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Could immortality be this easy?
Eat turmeric, exercise regularly, sleep well – a few of many tips to increase your lifespan. But if they work, they will probably only give you a handful of extra years. If you want to drastically prolong your time on earth, here’s what you might do instead.
The joy of getting your leg back
Meet Mike Jones who lost his leg in a motor accident but with the help of an artificial limb, he felt as if he had his leg back again. Scientists across the world are working hard on robotic limbs that can be integrated into our human bodies in a way that they become better than our biological limbs. Leaving us with the question… will we be able to become super humans at some point?
Imagine Beyond is a new web series about human augmentation. We are at an exciting stage of evolution. What was science-fiction is now becoming fact and it is happening faster than most of us expected. Missed the first episode? Check it out here.
hacker:HUNTER WannaCRY, Chapter 3
Stuck in the US, free on bail, Marcus Hutchins considers his options and decides to plead guilty. He faces up to 10 years in jail.
hacker:HUNTER WannaCry, Chapter 2
His random act of heroism makes security researcher Marcus Hutchins famous overnight. Being celebrated by media around the world, he spends a week in Las Vegas. When he wants to leave, the FBI arrests him. They suspect him of creating malware.
hacker:HUNTER WannaCry - Chapter 1
One day in May 2017, computers all around the world suddenly shut down. A malware called WannaCry asks for ransom. The epidemic suddenly stops, because a young, British researcher found a killswitch, by accident.
The assistant: controlling the gear
Ryan Hill was managing the camera equipment at #fromkurilswithlove
Ryan Hill was managing the camera equipment at #fromkurilswithlove
Ryan Hill was the assistant to Chris Burkard on #fromkurilswithlove. And although the camera crew was travelling light, there still was an enormous amount of equipment to take care of. They only brought less than 20 bags with equipment. it can easily be 100 in other shoots. Looking after the equipment, among other things, was Ryan’s job. Here, he gives a short impression of his work and the challenges on board.
Find photos of the mess and a list of all the equipment on board in this article.
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“I was shaking, I think I sweat through my t-shirt and through my blazer. I did not know how to feel – it just felt like everything was coming to an end but not in a good way…”
For Marcus Hutchins, a dream that had turned into a nightmare ended in July with a compassionate sentence by a judge in Milwaukee. “I just got out of my court hearing for the sentencing, of course. I wasn’t really sure how it was going to go down, I was very, very nervous”, he told us right after leaving the courtroom. “But the judge took a very broad view of the entire circumstances rather than just the case at hand – he weighed up my past work helping security. He also went into the unique circumstances of me being stuck in a foreign country instead of at home. And he ended up ruling ‘time served’, which was actually a big surprise to me. But looking back it does make sense when you weigh in the fact that I’ve not been at home, I’ve been forced to stay in a foreign country for two years.”
Hutchins became a cybersecurity celebrity from one day to another in 2017. “I came back from lunch, saw all the news about something targeting the NHS and so I decided to dig a little deeper into what it does, which was when I noticed that there was an unregistered domain inside the code”, he recalls what happened that day. He registered the domain and the infection count went down. He had – rather accidentally – found the kill switch for the Wanna Cry epidemic.
Marcus Hutchins, the cybersecurity hero who stopped WannaCry turned cybercrime defendant, tells his story in this exclusive documentary. Coming to YouTube en…
It changed his life – he became a hero, just to fall to zero a few weeks after. “I woke up on, I believe, a Sunday morning to see my face over a two page spread of the Daily Mail. Media had actually posted my address in the paper, which meant now I had the risk of the bad guys I am fighting, knowing where I live.”
Hutchins is a calm and friendly personality, and he pleaded guilty to a dark past. He had created a banking malware called Kronos and sold it through an online marketplace. It’s unclear if it was his sudden fame that sparked the FBI’s interest in Hutchins or if they had been after him before, but it didn’t take long until his short period of heroism was over.
He spent a few days of vacation at the hacker conference DefCon in Las Vegas. With friends he shared a mansion with a huge pool (as they figured out it was cheaper than booking hotel rooms for all of them). They celebrated more than actually participating in the conference – with a 30 bedroom mansion, huge pool, sports cars. Back at the airport, though, the party was over. “At this point, I am completely exhausted, I have no idea what’s going on anymore and I am just relaxing in the lounge waiting for my flight. And a man and two other people in uniform approached me and asked: are you Marcus Hutchins? I said yes and they asked me to come with them. It turned out the guy was actually an FBI agent and that’s when they arrested me”.
Two years later he left the court, clearly not a hero anymore. Yet, a free man.
See his story and the story of WannaCry in the second part of our hacker:HUNTER series: WannaCry – The Marcus Hutchins Story. On Tomorrow Unlocked at the end of October.
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25th October: hacker:HUNTER WannaCry
The Marcus Hutchins Story
The Marcus Hutchins Story
Taylor Rees is one of the most exciting filmmakers around, making documentaries from forgotten volcanic archipelagos to red-hot reflections on the American civil war. Who is Taylor Rees and what other documentaries has she made that you must see?
