A toy for your Bug-Out Bag, the Nuk Alert

NukAlert Key Chain: You never know what you might run into during a collapse, especially if international tensions are involved. A meter which is always running and alerts you when approaching dangerous radioactivity could save your life. Though most highly volatile gamma radiation falls to safe levels after two weeks of initial exposure, you should still be concerned about consumption of affected substances. Irradiated water sources, for instance, are undetectable to the eye, and without a device like the NukAlert, you would never know what you were drinking. The device is very small, and is also designed to be immune against an Electromagnetic Pulse.

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Bug-Out Tools: Here is a broad list of items every bug-out-bag should have, in no particular order…

Lighter
Magnesium Striker
Waterproof Matches
Canteen
Snare Wire
Fishing Kit
2 Compasses
Compact Binoculars
Topographical Map (know the terrain you are heading towards)
Camper Knife/Fork/Spoon Combo
Camp Knife (for work)
Combat Knife (for defense)
Leatherman Multi-tool
Wire Saw (get one with leather straps, not metal rings)
Folding Camper Saw (for bigger jobs)
550 Paracord
Plastic Zip Ties
Carabiners (numerous uses)
Small Sewing Kit (pack extra needles)
Snivel Kit (don’t forget Quick-Clot and poison oak/ivysoap)
Folding Shovel
Small Knife Sharpening Stone
Compact Mess Kit (get steel for durability and stay away from aluminum)
TOILET PAPER!!! (get a thick roll, cut out the cardboard center, and smash it down)
Poncho
2 Thick Emergency Thermal Blankets
Small Camp Stove (I recommend the Bushbuddy Stove)
Water Purification Tablets
Katadyn Water Filter
LED Flashlight (cover light with small piece of clear red plastic to reduce visibility)
Rechargeable Batteries
2 Pairs of Wool Socks (even if you bug-out in the Summer)
Solid Leather Boots (wear these, and make sure they’re worn in before an event occurs)
Small Survival Guide (helps you to remember possible strategies)
Wild E
Pen

This seems like an incredible amount of items to carry around on your back, but all of it should fit quite easily into your BOB if you use the space wisely, and the weight should not be an issue. Pack contents will also vary depending on personal survival strategies, but most of these tools should be present in your bag regardless of conditions. …

via Neithercorp Press» Blog Archive » The Art Of The Bug-Out Bag.

Plan where you will go and how you will get there. Hint: Practice survival for 3 days camping out with only your BOB and you’ll quickly discover what is missing… got food and water?

Record heat is spawning stronger hurricanes

The four major Atlantic hurricanes that spun toward the Caribbean in the past month were fueled by record warm seas and formed in an unprecedented 20 days. With 10 weeks left in the hurricane season, more may be coming.

The storms that were born off west Africa gathered strength by absorbing the ocean’s heat and swelled into Category 4-level hurricanes on the 5-step Saffir-Simpson scale. While none hit land at full speed, each packed winds of at least 131 miles an hour, stronger than Hurricane Katrina’s Category 3 winds when it devastated New Orleans at the end of August in 2005.

After Igor churned past Bermuda on Monday and cut power to two-thirds of the colony’s residents, Tropical Storm Lisa formed Tuesday in the east Atlantic. While the six-month season is past its statistical peak, forecasters and insurers said warmer seas can lengthen the danger period to property, from beach homes in Florida and the Hamptons to rigs and refineries owned by Royal Dutch Shell and ConocoPhillips in the oil-rich Gulf.

“The hotter the water, the higher the octane level, and there is going to be far more Category 4 and 5 hurricanes,” said Jim Rouiller, an Air Force meteorologist for 20 years who works for Planalytics Inc. in Berwyn, Pa.

The season may be busy for another month, said Simon Young, chief executive officer of the insurer Caribbean Risk Managers. “All the ingredients” were in place for major hurricanes to form this year, he said.

