The final resting place of three German U-boats, nicknamed Hitler’s lost fleet
, has been found at the bottom of the Black Sea. The submarines had been carried 2,000 miles overland from Germany to attack Russian shipping during the Second World War, but were scuttled as the war neared its end. Now, more than 60 years on, explorers have located the flotilla of three submarines off the coast of Turkey
In the chaos of the days leading up to the actual destruction of the wall and the fall of East Germany’s communist government, frantic Stasi agents sent trucks full of documents to the Papierwolfs and Reisswolfs — literally paper-wolves
and rip-wolves
, German for shredders. As pressure mounted, agents turned to office shredders, and when the motors burned out, they started tearing pages by hand — 45 million of them, ripped into approximately 600 million scraps of paper. The machine-shredded stuff is confetti, largely unrecoverable. But in May 2007, a team of German computer scientists in Berlin announced that after four years of work, they had completed a system to digitally tape together the torn fragments. Engineers hope their software and scanners can do the job in less than five years
Sydneysiders will have the chance to view the excavation of a First Fleet graveyard beneath Town Hall in the city’s CBD today. The archaeological dig has so far unearthed 58 graves and the remains of four bodies in the area, which was one of Sydney’s first cemeteries. It is part of a $60 million restoration of the historic building, which is being carried out over five years
The Library of Congress is making over 3,000 photos available on Flickr for public tagging. The idea of the pilot project is to invite people to add metadata to images that previously had little. The library is hoping that the metadata will add new context and meaning to the photos and make them more accessible to the public
A new book claims to have definitive evidence of a long-suspected technological crime — that Alexander Graham Bell stole ideas for the telephone from a rival, Elisha Gray. In The Telephone Gambit: Chasing Alexander Graham Bell’s Secret, journalist Seth Shulman argues that Bell — aided by aggressive lawyers and a corrupt patent examiner — got an improper peek at patent documents Gray had filed, and that Bell was erroneously credited with filing first
A 4,000-year-old clay tablet authorities suspect was smuggled illegally from Iraq was pulled from eBay just minutes before the close of the online auction. Criminal proceedings have been launched against the seller, identified only as a resident of Zurich
A team of clockmakers broke into the Pantheon in Paris in September 2005 and spent a year fixing the historic and neglected clock, which had been abandoned by the authorities. They were prosecuted for breaking in, but have just been cleared of the charges in court. The group, Untergunther
have a catalogue of subterranean lo-jinks to their name
Paleontologists discovered a giant fossilised claw that once belonged to an 2.5m long sea scorpion. The University of Bristol scientists uncovered the claw near Prum, Germany. It’s approximately 400 million years old
A paleontologist has discovered a 110 million-year-old dinosaur that had a mouth that worked like a vacuum cleaner, hundreds of tiny teeth and nearly translucent skull
Five Australian-based journalists were deliberately killed by Indonesian troops in East Timor in 1975, an Australian coroner’s court has ruled. Dorelle Pinch, deputy coroner of New South Wales, said the killings could constitute a war crime. The two Australians, two Britons and a New Zealander, known as the Balibo Five, were killed to stop them exposing the invasion of East Timor
For the first time in more than 60 years a Colossus computer is cracking codes at Bletchley Park. The machine is being put through its paces to mark the end of a project to rebuild the pioneering computer. It is being used to crack messages enciphered using the same system employed by the German high command during World War II. The Colossus is pitted against modern PC technology which will also try to read the scrambled messages
A paper published in 1955 by Homer Jacobson, a chemistry professor at Brooklyn College. The paper, entitled Information, Reproduction and the Origin of Life
, speculated on the chemical qualities of earth in the Hadean time, billions of years ago when the planet was beginning to cool down to the point where, as Dr Jacobson put it, one could imagine a few hardy compounds could survive
. Nobody paid much attention to the paper at the time, but today it is winning Dr Jacobson acclaim that he does not want — from creationists who cite it as proof that life could not have emerged on earth without divine intervention. So after 52 years, he has retracted the paper. Dr Jacobson’s retraction is in the noblest tradition of science
, Rosalind Reid, editor of American Scientist, wrote in its November-December issue, which has Dr Jacobson’s letter. His letter shows, Ms Reid wrote, the distinction between a scientist who cannot let error stand, no matter the embarrassment of public correction
, and people who cling to dogma
— via Slashdot
Some Neanderthals were probably redheads, a DNA study has shown. Writing in Science journal, a team of researchers extracted DNA from remains of two Neanderthals and retrieved part of an important gene called MC1R. In modern people, a change — or mutation — in this gene causes red hair, but, until now, no one knew what hair colour our extinct relatives had. By analysing a version of the gene in Neanderthals, scientists found that they also have sported fiery locks
The Tidbinbilla space tracking station, outside Canberra, Australia is still communicating with the two Voyager spacecraft 30 years after they were launched and 18 years after Voyager 2 passed close by Neptune. The bank of computers that would look at home in black-and-white episodes of Doctor Who cannot be junked. The 1970s hardware is now our world’s only means of chatting with two robot pioneers exploring the solar system’s outer limits. Today Voyager 1 is humanity’s most remote object, 15.5 billion kilometers from the sun. Voyager 2 is 12.5 billion kilometers from it. Both continue beaming home reports, but now they are space-age antiques. The Voyager technology is so outmoded,
said Tidbinbilla’s spokesman, Glen Nagle, We have had to maintain heritage equipment to talk to them
— via Slashdot
Scientists have suspected that the three known domains of life — eukaryotes, bacteria, and archaea — branched off and went their separate ways around three billion years ago. But pinning down the time of that split has been an elusive task. Now, a team of scientists present direct evidence that the three domains of life coexisted at least as long as 2.7 billion years ago. The discovery came from chemical examination of shale samples, loaded with oily lipid remains of archaea found in a deep Canadian gold mine near Timmins, Ontario, about 400 miles north of Toronto
The blueprint for a tiny, ultra-robust mechanical computer has been outlined by US researchers. The energy-efficient nano computer is inspired by ideas about computing first put forward nearly 200 years ago. The scientists say the machine would be built from nanometre-sized components, just billionths of a metre across. Chips based on the design could be used in places, such as car engines, where silicon can be too delicate
The launch of Australian Screen was met with an unfortunate fate: by 10.00am the site had crashed. The new site, which serves excerpts of Australian film and television archives crashed once users — primarily teachers and students — began accessing the new service
A 1935 analogue computer, built at Cambridge University and used to help plan the Dam Busters attacks on the Ruhr hydro dams in World War II, has been restored and put on display at Auckland’s Museum of Transport and Technology. The computer came to New Zealand around 1950 and was used, ironically, to build hydro dams there — and to calculate rabbit population numbers — via Slashdot
An Australian researcher has challenged the traditional assumption that the metric system of measurement was invented in 18th-century France. Pat Naughtin says he unearthed a description of such a system in a book written by John Wilkins, a century earlier in England In the book, Mr Wilkins describes a measuring system defined in units of ten for length, volume and money. He did not use the term metre, preferring Rhineland inches instead
Nestled at the foot of Syria’s coastal mountains, an ancient citadel has been put on the tourist map by restoration and excavation that revealed mysteries of the medieval Assassins sect, once based here. Saladin, the great Muslim leader, laid siege to Masyaf castle in the 12th century. But he thought twice before launching an assault on the Assassins, who had a reputation for mounting daring operations to slay their foes
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