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Ancient shipwreck to aid ghostly neutrino search
By Jennifer Ouellette - Discovery News
You wouldn't think a sunken ship from 2000 years ago could hold the key to the success of a neutrino detection experiment, except perhaps in a Hollywood movie, or a NOVA special on Jacques Cousteau. But sometimes truth really is stranger than fiction.
Scientists with the Cryogenic Underground Observatory for Rare Events (CUORE), a neutrino observatory buried under the Gran Sasso mountain in Italy, hit the mother load when archaeologists discovered a Spanish ship off the coast of Sardinia, filled with lead that dates back two millennia.
Yes, lead. Really, really old lead. That might not seem very exciting to you, but for CUORE scientists, it's a godsend. They use lead (also copper) as a shielding material for their neutrino detection materials.
See, neutrinos -- dubbed "ghost particles" because they so rarely interact with everything (billions course through you every second) -- are extremely difficult to detect, in part because their signals can be obscured by things like cosmic rays, and the natural radioactivity in rocks, for example.
CUORE is looking for an even rarer event, known as neutrinoless double-beta decay. Among other things, such an observation would provide a handy means of directly calculating the mass of a neutrino (which is very, very small -- so small that for decades physicists believed neutrinos had no mass).
Alas, there are also trace amounts of radioactivity in the very materials that are supposed to shield the experiments from interference -- the radioactive isotope lead-210, in the case of contemporary lead ingots.
But if you have lead that is 2000 years old, that radioactive isotope has pretty much disappeared.
Unfortunately, lead that old is quite a rare find. US scientists working on the IGEX experiment lucked out a few years ago when they snagged from 450-year-old lead from a sunken Spanish galleon.
Indonesia to ease auction rules to lure treasure bidders
By Putri Prameshwari - Jakarta Globe
The government is revising its bidding procedures for a cache of salvaged historical artifacts, following last week’s aborted auction that had aimed to raise $80 million but failed to get a single bid, an official at the maritime affairs ministry said on Sunday.
The auction flop has polarized the debate on whether such items are too valuable, historically, to be sold off.
Aji Sularso, director general of supervision at the Maritime Affairs and Fisheries Ministry, said officials would meet on Monday to discuss alternative procedures for the auction of 271,000 pieces of ceramics and jewelry recovered from a shipwreck off Cirebon, West Java.
“Having learned from the first auction, we’re evaluating the procedures for the next one,” he said.
Wednesday’s auction of 10th-century treasures was called off after five minutes because there were no bidders. The ministry had required a deposit of $16 million for the right to bid, about 20 percent of the minimum amount it sought to raise.
“We’ll probably be more flexible on the deposit,” Aji said.
He added that another problem was that the auction had been announced at short notice, giving potential bidders only a week to register and submit their deposits. Aji said an overhaul of the bidding procedure would be crucial to enabling the ministry to auction off more such items within the country, rather than through auction houses elsewhere.
Indonesian waters, historically busy shipping lanes, are believed to house numerous wrecks carrying valuable cargo. Aji put the number at more than 480. The Cirebon haul was recovered by Belgian salvager Luc Heymans’ Cosmix Underwater Research and its local partner, PT Paradigma Putra Sejahtera.
Paradigma CEO Adi Agung Tirtamarta welcomed further discussions with the ministry on loosening up the bidding procedure.
“It’ll be good for Indonesia to get its hands on treasures found in its own waters,” he said, adding that in the past such finds were looted and taken overseas.
Titanic attraction remarkably engaging and respectful
By Bruce C. Steele - Take5
As I enter the newly opened Titanic museum, I'm handed a boarding pass.
The good news is I've been assigned the identity of Isidor Straus, the wealthy founder of Macy's department store. He and his wife, Ida, stayed in one of the best first-class suites on the ship.
It's the room where Jack draws a nude portrait of Rose in James Cameron's movie. And it's faithfully reproduced on the second floor of the museum.
The bad news is I'm one of the 1,517 people who perished when the ship hit an iceberg and sank at 2:20 a.m. on April 15, 1912. The outside of “Titanic: The World's Largest Museum Attraction,” as it's called, is a huge, half-scale reproduction of the front half of the ship, apparently about to sail across Parkway, Pigeon Forge's main drag.
But beyond the goofball exterior is a remarkably informative, entertaining and, yes, respectful museum. In addition to its treasure trove of authentic artifacts — a deck chair, Mrs. Astor's actual life jacket, a crew member's penknife — it recounts in detail the lives of dozens of the ship's passengers who might otherwise have been forgotten.
“I like to say whether you're 5 or 95, you're going to enjoy this experience and how it pays tribute to those who were on board,” said John Joslyn, who owns and created the attraction with his wife, Mary Kellogg. “It tells their story.”
The research is impressive — and unique, since much of it is driven by the artifacts on hand.
WWII fighter plane buried in Wales for 65 years to be displayed
By Peter Hutchison - Telegraph.co.uk
A Second World War fighter plane buried under sand on a Welsh beach for 65 years is to be recovered and placed in a museum under a new plan.
Conservationists are in discussions with museums over hosting the United States Army Air Force fighter thought to be the oldest surviving aircraft of its type.
The Lockheed-P38 Lighting, known as the Maid of Harlech, crashed on the Gwynedd coast in 1942 when its engines cut out while taking part in secret training exercises.
The pilot, Second Lieutenant Robert Elliot, walked away from the crash uninjured but was reported missing in action three months later during a campaign in Tunisia.
In 2007 shifting sands revealed the plane for the first time in decades and the International Group for Historic Aircraft Recovery (TIGHAR) set about protecting it.
