Viking Chieftain’s Ship Found in Scotland

Sutton Who?

Archaeologists have unearthed another big ship virtually intact, this one also carrying the body of a chieftain. It's a Viking ship, and it was unearthed in a remote peninsula on the western coast of Scotland. It's the first Viking ship burial found on the mainland that is now the United Kingdom. Experts have dated it to the 10th Century. The site of discovery is on the Ardnamurchan Peninsula, the mainland's most westerly point.

The chieftain was certainly still ready for battle. His sword and spear were by his side, and his shield was on his chest. Nearby were a knife, an axe, and another object thought to be a drinking horn.

Other items in the boat show the metropolitan nature of the chieftain. The ringpin is from Ireland, and the whetstone is from Norway. Like other Viking burials, this one included a large number of rocks.

The boat is rather small, about six feet long and about four feet wide. Such a small craft would have been rather an inappropriate method of sending the chieftain to the afterlife because of the surrounding seas, which were and are usually quite stormy. Perhaps the purpose was a burial at sea.

Other items recovered by the boat and surrounding ground include a few teeth and a fragment of a bone from the chieftain's arm — virtually all that is left after so many hundreds of years underground.

Archaeologists will do more testing on the fragments of wood still attached to the rivets, in order to determine what kinds of trees made up the boat's carcass.

Comet Nearly Killed Us All One Hundred Years Ago

I suspect that this happens more often than many of us are comfortable with. Sometimes, too much information is entirely too much.

From someone who probably too much time comes the story of how we — meaning the entire planet — nearly escaped death as late as 1883.

The story of a comet wiping out the dinosaurs is far enough back in the dawn of time that we don't really think about it much anymore. Oh, it appears in books and magazines every now and again, but hey, that was tens of millions of years ago, so what's the big deal now?

Closer to our own time was the mystery-shrouded event in Siberia, called "the Tunguska event." Just little more than 100 years ago, in 1908, a huge extraterrestrial object, which most people think was a comet or an asteroid, went to ground in Tunguska, Siberia. Scientists have estimated that the result of the collision was about a thousand times more powerful than an atomic bomb. Of course, it was in Siberia, so not a whole lot of people were around at the time (and those who were … soon weren't.) And hey, this was Russia, so not a whole lot of news coverage made it out of the country anyway.

Now, however, comes word that a massive comet did a near-miss in August of 1883 and the only witness we know about was a Mexican astronomer who just happened to be in the right(?) place at the right time.

See, this guy named Jose Bonilla wrote about his observations of 450 huge things zooming across his view of the Sun. The French astronomy journal L'Astronomie published Bonilla's account, but it didn't gain much traction with the public at large.

A new study in Technology Review, however, has concluded, after further technological review, that Bonilla saw the huge bits and pieces of a comet that came very close to Earth, perhaps as 373 miles away.

The study quotes the size of the these observed fragments as anywhere from 164 feet across to 2.5 miles wide. Now that's a big range, and it all adds up to nearly an original weight of a billion tons — which is about what that dinosaur-killing comet weighed.

Of course, the comet didn't come close enough to make a whole lot of difference, and it certainly didn't strike the planet or wipe out any species. But it could have, and that's the point. 

Anyone know Bruce Willis's mobile number?

Run! Hide! T-rex Even Bigger Than Feared

Steven Spielberg was on to something. In the same vein as his friend George Lucas being prescient, Spielberg knew exactly what he was talking about when he showed us a rearview mirror in Jurassic Park that read "Objects in mirror are closer than they appear." Such is the case with the mighty T-Rex, which just got more mighty.

A new study led by scientists in the U.K. and the U.S. has asserted that Tyrannosaurus rex, the feared carnivore that has been the nightmare of many a Triceratops and young boy, was bigger than we have thought.

