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By Larisa Brown and Imogen Calderwood - Mail Online

For more than 70 years, the whereabouts of a British submarine which vanished in the Mediterranean during the Second World War has remained a mystery.

But now a 76-year-old scuba diver has discovered its wreck 160ft below the waves off the Libyan coast.

Researchers now believe the Royal Navy submarine sank along with its 29 crew and ten passengers after being dive-bombed by an Italian bi-plane.

HMS Urge was paid for by the town of Bridgend, South Wales, after residents raised money by organising dances and whist drives.

It disappeared while sailing from Malta to the Egyptian city of Alexandria in 1942 and families of those on board never knew what happened to their loved ones.

But Belgian diver and dive archaeologist Jean-Pierre Misson discovered the wreck using sonar while diving off Libya at Marsa el Hilal, near Tobruk in 2012. However, as the security situation in the country deteriorated after the downfall of Colonel Gaddafi he had to give up his plans to dive on the site.

He analysed the sonar pictures earlier this year and has finally identified the wreck as HMS Urge from the distinctive shape of Britain’s U-class submarines and corroborating German naval reports from the time.

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By Emily Retter and Sam Webb - Mirror

These fascinating images show the RMS Lusitania, which became a watery grave for nearly 1,200 innocents when it was torpedoed by a German sub in the First World War.

The disaster, 100 years ago this Thursday, came nine months into the conflict and fanned hatred of the Germans.

German submarine U20 had been patrolling British waters off the coast of Kinsale, County Cork, for hours. Commander Walther Schwieger could not believe his luck when the Lusitania sailed into view on the seventh day of its passage towards Liverpool from New York.

Without warning, he fired the torpedo on that sunny afternoon and 1,198 of the 1,959 passengers and crew on the liner were killed.

The images were taken using sonar images and will allow "new research and analysis", according to Joe McHugh, Ireland’s minister for natural resources.

Despite German threats in 1915 that passengers sailing the Atlantic were in danger, few Brits doubted the invincibility of Cunard’s greatest liner.

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By April Holloway - Ancient Origins

An archaeological diving team in Finland said they have found the wreck of the Hanneke Wrome, which sank with valuable cargo and some 200 passengers and crew on November 20, 1468.

Historic documents record the ship as carrying 10,000 gold coins, estimated to be worth around €50 million today.

Finnish Daily Helsingin Sanomat reports that diver and wreck researcher Rauno Koivusaari, Finland’s most experienced wreck researcher who discovered the famous treasure ship Vrouw Maria in 1999, found the treasured shipwreck just south of the island of Jussarö in Finland.

The Hanneke Wromen, named after the ship’s captain, was one of two ships on its way from Luebeck in Germany to Tallinn in Estonia, when it was hit by heavy storms that forced it to move closer to coast of Finland.

The Hanneke Wrome sank while the other ship managed to get to Tallinn.

The accident killed all 200 passengers and crew on board and was considered one of the most serious disasters to occur in the Baltic Sea at the time.

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From Martin Childs - The Independent

Margaret Rule was the archaeological director who led the team that raised the Mary Rose, Henry VIII's flagship, from its resting place in the Solent in front of a worldwide television audience of more 60 million, 437 years after it sank while engaging the French Navy.

Resolute and full of drive and determination, Rule was fundamental to the success of the project, and oversaw the world's largest maritime excavation, one which set the benchmark for future projects.

Rule became the face of and driving force for the Mary Rose Trust in the early stages of the project. She secured the funding for the excavation and the construction of the £27m Mary Rose Museum in Portsmouth's historic dockyard which houses the ship's hull and more than 19,000 recovered artefacts.

"This is a duty to the men of the Mary Rose," Rule declared at the opening of the new museum in 2013. It is their monument." Rear-Admiral John Lippiett added, "The Mary Rose is very much her legacy to the nation."

Born in High Wycombe in 1928, Margaret Helen Martin was the only child of Ernest, a sales manager, and his wife, Mabel. Soon after, the family moved to London, where Margaret lived through the Blitz.

After leaving school she read chemistry at University College London, but her studies were cut short when the government introduced a scheme to free places for returning servicemen, who were considered a higher priority.

Unperturbed, she went to night school, which soon led to her working for Beechams pharmaceutical company on a team developing toothpaste. There she met Arthur Rule, a microbiologist.

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By Jon Hamilton - NPR

On April 27, 1865, the steamboat Sultana exploded and sank while traveling up the Mississippi River, killing an estimated 1,800 people.

The event remains the worst maritime disaster in U.S. history (the sinking of the Titanic killed 1,512 people). Yet few know the story of the Sultana's demise, or the ensuing rescue effort that included Confederate soldiers saving Union soldiers they might have shot just weeks earlier.

