A GHOSTLY gallery of Scotland’s most famous shipwrecks has been revealed.
More than 20 of the country’s sunken relics of the sea have been
mapped by a diver then turned into undersea landscapes by an artist.
Rod Macdonald, one of the country’s best known divers, says the sea is revealing more details of the sunken ships as they erode.
He has surveyed and researched 25 lying in Scottish waters for his new book, Great British Shipwrecks.
Rod
provides a dramatic account of the ships’ time afloat and their eventual
sinking, with each wreck being illustrated by marine artist Robert
Ward, of Muchalls, Aberdeenshire.
His journey starts with the famous shipwrecks at Scapa Flow in the Orkney Islands – where the German fleet was scuttled in 1919.
Also
included is the legendary WWI British cruiser HMS Hampshire, on which
War Secretary Lord Kitchener perished on a voyage to Russia in 1916.
It rests in over 200 feet of water off Marwick Head to the north west of Orkney.
The
famous West Coast shipwrecks ,such as the steamships Thesis, Hispania
and Shuna, and cargo ship Rondo in the Sound of Mull are featured. There
are the renowned wrecks of the Dutch steamship SS Breda, lost near Oban
in 1940, and the WWII minelayer HMS Port Napier off Skye. The wreck of HMS Port Napier which lies off Skye
Rod
also reveals the haunting remains of HMS Pathfinder, the first Royal
Navy warship to be sunk by a U-boat torpedo during WWI. It lies in the
Forth.
Rod, 53 said: “The authorities at first attempted to cover up the true cause of the sinking.
“They
feared the affect that knowledge of the loss of such a ship to a U-boat
torpedo would have because it revealed just how vulnerable to torpedo attack British warships were.
“Pathfinder
was thus reported, at first, to have been mined. The Admiralty came to
an agreement with the Press Bureau, which allowed for the censoring of all reports.
“But other newspapers soon published an eyewitness account from an
Eyemouth fisherman who helped in the rescue and confirmed rumours a
submarine had
been responsible, rather than a mine.
“The
true story eventually came out and the sinking of Pathfinder by a
submarine made both sides in the conflict aware of the potential
vulnerability of large ships to attack by submarines. There were only 18
survivors.
“Small personal
items – a brass sextant in the bridge area and brass light cages and
lanterns – are strewn about, and all over the wreck are the reminders
that this was a warship.
“On the main section of the wreck, the deck collapses downwards towards the seabed.
“Here,
there is an ancient large gauge net lying over parts of it. The Royal
Navy draped a net over the wreck just after the sinking to catch any
bodies floating free from it and it may be part of that net that
remains.
“Some of the wrecks I have dived over 50 times – and brought back photographs and video for Rob to draw his illustrations.”
Rod said Scapa Flow was the still the top dive site in Britain and attracts around 4000 divers a year.
But more and more divers are also heading to St Abbs Head and
Eyemouth where underwater surveys for offshore wind farms have revealed
up to 100 new wrecks.
More than 40,000 dives are now carried out in the area each year.
? Great British Shipwrecks by Rod Macdonald is published by Whittles Publishing.
Enlarge PhotoAssociated
Press/United States Coast Guard, Colby Buchanan - This Nov. 28, 2012
photo provided by The United States Coast Guard shows a WWII minesweeper
on the Mississippi River near St. Louis, Mo.
ST. LOUIS (AP) — From sunken steamboats
to a millennium-old map engraved in rock, the drought-drained rivers of
the nation's midsection are offering a rare and fleeting glimpse into
years gone by.
Lack of rain has left many rivers
at low levels unseen for decades, creating problems for river commerce
and recreation and raising concerns about water supplies and hydropower
if the drought persists into next year, as many fear.
But for the curious, the receding water is offering an occasional treasure trove of history.
An old steamboat is now visible on the Missouri River near St. Charles, Mo., and other old boats nestled on river bottoms are showing up elsewhere. A World War II minesweeper, once moored along the Mississippi River as a museum at St. Louis before it was torn away by floodwaters two decades ago, has become visible — rusted but intact.
Perhaps most interesting, a rock
containing what is believed to be an ancient map has emerged in the
Mississippi River in southeast Missouri.
The rock contains etchings believed to be up to 1,200 years old. It
was not in the river a millennium ago, but the changing course of the
waterway now normally puts it under water — exposed only in periods of
extreme drought. Experts are wary of giving a specific location out of
fear that looters will take a chunk of the rock or scribble graffiti on
it.
"It appears to be a map of prehistoric Indian villages," said Steve Dasovich,
an anthropology professor at Lindenwood University in St. Charles.
"What's really fascinating is that it shows village sites we don't yet
know about."
Old boats are turning up in several locations, including sunken steamboats dating to the 19th century.
That's not surprising considering the volume of steamboat traffic that once traversed the Missouri and Mississippi
rivers. Dasovich said it wasn't uncommon in the 1800s to have hundreds
of steamboats pass by St. Louis each day, given the fact that St. Louis
was once among the world's busiest inland ports. The boats, sometimes
lined up two miles deep and four boats wide in both directions, carried
not only people from town to town but goods and supplies up and down the
rivers.
Sinkings were common among the wooden vessels, which often were poorly constructed.
"The average lifespan of a steamboat on the Missouri River was five
years," Dasovich said. "They were made quickly. If you could make one
run from St. Louis to Fort Benton, Mont., and back, you've paid for your
boat and probably made a profit. After that, it's almost like they
didn't care what happened."
What often happened, at least on the Missouri River, was the boat
would strike an underwater tree that had been uprooted and become lodged
in the river bottom, tearing a hole that would sink the ship. Dasovich
estimated that the remains of 500 to 700 steamboats sit at the bottom of
the Missouri River, scattered from its mouth in Montana to its
convergence with the Mississippi near St. Louis.
The number of sunken steamboats on the Mississippi River is likely
about the same, Dasovich said. Steamboat traffic was far heavier on the
Mississippi, but traffic there was and is less susceptible to river
debris.
