In 1948, Air Force Secretary Stuart Symington stationed the United States’ long-range nuclear bombers at Offutt Air Force Base in eastern Nebraska, a location safe in the middle of the nation and well-insulated from the coast.

But 70 years later, the base — now home to the U.S. Strategic Command which deters “catastrophic actions from adversaries and poses an immediate threat to any actor who questions U.S. resolve by demonstrating our capabilities” — isn’t safe from historic and record-setting floods. 

Intense rains on top of the rapid melting of ample snow has inundated large swathes of Nebraska and a full one-third of the Offutt Air Force Base, including the headquarters building.

NASA’s Landsat 8 satellite captured before and after images of the flooding — which the European Union Earth Observation Programme called “biblical.” The overloaded river burgeoned in size, creeping into Offutt, neighborhoods, and farmlands. 

A number of potent factors mixed to create what Offutt Air Force Base Commander Mike Manion has labeled a “1,000 year flood” — meaning there’s only a one in 1,000 chance of such an extreme event happening in any given year. 

NASA noted that exceptionally cold Arctic blasts (from a wobbly polar vortex) preserved bounties of snow that soon rapidly melted when “unusually warm” March air produced massive amounts of runoff. Exacerbating matters, the winter’s freeze made the ground less absorbent when extreme downpours then slammed the region. 

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If that wasn’t enough, big rains in 2018 had already “loaded the dice even more,” meteorologist Bryce Anderson noted on Twitter: A thawed ground, already saturated with water, wouldn’t have been able to soak up much water anyway, he said

On top of this confluence of extreme weather events, Earth’s atmosphere is considerably different than it was a century ago. Specifically, the climate has warmed by 1 degree Celsius (1.8 Fahrenheit), and due to simple physics, the warmer air is able to hold more water vapor. Specifically, for every 1 degree Celsius of warming, the air can hold seven percent more water.

That means more intense downpours. Between 1958 and 2012, the amount of rain in the heaviest rainfall events in the midwest shot up by 37 percent, according to U.S. government scientists.

Forthcoming research will reveal the role climate change played during these floods, though atmospheric scientists expect this same climate lever to bring more intense precipitation blasts to other parts of the nation in the near future, notably California. 

On March 17, the National Weather Service (NWS) expected the Missouri River just south of Offutt Air Force Base to break record levels by a whopping four feet, noted CBS meteorologist Eric Fisher. The forecast turned out to be almost spot on.

“That’s unreal for a river with some big floods in the past,” Fisher wrote. 

An Ode to… is a weekly column where we share the stuff we’re really into in hopes that you’ll be really into it, too.

What’s more satisfying than being able to 3D print stuff? Watching it happen. 

If you’re at all familiar with what goes into the 3D printing process, you know just how long it takes. But now, thanks to timelapse video, you can watch objects appear as if they’re being created out of thin air. 

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There is something intensely pleasing about seeing the inner structures that fortify 3D prints come to be in an almost fluid-like motion. Take this headless knight: Watching the wavy weavings is so bizarrely calming, it doesn’t matter that it takes more than one try. 

This next video looks straight out of some futuristic Disney Channel program, like Smart House or Phil of the Future. The borderline-eerie music really adds to the overall experience. You’ll feel like Zenon: Girl of the 21st Century watching this vase phase in out of nowhere. 

This moon city video gives off similar vibes (with some different music). Especially pleasing is the effect of the platform slowly descending rather than the 3D printer building up. 

The two clocks in this video illustrate just how lengthy a process a 3D print of this size actually is. The fact that this castle is also the equivalent of the Barbie Dream Home for kids who grew up liking medieval fantasy novels is just an added bonus. 

As technology advances, different types of 3D printing are evolving as well. For example, here’s a video of a 3D print being made out of a vat of resin. Sure, it seems a bit slimy and gross, but at the same time, it’s undeniably cool.

This lighthouse, as seen in the video game Elder Scrolls, was so massive it had to be built in three stages. 

As technology advances and 3D printers become more accessible, we can only hope that more printing timelapses will come along with it. It’s a little bit of magic right before your eyes. 

Devin Nunes, Republican congressman from California and Trump lapdog, is suing Twitter for a deeply hilarious reason.

The thrust of the Nunes’ lawsuit is that two parody accounts — @DevinNunesMom and @DevinCow — defamed Nunes with the assistance of the third defendant, strategist Liz Mair. Twitter is also named in the suit for just letting it happen. It also mentions “shadow banning,” a false claim frequently made by conservatives on Twitter that the platform suppresses their tweets.

The entire filing is about 40 pages and can be read here, but below is a selection of the parts that made us el oh el the most. 

The accounts in question

Credit to @DevinNunesMom for breathing new life into the “your mom” category of jokes. The account, now suspended, had the word “parody” in its Twitter bio, but that wasn’t enough to keep it off the chopping block. Still, it’s fun to imagine Nunes being triggered by such a schoolyard-style taunt.

More imaginative is @DevinCow, playing off of Nunes’ early life growing up on a farm. One hilarious point of fallout: @DevinCow has picked up thousands of Twitter followers thanks to the lawsuit. Probably not the effect Nunes was hoping for.

It’s also worth noting that while Liz Mair is named in the suit, the defamation claim against her is mostly separate from that of the parody accounts. The only thing that connects the two is a 2018 tweet from Mair that shouted out @DevinCow.

