History

Dozens of rare Spitfire fighter planes buried in Burma during World War II are to be dug up under an agreement between the Burmese government and a British aviation enthusiast.

The iconic single-seat aircraft are believed to have been hidden unassembled in crates by the former colonial power to prevent them falling into Japanese hands almost seven decades ago.

Local businessman Htoo Htoo Zaw, who is involved with the project, says the excavation is expected to take about two years — via redwolf.newsvine.com

A first-time treasure hunter is behind one of the largest Roman gold coin hoards ever discovered in the UK — thought to be worth £100,000.

National newspapers reported on Wednesday that the man, from Berkhamsted, had been sold a beginner’s metal detector from the town’s High Street-based Hidden History for £135.

He is reported to have gone back with 40 of the solidi coins, dating to the last days of Roman rule in Britain, and asked: “What do I do with this?”

Shop owners David Sewell and Mark Becher reported the find, and then joined a search party on the private land where the coins had been discovered.

The group found 119 more coins on the site to the north of St Albans. The last assignment of these coins to reach Britain arrived in AD 408 — via redwolf.newsvine.com

Sixty-five years after becoming the first human to fly faster than the speed of sound, retired Air Force Brigadier General Chuck Yeager is still making noise.

The 89-year-old Yeager, who was featured in the movie The Right Stuff, flew in the back seat Sunday of an F-15 Eagle as it broke the sound barrier at more than 30,000 feet above California’s Mojave Desert — the same area where he first achieved the feat in 1947 while flying an experimental rocket plane.

The F-15 carrying Yeager took off from Nellis Air Force Base near Las Vegas and broke the sound barrier at 10.24am Sunday, exactly 65 years to the minute the then-Air Force test pilot made history — via redwolf.newsvine.com

Three rare Australian coins to be auctioned in Melbourne tonight are expected to fetch more than $1 million.

One of the coins is a Hannibal Head holey dollar, created in New South Wales in 1813 from a silver dollar minted in Peru.

Also on offer are one of Australia’s first gold coins, the 1852 Adelaide Pound and an 1813 Colonial Dumps — via redwolf.newsvine.com

When archaeologists discovered thousands of medieval skeletons in a mass burial pit in east London in the 1990s, they assumed they were 14th-century victims of the Black Death or the Great Famine of 1315-17. Now they have been astonished by a more explosive explanation — a cataclysmic volcano that had erupted a century earlier, thousands of miles away in the tropics, and wrought havoc on medieval Britons.

Scientific evidence — including radiocarbon dating of the bones and geological data from across the globe — shows for the first time that mass fatalities in the 13th century were caused by one of the largest volcanic eruptions of the past 10,000 years.

Such was the size of the eruption that its sulphurous gases would have released a stratospheric aerosol veil or dry fog that blocked out sunlight, altered atmospheric circulation patterns and cooled the Earth’s surface. It caused crops to wither, bringing famine, pestilence and death — via redwolf.newsvine.com

This was hardly a joyride for Bob Russell.

But nearly 42 years after someone stole his 1967 Austin Healey 3000 from a Philadelphia apartment complex, the Southlake sleuth is back in the driver’s seat.

That was quite the knockdown-dragout, Russell said of the decades-long search that finally turned up his British sports car at a California car dealership in mid-May.

Russell, 66, a retired sales manager, spent years surfing the Internet looking for his car and eyeing similar Healeys on the road.

Still, he didn’t hold out much hope of ever finding the vehicle he paid a friend $3,000 for back in 1968, only to find it stolen the morning after taking his future wife out on their second date.

The fact that the car still exists is improbable, he said. It could have been junked or wrecked.

Instead, it was listed for sale by a dealer in an online auction, which is where a restless Russell came across it when he rolled out of bed a few weeks ago and wandered onto eBay — via redwolf.newsvine.com

Whence came pants? I’m wearing pants right now. There’s a better than 50 percent chance that you, too, are wearing pants. And neither of us have probably asked ourselves a simple question: Why?

It turns out the answer is inexplicably bound up with the Roman Empire, the unification of China, gender studies, and the rather uncomfortable positioning of man atop horse, at least according to University of Connecticut evolutionary biologist Peter Turchin.

Historically there is a very strong correlation between horse-riding and pants, Turchin wrote in a blog post this week. In Japan, for example, the traditional dress is kimono, but the warrior class (samurai) wore baggy pants (sometimes characterized as a divided skirt), hakama. Before the introduction of horses by Europeans (actually, re-introduction — horses were native to North America, but were hunted to extinction when humans first arrived there), civilized Amerindians wore kilts.

The reasons why pants are advantageous when mounted atop a horse should be obvious, nonetheless, many cultures struggled to adapt, even when their very existences were threatened by superior, trouser-clad horseback riders — via redwolf.newsvine.com