Boiler explosions, lightning strikes and accidents also sunk many a
steamboat. One of the grander ones, the Montana, turned up this fall on
the Missouri River near St. Charles. The elaborate steamer was as long
as a football field with lavish touches aimed at pleasing its mostly
wealthy clientele. It went to its watery grave after striking a tree
below the surface in 1884.
The U.S. Coast Guard and Army Corps of Engineers urge sightseers to
stay away from any shipwreck sites. Sandbars leading to them can be
unstable and dangerous, and the rusted hulks can pose dangers for those
sifting through them.
Plus, taking anything from them is illegal. By law, sunken ships and their goods belong to the state where they went down.
While unusual, it's not unprecedented for low water levels to reveal historic artifacts.
Last year, an officer who patrols an East Texas lake discovered a
piece of the space shuttle Columbia, which broke apart and burned on
re-entry in 2003, killing all seven astronauts aboard. And the remains
of a wooden steamer built 125 years ago recently were uncovered in a
Michigan waterway because of low levels in the Great Lakes.
But treasure hunters expecting to find Titanic-like souvenirs in
rivers will likely be disappointed if they risk exploring the lost
boats.
"It's not like these wrecks are full of bottles, dishes, things like
that," said Mark Wagner, an archaeologist at Southern Illinois
University-Carbondale. "If there was anything on there in the first
place, the river current pretty much stripped things out of these
wrecks."
Such was the case with the USS Inaugural, a World War II minesweeper
that for years served as a docked museum on the Mississippi River at St.
Louis. The Great Flood of 1993 ripped the Inaugural from its mooring
near the Gateway Arch. It crashed into the Poplar Street bridge, and
then sank.
In September, the rusted
Inaugural became visible again, though now nothing more than an empty,
orange-rusted hulk lying on its side not far from a south St. Louis
casino.
A pond where Pope Benedict XVI likes to pray and feed the fish has
inspired a new children's book published by the Vatican on Wednesday
that his closest aide described as a window into the pope's soul.
"The Mystery of the Little Pond" tells the story of a young goldfish and his
fondness for "the man in white" who feeds him bread during the summer
months when Benedict stays at his summer residence of Castel Gandolfo
near Rome.
The pond, which is set in some ancient Roman ruins on the grounds of
the palace, also features a statue of the Virgin Mary -- described by
the goldfish in the book as "a very important woman" when he sees her
reflection.
"You can discover the Holy Father's soul in this pond," Monsignor
Georg Gaenswein, the head of the papal household and personal secretary
to the nature-loving pope, said at a presentation of the book near St
Peter's Square.
"The message is between the lines. I recommend parents read this book
aloud to their children and they will discover the mystery of the
pope," he said.
The 24-page book is by Russian-born Natalia Tsarkova, the official
portrait artist of the Vatican, who wrote the text and painted the
illustrations.
The back cover of the book, which is only available in Italian for
the moment, features a photograph of the pope feeding the fish at the
pond.
The book also won endorsements from Antonio Paolucci, director of the
Vatican Museums, and Saverio Petrillo, the manager of Castel Gandolfo,
who said the peaceful pond had been a place of prayer for several past
popes.
Petrillo said John Paul II in particular was fond of the place but
not all of Benedict's predecessors showed the same love for animals as
Benedict -- Paul VI (1963-1978) had to be persuaded not to eat the frogs
from the pond.
Just
like a scene out of "Antiques Roadshow," a woman in Hartford, Conn.,
turned in an old rifle to her local police station's gun buy-back, only
to discover the gun was worth anywhere from $20,000 to $25,000. The
woman, who wishes to remain anonymous, inherited the gun from her father
who had brought it home with him from Europe as a memento from World
War II.
The two officers conducting the gun buy-back, who are resident gun
experts for the Hartford Police Department, informed the owner she was
in possession of a Nazi Assault Rifle, the first of its kind, that dates
back to 1944.
The gun is called a Sturmgewehr 44, literally meaning "storm rifle," and
is the first "modern assault rifle ever made, eventually replaced by
the AK 47 in 1947 by Russia, who copied the German design of the
Sturmgewehr 44," Officer Lewis Crabtree, one of the two officers who
discovered the gun, told ABC News.
"It's like finding the Babe Ruth of baseball cards," said Officer John
Cavanna. "The rarity, it was made for such a very short period."
Most people, however, who aren't avid gun fans would have no idea what role this gun played in history.
"If you were to look at the gun and didn't know anything about guns, you would think it was garbage," Crabtree said.
That is essentially what the owner thought the gun was, bringing it to
the station knowing full well it would be put into a smelter, melting
the gun down into an iron brick.
"People turn in guns for a variety of reasons," Cavanna told ABC. "They
don't have a good way to secure it, they have kids around their home, or
they don't know how to use it. This is an anonymous way for someone to
take an unwanted firearm and get it off the streets. We then give them a
$50 or $100 gift card to Wal-Mart."
Crabtree attributes gun accidents to ignorance and carelessness. The
anonymous gun buy-back program is aimed at preventing people from
running into potentially dangerous situations with a gun they don't know
how to use or work.
This seems to be the reason the woman who dropped off the historic rifle.
"Her father passed away. The gun was in her closet," Cavanna said. "She did not know it was a machine gun.
"If the gun had been in the closet loaded, any second you could hit the
wrong level and discharge a fatal round," he said of the Sturmgewehr 44.
This German-made machine gun can fire 500 rounds in minutes, according to Cavanna, who is also a gun range master.
At the time the officers received the gun, it was in such disrepair that
it was inoperable, unable to shoot a bullet even if the gun had been
loaded. Cavanna said ammunition would have to be especially made for
this gun.
The unnamed owner of the gun has left the valuable artifact at the police station for safe keeping.
"We did not take the gun in for the gun buy-back program," Crabtree
said. "If we took it as part of the buy-back, we would have no choice
but to destroy the gun. We don't want to destroy that gun."
The owner intends to sell the Sturmgewehr 44.
"It sounds like her family could use the money," Cavanna said.