“The nightmare scenario for industry losses is a Miami hit, closely followed by a New York hurricane,” Young said. “Gulf oil is a huge issue for the insurance industry. There’s a feeling that if something big happens, there’s going to be some hard times.”The National Hurricane Center predicts 2010 will have as many as 20 storms of at least 39 mile-an-hour winds, meaning they’ll be named, compared with 11 in a typical year. Lisa’s formation Tuesday brought this year’s tally to 12. The Miami center has identified five major hurricanes in 2010 compared with two in an average season when waters are cooler. …

via Record heat is spawning stronger hurricanes | NOLA.com.

World’s first ornithopter takes flight

A Canadian student inspired by Leonardo da Vinci’s sketches says he has made the first sustained flight in a human-powered, wing-flapping aircraft.

Todd Reichert’s ornithopter is an engineless plane that stays aloft by flapping its wings like a bird.

The craft, dubbed “Snowbird”, flew 145m (476 feet) at the Great Lakes Gliding Club in Tottenham, Ontario.

The Federation Aeronautique Internationale is expected to confirm the record at its meeting in October.

Previous attempts

Mr Reichert, a PhD student at the University of Toronto, said the Snowbird “represents the completion of an age-old aeronautical dream”.

“Throughout history, countless men and women have dreamt of flying like a bird under their own power, and hundreds, if not thousands have attempted to achieve it,” he said in a statement.

“This represents one of the last of the aviation firsts.”

Built from carbon fibres and balsa wood, Snowbird has a wing span of 32m (105 feet) – comparable to a Boeing 737.

But the aircraft weighs just 43kg (94 pounds).

To keep it light, lift-off mechanisms were not built in. Instead, a tow car helped lift it clear of the ground. But then Mr Reichert took over, using his feet to pump a bar that flaps the wings.

Snowbird flew for 19.3 seconds on its record-breaking flight, travelling at an average speed of 25.6 km/h (16.5 mph). The feat was accomplished on 2 August.

Others have claimed to have built machines that flew like birds. But those crafts are seen as having just glided after they took off.

The Canadian group says their ornithopter actually powered itself through the air, and that they have the telemetry data to prove it.

“Those past claims were never verified,” said chief structural engineer Cameron Robertson. “We believe we are the first, because we know what it took to do it.”

To achieve their dream, the team had to design a flapping wing with enough lift and thrust to overcome the aircraft’s weight. And Mr Reichert also lost 8kg (18 pounds) of weight over the summer.

He said Snowbird “is not a practical method of transport”. Rather, the aim of the project was to inspire others “to use the strength of their body and the creativity of their mind”.

The Italian painter Leonardo Da Vinci made his famous sketches of the ornithopter around 1485.

But it was not until 1903 that the Wright brothers made the first powered flight, lasting 12 seconds and covering 37m (121 feet).

In 1977, the Gossamer Condor became the first human-powered aircraft capable of controlled and sustained flight after covering a 1.6km (one-mile) figure-of-eight course.

via BBC News – World’s first ornithopter takes flight.

Cyborg professor looks to future of bionic technology

In 1998, Kevin Warwick became what some people call “the world’s first cyborg.” To be exact, Warwick, a professor of cybernetics at Reading University, had a radio frequency ID chip implanted in his arm. Years before RFID chips became common, this small implant allowed him to turn on lights by snapping his fingers, or open doors without touching them.

Once, after connecting his nerves to an array of electrodes in 2002, he let his wife use her brain waves to take control of his body. It was the first time the nervous systems of two humans had communicated electronically. “It was quite an intimate feeling,” he says.

This isn’t just for fun, Warwick tells Motherboard.tv, VBS’ technology channel. He is certain that without upgrading, we humans will someday fall behind the advances of the robots we’re building — or worse. “Someday we’ll switch on that machine, and we won’t be able to switch it off,” he says, sounding a note of alarm that clashes with the cheery visions of futurists like Ray Kurzweil. That might explain why he has very little technology at home, and counts “The Terminator” among his biggest influences.

