Hunley update

It could be one of the nation's oldest cold case files: What happened to eight Confederate sailors aboard the H.L. Hunley after it became the first submarine in history to sink an enemy warship?

Their hand-cranked sub rammed a spar with black powder into the Union blockade ship Housatonic off Charleston on a chilly winter night in 1864 but never returned.

Its fate has been the subject of almost 150 years of conjecture and almost a decade of scientific research since the Hunley was raised back in 2000. But the submarine has been agonizingly slow surrendering her secrets.

Full story here.

A treasure in the garage

A classic Bugatti car, which gathered dust in a Tyneside garage for almost 50 years, may fetch up to £3m ($4.35m) when it goes under the hammer.

Relatives of reclusive Newcastle doctor Harold Carr found the 1937 Type 57S Atalante in a garage after he died.

Now the classic car, thought to be one of just 17 built, is to be sold by Bonhams in Paris next month.

It was originally owned by Earl Howe - first president of the British Racing Drivers' Club.

Dr Carr, a former army surgeon, left the contents of a lock-up garage to his family when he died in 2007.

As well as the Bugatti, his nephew also discovered a classic Aston Martin, and a Jaguar E-type in the lock-up.

From the BBC. Note that the article mentions that the car's whereabouts had been, in fact, known to specialists for some time.

"Oldest tortoise" an impostor?

A giant tortoise that has been dubbed the world's oldest living creature may actually be an imposter, living under an assumed identity, it has emerged.

It had been reported that Jonathan, a present-day resident of St Helena, was living on the remote British island when Napoleon was exiled there back in 1815.

From the BBC.

PS Of course, the claim to be the oldest living creature is absurd. Even the oldest tortoises do not approach the longevity of the humble quahog.

Looted Etruscan votive deposit recovery

Italian police have found the long-sought "treasure of Satricum" in a farmer's bookshelf, they announced at a news conference in Rome this week.

Consisting of more than 500 delicate miniature pots crafted about 2,600 years ago, the "treasure" was discovered during a police investigation in the countryside near the village of Campoverde di Aprilia, some 25 miles south of Rome. . .

Meticulously stored in a bookshelf in the farmer's house, the miniature jars were made of Italo-Corinthian pottery and Etruscan bucchero pottery, a kind of ceramic made in the Etruscan region between the 7th and 5th centuries B.C.

They were thrown into the lake, which is fed by a perennial spring, as votive offers during ritual festivities.

Full story here.

Origami squid

So far not a lot of results searching for online how-to instructions. Some nice pictures of completed origami squid here and here, with one how-to here. Most impressive by far, however, is Attack of the Kraken -- sailing ship and monster squid, all folded from a single square of paper.

Rewriting the story of Machu Picchu

From the postcards bearing his swashbuckling, fedora-topped image to the luxury train emblazoned with his name that runs to the foot of the mountain redoubt of Machu Picchu, reminders are ubiquitous here of Hiram Bingham, the Yale explorer long credited with revealing the so-called Lost City of the Incas to the outside world almost a century ago.

But in recent months, a confluence of contrary events has threatened to upend the legacy of Bingham, the ostensible model for the fictional Indiana Jones. Peru has threatened legal action against Yale to recover thousands of artifacts Bingham removed. Evidence has emerged suggesting that a German adventurer may have arrived there first. And a dispute has been grinding on over who owned the site when Bingham supposedly discovered it. . .

Not only may Bingham not be quite the heroic pioneer that he has been portrayed as, but it may well be that the Lost City of the Incas was never really lost after all.

Full story here.

Oxyrhynchus Gospel fragment bought in?

Looks like the early fragment of the Gospel of John did not sell at Sotheby's December 3rd sale. Press release here; Sotheby's catalog entry here; sale results here.

The other highlight of the sale, an historical compendium including Marco Polo's travelogue, did sell. Catalog entry here; hammer price was £937,250. Excerpt from the description:

This is evidently the long-lost manuscript of historical tracts used by the scribe of the Burghley transcripts, last seen in the sixteenth century, and containing the only substantial Marco Polo manuscript to come to the auction market in nearly a century, as well as the only medieval manuscript of the Encomium Emmae (a contemporary biography of the wife of King Cnut) in the version revised for her son Edward the Confessor, and a number of other important and rare historical texts including accounts and assessments of medieval Islam and the Near-East

Better thinking through chemistry

Is the next doping scandal going to be academic?

