McCartney's first guitar sells for £330,000

The guitar on which Sir Paul McCartney learned his first chords has sold for £330,000 at an auction at London's Abbey Road Studios.

The instrument, which fetched more than three times its estimate, was sold by Sir Paul's school friend Ian James, who will use the money for his retirement.

The Rex acoustic guitar helped Sir Paul persuade John Lennon to let him join his band, The Quarrymen, in 1957.

Full story here.

Floyd Landis, doping, and the Tour de France

What a dramatic Tour this year -- and it still isn't over.

There appears to be a widespread presumption of guilt here, and given the history of doping in professional cycling, that's not surprising. But being of a contrarian mind, I hesitate to jump to any conclusions about Landis. Especially since the one positive test report doesn't make much sense: the test is designed to detect the use of steroids, but you don't dose yourself with steroids for a quick pick-me-up -- they are for building muscle over the long term. And since Landis passed the same test after every other race stage, if he did take steroids, he took them in a way sure to get himself in trouble and equally sure not to have any performance benefit.

The other thing I keep looking for in the news coverage is an estimate of the test's false-positive rate. This abstract (with link to full article) describes a study that found a false-positive rate of 4%, using a urinary testosterone to epitestosterone ratio of greater than or equal to six to define a positive result. Yet even though there is evidence that some male athletes naturally have a T/E ratio approaching or even exceeding six, the Tour's anti-doping agency has now lowered the threshold to four -- likely increasing the false-positive rate substantially.

I probably won't be adding much more on this topic, but Out of True appears to be following the story quite closely.

UPDATE: The NY Times is reporting that a carbon isotope ratio test has been run on the A sample -- and the results don't look good for Landis. There remains the question of why the T/E ratio was over limits on only one of the several tests run on Landis during the course of the race. Some authorities claim that while steroids' main benefit is in building muscle over the long term, they can also help in short-term recovery after intense exercise. There does not appear to be a consensus on this, however -- and placebo effects are not to be discounted, either (that would be ironic, if Landis ended up disqualifying himself for taking a substance whose only benefit was psychological). I imagine much of this could be cleared up if the remainder of Landis's urine samples were also subjected to carbon isotope testing. There are a number of possible explanations for the one failed T/E test, but things would get much, much more interesting if anomalies turned up in the carbon isotope tests. Three main possibilities then, as I see it:

1. All samples test positive for steroid use. Landis is disgraced, professional cycling takes another huge hit.

2. All samples up until the one with the skewed T/E ratio are clean, that and those after aren't. Landis is stripped of his title and suspended. Possibility of Landis recovering at least some of his good name, especially if it comes out that someone else such as a team doctor was responsible for dosing him.

3. All samples except the one with the skewed T/E ratio test clean, including samples taken afterwards. Near-conclusive evidence of malicious tampering: Landis vindicated, but a scandal for the Tour perhaps worse yet than doping!

UPDATE: More on carbon isotope testing at Corante; lots of comments, too.

Antipodean plesiosaurs

Australia was once home to ancient reptiles that swam in huge icy lakes, fossil evidence suggests.

The large, carnivorous reptiles lived 115 million years ago, during the age of the dinosaurs, when much of the continent was covered in water.

Fossils of two new species of plesiosaur were discovered near Coober Pedy in South Australia.

From the BBC. The fossils are notable for something else, as well:

Some 30 fossils were discovered at an opal mine near the outback mining town of Coober Pedy.

They are made up of the mineral opal, which filled the spaces left by bones when the original fossil-bearing rock was dissolved away by acidic ground water.

I've seen a few other fossils in opal, and they can be spectacular. In this instance, however, I suspect the beauty of the opal will not be readily visible, since the fossils are unlikely to end up polished.

Only Nazi aircraft carrier found?

The Polish navy says it is almost certain that it has located the wreck of Nazi Germany's only aircraft carrier, the Graf Zeppelin.

A Polish firm searching for oil first detected the wreck in the Baltic Sea, 55km (34 miles) offshore. . .

