6 Superpowers That Really Exist We’re fascinated by the idea of superpowers; they’re the stuff of myth and legend, not to mention fantasy, science fiction, and comic books. But they also exist in our world, too. Here, Gemsigns author Stephanie Saulter gives six examples. We know many animals have abilities we don’t. We don’t tend to think of them as “super;” they’re just different. But what if they could become human abilities? What if some humans already have them? In my (R)evolution novels ( Gemsigns , Binary and Gillung ) it’s important for the abilities engineered into gems (genetically modified humans) to feel plausible; I didn’t want any gem to be able to do something that hasn’t already been documented in a living creature somewhere on this planet. But their abilities still needed to be, well, super . Turns out this wasn’t as difficult as I feared. I found out some amazing stuff during my research – including the existence of real-life human mutants. Here are six of my of favorite superpower factoids. Bioelectrogenesis: Electric eels (which are more closely related to catfish than true eels) can generate both low and high voltage electrical charges, using special organs that take up more than three quarters of their body. An adult eel can deliver a shock of up to 500 volts and 1 amp of current – probably not enough to kill an adult human, but you wouldn’t want to test it. Biosonar: Okay, you already know about the sophisticated echolocation systems of bats and dolphins. But did you know some humans have also developed a form of sonar? There’ve been documented cases of people who have lost their sight learning to navigate by emitting clicking sounds and building up a picture of their environment from the echoes that come back. We’re not talking Daredevil yet, but it may only be a matter of time… Electroreception: Sharks have specialised organs called the ampullae of Lorenzini that enable them to sense the electromagnetic fields produced by other living things. They use it to find prey, and possibly to navigate by detecting the movement of ocean currents through the Earth’s magnetic field. Talk about being able to sense the planet. Sight: We come out pretty well on this one. Human vision is astonishing – few other animals can see as many colours as we can, to say nothing of our ability to focus on tiny details up close, and see clearly far into the distance. But we don’t see everything. Consider the mantis shrimp, which has trinocular vision (we’re binocular), at least twelve photoreceptors (we have three), and the ability to perceive polarised light. It’s almost impossible to imagine what it ‘sees’, but it’s more than we do. Closer to home, cats and dogs have the kind of night vision that means they aren’t likely to bang into the coffee table while mounting a midnight raid on the kitchen. No animal can see in complete darkness – sight is a function of light – but they can decipher detail in light levels that are imperceptible to humans. They’re also great at focusing on fast-moving objects, such as fleeing prey, and – along with some other mammals, and many birds and insects – can see ultraviolet (UV) light. Smell . You probably think I’m going to talk about dogs again, and it’s true that their olfactory sense is several hundred thousand times greater than ours. But bears are even better – a polar bear can smell a seal buried under three feet of snow from half a mile away. Some sharks can detect blood at one part per million. And if we get away from noses entirely, the antennae of some male luna moths can detect a single molecule of a female’s sex pheromone at a distance of more than six miles. Strength: This is the closest thing to an X-Men moment you’re going to get from me – and it’s pretty darn close. There have been at least two documented cases of a mutation in humans that triggers accelerated muscle growth and extraordinary strength right from birth; it happens when both copies of a myostatin-producing gene are defective, is extremely rare, and no one knows what the long term health consequences are. Having said that…the child in whom the mutation was first identified could, at age four, hold two 6.6 lb weights with his arms extended. That’s the equivalent of 3 litres of water. In each hand. Discuss on the BBS | Tweet
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6 Superpowers That Really Exist
