Gary Connery in world’s first skydive without parachute

A stuntman is thought to have become the first person to jump out of a helicopter and land safely without deploying a parachute.

Gary Connery, 42, used a “wingsuit” to make his descent from 2,400ft (730m) above Oxfordshire.

The 42-year-old said he felt “elated” after landing on a pile of 18,600 cardboard boxes.

He was fitted with a parachute for the jump, which saw him accelerate to 80mph, but it was not deployed.

The entire flight took less than a minute to complete.

During the flight, father-of-two Mr Connery dropped for three seconds before his suit “started to fly”.

‘Plotting challenge’

He used a landing strip of cardboard boxes, known as a box rig, covering about 350ft (100m) by 45ft (15m).

Cameraman Mark Sutton also jumped from the helicopter in a wingsuit but deployed a parachute before landing.

Minutes after landing, Mr Connery said: “I feel incredible, just completely elated. …

Mr Connery, who has worked on films including Die Another Day, Batman Begins and Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, said performing stunts was “his life”.

He has already completed about 880 skydives and 450 base jumps.

Before carrying out the flight in countryside near his home in Henley-on-Thames, Mr Connery, whose wingsuit has the ability to dramatically reduce speed on descent, said he was “100% confident” he would be successful. …

via BBC News – Gary Connery in world’s first skydive without parachute.

Houaka Yang, Suspected Thief, Confessed And Identified Himself On Tape With Stolen Camcorder

Houaka Wang faces a maximum penalty of two years and three months in jail and a $30,000 fine for misdemeanor theft and concealed weapon charges.

A Wisconsin man whose camcorder was briefly stolen has found a way to get back at the suspected thief: He uploaded to YouTube a video that the suspect took with the camera, a clip in which the man reveals his name, shows his face and admits he stole the camera.

Chris Rochester, 25, of La Crosse, said his camera was stolen a few weeks ago from the car of his boss, Republican state Senate candidate Bill Feehan. Police eventually arrested the suspect and returned the camera to Rochester, who set it aside.

Then, when Gov. Scott Walker made a recent visit to La Crosse, Rochester used the camera to film the event. When he went back to retrieve the video, he found 20 other segments the suspect apparently recorded.

Most were uneventful, generally 15- to 20-second clips of television screens. But one video caught Rochester’s eye.

“This is my house, yes, and a stolen camera that I stole. But it’s OK, the cop won’t figure it out,” the suspect says in the 79-second video, as he pans around a home and points out the kitchen and bathroom. Later he adds, “Oh yeah, to introduce you, my name is Houaka Yang. So yeah, how do you do.”

Finally, he turns the camera to reveal his face and says with a smile, “And this is me. Hi.”

via Houaka Yang, Suspected Thief, Confessed And Identified Himself On Tape With Stolen Camcorder.

Researchers from the Physics Department of the UJI are using semi-conductor materials to develop an artificial leaf in order to produce hydrogen in water using only sunlight

Scientists and researchers from the Photovoltaic and Optoelectronic Devices group from the Universitat Jaume I, led by Professor Juan Bisquert, have developed, using nanotechnology, a device with semiconductor materials which generate hydrogen independently in water using only sunlight. This technology, which has been named artificial photosynthesis, was inspired by photosynthesis which occurs naturally (a process in which plants use sunlight to transform organic material into organic compounds, freeing chemical energy stored in the bonds of the molecule adenosine triphosphate-ATP, and obtaining energetic compounds such as sugars or carbohydrates).

The efficient production of hydrogen using semiconductor materials and sunlight constitutes a crucial challenge to make a paradigm shift towards sustainable energy technology, using inexhaustible resources that are environmentally friendly. “Although the energy efficiency of the device is still not sufficient enough for us to consider marketing it, we are exploring various ways to improve its efficiency and to show that this technology represents a real alternative to meet the energy demands of the 21st century”, comments Sixto Giménez, one of the researchers responsible for the investigation.

Hydrogen is an extremely abundant element on the Earth’s surface, but in combination with oxygen: water (H20). The hydrogen molecule (H2) contains a great amount of energy that can be released when burned due to the reaction with atmospheric oxygen, creating water as the result of this combustion process. In order to convert water into fuel (H2), the H2O must be broken down into its separate components and so that the process can be carried out in a renewable way (without using subsoil fossil fuels), it is necessary to use a device which relies on solar power, and with no other assistance, to provoke the chemical reactions to break the water and form hydrogen in a way similar to leaves on plants. For this reason these devices are named artificial leaves.

The device is submerged in an aqueous solution which, when illuminated with a light source, forms hydrogen gas bubbles. Firstly, the research group used a solution with an oxidising agent and studied the evolution of hydrogen produced by photons.  “Now the biggest challenge”, comments Iván Mora, member of the team developing the solution, “is to understand the physical-chemical process which is produced by the semiconductor material and its interface with the aqueous medium in order to streamline the device process.”

The development of the artificial leaf is a great scientific challenge due to the difficulty posed by the selection of materials that will be used in the process, working continuously and not decomposing.  …

via Researchers from the Physics Department of the UJI are using semi-conductor materials to develop an artificial leaf in order to produce hydrogen in water using only sunlight.