The ship, built in 1938, never saw action in the war.

The navy said it was unlikely that the 250-metre (820-foot) wreck would be recovered from the seabed, as it was at a depth of more than 80 metres (264 feet).

From the BBC.

Big Digs in Byzantium

First there was the "Port of Theodosius" uncovered during subway construction in Istanbul (noted here; further information including pictures here and here); now they are tunneling under the other great Byzantine city, Thessaloniki:

Another subway in Greece, another look into the past.

Tunneling work to build a metro system for the country's second-largest city started Thursday, as Culture Ministry officials signed an agreement to protect antiquities they expect to be discovered during construction. . .

The subway system for Thessaloniki, where some 1.3 million people live, will span about 6 miles with 13 stations and is due to be completed by 2012, at an estimated cost of $1.27 billion.

From the Guardian.

Topics!

Eugene Volokh writes:

The UCLA Law Library and I have put together http://www.lawtopic.org, a Web-based clearinghouse for student article ideas. The theory is that law professors, lawyers, law clerks, and judges would submit such ideas to this site, and students would pick up those ideas.

What a timely idea -- and one that deserves to be expanded beyond the confines of law.

Volokh goes on to explain why this is a win-win situation, but the reasons are clear to anyone who's been in the research business for any length of time. When you are a grad student (or advanced undergraduate), energy and research time are in relatively plentiful supply. The problem is in finding good research topics: when you are new to a field, you don't know where the gaps are, and even when you do come up with what looks like a good topic, you may find it has been covered before or is being worked on elsewhere -- not to mention the possibility that it is either a dead end or just too ambitious.

Fast forward a few years, and the landscape has shifted. You've finished a dissertation, published articles, maybe written a book or two. One line of inquiry has opened up another, opening up another, and another; you are in regular contact with your professional peers, so you all have a good idea of what is being worked on and what needs working on -- but now that you are earning a living you can't spare a fraction of the time needed to delve into this proliferation of topics. Sometimes they end up getting handed down from teacher to student (the degree to which this happens is a significant measure of a professor, both as a teacher and a researcher), yet too often they do not: for not all researchers are teachers, and not all teachers have students interested in doing research of their own. Topics, anyone?

Ramses colossus to leave Cairo

A giant statue of Pharaoh Ramses II will be moved next month from a congested square in downtown Cairo to a more serene home near the Great Pyramids in a bid to save it from corrosive pollution, Egypt's antiquities chief said Monday.

Exhaust fumes from trains, cars and buses, as well as subway vibrations, are damaging the more than 3,200-year-old granite statue at Ramses Square, its home since the early 1950s, when it was taken from a temple at the site of the ancient Egyptian capital of Memphis.

The 125-ton statue -- a popular feature on postcards and guide books -- will become part of a new museum about a mile from the pyramids.

Full story here. The statue on the move will be quite a sight; the plan is to move a replica first by way of a trial run, with the real move to take place on August 25.

Bow Street Court closes

Missed this a couple of weeks back; hat tip to reader John Anderson:

BOW Street magistrates court in central London has heard its last case and will be sold to an Irish property developer who is believed to want to turn it into a hotel.

There has been a magistrates court in Bow Street since the system came into being, the first established on a site across the road from the current Victorian building in 1735.

More at the BBC (leading off with a list of "reluctant visitors": Casanova, the Kray twins, Oscar Wilde, Dr Crippen, the Pankhursts and Lord Archer) and the Guardian.

More hot news

It's been a hot summer in Europe, and the BBC reports that in Zurich

zookeepers said they had been serving the animals ice creams made of berries, meat and bones to cool them down.

No recipes provided, I'm afraid (more unusual ice creams noted here).

The BBC article's main subject is this summer's French heat deaths. Reported casualties are far below those of the summer of 2003, but final numbers typically take months to come in -- a full reckoning depending on comprehensive analysis of mortality rates rather than enumeration of deaths explicitly reported as heat-related.

