At 3:00 p.m. on New Year’s Day in 1995, work stopped on the deck of the Norwegian Draupner oil platform, which stood isolated out in the middle of the tempestuous North Sea. The wind had grown too strong, the waves roiled below, and it was no longer safe to be outside. 

But one wave dwarfed the others. It measured 84-feet tall — about two and a half times the height of a telephone pole — and was thereafter named the “Draupner wave.” Fortunately, the monstrous swell didn’t reach the platform’s deck.

The Draupner wave was the first scientific evidence of a rare rogue or freak wave, which is a wave that appears suddenly and measures at least twice as tall as the surrounding waves. These fleeting, colossal phenomena are thought to be possible culprits for the still-unexplained sinking of ships in the open ocean. 

While there’s still considerable uncertainty about how rogue waves form, a team of engineering scientists has successfully simulated a way that freak waves can suddenly rise from the sea. The researchers recreated a (smaller version) of  a Draupner wave in a simulation pool, and published their research in the Journal of Fluid Mechanics. 

“There’s a rather heated debate on the physical mechanisms of how these things form,” Mark McAllister, a mechanical engineer at the University of Oxford and coauthor of the research, said. “We’ve shown the conditions that can support such a wave.”

This simulation, achieved at The University of Edinburgh’s 82-foot diameter test tank — which is designed to create real ocean conditions — proved that when a series of waves cross each other at large angles (around 120 degrees), a freak wave will form. 

“It’s an important piece of the puzzle,” Günter Steinmeyer, a physicist at Germany’s Max Born Institute for Nonlinear Optics and Short Pulse Spectroscopy who has researched rogue waves, said.

Still, he emphasized that there’s still much we don’t know about these little-seen waves, even over two decades after the famous Draupner event.

“Roughly 20 years later we firmly believe they exist but there are so many explanations around,” said Steinmeyer, who had no role in the study. “They are so rare.”

“If you ask three scientists in the field you will probably hear four different stories, and everybody is sure that all other explanations are completely wrong,” he added.

To create a Draupner, the engineers spent about two days sending waves into one another at varying angles, until they found the right combination. The wave looked a lot like the famous woodblock print “The Great Wave of Kanagawa” from the early 1830s by artist Hokusai. 

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“The similarity to Hokusai’s Great Wave was purely coincidental, but a very nice surprise,” Samuel Draycott, an engineer at The University of Edinburgh and a study coauthor, said over email.

“Only a few months later did I read theories that Hokusai’s great wave may actually depict a so-called rogue wave,” Draycott added.

Freak waves have been reported in both the open ocean and near coastlines, Draycott said. Accordingly, understanding when a rogue wave might arise may help seafarers or people working at sea know when conditions are ripe for a rogue, such as two storms approaching from different angles. 

“There are theories that say it’s random,” said McAllister. “And others say that if you have specific conditions, the waves will grow in height.”

Though, there’s likely still a lot of chance at play with any rogue wave, noted Steinmeyer.

The weather conditions have to be right (perhaps stormy). Waves coming from different directions also have to collide at precisely the right time, and the right angle, just like they did beside the Draupner platform.

“Statistically, it’s a quite small number,” said Steinmeyer. Though, he noted that some ship captains who have been at sea for decades have reported spotting huge Draupner waves. 

The 1995 Draupner wave, at least, left the workers hunkered down amid the stormy North Sea but unscathed.

“Luckily the platform was high enough so the wave didn’t hit the deck,” said McAllister. “Had it been lower it could have been quite catastrophic.”

The effects of the longest government shutdown in U.S. history are starting to be felt by an FCC program set up to support low-income Americans living in rural areas, 

The FCC’s Connect America Fund (CAF) was established to bring broadband internet access to some of the country’s most rural areas. Internet service providers were awarded millions of dollars in subsidies during an auction as part of the program. These ISPs, which often serve smaller markets, are saying that the government shutdown has halted the FCC’s ability to distribute these funds. The FCC has been effectively closed because of the shutdown.

“Unfortunately, since the shutdown, we’re at a standstill when it comes to funding for the project so that definitely does affect us there,” said United Electric Cooperative COO David Girvan in a phone call with Mashable. 

Last year, the FCC awarded about $1.5 billion dollars in subsidies to internet service providers around the country in order to expand broadband access to people living and working in rural areas. The winning bidders in the Connect America Fund (CAF) Phase II auction will bring broadband to 713,176 new locations that are currently lacking the necessary infrastructure.

United will receive $20 million over a period of 10 years to bring high-speed broadband into parts of northwest Missouri.

“Before the shutdown, we’d been on calls with some government bodies,” said Girvan. “We would have thought we’d have been in line right now to receive our award but, obviously, that’s not going to happen and might not happen for a little bit longer now.” 

Due to the company’s previous participation in other federal stimulus programs, Girvan explained that United may be in a unique position as the company was further along in the process than most ISPs. Each winning ISP has to take part in a multi-step approval process before finally receiving the funds.

However, other providers that took part in the CAF II auction also shared concerns about the delay in the process due to the shutdown.