Healthy people are increasingly turning to brain-enhancing drugs like Ritalin to boost their performance in school or at work, researchers said on Monday.

And while some expressed alarm over the trend, others embraced the idea, provided the drugs are proven safe. . .

Volkow said recent surveys on college campuses suggest drugs like Novartis' Ritalin, or methylphenidate, and Cephalon's Provigil, or modafinil, for narcolepsy are being used by students, professors and others as a way to get a competitive edge.

From Reuters.

(Mis)estimating volume

John Tierney's science articles in the NY Times have been looking at consumers' tendency to underestimate the actual contents of supersized packages. I don't think it is cultural, or food-specific; rather, there's something about how humans are wired regarding perceptions of length vs volume. This struck me years ago, in both lab and kitchen settings, when transferring liquids or leftovers from one container to another. When the containers are the same shape, selecting the right size for the receptacle container is trivial -- but not so when, say, the transfer is from a wide, low dish or pan to a receptacle of squarer proportions. In those cases, pretty much everyone I've worked with overestimates the size of receptacle container needed, often by a good two-to-one.

It's not easy to make rational choices when our eyes come miscalibrated.

PS Note, too, Tierney's discussions of the "halo effect" -- the tendency of the diet-conscious to let down their guard around foods bearing the imprimatur of trusted names, or described as "low fat", "healthy", "organic", etc. How often I've shaken my head at friends who would never buy their kids junk cereals, yet happily bring home the Whole Foods counterparts containing just as much sugar, but organic.

Elephant Polo World Cup

Video coverage here.

A venerable fake

Sotheby's has withdrawn an important "13th century" belt buckle from its 2 December old master sculpture and works of art sale . . .

We were contacted by Claude Blair, retired head of the V&A's metalwork department, who told us that the buckle is a modern fake. . .

Dr Blair, who left the V&A in 1982, is convinced that the buckle is one of the notorious Marcy fakes, marketed by Louis Marcy in the 1890s. Marcy worked as a dealer in both Paris and London, selling "medieval" metalwork.

The buckle surfaced in the collection of Dacre Kenrick Edwards, whose estate was sold at Christie's in 1961. It then passed to distinguished New York collector Germain Seligman, who lent it for an exhibition at The Cloisters (Metropolitan Museum, New York) in 1968. The buckle was offered at Sotheby's in 1995 (estimate £15,000-£20,000), but went unsold. It passed through two specialist dealers in New York and in 2004 was sold to an English collector via the London dealer Sam Fogg.

From the Art Newspaper. Interestingly enough, it seems that the buckle (and three related pieces) were exposed as recent French fakery way back in 1908.

Gelman collection in limbo

Somewhere a great collection of 20th-century Mexican art has been hidden.

The works, by Frida Kahlo, Diego Rivera, José Clemente Orozco and their contemporaries have been removed from a museum in Cuernavaca, about an hour south of here, until further notice as a legal battle unfolds over the collection's rightful ownership.

The paintings belonged to Jacques Gelman, a Russian-born producer of Mexican films who died in 1986, and his wife, Natasha, who jointly began amassing art after they were married in 1941. The couple were best known for creating a sweeping collection of 20th-century European art that Natasha Gelman left to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York upon her death in 1998.

There seems to be little doubt about the Gelmans' intentions, but bring in cousins with opportunistic lawyers eager to exploit any twist in Mexican law, and you have a shuttered museum and art on the run. From the International Herald Tribune.

The dispersal of the libraries

Victorian churchmen assembled them; now their heirs are selling them off:

The sale of a 63-volume Bible for £55,000 in December 2006 was a thumping great clue in a detective trail to a scandal over which church people are still fuming. . .

That Bible came from the same source as other old books sold by Sotheby's in June last year, which fetched £400,000. One was the great Complutensian Polyglot, printed for Cardinal Ximenes in 1520.