Ric Gillespie, leading the TIGHAR team hoping to secure enough funding to pull the plane from the sand, said: “It’s one on the most significant WWII-related archaeological discoveries in recent history. Nature has done a good job hiding the wreck.”
Controversial sunken treasure auction attracts no bidders
By Dina Indrasafitri - The Jakarta Post
The auction of centuries-old artifacts recently discovered on the bottom of Indonesia’s ocean floor opened Wednesday with the attendance of government officials, including two ministers and a pack of journalists — and not a single bidder.
The seats saved for bidders were left empty, forcing the organizer of the auction to call it a day only minutes after the gavel was banged.
“There was an auction, but since there were no bidders, it was instantly closed,” said Sudirman Saad, the secretary-general for the recovery and usage of precious goods in sunken ships.
According to him, the offer to join the auction had been open until 12 a.m., or two hours before the auction, but no registrations had been made. Thus, he said, the auction was recorded as “being conducted, but without any bidders”.
More than 271,000 historical objects discovered in Cirebon waters in West Java were up for auction.
The artifacts were excavated from the ruins of a ship in 2005. The value of the retrieved objects was estimated at US$80 million.
The artifacts included a golden sword with Arabic inscriptions, a large vase from the 10th century Liao dynasty, rock crystals and a 32-centimeter bronze mirror.
Interested bidders were obliged to deposit 20 percent ($16 million) of the value of the auctioned goods.
Maritime and Fisheries Minister Fadel Muhammad, who is also the acting chairman of the National Committee for the Recovery and Usage of Precious Goods in Sunken Ships, said it might take weeks or months before the committee could decide what they would do next.
“We will have a meeting with committee members and then decide what to do. Of course we will also consult with the President,” he said after the auction closed.
The auction has drawn criticism from academics and history buffs as well as the royal family of the Cirebon Sultanate.
Cleopatra emerges from sands, seas of time
By Ford Cochran - Natgeo Newswatch
A new exhibition traces the life, loves, and death of Cleopatra, Egypt's final pharaoh and one of history's most compelling and enigmatic figures.
"Cleopatra: The Search for the Last Queen of Egypt," which opens June 5 at Philadelphia's Franklin Institute, explores what we know about the woman who descended from one of Alexander the Great's generals, tried to restore the might Egypt had known under some of its most powerful dynasties, saw her kingdom conquered by the Roman Empire, and enraptured both Julius Caesar and Mark Antony.
The exhibition also raises an enduring mystery: Where are Cleopatra and Mark Antony buried ?
Organized by National Geographic and Arts and Exhibitions International, with cooperation from the Egyptian Supreme Council of Antiquities and the European Institute for Underwater Archaeology, the project reunites the team behind the extraordinarily popular "Tutankhamun and the Golden Age of the Pharaohs."
Tickets for Cleopatra go on sale today to the general public.
Thousands of Ming artifacts secured from shipwreck in Java Sea
By Erwida Maulia - The Jakarta Post
Over 12,400 items of Chinese ceramics believed to originate from the Ming dynasty era have been secured from a ship wreck in Belanakan waters in Subang, West Java.
The ceramics have been gathered during the past month of diving operation around and into the wreck of 50 m x 20 m ship that lies 58 meters under the surface of Java Sea.
White ceramic plates, bowls and vases with blue motives, mostly floral, construct most found items; 40 percent of which are still in good condition.
"It is predicted to be a cargo ship sunken somewhere in 1,600s... Archaeologists believe, from the blue motives of the white ceramics, that they originate from the Ming dynasty," Maritime Affairs and Fisheries Ministry's director general for surveillance and control, Aji Sularso, said aboard a patrol ship on Wednesday after surveying the lifting of the ceramics 48 miles off the coast of Belanakan.
"Given the large size of the cargo, we predict that we need to dive for a year to secure all of its precious loads, which may amount to 1 million pieces; larger than the number of items secured from the shipwreck in Cirebon."
Aji said he expected to find gold bars among the loads so as to cover the survey and lifting costs of the artifacts, predicted to exceed US$10 million, the total costs needed to secure loads of the Cirebon shipwreck offered in a bid also on Wednesday in Jakarta.
The presence of the shipwreck along with its loads in Belanakan waters was confirmed in a survey conducted between July and October last year, following some local fishermen's finding of ceramics in their fish nets.
The lifting of the artifacts, Aji said, began in early April, with 22 professional divers specially hired to secure the precious loads from the shipwreck and brought them to the surface.
The Indonesian government, through the national committee for shipwreck loads, is partnering with local private firm PT Comexindo to conduct the survey, as well as to secure and store the precious loads.
University divers plumb new depths in Egypt
From BBC News
University of Ulster divers have been passing on their expertise to maritime archaeologists in the historic Egyptian port of Alexandria.
Staff from the UU's maritime archaeology centre conducted a 10-day training workshop for 15 archaeologists from north and east Africa who wanted an insight into the challenges of working underwater.
During their stay the UU divers were granted a rare opportunity to explore the underwater remains of the famous Pharos lighthouse - one of the wonders of the ancient world.
Work on the great lighthouse began in 290 BC and when it was completed 20 years later, it was the first lighthouse in the world and the tallest building in existence with the exception of the Great Pyramid.
The course, hosted by Alexandria University's new Centre for Maritime Archaeology and Underwater Heritage (CMA), involved all aspects of survey, documentation and management of archaeological sites and artefacts from maritime environments and enabled students to gain practical experience by diving in Alexandria's eastern harbour.