CHICAGO (WFLD/CNN) -- On this 71st anniversary of the attack on Pearl
Harbor, a World War II-era plane has been brought back to the surface
of Lake Michigan on Friday.
The plane has been lying on the bottom of the lake for nearly 70
years. The Naval Aviation Museum Foundation is sponsoring the recovery.
The aircraft crashed during training near Waukegan, IL in December 1944.
World War II-era plan found at the bottom of Lake Michigan. (Courtesy: WFLD/CNN)
This is just another example of why you'll never see a poor lawyer.
This lawsuit against a movie using a REPLICA of a skull has no merit,
yet there's actually a lawyer who is taking the case - and you may be
sure he's being paid big bucks - and a judge somewhere who said, "Ah,
sure, we'll let you take this to court. You might be able to get a
settlement from the movie folk (because settling is cheaper than
fighting this ridiculous thing, because they still ahve to pay *their*
lawyers) and it's just ridiculous!
LOS ANGELES — A Belize archeologist is suing the makers of a
blockbuster "Indiana Jones" film for using a likeness of a so-called
Crystal Skull, which he says is a stolen national treasure.
Dr.
Jaime Awe claims the skull was stolen from Belize 88 years ago, and that
filmmakers had no right to use a model of it in 2008's "Indiana Jones
and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull," according to the Hollywood
Reporter.
In a lawsuit filed in Illinois this week, Awe is
demanding the return of the Crystal Skull, which he says is a national
treasure, from a treasure-hunting family who allegedly stole it, said
the industry journal Friday.
But the legal action also targets
Lucasfilm, its new owner the Walt Disney Co. and Paramount Pictures
which released the film by Steven Spielberg, for allegedly using a
replica "likeness" of the skull.
Awe, head of the Institute of
Archeology of Belize, claims that the skull was found by the daughter of
an adventurer named F.A. Mitchell-Hedges under a collapsed altar in
temple ruins in Belize, and taken to the US in 1930.
The family is
said to have made money exhibiting the skull, described as 5 inches
high, 7 inches long and 5 inches wide, which Awe says was used as a
model for the Indiana Jones movie.
"LucasFilm never sought, nor
was given permission to utilize the Mitchell-Hedges Skull or its
likeness in the film," says the lawsuit, a copy of which was published
by the Hollywood Reporter.
"To date, Belize has not participated
in any of the profits derived from the sale of the film or the rights
thereto," it added. The movie grossed about $786 million worldwide.
The
skull is one of four valuable Crystal skulls seized from Belize -- the
others are on display in London, Paris and Washington.
"Belize was
.. an epicenter for nineteenth and early twentieth-century treasure
hunters plundering the nation's Maya ruins under the guise of
'archaeology'," said the lawsuit.
The lawsuit is seeking the
return of the original skull, which it describes as the "most notable"
of the four. It added that Belize has a "right, title and interest in
and to the Mitchell-Hedges Skull and its likeness."
The Hollywood
Reporter described Awe as a "real-life Indiana Jones," and his legal
action as "one of the most entertaining lawsuits of the year."
Neither
Lucasfilm -- which its founder and "Star Wars" creator George Lucas
sold to Disney in October for over $4 billion -- nor Paramount reacted
immediately to news of the lawsuit.
Medical experts expect the number of scuba divers
suffering the bends to reach a record high in New South Wales this year,
because of a new diving site on the state's central coast.
The ex-naval frigate HMAS Adelaide was sunk off Terrigal and Avoca beaches last year to become an artificial reef and dive site.
Since then, doctors are reporting significant increases in the number of divers with decompression sickness.
The wreck lies about 32 metres below the surface, which is around the depth limit for many recreational divers.
Figures
from the hyperbaric medicine unit at Sydney's Prince of Wales Hospital
show 27 patients were treated for the bends up until August this year.
In comparison there were 19 cases in total in 2011 and 28 in 2010.
Glen
Hawkins from the University of New South Wales, who is also the medical
director of private firm Hyperbaric Health, says the dive season has
only just begun.
"By August this year, we've already reached the
annual normal number and haven't hit the main diving season yet," Dr
Hawkins said.
"I would expect there's actually going to be a few
more cases and we'll actually get a record number of divers being
treated this year."
He says there are several contributing factors
to the condition, including the depth of the wreck, the time between
dives and relative diver inexperience.
Dr Hawkins says local diving operators need to ensure measures are in place to help address the problem.
"It's important that they get feedback that there is a problem," he said.
"The
reality is they may not actually be aware that something like this is
happening because the people come in, do their dive, then disappear."
When Yuri Kuzmin gets a call that someone is stuck in an elevator in
the Kotelnicheskaya Embankment Apartments, one of Stalin’s “Seven
Sisters,” the wedding-cake-shaped buildings that punctuate the Moscow
skyline, the first thing that the longtime onsite mechanic does is
curse. Then, he grabs his toolbox and heads to the building’s
thirty-second floor. There, in the machinery room. he checks the
nineteen-eighties’s era “brain” of the elevator, a bank of electronics
initially designed to raise and lower rockets being stored underground.
If he can, Kuzmin will release the stuck passengers from there. If he
can’t, he has to go down and do it manually. Does he receive thanks?
“From time to time,” he said. “People are different. Sometimes, they are
not happy. Some are inebriated. But it is always pleasant to help a
good person.”
That's a question most of us will
thankfully never know the answer to. But a few dozen people in
Columbus, Ohio, got close to the real thing, being surprised by an
animatronic dinosaur set loose by local comedians Roman Atwood and
Dennis Roady.
German archaeologists and filmmakers
have begun a massive expedition to explore the hauntingly beautiful
sunken caves of Mexico’s Yucatan Peninsula, once considered by the
Mayans as the gateways to their underworld. The
description seems only appropriate given the hundreds of human remains
that line the floors of these underwater labyrinths. In the Stone Age,
these caves, which were dry at the time, were used as burial sites.
