Crocodile Hunter Steve Irwin's death recounted by cameraman

The Associated Press Posted: Mar 12, 2014 9:51 AM ET Last Updated: Mar 12, 2014 9:51 AM ET

Australia's famed Crocodile Hunter Steve Irwin knew he was dying after a massive stingray stabbed him in the chest hundreds of times, the only witness to the fatal 2006 attack said in his first detailed public account of the beloved conservationist's death.

"We're saying to him things like, 'Think of your kids, Steve — hang on, hang on, hang on,'" Justin Lyons, Irwin's longtime cameraman, told Australia's Studio 10 morning show this week.

"And he just sort of calmly looked up at me and said, `I'm dying.' And that was the last thing he said."

In the nearly eight years since Irwin's death, Lyons has said little publicly about how the fatal encounter with the stingray unfolded. Now, he said, he wants to clarify exactly how Irwin died, including dismissing reports that his friend pulled the stingray's barb out of his own chest.

"The stories at the time of Steve's death — none of them were accurate because no one else was there," Lyons said in an interview Wednesday.

"And that always bothered me."

Lyons is also speaking out now because he has just finished producing a documentary, E-Motion, which examines the impact that repressing negative emotions can have on the body.

"I thought that it was a great way to illustrate my experience with Steve; holding onto these traumatic events can be very, very bad," he said Wednesday.

"I'm happy that I've finally spoken about it publicly. It has been, I guess, a weight on my shoulders."

Lyons still vividly remembers the day he lost his friend, who rose to fame via his TV series, The Crocodile Hunter. The two were shooting a wildlife documentary in the Great Barrier Reef when they spotted a nearly 2.5 metre-wide stingray.

They had been filming the creature for several minutes in chest-deep water and decided to try and get one final shot of the stingray swimming away. Suddenly, the animal began wildly stabbing Irwin with the barb on its tail — hundreds of strikes within seconds, Lyons said. The barb went through his chest "like a hot knife through butter," piercing his heart, Lyons said.

"It probably thought that Steve's shadow was a tiger shark, which feeds on them very regularly," Lyons told Studio 10.

"I didn't even know it had caused any damage. It wasn't until I panned the camera back that Steve was standing in a huge pool of blood that I realized something had gone wrong."

Lyons and his crew threw him into their boat and put pressure on the gash over Irwin's heart, which was seeping blood, and Lyons performed CPR. But the damage was too severe.

The 44-year-old died later that day, leaving behind his wife, Terri, and two young children.

The fact that Irwin — who was notorious for his extremely close encounters with crocodiles, sharks and other potentially lethal animals — died after a run-in with a normally docile creature shocked the public. But Lyons said he always had a sense his friend would meet an unusual end.

"It was never going to be a croc or a shark," he said Wednesday. "He was so good with animals."

The amazing life of Alice Herz-Sommer Mar. 12, 2014 6:31 PM Montreal-based director Malcolm Clarke speaks about his Oscar-winning short documentary The Lady in Number 6: Music Saved My Life.

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Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370 search crowdsourced by U.S. firm

A U.S. company has put crowdsourcing to work in the search for a missing Malaysia Airlines jetliner, inviting internet users to comb through satellite images of over 3,100 square kilometres of ocean for any sign of wreckage, the company says.

Colorado-based DigitalGlobe Inc. used two of its satellites to collect imagery from an area between the Gulf of Thailand and the South China Sea where the Boeing 777-200ER with 239 passengers and crew on board was at first believed to have crashed after it went missing early on Saturday, the firm said on its website Tuesday.

The effort by DigitalGlobe was launched just before Malaysia's military indicated the flight might have gone way off course, which could place its last known location hundreds of kilometres from where DigitalGlobe collected satellite imagery for its crowdsourcing project.

The company placed the images on its crowdsourcing website Tomnod on Monday and invited the public to join in the search for any sign of the plane, whose disappearance has become one of the most baffling mysteries in recent aviation history.

The flight last made contact with civilian air traffic control roughly midway between Kota Bharu, a town on Malaysia's eastern coast, and the southern tip of Vietnam while flying at an altitude of 10,670 metres.

"If there is something to see on the surface [of the water], we will see it," Luke Barrington, DigitalGlobe's senior manager for geospatial big data, told the Denver Post. "But the question is if we are looking in the right area," he added.

