as to change its name to — no big surprise, here — BlackBerry. It even named a new global creative director: self-confessed "iPhone junky" Alicia Keys. (Yah, I'm still scratching my head on that one too, especially after Lady Gaga fizzled in the same role for Polaroid.)

The Q10 is basically every BlackBerry ever created, but about three years too late to hold on to the corporate users who loved them.

But what a big day! New phone! New software! New name (sort of)! Newfound success? Not so fast.

It's obviously going to take some time to figure out if BlackBerry's Hail Mary will work, but initial reactions are pretty mixed. Wall Street was not impressed. Immediately following the company's unveiling of its new goodies, BlackBerry's stock tanked and was down over 7 percent within an hour or so. Then again, it doesn't really matter what Wall Street thinks if the phone actually sells. We won't have a solid answer on that for quite a while though.

The Z10 hits stores in the United Kingdom on January 31, but it won't arrive in the United States until March. It'll be priced about the same as every other smartphone -- $199 or so with a new contract and $599 without. At that point in time and at that price point, the Z10 will have to compete not only with the iPhone 5 but also the upcoming Samsung Galaxy S IV, which is apparently getting "iPhone-like hype." And it's been a long time since anybody lined up to buy a BlackBerry device. Come to think of it, I'm not sure that's ever happened.

BlackBerry's not just hoping they'll have a blockbuster with this new line up. They need to have a blockbuster. Last year, after it pushed back the release date of the new operating system and laid off 5,000 employees, BlackBerry said it "expects the next several quarters to continue to be very challenging for its business based on the increasing competitive environment, lower handset volumes, potential financial and other impacts from the delay of BlackBerry 10." The quarters before that weren't exactly a cakewalk, either.

CNET is positive about the Z10, but also sounds a bit like it's rooting for the underdog.

Whereas BlackBerry used to control some 85 percent of the smartphone market, the company now controls about 2 percent, and has lost a huge portion of the crucial enterprise market it once dominated as corporate IT departments started supporting iOS and Android en masse. In the same time period, BlackBerry stock took a nosedive from a high of about $144 to its current price of about $14. In other words, the company lost 90 percent of its value in the past five years.

This is all to say, BlackBerry is looking at an almost impossible challenge. We've seen technology companies throw Hail Mary passes in the past, and we've also seen the ball fall dozens of yards short of the end zone. Remember the Palm Pre? Much like the BlackBerry Z10 now, the Pre hit the market in 2009 basking in the warm glow of good reviews. At that point in time, Android was hardly the dominant force it is today, and Apple's iPhone was closing in on BlackBerry, which was still the corporate device of choice. But you know what? The Palm Pre was a terrible disaster, and within a year, the entire company was sold to HP. The Pre is now remembered as Palm's swan song.

It's hard to predict the future. But even if the BlackBerry Z10 is a tremendous hit, it seems like something world-changing will need to happen to put the company back up on its perch as a major player in the smartphone business. And no, hiring Alicia Keys to pretend to like BlackBerry products is not that something. Neither is changing the company name from Research in Motion to BlackBerry. The two brands have always been basically synonymous. If anything, we're now left with the impression that the research is no longer in motion, and BlackBerry is smoking its last cigarette before the firing squad arrives.

Mangrove forests are some of the most crucial ecosystems on Earth. They provide a buffer zone from heavy waves and storm action, which is important for inhabitants on land as well as the fish and marine creatures that raise their young in the calm waters of mangrove swamps. That means mangrove swamps provide huge economic benefits while also providing homes for a massively diverse group of species.

That means their disappearance is a massive problem. Mangrove forests cover about half as much area as they once did, much of which has come in the last three decades. It has been estimated that 35 percent of mangrove swamps were lost between 1980 and 2000, and a 2010 study showed that loss may have actually been more severe. Worse, the vast majority of mangroves left aren't protected.

“Our assessment shows, for the first time, the exact extent and distribution of mangrove forests of the world at 30 meters spatial resolution, the highest resolution ever,” said Dr Chandra Giri, who was part of the 2010. “This reveals that 75% of the remaining forest is found in just 15 countries, out of which only ~6.9% is protected under the existing protected areas network.”

That's why I enjoyed the below video from Dennis Zaidi, which shows the beauty of mangroves in Bimini, Bahamas. The overlaid text might be a bit much, but don't let it distract you from the beauty of the mangroves. I've spent time cruising around them in Costa Rica and Panama, and can personally vouch that they're as rad as Zaidi portrays them. 

@derektmead

(via)

Brazil just can't catch a break. Earlier this week a freak venue fire in the southern town of Santa Maria killed over 200 teenagers, and now this: A small hexacopter drone goes haywire at Castelão, a 2014 World Cup venue, smashing into what was thankfully a not-too-crowded section of the stadium's upper level. 

Details are spotty (though this guy is possibly the culprit), but from the look of it the drone was having difficulty righting itself long before careening into the stands. Whatever the case, it doesn't look like anyone was seriously harmed, which is a good thing. Then again, I'm already reading cries that for every drone-fail video upped to YouTube, 100 drone-success videos should be upped as counterweight--to show, once and for all, that more small-fry unmanned systems perform missions flawlessly than those that eat shit. I can see eye-to-eye with that thinking, for the most part. 

Just don't go thinking I'm holding my breath for slick drone footage of the Cup--or of any events at the 2016 Olympic Games in Rio. 

Reach Brian at brian@motherboard.tv. @thebanderson

This is what Ray Lewis looks like when you ask him about deer antlers. Image credit: Matthew Emmons/USA TODAY Sports via ESPN

If you want to annoy Ray Lewis right now (and I'd be careful about that), ask him about deer antlers.

It’s a bold journalist who puts Lewis on the spot. The 6’1, 240-pound future Hall of Fame linebacker for the Baltimore Ravens is easily one of the most intimidating men in all of sports. Questions still surround an unsolved double homicide from which Lewis fled 13 years ago. When Lewis is in a room, everyone is aware of these things. So when he said “next question,” as he did in a press conference this week to prodding about allegations he recently sought performance enhancing drugs (PED), the journalists in the room moved on to the next question.

For the moment, anyway. At present, it’s probably the number one sports story in America.

Yes, the sun came up this morning, so it’s another day. That means another alleged doping scandal. From Lance Armstrong’s not-quite-contrite confession on Oprah, to the Baseball Hall of Fame’s rejecting baseball giants like Barry Bonds and Roger Clemens a few weeks ago, sports doping is on everyone’s tongues right now.

Or under them. The PED in question, which a recent article in Sports Illustrated alleges Lewis sought for help recovering from a torn triceps injury, is an anabolic hormone called IGF-1 (or insulin-like growth factor), which users spray under their tongues. It is also derived from the soft “velvet” covering on deer antlers.

Deer antlers? What is this stuff?

Ray Lewis, dismissing allegations he used PEDs derived from deer antlers, via AP

Athletes are always looking for any advantage they can get, and one way is by staying a step ahead of regulations. Within that moving frontier, a thousand-and-one hucksters are happy to peddle their wares, each promising better results than the last, part of multi-billion-dollar industry.

Deer antler spray is easy to get online. Unsurprisingly, the way it’s sold bears all the marks of traditional snake oil salesmanship. Google “deer antler spray” and the second result—deerantlerspray.org—re-routes you to igf1plus.com, an hack-job website full of typos that begins by claiming that “Orientals” have been using deer antler juice for 10,000 years—a few thousand years before the invention of the wheel.

