STUFF: News, Technology, the cool and the plain weird

[MIKA27]

Is This Time Capsule Filled With $1 Million And A Ghost Or Nah?

Does this mason jar contain a treasure map? Or maybe a million dollars? Or maybe even the ghost of a pirate that spent decades stalking the coast of Florida? No one knows for sure. All we do know is that a Florida woman recently found this old mason jar in a decaying tree trunk and now she’s selling it on eBay.

Donna Handforth of Oceanway, Florida discovered the mason jar after her dogs started digging around an old tree stump. And to be clear, she’s not claiming that it contains some magical treasure. In fact she says that she hasn’t even opened it, which leaves dozens of possibilities for what could be inside.

But why wouldn’t she open it? Somehow, the local news in Florida never gets around to asking this question.

“Now I’ll be honest, when you shake it, it doesn’t rattle. So I don’t think there’s any coins in there,” Handforth told First Coast News. Yeah, but what about the ghost pirate? Or the $US1 trillion billion in bank notes! She doesn’t even mention the possibility!

The safest bet for what this time capsule holds? Literally nothing, of course. There’s pretty much a 99.9 per cent chance that the mason jar is just an old mason jar. It might not even be that old, despite the fact that Handforth seems convinced that it’s an ancient time capsule.

But who’s to say that it’s not a ghost jar haunted by the spirits of an alien race? Or even a portal to another dimension where up is down and cats are dogs and time capsules move backward in time instead of forward? Well, most people could say it’s not that and they’d probably be right. But we don’t know for sure! WHY WON’T SHE OPEN IT!

The bidding starts at $US9.99 and Handforth says that 50 per cent of the proceeds from the auction will go to a local bird rescue foundation, which is admirable even if it’s completely unverifiable.

As Handforth notes in the eBay listing, this time capsule could be another “Al Capone’s vault,” referring to that time Geraldo Rivera first became a national punchline. But she’s going to let the person who buys it find out.

Could this all be a weird hoax? Sure. But is “Women Finds Old Mason Jar In Tree Trunk”? one of the best local news headlines in months? You bet your arse it is.

It could not be confirmed at press time whether the eBay purchase includes insurance to cover the (unlikely? likely?!?!?) event of a ghost haunting you until you’re dead for disturbing its eternal slumber. Ladies and gentleman, start your bidding.

[MIKA27]

This Australian Printing Shop Is A Magnificent Place

Because the world we live in is now filled with pixels — on our phones, our tablets, our computers, our watches — it’s easy to forget how simply wonderful the idea of a printing press shop making words come to live could be. Here’s a look behind the works of Printext, a printing shop in Australia. It’s a beautiful endeavour.

[MIKA27]

New 'Scorpion' Robot Will Inspect Fukushima Reactor

When the 2011 earthquake in Japan damaged the Fukushima nuclear power plant, teams scrambled to find a robot that could go where humans couldn’t. In many ways those robots failed, and ever since, there has been a focus on creating robots that can get the job done. Enter Toshiba’s “Scorpion” robot, which will make its way inside the power plant this August.

The Scorpion is just 53cm long and is operated by remote control. The robot has cameras on both front and back, as well as LED lights to help light the way. What is Scorpion looking for? Fuel amongst the debris, which will give teams a better sense of how the decades-long clean-up at the reactors should proceed.

Back in April, teams sent a snake-like robot inside one of the nuclear reactors but didn’t find what they were looking for. That robot stopped working after just three hours in one of the reactors. A second snake-bot was sent in a few days later but that one stopped working in short order as well.

The Scorpion is said to be specially designed to operate in the highly radioactive environment. Teams expect the robot to be able to function for 10 hours inside the plant. But we’ll have to wait and see.

The main focus of last month’s DARPA Robotics Challenge was to develop robots for emergency scenarios. And that competition, along with the relatively primitive capabilities of a robot like Scorpion show that we have quite a long ways to go before robots are performing the human-like tasks that we’d like them to in disaster scenarios.

[MIKA27]

MiG-29 Flies Impossibly Close To An Aeroplane's Open Rear Door

This is just plain cool. Imagine opening the rear door of a paratrooper plane and seeing a MiG-29 right in front of you, dancing in the air mere feet away from the aircraft’s opening. This stunt was obviously planned for the photographs, but it’s not unlike opening your house’s front door and seeing a giant grizzly bear waiting to come in.

[MIKA27]

How A Museum Restores A Beautiful Painting From Hundreds Of Years Ago

Charles Le Brun’s painting of Everhard Jabach and His Family was finished in 1660. Now that it’s 2015 and hanging in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, my favourite museum in New York, it was in need of a little bit of, um, reviving. The Met guides us through as it restores the giant piece of art and shows the steps the artwork needed to shine again.

It’s explained all in the video below but the steps were pretty complicated and involved removing the varnish, laying the painting down, structural work, turning the painting over, re-stretching, varnishing the painting again, inpainting and spray varnishing the work. It’s an involved process, but you can clearly tell the difference from beginning to end.

MIKA: Simply amazing the whole process and the painting is beautiful.

[MIKA27]

Child Labor in America 100 Years Ago

7-year-old year old Ferris, a small newsboy, or “newsie”, who did not know enough to make change. Photographed in Mobile, Alabama, in October of 1914. The newspapers he holds are copies of The Mobile Item, with the headline “Germans Are Driven Out Of Ostend,” describing the end of the Siege of Antwerp in World War I.

At the start of the 20th century, labor in America was in short supply, and laws concerning the employment of children were rarely enforced or nonexistent. While Americans at the time supported the role of children working on family farms, there was little awareness of the other forms of labor being undertaken by young hands. In 1908, photographer Lewis Hine was employed by the newly-founded National Child Labor Committee (NCLC) to document child laborers and their workplaces nationwide. His well-made portraits of young miners, mill workers, cotton pickers, cigar rollers, newsboys, pin boys, oyster shuckers, and factory workers put faces on the issue, and were used by reformers to raise awareness and drive legislation that would protect young workers or prohibit their employment. After several stalled attempts in congress, the NCLC-backed Fair Labor Standards Act passed in 1938 with child labor provisions that remain the law of the land today, barring the employment of anyone under the age of 16.

A spinner in the Globe Cotton Mill in Augusta, Georgia, in January of 1909. The overseer admitted she was regularly employed.

Callie Campbell, 11 years old, picks 75 to 125 pounds of cotton a day, and totes 50 pounds of it when sack gets full. "No, I don't like it very much." Photographed in Potawotamie County, Oklahoma. on October 16, 1916

Willie, one of the young spinners in the Quidwick Co. Mill in Anthony, Rhode Island. He was taking his noon rest in a doffer-box on this day in April of 1909

Textile mill workers in Newberry, South Carolina, in December of 1908.

A few of the Western Union messengers in Hartford, Connecticut, They are on duty, alternate nights, until 10 P.M.

Shorpy Higginbotham, a "greaser" on the tipple at Bessie Mine, of the Sloss-Sheffield Steel and Iron Co in Alabama. He said he was 14 years old, but it is doubtful. He carries two heavy pails of grease, and is often in danger of being run over by the coal cars. Photographed in December of 1910. The historic photo website Shorpy.com has more background information on Shorpy here.

Minnie Carpenter, (left) photographed in November of 1908 at Loray Mill in Gastonia, North Carolina. Minnie makes fifty cents for a 10-hour day as a spinner in the mill. The younger girl works irregularly.

A pipe-smoking messenger boy working for Mackay Telegraph Company. He said he was fifteen years old. Photographed in Waco, Texas in September of 1913.

Pin-boys work in the Arcade Bowling Alley in Trenton, New Jersey, on December 20, 1909. The boys worked until midnight and later

A young driver in the Brown Mine in Brown, West Virginia, in September of 1908. He had been driving pack animals for one year, working from 7 a.m. to 5:30 p.m. daily. The device attached to his cap is an oil-wick cap lamp, which would be lit when the boy was working in the mine tunnels

"Fire! Fire! I want to make the fire!" An Italian boy on Salem Street on Saturday morning, offering to make fires for Jewish People on their Sabbath, in Boston, Massachusetts, in October of 1909

[MIKA27]

The Norwegian Town Where the Sun Doesn't Rise

Located over 200 miles north of the Arctic Circle, Tromsø, Norway, is home to extreme light variation between seasons. During the Polar Night, which lasts from November to January, the sun doesn’t rise at all. Then the days get progressively longer until the Midnight Sun period, from May to July, when it never sets. After the midnight sun, the days get shorter and shorter again until the Polar Night, and the yearly cycle repeats.

