Shark Deterrent: Western Australian Wetsuits - A World First

WA researchers have unveiled world-first wetsuits designed to protect surfers, swimmers and divers from shark attacks by using scientific discoveries about how the predators see and detect prey.

The shark deterrent wetsuits come in two different strategic designs - one that blends the wearer with background colours in the water and the other that makes the wearer highly visible but uses disruptive patterns unlike the appearance of a shark's normal prey.

The project began two years after five people were killed by sharks in two years along the WA coastline, making the State the shark attack capital of the world.

Hamish Jolly and Craig Anderson, both keen surfers and ocean lovers, were awarded a $20,000 State Government grant to work with University of WA shark scientists to design the wetsuits based on science of shark vision, neurology and behaviour.

Mr Jolly said that initial results of testing the wetsuits in the ocean with wild sharks had been extraordinary and had given them the confidence to release the wetsuits for sale.

"There's been a lot of anecdotal stuff about it and attempts at this, mostly trying to make the wearer look like a sea snake or putting stripes on the wetsuits, but what we have done is to put the science to the anecdotes," he said.

The "cryptic" wetsuit is designed to hide the wearer in the water and uses colours and shapes that, from a predatory shark's perspective, make the wearer difficult to see. Mr Jolly said the cryptic design was more geared towards divers. The "warning" wetsuit, which is more geared towards swimmers and surfers, uses bold patterns and shapes to overtly present the wearer as unlike any shark prey or even as an unpalatable or dangerous food option.

The wetsuits' designs have been patented by Mr Jolly and Mr Anderson's company Shark Mitigation Systems.

Professors Shaun Collin and Nathan Hart, from UWA's Ocean Institute, helped translate the latest scientific knowledge of shark sensory systems into specific designs that disrupt the visual perception of sharks.

Earlier this year, the research team spent more than four days testing the new wetsuit designs off the northern WA coast. Mr Jolly said in one encounter a tiger shark circled a dummy covered in the "cryptic" design, which helps make the wearer less visible to the shark, for six minutes before deciding to attack a dummy covered in traditional black neoprene."We have had a handful of engagements like that. We need to do more. All the early evidence is that it's working," he said, adding that testing would go on for many years and they could not say the wetsuits provided fail-safe protection.

Source: http://au.news.yahoo.com

Nazare - Biggest Waves Ever Ridden???

Big wave surfing by Brazilian surfers in Nazaré in Portugal has dominated the news yesterday. Hours after an epic session went down where Maya G. broke an ankle and lost consciousness, footage emerged of what looks like Carlos Burle and friends riding what could arguably be the biggest waves ever ridden in history.

Click here to see this insane video

Betty White Spoofs Miley Cyrus' Wrecking Ball Video

Thankfully this video is twerk-free, but 91-year old Betty White couldn't help spoofing the young singer while promoting her new show.

Betty put the 25-second video together as a promo for the launch of her “Off their Rockers” show on Lifetime Television in the US. She says she’s “Got some great ideas from recent pop culture events that really got the kids talking!”

Maya Gabeira Almost Drowned Today In Giant Nazaré, Portugal

Top Brazilian surfer Maya Gabeira almost drowned today in giant Nazaré in Portugal, she took two 70 footers on the head according to reports.

Maya Gabeira, 26, who is from Rio de Janeiro, was unconscious after taking off on a giant wave at Praia do Norte in Nazaré and being held under for a long time, before getting slammed by walls of white water. She was unconscious when they got her to the beach, say reports.

Reports are sketchy, with some saying she remains unconscious in hospital, but a correspondent from http://surfeuropemag.fr says she was rescucitated on the beach before going to hospital. Authorities have apparently confirmed that she is going to be okay.

She was part of the Zon North Canyon, which sees surfers trying to beat the world record of Hawaiian Garrett McNamara, which he broke at Nazaré. Here is a news report from Portugal on the incident.