AND don't forget the toll in California . . .

Deadly sun

Just when you were enjoying your summer:

As many as 60,000 people a year die from too much sun, warns the World Health Organization. . .

Of the 60,000 deaths, 48,000 are caused by malignant melanomas and 12,000 by other skin cancers, the report Global Burden of Disease of Solar Ultraviolet Radiation estimates.

More than 1.5 million "disability-adjusted life years" or DALYS - a measure of the loss of full functioning due to disease and death - are lost every year due to sun exposure, WHO believes.

From the BBC. On the other hand, too little sun exposure may also cause cancer, through vitamin D deficiency (easily remediable through diet, however -- that daily spoonful of cod liver oil doesn't seem so pointless now).

At least Mexoryl has finally been approved for sale in the USA (though it's been readily obtainable from eBay sellers in Canada and elsewhere for some time) -- though now comes this:

Rubbing sunscreen into the skin reduces its effectiveness, a study says. . .

They found that when the sunscreen was rubbed in it offered almost zero protection because the cream accumulated in lines and sweat glands and did not offer even protection.

Researchers said rubbing in sunscreen could even put people at higher risk because while it did not protect against UVA rays it did offer resistance to UVB which causes the skin to redden.

Whatever sunscreen they were using, it was an older single-spectrum formula -- clearly not Mexoryl or the like -- and it was tested not on live volunteers, but on "left-over skin from plastic surgery operations". In any event, there's no way beachgoers will be convinced to apply sunscreen without rubbing it in: you might as well get them to just paint themselves white.

Scottish snaphaunce found at Jamestown

ARCHAEOLOGISTS have uncovered a rare but perfectly preserved early 17th-century Scottish pistol at the historic former British colony known as the birthplace of the United States, making the firearm one of the oldest artefacts of European origin ever discovered in North America.

The weapon probably belonged to one of the first settlers to arrive at Jamestown, Virginia, in 1607, and was recovered from a well at the site with several other "hugely significant" artefacts. . .

The pistol, leather shoes, a ceremonial axe known as a halberd and a small lead tag engraved with the archaic spelling "Yames Towne" are some of the earliest European artefacts to be discovered in the United States, according to William Kelso, the site's director of archaeology.

Full story here.

Nazi archives opening

We've been following this story for quite a while: there's been a lot of foot-dragging, over a period of decades, but it looks as if the end is finally in sight:

Germany has signed an agreement to open for research purposes vast Nazi archives containing millions of files on Holocaust victims. . .

For many years, Germany had argued that giving wider access would violate its privacy laws.

In May, the 11-nation commission in charge of the Nazi records decided that they would be opened to the public.

The agreement was signed at a ceremony in Berlin on Wednesday. It has to be ratified by all the 11 members of the commission. This is not expected to happen before the end of the year.

New cricket

Some interesting discoveries out in one of the remoter regions of the American Southwest:

In addition to the possible new genus of cricket, four new species of crickets have been identified from the spring samples. A barklouse also was found in the caves. Though common in South America, this was the first one discovered in North America, Voyles said.

Previous cave trips yielded two new species of millipedes within three miles of each other.

What makes the yet-to-be-named new genus of cricket special is that it has pincers on its hind end. The pincers are functional, but it is not known why they have them nor what purpose they serve.

The Andrea Doria

The Andrea Doria sank 50 years ago today. Read all about it at Discovery News.

Elevated medieval walkway found at Bury St. Edmunds

Only a fragment, it appears, covered with ivy:

ARCHAELOGISTS have been left stunned by the discovery of a medieval walkway 60ft above a historic Suffolk town.

The find was revealed beneath soil and vegetation near the rooftops of the West Front of the Abbey at Bury St Edmunds.

The last people to have set foot on the six-foot long medieval stone walkway would have been the maintenance clerks at the Abbey, who would have used it to get to the building tops to carry out repairs.

Full story here. Apparently there were some other finds of medieval construction incorporated into Georgian buildings nearby.

