Artist Creates Incredible 25-Foot-Tall Castles from Icicles

50-year-old Brent Christensen, an artist from Alpine, Utah, creates extraordinary structures that I thought only existed in my imagination and really cool fantasy stories. For the past four years, Christensen has spent his time perfecting the craft of making structures as tall as 20 to 25 ft, using nothing but intertwining icicles as building blocks. He developed an interest in the unique craft began way back in 2000, when he and his family moved from sunny California to chilly Utah, and he was looking for some fun outdoor activities.
“We started off doing winter stuff in the yard, playing around with the kids, making igloos, ice forts and slides and stuff,” he says. “And it just evolved. One year I stumbled upon the concept of doing icicles by spraying water. We made one with a big wooden frame under it, and when it melted in the spring it was a huge mess with a pile of soaking wood. The following year I didn’t use any wood so it would just cleanly melt away. During the course of that winter I stumbled upon the concept of fusing icicles together to make a lattice to spray water on and build upon.” It was then that Chirstensen began building his magnificent ice fortresses. Utah locals would often stop by his house to gawk at the castles. Once he got pretty good at making icicle castles, he approached a few resorts nearby and asked if they would be interested in displaying his work for their guests. It took a while before the manager of a small local spa and resort agreed, in 2009, but this small opening got him into the public eye and there was no looking back from there.

Pakistan test-fires MRBM Hatf V (Ghauri)

RAWALPINDI: Pakistan today successfully conducted the training launch of Medium Range Ballistic Missile (MRBM)Hatf V (Ghauri).

The launch was conducted by a Strategic Missile Group of the Army Strategic Force Command on the culmination of a field training exercise that was aimed at testing the operational readiness of the Army Strategic Force Command.

Ghauri ballistic missile is a liquid fuel missile which can carry both conventional and nuclear warheads over a distance of 1300 kms.

The test monitoring of the launch was conducted at the National Command Centre through the medium of National Command Authority’s fully automated Strategic Command and Control Support System (SCCSS).

It may be recalled that the SCCSS enables robust Command and Control capability of all strategic assets with round the clock situational awareness in a digitized network centric environment to decision makers at the National Command Centre (NCC).

The test consolidates and strengthens Pakistan’s deterrence capability, and national security.

The President and Prime Minister congratulated all ranks of the Army Strategic Force Command on the excellent standard achieved during training which was reflected in the proficient handling of the weapon system in the field and the accuracy of the training launch

Felix Baumgartner, the man who fell to Earth

SIXTY-five years ago, Charles "Chuck" Yeager became the first man to break the sound barrier, in an experimental rocket plane.
Yesterday, on the anniversary of that supersonic breakthrough, an Austrian stuntman did basically the same thing - but without the plane.
As the amber of a desert sunrise faded to azure blue over New Mexico, Felix Baumgartner, a professional daredevil, strapped himself to a 50-storey-high balloon that would take him to the edge of space.
Hours later, he emerged from his capsule. He took a moment to survey the view the curvature of the earth, the patterns of continental weather systems. And then, from 128,097ft, or more than 38km up, he jumped into the record books.

