After two decades of drilling, Russian scientists are on the verge of coming into contact with Lake Vostok, Antarctica’s biggest subglacial lake, that has been buried beneath 13,000 ft of ice for more than 20 million years.

Reaching Lake Vostok would represent the first direct contact with what scientists now know is a web of more than 200 subglacial lakes in Antarctica — some of which existed when the continent was connected to Australia and was much warmer. They stay liquid because of heat from the core of the planet.

“This is a huge moment for science and exploration, breaking through to this enormous lake that we didn’t even know existed until the 1990s,” said John Priscu, a researcher at Montana State University who has long been involved in antarctic research, including a study of Vostok ice cores.

“If it goes well, a breakthrough opens up a whole new chapter in our understanding of our planet and possibly moons in our solar system and planets far beyond,” he said. “If it doesn’t go well, it casts a pall over the whole effort to explore this wet underside of Antarctica.”

Read more at The Washington Post.

CGPGrey | Previously: 10 Misconceptions Rundown

The latest from Pop Chart Lab:

This definitive guide to classic cocktails breaks down 68 drinks into their constituent parts. Follow the lines to see where spirits, mixers, and garnishes intersect to form delightful concoctions. This massive movie poster-sized print contains over 40 types of alcohol (from distilled spirits to bitters), mixers from raspberry syrup to egg white, and garnishes from the classic olive to a salted rim. This obsessively detailed chart also includes the ratios for each drink, as well as the proper serving glass, making it as functional as it is beautiful. Over a year in the making, this is Pop Chart Lab’s most elaborate chart ever.

Prints available here. ($28) | Via

Click to enlarge.

National Post

Never married singles between the ages of 20 and 34. More purple, more ladies.

NYCEDC

The end of the world, as told through screenshots, by Redditor Vidzilla.

Individual images: Day 1, Day 2, Day 3, Day 4, Day 5, Day 6, Day 7, Day 8, Day 9, Day 10, Day 11, Day 12, Day 13, Day 14, Day 1097

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The Daily | Via

Geoff Manaugh of BLDGBLOG took a visit to a brownstone with blacked-out windows located on 58 Joralemon Street in Brooklyn, which serves as “the world’s only Greek Revival subway ventilator”.

According to a blog called the Willowtown Association, “the ventilator was a private brownstone dating from 1847. The substation was built in 1908 in conjunction with the start of subway service to Brooklyn. As reported in the BKLYN magazine article, the building’s ‘cavernous interior once housed a battery of electrical devices that converted alternating current to the 600-volt direct current needed to power the IRT.’”

More photos and the story here. | Via

More at Architizer | Via

NYTimes | Via

Source: U.S. Department of Transportation’s consumer report for air travelers (doc)

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A handy map of states to avoid, from Goodreads:

A map of what each state thinks of Twilight ends up looking a lot like a map of the most recent election results. On the map above, the readers in the red states rated the book highly (the darker the red, the higher the rating), while readers in the blue states gave it a lower rating). The Midwest and the South represent The Twilight Belt, while the coasts were decidedly less impressed with the book.

Reviews were mostly distributed according to population, with the notable exception of Utah. Utah is the 34th most populous state in the US, but it generates the 6th most reviews of Twilight. In terms of cities, Salt Lake City—the 125th largest city in the country—is second only to New York in number of Twilight reviews. Opinion on the book is split in the Beehive state, with the average rating a pedestrian 3.64.

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The appropriately titled Moses Bridge, by RO & AD Architects, is a pedestrian bridge that allows you to “part” the West-Brabant waterline.

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Australian designer Edward Linacre has received this year’s James Dyson Award with his Airdrop irrigation concept. The self-powered irrigation system draws inspiration from the Namib Desert beetle, which survives in the desert by collecting fog droplets on its wings.

Moisture is harvested out of the air to irrigate crops by an efficient system that produces large amounts of condensation. A turbine intake drives air underground through a network of piping that rapidly cools the air to the temperature of the soil where it reaches 100% humidity and produces water. The water is then stored in an underground tank and pumped through to the roots of crops via sub surface drip irrigation hosing.

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YouAreNotSoSmart | Via

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Try it out here. | Via

NPR’s Planet Money got its hands on a government report entitled “Life After Debt“, which concluded the action would actually harm the global economy.

