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Fabulous Bus Driver Photos Show Off Mustaches, Sunglasses

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Operator of the Month, Gabriel Garcia. 2/22/1988

Operator of the Month, Gabriel Garcia, Feb. 22, 1988

Readers may know Raw File is a huge fan of Flickr commons. With new institutions joining every month, it is not difficult to find new photo sets with which to fall in love. (Our eyeballs have enjoyed recent love affairs with the National Library of Scotland's "Photographs of the South Side of Edinburgh" and Fylkesarkivet's "Lantern Slides of Norwegian Fjords.")

Last week, our promiscuity took us to the recently uploaded archives of the Metro Transportation Library and Archive, and specifically its set "Southern California Rapid Transit District (SCRTD) Operator of the Month."

This set takes us back to an era before Employee of the Month became known as a cheap play for morale from unfeeling corporate management. It wouldn't take long before movies and an upcoming generation of cynics would lampoon the tradition as a token gesture by the higher-ups to leverage ego for increased efficiency. But here we see some non-ironic pride and even more non-ironic facial hair. This, fellow readers, is what God had in mind when he invented the mustache. Enjoy.

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War-Torn and Overgrown, Ghost Town Was Soviet Paradise

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With grand buildings, subtropical climate and scenic location amid the forested hillsides of Georgia’s Black Sea coast, the resort city of Gagra was once known as the “Russian Riviera.”

At the turn of the 20th century, it was a getaway for wealthy tourists, anchored by a luxury hotel owned by aristocrat Duke Peter of Oldenburg. The duke built an opulent palace for himself nearby.

It is widely claimed that, shortly after the Soviet triumph, Lenin personally gave the order to convert this haven of the rich into a paradise for the proletariat. In the 70 years that followed, Gagra was to the USSR what Hawaii was to the United States, an exotic foreign kingdom located within its borders — all the sunshine you can handle and no need for a phrasebook.

Yet, almost immediately after the collapse of communism, this former playground of Czarists and lucky Soviet citizens became the scene of open combat and ethnic cleansing. Significant sections of the city were abandoned after the conflict came to an end in 1993, and since then have crumbled into an eerie ruin.

Russian photographer Oleg Slesarev visited Gagra to document the area’s scenic beauty, and to take a firsthand look at what remained of a place that had captured the imaginations of his parents and grandparents. While some inhabitants have returned and renovations have begun, Slesarev’s photos show a once-opulent paradise overrun by nature and and beset by decay.

Top photo: A gutted shopping mall overlooks the entrance to Gagra.

Bottom photo: Ruins of Zhoekvara Hotel in Old Gagra.

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Sir, Your Liver Is Ready: Behind the Scenes of Bioprinting

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SAN DIEGO -– Say goodbye to donor lists and organ shortages. A biotech firm has created a printer that prints veins using a patients’ own cells. The device could potentially create whole organs in the future.

“Right now we’re really good at printing blood vessels,” says Ben Shepherd, senior research scientist at regenerative-medicine company Organovo. “We printed 10 this week. We’re still learning how to best condition them to be good, strong blood vessels.”

Most organs in the body are filled with veins, so the ability to print vascular tissue is a critical building block for complete organs. The printed veins are about to start testing in animal trials, and eventually go through human clinical trials. If all goes well, in a few years you may be able to replace a vein that has deteriorated (due to frequent injections of chemo treatment, for example) with custom-printed tissue grown from your own cells.

The barriers to full-organ printing are not just technological. The first organ-printing machine will cost hundreds of millions of dollars to develop, test, produce and market. Not to mention the difficulty any company will have getting FDA approval.

“If Organovo will be able to raise enough money this company has [the] potential to succeed as [the] first bioprinting company but only time will show,” says Dr. Vladimir Mironov, director of advanced tissue biofabrication at the Medical University of South Carolina.

Organovo walked Wired.com through the process it uses to print blood vessels on the custom bioprinter.

Above:

Bioreactor

Shepherd places a bioreactor inside an incubator where it will be pumped with a growth medium for a few days. The bioreactor uses a special mixture of chemicals that are similar to what cells would see when they grow inside the body, which will help the cells become strong vascular tissue.

Photos: Dave Bullock/Wired.com

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Out of the Darkness: Wiring a Desert Village

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When the Peace Corps discovered that their new recruit Peter DiCampo had received first-aid training as a Boy Scout, they assigned him as a medical officer to the village of Wantugu, Ghana. The people there suffered from guinea worm, a horrifying parasite that nests in the body and then bursts through the skin. DiCampo was tasked with helping the village eradicate it.

