HOT NEWS !

By Jes Alexander - Herald de Paris

Researchers have revealed the first images from the Caribbean sea floor of what they believe are the archaeological remains of an ancient civilization.

Guarding the location’s coordinates carefully, the project’s leader, who wishes to remain anonymous at this time, says the city could be thousands of years old; possibly even pre-dating the ancient Egyptian pyramids, at Giza.

The site was found using advanced satellite imagery, and is not in any way associated with the alleged site found by Russian explorers near Cuba in 2001, at a depth of 2300 feet.

“To be seen on satellite, our site is much shallower.” The team is currently seeking funding to mount an expedition to confirm and explore what appears to be a vast underwater city.

“You have to be careful working with satellite images in such a location,” the project’s principle researcher said, “The digital matrix sometimes misinterprets its data, and shows ruins as solid masses.

The thing is, we’ve found structure - what appears to be a tall, narrow pyramid; large platform structures with small buildings on them; we’ve even found standing parallel post and beam construction in the rubble of what appears to be a fallen building.

You can’t have post and beam without human involvement.”

By Jean-Marc Mojon - Telegraph

Cruise-Wilkins has spent much of his life, as did his father before him, dynamiting granite boulders, exploring caves and pumping water to find the treasure that Olivier Levasseur is thought to have buried somewhere near his house in Bel Ombre, in the north of the Seychelles' main island of Mahe.

Standing near a rock just yards from his beach-front home where the ebbing turquoise sea laps at a keyhole-shaped marking his father found, the 51-year-old ponders his strategy.

"We've used all kinds of machines and expensive equipment, ground-penetrating radars, but I think we need to go back to the old method. We need to get into this guy's mind," he says with a haunted gaze.

Levasseur was known as La Buse, which is French for buzzard, although whether the moniker was for the speed at which he flung himself on his prey or for his aquiline nose is unknown. He was driven from the Caribbean with scores of other buccaneers and corsairs in the early 18th century.

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By Ellen Widdup - London Evening Standard

An amateur archaeologist is hoping to take children as young as five down to the mud banks of the Thames to search for buried treasure.

Steve Brooker, a "mudlark" who has helped find more than 13,000 objects of historical significance by the river, wants to encourage primary and secondary school classes to join him for a dig.

The 47-year-old has plans to start a history museum which would house some of his artefacts and provide a base for groups to explore the banks.

"This would not be like any other museum where kids get bored after five minutes," he said. "They could become involved in history, touch it, smell it, even change it."

He said he could give each class of 30 children who came to dig with him a guarantee that at least one would find something of major interest.

"The banks are teeming with surprises - from Elizabethan coins, buttons and pins to even older bits of pottery, bones and spears.

"The only rule will be that finds are handed over to the Museum of London to be recorded. The child's name will appear on that recording."

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From the Sydney Morning Herald

Susan Gough Henly peers into vessels submerged beneath North America's most historic body of water.

Standing on the deck of Philadelphia II, a replica of one of Benedict Arnold's 1776 gunboats, I listen to Eric, a guide fitted out in period costume. He is describing what it might have been like living and fighting alongside dozens of citizen soldiers aboard this 16-metre square-rig ship.

"Just up the lake, the British were building war boats at the rate of knots," Eric says. "It was too dangerous to stay on land because of unfriendly Native American tribes.

"So you can imagine what the conditions must have been like with 44 men in this space for weeks at a time."

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By Thomas H. Maugh II

The remains of a Japanese mini-submarine that participated in the Dec. 7, 1941, attack on Pearl Harbor have been discovered, researchers are to report today, offering strong evidence that the sub fired its torpedoes at Battleship Row.

That could settle a long-standing argument among historians.

Five mini-subs were to participate in the strike, but four were scuttled, destroyed or run aground without being a factor in the attack.

The fate of the fifth has remained a mystery. But a variety of new evidence suggests that the fifth fired its two 800-pound torpedoes, most likely at the battleships West Virginia and Oklahoma, capsizing the latter.

A day later, researchers think, the mini-sub's crew scuttled it in nearby West Loch.

The loch was also the site of a 1944 disaster in which six tank landing ships preparing for the secret invasion of Saipan were destroyed in an ammunition explosion that killed 200 sailors and wounded hundreds more.
 

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By Denise Perry Donavin - Southbend Tribune

Don McAlhany has a unique way of spending New Year's Eve: scuba diving under ice in Lake Michigan or the St. Joseph River.

This year will mark his 31st in scuba gear, as he joins members of the local Michigan Underwater Divers (M.U.D.). McAlhany is the president of M.U.D. — an organization of local scuba divers who explore the rivers and lakes of southwest Michigan.

M. U. D., an appropriate acronym, explains the diver, since mud is the venue the divers face most often.

Local lakes and rivers are not the clear blue of the Caribbean that many divers envision. And in that mud, the divers have found plenty of trash and treasures — from anchors and engines to cash registers and coins, McAlhany said.

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From Ana Mpa

The Antikythera mechanism, one of the world's oldest known geared devices, is an ancient mechanical calculator, also described as the first known mechanical computer, designed to calculate astronomical positions, that has puzzled and intrigued science and technology historians since its it was recovered from an 80 BC wreck off the island of Antikythera in 1901.

Dated to about 150-100 BC, the intricacy of the way in which the Mechanism works was so startling to scientists that initially they often the device's dating, doubting it could be as old as it really was.

Technological artifacts of similar complexity did not reappear before the 14th century, when mechanical astronomical clocks appeared in Europe.

A lecture on the Mechanism was recently delivered by Professor Robert Hannah of the Classical Studies Department at New Zealand's Otago University to a packed audience at Sydney University in Australia, who tried to analyze the workings of the Mechanism and, more importantly, to explain how the ancient Greeks were able to create such a complex, precise and sophisticated instrument more than 2,000 years ago, stressing that scientists are still studying and trying to decipher the device.

From Discovery News

A World War II fighter plane was recovered from the depths of Lake Michigan, more than 60 years after it crashed during a training exercise.

Cranes lifted the F6F-3 Hellcat out of 250 feet of water in Waukegan, Ill., about 40 miles north of Chicago, on Tuesday.

The plane had been submerged since Lt. Walter Elcock, the pilot who survived the crash, was practicing landing on the U.S.S. Sable aircraft carrier on Jan. 5, 1945.

As he was coming to the deck, Elcock recalled he brought the plane in too low, lost his lift and crashed into the water, according to an interview with the Daily Mail.

He is now 89 years old and lives in Atlanta. The plane will eventually be displayed at the National Naval Aviation Museum in Florida.

This is the sixth Hellcat fighter plane that the U.S. Navy has pulled out of Lake Michigan. Most recently, the Douglas SBD Dauntless U.S. Navy plane was recovered from the lake in April.