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Creating a font from a classic comic Typographer Nate Piekos describes how he created a 21st-century typeface from a 1980 issue of Elfquest —just in time to begin lettering the comic series’ conclusive installment. I remember asking my mother to get me the collected Elfquest trade paperbacks for Christmas one year. Weeks went by, and being a nosy kid, I stumbled upon them, concealed in the back of a closet just before the big holiday. Giddy with anticipation, I told no one. I bided my time … Wendy and Richard Pini’s epic tales got me through junior high and beyond. I carted those trade paperbacks with me when I left my mom’s house, went to design school, started a career in comics, got married … and moved a half dozen times in between. Fast-forward to just a few months ago. Editor Sierra Hahn told me new Elfquest comics were coming to Dark Horse and asked if I was interested in not only designing Wendy’s hand-lettering font, but if I’d also like to take on the lettering duties of the whole series! I couldn’t reply fast enough. Of course I was interested! It was one of those surreal full-circle moments when I get to work with some of my comic book heroes. I immediately broke out those faded, dog-eared Elfquest collections for reference, and they sat on my desk the entire time I worked on Wendy’s typeface. I’ve designed hundreds of fonts, but designing the definitive typeface of Wendy’s classic hand lettering was a pretty big deal to me. It had to capture the essence of the original Elfquest , it had to be top-notch software, and it had to be special. Wendy Pini’s lettering from Issue #9 of Elfquest Here’s how I did it Wendy picked out what she considered her best hand lettering-a selection of pages from Elfquest #9. And Dark Horse provided me with high resolution scans of all the pages. My first task was to study the letters in Photoshop, make an intimate analysis of the style as a whole, and choose the characters I thought were most representative. Every hand letterer brings unique qualities to the page. Some are slight, others overt, like the wiggle on the bottom of Wendy’s L’s! Idiosyncratic letterforms help establish the series’ distinctive voice Once I had enough characters picked out to work with, I brought the art into Adobe Illustrator and began creating vector objects of each character. Many typographers would autotrace these, but I always create the objects point by point. The time invested is hours versus seconds, but the results are far superior. Obviously, there are a lot of characters on your keyboard that don’t show up very often, or at all, in comic book lettering. But it’s important to me that a finished font contain these th ings-brackets, a plus sign, accents, etc. It’s a matter of craftsmanship and pride in the end product. You could drive a fancy car just fine without a paint job, but it just wouldn’t seem finished, would it? Many of these lesser-used characters were missing from Wendy’s samples, but the Pinis gave me permission to invent the missing pieces, mimicking Wendy’s style. In the end, I think I did a pretty seamless job. Piekos traces and adjusts the letterforms manually, avoiding use of automated tools available in applications such as Adobe Illustrator At least two versions of each letter were created, so later on, when I moved the project over to Fontlab, I could program Open Type autoligatures for any instance when two of the same letter appeared side by side. (Think of the two o’s in the word book.) The autoligatures swap one letter out so that they’re slightly different in appearance, creating a more organic look. The art contained fewer samples of bold and italic lettering, which are used less often than regular text, so I needed to search a larger number of Wendy’s art pages to get what I needed. I repeated the same process of checking off my top choices of which letters to create as point-bypoint vectors. Characters that I couldn’t find in the art were once again designed from scratch, simulating Wendy’s style. Over the course of about a week, I had re-created or simulated everything I needed. I decided the italic style would be created by slanting the regular characters in Fontlab, so I took some measurements of Wendy’s natural italic slant. You may imagine some very technical equation for figuring this out, or even some preprogrammed action in Illustrator, and those things probably exist, but taking the simplest approach, I just back-slanted some samples of Wendy’s italic letters with Illustrator’s Shear tool until they were nearly vertical. This gave me a measurement of 30°-35°. I made a note for later and moved on to tidying up the vectors that I’d made. As my work progressed, I’d send regular previews to Sierra and the Pinis, getting feedback and making adjustments. The Pinis decided to dial back the degree of slant on both the italic and bold italic sets-we ended up at a 24° slant-and reduce the weight of the bold italic a bit. Here are the samples I submitted to the Pinis for final approval before moving everything over to Fontlab. A font finally becomes a working piece of software once it’s been programmed. This happens in Fontlab or similar software, and it’s when things begin to get very technical, but don’t worry—I’m just going to hit the highlights! Careful adjustment of distances between specific pairs of letters — kerning — is a time-consuming process essential to a high-quality typeface. The most important process at this stage is kerning (how any two characters fit together). Imagine a letter T next to an A They have to scoot together to look right within a word. Over the last decade, I’ve assembled a proprietary list of over