Director. Adventurer. Photographer. Environmental documentary filmmaker. The list goes on, but this description gives you an idea of her versatility and talent.
Taylor Rees’ work focuses on environmental and humanitarian issues, exploring stories beneath the surface with insatiable curiosity, deepening public understanding of natural resource conflicts, climate change and human rights. Her middle name is Freesolo: No moniker but a lasting reminder of her parents’ love of free climbing.
Her career dates back to a Masters’s degree from Yale in environmental management and anthropology. This is the foundation for her stories, giving them a rigorous scientific and social justice approach.
Stylistically, Taylor’s work uses the power of landscape – skies, mountain ranges and large expanses. She also looks at a landscape’s story – the intricacies of its beauty, connection and how life interacts within different places. For storytellers out there, her TED talk is a must.
Taylor Rees said in a recent interview with culture and adventure journalist Simon Schreyer, “The love of what’s beautiful to me is deeply personal and it gives me a lot of intention, desire and drive to find aspects of beauty within a human life, or in a landscape, or in a way to incorporate that beauty in my own life. It’s like an indescribable phenomenon, that we don’t even know how to talk about rationally.”
Her first film Down To Nothing follows a five-person team who set out on an ambitious trek to find out whether Burmese peak Hkakabo Razi is really Southeast Asia’s highest point.
Alaska’s Ruth Glacier is a climber’s dream. When director Taylor Rees and climbers Renan Ozturk and Alex Honnold choose a specific route to the top, unfortunately – or perhaps, fortunately – the weather puts a swift stop to their expectations. What follows is remarkable.
Watch Taylor Rees’ film Life Coach
Is there room for glamour in the testosterone-filled world of ski mountaineering? Taylor and her team ask big questions as they follow ski mountaineer Hilaree Nelson in a stunning depiction of masculinity and femininity in sport.
Watch Taylor Rees’ film Mentors: Hilaree Nelson
Both Black history and US history, Ashes to Ashes is one of Taylor Rees’ more poignant and at times horrific explorations of humanity. She follows Winfred Rembert, an artist and rare survivor of a Jim Crow-era attempted lynching, as he explains a dark past.
When the guardian of an almost unreachable archipelago in the Far East of Russia hitched a ride with Taylor and her team, no one expected the result. From Kurils With Love’s team includes Rees’ spouse and fellow filmmaker Renan Ozturk. They set out to make a classic adventure story but what they got was something far more powerful.
Taylor’s most recent work is set on Mount Everest and narrated by Renan Ozturk. The big question: Who was the first to reach the summit? Rees directs this gripping and sometimes strained look at the history of Everest expeditions, the fraught relationship between indigenous guides and the commercialization of a sacred mountain.
If her previous work is anything to go by, the future is bright. To make sure you don’t miss her next project, keep up to date with Taylor’s adventures on her Instagram or the Taylor Freesolo Rees website.
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Imagine an entire country enacts a law that requires the use of a more energy-efficient LED lightbulbs. Sounds good right? But what if I told you that in every country this law has been passed energy consumption went up?
The reason why could be a bit of a mystery, but it’s exactly why using green technology to solve problems can be incredibly difficult. It all boils down to two main reasons: The first is that a lot of what we consider to be the sustainable option, is only sustainable if a product is used in a certain way. The second is that people’s behavioral changes that come from introducing new technology are hard to predict. That’s what we call “rebound effects”. But what does that mean?
Like many people today, you might feel guilty about going to your favorite café because every time you buy a coffee, it comes in a disposable plastic cup that you know will somehow, someway, end up in a landfill and slowly make its way into the ocean where it may sit for decades or even centuries. What do you do? The easy answer for many of us is to purchase a reusable coffee mug that we take with us every day to fill up our coffee. Voila! You’ve circumvented the need for a single-use paper cup with a plastic lid. The purchase feels good knowing that we’ve done our small part to help save the planet. Problem solved… right?
A Woman Holding A Takeout Coffee Getty Images
But is any of this really true- that a reusable mug is “greener” than a disposable cup? As it turns out, it depends on how you use your reusable coffee container. This is because, in part, it requires more CO2 emissions to produce than a disposable cup. Just to make up for emissions, it might need to be used up to 100 times in order to balance the emissions of a disposable cup. And it gets even trickier: “Sustainability” doesn’t just mean reducing CO2 emissions, right?
All the materials that combined make up everything we buy come at an environmental cost. If we take into account the materials used in a reusable coffee mug, the water it takes to wash it after each use, the soap and more – it may take over a thousand uses compared to a disposable mug to balance the overall environmental impacts. If you’re anything like me and you tend to lose reusable mugs every now and then, this really calls into question whether it’s an environmentally friendly purchase.
Nowadays, this is why researchers are trying to understand the lifecycle of products – the environmental impacts starting from the extraction of materials from the Earth, through manufacturing, to the transportation to stores – all for increased understanding of the conditions under which a product might actually be considered “sustainable”.