That is a proper Bible to be sure, with parallel texts in Hebrew, Greek, Latin and Syriac. Cranmer bought a copy. But this one, which fetched £69,000, bore the stamp of the Bishop Phillpotts Library in Truro.

It turned out that hundreds of old books from the library had been sold, for £36,000. What annoyed churchy people was that the dealer who bought them sold them on for more than half a million.

The bigger issue, though, is what is to be done with clerical libraries that are unused and neglected? It is sad to see such collections sold off, yet how much can the established public libraries of Britain afford to spend to acquire them in toto? Spotted via PalaeoJudaica.

Psoriasis: food for fish

A woman with the skin condition psoriasis has travelled to Turkey to sit in water and be nibbled by flesh-eating fish in a bid to find a cure. . .

The fish work by chewing away the excess cells caused by psoriasis, allowing the mineral water to reach the skin.

The spa water is rich in selenium - a mineral with skin-healing properties.

From the BBC.

Japanese toilet tech

No country takes toilets quite so seriously as Japan.

Machines with heated seats, built-in bidets and a dynamic range of flushing options are almost ubiquitous in homes and public buildings.

A poem recently published by a stressed-out salary man captured their comforting appeal with haiku-like brevity. "The only warmth in my life is the toilet seat," he mourned.

But lavatories here can do much more than keep you warm. One even sends a tiny electrical charge through the user's buttocks to check their body-fat ratio.

From the BBC.

"Oldest stash"

Researchers say they have located the world's oldest stash of marijuana, in a tomb in a remote part of China.

The cache of cannabis is about 2,700 years old and was clearly "cultivated for psychoactive purposes," rather than as fibre for clothing or as food, says a research paper in the Journal of Experimental Botany.

The 789 grams of dried cannabis was buried alongside a light-haired, blue-eyed Caucasian man, likely a shaman of the Gushi culture, near Turpan in northwestern China.

From the Canadian Press.

Supersizing the Uffizi?

World Heritage attractions such as Rome's Colosseum and the preserved city of Pompeii will be made to pay their own way under a radical reform of Italy's cultural heritage.

Mario Resca, who worked for McDonald's for 15 years and was head of the fast food chain's operations in Italy, will this week start injecting the dusty world of museum curators with some 21st century business savvy.

His appointment as director general of museums and archeological sites is highly controversial and has raised fears among Italy's cultural guardians that he will seek to "McDonaldise" the country's treasures during his three year stint in the top job.

From the Telegraph. I don't know how this appointment will turn out, but I don't think anyone will argue that the status quo is acceptable. Commercialization of cultural assets may be distasteful, but at least should be reversible -- unlike the present alternative, which is neglect leading to widespread deterioration, theft, and vandalism. I'm not encouraged by this statement, though:

The former fast food manager said it was a huge failure that Italy's most visited museum, the Uffizi Gallery in Florence, attracted 1.5 million visitors a year when the British Museum in London pulls in close to six million.

But according to its Wikipedia entry, the BM currently boasts

over 75,000 m² of exhibition space, showcasing approximately 50,000 items from its collection. There are nearly one hundred galleries open to the public, representing 2 miles (3.2 km) of exhibition space

Whereas the Guardian reported back in 2004 about the Uffizi:

The overall increase in exhibition space will be from 6,000sq metres to almost 13,000.

So on a per-area basis, the Uffizi is handily outdoing the BM -- which is obvious to anyone who's spent any time in them (though the prospect of the already-overcrowded Uffizi crammed with four times as many visitors is truly appalling).

Incidentally, I've not been able to reach the Nuovi Uffizi site, so I'm not sure the current status of the Uffizi expansion. How many of those 13,000 square meters are currently open?

Turtle ancestor found

A newly discovered fossil from China has shed light on how the turtle's shell evolved.

The 220 million-year-old find, described in Nature journal, shows that the turtle's breast plate developed earlier than the rest of its shell.

The breast plate of this fossil was an extension of its ribs, but only hardened skin covered its back.

From the BBC.