Will deer antlers become the next rhino horns? Image by Tanty Pas via Desktopas.com

From the SI article, here’s Christopher Key of the two-man company, S.W.A.T.S. (Sports with Alternatives to Steroids), pitching deer antler spray to a hotel room full of Alabama football players before their BCS Championship game against Notre Dame (if you can call it a game):

Like the star of an infomercial flush with catchphrases—“Guys, this stuff is beyond real!”—Key also showed the players gallon jugs of “negatively charged” water, which he claimed would afford them better hydration because it adheres like a magnet to the body's cells. Then he held up a canister containing a powder additive, to be mixed in water or juice, that he said had put muscle mass on a woman who was in a coma, and an oscillating “beam ray” lightbulb that could “knock out” the swine flu virus in 90 minutes. Finally, he pulled out a bottle of deer-antler spray (which also comes in pill form). Adrian Hubbard, a linebacker sitting on one of the queen beds, said he already had some, but Key explained its benefits for the others.

“You're familiar with HGH, correct?” asked Key, referring to human growth hormone. “It's converted in the liver to IGF-1." IGF-1, or -insulin-like growth factor, is a natural, anabolic hormone that stimulates muscle growth. "We have deer that we harvest out of New Zealand," Key said. "Their antlers are the fastest-growing substance on planet Earth . . . because of the high concentration of IGF-1. We've been able to freeze dry that out, extract it, put it in a sublingual spray that you shake for 20 seconds and then spray three [times] under your tongue. . . . This stuff has been around for almost 1,000 years, this is stuff from the Chinese."

IGF-1 is also a substance banned by the NCAA and by every major pro league. Alleging that the NFL warned players away from S.W.A.T.S.'s spray because it's a threat to "Big Pharma," Key boasted that S.W.A.T.S. is "the most controversial supplement company on Earth."

Beam rays and negatively-charged water... that's one thing. But deer antler spray has been banned because IGF-1 is a legitimate hormone similar to insulin. It plays a key role in childhood growth and is used therapeutically to treat children with stunted growth. According to the SI article, deer antler spray only contains IGF-1 in small amounts and the science is still out regarding whether deer-based IGF-1 actually works in humans.

Of course, interspecies-based therapies have been around forever. As I noted in a Motherboard article last month, a multitude of creams, oils and ointments using plant and animal cells—none of which have been FDA approved—flood the cosmetics market. Rhino Horn powder, as Derek Mead noted here in an in-depth article last week, really has been used in Asia for centuries and is currently worth more than its weight in gold—or platinum or cocaine. Other people, as this Motherboard video demonstrates,

Add deer antler spray to the list. As Mike Freeman notes for CBS Sports, players ingest all kinds of weird animal products to get an edge, from bull penis to horse meat. But the biggest takeaway from speaking with players about the Lewis situation," he adds, "was how players are using more extreme measures to better their physical performance."

"Players," he continues:

say the use of deer antler spray by NFL players -- while not common -- is not unusual. Estimates I'm getting are in the 10 percent to 20 percent range. Players have been using the extract for years.

The reason is because players have long known the spray acts like HGH, but there's no test for it, so they know they won't get caught.

I just feel bad for all the deer who, like the rhinos, will have to die so ridiculous, cartoonish humans can use just a fraction of their bodies.

As if we needed any reminder that we’ve barely scratched the interplanetary surface in studying Mars and the moon. Space.com assembled an infographic that displays the total distance traveled by the top 9 furthest-traveling rovers sent on Mars and the moon, and well, most Americans drive more than the grand total in under a week.

Strikingly, even though we humanfolk set the first rover down in 1970, well over 40 years ago, we’ve barely logged 110 miles of total travel between the two. That’s less distance than lies between Los Angeles and San Diego. That’s a blip. And while satellites and probes have surveyed much more terrain from above, it sort of serves to reinforce the fact that truly vast expanses remain unexplored from the ground. Mars alone, after all, is some 4,221 miles in diameter.

Of course, it’s pretty impressive that we’re driving unmanned Curiosities around a celestial body some 140 million miles (on average) away from Earth in the first place--perhaps the most impressive vehicular trip in history, so there’s that. But when it comes to actual extraterrestrial off-roading, we've got a ways left to go.

Do you keep a rocket launcher at home? Probably not, because rocket launchers are built for war — see above — and last I checked, the United States was not being invaded by North Koreans or Iranians or even Frenchmen. So why would anybody want a rocket launcher? Because they're pretty badass mantle pieces. Duh.

In recent weeks, a series of gun buyback programs have been going on across the country. While some of them are annual occurrences, many were inspired by last month's shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut. As such, the turnout at the gun buyback events has been especially stellar. So stellar that authorities have been getting a little more than they bargained for. They've been getting rocket launchers.

Two of the Army-green, cannon-shaped weapons showed up at a Los Angeles buyback event last month. Another appeared at an event in Seattle earlier this week, and just yesterday, yet another popped up in New Jersey. They were all exchanged for $100 to $250 in cash or gift cards.

This is great news in a way. All of those wacky weapons aficionados who were using them for either a badass door stop (best-case scenario) or to intimidate the neighbors (worst-case scenario) are finally coming around to the fact that they do not need a rocket launcher in their arsenal.

It was futile to begin with, though. From the photos of the gun buyback events, it looks like the model rocket launcher people are bringing in is the AT-4. These are standard issue U.S. military weapons, easily acquired by a current or former infantryman or anybody with money — a few hundred bucks will do. The AT-4s are scary-looking, and when loaded, they can blow up tanks. But they cannot be reloaded, and the best I can tell, the ones turned in at the gun buyback events had already been fired.

So you can stop freaking out about the threat of random Americans with rocket launchers — or at least freak out a little less. The rocket launchers showing up at gun buyback shows are basically just giant fiberglass tubes. Anybody who wanted to weaponize one of them would have just as much luck going to Home Depot, buying a length of PVC pipe and stuffing a projectile inside what amounts to a really dangerous potato gun.

Come to think of it, a used rocket launcher would make an excellent potato gun. And whenever you're not using it to scare your neighbors, it could be that very violent-looking mantle piece you've always wanted.

Image via Flickr

Finland is officially home to the freest press in all the land, according to Reporters Without Borders. The group's Press Freedom Index 2013 states, “For the third year running, Finland has distinguished itself as the country that most respects media freedom.”

The Scandinavian nation is some 30 spots higher up the list than the United States, which currently sits smack dab between Suriname and Lithuania. At least the U.S. climbed fifteen slots, recovering a tad after the press abuses during Occupy Wall Street protests kicked some dirt on the First Amendment.

But, Finland. How did it do it? How did a small nation mashed up between Russia and the Baltic Sea earn the distinction of harboring the planet’s freest press?

Well, for starters, Finns are major journalism consumers—according to the European Center for Journalism, 483 out of 1,000 regularly buy newspapers. And 76% of the population over 10 years old reads the paper. So there’s a big market for journalism, which incentivizes a better product. An interested, engaged audience begets better investigative reporting.

There's also a strong journalist's union that protects reporter’s rights—the Union of Journalists has 14,000 individual members, as well as 355 companies and six media associations. (Remember, there are only five and half million people in all of Finland.)

But the real reason that Finland scores big is that its government has made transparency and information availability—essentially, good journalism—an institutional prerogative. The Finnish government has actually adopted the explicit goal of making sure its citizenry are well informed. According to the EPC, "basic guidelines" were established in 2007, wherein the “special focus is to promote the information society in everyday life, aiming towards a ubiquitous information society.”