Early medieval psalter found in Irish bog

Irish archaeologists are celebrating the discovery of their own Dead Sea scrolls after a bulldozer unearthed fragments of a psalter that may have lain in a bog for more than 1,000 years. The book of psalms was found last Thursday when an engineer excavating bogland in the midlands noticed a bundle near his digger's scoop. It turned out to be the animal skin pages of an early Christian psalter that appears to date back as far as AD800. One psalm - number 89 - was still legible.

From the Guardian. Some pictures over at the BBC, which also notes:

Trinity College Dublin head of manuscripts Dr Bernard Meehan said it was the first discovery of an Irish Early Medieval manuscript in two centuries.

It will be quite a while before the book will be in any condition to study, let alone display; more on this here:

This is really a miracle find," said Pat Wallace, director of the National Museum of Ireland, which has the book stored in refrigeration and facing years of painstaking analysis before being put on public display.

"There's two sets of odds that make this discovery really way out. First of all, it's unlikely that something this fragile could survive buried in a bog at all, and then for it to be unearthed and spotted before it was destroyed is incalculably more amazing."

He said an engineer was digging up bogland last week to create commercial potting soil somewhere in Ireland's midlands when, "just beyond the bucket of his bulldozer, he spotted something." Wallace would not specify where the book was found because a team of archaeologists is still exploring the site.

Who knows what else they may be able to find? Peat bogs have turned up all sorts of preserved organic-matter artifacts, though much fewer since digging has been mechanized.

Crucially, he said, the bog owner covered up the book with damp soil. Had it been left exposed overnight, he said, "it could have dried out and just vanished, blown away". . .

It could take months of study, he said, just to identify the safest way to pry open the pages without damaging or destroying them. He ruled out the use of X-rays to investigate without moving the pages.

Entemena recovered

One of the most important treasures looted in the ransacking of Iraq’s national museum three years ago has been recovered in a clandestine operation involving the United States government and was turned over to Iraqi officials in Washington yesterday.

The piece, a headless stone statue of the Sumerian king Entemena of Lagash, was stolen in the days after the fall of Baghdad. . .

The Entemena statue was taken across the border to Syria, and put on sale on the international antiquities market . . . [it] is the first significant artifact returned from the United States and by far the most important piece found outside Iraq.

American officials declined to discuss how they recovered the statue, saying that to do so might impair their efforts to retrieve other artifacts. But people with knowledge of the episode described a narrative that included antiquities smugglers, international art dealers and an Iraqi expatriate businessman referred to as the broker who was the linchpin in efforts to recover the piece and bring it to the United States.

From today's NY Times. The situation at the Baghdad museum still looks pretty grim:

. . . a tour of the building over the weekend, granted reluctantly by Mr. Hassan, raised questions as to how the museum could function while housing valuable artifacts like the statue. A walk down a corridor toward the Sumerian Hall, for example, ended abruptly at a concrete wall, which someone had crudely crosshatched with a fingertip to simulate bricks. Mr. Hassan awkwardly conceded that four times since the invasion, he had been forced to wall off the collections as the only reliable means of preventing further looting.

Deaccessioning: more messiness in Manhattan

Lee Rosenbaum's been hammering on the Metropolitan Museum's Gary Tinterow (more followup blows here).
It is hardly undeserved, as Tyler Green elucidates -- but other departments and other institutions have also been big offenders, which leads Green to call for trustees to take a more active role in preventing hasty and unwise selloffs.

PS Modern Kicks points out something about Tinterow's comments to Rosenbaum that struck me independently: the statement that for most museums space is "the most precious thing" doesn't deserve such dismissive treatment ("the most precious thing" might better have been phrased "the limiting factor", but these were extemporaneous spoken comments). And though one might reply that if money isn't in short supply, space shouldn't be either, it mightn't be so simple: monies available for certain purposes (e.g., acquisitions and installation) may not be available for others (e.g., offsite storage and conservation of items not on display). Nonetheless, Tinterow's comments taken as a whole strike all the wrong notes when read in the context of his department's recent deaccessioning attempts.