Later, the Mayans worshiped them and believed that they would lead them
to the ‘Place of Fear.’ Today,
these caves are the subject of a new 3-D film titled ‘The Cages of the
Dead,’ which is set to hit theaters in the summer of 2013. But already,
photos from the one-of-kind voyage give us a preview of the unsettling
wonders held in these subterranean caverns.
Spectacular: German archaeologists and
filmmakers are exploring the hauntingly beautiful underwater caves along
Mexico's Yucatan Peninsula with the hope of finding historical
artifacts.
One of Kind: Already, the crew has found some a treasure trove of items, including 10,000-year-old human remains.
Never Before Seen: These remains date back to
the Stone Age when these caves were used as burial grounds and have
never been filmed before.
DARING TO ENTER THE 'PLACE OF FEAR'
The
Mayans lived in this region of Mexico from around 3,000 B.C. to 900
A.D, and they believed that these caverns led to their mystical
underworld known as Xibalba, or the 'Place of Fear.' Written about in their ancient scrolls, Xibalba was
a complicated place. It was to be both feared, filled with monstrous
beings, but also revered, as it was home to the beloved dead. To honor those who had fallen, the Mayans constructed temples throughout tunnels like these. In the end, it was believed that those who could make it through the dreaded Xibalba would rise 'triumphantly like the sun.'
But getting these shots is no simple
task for director Norbert Vander and his team. They require transporting
incredibly expensive 3-D cameras, along with hundreds of pounds of
equipment, through the sweltering jungles before then lowering them deep
into the jagged rocks of the caves below. The
crew must then dive as deep as 300 feet to access the hundreds of miles
of meandering tunnels with little less than a lantern to cut through
the absolute darkness. ‘If, under
these circumstances, you calculate your air supply incorrectly, get
lost or panic, you're as good as dead,’ Uli Kunuz, a team member, told
ABC News. But all of this
is worth in the end, as their ultimate goal is to document for the first
time ever some of the historical treasures kept deep underground.
Already, they have discovered some of the oldest human remains to be
found in the Americas - the 10,000-year-old bones of a boy. They also
found a fire pit from roughly 8,500 years ago kept in astoundingly good
condition. The water
helps to preserve much of these items that otherwise would have
disintegrated years ago. Team leader Florian Huber said, ‘It looked as
if there had been a fire there just the day before yesterday.’ The crew has also discovered ancient ceramics
and jewelry left by the Mayans, as well as the remains from long-extinct
animals, including the giant ground sloth and the mastodon.
In the end, they hope
to discover more artifacts that can perhaps shed light on the origins of species on the continent.‘Perhaps
the cenotes contain the answer to the questions of when the first
humans reached the Americas and how the continent was settled,’ Huber
said. To make this
incredibly journey possible, the crew have relied on a combination of
will and the best modern technology has to offer.
Because the crews are diving so deep underwater, compressed
air alone would not work. Instead, divers must rely on Trimix, a combination of
oxygen, nitrogen and helium to survive.
Rocky Straights: Crew members dive as deep as
300 feet to access the hundreds of miles of meandering tunnels with
little less than a lantern to cut through the absolute darkness.
As far as capturing their astonishing
discoveries, the crew uses high-tech camera cases that are light and small enough to capture these incredible moments on film.
In the past, to transport 3-D cameras
underwater, filmmakers used to have to keep their machinery in
underwater cases that were almost as tall as a man and weighed hundreds
of pounds. Carrying it was difficult enough, let alone having to move it
through narrow passageways of underwater caves. The film's producers say the costs are more than enough to be able to Ultimately,
Huber believes that the documentary will allow viewers to catch a
glimpse of this magic place and that the 3-D will let them feel as if
they were actually there. And while he understands that exposing these
treasures may mean jeopardizing their safety, he hopes that it it will
in turn lead to their preservation. 'Of course, this sort of film can increase the temptation,' Huber says. 'But it can also promote respect for this world and the
willingness to protect it.'
Information about one of the Japanese space program’s newest rockets
was stolen from a desktop computer that had been infected with malware,
officials from the organization revealed on Friday.
A computer housed at the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency’s (JAXA)
Tsukuba Space Center northeast of Tokyo had been discovered compiling
data and transmitting it to computers outside of the agency, according to Ars Technica’s Dan Goodin.
The computer was found to be infected and was cleaned on November 21, and no other computers were found to contain malware, Martin Fackler of the New York Times added.
JAXA officials said that it was not clear if the virus was a
cyberattack, Fackler said, but Japanese defense firms had been targeted
by similar information-stealing programs, including some that had been
linked to China.
“The data stolen from the space agency included information about the
Epsilon, a solid-fuel rocket still under development,” Fackler said.
“While the Epsilon is intended to launch satellite and space probes,
solid-fuel rockets of that size can also have a military use as
intercontinental ballistic missiles.”
“The Epsilon, whose first launching is scheduled for next autumn,
will also feature new technology that will allow it to be remotely
controlled by a personal computer,” he added. Computer-based espionage
attacks have become more and more common in recent years, with a vast
array of international targets – including private companies, government
organizations, and human rights advocacy groups – becoming frequent
targets of such cybercrime efforts, Goodin said. In many cases, evidence
linking the attacks to Chinese government officials has been uncovered.
“Highly sophisticated malware dubbed Flame,
which reportedly was jointly developed by the US and Israeli
governments, has also been used to spy on Iran,” he added. “On Friday,
researchers from antivirus provider Kaspersky Lab, published details on a targeted attack on Syria’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs.”
ATLANTA (AP) - The mysterious iron
contraption jutted above the surface of a north Georgia river for
decades, as children swam around it and historians wondered about its
past.
Now, more than 125 years
after gold explorers placed the underwater capsule in the Chestatee
River murk, townspeople in Dahlonega are about to put the ancient relic
on display.
The "diving bell," which
allowed gold miners to explore the river bed from its underwater
capsule, is set to be unveiled Friday in a park not far from Dahlonega's
town square. Historians see it as a valuable link to the gold mining
history of the area, the scene of the first major gold rush in the
United States.
