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The world’s first hydrogen-powered city?

Matthew Baldwin of Defective Yeti fame has a great article up on the Morning News about loopholes.

The Onion is possibly the most consistently funny site on the internet, but it can also be frighteningly prescient. It predicted the advent of Gillette’s five-bladed razor more than a year ago, and now Cynical-C has drawn my attention to the Onion’s report just days before Bush assumed office where they successfully predicted the administration’s [...]

Turns out going to the North Pole is a lot more dangerous than I thought.

Life has taken a turn for the hectic here as I once again get into expedition mode. Ben and I are off to Greenland for a month for our final test and training phase before we go SOUTH and I am juggling phonecalls, kit orders and eccentric email servers.
In mid May we are taking a [...]

Scientists have found rivers under the ice in Antarctica. Maybe Ben and I should take the kayaks this October.

It slightly goes against the whole extreme endurance/adventure persona I have carefully crafted to say that I love the Princess Bride. However, I don’t hold a candle to this guy. This re-enactment of the Battle of Wits is spot on and hilarious.

The Easter weekend was expensively spent celebrating my good friend Colin McCann’s impending marriage to the beautiful Jo Nielsen in Amsterdam. After throwing go-karts around the track at 50mph and subsequently playing football against some heavy-set locals I didn’t manage to pick up any silverware. However, I managed to set one car on fire, got [...]

Slate tests the best bike locks.

Ben Folds, who I used to listen to religiously in my uni days, was in a cab in Lansing Michigan when he heard the driver play his Harmonica. That evening, the cabbie joined him on stage to play a set with him. Folds even worked the cabbie’s name into some of the songs. (Via)

There’s a bit of a construction boom in Antarctica at present and there are concerns at what this might mean for the environment, especially after the Antarctic Treaty runs out and all the scientific bases get converted into strip mines.

Professor Steve Jones lives down the road from me in Camden Town and this year was invited to lecture to the Royal Society. His talk was forthrightly entitled ‘Why Evolution is right and Creationism is wrong‘. It’s bloody brilliant. Jones contrasts Western and Chinese creation stories (the Chinese one sounds more fun) but doesn’t spend [...]

Craig Mathieson who did the Hercules Inlet-South Pole route in 2004 is looking to start a Polar Academy in Scotland to inspire Scottish children to achieve their dreams. A trial expedition is setting off this week with a guinea pig in the form of 16-year-old Christopher Struthers. They aim to do the final half degree [...]

Run the Planet is a website showcasing routes to run in cities around the world. It even has an Antarctica section with some good routes around McMurdo Station.

Forty-Five years ago today, Yuri Gagarin blasted off in the Vostok 1 and became the first man in space. Yuri is up there on my all-time list of heroes, Ben and I believe in pushing our limits and SOUTH will certainly do that, but Yuri’s voyage was of a whole other order of magnitude. We [...]

National Geographic Photographer Thomas Abercrombie died today aged 75. He was the first journo to visit the South Pole and worked out of some of the most dangerous places on earth. You can see some of his pictures here.

Photographer Gregory Colbert’s site Ashes and Snow is possibly the most beautiful thing I have ever seen on the interweb.

Fascinating story about a structural engineer called William LeMessurier who realised that the Manhattan skyscraper that was his crowning achievement might fall down in heavy wind.

Maciej Cegłowski has written a great piece on Tierra del Fuego, an area I sailed past in 2000 and will be finally seeing this October.

The publishing business has a glorious history in Antarctica. Scott and his team self-published the first Antarctic newspaper ‘the South Polar Times‘ (Editor: Mr Ernest Shackleton) and even put out an additional magazine for the bits considered inappropriate for their main publication: ‘the Blizzard‘. Nowadays, the yankees at McMurdo run the ‘Antarctic Sun‘, which is [...]

Simon Coggins has just returned from two years stationed at Halley, the British Antarctic Survey base near the Ronne Ice Shelf. There are some great photos on his blog and it’s a good insight into the other side of Antarctic life.

Huge news for those interested in evolution. Scientists combing Ellesmere Island in the Canadian Arctic have found Tiktaalik, the missing link between marine and land-based animals.

Robot hybrids are also taking over the world of mountaineering it seems.

It looks like Ben and I are to be consigned to the scrapheap as robots take over the polar world. I, for one, welcome our new robotic overlords.

In honour of my good friend Liz Mair who has deserted these shores to fight for the soul of the GOP on Capitol Hill, I give you 1,313 Libertarian quotes.(Via)