The government is, in other words, both taking care to safeguard the role of journalism and to expand it with new technologies. Finland was the first nation to make broadband access a legal right, and now it’s experimenting with crowd-sourced legislation—both in the interest of allowing citizens access to more and better information. No suprise, then, that the Ministry of Transport and Communications has adopted an explicit focus on promoting new information tech.

This is quite a different approach from the U.S., where our hallowed Fourth Estate prides itself on its separation from the government, and where subsidies to public journalism outlets like NPR are hotly contested.

You’d never see anything like this in the United States—an extensive, incredibly useful website designed by Finland’s Ministry for Foreign Affairs to help traveling journalists get their bearings. It contains of host of information: maps, history, a list of free internet hotspots, etc, and it directs you to useful contacts in parliament, important government bureaus, and unions. This isn’t puff stuff, either—the third link down delivers you a straight line to the President of Finland. Yep, here’s his email address. No, not for the Office of the President—that’s a separate addy—but the actual President of the Republic of Finland.

The respective U.S. State Department website, meanwhile, gives you a list of visa requirements.

Above all, Finland’s government itself is clean and transparent in all manners of its operations. It took top honors, along with Denmark and New Zealand, in Transparency International’s 2012 Corruption Index, which came out last month. In other words, it’s just about the least corrupt nation in the world. No wonder the nation’s politicians and bureaucrats go to such lengths to promote free press—when you’re running such a tidy shop, you want the people to know about it. They do: an impressive 90% of Finns believe their public sector is free of corruption.

And a government with nothing to hide has little reason to fear the press.

A scanning electron micrograph of MRSA, via Public Health Image Library

Over the past 60 years, human beings haven’t been good stewards of their own environment and technological innovations. The proliferation of automobiles and other oil-dependent technologies has  changed our weather patterns and, if we don’t alter our behaviors soon, the future of our planet. In the same way that we’ve augmented our climate through human interference and irresponsibility, we’ve also irrevocably changed the landscape of both beneficial and harmful bacteria through the use and overuse of antibiotics.

Now the same doom-and-gloom rhetoric used so frequently by environmentalists regarding climate change is being applied to our antibiotics future. If there’s a coming, man-made apocalypse, it might be the little stuff, rather than the big, that gets us in the end.

Last week, Britain’s senior medical advisor, Dame Sally Davies, warned MPs that the combination of rapid bacterial resistance paired with the lack of next generation antibiotics coming down the line would result in severe global repercussions unless something is done about it. In fact, she recommended the threat of a coming antibiotic-resistant bacterial Armageddon be added to the register of civil emergencies.

Penicillin saved untold lives

Antibiotic resistance isn’t a new phenomenon, exactly. Natural selection obviously plays a role in the development of antibiotic resistance; if a gene that confers antibiotic resistance occurs in 0.01 percent of the population of an infectious bacteria, and you treat for the illness, then those bacteria will survive and go on to infect others. Bacteria are also capable of transferring genes through their plasma, thus the resistant bacteria may pass their genetic good fortune on to others.

Some types of bacteria are more adaptable and respond more quickly to the evolutionary pressure of antibiotic use. Famously, multiple resistant strains of Staphyloccocus have evolved in the antibiotic age. In fact, Staph was the first bacteria to develop resistance. In 1947, only four years after penicillin began to be mass-produced, penicillin-resistant Staph had already made an appearance. Methicillin, a second-line antibiotic, was then used to treat Staph infections, but MRSA (methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus) is now the most common drug-resistance bacterial infection in the United States, and acquiring MRSA is a real threat is many hospitals, especially for patients with compromised immune systems. New research suggests how Staph superstrains create their resistance, but there's still a long way to go to develop a cure.

In addition, our creation of super bugs, or bacteria resistant to most or all drugs. In many cases, the last line of defense are broad spectrum antibiotics, which also indiscriminately kill many of the beneficial bacteria living in our bodies. This includes those that help us do things like fend off infection and digest foods properly. Disrupting our internal bacterial biome can have serious consequences, including a wide array of diseases and gastrointestinal dysfunction. Restoring that balance requires measures as drastic as fecal transplants.

Reestablishment of the proper balance of gut bacteria is proving such an effective treatment that scientists have developed a delivery system that no longer involves transplanting someone else's poop into your body, an idea that no doubt some find bothersome. RePOOPulate, a laboratory-created substance that stands in for the poop of fecal transplants had recently been developed to help move bacterial transplant treatments into the future.  

Clostridium difficile, a common bacteria responsible for diarrhea, can be treated using rePOOPulate

Healthy gut biota are crucial to our health. In an article forthcoming in the February 1 issue of Science, researchers discovered a frightening impact of unhealthy gut biomes in a study on African children in Malawi. Malnutrition is the leading cause of death for children worldwide, and a specific form of malnutrition known as "kwashiorkor" is prevalent in Malawi. In a study on twins between ages three and five years old in which one twin had kwashiorkor and one was healthy, researchers found that gut microbiota of acutely malnourished children differed significantly from those who were healthy.

The bacterial makeup of their guts was effectively changing their ability to absorb nutrients, and though the bacterial makeup changed when they children were fed therapeutic food, becoming more normal, they reverted when the children were taken off of it. Scientists transplanted the fecal matter of the twins into healthy mice and, sure enough, the mice transplanted with the kwashiorkor poop developed malnutrition. 

But even broad-spectrum drugs don't always work. Gonorrhea has also been in the news due to emergent strains resistant to Ceftriaxone, an antibiotic medication of the most recent generation and the last known defense against the steadily mutating disease. That is effectively a dead end; right now, there's no way antibiotic to treat resistant strains of gonorrhea. There’s also no effective pipeline of antibiotic innovation to deliver to us new medications to use up with abandon and then cast aside once they become ineffective.

This is due, in large part, to the evolving landscape of the pharmaceutical industry and the ways in which we are sick today. Because of the way the patent system functions in the United States, and because of the way that human beings need and purchase prescription medications, pharma R&D isn’t now chiefly concerned with developing a fourth generation of antibiotics, which are only used in short bursts.

The new pharma sweethearts are the so-called “blockbuster drugs,” drugs that create billions of dollars in profits each year, drugs that must be taken everyday for things like arthritis, cholesterol modification, and mental illness. Sure, we may feel snug in our current position as lords over the microbial world, but we can't forget that only 100 short years ago people died of common bacterial infections all the time. If Dame Davies’ apocalyptic warning is as urgent as she claims, those times might be returning sooner than we think.    

Image via CDC

The impact of bacteria on our lives -- both good and bad -- is becoming more evident. It seems the responsibility of doctors and patients to reduce their antibiotic usage; this can decrease evolving resistance and protects the delicate balance of individual gut microbiomes. Unless there is swift change in the drug development for antibiotics, there likely won't be another line of defense when more bacteria begin to overpower our most advanced drug treatments. If the apocalypse is coming, perhaps it's not in the form of an asteroid or storm or huge, spectacular event, but instead will result from the invisible action of these tiny, powerful creatures. 

If water is the key to life on Earth, it's doubly so if we want to survive in space. Water's crucial for our own human needs, and is also an excellent starting point for rocket fuel, but it's also prohibitively heavy to lift up from Earth in large quantities. Until now, NASA has mostly been concerned with just finding the stuff. That's changed: In a signal that the agency is confident it will be extracting water in the relatively near future, it's unveiled a prototype mining robot that help scrape the good liquid out of the Moon.