The lawsuit ultimately accuses the accounts of a “concerted defamation campaign… to cause immense pain, intimidate, interfere with and divert Nunes’ attention from his investigation of corruption and Russian involvement in the 2016 Presidential Election.”

If the investigation referred to here is actually the now-infamous Nunes Memo, that makes the argument even more laughable given that the memo wound up contradicting itself and ultimately being a self-aggrandizing nothing burger.

Ridiculous tweets

The suit mainly focuses on the now-deleted @DevinNunesMom account and, boy, does it not disappoint. The tweets quoted in the lawsuit include a few real doozies, like:

• “Devin Nunes’ Mom stated that Nunes had turned out worse than Jacob Wohl” 

• “falsely stated that Nunes would probably join the ‘Proud Boys’ if it weren’t for that unfortunate ‘nomasturbating’ rule”

• “and even falsely stated that Nunes has “herp-face’”

But that’s nothing compared to some of the screenshots they put in the lawsuit:

But even that was no match for the tweet that played the Human Centipede card.

Astonishing. 

As for @DevinCow, the lawsuit focuses in on critical tweets that are far more offensive for the puns.

These tweets are pretty ridiculous as is, but they sound even more absurd in the context of a multi-million dollar lawsuit. Yes, some cross the line into being mean-spirited. But it’s hard to be sympathetic to Nunes here, since he has remained silent on many of the far more pervasive examples of Twitter harassment. 

It’s as if Nunes was shocked to learn that people would say nasty things about elected officials, which has pretty much been an American tradition going back to its beginning.

‘Dirty Devin’

In describing the defamation claim against Mair, the suit points out the nickname that Mair gave Nunes: “Mair’s tweets about Nunes, for example, referred to the Congressman with disdain as ‘Dirty Devin’.” Oh, the horror. 

Much like with the “mean tweets” the lawsuit cites, Nunes’ complaint ignores the fact that much of the same behavior is exhibited by President Trump, of whom Nunes has been quite an ardent supporter. 

Bullying? Spreading of conspiracy theories? Using Twitter to undermine democracy? Mean nicknames? All things Trump has done with his own account, though probably minus the Human Centipede meme.  

This one complaint about Twitter

At one point, while discussing the lack of action from Twitter with regards to his complaint, the lawsuit emphasizes, in bold, “Twitter did absolutely nothing.” To that, everyone who has ever been threatened or harassed on the platform can respond, “No kidding.” 

It’s as if Nunes and his team are just now discovering that Twitter is a problematic tool.

The “shadow ban” scam

The lawsuit also regurgitates the claim that Twitter suppresses conservative voices. Except this isn’t true. As we detailed in 2018, the incidents that led to the claims from conservatives actually had everything to do with alt-right Pizzagate trolls and nothing to do with actual suppression of free speech.

Twitter is also largely protected from the defamation charges Nunes has leveled against it thanks to the Communications Decency Act that shields platforms from lawsuits based on what its users say. 

Not that any of this really deeply matters to Nunes. Sure, maybe his feelings are really hurt, but given the fact that Trump and others have brought up strengthening libel laws multiple times — the old “you can’t take what you dish out” syndrome — it could be setting up more nefarious actions to come. 

And a whole hell of a lot of fundraising off the backs of these silly tweets from a fake cow. 

The hyper-realistic reflection of light on the ground in front of the car should’ve given it away, but I was so distracted by the realness of everything else that I didn’t pick up on the clues that the BMW 8 series coupe I was looking at wasn’t the real thing.

San Francisco-based Unity Technologies general manager Tim McDonough had given me this challenge via video chat. On the screen, he showed me three sets of side-by-side images of a BMW car on a stage. Some of the images I was looking at had been created in virtual reality, using the 3D imaging tools on the Unity Technologies platform with Nvidia software processing to make a photo of a car look like the car was actually on a stage. I had to guess which was the real car and which was made through a Unity ray-traced rendering.

Real-time ray tracing — a rendering method that creates a virtual image by copying how light falls and interacts with images — makes for photorealistic images that are almost indistinguishable from the real thing. The light bounces off the rearview mirror and the grille glimmers in the light. 

And I was easily fooled — all of the images looked real enough to me.

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The company announced the new ray-tracing tool at the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco Monday afternoon. 

It’s a tool that can be used for rendering cars for designing or marketing purposes. Outside of the automotive industry, the technique is popular in media, entertainment, and gaming to create realistic virtual scenes, characters, and more. 

For the car industry, this means being able to create virtual cars of a prototype that’s not as far along as the real thing but will still look complete, finished, and most importantly, real. If a designer wants to see what the car would look like parked in front of the Sydney Opera House at sunset, for instance, it can do that — without heavy equipment and long re-rendering times to process the images.

Here were two of the challenges I took to see if I could tell which was a photo of a real car:

In the end, I got every single one wrong: 0/3. A fail for me, however, is a win for the company. The images fooled my untrained eye — which means that if a car company used the rendered version in its marketing website, most of us wouldn’t know the difference. Designers don’t need to work with expensive tools and heavy-duty equipment when a simplified VR tool running on a usual design set-up can produce the same thing. 

The one on the right was rendered for both of those challenges (did you guess correctly?), and Unity had made its point. 

As McDonough said, “Ray tracing lets designers and developers create content that looks super real … You can’t tell the difference anymore.”