Historians believe the 15-foot-tall device is the only known surviving diving bell, or caisson, from that era.
From Wales Online : Top secret Doctor Who script found by student in taxi on night out
If you found a top secret script for a new episode of one of TV’s
most popular shows, would you be able to hand it straight back without
releasing any spoilers?
That’s exactly what one Cardiff student did after finding a Doctor Who script in the back of a Cardiff taxi.
Hannah Durham stumbled upon the script for a forthcoming episode of the sci-fi show during a night out with friends.
Producers, scriptwriters and fans of Doctor Who thanked her for
returning the missing script and preventing precious plot details from
being leaked online.
Hannah told WalesOnline she was unaware of the significance of the
find until she was bombarded with praise from the show’s “Whovian” fans.
She said: “I had never even heard of a Whovian before. I have had so
many tweets from people thanking me for returning it – it has just been
crazy.”
She added: “I like Doctor Who but I haven’t seen it in a while, so the whole significance passed me by a bit.”
Hannah discovered the script on Halloween night at about 10pm after getting into a black cab with friends in Cathays.
Dressed as a skeleton, Hannah spotted the top-secret script, entitled The Last Cyberman, tucked inside a seat pocket.
The 20-year-old said she placed the script in her bag and only fully realised it was a Doctor Who script the next day.
Hannah said she wasn’t tempted to read the contents – or sell it.
She said: “I glanced at it enough to see that it was a script and I
saw the title and everything, but I didn’t feel the urge to read through
it or copy it or anything.”
Hannah set about attempting to return the script to show bosses by e-mailing and tweeting scriptwriters and producers.
Her friend Ben Rowling, a fan of Doctor Who, helped her get in touch with the show’s production team.
Cardiff University student Hannah said: “He was more excited than me
to be honest. It made his life really. He was just really happy that he
could help out.”
She eventually arranged to hand in the script at the BBC’s Roath Lock studios in Cardiff Bay.
The final year English Literature student’s good deed was widely praised.
And scriptwriter Neil Gaiman, who wrote the episode, personally offered his thanks.
He wrote on Twitter: “A world-sized pat on the back to Hannah who
found a copy of the Dr Who I wrote, an actress left in a taxi, and
returned it safe & sound.”
Hannah said she hoped the BBC would be able to offer her some work experience after returning the Doctor Who script. What can Doctor Who fans expect from The Last Cyberman?
Doctor Who villains the Cybermen will make a reappearance when the show returns for a run of eight episodes in Spring 2013.
An all-star cast has been lined up to appear in the episode,
including Eastenders actress Tamzin Outhwaite and Warwick Davis, the
star of Ricky Gervais’ sitcom Life's Too Short.
Jason Watkins, from Being Human and Lark Rise to Candleford, will also appear among the stellar cast.
The official Doctor Who team blog said the guest stars would portray “a band of misfits on a mysterious planet”.
PROVIDENCE,
R.I. (AP) — The obscure book's margins are virtually filled with
clusters of curious foreign characters — a mysterious shorthand used by
17th century religious dissident Roger Williams.
For centuries the scribbles went undeciphered. But a team of Brown University students has finally cracked the code.
Historians call the now-readable writings the most significant addition to Williams scholarship in a generation or more. Williams is Rhode Island's
founder and best known as the first figure to argue for the principle
of the separation of church and state that would later be enshrined in
the Bill of Rights.
His coded writings are in the form of notes in the margins of a book at the university's John Carter Brown Library.
The nearly 250-page volume, "An Essay Towards the Reconciling of
Differences Among Christians," was donated in the 1800s and included a
handwritten note identifying Williams as the notes' author — though even
that was uncertain at first.
A group including former library director Edward Widmer,
Williams scholar and Rhode Island College history professor emeritus J.
Stanley Lemons and others at Brown started trying to unravel the
so-called "Mystery Book" a few years ago. But the most intense work
began earlier this year after the university opened up the challenge to
undergraduates, several of whom launched an independent project.
"No
one had ever looked at it systematically like this in generations,"
said Widmer. "I think people probably looked at it and shrugged."
Senior math major Lucas Mason-Brown,
who has done the majority of the decoding, said his first instinct was
to develop a statistical tool. The 21-year-old from Belmont, Mass., used
frequency analysis, which looks at the frequency of letters or groups
of letters in a text, but initially didn't get far.
He picked up
critical clues after learning Williams had been trained in shorthand as a
court stenographer in London, and built his own proprietary shorthand
off an existing system. Lucas-Brown refined his analysis and came up
with a rough key.
Williams' system consisted of 28 symbols that
stand for a combination of English letters or sounds. How they're
arranged is key to their meaning; arrange them one way and you get one
word, arrange them another, you get something different. One major
complication, according to Mason-Brown: Williams often improvised.
From
there, Mason-Brown was able to translate scattered fragments, and the
students determined there were three separate sections of notes. Two are
Williams' writings on other books, a 17th century historical geography
and a medical text. The third — and most intriguing — is 20 pages of
Williams' original thoughts on one of the major theological issues of
the day: infant baptism.
Williams
also weighed in on the conversion of Native Americans, implying it was
being achieved through treachery and coercion, said Linford Fisher, a
history professor at Brown who has been working with Mason-Brown.
Fisher
said the new material is important in part because it's among Williams'
last work, believed to have been written after 1679 in the last four
years of his life.
Widmer said the new discovery is remarkable on several levels.
"Part
of it was the excitement of a mystery being cracked, and part of it was
Roger Williams is very famous in Rhode Island — no other state has a
founder as tied up with the state's identity as Rhode Island," he said.
"To have a major new source, a major new document, from Roger Williams
is a big deal."
The master wears an amulet with a blue eye in the center. Before him, a candidate kneels in the candlelit room, surrounded by microscopes and surgical implements. The year is roughly 1746. The initiation has begun.
The master places a piece of paper in front of the candidate and orders him to put on a pair of eyeglasses. “Read,” the master commands. The candidate squints, but it’s an impossible task. The page is blank.
