Prion removal breakthrough?

The number of people who fall victim to prion diseases is still pretty small, but this is very encouraging news considering the recent concerns about contamination of livestock and blood supplies:

Scientists have found a way to remove disease-causing proteins from infected animal blood, which they hope may fight the human form of mad cow disease.

The UK and US researchers identified a molecule which removed the prion proteins from blood infected with scrapie, the Lancet reports.

Nazi gift to Norway

When it set sail in December 1944, U-864 was packed with 65 tonnes of weapons-grade mercury destined to help the Japanese win back supremacy over the US in the Pacific - and divert American attention away from Europe in the process.

Neither the cargo nor the 73 men on board made it. The U-boat was torpedoed to the bottom of the North Sea floor by a British submarine in the only incident of its kind during the war.

More than 60 years on its toxic cargo is slowly leaking into the waters off the coast of Norway, an ecological time bomb threatening marine - and potentially human - life.

Now the Norwegian government is set to act, following recommendations that the wreck be hermetically sealed to prevent any more of the mercury from escaping.

From the BBC.

Domus Aurea: now you see it, now you can't

The palace of Nero, one of Rome's most popular tourist sites, will partly reopen to the public in January after being closed for more than a year for emergency repairs, officials said.

The Domus Aurea, or House of Gold, had attracted an average of 1,000 visitors every day until water leaks last December stoked fears that the nearly 2,000-year-old palace might collapse.

Italy's government and the city of Rome have earmarked more than 4 million euros ($5.27 million) for the repairs, which officials described on Tuesday as part of a broader initiative to rescue the city's eroding archaeological sites. . .

Only about half of the 32 rooms that were previously open to public will be made available, officials said.

From Reuters.

A notable Goya

It is the portrait that everyone knew existed but few have been fortunate enough to see in the two centuries or so since it was painted.

Yesterday that painting of a cherubic-looking six-year-old member of the Spanish royal family, the Infante Don Luis Maria, was displayed to the world for the first time since Francisco de Goya put paintbrush to canvas in 1783.

But just as intriguing as the painting is the subject himself - an apparently studious little boy who would go on to become a cardinal at the age of 23 and who would put an end to that most infamous institution, the Spanish Inquisition. . .

For Goya, still in his 30s, this was the first portrait of what would go on to become one of his staple subjects - the children of Spanish royalty. A second portrait, of Luis's sister Maria Teresa, was painted at the same time and now hangs in the National Gallery in Washington. . .

Although the Prado museum officially said yesterday the previous owners had requested anonymity, the Spanish press named them as the Dukes of Sueca - a family of Spanish grandees who have been selling off inherited wealth for decades.

The painting has been given to the Prado for conservation work but it will soon hang in the city museum in Zaragoza, central Spain - close to the town of Goya's birth, Fuendetodos. A new museum to house Goya paintings is be built in the city as part of an international Expo that it hosts in 2008.

Read the rest in the Guardian.

Christmas crackers find

No Christmas celebrations would be complete without them but, with rationing in post-war Britain, Christmas crackers were an expensive luxury few could readily afford.

Now, after spending 60 years hidden in the dusty attic of a family-run newsagents, two rare and untouched boxes dating back to the 1940s have been unveiled for the first time.

Most Americans have no idea of how rough things were in postwar Britain, and for how long. In contrast, US manufacturers had to work nonstop to keep up with postwar consumer demand, and it is still striking how much stuff from the later '40s and '50s survives in near-new condition -- unlike in the UK, where similar articles were used until they were worn out.

The two boxes were found in the attic of a York newsagents in September this year. The owner of the family-run business had decided to sell up and was clearing away old stock when he came across them.

Experts from the York Archaeological Trust were called in to examine the find before sending the crackers to a local laboratory where they were analysed.

Full article here.

eBay UK: flood of illegal antiquities unabated

Roman and Anglo-Saxon jewellery and other artefacts are still being sold illegally on eBay, despite the website’s promise to clamp down on the trade.

The British Museum has told The Times that it is alarmed at the number of sellers offering gold and silver that has apparently been found on British soil but has not been reported. . .

This month the journal British Archaeology reports that between August and September this year almost 3,500 antiquities were offered for sale on the British eBay website, of which 600 were “British”.

In October eBay addressed the problem, signing a memorandum of understanding with the British Museum and The Museums, Libraries and Archives Council, the Government’s advisory body. The website promised to discourage the illegal trade in antiquities and agreed to allow the British Museum to contact sellers “to ascertain whether there is a reasonable cause for concern”.

Fine words, but something more is clearly needed.

Sellers have found a way round the problem. On being contacted by the British Museum, they simply insist that the objects came from overseas. Miss Costin said: “Frequently we are told that an item was bought abroad or was from an old collection, in which case there is not much that we can do, although in some cases we will inform the seller that they should provide evidence to buyers that the object has been legally exported from its country of origin.”

Among the recent offerings on eBay was an early medieval gold pendant. When contacted by the British Museum, the seller said that it had been bought at an antiquities fair in Germany in the 1980s.

And so on, and so on. eBay's responses were not terribly impressive, either:A spokesman for eBay said: “If people are saying they don’t know where something’s from, then that is the truth, as far as we know”. . .

The eBay spokesman said that if they did not sell the antiquities, people would find a way to sell them “one way or another”. He added: “eBay is the safest place to do so.”

From the Times of London.

Posted by David at 9:08 PM | Comments (0)

Historic preservationists vs UK's Supreme Court

One law for the Law Lords, another for the rabble:

The Lord Chancellor, Lord Falconer of Thoroton, was accused of "state-sponsored vandalism" yesterday over Government plans to strip out the interior of an important listed building in order to make way for the new Supreme Court.