The Regolith Advanced Surface Systems Operations Robot (RASSOR, pronounced "razor") isn't a final design just yet. For starters, as you might have guessed by looking at the pictures, it's a prototype that's too small to do any serious mining. (In the configuration above, it's about two-and-a-half feet tall.) But its design highlights the inherent challenge of mining the Moon: Rovers need to be fairly light to lift into space, but on the Moon's 1/6 gravity, a light bot won't be able to dig effectively. To counteract that, the two bucket wheels on RASSOR rotate in opposite directions, which effectively locks the bot in place.

"We proved that if you engage one bucket, it pulls itself but when you lower the other bucket and rotate it, once they both catch in, it starts digging," RASSOR engineer A.J. Nick said in a release.

RASSOR is designed to be flexible enough to scale obstacles.

RASSOR also has relatively shallow buckets, which would essentially grind away at the soil, rather than scooping it up in big loads like a backhoe here on Earth. According to NASA, the idea is that RASSOR will be able to scoop up ice- and water-laden soil from the Moon, and transfer that soil to a device that can suck the water out of it. That device has yet to be developed, but hey, the mining bit is a start. NASA said it's hoping to develop the whole package to be around 2000 pounds, 100 for a full-size RASSOR design and the rest for processing and landing equipment.

The big goal for such a resource-processing mission is sending it to Mars, as processing water and fuel on site is currently the only way a round trip to the red planet could be possible. And with water increasingly probable on Mars, it's mostly a matter of figuring out where to dig.

"There are some areas at the poles where they think there's a lot of ice, so you'd be digging in ice," Nick said. "There's other areas where the water is actually 30 centimeters down so you actually have to dig down 30 centimeters and take off the top and that depth is really where you want to start collecting water ice."

That's not to say that it's an easy task. Even with a fully working processing plant, RASSOR is only expected to carry 40 pounds of raw material at a time, and NASA estimates it would have to dig 16 hours a day for five years to build up an appreciable stockpile of water. That's a long time indeed, but when the alternative is hoping the urine recyclers don't fizzle out, perhaps it's okay to wait.

@derektmead

At first sight, Grizzly Bear's latest video, "Gun-Shy," directed by Kris Moyes as a kind of science-y meditation where the band's creativity comes from, had that crisp color corrected HD feel that every new music video has. A little extra saturation, some grass that's more Key Lime than Kentucky Blue. Sometimes it feels like video directors are hanging at the mercy of the +CONTRAST button in the Instagram app. When will there ever be enough grit, enough contrast, enough of enough going on in a little square cellphone pic?

Of course, channeling the hell out of Instagram is, more or less, right about now, par for the course. But about a few seconds into it, I saw something a little more close to home for me. A jitter, a movement, a cycle, a little flexing. A repetition. Wait a sec, is that–but it's too HD to be a–Jesus, it happened again, and again, and again. A succession of jerky GIF-like movements and scientific processes, as told through point-blank HD lenses. The pop art questions popped up: Was Moyes mocking cinemagraphs, the latest in a series of unlikely appropriations of our ironically-loved internet style, or simply mimicking them? (Cinemagraphs are those movie-like "animated GIFs for adults"; Grizzly Bear is that indie band for adults.) Then again, to ride the irony all the way down, what is a GIF itself–a comically brief moving still life–if not a mimicry and a mockery of the world? The only correct, instinctual, ironic response was to open up Photoshop and start GIFfing.

You are welcome, guys. (Despite being a great and popular band, the Grizzly Bears are not rich, remember; they may have a music video director but they probably don't have a professional GIF maker). But I didn't do this for you. I immediately shared the results on the image chat site dump.fm. The reaction was tepid, but it was three in the morning. "that grizzly bear video," dates, one user wrote, "is really confusing to watch at first. its like ... ken burns effect on gifs..." It's like Terrence Malick, it's like Tumblr. It's loops repeating. It's possibly, exactly where creativity comes from.

Image: Hugo Jaeger/LIFE

Hitler's Nazi party is well known for its heavy use of symbolism in campaigns. Today, that use of massive banners and massive eagles and massive crowds all lined up at attention has left a deservedly sinister impression, and has been effectively copied in just about every brutal totalitarian state in fiction. Yet while many of us know how powerful Hitler's propaganda and imagery machine was, seeing it in on the ground in full color in this stunning Life photo series is like a punch in the gut.

Image: Hugo Jaeger/LIFE

Life has been digging through its archives lately for great retrospectives of old, and sometimes unseen, photos. (The tribute to war photographer Larry Burrows is particularly powerful.) But Life has outdone itself with this series from Hugo Jaeger, who was one of Hitler's personal photographers.

Image: Hugo Jaeger/LIFE

To see entire towns swathed in swastika banners is haunting. But to see it in color is to see how jarring those red banners are in the landscape. It's like a red tide flooding every nook and cranny of a town.

That's obviously the impression that Hitler and his propaganda machine wanted; that the Nazi party was an unstoppable force washing through the land, and the only option was to join in. 

Image: Hugo Jaeger/LIFE

Hitler's power was partly born of the sheer cultish aesthetics he espoused. When faced with such an incredibly efficient machine that seemingly paints everything red wherever it goes, it's difficult for the individual to dissent, and as Hitler gained power, that only became harder.

Image: Hugo Jaeger/LIFE

But imagery alone, however powerful, can't sustain a political movement forever. While the Nazi party was successful at gaining ranks by essentially saying "Look, everyone is with us, join or be left behind (or murdered)," it wasn't 100 percent successful. Dissent, both at home and abroad, persisted. Hitler portrayed his "Thousand Year Reich" as invincible and all-encompassing, and while he committed unspeakable atrocities during his reign, the Allieds kept that reign to just ten years.

Image: Hugo Jaeger/LIFE

That gross simplification is a basic part of any 20th century history book, but the black-and-white photos we're used to accompanying that simple don't portray the scene nearly as well as color. Subject matter aside, Jaeger's photos are technically impressive. 35mm Kodachrome was first released in 1936, and it was only after that that color photography made its slow spread into the hands of professionals. 

It's a rather incredible example of how powerful technical development can be, even in the arts; just a few short years after the commercial advent of color film technology, it was being put to use to create images that evoke even more emotion than their black-and-white counterparts, even today. In that light, Jaeger's skill with the new medium is notable based on this portfolio, although it's highly unfortunate that it was used to document the life of history's most notorious villain. But that's what's fascinating about these photos, especially from the standpoint of innovation. I doubt the film chemists who'd figured out how to replicate color expected it'd be used for propaganda so quickly.

Image: Hugo Jaeger/LIFE

But as utterly shocking as the imagery is in color, it's important to remember that while Hitler's propaganda machine was powerful, it wasn't enough. As Life.com editor Ben Cosgrove writes in his essay accompany the photo set, which you ought to read, "it never hurts to remind ourselves that it takes far more than emblems — no matter how commanding they might be, or how transcendent they might seem — to transform a movement into an enduring political, social or military force."

Image: Hugo Jaeger/LIFE

And that's the truth. There's a reason the Nazi party's heavy-handed symbolism has been caricatured in films like 1984 and Death Race 2000: It's not only one-dimensional politically, but also historically. The concept of covering every square inch of public space with banners representing the Party, whichever it may be, is an old trope, and one that we almost automatically associate with totalitarian governments.