So, perhaps understandably, many people had a hard time relating when I told them I was moving there.

“I could never live there,” was the most common response I heard. “That winter would make me so depressed,” many added, or “I just get so tired when it’s dark out.”

But the Polar Night was what drew me to Tromsø in the first place.

Despite the city’s extreme darkness, past research has shown that residents of Tromsø have lower rates of wintertime depression than would be expected given the long winters and high latitude. In fact, the prevalence of self-reported depression during the winter in Tromsø, with its latitude of 69°N, is the same as that of Montgomery County, Maryland, at 41°N. While there is some debate among psychologists about the best way to identify and diagnose wintertime depression, one thing seems clear: Residents of northern Norway seem able to avoid much of the wintertime suffering experienced elsewhere—including, paradoxically, in warmer, brighter, more southern locations.

I first learned of Tromsø two years ago, as a recent college graduate looking for more research experience before applying to graduate school for social psychology. In search of an opportunity that would allow me to explore my interests in positive psychology and mental health—and satisfy my sense of adventure—I stumbled upon the work of Joar Vittersø, a psychologist at the University of Tromsø who studies happiness, personal growth, and quality of life.

After reaching out to him via e-mail, I learned that the University of Tromsø is the northernmost university in the world. It seemed like the perfect place to test just how adventurous I really was, while also providing a unique population for a psychology research study: How do the residents of northern Norway protect themselves from wintertime woes? And could these strategies be identified and applied elsewhere, to the same beneficial effects?

A few months after our initial correspondence, Vittersø agreed to serve as my advisor on a research project designed to answer these questions; a year later, after receiving a U.S.-Norway Fulbright to fund my study, I boarded a plane to Norway. When I arrived in Tromsø in August, the Midnight Sun period had just ended, the sky was only dark for an hour or two each night, and the Polar Night was still some three months away.

Tromsø is a tiny island, roughly the same size as Manhattan, and is home to approximately 70,000 inhabitants, making it the second-most populated city north of the Arctic Circle. With everything a person could “need”—a mall, three main shopping streets, and a few movie theaters—but nothing extra, Tromsø felt more like a small suburb than a city. Surrounded by mountains and fjords on all sides, it also felt isolated and wild.

For all that, I soon found Tromsø likable. For the city’s relatively small size, I was pleasantly surprised to find it home to an astounding number of festivals, cultural events, and city-wide celebrations. The main pedestrian street is thrumming every day of the week except Sunday, when most shops are closed, and is particularly lively on Saturdays and after 2 a.m. on weekends.

I settled into my student-housing apartment, with its amazing fjord views and three Norwegian roommates, and began building my Tromsø life. I took Norwegian lessons, which I used mostly to decipher food items in the grocery store, as almost everyone in Norway speaks English. I found a group of friends composed mostly of European international students, all of whom shared my desire to experience all that Tromsø had to offer (and to do it cheaply— Norway is prohibitively expensive). Instead of frequenting bars and restaurants as I had in the U.S., I enjoyed hikes, cabin trips, and yoga with my new friends. I joined several Norwegian meditation groups, which gave me friends outside the student community, and my Norwegian friends in these groups were kind enough to hold conversations in English for my benefit.

Tromsø in the summer

I soon found my routine: work on my research and graduate-school applications during the week, and enjoy the outdoors and potluck dinners on the weekends. Over several months, Vittersø and I laid the groundwork for our study, expanding upon the background research I had conducted before coming to Tromsø, deciding what questions we wanted to ask, recruiting participants, and testing the online platform we would use to distribute our survey. I became more comfortable spending time alone, and frequented Tromsø coffee shops where I would spend the day working or reading, nursing a $6 latte to the point of loitering.

As I became more at ease in my foreign surroundings, I discovered an additional benefit of my research topic: Almost everyone I spoke with—in casual conversations, at parties, over psychology-department lunches at the university—had a theory as to why their city flourished during the Polar Night. Some people swore by cod-liver oil, or told me they used lamps that simulated the sun by progressively brightening at a specific time each morning. Others attributed their winter well-being to community and social involvement, Tromsø’s wealth of cultural festivals, or daily commutes made by ski. Most residents, though, simply talked about the Polar Night as if it wasn’t a big deal. Many even expressed excitement about the upcoming season and the skiing opportunities it would bring.

Even so, it wasn’t until October, several months into my project, that I realized I might be asking the wrong kinds of questions. The crystallizing moment was a conversation with my friend Fern, an Australian transplant who had been in Tromsø for more than five years, about how long I was planning to stay. Although my grant technically ended in May, I explained that I hoped to stay through as much of the summer as possible. (Tromsø has only two seasons: a long winter, and a brief summer that arrives almost overnight sometime between late May and late June, at the start of the Midnight Sun period.) “It would be a shame to make it through the winter only to leave right before the best season,” I said.

Without pausing, Fern replied, “I wouldn’t necessarily say summer is the best season.”

Fern’s comment helped me to view my research question with a newfound sense of clarity. It dawned on me that the baseline assumption of my original research proposal had been off: In Tromsø, the prevailing sentiment is that winter is something to be enjoyed, not something to be endured. According to my friends, winter in Tromsø would be full of snow, skiing, the northern lights, and all things koselig, the Norwegian word for “cozy.” By November, open-flame candles would adorn every café, restaurant, home, and even workspace. Over the following months I learned firsthand that, far from a period of absolute darkness, the Polar Night in Tromsø is a time of beautiful colors and soft, indirect light. Even during the darkest times, there are still two or three hours of light a day as the sun skirts just below the horizon, never fully rising. During the longer “days” of the Polar Night, in November and January, the skies can be filled with up to six hours of sunrise and sunset-like colors.

Colors of the Polar Night

It was now clear to me that my original research questions were colored by my own culturally biased perspective—in New Jersey, where I grew up, almost no one looked forward to winter, myself included (I even chose to attend college in Atlanta to escape the cold). In my experience, people simply got through the wintertime darkness on the way to a brighter, happier season. But in Tromsø, the Polar Night seemed to hold its own unique opportunities for mental and emotional flourishing.

I decided to include in my research a questionnaire that would capture the potential benefits of winter for the residents of Tromsø. But I quickly hit a snag: Aside from the standard assessment surveys used to identify Seasonal Affective Disorder, no other standardized psychological questionnaires about attitudes toward winter existed. (In general, psychology researchers prefer to use existing psychological measures, rather than create new ones, so that their work can be compared and contrasted to previous studies.) But while there were plenty of questionnaires that asked about seasonal depression, distress, and sleep disorder in winter, there were no surveys that made room for the potentially positive aspects of the season.

It was around this time, as I was investigating psychology graduate programs more thoroughly, that I flew back to the U.S. for a conference, a wedding, and a visit to Stanford University. While at Stanford, I met with Alia Crum, a professor of psychology, to learn more about opportunities for graduate students in her Mind & Body Lab. Crum’s research focuses on subjective mindsets, which she defines as “the lenses through which information is perceived, organized, and interpreted.” As we chatted about her research and my own work in Norway, Crum suggested that mindsets might play a role in the wintertime flourishing I was observing in Tromsø.

Crum follows in the footsteps of the psychologist Carol Dweck, whose work focuses on the psychological concept of “mindset.” In her research and her book, Mindset: The New Psychology of Success, Dweck details the ways a growth mindset (the belief that traits like intelligence and talent can be developed through sustained effort over time) leads to greater success than a fixed mindset (the belief that individual qualities are set for life). Those in a fixed mindset, she argues, often fail to see feedback as an opportunity for learning, and are more likely to view criticism as a personal attack. Conversely, those in a growth mindset tend to be more open to learning from their mistakes, taking risks, and pursuing self-improvement. Dweck’s belief, now widely accepted, is that mindset can be changed, and that a person can move from a fixed mindset to a growth mindset.