And they complain about the newspapers here . . .

Worrisome enough when government sting attempts get out of control -- but what about when tabloid newspapers get involved as self-appointed freelancers?

Three men have been cleared of trying to procure a substance which police claimed could have made a "dirty bomb".

They were arrested in September 2004 after trying to buy "red mercury" from an undercover reporter.

The News of the World surely sold a lot of papers as a result; we'll see if it was enough to pay for any forthcoming damage awards.

What is truly absurd is that the substance being negotiated over ("red mercury") is no more real than kryptonite.

[Prosecutor] Ellison told the jury red mercury was believed to be a material which could cause a large explosion, possibly even a nuclear reaction.

He told the court there were different descriptions of the substance described as red mercury. But he added: "The Crown's position is that whether red mercury does or does not exist is irrelevant."

He warned the jury not to get "hung up" on whether red mercury actually existed at all.

From the BBC. And this isn't the first time the News of the World has gone over the line in ferreting out nonexistent crimes -- which very real defendents have had to answer for:

The collapse of the case came two years after the trial of several men accused of attempting to kidnap Victoria Beckham.

That case collapsed after it emerged that Mr Mahmood's main informant, Florim Gashi, had been paid £10,000 for the story.

The Crown Prosecution Service was forced to drop the case because it felt Mr Gashi's evidence could not be considered reliable.

The harm this does to legitimate antiterrorist efforts cannot be overstated:

In November 2005, a 27-year-old man was jailed for four months after he admitted selling a fake story to Mr Mahmood and the News of the World about being lined up to be "the fifth bomber" on 7 July. . .

As a result of the story several anti-terrorist detectives were obliged to look into the allegations and ended up wasting 4,070 hours of police time.

Patel was paid £200 for an interview and was promised £5,000 for his story by the News of the World.

No mention of any punishment being meted out to the newspaper or its editors, however, though their culpability was vastly greater than Patel's.

Baby triceratops found

The partial skull and frill of a baby triceratops have emerged from the Montana Badlands, only the sixth discovery of its kind and one that promises to reveal clues about the dino's poorly understood life history.

A team under the direction of Jack Horner, a Discovery Channel-funded paleontologist, made the discovery last week as part of a 10-year dig in the Hell Creek formation of eastern Montana.

Full story here.

Zoom, no vroom

The Tesla electric sports car has been getting a lot of press lately; FuturePundit takes a critical look at it, adding some observations about hybrids (which, note, the Tesla is not) along the way:

While this car is interesting and will provide a lot of fun for some highly affluent people . . . hybrid vehicles, because they generate mass production volumes, are much more important for driving development of better batteries. Battery makers and venture capitalists are funding battery research in order to chase after really big purchase orders from Toyota, Honda, GM, Ford, and Nissan. Hybrids are the path we will take to eventually reach all electric high production volume cars.

I would go even further: Hybrids are less important for the fossil fuel they save in the short run than they are for the battery technology innovations they will spark. Those innovations will enable mass produced pure electric cars. More efficient ways to burn gasoline just lead to bigger and faster cars with little net gain in fuel efficiency. Pure electric vehicles will enable the use of non-fossil fuels for transportation. That will be the greatest legacy of hybrids.

Other FuturePundit posts on hybrids, fuel economy, and buyers' preference for performance here, here, here, and here.

Deadly art

From the BBC:

Two people have been killed and 13 injured after a giant, inflatable sculpture blew free from its moorings.

Many were inside the artwork, which consists of connected rooms, when it lifted 30ft into the air at Riverside Park, Chester-le-Street, County Durham.

The Dreamspace sculpture is thought to have drifted for about 40m.

I wonder if this is a case where engineers were not consulted about design safety. It's happened before in the art world -- consider the Louvre and Veronese's Marriage at Cana -- though it certainly doesn't take an artist to get in over one's head.