It's because free thought requires free aesthetics, and a despot shoving his imagery in your face at every turn traps the mind, and some will always dissent. . If looking at 80 year old scans of photos of long-dead evil on your screen has got your heart rate up, then you totally understand.

@derektmead

L to R: Khan's son, Noor, holds a photo of his father, who was killed by a US drone in 2011. A relative, Kareem Khan, holds a photo of his son and brother, both killed in American drone strikes (via)

If England hadn't whispered to its ally, it's likely the US wouldn't have ever pulled the trigger on the drone strike that killed Malik Daud Khan. That's presuming the intelligence handoff actually happened--Noor Khan, Malik's son, insists that it did, and is behind a lawsuit that accuses British officials of being "secondary parties to murder" in the hit that took out the elder Khan and dozens of others in Pakistan in March of 2011.

The incident has drawn the ire of critics of both country's weaponized drone programs. They believe the 40-some odd victims, who were attending a tribal meeting in North Waziristan, were innocent civilians mistaken for a gaggle of militants. But setting aside whether this all played out on questionable intelligence or not, the case foregrounds not just the nature of some of the longer-standing Western intelligence-sharing pacts, but how those pacts may shape the technological and ethical contours of future conflicts. 

Of course, British-American intelligence sharing traces back to at least World War II. And if anything, recon swaps between the two powers have only increased. According to Richard Aldrich, an international security professor at the University of Warwick, it's this relatively free flow of a lot of sensitive information that makes it difficult to say how, precisely, every single strand of intelligence could eventually be woven into cases that either country feels compelling enough to warrant death from above. 

“There’s a very high volume of intelligence shared, some of which is collected automatically," Aldrich, who's also a historian of the British signal-intelligence agency otherwise known as the Government Communications Headquarters, tells The New York Times. "So it’s impossible to track what every piece is potentially used for." 

What's clear, though, is that the US is using what Britain knows to compound its own intelligence, the sort of stuff that goes into the decision process governing where and when drones should strike. Current and former British government and intelligence officials, some of whom claimed to have worked intimately with the US after its drone program begain in earnest in 2004, tell the Times that Britain does indeed pass along intelligence to the US, who then "almost certainly" use the information "to target strikes." 

Making England's intelligence in Af-Pak and surrounding tribal regions all the more in demand, Aldrich adds, is its "history and expertise" in South Asia.

Recently, the British-US arrangement seems to have sharpened in light of increasing friction between the US and Pakistan. Britain, in response to Khan's case, is now following the American rulebook in neither confirming nor denying the existence of what it adroitly calls "any such allged activities." So nevermind that Britain, along with the US and Israel, is the focus of a new UN inquiry into the legality and rationale of its droning on across the the Middle East and Horn of Africa. Intelligence relations laid bare by the Khan case could suggest that Britain is making some sort of effort to distance itself from the American drone program, which is widely rebuked on the international stage as run amok and having already established troubling precendents in terms of extrajudicial killings.

But it could be too little, too late. One official, who spoke to the Times on condition of anonymity due to his "detailed knowledge of internal discussion," claims that many in Britain’s intelligence community are losing sleep over the thought of being prosecuted for involvment in lethal dromne strikes. 

“The policy on drones and torture is clear: We don’t do any of it,” the unnamed former British counterterrorism official tells Times. Yet the line is murky. And until more comes of both Khan's case and the UN special inquiry, that line may well remain murky. "[If] we pick up on some hostile phone chatter," the official continues, "and we pass the number on to the Americans, who then pinpoint the phone and target the person, did we provide intelligence for the killing?”

Reach Brian at brian@motherboard.tv. @thebanderson

Think of your time on YouTube: Most of it is spent watching a two-minute cell phone clip waiting for five seconds of action. Now that Vine has that segment covered, would you pay for something that's, well, better? YouTube thinks you will.

According to Ad Age, YouTube is talking to content partners about producing premium channels, which may roll out this spring for somewhere between $1 and $5 a month. That model could expand to pay-per-view style events, as well as potentially licensing content libraries or something to that effect. 

YouTube has been working with content partners for awhile now on producing premium content, which is partially or wholly funded by YouTube. It's an effort by the site to push viewership beyond viral hits and music videos into become a complete content platform. That move mirrors Netflix, which says it wants to produce five original content series a year to take on HBO. But we're talking about YouTube here. Would you honestly pay for it?

My guess is that people will, and in droves. It's for two reasons: a la carte cable services have been bandied about forever, but breaking the cable cartel remains nearly impossible. Furthermore, the future of gadgets aren't the gadgets themselves, but how well they connect with content. Netflix and YouTube are already entrenched in internet-enabled TVs and Blu-Ray players, which puts them at a huge advantage in the post-cable age.

The simple fact is that cable programming is absurdly expensive, and getting exactly what you want is impossible. Sure, ESPN is great, but even as a sports fan I might forgo spending $5 a month for just that channel if I could. But paying per channel still hasn't happened.

But YouTube might just go for it. I would absolutely pay $5 a month for YouTube sports, especially if it had more diverse coverage (and actually played games) than ESPN. The same goes for all kinds of original content. It's really hard to take the plunge for a $80 a month cable bill when one's constantly pinching pennies, but a la carte services are much more palatable.

Just look at Netflix. At $7 a month, it's still a screaming deal, even if it doesn't have as much content as I could ask for. But there's one fatal flaw: Netflix only does reruns, which is great for binge watching, but isn't going to totally supplant the newness and relevancy around the water cooler as original programming.

Still, cable continues to lose subscribers, and more flexible content packages are simply the way of the future. Netflix and YouTube, being behemoths across numerous platforms, are extremely well positioned to take advantage of that. So, yes, paying for a squirrel water skiing video sounds totally absurd. But paying a few bucks a month for the exact shows you want to watch, rather than a bloating package of pawn shoes and other iterative bullshit that never changes because there's no real competition? Yeah, you'll pay for that.

@derektmead

This month, the RYNO, a one-wheeled electric motorcycle, is slated to start rolling off the assembly line. Why, one might ask, might human society need a one-wheeled electric motorcycle? Well, we don’t, but that hasn’t stopped us from churning out all kinds of vehicular experiments with dubious utility—today’s prime example being the Segway. But the all-time poster child for claptrap transportation might well be the monocycle, or the monowheel, in all of its myriad forms over the last century.

Humankind has, for some reason, been intent on perfecting a one-wheeled form of transportation since the 1800s. Below is the Rousseau Monowheel, invented by Rousseau of Marseilles in 1869.

Douglas Self, who curates an online museum of retro technology, notes that:

This elegant monowheel cycle- the word "bicycle" seems somehow inappropriate, though there are certainly two wheels involved- dates back to 1869. It was built by Rousseau of Marseilles.

"In 1869 the craftsman Rousseau of Marseilles built this monocycle, which perches the cyclist on the inside of a 2 1/2 yards-high wheel. As there is no steering mechanism, it makes uncommon demands on the rider's sense of balance." (from Galbiati & Ciravegna)

Note that bicycles had been invented a whole half-century earlier, and that there probably was never any feasible possibility that a one-wheeled vehicle would ever, for any reason, be more effective, efficient, or an improvement of any kind over its duel-wheeled predecessor. And yet inventors around the world continued to experiment with the monowheel—there were dozens of designs, some better than others, and multiple patents filed.

This, for example, is the only known design for a ludicrously inefficient hand-powered monowheel. It was invented by Richard Hemmings of Connecticut at around the same time as Rousseau's.