If the U.S. paid off its debt there would be no more U.S. Treasury bonds in the world. “It was a huge issue … for not just the U.S. economy, but the global economy,” says Diane Lim Rogers, an economist in the Clinton administration.

The U.S. borrows money by selling bonds. So the end of debt would mean the end of Treasury bonds.

But the U.S. has been issuing bonds for so long, and the bonds are seen as so safe, that much of the world has come to depend on them. The U.S. Treasury bond is a pillar of the global economy.

Banks buy hundreds of billions of dollars’ worth, because they’re a safe place to park money. Mortgage rates are tied to the interest rate on U.S. treasury bonds. The Federal Reserve — our central bank — buys and sells Treasury bonds all the time, in an effort to keep the economy on track.

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RSA | Previously: The Paradox of Choice

Vsauce | Via

By Drew Stearne:

The iPhone might be at the cutting edge of technology but it took a long time and many innovations to get there, take a trip through history and explore the people and technology that contributed to the iPhone becoming what it is today.

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Space | Via

By the magicians at Artefact:

The issue with printers is not that we lack the necessary technology, but rather that the core design and usability issues have not been fully addressed. Traditional OEMs are making incremental improvements end up over-complicating what should be a simple process and producing over-bloated boxes that sit in our shelves.

So we decided to explore how to innovate printers.

Our initial design explorations yielded futuristic printer concepts such a “printing home hub,” a “Roomba printing device,” and other concepts that are 5-10 years out; but in the end we chose to focus our design work on a solution that that is near-term and breathes new life into this humble “peripheral” by radically simplifying it.

Artefact | Via

Or at least the places that are prepared for them, created by The Oxford Internet Institute:

Using a keyword search for “zombies”, the following map visualizes the absolute concentrations of references within the Google Maps database. The map reveals two important spatial patterns. First, much of the world lacks any content mentioning “zombies” whatsoever. Second, and related, the highest concentrations of zombies in the Geoweb are located in the Anglophone world, especially in large cities. The results either provide a rough proxy for the amount of English-language content indexed over our planet, or offer an early warning into the geographies of the impending zombie apocalypse.

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Graphic designer Anthony Herrera’s daughter loves Star Wars, so when he took his daughter to Sequoia National Park (which resembles the redwood forest used in Return of the Jedi), he told her that it was the place where Ewoks live and she should keep an eye out for them. Unfortunately, she didn’t see any. After applying some Photoshop to the album photos, he showed her that although they didn’t spot any, the Ewoks had definitely spotted them.

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Via | Previously: Coffee: The Greatest Addiction Ever

A rundown of the electronic Willy Wonka’s 313 patents by The New York Times.

From Gizmodo:

IBM’s aptly-titled 2011 Commuter Pain Study polled drivers around the planet to find whose life sucks the most behind the wheel, based on the following factors:

1. Commuting time
2. Time stuck in traffic, agreement that:
3. Price of gas is already too high
4. Traffic has gotten worse
5. Start/stop traffic is a problem
6. Driving causes stress
7. Driving causes anger
8. Traffic affects work
9. Traffic so bad driving stopped and
10. Decided not to make trip due to traffic.

IBM

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NASA | Via | Video via

More on the study here. | Via

From The Guardian:

Both the Amazon and Hamza flow from west to east and are around the same length, at 6,000km. But whereas the Amazon ranges from 1km to 100km in width, the Hamza ranges from 200km to 400km.

The underground river starts in the Acre region under the Andes and flows through the Solimões, Amazonas and Marajó basins before opening out directly into the depths of the Atlantic Ocean.

The Amazon flows much faster than the Hamza, however, draining a greater volume of water. Around 133,000m³ of water flow through the Amazon per second at speeds of up to 5 metres per second. The underground river’s flow rate has been estimated at around 3,900m³ per second and it barely inches along at less than a millimetre per hour

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ViHart | Via

Click to enlarge.

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“My friends and I have been coddled long enough by a billionaire-friendly Congress. It’s time for our government to get serious about shared sacrifice.” - Warren Buffett for the New York Times

Obama agrees.