So on the 150th anniversary of the sinking, the city of Marion, Ark., is trying to make sure the Sultana will be remembered. The city has created a museum and is hosting events intended to bring attention to the tragedy.

Marion, across the river from Memphis, Tenn., is near the spot where the 260-foot side-wheeler came to rest. "We feel like we're a part of this Civil War story, but we're the conclusion that no one heard," says Lisa O'Neal, a Marion resident and member of the Sultana Historic Preservation Society.

The Sultana was on its way from Vicksburg, Miss., to St. Louis when the explosion occurred, says Jerry Potter, a Memphis lawyer and author of The Sultana Tragedy. It was just weeks after the Civil War ended, Potter explains, and the vessel was packed with Union soldiers who'd been released from Confederate prison camps.

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By Sarah Taillier - ABC News

Four skeletons - one of them headless - were found in February during an archaeological exhibition on Beacon Island, which forms part of the Abrolhos Islands, west of Geraldton.

One of the darkest chapters of Australia's maritime history played out on the islands, following the shipwreck of the Dutch ship Batavia in 1629.

The Dutch East India vessel was on its maiden voyage when it wrecked with more than 300 people on board. About 40 people drowned but the survivors managed to swim to nearby Beacon Island where mutiny and systematic murders took place.

Over the past two months, specialists at the University of Western Australia's Centre for Forensic Science have been piecing together and stabilising the skeletons found on the tiny coral cay.

Associate Professor Daniel Franklin said through the process, they have uncovered evidence there is probably more skeletons on the island to recover.

"I think, at this point, we may have another individual that we found some fragments of remains from in the same area," he said. "In particular, there's some teeth that we recovered and some other hand and foot bones that really don't look like they belong to any of the three new individuals that we recovered.

"So there is the likelihood that there could be more skeletons there to recover." The examination of the latest Batavia skeletons has found that one skeleton is most likely to be an adolescent, while the others belong to adults. T

The headless skeleton has been reunited with its skull which was found on the island in 1964.

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By Lauren Biron - Symmetry

Scientists on an experiment in Italy are looking for a process so rare, it is thought to occur less than once every trillion, trillion years.

To find it, they will create the single coldest cubic meter in the universe.

The experiment, the Cryogenic Underground Observatory for Rare Events, will begin by the end of the year, scientists recently announced after a smaller version demonstrated the feasibility of the design.

The project, based at Gran Sasso National Laboratory, will examine a property of ghostly neutrinos by looking for a process called neutrinoless double beta decay. If scientists find it, it could be a clue as to why there is more matter than antimatter in the universe–and show that neutrinos get their mass in a way that’s different from all other particles.

The full CUORE experiment requires 19 towers of tellurium dioxide crystals, each made of 52 blocks just smaller than a Rubik’s cube. Physicists will place these towers into a refrigerator called a cryostat and cool it to 10 millikelvin, barely above absolute zero.

The cryostat will eclipse even the chill of empty space, which registers a toasty 2.7 Kelvin (minus 455 degrees Fahrenheit).

CUORE uses the cold crystals to search for a small change in temperature caused by these rare nuclear decays. Unlike ordinary beta decays, in which electrons and antineutrinos share energy, the neutrinoless double beta decay produces two electrons, but no neutrinos at all.

It is as if the two antineutrinos that should have been produced annihilate one another inside the nucleus.

“This would be really cool because it would mean that the neutrino and the antineutrino are the same particle, and most of the time we just can’t tell the difference,” says Lindley Winslow, a professor at MIT and one of over 160 scientists working on CUORE.

Neutrinos could be the only fundamental particles of matter to have this strange property.

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From Ancien Origins
 

A vow of silence has protected the mystery behind an ingenious invention for nearly 500 years. The secrets behind Guglielmo de Lorena’s amazing diving bell, a technical marvel, would have remained an engineering puzzle if not for the attentions of a curious maritime researcher.

The article “Guglielmo’s Secret: The Enigma of the First Diving Bell Used in underwater Archaeology” as written by researcher Dr. Josheph Eliav and published in International Journal for the History of Engineering & Technology, hypothesizes a solution to the longstanding mystery of how two men in the 1500s were able to remain deep underwater for hours at a time in order to examine ancient wrecks and return to the surface with amazing artifacts.

Italian Guglielmo de Lorena is credited with inventing the first one-man diving bell. It boasted a revolutionary air-supply mechanism which would exchange the air inside while maintaining pressure, allowing the diver to remain underwater for hours.

In July 1535, set on exploring a sunken Roman vessel in Lake Nemi, Guglielmo de Lorna and partner Francesco de Marchi used the invention to examine and document sunken barges which had lain at the bottom of Lake Nemi. These wooden barges had once reputedly served as floating platforms for infamous Roman emperor Caligula in the first century A.D.


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