A Malaysian military officer told Reuters that Flight MH370 from Malaysia's capital of Kuala Lumpur to Beijing appears to have turned around and made it to the Strait of Malacca, to the west of peninsular Malaysia, instead of to the northeast of the country where initial search efforts were conducted.

Navy ships, military aircraft, helicopters, coast guard and civilian vessels from 10 countries have crisscrossed both coasts of Malaysia in an effort to find the plane, deepening the mystery over its disappearance.

The DigitalGlobe imagery collected for the crowdsourcing project covers over 3,100 square kilometres where the Gulf of Thailand meets the South China Sea, the company said on its blog.

DigitalGlobe said in a statement that it was working to best handle "an unprecedented level of web traffic" and interest in supporting the search.

DigitalGlobe is asking web users to tag any clues that may help locate the missing plane. If users start tagging some regions in large numbers, DigitalGlobe plans to use a computer algorithm to detect that, Barrington earlier told ABC News.

DigitalGlobe used a crowdsourcing campaign when Typhoon Haiyan struck the Philippines in November, as the company relied on thousands of volunteers who tagged over 60,000 objects of interest to help tally the destruction, according to the firm.

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How humans shaped Canada's spectacular wilderness

By Emily Chung, CBC News Posted: Mar 11, 2014 5:00 AM ET Last Updated: Mar 11, 2014 11:50 AM ET

Long before Europeans arrived, Canada's aboriginal people were applying fire to shape the bison-friendly grasslands of the Prairies and the scrub oak forests of eastern Canada.

On the Pacific coast, they were cultivating camas lilies and settling salmon eggs in new streams, a new documentary series shows. And of course, the human influence on Canada's wilderness has only increased since then.

Wild Canada, which debuts on CBC-TV's The Nature of Things on Thursday, is a four-part series shot in ultra-high definition that takes viewers on an exploration of some of our country's most spectacular landscapes, and intimate encounters with the animals that live there. It also features historical re-enactments illustrating how humans have interacted with their surroundings and their animal neighbours for thousands of years. 

An interactive iPad app envisioned as a companion "coffee table book" can be downloaded for free until Thursday. Starting Friday, it will cost $3.99.

Canadian nature documentary filmmaker Jeff Turner had previously worked on projects such as BBC's Planet Earth series, acclaimed for its high-definition footage of beautiful and rarely seen wild places and wildlife around the world. Turner said he came to realize that the natural beauty of our own country had never been showcased like that.

"It's an incredibly wild and beautiful place," he said. "There was so much in the country that people hadn't seen before. There was a newness here."

After some research, he realized that despite its seemingly natural state, one of the things that makes Canada's wilderness unusual is that it has been influenced by humans from the beginning.

Dall's sheep live in the mountains of Canada's North. One of the goals of Wild Canada was to show people parts of Canada that most people haven't seen before. (CBC)

"Just 15,000 years ago, Canada didn't exist as a natural landscape. It was covered by ice," Turner said.

Shortly after that, the ice melted and exposed new landscapes for plants and animals to colonize. Human beings first set foot on the continent at about the same time.

"That's fairly unique in the world. All the landscapes that formed in the country – all the natural landscapes – formed with the presence of humans … people have been shaping the landscape that they lived in over thousands and thousands of years."

The vast prairie landscape stretching from Manitoba to the Rocky Mountains in the West is one of the classic examples showcased in the series.

"If human beings hadn't been here, then that landscape would have looked very different than it does today and it would have very different animals in it," said Turner.

It's easy to imagine that the Prairies have always been a sea of grasses stretching as far as the eye can see, providing the perfect habitat for vast herds of bison to roam. But the grasslands were actually shaped by regular fires that have kept trees at bay for thousands of years. And those fires were caused by humans in order to expand grazing lands for the bison, their prey, Turner said.

The Canadian Prairies were shaped by aboriginal people who use fire to keep trees from encroaching on the grasslands, expanding the habitat favoured by the bison they hunted. (CBC)

Meanwhile, the maple forests of Ontario that wow Algonquin Park visitors with their scarlet leaves each fall were shaped by Europeans, who valued the trees for the syrup they produced, the series shows.

Prior to the arrival of European settlers, aboriginal people kept the maples in check through burning, transforming the landscape into oak savannah forests. Those forests featured open grassy areas that provided the light for widely spaced trees to grow very large and produce more edible nuts and cones. Turner said one of the few remnants of that habitat remains in Toronto's High Park, and is now preserved by an annual burning every spring.