Sweden Runs Out of Garbage

Imagine a world where pollution is a non-issue, cities are pristine, healthy environments to live in, and little to no entanglements from discarded trash injures wildlife or clogs the oceans. In Sweden, this is almost a reality, yet it’s causing a paradoxical predicament for the recycle-happy country that relies on waste to heat and provide electricity to hundreds of thousands of homes.

The Scandinavian nation of more than 9.5 million citizens has run out of garbage; while this is a positive – almost enviable – predicament for a country to be facing, Sweden now has to search for rubbish outside of its borders to generate its waste-to-energy incineration program. It’s namely Norway officials who are now shipping in 80,000 tons of refuse annually to fuel the country with outside waste.

The population’s remarkable pertinacious recycling habits are inspiration for other garbage-bloated countries where the idea of empty landfills is scarce. In fact, only 4 percent of all waste in Sweden is land-filled, a big win for the future of sustainable living. By using its two million tons of waste as energy and scrapping for more outside of its borders, this country is shown in international comparisons to be the global leader in recovering energy in waste. Go Sweden.

Public Radio International has the whole story. This (albeit short-term) solution is even highly beneficial for the Scandinavian country; Norway pays Sweden to take its excess waste, Sweden burns it for heat and electricity, and the ashes remaining from the incineration process, filled with highly polluting dioxins, are returned back to Norway and land filled.

Catarina Ostland, senior advisor for the Swedish Environmental Protection Agency, suggests that Norway may not be the perfect partner for the trash import-export scheme, however. “I hope that instead we will get the waste from Italy or from Romania or Bulgaria, or the Baltic countries because they landfill a lot in these countries” she tells PRI. “They don’t have any incineration plants or recycling plants, so they need to find a solution for their waste”.

There’s definitely something to be said about being ‘green’. Regardless of its sourcing, hopefully Sweden’s impeccable job of reducing its carbon footprint may serve as an example to other areas of the world that have more than enough trash to utilize and put to sustainable use.

Sources: 

capaitalfm.co.ke

Sweden Waste-Energy Sustainability

Russian Scientist Photographs The Soul Leaving The Body At Death

The timing of astral disembodiment in which the spirit leaves the body has been captured by Russian scientist Konstantin Korotkov, who photographed a person at the moment of his death with a bioelectrographic camera.

The image taken using the gas discharge visualization method, an advanced technique of Kirlian photography shows in blue the life force of the person leaving the body gradually. According to Korotkov, navel and head are the parties who first lose their life force (which would be the soul) and the groin and the heart are the last areas where the spirit before surfing the phantasmagoria of the infinite.

In other cases according to Korotkov has noted that "the soul" of people who suffer a violent and unexpected death usually manifests a state of confusion in your power settings and return to the body in the days following death. This could be due to a surplus of unused energy. The technique developed by Korotkov, who is director of the Research Institute of Physical Culture, St. Petersburg, is endorsed as a medical technology by the Ministry of Health of Russia and is used by more than 300 doctors in the world for stress and monitoring progress of patients treated for diseases such as cancer. Korotkov says his energy imaging technique could be used to watch all kinds of imbalances biophysical and diagnose in real time and also to show if a person does have psychic powers or is a fraud.

This technique, which measures real-time and stimulated radiation is amplified by the electromagnetic field is a more advanced version of the technology developed for measuring Semyon Kirlian aura. Korotkov observations confirm, as proposed by Kirili, that "stimulated electro-photonic light around the tips of the fingers of the human being contains coherent and comprehensive statement of a person, both physically and psychologically."

In this video interview Korotkov speaks of the effect in the bioenergy field with food, water and even cosmetics. And emphasizes one umbrella drink, water and organic food, particularly noting that the aura of the people in the Undies suffers the negative effects of nutrients as technologization distributed in this society. Korotkov also speaks of their measurements in supposedly loaded with power and influence that people have in the bioenergy fields of others. Checking Rupert Sheldrake's experiment of the feeling of being watched : Because a person's bioenergy field changes when someone else directs his attention, even though it is backwards and not consciously perceived. Also a place fields are altered when there is a concentration of tourists. Also warns of cell phone use and their negative radiation often being carcinogenic, which several studies seem to confirm. Korotkov hosting is optimistic that this new scientific field, which is a pioneer, is taking, especially in Russia, where some schools were teaching children to recognize and use energy, and not as a suspect but as a metaphysical quantifiable fact.

