It’s official: The drone war has come home to America.
Wanted fugitive Christopher Dorner, the former cop currently at war with the LAPD, has become the first known human target for airborne drones on U.S. soil. Their use was confirmed by Customs and Border Patrol spokesman Ralph DeSio, who revealed the government’s fear that Dorner will make a dash for the Mexican border. The fugitive has already killed three people, according to police, and has a $1 million bounty on his head. Dorner, who has military training, is believed to be hiding in the wilderness of California’s San Bernardino Mountains, where locating him without air support may be all but impossible
Even though the drone is surveillance only (for now), I have no doubt that weaponized drones are very quickly going to be part of our daily lives. This is a big step in that direction.
Top Photo: San Diego, CA — Federal roadblocks and checkpoints are springing up in the zealous search for an ex-LAPD officer suspected of murder. Not only are vehicles being searched without probable cause or a warrant, but 600 homes were searched in Big Bear, CA.
Bottom Photo: Big Bear Lake, CA — California Highway Patrol forcibly search vehicles on the road at gunpoint, as they aggressively search for the ex-LAPD officer accused of murder.
One man, one excuse is all that is needed to suspend innocent people’s rights and impose police state tactics.
There is nothing like the feeling of being pulled along a frozen trail by a team of sled dogs.
Their eagerness electrifies the lines tethering them to the sled, and you can feel their desire to run in your bones.
I have been pulled by trains, horses, elephants and even people, but being pulled by canines born to pull, born to run, born for the cold and wide-open land is a different connection altogether. It’s a tether only the musher truly knows.
My concept of mushing and sled dogs was a combination of “Call of the Wild,” and PETA ads before I moved to Alaska.
I was lucky that the first musher I met was Dallas Seavey, who would go on to become the youngest winner of the Iditrarod sled dog race less than two years later.
Seavey, a member of the racing Seaveys, as venerable an Alaskan family as I would come to know, was coming off a top-10 finish in the Iditarod and a win in the Jr.
He was poised to win it all, and if I listened closely to his words in our first conversation, he laid it all out in plain English.
His dogs would continue to breed for endurance, for less rest, faster digestion and more run.
He told me the only limit to the 1,000-mile race would be human endurance. And we all know that we’ve reached the limit of that without the addition of performance-enhancing drugs or human growth hormone.
It’s a science project began by Gregor Mendel and perfected in land of the Midnight Sun under blindingly frozen skies over tundra and stream with overflow, sub-zero wind and aurora borealis.
The day I met Dallas he was busy dealing with dogs, which is so normal as to be habitual. He, like other mushers, lives a life that is revolved by dogs. Like the opposite of the earth and sun, his universe is barking and shit, endless shit.
And cold.
It was near zero when I ran with his team. The sun was low on the horizon, as it neared the shortest day of the year. As high in the sky as it would get that day, it painted gold across ice and snow in a meadow near where Dallas lived with his wife and children.
We drove in a circle, the wind whipping over us as the dogs strained in harness, responding to his gee and haw.
We splashed through some melted streams and waded through deeper snow, and I let the sun wash over me and focused in on the sounds of the padding feet on hardened trail, the panting and the slice of sled skis through ice and snow.
After all of that, we were rewarded with hot cocoa in the warm yurt where the Seaveys resided.
I’m not an animal person. I loved a dog once. I loved him for half my whole life, and he died one day, and I felt like I lost a part of me. It’s been hard to love another animal since then.
Seavey walked into the yurt with a box full of puppies, and for the first time in a long, long time, I felt my heart twitch just a little as the balls of smiling fur wriggled in my arms.
Not much compares to an armful of puppy.
But these guys only get so much coddling, because they’ll be on the puppy team before long, and that means they start putting on the miles, and sojourns inside to the warm world of humans will be less and less, until they learn to love the cold.
The colder the better. For racing dogs.
Graphene: The Miracle Material
Graphene is 200 time stronger than steel, harder than diamond, super flexible, and an excellent conductor of heat and electricity—and yet is only one atom thick. It’s a material made out of a single layer of pure carbon atoms, arranged in a honeycomb lattice connected by the strongest bonds known to science. Basically, graphene is just a super-thin sheet of graphite, the material found in pencils—so thin that a stack of three million sheets would be just 1 mm thick. Physicists Andre Geim and Konstantin Novoselov discovered it in 2004, and later received a Nobel Prize for their work because graphene is an incredibly versatile material—comparable to the vast range of uses that plastic has—and can even be modified to take on different properties: researchers have successfully made it magnetic. Graphene’s amazing mechanical, electrical and optical properties mean that it could be used for vast range of applications, from stronger and lighter car and airplane parts, to super-tough textiles, to healthcare, to a replacement for silicon in nano-electronics—which could lead to faster, thinner and more flexible electronic devices. It may be some years before we see these applications fully realised because there are still obstacles to overcome, but there’s no doubt that graphene has incredible and unparalleled potential.
The river that DID run red: Residents of Chinese city left baffled after Yangtze turns scarlet.
“It is the last thing the residents of Chongqing would have expected to see.
But the Yangtze river, which runs through the city in south-western China, turned a bright shade of orange-red yesterday.
The waterway where the Yangtze met the Jialin River provided a fascinating contrast as the red started to filter into the other river.”
- Meeting point: A ship sails across the junction of the polluted Yangtze River (left) and the Jialin River in Chongqing, China, yesterday.
- Shock: The Yangtze river, which runs through the city in south-western China, turned a bright shade of orange-red yesterday.
- In the thick of it: A fisherman goes about his daily business.
- Bizarre: The red river gave Chongqing an apocalyptic appearance yesterday.
- Check it out! Some residents were so amazed that they collected samples in water bottles.
“Although the cause is yet to be determined, this is not the first time a river has turned red in China.Last December, the Jian River in the city of Luoyang, in the north Henan province, turned red after becoming polluted by a powerful dye.
The dye was being dumped into the city’s storm drain network by two illegal dye workshops.”
See more photos & continue reading here.