“I’ve got to imagine we might be waiting a bit longer for the final approval from the FCC,” Wisper ISP CEO Nathan Stook told Mashable. His company was awarded more than $220 million over 10 years to provide broadband services to rural locations in a half dozen states. 

“We have 80,000 locations across six states with the majority of them in Missouri, then Southern Illinois and a little bit in Indiana, Arkansas, Oklahoma, and Kansas,” said Stook. “These are people who have never really had broadband before, broadband as maybe you and I would know it coming from a more suburban or urban area. In many cases they didn’t even have that as an option.”

“We were expecting funding towards the end of March, maybe end of April” Stook said. “With the shutdown going for as long as it has, it maybe pushing that back further. With all these other things they’ll have to catch up on, it’s hard to predict from our side.”

SEE ALSO: A pot marketplace is offering federal employees free weed during the shutdown

The biggest winner of the CAF II auction, NextLink, was awarded $281 million over 10 years to bring broadband service to rural parts of Texas, Nebraska, Oklahoma, Kansas, Illinois and Iowa. When reached by email, a spokesperson also confirmed the effects of the government shutdown on CAF fund distribution. “It’s true. Funding can’t receive final approvals and be initiated if FCC is closed,” the statement said.

The FCC first created the Connect America Fund back in 2011. The FCC found that 35 percent of Americans lacked broadband access and established the CAF in order to close the digital gap between rural America and the rest of the country. As a requirement of the CAF, ISPs must provide these locations with internet speeds of at least 25 Mbps downstream. In some locations, the minimum speed is even higher at 100 Mbps.

The U.S. federal government has now been partially shut down for over a month with no end in sight. The deadlock over the government’s spending budget has been caused by President Trump’s insistence that $5.7 billion be set aside for his border wall. It is now the longest government shutdown in U.S. history. Many of the areas that will benefit from the CAF funds voted for Trump in the 2016 presidential election.

It’s important to note how the shutdown’s sprawling effects can reach those miles away from Washington DC. However, with hundreds of thousands of federal employees working without pay, it’s also crucial to put the issue into perspective.

“The program is really important,” said Jonathan Chambers of Conexon, the organization which administers the Rural Electronic Cooperative Consortium, a group of rural ISPs that bid in the CAF auction collectively. “But, it’s not at all like a federal employee missing a check, it isn’t that kind of impact.”

Chambers points out that the ISPs will still eventually receive approvals for the funds, albeit delayed, and be awarded the full monetary amounts over the next decade. He also notes that the ISPs he works with are not planning to delay expanding broadband networks into rural areas due to the shutdown.

“I’m not downplaying the importance of the funds for providers, but nobody I work with has altered any of their activities due to the delay” says Chambers. “There might be a higher cost in using other funds, say, borrowing money or using a line of credit, but it’s not like the poor government workers who are living without a check week to week.”

“Even though we won $20 million in an auction, it’s a far greater cost to build and it’s never going to be a slam dunk so it does hurt us, you know, there’s no doubt about it,” said United’s Girvan, whose company bid as part of the Consortium. 

“People are knocking on our door for service every day, so we’re going to keep on installing until, basically, we get the money.”

A new study tracking injuries from riding e-scooters confirms what we all knew: electric scooters can be dangerous as hell. 

Also, nobody wears helmets. And these vehicles go as fast as 15 mph.  

A study published in the JAMA (Journal of the American Medical Association) Network Open on Friday observed e-scooter riding in the Los Angeles area (the birthplace of e-scooter sharing) for about a year from Sep. 1, 2017 through Aug. 31, 2018. In that time period, about 250 people ended up in the emergency room.

The most common injuries were to people’s heads. More than 40 percent of incidents, involving 100 people, resulted in some sort of head injury. Five people had serious bleeding in the brain from a scooter crash. These weren’t just cuts and bruises: two riders were sent to the ICU.

With all those noggins hitting the pavement you’d think more people would wear a helmet. But “helmet compliance” was recorded at only about 4 percent.

SEE ALSO: Scooting while drunk is a dangerous, lame way to get a DUI

The study’s lead author, UCLA emergency physician Tarak Trivedi, a scholar in the National Clinician Scholars Program at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA, said he’s seen nearly every bone broken from improper scooter riding. And yet, he rides e-scooters in LA and even encourages their use. 

In a phone call, he said while working in emergency departments in the LA area he started to see more injuries like broken elbows and dislocated shoulders around the same time he started seeing Bird and Lime e-scooters in his Santa Monica neighborhood. 

“It woke us up to the fact that these injuries are serious,” he said. 

Trivedi said the two emergency rooms had 193 bicycle accidents in the same time period, but the study’s doctors can’t pin down an injury rate for e-scooters since the study was only a limited look at all incidents. 

Even so, Trivedi said e-scooters shouldn’t be underestimated. “They have the potential to be dangerous,” he said. “You need to be careful while riding these things.” While they’re also fun, easy to ride, and convenient, there’s extremely easy to injure yourself with. For instance: 92 riders observed came out of their accidents with head injuries. 