Crum’s work expands on this idea by investigating how mindset influences not only achievement and success, but also physical health. In one of her studies, for example, people who had a positive mindset towards stress, viewing it as productive rather than debilitating, had healthier levels of the stress hormone cortisol. In another, hotel employees who believed that cleaning rooms was good exercise saw decreases in their body fat and blood pressure, compared to those who simply viewed it as work. As her research illustrates, mindsets aren’t only “fixed” or “malleable:” They can be positive or negative, constructive or destructive.

Which led me to the question: Can we measure positive or negative mindset toward winter? And might this wintertime mindset have something to do with Tromsø residents’ psychological well-being during the Polar Night?

Using Crum’s Stress Mindset Measure—a questionnaire developed to measure attitudes toward stress—as a model, Vittersø and I developed the Wintertime Mindset Scale. This 10-item scale asked respondents to rate how strongly they agreed or disagreed with statements like, “There are many things to enjoy about the winter,” “In the winter, I often don’t feel like doing anything at all,” and “I find the winter months dark and depressing.”

A random sample of 238 Norwegian adults responded to our online survey. Of these respondents, the group was almost evenly divided between respondents living in southern Norway, northern Norway, and Svalbard, an Arctic island located halfway between northern Norway and the North Pole. Thanks to the warm current of the Gulf Stream, Tromsø is considered “sub-arctic” despite its northern location, but Svalbard is the real thing: With a population of only 2,000, Svalbard’s residents are required to carry guns with them if they leave the island’s main town, to protect themselves from hungry polar bears. Both in terms of light and temperature, Svalbard feels much more extreme than Tromsø; its average January temperatures range from -4 to 8 degrees Fahrenheit, compared to 20 – 28 degrees Fahrenheit in Tromsø. The Polar Night of Svalbard is significantly darker: absent even indirect sunlight, with no change in light to mark the passage of a 24-hour time span.

The survey results indicated that wintertime mindset may indeed play a role in mental health and well-being in Norway. The Wintertime Mindset Scale had strong positive correlations with every measure of well-being we examined, including the Satisfaction with Life Scale (a widely used survey that measures general life satisfaction), and the Personal Growth Composite (a scale that measures openness to new challenges). The people who had a positive wintertime mindset, in other words, tended to be the same people who were highly satisfied with their lives and who pursued personal growth.

We also found that wintertime mindset was significantly correlated with latitude in Norway— those living farther north tended to have a more positive wintertime mindset. With its extreme climate, Svalbard is almost certainly home to a self-selecting group; most residents only live on the island for a few years at a time. (Svalbard has several kindergartens but only a handful of high-school students, indicative of how often young researchers or oil workers come with their families and leave before their children are grown.) But even when the residents of Svalbard were excluded from the sample, those residing in northern Norway still had a significantly more positive wintertime mindset than those living in southern Norway. This isn’t a case of self-selection between snow birds in Florida and ski lovers in Maine; respondents living in southern Norway reside at roughly the same latitude as Anchorage, Alaska, and still have cold, dark, and long winters—but not the total Polar Night (or Midnight Sun). Southern Norwegians still experience winter; they just don’t experience it as positively as their compatriots in the north.

It’s true that the winters in Tromsø can be uniquely magical. Tromsø is home to some of the world’s best displays of the Aurora Borealis, surrounded by mountain and nature trails perfect for an afternoon ski, and part of a culture that values work-life balance.

But I also believe the cultural mindset of Tromsø plays a role in wintertime wellness. I found myself the happy victim of mindset contagion after Fern told me she refused to call the Polar Night the mørketid, or “dark time,” preferring instead to use its alternative name, the “Blue Time” to emphasize all the color present during this period. (Plenty of people with a positive wintertime mindset might still refer to the Polar Night as the “dark time,” but Fern’s comment was indicative of one of the ways she purposefully orients herself towards a positive wintertime mindset.) After hearing this, I couldn’t help but pay more attention to the soft blue haze that settled over everything, and I consciously worked to think of this light as cozy rather than dark. And rather than greeting each other with complaints about the cold and snow, a common shared grumble in the U.S., my Norwegian friends would walk or ski to our meet-ups, arriving alert and refreshed from being outdoors, inspiring me to bundle up and spend some time outside on even the coldest days.

As far as we are aware, Vittersø and I are the first to examine wintertime mindset, and we are all too familiar with the scientific mantra that correlation does not equal causation. Thus, we can’t say with certainty that having a positive wintertime mindset causes people to have greater life satisfaction, or vice versa—only that these things are somehow associated. And this is not to suggest that those experiencing clinical wintertime depression, or Seasonal Affective Disorder, can magically cure themselves by adjusting their mindset. There’s a big difference between feeling cranky about the cold and clinical seasonal depression. Yet our research data—and my personal experience—suggest that mindset may play a role in seasonal well-being, and the area appears ripe for future research. I hope to conduct some of this future research myself; when I leave Tromsø, I will head to Stanford University to pursue my Ph.D. in social psychology, with Crum as my advisor.

But I plan to keep my ties to Tromsø, too. Studies comparing wintertime mindset in colder U.S. states to our data in Norway could provide insight into cultural views of winter. Similarly, studies that induce a positive wintertime mindset by helping people pay attention to its benefits could answer questions about the role of mindset in wintertime well-being. As someone who moved from New Jersey to Georgia because I hated the cold, my personal experiment in wintertime mindset has left me convinced that, with the right mindset, it’s easy to love the Polar Night.

[MIKA27]

RACER OUTDOOR ROCKING CHAIR

When it comes to lounging on the patio, few chairs rival the comfort induced by a rocking chair. The problem is most of them aren’t aesthetically pleasing. The Racer Outdoor Rocking Chair looks to change the way you look at the ugly, traditional rocking chair.

Constructed from 100% recycled HDPE plastic, this modern lounger is a rocker for the new age. It features a wide, low seat with an open storage trunk located out back – perfect for stashing everything from gear to magazines. The styling is inspired by vintage race cars from yesteryear, as indicated by the sporty stripes across the backside. The chair was created by Loll Designs after being idealized by Eric Pfeiffer, and comes in seven different color combinations to suit your needs. It retails for $479. [Purchase]

[MIKA27]

THE GUNNAR DUFFLE BY GO FORTH GOODS

We are loving this beautiful duffle by leather crafters Go Forth Goods, the perfect bag for both a weekend or a week long trip. The top loading Gunnar Duffle is crafted from full grain waxed leather, a soft yet durable leather that is also water resistant, and ages beautifully. The bag also features a leather luggage tag, an adjustable shoulder strap, and a hand strap. Available in a choice of four colors.

[MIKA27]

BREITLING X BENTLEY B06 S WATCH

More compact than it's older brother the B06, the Breitling x Bentley B06 S Watchis yet another solid collaboration between the motion-focused manufacturers. In addition to a 44 mm case in either steel or red gold, the S features an in-house movement with a 30-second chronograph that sweeps the central hand around the dial in just half a minute, allowing for accurate 1/8th second time readings. The rotating knurled bezel lets you calculate average speed, and the date complication between 4 and 5 keeps you abreast of things outside the track. Available with either a black or silver face, and with a metal bracelet or crocodile, leather, or rubber strap.

[MIKA27]

UK at risk of asteroid tsunami 'that could kill hundreds of thousands'

Experts at the University of Southampton have developed software that predicts the impact of "corridors" of known asteroids and calculates the risk to communities if they struck.

Although the UK is not directly under an asteroid path, it is at risk from impacts in the Atlantic Ocean and North Sea that could trigger devastating tsunamis. For example, there is a one in 10,000 chance that a space rock could hit just off the coast of Norfolk within the next 85 years.

PhD student Clemens Rumpf who developed the software - called Armor - is hoping it will help organisations like the United Nations decide whether to evacuate communities or send spacecraft to intercept deadly objects.

"We have discovered around 13,000 asteroids and around 500 of them have a chance of hitting Earth," he said.

"We can now calculate where they could impact and the damage that would be caused so that we could get evacuation plans in order.

"When an asteroid strikes one of the biggest problems is a tsunami. Britain is an island with lots of coastline, and lots of people living there so it is a risk."