The candidate is told not to panic; there is hope for his vision to improve. The master wipes the candidate’s eyes with a cloth and orders preparation for the surgery to commence. He selects a pair of tweezers from the table. The other members in attendance raise their candles.
The master starts plucking hairs from the candidate’s eyebrow. This is a ritualistic procedure; no flesh is cut. But these are “symbolic actions out of which none are without meaning,” the master assures the candidate. The candidate places his hand on the master’s amulet. Try reading again, the master says, replacing the first page with another. This page is filled with handwritten text. Congratulations, brother, the members say. Now you can see.
For more than 260 years, the contents of that page—and the details of this ritual—remained a secret. They were hidden in a coded manuscript, one of thousands produced by secret societies in the 18th and 19th centuries. At the peak of their power, these clandestine organizations, most notably the Freemasons, had hundreds of thousands of adherents, from colonial New York to imperial St. Petersburg. Dismissed today as fodder for conspiracy theorists and History Channel specials, they once served an important purpose: Their lodges were safe houses where freethinkers could explore everything from the laws of physics to the rights of man to the nature of God, all hidden from the oppressive, authoritarian eyes of church and state. But largely because they were so secretive, little is known about most of these organizations. Membership in all but the biggest died out over a century ago, and many of their encrypted texts have remained uncracked, dismissed by historians as impenetrable novelties.
It was actually an accident that brought to light the symbolic “sight-restoring” ritual. The decoding effort started as a sort of game between two friends that eventually engulfed a team of experts in disciplines ranging from machine translation to intellectual history. Its significance goes far beyond the contents of a single cipher. Hidden within coded manuscripts like these is a secret history of how esoteric, often radical notions of science, politics, and religion spread underground. At least that’s what experts believe. The only way to know for sure is to break the codes.
In this case, as it happens, the cracking began in a restaurant in Germany.
PLYMOUTH divers are investigating the mystery of a wreck site off the Mewstone dating back hundreds of years.
The Mewstone Cannon site, thought to date back to the 18th century, was discovered just off the coast of Wembury in 1968.
The wreck site has cannons, anchors and fragments of olive oil jars
Now it has been adopted by Plymouth Diving Centre, based
at Queen Anne's Battery, through the Nautical Archaeology Society's
Adopt-A-Wreck scheme.
The wreck site covers a large area between five and 18 metres
deep, with cannons nearly two metres long scattered across the sea bed
alongside anchors and fragments of olive oil jars which originally stood
over a metre tall.
The site was discovered by visiting divers and was surveyed and
finds noted, but no further work was done until last year, when
non-profit marine research organisation ProMare took up the
investigation.
As part of its SHIPS – Shipwrecks and History In Plymouth Sound –
programme, it carried out a geophysical survey with Plymouth University
to map accurate locations for the cannons before handing its findings
over to Plymouth Diving Centre.
Diving centre manager Lisa McLernon said: "This project will test
our divers' investigative skills, as the cannons are in the same area
as a couple of other wrecks.
"There are various theories about how the site came about.
"It could be a shipwreck destroyed in a storm in the 1700s, with the wood eaten away by marine organisms over time.
"It could be that the cannons were thrown overboard in bad weather in an attempt to save the ship.
"It's exciting that we'll be finding out what really happened all those years ago."
The team will also be creating a diver trail with an easy-to-follow map.
Sandy Island was nowhere to be found when Australian scientists reached the South Pacific location where it appeared on Google Earth, nautical charts and world maps.
"It raises all kinds of conspiracy theories," expedition member Steven Micklethwaite
said, adding that the CIA is among the sources of the world coastline
database. "It reminded me of the hypernatural island in the "Lost" TV
series."
The phantom Manhattan-size island in the Coral Sea was shown as Sandy
Island on Google Earth, sized about 15 miles by three miles on Google Maps, and halfway between Australia and the French New Caledonia.
Sandy Island has been featured in various publications, even the most
authoritative sources, for at least 116 years and, according to Jethro
Lennox, a publisher of The Times Atlas of the World, "back in the 19th
century, cartographers would gather their information from various
sources like explorers or even sailors, so you could never have a
perfect map."
From 1967, The Times Atlas of the World identified the phantom isle, in the supposedly French territorial waters, as Sable Island,
but was among few publications to remove it from the map, when it got
new bathymetric data in 1999. It also does not appear on French maps
from 2000.
Local weather maps placed it 700 miles from the coast of Brisbane, Australia. Many scientific maps, as well as weather maps
used by the Southern Surveyor, an Australian maritime research vessel,
also placed the island there, according to Maria Seton, the chief
geologist at the University of Sydney who led the expedition.
"Somehow this error has propagated through to the world coastline database, from which a lot of maps are made," she said.
Researcher Micklethwaite,
in a phone interview, explained that the expedition was investigating
the sea bed and plate tectonics around Australia and decided to head to
an unusual island listed on their charts.
But there were some perplexing issues. "We checked the coastline
database, you could see it there but when you zoom in on it it's just a
black blob. Google has no photos from it," Micklethwaite, an associate
professor at the University of Western Australia, said. "It's just a
sort of slit in the earth so we went upstairs, and the navigation charts
didn't have it on.
"So, who do we trust, Google Earth or the navigation chart? So we decided to sail through the island.
"The captain was understandably very nervous because although it wasn't
on the navigation charts, it was on his weather maps, so he put into
place all the safety stops to make sure we didn't run aground.
"We all had a good giggle at Google as we sailed through the island. It
was one of those happy circumstances in science. You come across
something somebody has never noticed before."
Where Sandy Island was marked on maps they found only deep blue ocean, very deep, as it turned out: water depth of 4,620 feet.
Micklethwaite said the mapping was most likely a cartographic error.
The scientists recorded information about the seafloor so the world maps can be changed.
Bottom line: the Pacific Ocean just lost an island it never had.
Before military forces had secure
cell phones and satellite communications, they used carrier pigeons.
The highly trained birds delivered sensitive information from one
location to another during World War II. Often, the birds found the
intended recipient. But not always.