Over the next few moments he demonstrated that a man in a $US200,000 pressurised suit can plunge through the stratosphere, accelerate to 1136km, free-fall for more than four minutes and live to tell the tale, speaking at a press conference. Preliminary readings also suggested that he had become the first skydiver to break the sound barrier.
As he fell through a near-vacuum, his handlers at mission control urged him to talk to them. It seemed, however, that Mr Baumgartner was left as speechless as his Earth-bound spectators. His silence was frightening: leading up to the attempt, he had battled panic attacks caused by bouts of claustrophobia in his suit. Ultimately, however, he achieved a set of landmarks unlikely to be outdone for generations. The previous free-fall record, of 102,800ft, had been set by Joe Kittinger, a US Air Force test pilot, at the dawn of the space age in 1960.
Mr Baumgartner, 43, accelerated from 0 to 1126kmh in less than 40 seconds, but at first he had no sense of motion. Mr Kittinger, 84, who acted as his mentor, described the sensation of jumping at such monumental, nearly airless altitudes as akin to "a state of suspended animation. No [sense of] acceleration, no movement, no noise, nothing. It was absolutely quiet, absolutely still, and absolutely horrifying".
As the air density increased closer to Earth, Mr Baumgartner slowed and stopped spinning, bringing forth cheers from his back-up team. He deployed his parachute at about 5000ft. Minutes later, he performed a perfect landing, triggering yet more applause. He had broken three records: the highest manned balloon flight; the highest altitude from which a man had free-fallen; the first supersonic free-fall.
The feat was truly death-defying. If his suit had malfunctioned, his blood might have boiled while millions watched on the internet. In short, for Red Bull, the drinks company that funded the venture, it was going to be one of the best, or worst, marketing stunts in history.
The day began with a series of nervous pre-dawn conferences between engineers, doctors and pilots responsible for avoiding disaster. Ultimately, the ascent included just one heart-stopping glitch, when a problem with Mr Baumgartner's visor risked aborting the mission.
"This is very serious," he told his handlers at mission control as he travelled upwards at close to 160kmh. "Sometimes it's getting foggy when I exhale."
For several agonising seconds, the technicians at mission control sat silent. At the request of Mr Kittinger, an audio feed from the capsule was shut off. Mr Baumgartner's mother, who had wept as her son ascended, was powerless to do anything but pray.
Then a small army of technicians scrambled to trouble-shoot the problem. When the time came, it was Mr Kittinger who talked "Fearless Felix" through the jump's final stages.
"Stand up on the exterior step but be sure to duck your head down as you go out that door," he said as his protege prepared to leap. As he paused on the ledge, Mr Kittinger added: "The rest is yours."
The jump organisers hoped to test whether parachuting from immense heights could prove a viable means of escape for the nascent commercial space industry. Those parsing the biometric data gathered during the mission included the US Air Force and Nasa. It was clear, however, that the objectives went beyond scientific discovery.
The mission was filmed by 20 cameras and generated global excitement, forcing the organisers to rebut claims that the primary objective was publicity. "This is a flight test programme, not a stunt," said Art Thompson, the project's technical director.
In Roswell, a flat dusty town best known as the site of a rumoured UFO landing in 1947, conditions had to be perfect. Last Tuesday, a gust of wind had twisted the giant balloon; the mission was abandoned and $US70,000 of helium was lost. The mission was left with just one back-up balloon. The hiatus that followed helped to highlight the scale of a stunt that was first dreamt of seven years ago. The balloon was the largest to have carried a man. The plastic from which it was made was a tenth of the thickness of a sandwich bag.
Mr Baumgartner, a former military parachutist who lives in Switzerland, was famous. In 2003, he became the first person to skydive across the English Channel. He also holds the record for the lowest base jump, 95ft, from the statue of Christ the Redeemer in Rio de Janeiro. He plans to settle down to a quiet life - as a rescue helicopter pilot.

Pills to prevent HIV raise questions

 

NEW YORK: Various trials examining the use of anti-retroviral drugs in healthy heterosexuals as a way to prevent HIV have shown drastically different results, research showed.

The findings of three major studies in Africa, published in the New England Journal of Medicine, raise many questions about which groups would likely benefit and how to manage such treatments in the future, doctors said.

The approach is known as pre-exposure prophylaxis, or PrEP, in which healthy people take antiretroviral drugs -- the kind used to treat people with HIV -- in order to prevent getting the virus during sex with HIV-infected partners.

One study detailed in the journal which included heterosexual couples -- each with one HIV-positive partner, one HIV-negative -- showed a 67 to 75 percent reduced risk of getting HIV among uninfected partners taking the drugs.

The study, known as Partners PrEP, ran from 2008 to 2010 in Kenya and Uganda and included more than 4,700 couples. It randomly assigned the HIV-negative partners to once-daily tenofovir, a combination of tenofovir-emtricitabine, or a placebo.

Both treatments showed "significant" and a "similar magnitude" of protection for both men and women, the study said.

Adherence to the drug regimen was also high in this study, with 82 percent of samples from randomly selected participants showing detectable drug levels, and study authors estimating an overall 92 percent adherence rate.

Another study detailed in the journal however was stopped early in April 2011 because the group receiving the drug did not show any better level of protection than the group taking the sugar pill.

That study, known as FEM-PrEP, was a randomized trial of 2,120 women in Kenya, South Africa and Tanzania.

Thirty-three women taking the drug became infected with HIV, compared to 35 taking the placebo.

The study also showed a much lower rate of adherence to the medication regimen (40 percent) and a much higher rate of reported side effects such as nausea, vomiting and kidney or liver abnormalities.

Since many of the women in the study reported viewing themselves at low-risk for acquiring HIV, this may have contributed to their failure to take the drug regularly, the study authors said.

A third study, called TDF-2, enrolled 1,219 men and women in Botswana, and showed that pre-exposure prophylaxis had an efficacy rate of about 62 percent in sexually active heterosexual adults.

Previous studies on men who have sex with men have shown that the approach could reduce transmission of HIV by 44 percent overall, though much higher success rates were seen in men who took the pills most regularly.

"Why the results differ across the various studies reported to date is unclear," said an accompanying editorial by Myron Cohen from the University of North Carolina and Lindsey Baden of Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston.

Learning more through future study is important because PrEP is increasingly being seen as a part of an integrated HIV prevention approach, they wrote.

Also, an advisory panel to the US Food and Drug Administration earlier this year recommended approving the first ever pill for HIV prevention. A decision is expected in September.

Therefore, doctors need to consider how to manage such an approach with patients, the authors said.

Questions to consider include which populations are best suited, when to start and stop treatment, how to avoid the risk of drug resistance, what long-term side effects may include, and how to make sure the treatment does not encourage risky behavior such as unprotected sex.