But in the barren scrublands, it soon became clear that the village had an even larger problem on its hands: When the sun went down, Wantugu disappeared into darkness.

Wires were strung throughout the streets but there was no electricity coursing through them. For DiCampo, who is also a photojournalist, there would be no e-mail, no television and no phones, and he would have to travel to the nearest town to charge his camera and laptop batteries.

A minor inconvenience to a temporary aid worker was a major problem for a struggling agricultural community. For those living in more-developed parts of the world, it can be surprising how difficult it is to progress as a community without this basic service. Especially for a country near the equator where night falls at about 6:00 p.m. year-round. The lack of electricity has impacted education, food production and Wantugu’s stunted economy.

That was 2006. Now, after eight years of broken promises by politicians, Wantugu is finally leaving the darkness, and DiCampo returned to see what changes may come. Befriending the community over the years, DiCampo has been welcomed into people’s homes as the funny white guy who takes pictures, offering a unique opportunity to tell the stories of northern Ghana.

Photos: Peter DiCampo

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Hot Collectible Lunch Boxes Preserve the Past

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EASTPOINTE, Michigan — Dan Zieja collects stuff. Civil War weaponry. Picture discs. Autographs. It doesn’t really matter what it is. Odds are he collects it.

But of all the many, many things Zieja has stuffed into Melodies & Memories, his eclectic record store in this suburb of Detroit, the coolest has to be the lunch boxes.

All 3,000 of them.

“I’m stopping at 3,000,” Zieja says. “I’m not collecting metal lunch boxes anymore because there are only about eight ever made that I don’t have.”

Zieja, 54, claims he’s got the largest collection on public display in the United States. Maybe even the world. Still, it’s hard to fathom a number like 3,000 when talking about lunch boxes.

Maybe this will help:

“If I went from kindergarten through 12th grade and took a different lunch box to school every day, I’d still have something like 500 left over.”

Six hundred and sixty, actually. We did the math.

Photo: Jim Merithew / Wired.com

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Dentistry Goes Digital

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For all the advancements in dentistry these days, someone still has to reach into your mouth and do unpleasant things. That’s the one constant in a field undergoing rapid change, as dentistry goes digital.

Dental students are entering a profession radically different the one their professors entered a generation ago. Drills are giving way to lasers and air abrasion. Digital tomography is replacing X-rays. Files stuffed with charts will soon be a thing of the past. Classrooms are changing, too, as students hone their skills on realistic dummies (like the one above) with real teeth. 3-D simulations in virtual reality are on the horizon.

“This has been the most change I’ve seen,” said Dr. Denly Herbert, a dentist of 30 years who runs the clinic at the University of California-San Francisco School of Dentistry. “My perspective is the old way. These students are learning the new way.”

Photo: Jim Merithew/Wired.com

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Meet the Last Generation of Typewriter Repairmen

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It’s easy to forget how much time computer word-processing programs have saved the writing public. Before computers, any typewritten document that needed revision had to be retyped again and again. And that’s hardly the end of it. Total up all the hours that people spent whiting out errors before the Delete key … how many zeroes would the final figure have? Combine the surface area of every lumpy smudge of liquid paper: Would it cover the country? The world?

Despite these inefficiencies, there are a few places where typewriters still clack away. New York City police stations, the desks of a few stubborn hangers-on, and, increasingly, the apartments of hip young people who have a fetish for the retro. Mechanical devices with a lot of moving parts, typewriters require maintenance by technicians with specialized knowledge and years of experience. A surprising number of people still make their living meeting that demand.

Wired.com takes a look back at these charming machines and visits three Bay Area workshops whose proprietors keep hearse-colored Remingtons and Underwoods from disappearing into the grave.

Above: The storefront of Berkeley Typewriter, located down the street from the University of California.

Typewriters provoke curiosity and nostalgia for many. They are one of the more visually appealing members of the catalog of once-ubiquitous technologies that includes kerosene lamps, land lines and VHS.

Second photo: If you need a spare part, or a carrying case, then Berkeley Typewriter is a good place to look.

Photos: Jon Snyder/Wired.com

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Maximum Rocknroll: Kick-Ass Photos From Iconic Punk Mag

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The Beatles crossing Abbey Road. Jimi Hendrix kneeling over a burning guitar. Bo Diddley’s horn-rim glasses and square Gretsch. Elvis Presley’s pompadour. Rock ‘n’ roll has been defined by images as much as by power chords and amps that go to 11.

But as many people know, there’s a thriving global punk scene with its own images that has been largely invisible to the mainstream since its inception in the ’70s. And one of the most popular icons of this underground is Maximum Rocknroll magazine.