The code
features a series of 27 groups of five letters. According to Reuters,
nobody from Britain's Government Communications Headquarters has been
able to decipher it. The message was sent by a Sgt. W. Scott to someone or something identified as "Xo2."
A spokesperson remarked,
"Although it is disappointing that we cannot yet read the message
brought back by a brave carrier pigeon, it is a tribute to the skills of
the wartime code-makers that, despite working under severe pressure,
they devised a code that was indecipherable both then and now."
The bird was discovered by a homeowner doing renovations earlier this month. In an interview with Reuters,
David Martin remarked that bits of birds kept falling from the chimney.
Eventually, Margin saw the red canister and speculated that it might
contain a secret message. And it seems as if the message will always be
secret.
Carrier pigeons played a vital
role in wars due to their incredible homing skills. All told, U.K.
forces used about 250,000 of the birds during World War II.
Queensland coal miners say activists dressed as sharks, octopuses,
fish, turtles and coral polyps don't care about regional communities
because they're being funded by a US organisation.
About 50
Greenpeace activists dressed as creatures from the Great Barrier Reef
protested outside a coal mining conference in Brisbane on Monday.
They say the Galilee Basin Coal Conference showcased plans for at least nine new coal mines in central Queensland.
'It's
clear that official institutions, governments have failed to protect
the Great Barrier Reef from the coal industry,' Greenpeace said in a
statement.
'It's time for people who love the reef to come together and demand that it is protected.'
The Queensland Resources Council (QRC) says Greenpeace is trying to drive a wedge into regional communities.
Speaking
at the conference, QRC chief Michael Roche told miners Greenpeace's
anti-coal campaign was funded by US philanthropic organisation the
Rockefeller Foundation so it wasn't interested in local development.
'Regional
communities understand their long-term prosperity relies on the
economic diversity that the minerals and energy sector is delivering,'
Mr Roche said.
'Greenpeace have no interest in the future of these
communities, particularly when you learn that seed funding for their
latest anti-coal campaign came from the United States.'
Greenpeace was not available for comment.
From the New York Times: A Bounty of Souvenirs From a Captured Ship
Naval adventure, detective yarn, travel diary, shopping survey. You don’t normally expect to encounter these narratives at an art show. But despite the presence of paintings, prints, sculptures and such, “The English Prize,” at the Yale Center for British Art, isn’t mainly about looking at art. As suggested by its double subtitle, “The Capture of the Westmorland, An Episode of the Grand Tour,” this show has many other things on its mind.
The story starts in 1778, when France joined the Revolutionary War on the side of the Americans. In the course of harassing British ships near the coast of Spain the following year, two French warships seized the Westmorland, a 300-ton “merchantman” sailing home from Italy, as a prize of war. Its English crew and passengers were exchanged for French and Spanish prisoners and its cargo sold, as was the custom. Insurers paid off the owners of the lost goods to the tune of £100,000 — about $210 million in today’s dollars — and the Westmorland’s bad luck was forgotten.
A couple of centuries later, in the late 1990s, scholars poking around in the archives of the San Fernando Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Madrid determined that the mysterious initials PY, inscribed on many objects in the collection, stood for Presa Ynglesa, the English Prize. Over the next decade, following leads in Spain, Italy, England and elsewhere, they pieced together the story of the Westmorland and its cargo.
In addition to silk, olives and 32 wheels of Parmesan cheese destined for London markets, the Westmorland had carried crates of books, maps, pictures, statues and other souvenirs being shipped home by English travelers on the Grand Tour. These make up the bulk of this varied show — an inlaid marble tabletop here, pages of sheet music there, and in between, watercolor views of the Alban hills and lakes near Rome by the English landscape painter John Robert Cozens and a bootleg edition of Laurence Sterne’s entertaining novel “Tristram Shandy.”
By the 18th century, the Grand Tour had become a rite of passage for young men of the British upper classes. Accompanied by tutors, they spent months, sometimes years, acquiring firsthand knowledge of the European arts, languages and even sciences. Along the way, they sat for oil portraits and busts, commissioned work from the fashionable artists of the day, and bought rarities, copies and fakes.
The Westmorland’s hoard, most of which landed at the academy in Madrid, comprises all this and more. And for “The English Prize,” the dispersed contents of several of its crates have been reassembled, allowing us to discern not just the tastes and interests of the Grand Tourists in general, but those of specific individuals as well.
For example, in a portrait by Pompeo Batoni, Francis Basset, heir to a Cornwall tin and copper fortune, leans on a classical plinth with a map of Rome in his hand and the dome of St. Peter’s in the background. He looks quite the serious fellow, and the objects he shipped home included classical statuary, architectural drawings and Piranesi prints. But that saucy Sterne novel belonged to him, and so did the proto-romantic watercolors.
Another traveler who sat for Batoni — the go-to painter for Englishmen in Italy — was George Legge, Viscount Lewisham. His father, the Earl of Dartmouth, had been painted by Batoni some 25 years earlier, but the son’s portrait seems to have been something of a splurge. His other purchases were more modest. One, a small, skillful copy by an unknown artist of Raphael’s tenderly religious “Madonna della Seggiola,” from the Pitti Palace in Florence, stands out among all these artifacts of the Age of Reason.
The Grand Tour was not only about art and ideas, however. Frederick Ponsonby, Viscount Duncannon, sent home painted fans and fanciful ceiling designs with classical motifs. And lacking cameras, the travelers had to buy pictures of the sights they were so busy seeing. These images will look both familiar and startling to modern-day travelers. The Alpine scenery at Chamonix, the ski resort in France, betrays no sign of winter sports. The Arch of Titus, in Rome, stands ruined amid remnants of later brick walls. Glowing lava from Mt. Vesuvius paints the night red in a hand-colored print.
To the Englishmen who bought them, the works were travel mementos; to us, they are vehicles for a trip through time. They are also collateral damage from the war that gave us independence. And clues in a scholarly mystery story. And, yes, shopping.