'There is some staggering photographic and video evidence demonstrating some of the technologies, particularly shocking is the Oldfield Camera Filter which using a normal camera appears to show ghosts or other worldly entities clearly in photographs! Truly amazing stuff! Harry, the author of 'Harry Oldfield's Invisible Universe' goes on to demonstrate how through various technologies he is able to reveal aspects of this previously unseen universe in all their glory! Three decades of research into this area and considerable practical application enable Harry to present some very convincing evidence that there is far more to the Universe than that which we currently experience with the 5 senses.'

Source: http://www.social-consciousness.com

The Ocean Is Broken!!!

It was the silence that made this voyage different from all of those before it.  Not the absence of sound, exactly.  The wind still whipped the sails and whistled in the rigging. The waves still sloshed against the fibreglass hull.  And there were plenty of other noises: muffled thuds and bumps and scrapes as the boat knocked against pieces of debris.  What was missing was the cries of the seabirds which, on all previous similar voyages, had surrounded the boat.  The birds were missing because the fish were missing.

Exactly 10 years before, when Newcastle yachtsman Ivan Macfadyen had sailed exactly the same course from Melbourne to Osaka, all he'd had to do to catch a fish from the ocean between Brisbane and Japan was throw out a baited line.  "There was not one of the 28 days on that portion of the trip when we didn't catch a good-sized fish to cook up and eat with some rice," Macfadyen recalled.  But this time, on that whole long leg of sea journey, the total catch was two.  No fish. No birds. Hardly a sign of life at all.  "In years gone by I'd gotten used to all the birds and their noises," he said.  "They'd be following the boat, sometimes resting on the mast before taking off again. You'd see flocks of them wheeling over the surface of the sea in the distance, feeding on pilchards."  But in March and April this year, only silence and desolation surrounded his boat, Funnel Web, as it sped across the surface of a haunted ocean.

North of the equator, up above New Guinea, the ocean-racers saw a big fishing boat working a reef in the distance.  "All day it was there, trawling back and forth. It was a big ship, like a mother-ship," he said.  And all night it worked too, under bright floodlights. And in the morning Macfadyen was awoken by his crewman calling out, urgently, that the ship had launched a speedboat.  "Obviously I was worried. We were unarmed and pirates are a real worry in those waters. I thought, if these guys had weapons then we were in deep trouble."  But they weren't pirates, not in the conventional sense, at least. The speedboat came alongside and the Melanesian men aboard offered gifts of fruit and jars of jam and preserves.  "And they gave us five big sugar-bags full of fish," he said.  "They were good, big fish, of all kinds. Some were fresh, but others had obviously been in the sun for a while.

"We told them there was no way we could possibly use all those fish. There were just two of us, with no real place to store or keep them. They just shrugged and told us to tip them overboard. That's what they would have done with them anyway, they said.  "They told us that his was just a small fraction of one day's by-catch. That they were only interested in tuna and to them, everything else was rubbish. It was all killed, all dumped. They just trawled that reef day and night and stripped it of every living thing."

Macfadyen felt sick to his heart. That was one fishing boat among countless more working unseen beyond the horizon, many of them doing exactly the same thing.  No wonder the sea was dead. No wonder his baited lines caught nothing. There was nothing to catch.  If that sounds depressing, it only got worse.  

The next leg of the long voyage was from Osaka to San Francisco and for most of that trip the desolation was tinged with nauseous horror and a degree of fear.  "After we left Japan, it felt as if the ocean itself was dead," Macfadyen said.  "We hardly saw any living things. We saw one whale, sort of rolling helplessly on the surface with what looked like a big tumour on its head. It was pretty sickening.