The new maps show a wide asteroid risk zone running through Europe, passing directly over Scandinavia, Germany, France and Spain.

The US is largely unaffected, although Florida and Louisiana could be hit. South Australia is particularly at risk.

The asteroid impact probability distribution was also combined with the Earth population map to produce the global asteroid impact risk distribution, which shows that south-east Britain is one of the most at-risk areas of the world.

Dr Hugh Lewis, senior lecturer in Aerospace Engineering, at the University of Southampton, said: "It's very easy to be flippant because of the Hollywood effect but it is a real risk.

"When you look at global vulnerability, Britain is at very high risk. You might think that is odd because we are a very small country but we have a high population density on the coastline so that means we are vulnerable to an impact in the Atlantic Ocean.

"Small asteroids are hitting the Earth all the time, and even if we don't (get) anything large, we are still likely to have tens of thousands of people dying in the next 85 years."

Irish Independent

[MIKA27]

Jerusalem family finds 2,000-year-old ritual bath under living room

Home renovation usually entails picking paints, buying furniture, and dealing with contractors. For the Shimshoni family living in Jerusalem’s Ein Kerem neighborhood, it meant calling in archaeologists after stumbling upon a perfectly preserved 2,000-year-old ritual bath under their living room.

Last week the Israel Antiquities Authority finished excavating the subterranean bath, which archaeologist Amit Reem said Wednesday was “a significant find” and may have belonged to a private home in a first century Jewish village.

The ritual bath adheres to Jewish halachic requirements and measures 1.8 meters (5 feet, 11 inches) deep, 3.5 meters long and 2.4 meters wide.

More intriguingly, it lends some support to Christian tradition linking Ein Kerem, today a quaint neighborhood clinging to a hill on Jerusalem’s southwestern edge, with the birthplace of John the Baptist.

Starting in the 6th century, Christians began associating the “town in the hill country of Judea” mentioned in the Book of Luke as the birthplace of John the Baptist, the mentor of Jesus, with Ein Kerem. The village is home to the Catholic Church of St. John the Baptist, dedicated to his birthplace.

Church of St. John the Baptist

“All these events took place 2,000 years ago in the days of the Second Temple [in Jerusalem] but until now we didn’t have archaeological evidence supporting the notion that there was a Jewish community in Ein Kerem” during that period, he said, standing next to the gaping maw of the mikveh in the Shimshonis’ living room.

Previously, archaeological remains in Ein Kerem from that time period were “fragmentary,” limited to a handful of graves, bits of wall, an olive press and a mikveh. “The discovery of this mikveh strengthens the hypothesis that in the area of Ein Kerem today, there was a Second Temple Jewish settlement,” he said.

While Reem was reluctant to draw any direct associations between John the Baptist and the ritual bath found in the Shimshoni home, he said its discovery pointed to the presence of religious Jews who were fastidious about matters of ritual purity. Within the soil filling the mikveh, which plunges about 10 feet below ground, archaeologists found potsherds and remnants of stone vessels from the first century.

According to Jewish tradition, stone vessels do not contract religious impurity, whereas ceramic ones do and once contaminated must be destroyed.

IAA archaeologist Amit Reem examines remains of ceramic and stone vessels found in a first century Jewish ritual bath in the Shimshoni home in Ein Kerem, on July 1, 2015

Remains of ceramic and stone vessels found in a first century Jewish ritual bath in the Shimshoni home in Ein Kerem, on July 1, 2015.

“Maybe this is the ‘town of Judea’ [mentioned in Luke], we don’t know,” he said.

Archaeologists also found a burnt layer, possibly from destruction during the Jewish Revolt against Rome between 66 and 70 CE. Reem said it had yet to be dated, however.

Oriah Shimshoni, who owns the house with her husband Tal, said they’d bought the home several years ago and, like many of the old Arab houses in Ein Kerem, it required some fixing up.

“We started work, getting rid of layer after layer of flooring and pipes,” she said. “And at some point while the workers were breaking up flooring, the jackhammer disappeared. It just plunged downward.” It had broken through the ancient limestone ceiling of the mikveh.

Tal Shimshoni stands in a first century Jewish ritual bath found under his home in Ein Kerem, on July 1, 2015.

They stopped work and began digging by hand, unaware of what lay below. Upon realizing what they’d found, she said they were concerned about going through the bureaucratic procedure of reporting the finds, but “this thing gave us no rest.” In the end, Oriah and Tal called the IAA and reported the discovery.

The IAA on Wednesday awarded the Shimshonis a certificate of appreciation for reporting the find, as required by law.

The Shimshoni family invited the press to their home where they shifted some furniture and removed a carpet to reveal a trap door leading down in to the dank and stuffy bath.

Tal Shimoni reveals the entrance to a first century Jewish ritual bath in his home in Ein Kerem, on July 1, 2015

Tal Shimshoni stands in a first century Jewish ritual bath found under his home in Ein Kerem, on July 1, 2015

“It still fills up with water in the winter,” Tal Shimshoni said. “Where it comes from, we don’t know.” The dehumidifier in the corner was working overtime, and he said it sucked up four liters of water per day.

“Finding antiquities under a private home or public building only happens in Israel, and in Jerusalem particularly,” Reem said. “Every time it’s thrilling anew.”

[Fuzz]

This Exoskeleton Rig Makes Factory Workers 10 Times Stronger

Whilst I find this fascinating, this particular exoskeleton doesn't solve the issue of where man meets object. Doesn't matter how much the exo enhances your lifting ability or reduces the load, you still need to be able to physically hold onto the object.

[MIKA27]

Whilst I find this fascinating, this particular exoskeleton doesn't solve the issue of where man meets object. Doesn't matter how much the exo enhances your lifting ability or reduces the load, you still need to be able to physically hold onto the object.

Baby steps mate... baby steps

[Fuzz]

Baby steps mate... baby steps

Exo-hands have been in the works for years. Here's one example: http://www.cnet.com/news/exoskeleton-hand-gives-you-robo-powered-fingers/ Though, I would think a powerglove or gauntlet would be better. Your hand would never be in contact with the object being picked up.

The human component will always be the limiting factor, especially in the case of artificial limbs. You would never be able to fully utilise a superhumanly enhanced limb attached to a human body.

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NASA Proves Mars Isn't Just One Big Desert

If you’ve spent any time looking at the average satellite image of Mars, you’d be forgiven for concluding that our nearest planetary neighbour is actually just one gigantic sandy wasteland. But as this close-up image of the Aureum Chaos proves, Martians don’t just hide in the sand.

The Aureum Chaos is a light-toned deposit some 370km wide in the Valles Marineris. The area is pockmarked with canyons, around a kilometre deep, most likely formed by fluid motion — quite possibly ground water discharges — sometime in the past.

Minerals in the ground give it the light colour seen in this image, captured earlier this year by the High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment aboard the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter. [NASA]

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After String Of Failures, Today's Russian Rocket Launch Really Counts

Russian rocket launches don’t get nearly as much play as, say, a SpaceX launch. But in light of recent events, the Soyuz rocket blasting into orbit at 12.55am EST (2.55pm AEST), which will carry a spacecraft loaded with food and supplies to the International Space Station, is more important than usual.

The eight-ton Russian Progress M-28M craft will be packed with 420kg of water, 47kg of air and oxygen, 1392kg of food, medical supplies and hardware, and 520kg of propellant, according to Spaceflight Now. While Russian Progress missions to the ISS are quite routine (this will mark the 60th such mission since 2000), the recent string of failed resupply missions is fresh on everybody’s mind, and makes a successful launch tonight really, really important.

On Sunday, a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket disintegrated minutes after liftoff, taking with it a Dragon capsule packed with over 1800kg of supplies and 30 student research projects. On April 28, a Progress freighter bound for the ISS started spinning dizzily out of control shortly after launch, a problem that was blamed on vibrations in the connection between the spacecraft and the third stage of its rocket, which was flying an upgraded Soyuz-2.1a configuration. (Friday’s launch will employ the older Soyuz-U rocket, which Russia says isn’t susceptible to the anomaly that caused the last mission to crap out.)