But it wasn’t until we started outfitting the monowheels with internal combustion engines that things became truly absurd. Here, according to Self, is the first motor-powered monowheel.

It was displayed in an exhibition in Milan in 1904, and is known as the Garavaglia Monowheel.

“The picturesque machine shown below was shown at the Milan Exposition by the House of Garavaglia. It was, it appears, a genuine success ... The big tyre with its rim fitted internally with ball-bearings, upon which the fixed frame sits, which supports both the driver of this strange vehicle, and the petrol engine; the rim of the tyre is moreover toothed on the side, and engages with the pinion of the engine; this can be seen at the bottom right of the picture. In sum, the mobile tyre rolls around the built fixed engine.

In following decades, the monocycle would become a popular technical curiosity, appearing on magazine covers and at exhibitions around the world.

They were something of a phenomenon well through the 1930s, though again, motorcycles had risen to prominence decades prior, and were clearly the more practical vehicle.

M. Goventosa , an Italian from Udine, built this, the culmination of an era of motorized monowheeling, in 1931. It was allegedly capable of reaching speeds of 150 km, or 93 miles mph. Someone dug up some archival footage of the bizarre monocycle being ridden in France:

And so the strange dream of the monowheel had reached its apex; magazine readers were tired of hearing about weird unicycles with motors, and inventors were tapped out—there were only so many ways you could sit a man inside of a wheel, obviously.

Until the end of the century, that is, when hobbyist motorists started tinkering with monowheels again for sport. Search YouTube for monocycle, and you’ll be treated to a surprisingly large selection of dudes in their one-wheel contraptions, running with Goventosa and Rousseau’s torch.

One of which reveals the dangers inherent in monocycles:

Finally, in the 2000s, companies started to look at the potential of actually marketing a monocycle—the popularity of the Segway revealed that there was an interest and a market for off-kilter electric personal transit vehicles, and the pursuit of a feasible one-wheeled variant was on.

A company in the Netherlands, for instance, is now marketing the monocycle as a vehicle for kids:

Elsewhere, sustainability factors play a key part of the pitch. Which brings us back to RYNO, which is on the verge of offering the most widely-produced monocycle yet:

RYNO is poised to create real fundamental change. Since you can take it on the train in the suburbs, get off downtown and quietly ride it all around, city planners will finally have a product that will allow urban centers to clear out automobile free zones and get people out of their cars and back to meeting face to face.

Slide the battery out and take it upstairs to charge or simply ride the RYNO through a lobby and up the elevator to your own apartment.

Once again, it’s a little difficult to see how the RYNO is more practical or energy efficient than a bicycle, or a Segway for that matter. It's clearly worlds better than the monowheels that lodge their drivers inside the frame of the wheel. And, as the history of our odd fascination with the monowheel reminds us, the pursuit of practicality has rarely governed our technological tinkering—when we seek to innovate, it seems we’re drawn to bushing the boundaries of the novel and the bizarre as much we are to overcoming concrete problems. If we weren’t, the monowheel would never have been built in the first place.

Under any other circumstances, passing tumbleweed conjures up all the rough-n-tumbled grit of a disappearing American West. But then you have something like this, which if it isn't something straight out of some forgotten Southern Gothic novella, well, then I just give up.

This footage was shot somewhere in Midland, Texas, one-time Bush stomping ground. I can't stop watching. I am mezmerized, even though it reminds me of that one time I fell into a clump of staghorn cholla in far West Texas and was caught pulling barbs out of my hands, arms, and side for a few days afterward. I still have phantom pains. 

So, pro tip: Do not ever fall into staghorn cholla. Pro-er tip: If you're going to get caught in a freak tumbleweed stampede, just pretend Set, great god of storm, desert and chaos, is pelting you with Cocoa Puffs. 

Front image via

Reach Brian at brian@motherboard.tv. @thebanderson

Twitter's new Vine service is rad, but it hadn't fully arrived until now. Yes, Vinecats.com has arrived, as signals that Vine has been fully accepted by the internet because it can finally trade in pawwdorable clips in the Cat Economy. Absolutely no one is surprised by Vinecats release (it does look nice), and the savvy Internet folks are starting to tire of the Put a cat on it! clickwhoring trope, and yet those same people are LOVING THAT SHIT like it's the second coming of the Dancing Baby.

Look, I'm chill with cats for the most part (Sir Abner is my phone's wallpaper), but it's time we stop pretending that a housecat is some amazingly adorable thing that makes the world better and thus we should fill every corner of the internet with it. Let me be clear: Cats are evil, and here are twelve links explaining why. For those of you who refuse to open your eyes to the real world, enjoy the cat vines instead.

1. Cats harbor parasites that control our brains

#cats vine.co/v/b1ZBrjLZqzx

— Alexander Horré (@alexhorre) January 31, 2013

2. That parasite can kill or blind a baby

Are you going to give me your water or what? #cats #pets vine.co/v/b17l53YdJxp

— Tamre (@tamremullins) January 31, 2013

3. Stray cats in the US will kill billions of wild animals this year

Aww! My #scottishfold #cat with a Pumpkin. #kawaii #baby #pets #cats #cute vine.co/v/b1703amKxOi

— La Carmina (@lacarmina) January 31, 2013

4. The 600 million housecats worldwide are responsible for numerous mammal, reptile, and bird extinctions

Melancholy... And confused #cats vine.co/v/b17pImYgn1M

— Chavez (@SantiagoChavz) January 31, 2013

5. Cats Made Ted Nugent relevant

Catt is a majestically melancholy kitteh. Because #cats vine.co/v/b17dlvBb9w9

— Chavez (@SantiagoChavz) January 31, 2013

6. Cats Are reported rabid more than any other domesticated animal in the US

Marbles gets inspiration from cultural critic Carlos Mandelbaum vine.co/v/bJ0B329AvLV #cats #philosphy #spirituality

— Carlos Mandelbaum (@cmandelbaum) January 31, 2013

7. Cats have turned youtube into shit

Trying out this new video app #vine, add me? #scottishfold #cat #cute #cats #pets #baby vine.co/v/b17gIXbzwYQ

— La Carmina (@lacarmina) January 31, 2013

8. Cats and their brain parasites have convinced us they own the web, when dogs are actually more popular

Marbles The Transgender Cat finds #porn embarrassing vine.co/v/bJ2PitnhmTd #cats#sex #vineapp cats

— Carlos Mandelbaum (@cmandelbaum) January 31, 2013

9. When used as performance art, they distract from the sordid politics of drone use

Soft exterior and interior. This cat is pathetic. #petsofvine #pets #catsofvine #cats #petsinbed vine.co/v/b1aVbzg7TLA

— Kayley Heeringa (@SidewalkReady) January 31, 2013

10. They play with corpses, and like it

Jasmine's first glimpse at Paint for #Cats vine.co/v/b1WOIWFYpH7

— Angela Bowman (@angelabdotme) January 31, 2013

11. Your cat leaves its poop on display just to insult you

Catnip bliss #cats #pets vine.co/v/b1WrKuBu3ue

— mirrorgirl (@fancyghost) January 31, 2013

12. They straight-up don't like how you smell, and think that they own you

Saki doesn't care about the camera. #cats vine.co/v/b1anWVMMD0q

— Austin (@AustinXC04) January 31, 2013

There you have it. Cats are evil as shit. Can we please end the charade? The Internet will thank you.