"I've done a lot of miles on the ocean in my life and I'm used to seeing turtles, dolphins, sharks and big flurries of feeding birds. But this time, for 3000 nautical miles there was nothing alive to be seen."  In place of the missing life was garbage in astounding volumes.  "Part of it was the aftermath of the tsunami that hit Japan a couple of years ago. The wave came in over the land, picked up an unbelievable load of stuff and carried it out to sea. And it's still out there, everywhere you look."

Ivan's brother, Glenn, who boarded at Hawaii for the run into the United States, marvelled at the "thousands on thousands" of yellow plastic buoys. The huge tangles of synthetic rope, fishing lines and nets. Pieces of polystyrene foam by the million. And slicks of oil and petrol, everywhere.  Countless hundreds of wooden power poles are out there, snapped off by the killer wave and still trailing their wires in the middle of the sea.  "In years gone by, when you were becalmed by lack of wind, you'd just start your engine and motor on," Ivan said.  Not this time.  "In a lot of places we couldn't start our motor for fear of entangling the propeller in the mass of pieces of rope and cable. That's an unheard of situation, out in the ocean.  "If we did decide to motor we couldn't do it at night, only in the daytime with a lookout on the bow, watching for rubbish.

"On the bow, in the waters above Hawaii, you could see right down into the depths. I could see that the debris isn't just on the surface, it's all the way down. And it's all sizes, from a soft-drink bottle to pieces the size of a big car or truck.  "We saw a factory chimney sticking out of the water, with some kind of boiler thing still attached below the surface. We saw a big container-type thing, just rolling over and over on the waves.  "We were weaving around these pieces of debris. It was like sailing through a garbage tip.  "Below decks you were constantly hearing things hitting against the hull, and you were constantly afraid of hitting something really big. As it was, the hull was scratched and dented all over the place from bits and pieces we never saw."
Plastic was ubiquitous. Bottles, bags and every kind of throwaway domestic item you can imagine, from broken chairs to dustpans, toys and utensils.  And something else. The boat's vivid yellow paint job, never faded by sun or sea in years gone past, reacted with something in the water off Japan, losing its sheen in a strange and unprecedented way.

Back in Newcastle, Ivan Macfadyen is still coming to terms with the shock and horror of the voyage.  "The ocean is broken," he said, shaking his head in stunned disbelief.  Recognising the problem is vast, and that no organisations or governments appear to have a particular interest in doing anything about it, Macfadyen is looking for ideas.  He plans to lobby government ministers, hoping they might help.  More immediately, he will approach the organisers of Australia's major ocean races, trying to enlist yachties into an international scheme that uses volunteer yachtsmen to monitor debris and marine life.  Macfadyen signed up to this scheme while he was in the US, responding to an approach by US academics who asked yachties to fill in daily survey forms and collect samples for radiation testing - a significant concern in the wake of the tsunami and consequent nuclear power station failure in Japan.  "I asked them why don't we push for a fleet to go and clean up the mess," he said.  "But they said they'd calculated that the environmental damage from burning the fuel to do that job would be worse than just leaving the debris there."

Source: http://www.theherald.com.au

Fatal Shark Attack At Jeffreys Bay

A man has died after a shark attack at Jeffreys Bay in the Eastern Cape, the National Sea Rescue Institute said on Friday.

"At approximately 11:30 NSRI Jeffreys Bay volunteer sea rescue duty crew were activated following reports of a shark incident at Lower Point, next to Albatros Beach, Jeffreys Bay," theNSRI said.

Remains of a body, believed to be an adult male, were recovered from the water and handed to police and forensic pathology services.

According to Algoa FM, the man was believed to have been snorkelling when he was attacked.
There were reports that two sharks were involved, but this was apparently due to the large size of the shark involved in the attack, which was estimated to be four metres long.

The beaches in the area have reportedly been closed.

FBI Arrests 29 Year Old Mastermind Of Billion Dollar Internet Drug Blackmarket

If you want to buy a book online, at this point pretty much everyone goes to Amazon.com. Right? If you want to buy shoes? Zappos. Domain name? Godaddy. An 18 year old Brazilian girl’s virginity? eBay. A one way flight to Brazil? Kayak. But where do you go if you want to anonymously buy illegal drugs like heroin, cocaine, meth, molly, LSD etc… all from the privacy and comfort of a web browser? Well, up until 3:15pm on Wednesday October 2nd, for all these illicit purchases and more you could have gone to a website called SilkRoad.