What this all boils down to is that the ISS astronauts haven’t received any new supplies since April 14, when SpaceX’s sixth commercial resupply capsule successfully rendezvoused with the station. But on Sunday, NASA assured the public that the three-person crew currently in orbit has enough supplies to make it until October. And if tonight’s launch fails, there’s still a Japanese HTV resupply craft going up in mid-August. What’s more, NASA says it’s still on-track to launch three additional crew members on July 22nd, pending a last round of readiness reviews. If NASA felt there was a serious supply shortage, that crewed mission would have already been cancelled.

In other words, the space powers that be aren’t too worried — yet. Still, let’s all cross our fingers, hold our breath, and pray to a higher power of choice that tonight’s launch is a success.

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Slicing Golf Balls In Half Exposes The Weird Guts That Hide Inside

Golf balls are really, really weird. Especially the old ones used over a hundred years ago. The dimpled shell can hide things like goose and duck feathers, wound rubber and all other sorts of colourful and bright polymers and rubbers and plastics. The current balls are super fancy, I wish each golf ball still hid the rubber that looks like tobacco leaves.

This video, by Golf Digest, just re-confirms how cool it is to see things split in half.

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Someone Smuggled This Teahouse Into A Park Without Anyone Noticing

Los Angeles’s Griffith Park is home to miles of hiking trails, the Hollywood Sign, and at least one mountain lion. Now, suddenly, the park has a teahouse, secretly installed by a group of anonymous artists on a hillside overlooking the city.

Los Angeles Times writer Carolina Miranda was one of a handful of journalists invited to the teahouse’s opening, which took place yesterday morning at sunrise. Miranda was sent a piece of laser-etched wood telling her to meet in a parking lot at 5:00 a.m. and “follow the lights”:

On the north end of the parking lot, we find an arrangement of ceramic teacups each bearing an LED candle. Each guest is given a cup, along with a small map on vellum emblazoned with the profile of a griffin. A red line marks a path that zigs then zags up the flanks of Mt. Hollywood, past Dante’s view, before coming to rest on Mt. Bell, to the northeast.

Our destination is the Griffith Park Teahouse, a diminutive wood structure, loosely inspired by Japanese architecture, which did not exist until Monday night when it was surreptitiously installed by a loose collective of artists.

The 80-square-foot teahouse not only was built guerrilla-style, it was also constructed using reclaimed materials from the park itself. Wood that had been burned in a devastating wildfire that swept through the park in 2007 was salvaged and used to build the structure.

In addition to the structure — which looks incredibly sturdy for being built on the sly — there’s an actual teahouse setup inside. On the morning of the opening, someone was performing a Japanese tea ceremony, serving green tea and almond cookies to guests.

Also according to Japanese tradition, the teahouse has a place to make wishes. In this case, wishes for the future of Los Angeles can be inscribed on thin sheets of salvaged redwood. The “P-22″ that’s laser-etched into each wish and appears in the gryphon-like logo for the teahouse is a reference to the famous mountain lion who roams the park and sometimes hides out in neighbouring basements.

The team of artists, which includes some professional woodworkers, designed the structure to be bolted to an old foundation they discovered in the park. The teahouse was prefabricated off-site and smuggled into the park in pieces. I’m completely impressed that they were able to spec out the location, gather all the wood, and build the damn thing without making trouble — this is a busy urban park that’s home to tourist-thronged attractions like the Griffith Observatory and LA Zoo as well as plenty of hikers.

Although the artists didn’t get permission to build the structure, they’re hoping that it will remain standing in the park as their gift to the city. There isn’t much infrastructure in this part of the park, and to be honest, hikers could use a shady place to rest. Let’s hope the city is smart enough to permanently add this teahouse to the park’s long list of destinations.

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Flying Man In Wing Suit Slices Right Through A Hole In A Mountain

It’s never not pure insanity to fly in a wing suit. It’s never not pure insanity to fly in a wing suit straight through a tiny sliver of a hole on a mountain. These devils of dare are made up of such extremes that they’re not even human. Watch as extreme pyscho Uli Emanuele rip through a mountain after hiking it. Crazy doesn’t even begin to describe it.

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How This Underground Park Is Piping In Real, Live Sunshine

We’re living in an age of extremely ambitious urban technology: floating pools that filter dirty river water; artificial eco-habitats; and even green parks that sit under cities, nourished by actual sunlight literally piped down from above.

At least, that’s the idea. The Lowline, an underground park in New York City, was first proposed in 2011 — a truly exciting time in New York and other cities. The second phase of the Highline had just opened. City officials were transforming city streets and throwing their weight behind sprawling projects to improve urban life. Kickstarter and IndieGoGo were just finding a footing in our culture at large, and the cynicism many people feel about crowdfunding today had not yet emerged. Lowline became one of the first city-scale projects to launch using crowdfunded money.

In the four years since, its creators Dan Barasch and James Ramsey have grappled with design, fundraising, and government bureaucracy. Now, they’re fundraising for the next, and perhaps most important, phase of their project: the technicalities of building an underground park lit with real sunlight.

How To Port the Sun

The Lowline team is now working out how to pipe real, grass-nourishing sunlight into the depths of a 112-year-old cavern. It’s known as the Williamsburg Trolley Terminal, and it’s where trolleys connecting Manhattan and Brooklyn over the Williamsburg Bridge began and ended from 1903 until the modern subway system took over.

Over the past year, the Lowline team has worked with SunPortal, a three-year-old company based in the UK and South Korea that sells “daylighting technology,” an emerging category of lighting that uses a complex series of mirrors and focusers to deliver “real” daylight into the depths of factories, tunnels, and spaces that are otherwise without natural light.

SunPortal and other daylighting technology startups are on the fringes of a broader effort to use technology to recreate the chemical and biological environment of Earth — in this case, its sunlight — in places where human life would otherwise be untenable. It’s a project that could end up having literally far-reaching implications, as NASA and the European Space Agency work to study how the human body could survive without the unique biological conditions of Earth, where our bodies flourish so perfectly. There are darker versions of that future, too, in which humans depends on artificial simulacra of Earth to survive on a planet damaged beyond repair.

Of course, the Lowline is just a park. But it’s a park that aspired to use a technology still in its infancy, and it could end up being a proving ground for other projects.

The Uncanny Outdoors

SunPortal’s founders reached out to the Lowline directly after their first campaign, offering to help them develop a workable design for the underground park — which must support the growth of plant life and grass.

“I hadn’t heard about them before,” said Ramsey, who is an architect by trade but is focusing on developing the hardware the Lowline will need to pipe in sunlight. “But they had a system and process that was perfectly suited to becoming what we had wanted to execute.”

Originally, the duo had proposed using a daylighting technology that transferred sunlight through fibre optic cables, but since then, they have shifted their focus to Sunportal’s reflector-based technology. Ramsey has been to South Korea three times since then to look at the company’s technology and develop the altered version that the Lowline will theoretically use — which is currently being custom-built in South Korea.

So, how does SunPortal’s technology work? In the case of the Lowline, it will begin on the street level above the park, with huge sunlight collectors and parabolic dishes that concentrate that sunlight, made from silver and glass that help efficiently concentrate and reflect light and repel dust that would otherwise dim the intensity of the lumens. Then, a pipe full of roughly seven-inch-wide optical lenses reflects that light downward — until it reaches the park level, where it’s diffused through a fixture.

SunPortal says this technology can carry sunlight 200m in total, which is far deeper than the Lowline will need to go. At one of its projects in South Korea, the company installed 200m of daylighting in South Korea’s first hydroelectric power plant, which opened 35 years ago and includes vast underground workspaces that had to be lit artificially. Using a system of concentrators and lenses that’s similar to what the Lowline will use, Sunportal now illuminates those tunnels with 100 lux of light, which shimmers with an almost uncanny yellow-green light that’s shuttled through a clear pipe overhead.

While the Lowline is staying relatively mum about how the team will alter Sunportal’s existing technology — after all, the new Kickstarter campaign will fund the lab where it will be developed and tested — Ramsey was able to tell me a bit about how it’s changing.

“The transmission will be roughly similar to their existing system, but without glowing polycarbonate output,” he writes. “The output will be completely our own design, using a combination of high performance lenses, reflective surfaces, and in-line electrical lighting for times of darkness.”