Pic: White House Flickr

Amazon UK | Related: What Happened Last Night In The London Riots

Interactive version here. | Via

Samuel K. Sia, assistant professor of biomedical engineering at Columbia Engineering, has developed a credit card-sized chip that can perform an HIV test on a blood sample in 15 minutes with a reported 100% detection rate, all for about a dollar.

“We have engineered a disposable credit card-sized device that can produce blood-based diagnostic results in minutes,” said Sia. “The idea is to make a large class of diagnostic tests accessible to patients in any setting in the world, rather than forcing them to go to a clinic to draw blood and then wait days for their results.”

Sia and his team performed testing in Rwanda over the last four years in partnership with Columbia’s Mailman School of Public Health and three local non-government organizations in Rwanda, targeting hundreds of patients. His device, known as mChip (mobile microfluidic chip), requires only a tiny finger prick of blood, effective even for a newborn, and gives—in less than 15 minutes—quantitative objective results that are not subject to user interpretation. This new technology significantly reduces the time between testing patients and treating them, providing medical workers in the field results that are much easier to read at a much lower cost. New low-cost diagnostics like the mChip could revolutionize medical care around the world.

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Run For Your Lives is a zombie-themed 5k/obstacle course starting in Baltimore on October 22nd that will allow participants to pit themselves against a zombie horde as they try to complete the course without “dying”, which sounds exactly like the beginning of a zombie movie where the fake zombies somehow turn into real zombies and actually try to eat the unknowing participants. Here’s how the race will work, from the official website:

BASIC SURVIVAL

• Before the race, you will be given a flag belt, just like the overly intimidating game of flag football. These flags represent your health.
• The zombies want to take your flags and maybe eat your brains.
• If you lose all your health flags, you die. And the zombies win.
• Health bonuses will be hidden throughout the course. If you find one and carry it to the finish, it will save your life.

WHAT YOU’RE UP AGAINST

• Throughout the 5K obstacle race, there will be 12 man-made and natural obstacles for you to complete. Runners may choose NOT to complete an obstacle, BUT any runner who skips an obstacle will not be eligible for prizes.
• There will be zombies. Their job is to chase you and eat you — but mainly go after your health, in the form of your flag belt. Avoid the zombies to keep your health flags.
• Use speed, strategy and your intact brains to make it to the FINISH LINE with at least ONE FLAG INTACT. If you finish with zero health flags, your time will be recorded, but you will not be eligible for awards.

I’m not saying the above scenario will definitely happen, but it definitely will. So if you’re planning on participating, you’d be wise to bring one of these bad boys along.

Run For Your Lives | Via

Today I Learned about the Vidocq Society, an elite crime-solving club made up of current and former FBI profilers, homicide investigators, scientists, psychologists, prosecutors and coroners that meets each month in Philadelphia to solve cold cases.

Members, who like to describe themselves as ‘crime solution catalysts’, pay an annual $100 subscription fee, and agree to attend at least one meeting a year, regardless of where in the world they live. Each meeting attracts about 60 members. Funded in part by a cut of a reported $1.3 million film development deal signed with Danny DeVito’s Jersey Films in 1997, the society pays for travel and accommodation expenses – so that underfunded detectives from across America can present their most perplexing cases at the Downtown Club.

‘We’ll never see the FBI or the New York City police bring a case to us,’ says Vidocq’s chairman, Fred Bornhofen – a 70-year-old private security consultant and former spook for the Office of Naval Intelligence. ‘But we’ll get all the state and town cases, because they just don’t have the training, background or sophistication to handle it.’

Despite the restrictions the society places on the crimes it will consider – only unsolved deaths more than two years old; the victims cannot have been engaged in criminal activity such as prostitution or drug-dealing; the case must be formally presented to them by the appropriate law enforcement agency – there is no shortage of work.

Telegraph | Via | Photo: Peter Bond

etnies | H/T

A simple piece of foam rubber that instantly turns any stick into a pirate cutlass. My childhood self would have totally stabbed someone with a stick sword to get his hands on one of these.

From designer Naama Agassi. | Via

Mint | Via | Thanks Jules.

From Evernote:

Evernote Peek is a free app designed to help you study, learn and strengthen your memory. Interacting with Peek is pretty intuitive. Once you’ve connected Peek to your Evernote account and selected your study materials, you simply close the Smart Cover and peek under it to see a clue. Raise the cover further to reveal the answer. To advance to the next clue, just close the cover and repeat.