"Concern about the management of pre-exposure prophylaxis of HIV infection should not detract from the potential importance of the intervention," Cohen and Baden wrote.

"The health care provider who recommends pre-exposure prophylaxis needs a management plan that recognizes the effects of the intervention on the patient's sexual behavior, safety and well-being as well as the ramifications of the intervention for the health of the public."\

Internet doomsday virus fizzles out

WASHINGTON: The so-called Internet doomsday virus with the potential to black out tens of thousands of computers worldwide appeared to pose no major problems Monday after a temporary fix expired.

Security firms reported no significant outages linked to the DNS Changer virus, as many Internet service providers have either implemented a fix or contacted customers with steps to clean their computers.

The problem stems from malware known as DNS Changer, which was created by cybercriminals to redirect Internet traffic by hijacking the domain name systems (DNS) of Web browsers.

The ring behind the DNS Changer was shut down last year by the US Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), Estonian police and other law enforcement agencies, after infecting some four million computers worldwide.

Some 210,000 computers worldwide remained infected as of Sunday, including more than 41,000 in the United States, according to a working group monitoring the problem.

On Monday, temporary servers set up by the FBI to direct Internet traffic normally, even for infected computers, were shut down.

But security specialists said most Internet users and providers have had time to work around or fix the problem.

"Although it's not completely over, I think we can count case DNS Changer as a success story, said Mikko Hypponen, chief research officer at the Finland-based firm F-Secure, in a Twitter message.

"Many global operators are keeping their DNS Changer victims online, even after FBI stopped," he said in a separate tweet.

Johannes Ullrich of the SANS Security Institute said that for computers running Windows, the computer "may actually revert to the default settings once the DNS server is turned off."

He added, that "if you used the bad DNS server, chances are that various entities tried to notify you. Google for example should have shown you a banner."

Additionally, Ullrich said the malware is "old enough where antivirus, if you run any, should have signatures for it."

Six Estonians and a Russian were charged in Estonia in November with infecting computers, including NASA machines, with the malware as part of an online advertising scam that reaped at least $14 million.

Because the virus controlled so much Internet traffic, authorities obtained a court order to allow the FBI to operate replacement servers until July 9.

The FBI, as well as Facebook, Google, Internet service providers and security firms have been scrambling to warn users about the problem and direct them to fixes.

FBI spokeswoman Jenny Shearer said the temporary servers were indeed halted and that the agency had no reports of outages.

"I'm not aware of any problems," she told AFP.

"If members of the public are not able to use their Internet they should contact their Internet service providers."

The working group website said traffic directed to the servers that were under temporary control "will be monitored by several service providers and security organizations to insure they are not maliciously hijacked."

Experts said that if a computer is infected, they could still access the Internet by reconfiguring the way they access the domain name system.

Instead of entering an address such as ebay.com, they could use the underlying address, which is a series of numbers, said Marco Preuss of the Russian security firm Kaspersky on the company's Securelist blog.

"If you know the address of the server you can still use it instead of the name, e.g. 195.122.169.23 is 'securelist.com' but this is not an easy solution," he said.

Others with more technical savvy can also reprogram their computer's network settings, to access public DNS servers such as one operated by Google.

Yahoo!, Facebook resolve patent dispute

 

SAN FRANCISCO: Facebook and Yahoo! announced Friday they were launching an advertising partnership as the two tech giants settled a longstanding dispute over patents.

The deal includes "a patent portfolio cross-license" and will allow the two firms to "work together to bring consumers and advertisers premium media experiences promoted and distributed across both Yahoo! and Facebook," a statement by the companies said.

Black widow wins hot dog eating contest

 

NEW YORK: World champion hot dog eater Sonya Thomas crushed her previous record Wednesday in the annual showdown, wolfing down 45 dogs and buns in 10 minutes, to the cheers of an entranced crowd.

The 44-year-old "Black Widow," weighing in at 100 pounds (45 kg), said she achieved her goal of eating her age in dogs. The Korean-American, one of 14 competitors, beat her record from last year by five.

Thousands of spectators braved scorching temperatures to attend Wednesday's contest, held each year in a carnival atmosphere at Coney Island on the July 4 US independence day.

Men's champion Joey Chestnut earned his sixth consecutive Mustard Belt, putting away 68 hot dogs to tie his 2009 record and take home the $10,000 prize.

Chestnut, known as "Jaws," a 28-year-old, 210-pound (95 kg) Californian, beat his 14 competitors by a wide margin -- the second-place finisher ate a mere 52 hotdogs.

The separate women's contest was created last year. "It's good, because we have smaller throats, so we can't swallow as quickly," Thomas said before the competition.

When the Coney Island contest was first held 1916, the winner ate 13 hot dogs in 10 minutes.

Today, the "sport" of competitive eating has taken off in the US, with contestants gorging on hot dogs, chicken wings, hamburgers, crayfish, oysters or fruitcakes at a variety of events all year long.