It's not like we have these creatures around anymore to do some handy measuring, despite the kind of entertainment that Spielberg and others have given us on the Silver Screen. After all, T-rex and his Cretaceous cousins died out 65 million years ago. (And whether you believe that an asteroid or disease or aliens killed them, they're still long dead.) But we do have these fossils, see, and we do have computers now, see, and so the journal PLos One now reports, thanks to the diligence of these scientists and their computer models, that T-rex could grow nearly 4,000 pounds in a year. The paper asserts that the largest of the nightmarish razor-toothed carnivorous predator could have weighed in at more than 18,000 pounds of muscle — 4,000 pounds more than previously thought.

How have these men and women of science come to this conclusion? So back to the skeletons, and the computers. By taking 3-D laser scans of five mounted skeletons of the big lizards, the scientists had plenty of material for extrapolating — using strict scientific method, of course — and so they went to work, inch by inch, pound by pound, computer model by computer model, crunching the numbers and poring over the details, until they had come up with their conclusions, which are enough to upset the dreams of a whole new generation of young children.

If there's one bright side to these new conclusions, it's that the weight gain eventually caught up with the body type. In other words, the more the T-rex aged, the slower it moved. This is typical of nearly animals, and it must be comforting for us humans to know that T-rex slowed down eventually, although we would do well to remember that the giant beasts could still use their huge hips and tail to propel themselves at up to 25 mph. That's still fast enough to run down most kinds of prey, including those in dreams.

Michelangelo in the Eye of the Holder

Is that a Michelangelo you see before you? Could be.

News out of the Italian art history community this week is that a marble tondo depicting a bearded man is a portrait (possibly even a self-portrait) of Michelangelo. The tondo, or circle, is 14 inches in diameter and shows a man in three-quarter profile. It has been dated to about 1545.

The celebrated artist whose last name has come down to us as Buonarroti lived from 1475 to 1564, so he was definitely alive when this tondo was completed. That's the first clue.

Another fine clue is that the marble used to create the tondo in question came from the same place as that used to create the famed tomb of Pope Julius II — from the Polvaccio quarry in Carrara, in northwest Tuscany. Julius, of course, was the pope who commissioned Michelangelo to build a tomb for the emperor, then told him to put that on hold and get on with painting the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel.

Julius wanted such a massive tomb and Michelangelo wanted such a massive building project that the tomb wasn't finished in the pope's lifetime. Indeed, Michelangelo continued work on it off and on for 40 years, so he must have had some marble left over with which to create the tondo in question. And the dating of the tondo to about 1545 is consistent with the cessation of work on Julius's tomb (1545).

The fresh news was from the director of the Museo Ideale, in Vinci, who corroborated an assertion made by a noted Michelangelo scholar back in 1999 and affirmed by another leading art historian not long ago. Some art historians even think that the artist intended the tondo to appear in the tomb, alongside other massive statuary, such as the celebrated Moses.

This is news because portraits (self- or otherwise) of Michelangelo are a bit on the rare side. If this is indeed one of those, it's a rather good one, capturing a moment in the existence of a man who was larger than life.

The Artists of 100,000 Years Ago

The artists of yesteryear had so much more time than today's artists — at least that's what today's artists would say.

Truth be told, artists in ancient times were more than likely scarce and scared, but that's perhaps another story.

Our story for today is that researchers have discovered in a South African cave the remains of what they think is an artist's studio. The evidence for this is rather rich — in ochre. In a pair of abalone shells was a bit of material rich in ochre. Alongside the shells were bones, charcoal, and such tools of the trade as grindstones and hammerstones. The working theory is that the ancient people (or at least those who were around 100,000 years ago) used bones to stir the ochre mixture and then use that ochre mixture for decoration. All of these things were buried underneath sand, as if (the researchers speculate) someone had intended to come back for them but never returned.

The researchers discovered the items in 2008 and subjected them to large volumes of luminescence dating and other analysis before announcing the findings, which also included a theory that the "painters" rubbed bits of ochre on quartzite slabs to make a red powder — perhaps evidence of an early form of chemistry.

It was not the first announcement from the cave: Eons ago — or at least back in 2002 — researchers found blocks of ochre containing engravings in the abstract, dating from 70,000 years ago. Other discoveries have come from the cave as well. Clearly, this was a group of people who had time on their hands.