“I think of that picture of Robert Plant with his arm in the air, with the mic and the light shining behind him, bare-chested with the vest thing on,” said Paul Curran, longtime volunteer with Maximum Rocknroll. “We’re the opposite of that.”

Maximum Rocknroll has been a beloved indie music publication for more than a quarter-century. The monthly magazine survives on a shoestring budget and an army of volunteers, whom it lovingly calls “shitworkers.”

This year MRR released its first photography issue in quite some time, interviewing punk shooters and showcasing contributions from MRR’s global readership.

Punk’s in-your-face aesthetic is as different from detached rock stars as Maximum’s anti-commercial stance is from corporate magazines. Despite the dire financial straights of many media outlets, including MRR, the photo issue has sold out, proving there’s still life underground.

Read on to see photos from the issue and take a look inside a world of cramped basements and distorted guitars.

Update: This is not MRR’s first photography issue, as the post originally stated, but it has been a while since their last one.

Photo: The Mummies at Bottom of the Hill, San Francisco, Halloween 2009, by Mark Murrmann.
Bay Area garage kings The Mummies ruled the low-fi roost for the late ’80s and early ’90s, touring around in a derelict ambulance and leaving a trail of rags in their wake.
In addition to curating MRR’s weekly photo blog, Murrmann is photo editor for Mother Jones and contributes to San Francisco photo collective Hamburger Eyes.

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Growing Solar Panels Is Cheap, Efficient and (Relatively) Easy

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PASADENA, California — There are many political and economic barriers to widely adopting solar panels, but part of the problem is also technological. Now, researchers at Caltech have created a new solar-panel material that could replace solar cells as we know them.

Currently there are two primary types of photovoltaic, or PV, cells. The first is a solid silicon-based PV cell that is very efficient, but also expensive to make and relatively fragile. The second is a thin film cell, which is relatively cheap to make but not as efficient. This new material potentially bridges that gap, creating a PV cell that is cheap to make, but which is close to the efficiency of traditional silicon-based solar panels.

The new solar material made of tiny silicon wires could “dramatically reduce the cost of making a silicon solar cell,” according to Harry Atwater, head of the Atwater Research Group at Caltech.

“Instead of the expensive process of making a wafer and slicing it up with a saw, throwing away two thirds of it,” says Atwater, “We grow the material and literally peel it off. The plastic sheet is peeled off like scotch tape off a tape dispenser.”

The material is relatively easy to produce and uses 99 percent less silicon than a regular solar panel. Despite the small amount of material, the silicon wire panels have very high solar-absorption rates, with efficiency levels much higher than current polymer film panels. Theoretically, more panels could be produced for less money using this process, which would bring the cost per watt for solar energy way down.

Take the Wired tour of Caltech’s lab to see silicon baked in gas, cells bombarded with lasers and microscopic views of this potentially revolutionary process.

Above: These square wafers of silicon substrate are coated with a thin layer of metal that acts as a catalyst when the wafers are placed into a special reactor (below). The reactor is basically a sealed oven that can be filled with gas.

The silicon wafer is just a reusable template for the silicon wires to “grow” on and is not used in the final product. When the material is completely formed, it peels off the template like a thin piece of rubber.

Researcher Morgan Putnam places the wafers carefully in the reactor.

Photos: Dave Bullock/Wired.com

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Gates, Zuckerberg Meet for Wired Cover Shoot

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Wired magazine has put Bill Gates on the cover five times, but this is the first time Gates agreed to sit for us in a cover shoot. He agreed to a shoot with Mark Zuckerberg for a story about the 25th anniversary of Steven Levy’s “Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution.”

The photo session took place during the TED conference in Long Beach, California, at the Westin Hotel. We had roughly 30 minutes to photograph Gates alone and with Zuckerberg.

When you have 30 minutes to photograph one of the busiest men in the world, it’s important to have a clear creative vision. You don’t have the luxury of reviewing wardrobe and discussing each shot. Gates’ communications director John Pinnette helped get him on the set, make way for one wardrobe change and light grooming.

The biggest challenge was to keep him interested and occupied while we waited for Zuckerberg, whose flight was delayed 45 minutes. Enter our editor-in-chief, Chris Anderson, also in town attend the annual TED conference. Chris occupied Bill in a lively conversation about nuclear physics. This exchange continued throughout the entire session. Unfortunately, Gates had to leave for a meeting, but we managed to talk him into returning so we could complete the group shot with Zuckerberg.

Above:
Photo set at the Westin Long Beach during the TED conference for a Wired cover shoot with Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg.

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