The series also shows how humans helped some wild animals spread beyond their traditional ranges, while changing what was the "natural" range for others. The bison are just one example.

On the West Coast, salmon were valued by the Heiltsuk people for food and recognized for their role in nourishing the entire ecosystem. One of their traditional practices was to take eggs from a river rich in fish to one that didn't have many, spreading salmon populations through the river system.

There are many ways humans have changed the way wild animals live in ways we don't even realize, such as pushing grizzly bears into the mountains, where they were less likely to prey on livestock, Turner said.

"We think of them as mountain species, but they're actually a prairie animal."

He added that humans are now recognizing this and allowing the grizzly bears back to their traditional habitat. The bears are resettling the Prairies.

"Nature is here," Turner said. "If we give it a chance, it'll come back."

Canadian nature documentary filmmaker Jeff Turner had previously worked on projects such as BBC's Planet Earth series, and realized the natural beauty of our own country had never been showcased like that. (CBC)

March 15: Beyond Antibiotics Mar. 12, 2014 12:06 PM This week on Quirks & Quarks, we look at the threat of a post-antibiotic world, and what new strategies researchers are looking at to cope with a world where antibiotics no longer work.

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Mysterious Windsor Hum gets Ottawa review

A federally funded report on the mysterious Windsor Hum has been submitted to both the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Natural Resources Canada.

For years, residents in west Windsor and the neighbouring town of LaSalle have been complaining of a mysterious rumble or hum that is often described as an idling truck or locomotive.

Both ministries are reviewing the results of the $60,000 report, said the University of Windsor’s Colin Novak, one of the authors of the report.

Novak said the report was submitted in January and that the final review has not yet been conducted.

A spokesperson for Windsor West NDP MP Brian Masse, who has been keeping tabs on the issue, said the two ministries have additional questions and are seeking clarifications on some points.

University of Windsor professor Colin Novak has been one of the leads on the Windsor Hum research.

Masse’s spokesperson said officials are trying to arrange a meeting between the ministries and researchers, including Novak and the University of Western Ontario's Peter Brown.

Masse wasn’t available for comment Wednesday but a spokesperson said the federal government needs to make the report public.

In 2012, a different federal study suggested the hum may originate from the U.S. side of the Detroit River, in the general area of Zug Island, an area of concentrated steel production and manufacturing in River Rouge, Mich.

Zug Island is directly across from the western edge of Windsor.

The mayor of River Rouge said at that time that his city doesn't have the funds to investigate further.

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Canadians aim to make $20 tablet computer

The Canadian Press Posted: Mar 12, 2014 3:35 PM ET Last Updated: Mar 12, 2014 4:03 PM ET

The Canadian makers of the "world's lowest cost tablet," the UbiSlate 7Ci, think $37.99 still isn't cheap enough.

They figure there's still room to knock about 50 per cent off its price and make tablet ownership possible for anyone and everyone.

"This idea is to bridge the digital divide, it's really that simple, the idea is to overcome the affordability barrier," says Datawind CEO Suneet Singh Tuli during an interview at his Toronto-area office, one of five the company has in Canada, England, Germany and India.

"We think as the Scandinavians do that (internet access) is a fundamental human right."

On the second floor of an unassuming strip mall — strategically located within spitting distance of Toronto's Pearson airport, where Tuli says he's coming from or going to a few times a week — the Datawind team is working on its strategy to sell cut-rate "good enough" tablets.

Datawind CEO Suneet Singh Tuli says the company's founders think internet access is a fundamental human right. (Parivartan Sharma/Reuters)

The company is best known for its work with the Indian government, which it supplied with low-cost tablets for a program to get technology into the hands of students.

Datawind was recently named one of the world's 50 smartest companies by the MIT Technology Review magazine for launching those tablets, branded under the Aakash name.

While India's government is considering proposals from Datawind and other vendors to make the next version of the Aakash, the company has turned its attention to North America and the U.K. to sell its tablets directly to consumers under the UbiSlate brand.

The cheapest version of the seven-inch tablet, the UbiSlate 7Ci, has a not-too-sharp screen resolution of 800 by 480 pixels, four gigabytes of memory, half a gigabyte of RAM, runs a current version of Google's Android operating system and can only get online with WiFi. It sells online for $37.99 plus taxes and shipping. The next model up, the UbiSlate 7C+, costs an additional $42 to gain access to EDGE mobile networks. The most expensive model, the UbiSlate 3G7 at $129.99 plus taxes and shipping, has a better screen and processor and can also access HSDPA 3G mobile networks.