Evernote Peek | Via

More at Surfline. | Thanks Peter.

My buddy Sean Stillwell (who designed the Time Capsule cover) designed a skyscraper that was recently highlighted by eVolo Magazine, because he’s got serious skills and it’s about time that fact became public.

Compressive looks at this existing condition and, more specifically, the car as a representation of human beings’ very worst and very best achievement. While the resources consumed to manufacture and operate the car are astounding, the personal freedom the car affords is something that every society should strive for (personal freedom, that is). The car is an integral component of our existing lifestyle, and Compressive reexamines the interaction between person and car at various scales, while also questioning the current understanding of the parking lot as a type of “service space.”

By utilizing the car as another form of vertical transportation, the building can begin to register occupation by reacting to the weight of cars parked on various floors. By sectionally arranging the main programs of the mixed-use tower, groups of up to 5 floors will actually begin to sag with the weight of cars based on program use at different times throughout the day. The dynamic façade system intensifies this condition by folding out and up when the floors compress, allowing for more ventilation throughout the parking area in order to counteract the greater number of cars. Whatever solar protection is lost by the folding façade is made up for by the new condition of shorter floor-to-floor height of the surrounding parking ramps.

Relevant Design

Prior to his Calvin & Hobbes days, Bill Watterson had a 6-month trial gig drawing editorial cartoons for The Cincinnati Post, specializing in cartoons inspired by and including quotes by Mark Twain.  In an interview with Honk Magazine, Watterson describes the experience:

The agreement was that they could fire me, or I could quit with no questions asked if things didn’t work out during the first few months. Sure enough, things didn’t work out, and they fired me, no questions asked.

My guess is that the editor wanted his own Jeff MacNelly (a Pulitzer winner at 24), and I didn’t live up to his expectations. My Cincinnati days were pretty Kafkaesque. I had lived there all of two weeks, and the editor insisted that most of my work be about local, as opposed to national, issues. Cincinnati has a weird, three-party, city manager government, and by the time I figured it out, I was standing in the unemployment lines. I didn’t hit the ground running. Cincinnati at that time was also beginning to realize it had major cartooning talent in Jim Borgman at the city’s other paper, The Cincinnati Enquirer, and I didn’t benefit from the comparison.

More at The Mary Sue.

Tagged as “The Ultimate Survival Tool”, the Crovel has a shovel on one end, a crowbar on the other, and a whole myriad of tools in between to satisfy all of your shoveling, chopping, prying, hammering, bottle-opening, sawing, and zombie killing needs. As an additional bonus, the handle is wrapped in 15 feet of paracord in case you need to climb, rappel, or tie something up.  It’s basically the closest you’re going to get to being Batman in a survival scenario.

Get one here. ($85) | Via here & here | Pic via

NASA announced today that not only was Einstein correct in his inference that a  space-time vortex exists around Earth, but the shape matches Einstein prediction in his General Theory of Relativity that he published in 1916. From NASA:

Researchers confirmed these points at a press conference today at NASA headquarters where they announced the long-awaited results of Gravity Probe B (GP-B).

“The space-time around Earth appears to be distorted just as general relativity predicts,” says Stanford University physicist Francis Everitt, principal investigator of the Gravity Probe B mission.

Time and space, according to Einstein’s theories of relativity, are woven together, forming a four-dimensional fabric called “space-time.” The mass of Earth dimples this fabric, much like a heavy person sitting in the middle of a trampoline. Gravity, says Einstein, is simply the motion of objects following the curvaceous lines of the dimple.

If Earth were stationary, that would be the end of the story. But Earth is not stationary. Our planet spins, and the spin should twist the dimple, slightly, pulling it around into a 4-dimensional swirl. This is what GP-B went to space in 2004 to check.

The results of Gravity Probe B give physicists renewed confidence that the strange predictions of Einstein’s theory are indeed correct, and that these predictions may be applied elsewhere. The type of spacetime vortex that exists around Earth is duplicated and magnified elsewhere in the cosmos–around massive neutron stars, black holes, and active galactic nuclei.

More here. | Via