“Helmet use is of utmost importance,” Trivedi said after seeing the damage done. California just implemented a new law that allows adults over 18 to decide if they want to wear a helmet while riding an e-scooter. He can’t understand why you’d ride so fast amongst cars, bicyclists, pedestrians, and other scooter riders without protecting your head.

Trivedi said the study members did not work with or reach out to any e-scooter companies during the course of their research. Bird’s director of safety policy and advocacy Paul Steely White said in an emailed statement that the company would like to work with the authors “so that we can have a productive and collaborative conversation that focuses on proven preventative measures and education.”

He called the report “very limited,” and went on to criticize its shortcomings, such as overlooking the big picture of all road injuries and deaths from cars and motorcycles.

“[The study] fails to take into account the sheer number of e-scooter trips taken—the number of injuries reported would amount to a fraction of one percent of the total number of e-scooter rides.  Moreover, the report fails to put e-scooter injuries into context as they relate to the high number and severity of injuries and deaths caused by motorcycles and automobiles,” White wrote.

Beyond the LA area, San Francisco started tracking scooter-related injuries when its pilot program kicked off mid-October with two e-scooter operators, Skip and Scoot. A San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency spokesperson said 17 injuries have come in since – all from Skip, with two reported as “severe.” Scoot didn’t report any injuries to the transit agency.

In Portland, Oregon, a pilot program closely observed how residents were using e-scooters last year. The city’s transportation department reported 700,000 e-scooter trips during the four-month program. Between July 25 and  Nov. 20, the county reported 176 emergency room and urgent care visits related to scooter incidents. 

The Portland findings look very similar to what the UCLA study found. Broken down, the majority (83 percent) were people falling off scooters. Only one scooter-on-scooter accident was reported. In only six reported incidents the rider was wearing a helmet. In 23 of the 176 incidents, it was explicitly noted the rider wasn’t wearing one. 

In 16 percent of incidents drunken scooting was determined as the cause. (Now’s a good time to remind everyone you can get a DUI for riding a scooter under the influence.)

The scooter-sharing companies don’t want a reputation for providing a dangerous, emergency-room experience, but their efforts haven’t done much to curtail bad practices. Sure, there are helmet giveaways, safety campaigns, and in-app instructions on how to ride properly, but the incidents keep piling up.

Lime said in an email statement, “At Lime, the safety of our riders and the community is our number one priority. That’s why every day we’re innovating on technology, infrastructure and education to set the standard for micromobility safety.”

A spokesperson pointed out that Lime has new scooters to make for an improved (and hopefully safer) riding experience. The company also gave away 250,000 free helmets and put $3 million into a safety education campaign.

As far as helmets, a Lime spokesperson said “Lime supports the [American Medical Association’s] recommendations to further innovate helmet designs and for the industry to continue focusing on safety.”

Spin, which Ford acquired late last year, has a partnership with folding helmet company Overrade Plixi in an effort to encourage head protection while scooting. A spokesperson said safety demos are held in cities where they operate. The next one will be in Boise for Spin’s upcoming launch there.

But the company believes safety goes beyond helmets. Spin says it’s just as much about designing city streets and sharing the road and about maintaining a healthy fleet of vehicles. 

Scoot, which operates motorized mopeds and standing e-scooters, said in an email that they track incidents from riders that come in through the app, website, and social media. Every moped comes with two helmets and the vehicle is put out of service if one is missing. If you’re caught not wearing a helmet, you could be booted off the Scoot platform. 

Ride safely!

Metroid Prime 4 just hit quite the development speed bump.

Development on Metroid Prime 4 for Nintendo Switch has been restarted about a year and a half after the game was first revealed by Nintendo, Nintendo’s head of development Shinya Takahashi announced in a video Friday. The game is now in the hands of Retro Studios and probably won’t be coming out in the next year or two as fans had hoped.

SEE ALSO: This Nintendo Switch was modded to look like a GameCube and it rules

Takahashi said that development on Metroid Prime 4 was not meeting Nintendo’s standards, and so instead of delivering a product that the company wasn’t proud of, they are restarting development with producer Kensuke Tanabe and developer Retro Studios.

Retro Studios is the same studio that created the original Metroid Prime trilogy, although Metroid Prime 3 released in 2007 and much of the studio has changed in the past 12 years. Still, they’ve proven to be successful with another Nintendo franchise, developing the acclaimed Donkey Kong Country Returns and Donkey Kong Country: Tropical Freeze games in the interim.

The decision to restart development was not made lightly by Nintendo, and Takahashi acknowledged that they understand if some fans are disappointed.

“We did not make this decision lightly,” Takahashi said. “This change will essentially mean restarting development from the beginning, so the completion of the game will be delayed from our initial internal plan. We strongly recognize that this delay will come as a disappointment to the many fans who have been looking forward to the launch of Metroid Prime 4.”

Before this announcement, Nintendo had only showed the logo of Metroid Prime 4 at E3 in 2017 with no other updates since.