Tuli says the company can sell the tablets so inexpensively because of the scale of its production runs and the fact that it makes its own screens, which helps boost profit margins. A preloaded web browser also displays ads that generate additional revenue for Datawind — although users can choose to download another ad-free browser — and the company monetizes some downloads of apps.

Datawind has also kept its prices down by selling directly to consumers through its website and not seeking retail partners.

"Something that costs $50 to make ends up at $150 easily at retail," he says.

"In our case, something that costs $32 to make ends up at $38 in the consumers' hands."

Tuli says he envisions the price of Datawind's lower-end tablet slipping below $20 "within the next year or two," especially if revenues from ads and apps grow.

"We think pricing will continue coming down and we think features will continue going up. We will keep our high end between $100 to $150, we don't see ourselves going up anything higher than that, but we'll continue pushing the barriers on the lower end," he says.

While he insists that Canadian consumers won't find the tablets lacking, the reviews for Datawind's tablets in India were far from positive. And anyone who has used an iPad or a higher-end Android tablet will notice a major difference in performance.

But he believes there is a strong market of consumers who are willing to trade performance for a low price.

"What we tried to focus on was realizing that for our customer, price is the most important feature and starting with that element we said, 'What can we bundle in to provide a performance experience that would be good enough for them?"' Tuli says.

"You want something for your kids to take to school.... Kids are going to lose them or break them and you want something that you're not worried (about)."

March 15: Beyond Antibiotics Mar. 12, 2014 12:06 PM This week on Quirks & Quarks, we look at the threat of a post-antibiotic world, and what new strategies researchers are looking at to cope with a world where antibiotics no longer work.

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Elephants can identify dangerous humans from their voices

Thomson Reuters Posted: Mar 11, 2014 11:26 AM ET Last Updated: Mar 11, 2014 1:14 PM ET

The big ears are not just for show.

Elephants can tell whether a human poses a threat by listening to his voice and sussing out subtle clues about his age, gender and ethnicity, according to a study released on Monday.

Researchers from the University of Sussex and the Amboseli Trust for Elephants played recordings of human voices to wild elephants in Kenya and watched how they reacted.

"Our results demonstrate that elephants can reliably discriminate between two different ethnic groups that differ in the level of threat they represent," the authors said in an article published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

The study said an elephant herd was more likely to bunch up in a defensive position following playbacks of voices of Maasai people, an East African ethnic group that has hunted elephants for centuries, than other groups.

"Moreover, these responses were specific to the sex and age of Maasai presented, with the voices of Maasai women and boys, subcategories that would generally pose little threat, significantly less likely to produce these behavioural responses," according to the study.

The researchers said the findings provided the first proof elephants can distinguish between human voices, and suggested that other animals seeking to avoid hunters may also have developed this skill.

"Considering the long history and often pervasive predatory threat associated with humans across the globe, it is likely (this ability) could have been selected for in other cognitively advanced animal species," it said.

March 15: Beyond Antibiotics Mar. 12, 2014 12:06 PM This week on Quirks & Quarks, we look at the threat of a post-antibiotic world, and what new strategies researchers are looking at to cope with a world where antibiotics no longer work.

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Fake Microsoft help line can fool even 'computer literate'

An Edmonton couple says they were scammed out of more than $600 by a call centre in India pretending to be a help line for software giant Microsoft.

Jim Musson, 80, and his wife Alice Musson, 75, of Edmonton, have had to cancel their credit cards, close their bank accounts and change all their passwords.

'Jim kept asking him, ‘Are you with Microsoft?’ And he said. ‘Yes. Yes, yes'- Alice Musson

“This took me off-guard because I thought I was talking to Microsoft,” said Jim Musson, a retired school principal.

“I thought I was on safe ground.”

The Mussons have both been computer-users since the 1980s.

They own two iMac desktop computers, using them for research, emailing, and banking.

Jim Musson said he has even published books using his Mac.

“I’m computer literate, but I do not know the technical aspect of computers,” Musson said.

Musson was looking for help with Microsoft Entourage, an email and personal information management program for Macintosh computers.

Musson used Google to search “Microsoft Help”, and called the toll-free number for the first search result, which had “microsoft-support” in both its link and address bar, or URL.