The name of the cave needs a bit of work if it's to be accepted by the norms of society: Blombos Cave, on the southern Cape Coast, on points east of Cape Town.

We can't have everything.

Charting WWII oil spill potential

The common perception is that during World War II, Japanese forces came nowhere the American western coastline. To a large extent, that is true. However, it is not entirely true, as we are reminded by the launch this week of an oil recovery program for an oil tanker sunk by a Japanese submarine off the coast of Cambria, Calif., in 1941.

The SS Montebello was the target of a Japanese torpedo, and the result was a ship 900 feet below the surface, with the oil intact. Seven decades later, the 440-foot ship — and its oil — are still there.

Divers accompanied by a remotely operated underwater vehicle are aiming to ascertain whether the oil is in danger of spilling out of the ship. Scientists think that the oil would be very thick after so long in the ship's hold, but they're not taking any chances. The divers will drill a 1-inch-diameter hold into a couple of the oil tanks and extract samples that scientists will analyze, before deciding on further action, which include a recovery operation.

The publicity is a far cry from what accompanied the sinking. The U.S. Military hushed up the incident. All 38 people onboard were rescued and (presumably) sworn to secrecy. The U.S. Government did not confirm knowledge of the incident until many years later.

Now, though, the priority is preventing a big oil spill.

Oldest Still-running Car Sells for $4.6 million

What's the price of propulsion? In this case, it's $4.6 million.

That's the price paid for the world's oldest still-running vehicle, a steam-powered car from france that sold at auction in the U.S. The car has a nickname of La Marquise, but has a much longer actual name of the De Dion-Bouton et Trepardoux Dos-a-Dos Steam Runabout. Built under the longer name, the car was put together in 1884 and was driven in the first automobile race three years later.

Only four men owned the car in its long life. The latest previous owner was John O'Quinn, a collector from Texas, who had bought it in 2007 for $3.5 million.

The longer name of the vehicle comes in part from the man for whom it was built, Count De Dion. His mother, of course, was La Marquise.

The car seats four people back-to-back, eliminating the presence of a back-seat driver because they can't see where they're going — only where they've been. And that's just as well because the driver doesn't have a steering wheel; rather, the driver is tasked with maneuvering a tiller that resembles nothing so much as a common garden implement.

The new owner won't be going very fast in this vehicle, or very far — the car gets only half a mile to the gallon. But the new owner probably didn't buy it to run it in any races. If he or she is in any way like one of the previous owners, it will be more than 80 years before the car changes hands again.

JFK Bomb Shelter Begging for Tourists

You'd be forgiven for at first thinking "Why bother?" But as a piece of historical trivia, this is a good one: Now open to the public is a bomb shelter built for President John F. Kennedy at the height of the Cold War.

It's a bit of a trip from Massachusetts or Washington, D.C., but it's worth the trip if you want to get away from it all. The shelter, referred to in documents at the time as the "Detachment Hotel," is on Peanut Island, off the coast of Palm Beach, Fla. Navy Seabees built the shelter in December 1961, and Kennedy did stay there, for brief periods of time, twice.

Trees camouflage the entrance, and passersby who happened to notice the shelter were told that it was a munitions dump. Incredibly, it was maintained for a few decades before falling into disrepair in the 1990s. (No doubt the funding ran out, just like for many other military installations.)

However, some new money was found and the bunker is now open to the public, in a promotion that organizers hope will put the tiny island on the map.

Visitors can take a step into the recent past, viewing the 15 metal bunk beds, ham radio, petroleum jelly, castor oil, and K-rations (not to mention the gas masks that would probably be the most sought-after item of supply if things really got rough). Fittingly, the shelter also contained a bona fide escape hatch, in case the cover was blown and a full-scale physical invasion was under way.

You can book your tour of the bunker, which is now a museum, at any time, really, since the organizers are quite happy to show anyone around. Crowds have become sparse, as has funding.