eleven thousand kerning pairs that I check and adjust for every font I create. The process can take anywhere from hours to days and is the true measure of a professionally made font. Each typeface also needs to be cleaned up one final time, spaced, and hinted (the process of making characters render properly onscreen), and the Open Type autoligatures must be programmed. After much work, the software was saved as installable font files and approved by the Pinis. As I remember it, we made barely any changes at this point. (Always good news!) The font Richard and Wendy decided to call “Elfquest” was finished, and it was about to get a trial by fire! The completed typeface Dark Horse was going to print the Final Quest Special issue that the Pinis had already completed. But first it needed to be relettered with the new font to match the style of upcoming issues. So within a day or two of finishing, I was hard at work using the new typeface and developing a style guide that evoked those classic tales I grew up with while bringing a fresh, uniform aesthetic to the series’ lettering. If the lettering didn’t really jump out at you in this comic, I’ll take that as a compliment. When comic lettering is done well, by a letterer with a love of typography and graphic design, it’s unobtrusive to the reader and complements the art. When it’s done poorly, it’s a distraction, and worse yet, it makes your reading experience difficult. It’s a serious business to me. That said, if you did enjoy the lettering in Elfquest: The Final Quest half as much as I enjoyed designing it … well … I guess we both have my mom to thank! ✦ Issue #1 of Elfquest: TFQ is available now from Dark Horse Comics. See more of Nate’s work at Blambot.com . A panel from Elfquest typeset … in Elfquest ✦ Nate Piekos graduated with a Bachelor of Arts in Design from Rhode Island College in 1998. Since founding Blambot, he has created some of the industry’s most popular fonts and has used them to letter comic books for Marvel Comics, DC Comics, Oni Press, and Dark Horse Comics, as well as dozens of independent publishers. In 2001 he became type designer to Harvey Award Winner, Mike “Madman” Allred, and has had his designs licensed by such companies as Microsoft, Six Flags Amusement Parks, New Yorker Magazine, The Gap, and many more. Nate’s work has not only been utilized in comics, but in video games, on television, and in feature films as well. When not designing, Nate is committed to a regular fitness routine, reads voraciously, writes and illustrates webcomics, and is a dedicated musician. He’s married and lives in New England. COMMENTS AND DISCUSSION Previously in Typography Domo Arigato, Mr. Roboto 
Nicholas Carlson, at Business Insider , on the day AOL’s CEO briefly interrupted a motivational post-layoffs session with staff to fire one of them on-the-spot —and the business pressures that led to it. The impulsive firing on the heels of this statement made Armstrong sound unhinged — “schizophrenic in his thinking” is how a source close to him later described it. Several days later, Armstrong apologized privately to Abel Lenz and then publicly to AOL employees. But, by then, mainstream outlets including Yahoo and the Daily Mail had picked up the news. Some people viewed the public firing as a bad-ass CEO move, the kind of thing that a famously demanding executive like Steve Jobs or Larry Ellison might have done. But most people across the country and world saw it as gratuitous and humiliating: What’s wrong with Tim Armstrong, people wondered? What kind of CEO fires some poor guy in front of all his colleagues? What did this say about what was going on at AOL? 
Jeff Atwood loves everything about his Surface Pro 2 except for its terrible battery life . The Windows light usage battery life situation has not improved at all since 2009. If anything the disparity between OS X and Windows light usage battery life has gotten worse. Microsoft positions Windows 8 as an operating system that’s great for tablets, which are designed for casual web browsing and light app use – but how can that possibly be true when Windows idle power management is so much worse than the competition’s desktop operating system in OS X – much less their tablet and phone operating system, iOS? A typical data point: Windows, on a 13″ MacBook Air, lasts about half as long per charge as OS X. What’s the deal? 
Looks like the government shutdown didn’t stop federal agents from shutting down the most popular “deep web” illegal drug market. In San Francisco, federal prosecutors have indicted Ross William Ulbricht, who is said to be the founder of Silk Road. 
oclHashcat-plus is a “password-recovery” tool that chews through 8-million guesses a second. It optimizes its guesses by trying phrases from “the Bible, common literature, and in online discussions, ” and by formulating characters into websites’ required “password-construction protocols.” One security researcher cracked the passphrase “Ph’nglui mglw’nafh Cthulhu R’lyeh wgah’nagl fhtagn1, ” a phrase from an H.P.