The agent, who gave his name as “Alex”, asked for permission to remotely access Musson’s computer.

“He asked if he could help me,” Musson said. “He was very polite. He had an East Indian accent, but I didn’t think anything of that because some of the best technologists in the world come from India.”

The company Musson called was actually not Microsoft but a separate company, V tech-squad, with addresses in Palo Alto, Calif., and Gurgaon, India.

Alice Musson was listening on the line as her husband is nearly deaf.

“Jim kept asking him, ‘Are you with Microsoft?’ and he said. ‘Yes. Yes, yes.’”

Once he was connected however, the agent didn’t deal with the Mussons’ email question, but instead began showing them administration tools and logs within the operating system.

He highlighted dozens of lines of warnings he said were proof the computer was infected by powerful viruses.

“And we believed that. We believed we had been hacked … and he said, ‘We’ll fix that.’”

The agent said he would need to run special software that would cost “five ninety-nine.”

Alice Musson gave him his MasterCard number thinking the cost was $5.99.

“But then he said, ‘$599.’”

“I said I’m not doing this,” she said. “I just didn’t want anything to do with it.”

The Mussons say they told the agent they wanted to stop the transaction and investigate who they were dealing with, but that he kept talking fast about the dangers their computer was facing.

They hung up and called MasterCard to cancel their card and also advised ATB Financial whom they say advised them to close all their accounts, open news ones, and change their passwords.

Several hours later Jim Musson noticed the remote connection was still active and someone was exploring his wife’s computer.

He unplugged it and took to an Apple dealer who said the computer was virus-free.

Musson said V tech-squad are scammers.

“They are not only a danger to me and Alice they are a danger to a lot of people who have complained,” he said.

Go Public took the Mussons’ story to CBC web developer Michael Leschart.

Leschart said the demonstration the V tech-squad agent used to claim the computer was infected was effective, but fraudulent.

“Somebody has put a bit of work into finding normal things present in every computer that have the appearance of looking scary,” he said.

Leschart showed Go Public how easy it is to probe deeper into the operating system of a healthy computer and find scores of red and “critical” warnings with exclamation marks and “foreign address” network connections.

In fact, Leschart said, these messages are usually just benign logs, but because most users have never seen them before, scammers can say they are proof the computer is infected, or that someone in China or Russia is accessing the computer’s files.

“At any given time your computer will have a number of connections to foreign computers when it’s downloading email or software updates,” Leschart said.

“(They’re) using something that’s present on most computers … and making it seem like it’s a big problem that needs taking care of.”

Leschart said it’s a sophisticated deception.

“The people you are talking to are very practised in getting people to believe them and getting people to believe they’re with a reputable company.

“You have to admit in one sense, it’s kind of creative. But it is definitely fraud and it definitely unethical.”

In an email, V tech-squad CEO Manish Sharma says the Mussons purchased a $599.99 “family plan” for tech support and that the company has written confirmation the Mussons’ technical issue was resolved.

“We do not advertise ourselves as ‘Microsoft Support,” Sharma wrote.

“On our pages we clearly state ourselves as third-party support providers and have no affiliation to anyone.  We are registered partners of Microsoft and we are not wrong in claiming that.”

“We would be happy (to) refund the customer if the customer so desires.”

The Mussons said they don't believe Sharma and are trying to get back the $648.50 V tech-squad charged to their MasterCard.

In an email, ATB spokesman Barry Strader said V tech-squad has up to 90 days to respond.

If ATB investigators find the vendor did not fulfil its duties or misled the customer, the Mussons  would be entitled to a refund.

However, if the company can show it provided a service as outlined in a contract, the money would be lost.

“These rules were put in place to protect both credit card customers and vendors,” Strader wrote.

“We do get dispute claims like these on a regular basis and we owe it to customers and vendors to conduct a thorough investigation. In many cases, it comes down to one person’s word against another.”

Go Public asked Microsoft for comment but a Microsoft spokeswoman would only say the company encourages “customers to be wary of tech-support scams.”

Jim Musson says he never thought of himself as a vulnerable senior because he was such an experienced computer user.

It makes one feel extremely vulnerable Every night before I go to bed I pull the plugs out of the computers.”

“I am embarrassed. I am humiliated because I fell for a scam. My only defence is that these guys are clever enough to get into the Pentagon.”

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