Warwick doesn’t want to turn into a robot: He wants to be a better human. Augmenting human ability, not turning into an automaton, is, after all, the premise of the “cyborg.” One of the term’s earliest uses, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, was in a 1960 New York Times article: “A cyborg is essentially a man-machine system in which the control mechanisms of the human portion are modified externally by drugs or regulatory devices so that the being can live in an environment different from the normal one.”

Today, the argument for cybernetics may seem more imperative than ever. Already the latest bionic technologies are allowing deaf children to hear and disabled war veterans to run again. Technologists, meanwhile, see “augmented reality” applications for smartphones as doing something similar for our brains, fortifying them for life in a world overflowing with data.

For now, Warwick, who will be awarded the Ellison-Cliffe Medal from the Royal Society of Medicine in 2011, is using his research into brain interfaces and autonomous robots to provide better insight into how memories are formed, and learn how to better treat brain diseases like Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s. “Technology, directly integrated with the brain, can help overcome some problems people have,” says Warwick. Brain implants could keep people fit, making sure, for instance, “you don’t eat that chocolate cake that you want.”

But the possibilities may also be stranger than we have yet imagined. Someday, says Warwick, humans could become “a curiosity for the machines.”

” ‘Look at that — that’s where we were in historical times,’ they will think to each other.”

via Cyborg professor looks to future of bionic technology – CNN.com.

Photos: The freaky maw of Venus

When Pioneer Venus visited our sister planet in 1979, it found an atmospheric feature called a “dipole” near Venus’ north pole — a pair of eddies swirling and rotating around each other as Venus rotated. When ESA’s Venus Express arrived in 2006, it observed the same sort of thing at Venus’ south pole, and scientists wrote a lot about how Venus was symmetric from north to south and how the polar dipoles were atmospheric features that were stable over decades.

…it turns out it’s not stable! Venus Express has been there for more than four years now, and as it’s kept watching Venus’ swirling atmospheric patterns, that “stable” southern dipole turned out not to be stable. At all. In a press release issued today, Venus scientist Giuseppi Piccioni remarks that the original observation of the southern dipole by Venus Express was “just a coincidence…the dipole in reality is not a stable feature on Venus, but just one shape among others.”

via Venus: Not so neat and tidy as we thought – The Planetary Society Blog | The Planetary Society.

Don’t fall in.

International Space Station undocking delayed

Three crew members have returned to the International Space Station after the Russian Soyuz capsule due to take them home failed to undock.

The two Russians and one American had been due to return to Earth when computers signalled a technical problem with the hermetic seals.

Their descent has now been postponed until Saturday.

Russia’s space agency says checks show the station is sealed and it is unclear why a false signal was sent out.

“The preliminary analysis based on technical expertise shows that the on-board computer received a false signal that the hermetic seal was missing, after the door between the capsule and the space station was closed,” Roscosmos chief Anatoly Perminov told reporters at mission control in Korolyov, near Moscow.

“We have carried out all necessary checks today on the hermetic sealing of the station and they show that the station is sealed.

“We need to figure out completely the reason for the false signal and fully guarantee that the moving processes of the operation are safe.”

Nasa said the crew had found a small piece of damaged equipment and experts were trying to work out whether this was causing the problem.

Nasa will be watching developments particularly closely because next year its space shuttle will be taken out of service, the BBC’s Richard Galpin reports from Moscow.

The only way to get Nasa astronauts to the International Space Station and back will be on board Russian Soyuz capsules, our correspondent says.

The new scheduled time for the spacecraft’s descent is about 0520 GMT on Saturday, according to Roscosmos official Alexei Krasnov.

The three crew members due to return are Russia’s Alexander Skvortsov and Mikhail Korniyenko, and Nasa’s Tracy Caldwell Dyson.

All three arrived on the ISS on 4 April, travelling up on the same Soyuz capsule.

Mr Perminov said they were in good health.

“We could have done it [the undocking] today but we need extra time to avoid further risks,” he added.

“There is no reason to rush. The most important thing is to guarantee the safety of the crew.” …

via BBC News – International Space Station undocking delayed.