Adam Wilkinson, of Save Britain's Heritage, warned of growing anger among conservationists and some members of the judiciary over proposals to alter the interior of the grade 11*-listed Middlesex Guildhall, next to Westminster Abbey on Parliament Square, which is a World Heritage site. . .

The current plans would not be given the go-ahead if proposed by any other owner of a listed building, according to Save Britain's Heritage.

From the Telegraph.

PIRGatory

What does it say about me that when I read, "If you want to know why I am no longer a lefty", my immediate reaction is, "oh, another sad tale of a left-hander forced to write with her right hand"?

As it happens, that is the opening of a post on what lies behind those earnest door-to-door PIRG canvassers -- and it ain't pretty. And the more you believe in the causes that those canvassers claim to support, the more you'll feel betrayed when you find out where they money they collect actually goes.

Scooby-Doo orphaned

From the BBC:

Joseph Barbera, one half of the team behind such cartoon classics as The Flintstones, Yogi Bear, Scooby-Doo and Huckleberry Hound, has died, aged 95. . .

With William Hanna, Barbera founded Hanna-Barbera in the 1950s, after the pair had earlier worked on the Tom and Jerry cartoons at MGM studios.

Hanna died in 2001. My kids have been keenly watching the old Scooby-Doo TV show on DVD this last week or so. Not having seen it since it was first on, I was impressed at how crude the animation (not to mention the story line) was.

Allan Stone obit

Allan Stone, a New York dealer who combined a broad expertise in Abstract Expressionism with a zeal for junk sculpture and realist painting and was perhaps as well known for amassing art as for selling it, died on Friday at his home in Purchase, N.Y. He was 74. . . Mr. Stone was considered an expert on the work of the Abstract Expressionists Willem de Kooning, Arshile Gorky, Barnett Newman and Franz Kline as well as their contemporaries John Graham and Joseph Cornell. His gallery was especially known for imposing exhibitions of their work, often accompanied by catalogs for which he wrote essays filled with personal reminiscences and unusual insights.

But he was legendary in the New York art world for his obsessive collecting. His gallery (like his home) teemed with primitive and folk art, no matter what exhibition was formally on view. At one point he owned untold numbers of de Koonings and nearly 30 Bugatti automobiles. When the gallery moved in 1991 from its longtime site at 86th and Madison to a carriage house on East 90th Street, Ms. Stone said, long-lost artworks resurfaced.

From the NY Times.

To be or not to be . . . ambergris

Another cetacean story from the NY Times:

In this season of strange presents from relatives, Dorothy Ferreira got a doozy the other day from her 82-year-old sister in Waterloo, Iowa. It was ugly. It weighed four pounds. There was no receipt in the box.

Inside she found what looked like a gnarled, funky candle but could actually be a huge hunk of petrified whale vomit worth as much as $18,000.

Thanks for the fish

A sad story from the NY Times:

The first species to be erased from this planet’s great and ancient Order of Cetaceans in modern times is not one of the charismatic sea mammals that have long been the focus of conservation campaigns, like the sperm whale or bottlenose dolphin.

It appears to be the baiji, a white, nearly blind denizen of the Yangtze River in China.

On Wednesday, an expedition in search of any baiji, run by Chinese biologists and baiji.org, a Swiss foundation, ended empty-handed after six weeks of patrolling its onetime waters in the middle and lower stretches of the river, the baiji’s only known habitat. . .

In the last few decades, the dolphin’s numbers plunged as rapidly as the Chinese economy surged. The Yangtze’s sandy shallows, which the baiji frequented, have largely been dredged for shipping.

The baiji sought fish that have been netted or driven from the river by pollution. And its sonar may have been disrupted by the propeller noise from boats above. A 1997 survey counted 13 baiji in the river. None of the dolphins survive in captivity.

baiji.org has more about the baiji and other endangered freshwater cetaceans.

Saving the last Schnellboot

She started life under the Nazis and later played a crucial role in the Cold War. Now naval historians have come to the rescue of the last surviving German Schnellboot, which is languishing in a dockyard in Plymouth . . .

In her day the S130, right, was the fastest craft on the sea, and neither the Americans nor the Royal Navy had anything that could match her 55 knot top speed. After the war S130 was surrendered to the Royal Navy and used to drop agents on the Baltic coast.

From the Times of London. More on these fast torpedo boats here and here. There's a profile on the S-130 here, but rather confusingly it states that it was returned to the German navy in 1957 and is now in retirement in Wilhelmshaven.

Diabetes breakthrough?

Hugely significant, if it pans out:

One of the root causes of type 1 diabetes may need rethinking – the condition may be triggered by faulty nerves in the pancreas, a new study reveals.

Type 1 diabetes has long been described as an autoimmune disease in which the body’s immune system targets islet cells in the pancreas, eventually destroying their ability to produce insulin. Without insulin, the body cannot convert glucose into energy, so people with type 1 diabetes have to regularly inject themselves with insulin to survive.

However, what initiates the original attack on the pancreas had been unclear. It now seems that the nervous system may play a key role, according to researchers in Toronto, Canada. The team eliminated the disease in diabetes-prone mice by knocking out a set of faulty sensory nerves. They believe the finding could chart a new path in treatment of the disease in humans. . .

About 85% of human diabetics are believed to have impaired sensory nerve function, but it has always been assumed to be a consequence of the disease, rather than a cause, says Dosch.

From New Scientist. Reuters UK also notes:

the findings might also hold promise for type-2 diabetes -- which affects about 10 times as many people as type-1 -- though the results were not as strong.

The researchers found that the peptide injections lowered resistance to insulin, which is used to move blood glucose to the body's cells.

People with type-2 diabetes often are obese. By lowering insulin resistance, it might be possible to prevent further obesity and damage from diabetes.