Moon rock chips from Vegas casino mogul sent to NASA

It’s been a long, strange trip for what appears to be several tiny chips of lunar rock that found their way into a casino mogul’s hands after being collected by the first men on the moon.

If they’re real, they were plucked from the lunar surface by Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin, given by then-President Richard Nixon to former Nicaraguan dictator Anastasio Somoza Garcia, pilfered by a Costa Rican mercenary soldier-turned Contra rebel, traded to a Baptist missionary for unknown items, then sold to a flamboyant Las Vegas casino mogul who squirreled them away in in a safety deposit box.

Now, more than 2½ years after Bob Stupak’s death, an attorney for his estate has sent to NASA officials in Houston a tabletop display featuring the four gray chips the size of grains of rice.

They’re magnified in a Lucite dome about as big around as a U.S. 50-cent piece set with a small blue and white Nicaraguan flag.

Combined, the chips weigh 0.05 grams.

A NASA spokeswoman, Renee Juhans, confirmed Tuesday that the agency was “taking steps to authenticate” the display it received from attorney Richard Wright. Juhans declined to say what would happen after that. …

via Moon rock chips from Vegas casino mogul sent to NASA – CBS News.

9,000-Year-Old Mask from the Neolithic area

A 9,000-year-old mask is set to be auctioned off at Christie’s June 8. The 9,000-year-old limestone mask will be the oldest art piece to ever grace the famed auction house, reports Yahoo.

It’s estimated that the 9,000-year-old mask could fetch upwards of $600,000. The mask is Neolithic and is meant to represent a human skull and resembles a modern-day hockey mask.

The 9,000-year-old limestone mask found in the Judean dessert, estimated to be from around the 7th millenium B.C., is about 9 inches long and resembles a human skull, according to the listing on the website of auction house Christie’s.

Molly Morse Limmer, head of Christie’s Antiquities department in New York, believes that the mask was one of the first attempts to connect with the spiritual world.

This sort of mask is particularly rare. Although others were thought to have existed at some point in time, very few remain intact. Molly Morse Limmer, head of Christie’s Antiquities department in New York, says that the Judean desert’s dry climate is what helped preserve the item for so many years. However, nobody seems to know what purpose the mask served upon its creation.

via 9,000-Year-Old Mask from the Neolithic area ~ Incredipedia.

Mixed bacterial communities evolve to share resources, not compete

New research shows how bacteria evolve to increase ecosystem functioning by recycling each other’s waste. The study provides some of the first evidence for how interactions between species shape evolution when there is a diverse community.

Predicting how species and ecosystems will respond to new environments is an important task for biology. However, most studies of evolutionary adaptation have considered single species in isolation, despite the fact that all species live in diverse communities alongside many other species. Recent theories have suggested that interactions between species might have a profound effect on how each species evolves, but there has been little experimental support for these ideas.

The research, published May 15 in the online, open-access journal PLoS Biology, involved culturing five bacterial species in the laboratory, studying them both in isolation and mixed together in a community of all five species. Cultures were allowed to adapt to new conditions over seventy bacterial generations. The feeding habits of each species were then measured using chemical analyses; by comparing chemical resource use at the start and end of the experiment, it was possible to show how the resource use and waste production of each species had evolved.

The research team, from Imperial College London, found that bacteria that evolved in a mixed community with other species altered their feeding habits to share resources more effectively amongst themselves and to make use of each other’s waste products in a cooperative manner. In contrast, when grown alone, the same species evolved to use the same resources as each other, thereby competing and impairing each other’s growth.

The changes in feeding habits led to a greatly improved functioning of the community of species as a whole. Communities that were reassembled with bacteria that previously evolved together were better, collectively, at breaking down resources than those reassembled with bacteria that had previously evolved in isolation. Together, the results show that the way in which species adapt is greatly altered by the presence of other species, and that co-evolution enhances the ecological functioning of groups of species.

“Our findings have wide implications for understanding how species respond to changing conditions,” says Diane Lawrence, a PhD student in the Department of Life Sciences and Grantham Institute for Climate Change, and lead author of the study. “Because all species live together with many hundred other species present, the kind of phenomena observed here are likely to apply widely”. For example, predicting how insects and plants will respond to climate change over the next hundred years—a timescale in generations similar to the one studied here for bacteria—will need interactions with other species to be measured and taken into account.

Similarly, the way in which the bacteria living in the human gut adapt to changes such as antibiotic treatments or a shift to a high-fibre diet is likely to depend on interactions among species. Tim Barraclough, who initiated the study, explains: “Engineering bacterial communities to improve human health requires greater understanding of the interactions among component species than we currently have. Our results provide a step in the right direction to developing that understanding.”

The challenge now is to test whether species interactions are as important in shaping evolution in nature as they have been shown to be in the laboratory. This will require scaling up these experiments to include the hundreds or thousands of species found in real ecosystems.

via Mixed bacterial communities evolve to share resources, not compete.