The Business of Selling Sunlight

Daylighting is a big business, and SunPortal isn’t the only company trying to sell it. Cities are getting denser, energy is getting more expensive, and “The tracking and materials technologies are still relatively new in many instances, and the AEC industry is perhaps not well acquainted with them,” says Ramsey, “but there are numerous cost-effective solutions on the market that can produce some very useful and spectacular effects.”

There’s CoeLux, an Italian startup with radical take on daylight, even for an industry that sounds straight out of a dystopian thriller.

It uses a simple LED, behind a screen of titanium dioxide nanoparticles — yep, the stuff that’s often used in sunscreen because it absorbs UV rays. It also scatters light in a way that’s very similar to our own atmosphere, a phenomenon known as Rayleigh scattering, which you’ll often hear explained as the reason the sky is blue.

CoeLux is selling its nanoparticle screens in three varieties, each calibrated to recreate the angle and warm of light in a different part of the world — tropical, mediterranean, and nordic. Seeing it in action, for instance at a radiological center in Italy, is an uncanny experience: It looks truly blue, as though you were sitting inside one of James Turrell’s famous skyspaces.

While Sunportal’s systems pipe in what you could call “real sun,” CoeLux is doing something far more eerie: Creating a near-perfect aesthetic simulacrum of the sky with completely artificial materials — no sun involved. Its founders point out that access to sun and sky is shown to have positive effects on health and mood, and the benefit of recreating those effects inside a hulking hospital or office is clear.

The question, then, isn’t whether we can fake sunlight — either by reflector or nanoparticle — it’s whether we can get over the cognitive dissonance of knowing that this sunlight isn’t coming directly from the sky. Reviewers of simpler daylighting systems on Amazon, which use mirrors to concentrate sunlight from a roof into windowless interior rooms, seem torn.

“I did find the colour of the light a bit sterile,” writes one. “I feel like pressure has been lifted from this low ceiling home,” says another.

For now, the Lowline team will keep fundraising — as of this post, they have blown past their goal of $US100,000. And even if it doesn’t usher in a new era of underground urban life, Ramsey and Barasch are seeing their experiment with natural daylighting through to its conclusion, which will serve as an important case study for designers and scientists working on related problems.

In a way, the old Williamsburg Trolley Terminal is the perfect location for their experiment: It was here that an old urban technology died, and here that they hope a new one will be born.

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The Bike Tricks In This Video Are Impossibly Fun To See

Road bikes are meant for the road… but that’s too limiting and not fun at all. What’s really fun is seeing Italian cyclist Vittorio Brumotti freestyle all over anything that can remotely come close to being ridden on with his road bike. Like highway rails next to the ocean or narrow hand rails or an aeroplane graveyard or inside an aeroplane and more.

It’s sad to know that I will never be able to do any of the stunts he pulled in this video in my life.

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Yo Air Force: Don’t You Dare Kill Off TheToughest Warplane

The U.S Air Force wants to kill off the A-10 Thunderbolt II. You can see why: The plane was designed to fight Russians in the Cold War. It’s old. It’s slow. It’s expensive to maintain. It’s about as sophisticated as a hammer, and it’s the weapon we’ve sent to battle ISIS in Syria and Iraq.

Pentagon top brass think it’s time for younger, swankier aircraft to take its place providing close air support (attacking enemy ground forces who are close to and engaged with friendly ground forces). Sexier swept-wing fighters like the F-35 and the F-16 and F15-E.

Not everyone’s onboard, however. See, the A-10, aka the Warthog (so called because it’s really ugly), is heavily armored and the plane is literally built around a gigantic 30mm cannon. It can fly low and slow, making it perfect for picking apart ground infantry and armor. It’s incredibly accurate, so it can engage hostile targets even when they’re in very close proximity to friendly soldiers.

It is ruthlessly effective, and the grunts on the ground absolutely love it because it keeps them safe. If you need to hit a nail, a hammer is exactly what you want.

Rory Bisby, an aircraft mechanic, watches over new mechanic David Montano while he works inside an A-10 Thunderbolt II outer wing at the 309th Aerospace Maintenance and Regeneration Group, or AMARG, Davis-Monthan Air Force Base, Az. Dec. 17. The Thunderbolt II is undergoing a wing upgrade which will make the wings of the tank killer, thicker and stronger while doubling the service life to 8,000 miles in the air

That’s why a bunch of senators, including former Navy pilot John McCain of Arizona and Kelly Ayotte of New Hampshire (whose husband flew the A-10 in Iraq), both powerful members of the Senate Armed Services Committee, are determined to keep the A-10 flying. And now they’ve got extra ammo.

The Air Force claims shutting down the A-10 program would save $4.2 billion over five years, but a new report from the Government Accountability Office shoots that down, finding USAF analysis incomplete.

More worrying (and unsurprising, to anyone who’s been paying attention), the GAO report says dropping the A-10 would “create potential gaps” in close air support. Even though every A-10 flying is more than thirty years old, it remains “the only or the best Air Force platform to conduct certain missions” like escorting helicopters (the Warthog can fly really slowly, making it effective at protecting the pokey choppers) or engaging small boats that could threaten US ships (See: USS Cole).

Close air support is a vital job that, when properly executed, can mean the difference between life and death for soldiers. It’s highly dangerous, because it requires flying at altitudes low enough to discern friend from foe, leaving the plane particularly vulnerable to ground-based anti-aircraft fire.

But the Warthog was specifically designed for close air support: the cockpit sits in a 1,200 pound titanium tub, specifically designed to withstand fire from anti-aircraft shells at close range. Every system is double or triple redundant, and it can take a ridiculous amount of abuse. It can continue flying if it’s lost an entire engine, part of its tail, or even half a wing.

And, because the A-10’s role is so important, it’s designed for easy repairs to keep it in the air. Entire engines can be quickly and easily replaced. Most repairs can even be made in the field. Many parts are interchangeable between the left and right sides of the plane, and the A-10 can take off from rough and unpaved runways. Because it has huge wings, a high wing aspect ratio and huge ailerons (almost 50 percent of its wingspan), it’s incredibly maneuverable.

The Warthog is basically a flying gatling gun, and it’s terrifying if you’re on the angry end.

Simply put, the A-10 is a SkyTank, beloved by pilots and troops alike. We wrote about the A-10 last year and the articleattracted more than 1,700 comments, many from service members sharing stories about the A-10 and more than a few claiming they would have been killed if not for the aircraft and its pilots.

“The GAO findings reinforce what soldiers, special operators, and Joint Terminal Attack Controllers have said from the beginning: the premature divestment of the A-10 will create a close air support capability gap, increase the risk to our ground troops, and result in unnecessary American casualties,” Ayotte says. “If the Air Force decides to ignore the clear and consistent will of the overwhelming majority of soldiers, special operators, and JTACs, I will continue to stand with them in opposition to the Air Force’s plans to prematurely divest the A-10.”

Senator McCain concurs: “This report underscores the concerns I have been raising for years about the Air Force’s misguided attempts to prematurely retire this vital aircraft … As the GAO confirms, any premature divestment of the A-10 would not only fail to achieve the Air Force’s purported cost savings, but also leave us with a serious capability gap that could put the lives of American soldiers in danger.”

What makes the plane’s continued relevance so impressive is the fact it was designed more than 40 years ago, and a new one hasn’t been built since 1984.

That durability and effectiveness is especially striking giventhe rolling debacle that is the F-35 program. The development project has stumbled time and again, and according to one report this week, the trillion dollar superplane gets its ass kicked in dogfights with much older aircraft. Is it any surprise the Senators want to keep the A-10 around at least a while longer?

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The Haunted Submarine of World War I

During the hellacious and bloody battles of World War 1, a terrifying new enemy was unleashed beneath the waves of the sea; the submarine. Never before had these new weapons of war seen such deadly and widespread usage. The Germans in particular put submarines to spectacularly lethal effect. Silent, stealthy, appearing from nowhere from under the dark waves to ravage their victims, the German U-boots or U-boats, a shortened version of Unterseeboot or literally “undersea boat,”were feared by seafaring vessels, in particular the merchant and supply ships which would go on to lose millions of tons of cargo by the time the war ended. Yet although these undersea specters of death terrorized the enemy, it would prove that there were mysterious forces at work aboard one U-boat that would prove to terrorize the crew just as much as anyone else, and propel it into the long maritime pantheon of undersea mysteries and cursed vessels.