@derektmead

Amid the commotion over Chuck Hagel's nomination to lead the defense department, Obama's pick for CIA director has received considerably less attention. But if John McCain's stance on torture and his hardball approach to Hagel during his Senate confirmation today are any indication, Obama's old Republican rival could end up being the one that shines a spotlight on Obama's most controversial nomination yet.

The thorny details of foreign policy differences during American presidential campaigns are frequently expunged from the historical record with good reason: they tend to contradict the dominant perception of the given contest. For instance, FDR declared he wouldn’t intervene in European conflicts and Lyndon Johnson positioned himself as the peace candidate to the rancorous specter of an atomic Goldwater presidency.

However, every once in a while, American presidential hopefuls detail exactly what they are going to do, beyond our borders, and then, subsequently, do it. These cases are, also, often purged from the dominant narrative, as they tend to contradict the cultural interpretation of the candidate. For instance, after twelve years of dismal conservative policies, liberals were more than willing to overlook the fact Bill Clinton ran to the right of the elder Bush on two pivotal issues: the crippling embargo against Cuba and the loan guarantees siphoned off for Israel. By the same token, it is often forgotten that that similar strain of cognitive dissonance was applied to John Kerry’s warmongering during the peculiar “Anyone but Bush” days of the 2004 election cycle, with his supporters inventing creative ways to spin his plans to expand the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.

And, so it has gone with President Obama. Despite the millions of words that have been typed on the laptops of vexed liberals since 2008, detailing a shocked sense of disappointment with the President, he has, largely, lived up to his foreign policy promises. He said he wanted to put more troops in Afghanistan and he did. He said he wanted to bring the fight against terrorism into Pakistan, whether our ally agreed with our vision or not. He did that too.

Since 9/11, the US media has made a sizable fuss on the question of whose side Pakistan is truly on in America’s “War on Terror,” but the question is hardly ever reversed: is the United States truly on Pakistan’s side? Just imagine, for a moment, the congressional calls for blood that would ring out if Pakistan, somehow, accidentally killed 24 members of the US military or patrolled our skies with drones, killing hundreds of our civilians. The McCain ticket harbored a wacky interpretation of the Iraq War completely removed from reality, but it, certainly, didn’t promise the same kind of military expansion in Pakistan. Nonetheless, the roles were assigned by the media and the bases of the two parties: McCain was the elderly man who wanted to blow up the world and Obama was the candidate whose name could be written with a peace sign and emblazoned on a Volvo bumper sticker.

John Brennan, current White House counter-terrorism advisor and architect of the CIA's controversial new drone "playbook," was Obama’s pick to head the CIA in 2008, while the President was following through on these campaign promises. But the man’s connection to the Bush-era’s torture programs seemed to invalidate him from the position. While the psychological reasons behind trust in Obama probably require rigorous examination, one thing is clear: there was a lot more hope for “Hope” in 2008. Obama had recently condemned the practice of torture and spoke eloquently of one admirable promise: closing down Guantanamo Bay detention camp.

It isn’t talk of closing Gitmo that overshadows a potential Brennan nomination this time, but rather a muffled discussion about closing the office that was trying to close Gitmo. Last week, the State Department reassigned Daniel Fried, the special envoy who had been working on closing the prison, to focus instead on issues related to Syria and Iran. No one replaced him. As the New York Times reported, “The announcement that no senior official in President Obama’s second term will succeed Mr. Fried in working primarily on diplomatic issues pertaining to repatriating or resettling detainees appeared to signal that the administration does not currently see the closing of the prison as a realistic priority, despite repeated statements that it still intends to do so.”

This alteration in collective mood engulfs a recent story that Brennan was well aware of: the enhanced interrogation policies as an agency official under the Bush administration. A new Reuters report cites “multiple sources familiar with official records” who say Brennan “was a regular recipient of CIA message traffic about controversial aspects of the agency's counter-terrorism program after September 2001, including the use of ‘waterboarding.’”

The same report quotes the aforementioned Senator from Arizona, John McCain, who seems to be gearing up for his Brennan questioning during Brennan’s confirmation hearing: “I have many questions and concerns about his nomination to be director of the Central Intelligence Agency, especially what role he played in the so-called enhanced interrogation programs while serving at the CIA during the last administration.”

The fact that McCain is likely to emerge as the most vociferous questioner during the hearing highlights two interesting points. 1.) Since Obama's first election victory, the standards and expectations regarding a shift from Bush’s foreign policy are now, virtually, nonexistent. 2.) One of the only prominent politicians who seems exceptionally concerned with Brennan running the CIA is the only Senator who has been tortured.

Despite McCain’s imperial outlook, history of deplorable war votes, and inability to select a vice-presidential candidate who possessed rudimentary skills in the field of geography, McCain has never faltered in his principled stance against torture. "This is what America is all about," he said in a 2007 presidential debate with Mitt Romney. "This is a defning issue. We weill never allow torture to take place in the United States of America." There was rousing applause.

During Brennan’s confirmation hearing on February 7th, will McCain be the only one who even raises the torture question? If he is, and he grills Brennan with the necessary zeal, the War Candidate may not derail Obama's CIA pick. But he will be raising other important questions--about secrecy, drones, and certainly about an issue that may spark debates about movies but that no one really likes to know or think about, the details of which are still buried inside a classified 6,000-page Senate report. He'll also further position himself to the left of the Peace Candidate he ran against not so long ago, on one of the most important moral issues of our time.

@michaelarria

Connections:

CIA Drones Have Free Rein in Pakistan for the Next Year

John Kiriakou Will Tell You Everything You Need to Know About Transparency Under Obama

Top image: Reuters/Kevin Lamarque

It always sounded like a hoax, didn't it? Silk Road: an Internet website where you can buy any drug in the world? Yeah, right. But it's real. It was almost two years ago that we first heard about the site, which hosts everything from Adderall to Ketamine, LSD to MDMA and tons and tons of weed. After it started to pick up a ton of press and exposure, we all thought that certainly the Silk Road would get shut down. It's super illegal to sell drugs or even to help people sell drugs. But it didn't. Silk Road survives to this day. However, with the arrival this week of the first conviction of a Silk Road-related crime, you have to wonder if Silk Road's days might be numbered after all.

The trouble is brewing in Australia, where a guy named Paul Leslie Howard is facing as many as five years in prison for selling drugs on Silk Road. We're not talking millions of dollars worth of drugs, but we are talking about thousands of dollars worth. And just as Silk Road natives had feared, Howard was one of those Silk Road n00bs who read a newspaper article about the site and decided to try it out for himself.

Despite the many layers of anonymity and firewalls involved in the Silk Road experience — encrypted transfers of the anonymous currency Bitcoin, for instance — Howard got caught last summer from the simplest mistake. He had a shitload of drugs sent to his house. Though it's unclear what tipped them off — drug dogs? snitches? some sophisticated cyber crime task force? — police intercepted a number of packages bound for Howard's home, opened them up, and ended up finding a total of 46.9 grams of pure MDMA and 14.5 grams of cocaine. 

This is when Howard's burgeoning stimulant business took a turn for the worse. Australian federal police stormed Howard's house on July 12 of last year and found a bunch of the stuff one finds in the home of a drug dealer: scales, baggies, a money counter, $2,300 in cash, and 35 stun guns disguised as mobile phones. (By the way, you've gotta be a pretty paranoid drug dealer if you keep 35 stun guns at your side.) They also found real mobile phones with thousands of incriminating text messages like "I got 5 grand worth if you want" and " ... promote the LSD I got more in. I sold 200 cubes last week."