The second, even more tricky issue, is that day-to-day human behavior may change when we exposed people to a new piece of technology. Going back to the coffee mug, for example, a consumer may drink 50% more coffee, simply because the volume of the mug is larger compared to a single-use cup. At first, it may seem like a small change, but on a large scale, an increase in coffee demand, simply from using a bigger mug, could easily lead to a huge number of unintended consequences: Increased coffee demand, for example, has long been linked to deforestation and economic inequality. These types of changes are known as direct rebound effects.
On the other side of that same coin are indirect rebound effects. Indirect rebound effects are even more difficult to quantify, and there can be many of them associated with a single new product or technology. In our coffee cup scenario, it could be that with your new purchase you start drinking more milk with your coffee – another driver of deforestation. It might mean you make more frequent trips to a café and increase your time driving which increases your annual CO2 emissions. You might start purchasing more snacks alongside each new coffee, increasing your net consumption of goods that were likely imported from all over the world. As you can imagine, those indirect rebound effects are extremely hard to track and basically impossible to predict in advance.
It’s amazing that even the example of the reusable coffee mug above can have so many unintended consequences on a global scale. It’s also important to note that these may be particularly prevalent in technological products that are individually owned, rather than something that is publicly owned. This is exactly why the problem gets even more precarious with initiatives like promoting an entire rehaul of the transportation system by electric vehicles (EV). Other options like making public transit and biking more accessible is more likely to have a net positive effect since both are options that are less materially intensive than an EV.
Electric car charging. Getty Images
The lifecycle of electric vehicles already requires rare earth metals that are more environmentally destructive than a comparable fossil-fuel-powered vehicle when being mined. In many places, they also have thin margins in terms of how much they actually reduce emissions compared to fossil-fuel-powered vehicles. This gets tricky because when people buy an EV, their behavior may change. In their excitement of driving a new, “sustainable” vehicle, they may end up driving it more often and actually emitting more carbon dioxide than the average diesel-powered vehicle – a direct rebound effect commonly associated with electric cars. Electric vehicle owners may also make other decisions differently: to use less public transport, car share less with others, or to use the tax rebate issued to promote electric cars (such as in California) to buy other products that, in the end, all contribute to increased emissions and environmental destruction. Of course, none of this means we should keep using huge amounts of fossil fuels in the face of climate change- it just means that the solutions to these problems may be even more difficult than we initially expected.
Pollution Getty Images
While the idea of rebound effects applies most commonly to topics related to energy use, it’s conceptual framework can apply to almost any new integrated technology or product. As of now, all that researchers and policy-makers can do is monitor the impacts in the aftermath of introducing new “green” technology. In the face of these rebound effects, more and more people have been asking themselves whether or not the current technological solutions to climate change are the way to go, especially for individually owned products. Given the urgency of climate change mitigation, the environmental destruction many types of green technology causes because of their lifecycle is precarious. Added is the uncertainty of how rebound effects might actually reduce emissions benefits of EVs in the real world compared to theory. And, in the end, it’s why we can mysteriously advocate for energy-efficient lightbulbs and see energy consumption go up. Sometimes, “green” energy may be anything but.
Related articles:
The Guardian – Could the rebound effect undermine climate efforts?
World Economic Forum – Do fuel-efficient cars make us drive more?
A hodgepodge mix and a stroke of luck
Chris Burkard's thoughts at the end of #fromkurilswithlove
Chris Burkard's thoughts at the end of #fromkurilswithlove
#fromkurilswithlove was a coincidence, in many ways. A photographer (Renan Ozturk) does a commercial shoot for a company (Kaspersky) and they find a common interest (The Kuril Islands). The photographer finds a group of people that is as passionate about the idea as himself, and a year later they all board a boat.
Chris Burkard was one of those people and in this video he explains how this random mix of people ended up being a perfect crew.
If you are a surf fan you probably heard of Chris Burkard. By breaking out of his daily routine he became not just one of the most famous surf photographers but also nature photographers. Neither he nor his parents thought so when Chris decided to quit his job at 19 to pursue his dream career and travel to exotic touristic destinations taking pictures of surfers in front of blue skies. Chris was seeking adventure – but all he got was a monotonous routine. The more he travelled to overcrowded places, the more he craved secluded wide and open places. And so began, as he calls it, his personal crusade against the mundane by searching for destinations that seemed too cold, too remote, and too dangerous to surf at.
Chris’ first trip took him to Norway, where in-between of harsh conditions and frozen chunks of ice he found exactly what he was looking for: the perfect surfing place in a naturally beautiful landscape. And he connected with the world in a way, he could never do on a crowded touristic beach. Validated by this experience he travelled all over the world to Alaska, Iceland, Norway, Russia, as well as the Kuril Islands, where he was part of the #fromkurilswithlove expedition, to seek the beauty and adventure the world has to offer and by this inspiring us to appreciate nature and ideally create a world where the environment doesn’t need protection.
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