What happened Wednesday at 3:15pm? After months of painstaking investigation, the FBI swooped in and arrested the long sought-after mastermind of this highly illegal anonymous drug marketplace. Who was this mastermind? Was it a secretive Russian hacker living in Moscow? A Chinese internet tycoon operating from a private yacht in international waters? Actually, it was a 29 year old American named Ross Ulbricht who operated most of his empire out of a San Francisco coffee shop. When he was arrested, he was actually using the free wifi at a public library.

This story is long, but completely insane, totally worth reading all the way through. In case you need some teasers, this story involves billions of dollars worth of drug transactions, an enormous illegal fortune made entirely out of Bitcoins, fake passports and even a couple of hitmen.

SilkRoad was founded in 2011 as an underground marketplace where internet users could buy, sell and trade illegal drugs anonymously. The reason it worked was because SilkRoad required every potential buyer and seller to use a routing service called Tor. When someone uses Tor, their IP address (geographic location) is encrypted several times over then routed all over the world to dozens of locations. Using Tor, someone could be sitting in Los Angeles but would be tracked as a zipping line that appears then disappears from one location to the next instantaneously. Tor was originally invented by the U.S. NAVY to help mask top secret messages. It has lots of legitimate uses like maintaining a journalist’s anonymous sources or keeping a business meeting extra private. Unfortunately, Tor is also perfectly suited for keeping illegal transactions totally untraceable and anonymous. That’s where SilkRoad came in and thrived.

When it was up and running, there wasn’t much of a difference between SilkRoad and eBay or craigslist. It was a website where buyers and sellers met to exchange money for goods and services. The main difference, aside from the fact that most of the products being listed were illegal, was that on SilkRoad you couldn’t simply charge a credit card or use your paypal account to complete the transaction. Instead, users traded Bitcoins. What’s a Bitcoin? That question alone probably deserves its own dedicated article on CNW, but for now all you need to understand is that Bitcoin is a completely anonymous virtual currency. The most recent value of a single Bitcoin was right around $130. So that means if you wanted to buy $250 worth of cocaine on SilkRoad, at today’s price you would need to own at least two Bitcoins.

“I love my fed-ex guy cause he’s a drug dealer and he doesn't even know it…and he’s always on time.” – Mitch Hedberg.

Actually, SilkRoad preferred the US Postal Service over Fed-Ex, but the late great comedian Mitch Hedberg was clearly way ahead of his time with that classic line. So you’ve just spent two Bitcoins to buy $250 worth of cocaine. How were these drugs delivered? Simple. The seller would vacuum seal the package then ship it through the USPS, likely with a false return address. Ironically, the Federal government was a drug dealer and they didn’t even know it… for a while. SilkRoad would make money by taking a 10% commission on every transaction. It has been estimated that prior to being shutdown, SilkRoad was responsible for more than half of the daily trading volume of Bitcoins around the world.

It turns out, the FBI had been trying for over a year to unmask the mastermind of SilkRoad who they only knew by the internet handle “Dread Pirate Roberts“. The FBI spent thousands of hours scouring the internet trying to find traces of his potential real identity. Unfortunately for “Dread Pirate Roberts”, this internet mastermind made a few very crucial errors. First off, he accidentally used his real name and personal gmail address on at least two occasions when posting in online forums to ask questions about working with Tor and to advertise SilkRoad. The FBI was then able to subpoena some very valuable information from Google and another technology firm that ran what is called “VPN” software which was supposed to help keep Ulbricht anonymous. Through these subpoenas, the FBI was able to piece together that the vast majority of SilkRoad’s operations were being run out of a coffee shop on a quiet San Francisco street. Agents then began to track Ulbricht back and forth to the coffee shop.