So it seems that Howard got a little bit ambitious and started selling drugs outside of Silk Road as well. He was pretty dumb about that, too, since anybody who knows anything about dealing drugs knows that you're not supposed to leave a paper (or pixel) trail. In the end, Howard pleaded guilty to 32 counts of possessing a controlled weapon, importing a marketable quantity of a border-controlled drug and trafficking controlled drugs.

Like I said before, this is the first conviction of a Silk Road-related crime — or in Howard's case, 35 Silk Road-related crimes. You can't  help but wonder if this is the beginning of the end. The investigation that brought down Howard is not, after all, an isolated incident. Australian police officials pounded their chests after Howard's arrest last year, promising Silk Road users that they "will not always remain anonymous and when caught, they will be prosecuted."

Meanwhile, in the United States, the government's been going after Silk Road at least since that Gawker story came out and Sen. Chuck Schumer asked the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) to investigate. It was revealed around the time that Howard was arrested in Australia that the DEA were indeed pursuing Silk Road users. And why wouldn't they when anybody with an Internet connection and pocket of cash can log on to the site and find listings like this:

Whether it was a coincidence or not, the DEA started speaking publicly about their Silk Road investigation only after they'd made a series of arrests related to a similar website called the Farmer's Market. This was a decent-sized bust that led to at least eight suspects being arrested around the world and implicated in the sale of ecstasy, LSD, marijuana, and other drugs to some 3,000 customers in 34 countries. Six of them were in the U.S., and they were all charged with drug trafficking and money laundering, presumably due to the layers of online payments.

In addition to process orders through HushMail, a secure but not completely secure email service, the Farmer's Market dealers accepted payments via Western Union, PayPal, iGolder, Pecunix, and cash. Like Howard, one small misstep exposed the dealers' identities and gave police enough evidence to arrest them.

I'm going to go out on a limb here and say that dealing drugs anonymously over the Internet is not idiot-proof. (Buying drugs from a site like Silk Road, however, might be — more on that in a sec.) In the Farmer's Market and Howard's cases, veering off the path paved by Silk Road mastermind Dread Pirate Roberts spelled doom for the drug dealers. Howard got a little greedy and let his anonymous virtual transactions spill over into the very non-anonymous real world. Shipping the drugs from his suppliers to his home full of dealer paraphernalia also wasn't the smartest idea.

The Farmer's Market kids did a little better. They kept their little business running for about three years, netting an estimated $1 million in revenue and it might've earned more if the owners were running the business over email. At some point in time, the cops must've gotten a tip, and based on the evidence in the indictment, they got Hushmail to handover a bunch of messages.

There have been other arrests, and those culprits' mistakes are similar. So now we know that the police are listening to the correspondence between dealers and  watching the money, just like they do in the mobster movies. We also know that, just like in real life, they're less concerned with the average Joe Schmo drug buyer than they are with the major dealers. In the time that people were starting to get arrested, a number of people in the Silk Road forums have pointed out that some of the top sellers were disappearing at an alarming rate, prompting threads of conspiracy theories and a fair share of paranoia. Was this the beginning of the end, the dawn of apocalypse?

But Silk Road is alive and well. I logged on today to check and found, to borrow the words of the Australian judge who convicted Howard, a smorgasbord of drugs — over 7,000 separate items to be specific. The regular roster of street drugs was all there: cocaine, ecstasy, heroin, ketamine, LSD, MDA, marijuana, meth, psychedelic mushrooms, and something called moonrock, to name a few. If you're more into the prescription variety, you can find everything from Atavan to Viagra on the site.

Don't like drugs? How about a forged passport, or some hardcore porn, or some home and garden equipment? You see, Silk Road was not designed to be an illicit drug market. The site's anonymous nature, however, makes it a perfect candidate. And as long as you follow the standard protocol, you should be okay. You can even add in a couple extra layers of encryption if you're really paranoid.

From here on out, though, we enter a new stretch of ground for Silk Road, and it's a rocky one. Part of the reason the site has been able to survive and keep its security features up to date is that it's making money–a lot of money. Much like eBay, Silk Road takes a commission on each transaction, in this case 6.23 percent. Last August, Carnegie Mellon computer security professor Nicolas Christin published an academic analysis of Silk Road's business and found that the site's owners were bringing in $6,000 in commission every day. That's on an estimated $22 million in annual sales. It's no eBay, but that's a lot of cheese.

The site just keeps growing, too. Christin explains that the vast majority of transactions result in positive feedback for sellers, boosting confidence in the system over all. "If you imagine them selling paperclips and buttons, they’re a stable business that’s growing without advertising or being in the news, just by word of mouth," wrote Christin in his paper. "That was the surprising thing: How normal the whole thing seems."

Well, this is a great time for things to come tumbling down. More people using the site means more people potentially making mistakes along the way and tipping off the Feds. So enjoy it while you can, folks. And enjoy it wisely.

René Descartes thought human beings were pretty special. And we are. But it also led him to say a lot of things that were wrong. We’re only special to a point.

He said, “I think, therefore I am,” and that was wrong. He also said that animals, as opposed to humans, were automatons—machines without souls that act “mechanically” and are “destitute of reason.” In case there was any lingering doubt, new evidence shows he was wrong about that, too.

The latest nail in Descartes’ coffin is a new study published yesterday in the open access journal, PLoS One, demonstrating that monkeys, like humans, can learn more efficient ways to use a single tool by watching each other. 

Led by Shinya Yamamoto at Kyoto University’s Primate Research Institute, a team of researchers gave drinking straws to a group of chimpanzees and directed them to clear, wall-mounted juice boxes; the chimps, who were tested in isolation from one another, proceeded to spontaneously employ two separate techniques for using them.

Five of the nine chimps in the experiment used what researchers called a “dipping” technique to get the juice, which involved inserting the straw through the small hole in the juice box and sucking the juice out of the straw. Here’s one using the dipping technique. He almost figures out how to use it properly on his own, but not quite:

But researchers found when the “dipping” monkeys were exposed as a group to a fellow chimp or human being who used a straw in the more efficient way—the “sucking” method—all five changed their technique. With the clear juice boxes, they could see the difference in efficiency. Here are few of them figuring it out:

Scientists have known for a while that chimps can learn how to use tools by watching. But what distinguishes the results of this experiment from others is that it exhibits a more complex form of “social learning.” In this case, it wasn’t just a matter of giving a monkey a juice box and a straw and showing the monkey how to use it. That’s just “monkey see, monkey do.”

As the researchers describe the previous findings:

Previous experimental studies have revealed that chimpanzees can socially learn different techniques. However, while most of these studies have focused on the social transmission of behavioral techniques not involving tools, others reported social learning of two optional tool-uses whose performance differed in the target location of the tool-use action. Based upon the strict criteria of same tool, same target, and same location, there is to date little experimental evidence for social transmission of tool-use techniques in non-human animals, even in chimpanzees.

Monkeys in this experiment, rather, made clear inferences by observing demonstrably different ways to use the same tool to achieve a specific task. That’s a complex act of discernment—the kind of reasoning we humans, like Descartes, assumed for a long time fell strictly within our purview.

Data, image and video source: Shinya Yamamoto, Tatyana Humle, Masayuki Tanaka. Basis for Cumulative Cultural Evolution in Chimpanzees: Social Learning of a More Efficient Tool-Use Technique. PLoS ONE, 2013; 8 (1): e55768 DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0055768