“The English Prize: The Capture of the Westmorland, an Episode of the Grand Tour” is at the Yale Center for British Art, 1080 Chapel Street, New Haven, through Jan. 13. For more information: (203) 432-2800 or ycba.yale.edu.
The investigation bears all the elements of a Hollywood blockbuster:
an undercover sting, mobile surveillance teams, an international
smuggling operation and, most importantly, a catchy name – Operation
Serpent.
It also contains one heck of a fish story involving a freakish predator with near-mythological powers.
Bearing razor teeth, an insatiable appetite for aquatic vegetation
and other fish and an ability to slither up to half a kilometre over
land, the snakehead fish has become the stuff of urban legend, inciting
mild panic seven years ago in New York, when conservation officials
caught five in a brackish Queens lake, one measuring more than two feet
long.
The fearsome fish hails from Asia, where many consider it a
culinary delicacy. North American importers have found a healthy market
for the fish among the Asian diaspora here, as well as fish collectors
who enjoy watching aquarium-bound snakeheads devour everything in their
paths, according to investigators. That aggressive disposition has also
earned it invasive species designation throughout North America, where
it has no known predators.
That incident, along with the
creature’s knack for destroying habitat, fed a zeal to root out and
destroy the so-called monster fish in the United States. Last year, U.S.
authorities began gazing to the porous northern border in the battle
against the snakehead and, more specifically, an unassuming fish store
in Markham’s Pacific Mall.
On Wednesday, authorities in Canada and
the United States officially closed their case against Lucky Aquarium
after the company and employee Jimmy Ip pleaded guilty to importing and
selling snakehead fish – banned in both Ontario and the United States –
despite his lawyer’s reservations. “There was no real threat to the
public,” attorney Darren Sederhoff said. “I thought that was
exaggerated. The pictures, with the teeth and all that, I know, they can
look scary, but the majority of snakehead fish are no threat to our
ecosystems.”
The punishment amounts to more than $90,000 in fines and 120 days in jail.
According
to documents and agents involved in the investigation, Operation
Serpent began in March of last year, when agents traced online ads for
snakehead fish to Lucky Aquarium.
Taking cues from hard-drug investigations, the team of Canadian and U.S. investigators first had to set up a confidence buy.
An
undercover U.S. Fish and Wildlife agent posing as a customer began
recording regular conversations with Mr. Ip, and eventually ordered 26
giant red snakehead fish to be sent to a Buffalo address. Apparently
aware of the illicit nature of the transaction, Mr. Ip advised the agent
how to avoid detection at the border and said he would courier the
shipment using “a fake name and fake address on the packaging,” Bob
Baxter, an operations manager with Environment Canada’s wildlife
enforcement division and who was closely involved in the investigation,
said in an interview. “That built a confidence between Mr. Ip and our
undercover operator so that a second transaction could be entered into.”
For
months, Canadian authorities gathered information on Mr. Ip, employing
mobile surveillance teams to observe where he lived, where he did
business and if he was picking up shipments at the airport. They even
used telephone warrants to determine who he was talking to.
The
investigative coup came in December, 2011. The U.S. agent travelled to
Markham to buy 155 more snakehead fish, a potentially tricky transaction
that required Environment Canada to supply a team to be on standby in
case the covert operator’s safety was endangered. When the deal was done
– $233 apiece for fish that were in Thailand one day and Pearson
International Airport the next – officials in both countries knew they
had enough evidence to take down Mr. Ip and his employer.
Environment
Canada officials worked closely with the Ontario Ministry of Natural
Resources and the New York Attorney-General’s office to create a plea
bargain for Mr. Ip. He pleaded guilty on Friday. According to his
lawyer, Mr. Ip has already paid fines totalling more than $90,000 in
both countries and he will serve his two 60-day jail sentences on
weekends.
“He’s accepted responsibility, he’s paid up, he’ll do a
bit of a jail sentence and that’s the end of it,” said Mr. Sederhoff,
who questioned why the agencies involved sent out several
self-congratulatory press releases about the case. “A big win for the
governments? I don’t know. They’re trying to toot their own horn here.
You know, we’ve caught the big fish. Let me know when the parade is.”
At first Max Galuppo, university student, of Bloomsbury, New Jersey, didn't believe it.
Then he saw a picture of himself next to the portrait.
And he had to accept that he looked remarkably like the figure described as Nobleman with Dueling Gauntlet.
Max and his girlfriend were strolling through the Philadelphia Museum on November 11 when they stumbled across the portrait.
Max's
girlfriend Nikkie Curtis told ABCNews.com: "We went into the armor
exhibit and he loved the helmets. He was completely oblivious to it, and
I walked past it and was like, 'Do you see this painting right now? It
looks just like you.'"
Max said: "To be honest, I didn't see it. I
didn't see the resemblance. Then I saw the picture of me next to it,
and you can't deny that."
Max has been asked to pose with the 1562 portrait dressed in the same way.
He's thinking about that while he tried to find more information about the painting and the nobleman it depicts.
Archaeologists uncover the fish trap. Picture: David Guilfoyle
Archaeologists have found an ancient fish trap near Esperance, the
first to be recorded in the area, which is believed to have been used up
to 1000 years ago.
The trap is made up of a series of rocks
placed across a tidal creek east of the south coast town and would have
been supported by wooden stakes and covered in netting to catch passing
fish.
A research team uncovered the fish trap while surveying the area.
Doc
Reynolds, a traditional owner of the area and chairman of the Gabbie
Kylie Foundation which organised the expedition, said the site was well
known among indigenous people.
"The old fellas had a very complex
understanding of the seasons, tides and animal behaviour and were able
to harvest a catch with great skill and efficiency," he said.
Archaeologist
David Guilfoyle said the rock structure harnessed the natural tidal
cycles of the estuary by trapping fish as they moved in and out with the
tides.
"It is difficult to determine how long these traps have
been used, but we guess at least over the last 500 to 1000 years," he
said.
Similar rock structures have recently been found elsewhere in the South West, including Albany.