The submarine UB-65 was a Type UB III U-boat built by the German Imperial Navy in 1916, and before it was even completed and launched to seek havoc upon the enemy, it had already acquired a dark, ominous reputation for death. The construction of the sub was plagued by numerous freak accidents and horrific deaths. In one instance while the hull was being laid, a huge steel girder that was being lifted by chains and swung into position crashed to the ground when its sturdy chains inexplicably snapped. Two workers were unfortunate enough to be below the massive girder when it fell and were subsequently horrifically crushed beneath it. One of the workers was killed instantly but the other was not so lucky, writhing in agony as colleagues tried desperately to free him before he finally succumbed to his grievous injuries two hours later. It would later be established that the chains seemed to be in perfect working condition and no explanation could be found for how they might have suddenly broken as they had. In another incident, three engineers were in the newly built engine room doing a routine test of the dry cell batteries when they were overcome by sudden noxious diesel fumes. The deadly fumes quickly incapacitated the men and they had all asphyxiated by the time their bodies were dragged up into the light of day. Again there was no explanation for what had caused the fatal leak.

These ominous portents of doom and spooky freak accidents would not stop with the completion of the submarine’s tumultuous construction. During a test run with the aim of establishing the sub’s seaworthiness, the UB-65 encountered a fierce storm that brewed out of nowhere and violently swept one crewman overboard with an enormous wave. The crewman’s body was never found and it was assumed that he had died. Not long after this, as the sub was doing a test dive, the ballast tank was damaged and the dry cell batteries flooded with seawater, which again filled the engine room with poisonous gas killing two additional crew members. When the captain ordered the sub to the surface, it refused to do so as the deadly fumes continued to spread throughout the ship. The crew were luckily able to repair the malfunctioning sub and get to the surface before any more crew were lost to the toxic gases.

On another test run meant to test the sub’s diving ability, a fracture occurred in one of the ballast tanks yet again. Inundated with a sudden deluge of seawater, UB-65 sank in short order, finally resting upon the bottom with its crew in a mad panic and doubtlessly wondering how long they’d last before they all suffocated. The crew, now stranded at the bottom of the sea in a steel coffin, desperately worked to repair the sub and bring it to the surface as their limited oxygen supply dwindled. After 12 perilous hours under the sea, UB-65 was finally fixed and was able to surface before everyone aboard perished. It was considered almost a miracle at the time that no one else had died in the incident.

These accidents and incidents quickly imbued UB-65 with the malevolent reputation as a cursed vessel. In 1917, despite all of the problems and spooky rumors being whispered amongst sailors, UB-65 was scheduled to embark upon its official maiden voyage. If there was truly some sinister force infesting the sub, then it showed no signs of waning. As the torpedoes were being placed prior to this first real mission, one of them inexplicably exploded, which damaged the ship, seriously wounded several crew members, and killed the sub’s second officer, a Lieutenant Richter. Despite the tragedy, the Germans were desperate for more ships and hastily repaired and launched UB-65 again

A German U-boat

Not long after this, UB-65, already known for being a cursed vessel, would earn itself the title of a haunted one as well. One of the earliest ghostly sightings aboard the sub was made in 1918, as UB-65 was scouring the English Channel for enemies to decimate, by a lookout stationed up in the ship’s conning tower. The lookout was allegedly up in the tower when he noticed someone standing down on the deck directly below him, which was unusual since all of the hatches had been battened down and there should have been no one there. When the mysterious figure looked up, the lookout could clearly see that it was Lieutenant Richter, the second officer who had been killed in the freak torpedo accident. The ghostly Richter reportedly shouted some sort of warning and disappeared when the lookout began screaming in terror. Shortly after this, a panicked crewman ran to tell others that he had seen the dead Richter casually strolling about on deck. The captain thought the crewman was just seeing things, but nevertheless went to investigate the deck, where he found another crewman cowering in fright near the conning tower. This terrified crewman confirmed the story and explained that the dead second officer had sort of hovered off of the ground up the gangplank, along the bow, and had stopped to look out over the sea before simply vanishing into thin air.

From these initial sightings, the dead Lieutenant Richter began to make regular appearances aboard UB-65. He was seen by one engineer in the engine room, where he seemed to be examining the instrument panels before fading away into nothing. On another occasion, the spectral second officer was seen standing atop the conning tower in the middle of a violent storm, seemingly oblivious to the howling winds and enormous swells churning around him. In other instances, the ghost was seen roaming around the darkened, claustrophobic passages below decks and even phasing through walls. Richter would apparently gain some company when a crewman was killed in an air raid while on shore leave and his ghost began to be sighted aboard the sub as well.

The captain for his part did his utmost to try and discourage the stories, imposing heavy punishments on those who dared speak of the ghosts, but this failed to dispel the spooky rumors and the legend of UB-65’s curse continued unabated. The captain’s own viewpoint would change somewhat when he saw the ghost of Richter one night with his own eyes. During one storm, the sub was ordered to surface in order to survey the situation of the rough seas. As a crewmember peered through a hatch to scan the horizon, he was shocked to see a lone figure standing out on the deck, which was lurching madly in the stormy grey waters. The sight was strange not only in that only a madman would be standing out on the deck in the middle of such foul weather, but also because every other hatch was battened down, leaving no way for whoever it was to have gotten there in the first place. The figure then turned around to reveal that he was Richter, after which the frightened crewman shouted down to the others that he could see the ghost. The skeptical captain, sick of all of the nonsense about ghostly apparitions and eager to dispel the stories, rushed up to the hatch but when he arrived he too saw the specter. The hatch was promptly closed and the whole crew was in a panic.

These eerie stories spread quickly among the fleet and it did not take long for UB-65 to become infamous as a cursed and haunted sub. Many sailors outright refused to serve aboard her, and the ones who did want very much to get off. Crew morale spiraled downward in the face of these paranormal occurrences and everyone was fairly exhausted and shaken. Many of the crewmembers were reassigned to other vessels in the face of their growing dread. The German Imperial Navy even went as far as to have a Lutheran pastor perform an exorcist on the vessel in order to dispel the crew’s fears. In an effort to get to the bottom of what was going on, the German’s assigned a commodore to UB-65 in order to investigate the situation. After carefully interviewing the crewmembers, he became convinced that they were telling the truth. Nevertheless, the Imperial Navy decided that enough was enough and assigned a new captain to UB-65. This new captain was very no-nonsense and determined not to allow any hint of ghost stories, imposing harsh punishments on those that spread such tales or even mentioned them. After the change of command, UB-65 completed two tours of duty without incident, but whatever force was lurking within the confines of the sub was merely dormant, not gone.

In May of 1918, UB-65 was engaged in the task of patrolling the supply lanes in the English Channel off of Spain. During this mission, an officer reported seeing a shadowy figure enter the torpedo room, but when he went to investigate there was no one there. Another crewman claimed that the ghost of Richter appeared and walked straight through a massive iron bulkhead into the engine room. In yet another incident, the torpedo gunner claimed that the apparition had been harassing him for several nights in a row. The experience reportedly drove him mad, and during one particularly animated episode when he was ranting about ghosts the other crewmen tied him to restrain him. One night the disturbed crewman climbed out onto the upper deck as the sub surfaced to recharge its batteries and hurled himself into the sea. His body was never recovered.