Here’s where the story gets completely insane: According to the indictment documents filed today in New York, the FBI was able to determine that over the last two years, SilkRoad processed $1.2 billion dollars worth of transactions. In other words, 9.5 million Bitcoins have flowed back and forth between SilkRoad buyers and sellers. What does that mean for Ross Ulbricht personally? Over that same time period, the FBI determined that Ulbricht collected some 600,000 Bitcoins in the form of his commission. How much are 600,000 Bitcoins worth? At today’s closing price, $78 million. At yesterday’s closing price? $90 million (the price of Bitcoins dropped sharply in the wake of Ulbricht’s arrest). When Bitcoins hit an all time peak value in April 2013 of $266 per coin, his virtual collection was worth $160 million. To give you some idea of how insane the market for Bitcoins has been recently, in the fall of 2011 when SilkRoad was founded, a single Bitcoin was worth just $2.

Just to re-iterare: 29 year old Ross Ulbricht earned nearly $80 million in commissions for maintaining and operating SilkRoad over the last two years. Here’s a screenshot of his LinkedIn page:

And the story gets crazier: As if operating a billion dollar illegal online narcotics marketplace wasn’t bad enough, the FBI alleges that Ulbricht hired at least two hitmen over the last 12 months to murder people who were threatening SilkRoad and his own personal anonymity. He didn’t know it at the time, but Ulbricht was already being closely watched by the FBI when he used $150,000 worth of Bitcoins to order a murder from a hitman he met online. The target was a former SilkRoad employee called “FriendlyChemist” who was threatening to release the identities of 5000 SilkRoad users in addition to outing Ulbricht as the mastermind of the whole operation unless he received a one time payment of $500,000. Just listen to the morbid online exchanges between Ulbricht and one of the hitmen, this all went down just seven months ago, in March 2013:

“In my eyes, FriendlyChemist is a liability and I wouldn’t mind if he was executed… I have the following info and am waiting on getting his address…[He] lives in White Rock, British Colombia [with a] wife + 3 kids.”

The hitmen responded with a quote of: “$150,000 to $300,000 depending on how you want it done, clean or non-clean”

To which Ulbricht responded: “Don’t want to be a pain here, but the price seems high. Not long ago, I had a clean hit done for $80k. Are the prices you quoted the best you can do? I would like this done ASAP because he is talking about releasing the info Monday.”

Finally Ulbricht accepted the $150,000 price and on the night March 31st he received the following message from his hitman: “I received the payment… We know where he is. He’ll be grabbed tonight. I’ll update you.”

And 24 hours later another message from the hitman: “Your problem has been taken care of… Rest easy because he wont be blackmailing anyone again. Ever.”

It may further shock you to know that Ross Ulbricht wasn’t sending these chilling execution orders from a dark room in a palatial San Francisco mansion. The FBI determined that when he wasn’t operating from the library or his favorite coffee shop, Ulbricht was working out of a three bedroom apartment he shared with two roommates directly across the street from the coffee shop. Those roommates knew him as “Josh”, the friendly computer programmer who paid his $1000 a month rent every month right on time, in cash. Remember, the guy was worth $80 million and simultaneously operating a business that rivals many Fortune 500 companies.

One final strange twist to this case occurred back in July 2013. FBI agents received a huge break when Canadian border control randomly chose to open and inspect a package that ended up containing several fake passports and IDs all for the same person, all addressed to Ross Ulbricht in San Francisco. Homeland security visited Ulbricht shortly thereafter with the help of the FBI. Ulbricht claimed to have no clue why or who would send him those fake IDs. Incredibly, he even used SilkRoad as a defense by claiming that hypothetically anyone could order forged identity documents “on a website called SilkRoad“.

When FBI agents arrested “Josh”, AKA “Dread Pirate Roberts”, on Tuesday, it was 3:15 in the afternoon and Ulbricht was quietly working away at his local branch of the San Francisco public library. Today his funds are being seized and SilkRoad has been shut down completely. Ulbricht faces a slew of very serious charges including attempting and possibly succeeding to commit two murders. Finally, we’d like to officially announce that from on you can buy all your drugs on CelebrityNetWorth! Kidding.

Source: topinfopost.com