Acqua Altissima

The water's been especially high in Venice lately. As the AFP reports:

Venice suffered its worst flooding in 22 years on Monday as water in the Renaissance city stood more than 1.5 metres (five feet) deep before beginning to recede.

A change in the direction of the wind helped the "acqua alta" (high water) water start backing down from a high of 1.56 metres (5 feet, 2 inches), the tide monitoring centre said. . .

Nearly all the streets of the city, including the central tourist district, were already under water by mid-morning -- the famous Piazza San Marco by 80 centimetres.

The BBC has a collection of recent snapshots here. The Telegraph has a good video clip, as well.

Late Neolithic ivory sculpture find

The site at Zaraysk, 150km south-east of Moscow, has yielded figurines and carvings on mammoth tusks. . .

The new artefacts, discovered by Hizri Amirkhanov and Sergey Lev of the Russian Academy of Sciences, include a mammoth rib inscribed with what appear to be three mammoths, a small bone engraved with a cross-hatch pattern, and two human figurines presumed to be female.

From the BBC.

The heavens smile upon Australia

But not upon America:

Australians are getting a big hello from the heavens as Venus, Jupiter and a waxing crescent moon combine to create a celestial smiley face.

The best time to see the friendly phenomenon is about 20 to 30 minutes after sunset . . .

Stargazers in Europe and Africa will miss out completely. By the time the sun sets for them the moon will appear between the planets, pushing the "mouth" between the "eyes" to create more of a Picasso-esque effect.

In the United States, the effect will be inverted and will appear as a frown.

From Fox News.

Big-fin squid video

A mile and a half (two and a half kilometers) underwater, a remote control submersible's camera has captured an eerie surprise: an alien-like, long-armed, and -- strangest of all -- "elbowed" Magnapinna squid

From National Geographic.

Thanksgiving: more Sam Adams, less Pilgrims?

When was the first Thanksgiving? Most of us think of the Pilgrims at Plymouth in 1621. But if the question is about the first national Thanksgiving holiday, the answer is that the tradition began at a lesser-known moment in 1777 in York, Pa. . .

It was the first of many Thanksgivings ordered up by Samuel Adams. Though the holidays were almost always in November or December, the exact dates varied. (Congress didn't fix Thanksgiving on the fourth Thursday in November until 1941.) . . .

After the Revolution, Adams, who was eventually elected governor of Massachusetts, maintained the practice of declaring these holidays. . .

These statements were greeted with cynicism and derision by some of Adams's younger political opponents, who saw them as archaic. One of them, Christopher Gore, wrote a friend that it would be an occasion for a real day of thanksgiving when Adams finally retired.

Read the rest by Ira Stoll, in the Wall Street Journal.

Yes, but do they get Equity cards?

First there were dancing robots, then house-sitting robots and now a new breed of acting robots is making its big debut on the Japanese stage.

The play, which had its premiere at Osaka University, is one of Japan's first robot-human theatre productions.

From the BBC.

Billboards on Piazza San Marco

The images are appalling: huge banners and billboards plastered on the Doge's Palace, the Piazzetta, and the Bridge of Sighs. What's going on? The Art Newspaper explains how changes in the law are drastically altering the face of Venice:

The law allows the scaffolding on public buildings under restoration to carry advertising so long as the superintendent considers that it does not "detract from the appearance, decorum or public enjoyment of the building". While the existing ads in Venice have aroused local and international protest, Venice superintendent Renata Codello insists that she has been very discriminating.

It might be argued that the deal to sell advertising space is needed to bring in desperately-needed funds for essential maintenance and restoration work. But anyone familiar with Italy knows that when the scaffolding goes up, it has a way of staying up -- often for long after the projected or even actual completion date for the work. At one point when I was spending nearly every summer photographing monuments and artwork in Italy, I gave serious consideration to doing a photo-essay of green-shrouded churches, sculpture, and palazzi, to be title Italia in restauro. It took the Papal Jubilee of 2000 to get the authorities to de-shroud the monuments of Rome, many of which had remained covered even though active restoration work had come to a halt years before. What would it take to uncover Venice, then, now that there is such a powerful financial incentive being added to keeping the scaffolding up?