Despite all of these strange incidents, the UB-65 had a fairly successful career, sinking 6 merchant vessels and damaging 6 more during its days of active service. However, the various mysteries surrounding it would continue right up until the UB-65’s final engagement, which would prove to be just as bizarre as its dark history. On July 10, 1918, off Padstow, Cornwall on the Irish coast, an American submarine came across UB-65 as it was at the surface. This is a very compromising position for a submarine as they are basically sitting ducks open to attack when they are at the surface. Additionally, the captain of the American submarine noticed that the German sub was listing as if it had been damaged somehow. Recognizing their good fortune to come across the enemy in such a vulnerable position, the American sub immediately prepared for attack. Yet bizarrely, as the torpedoes were being loaded and prepared to fire, UB-65 spectacularly exploded into a rain of debris for apparently no reason at all. The perplexed Americans had certainly not fired and there were no other vessels in the immediate vicinity at the time that could be blamed. It was presumed that UB-65 had experienced a malfunction of its weapons systems and had been sunk by its own torpedoes, but no one knew for sure what had caused the explosion. All of the UB-65’s crew of 37 was killed and none of the bodies were ever found. Adding to the mystery was the account of one American officer who reported seeing a lone figure in a German officer’s overcoat standing on deck with its arms folded shortly before the mysterious explosion, leading to speculation that this was Richter’s ghost serving as an omen of destruction.

For a long time, the wreckage of UB-65 could not be located and the mystery of its explosion and sinking over the years became a perplexing maritime mystery. The wreck was finally found and identified by underwater archaeologists in 2004. Examination of the UB-65 wreck showed no signs of being heavily damaged by a weapon attack, which conflicted to official German Naval records which list it as having been destroyed by its own torpedoes. The aft hatches of the wreck were also found to be open, an apparent indicator that some of the crew had made attempts to escape. The sinking of the sub was eventually attributed to “accidental causes” although the exact cause is still not known for sure and it is still not clear what the explosion was that the American sub reported. It is thought that perhaps the explosion could have been caused by a depth charge which detonated near the doomed vessel and caused enough internal damage to sink it without leaving any obvious major hull damage. However, in the end, even with the discovery of its wreckage the exact fate of UB-65 remains as mysterious as the ominous phenomena that hung over it throughout its career.

What was it about U-65 that made it such a magnet for unexplained bizarreness? What were the circumstances surrounding its ultimate demise? Was this all just bad luck mixed with sailors’ tall tales or was there some enigmatic and sinister force permeating this submarine’s steel innards? If so, one wonders was this force dispelled upon the sub’s final destruction or is there still a cloud of evil hovering about its sunken wreckage to this day? World War I brought its fair share of hell to both sides, and in the case of UB-65, perhaps a bit of hell was brought to it as well, infesting it, pervading it, and locking it into the annals of great unexplained mysteries of the sea.

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100 Years Ago a Harvard Professor Bombed the Capitol and Shot J.P. Morgan Jr.

On July 2, 1915, a German sympathizer sought to make America pay for supporting the allies against the Kaiser with a spree of terror.

In the early days of July 1915, the United States was preparing for a subdued celebration of America’s 139th Independence Day. It was hardly a festive time. War was still raging in Europe, and America was debating its entry on the side of Britain, Italy and France.

The deaths of 128 Americans aboard the RMS Lusitania on May 7 had forced the U.S.’s hand, some thought. President Woodrow Wilson pressed Germany for an apology while not yet calling for war. His Secretary of State William Jennings Bryan thought even that too harsh; he resigned in protest from Wilson’s cabinet in June.

The headlines were dire as it seemed the entire world would soon be caught in the maelstrom of the Great War.

And then, right before midnight, July 2, 1915, a bomb went off at the U.S. Capitol building in Washington, D.C.

It exploded in an empty reception area. “The explosion was a loud one and shook the entire building, breaking transoms and shattering plastering, ” said the Sun. Windows and mirrors were smashed, but the only bodily harm it caused was throwing a watchman from his chair.

The Sun: “Some persons in the crowd which had gathered around the Capitol were inclined to believe that the bomb had been placed by some war fanatic as an act of resentment against the United States government.”

They were right. And Eric Muenter wasn’t done.

Before newspaper readers in New York City would find out about the bombing, its instigator would have already arrived in their city, with a roster of further crimes on his mind.

Muenter, a former professor at Harvard University*, was a German sympathizer angered at American intervention in the war. He spread his vitriol wide, preparing to target private businessmen personally funding war efforts. In fact targeting one of America’s most wealthy financiers—JP Morgan Jr.

Following his sabotage at the Capitol, Muenter fled to New York on the morning of July 3 to wreak further chaos. He had a makeshift headquarters at the Mills Hotel (Seventh Avenue and 36th Street) where he had stored dozens of sticks of dynamite and fuses. At the port of New York, he managed to sneak aboard the SS Minnehana, an ocean liner filled with explosives destined for England, and install a time bomb to detonate once the ship was at sea.

It’s at this time that a similar time bomb was placed at New York Police Headquarters at 240 Centre Street. The device here was later believed to be from the same batch of dynamite as Muenter’s. If he was involved, you have to admit he was incredibly efficient with his time, for by 8 am, he had boarded a train, headed to Glen Cove, Long Island.

JP Morgan Jr. had been in control of his father’s banking empire since the elder’s death in 1913. The son embodied America’s involvement in the Great War in the years before the U.S.’s official entry. He facilitated an unprecedented loan of 500 million dollars to the Allied counties, backed by a consortium of over 2,000 American banks. The loans would soon grow to almost 3 billion dollars.

This made the financier both a symbol of American beneficence for some and a target of unwanted intervention for others. New York was a great stew of European diversity in the 1910s, and the far-away war often played out in the streets of New York, especially in German communities.

Morgan Jr had his recently-built summer home in Glen Cove, a palatial manor called Matinecock Point (pictured below). This was Muenter’s destination.

The assailant arrived, armed with two revolvers and a set of dynamite in his pocket, during an opportune breakfast meeting; the Morgans just happened to be entertaining the British ambassador Sir Cecil Spring-Rice.

At the door, Muenter pulled a gun on Morgan’s butler who, quickly thinking, directed the intruder down an opposite hall then shouted in the other direction for the Morgans to hide. The family scattered throughout the house.

Eventually, for the safety of their children, the Morgans did appear at the second floor landing and lured Muenter to them.

“Now Mr. Morgan I have got you.” he said reportedly.

His wife Jane attempted to leap in front of the gunman but was harshly shoved out of the way. Muenter then shot Morgan twice and prepared to fire again from the second pistol.

Fortunately Morgan had actually fallen into the gunman, pinning him to the floor. This allowed time for Mrs. Morgan and the children’s elderly nurse to finally apprehend the shooter. The fact that Spring-Rice, the British ambassador, also personally assisted in the capture of the shooter seems especially notable.

His plan thwarted, Muenter reportedly exclaimed, “Kill me! Kill me now! I don’t want to live any more. I have been in a perfect hell for the last six months on account of the European war.”

Originally giving his names as Frank Holt, it was soon discovered that the assailant was in fact Muenter, the former Harvard professor. In 1906, he wasaccused of poisoning his pregnant wife. Most likely, he did indeed kill her, for he disappeared from campus, changing his name to avoid arrest and had apparently spent years cultivating this new identity.

Once in custody on Long Island, Muenter spilled the beans. “I wanted to attract the attentions of the country to the outrages being committed by those who are sending the munitions of war to the Allies.”

Below is a fragment of a letter Muenter wrote to his father-in-law while in custody. “I learned to my sorrow that Mrs. M[organ] was hurt,” it begins.

On July 5th the explosion at New York Police Headquarters went off, following another explosion at the home of Andrew Carnegie. Nobody was hurt in these blasts. These similar explosions were later declared unrelated to the Muenter incident itself, but it grimly reinforces the danger New Yorkers faced during wartime, even so far away from the battlefields.

Morgan quickly recovered from his injuries although the attack had a chilling effect among the residents of Long Island’s Gold Coast. Security was quickly beefed up at Matinecock Point and at the estates of other wealthy financiers associated with the Morgan bank loan.

On the evening of July 6, Muenter leaped to his death from his cell at Nassau County jail in Mineola. While it was but a short drop, he had jumped head first, crushing his skull. The death was so bizarre and sudden — it actually made a loud, deafening thud — that investigators initially believed that he had placed a blasting cap in his teeth to hasten his demise.

But the reign of terror wasn’t over. The time bomb that Muenter had placed aboard the SS Minnehaha did eventually explode while the ship was in the Atlantic. While it caught the ship ablaze, fortunately the ship was able to reroute to Halifax, and the fire was safely put out.

*Press reports initially thought he was from Cornell.