Pompeiian paintings on show

The wall paintings that first brought the civilisation of ancient Italy home to modern Europeans went on show in Rome yesterday, for the first time in decades.

The exhibition at the Roman National Museum shows the fruit of the work of the 18th-century enthusiasts -- today we would call them vandals -- who, on discovering the entombed cities of Pompeii and Herculaneum, near Naples, set about prising them from the ground and carting them off. They have been brought to Rome from the National Archaeological Museum in Naples.

On show are 108 different scenes from the cities destroyed by Vesuvius and elsewhere, deliberately hung as paintings in the 18th-century style. Subjects range from the heroic -- Theseus standing in triumph over the slain Minotaur -- to still-life depictions of mushrooms, eels and fruit.

From the Independent. More information on the exhibition here (in Italian). The BBC also has a slide show.

Tank theft in Bulgaria

Bulgarian police detained two German citizens and a Bulgarian military officer on charges of stealing a World War 2 Maybach tank and attempted theft of another tank.

The three were arrested while trying to steal a second tank, Hristo Tinev, spokesperson of the military prosecution said.

The first tank disappeared between October and November 2007 and was still missing. . .

Both tanks were used in World War 2 and later dug in the ground at the Bulgarian-Turkish border to serve as firing points. The three detained, hired Roma people to dig the tanks out, Focus said. Most probably the first tank was transported on a cargo vehicle.

Full story here. One wonders how many other interesting old tanks might be left dug in along Bulgaria's borders. Other, brief, reports indicate the stolen tank was a Panzer Mk IV.

Gardner theft investigation reinvigorated?

A federal grand jury is scheduled to hear evidence this week into one of Boston's most enduring unsolved criminal cases, the 1990 theft of priceless artwork from the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, according to a former employee who worked at the museum at the time.

The former worker said two FBI agents questioned him about his recollection of the theft several days ago and handed him a subpoena to testify before the grand jury in Boston tomorrow.

The agents told him they were gathering facts on the case and were hoping that the grand jury would "shake things up" in the long-stalled investigation, said the former worker, who asked not to be identified.

The agents did say that they were pursuing the possibility that the theft may have been carried out by three individuals - and not two as has long been publicly believed, the former employee said.

From the Boston Globe.

Secure browsing made easy

This sure makes sense:

. . . Jeremiah Grossman, CTO at Whitehat Security and one of the country's most prominent application security researchers, has a workaround he uses to protect himself online. It involves having two browsers: One, which he calls the "promiscuous" browser, is the one he uses for ordinary browsing. A second browser is used only for security-critical tasks such as online banking. When Grossman wants to do online banking, he closes his promiscuous browser, opens the more prudish one, and does only what he has to do before closing it and going back to his insecure browser.

I use three different browsers already -- Opera and Firefox, chiefly, with Internet Explorer only for the one or two sites that demand it -- so it wouldn't be hard to designate one for security-critical sites only. On the other hand, I'm not a very promiscuous browser myself, so perhaps if I am to designate one browser as special-purpose, it should be so designated for exploring sites other than the ones I regularly visit. More on Cross Site Request Forgery (CSRF) attacks here; one measure that would appear to reduce vulnerability would be to remain logged on to secure sites only as long as you need to be.

Another collision-course asteroid on its way

Mars is in danger of being struck by an asteroid at the end of next month, astronomers have calculated.

The newly discovered space rock known as 2007 WD5 has a one in 75 chance of colliding with the planet on January 30 . . .

If 2007 WD5, which is about 100 metres in diameter, does strike Mars on January 30, it would cause an explosion equivalent to several megatonnes of TNT. . .

The object is broadly similar in size to the one that hit Tunguska in Siberia in 1908, which felled an estimated 80 million trees over 810 square miles. Had the Tunguska rock hit a city, it would have wiped it out.

From the Times of London. More detail at the Planetary Society.

Medieval Chinese shipwreck raised

Chinese archaeologists have raised a merchant ship which sank in the South China Sea 800 years ago while transporting a cargo of precious porcelain.

The Nanhai 1 treasury ship, built during the Song dynasty which ruled China from 960-1279, is believed to contain one of the biggest discoveries of Chinese artefacts from that period. . .

As many as 6,000 artefacts have already been retrieved from the 13th Century vessel, mostly bluish white porcelain, as well as personal items from crew members, including gold belt buckles and silver rings.

A further 70,000 artefacts are believed to be still on board, many still in their original packing cases.

As the article goes on to note, this is not the first huge haul of Chinese artifacts from the seabed:

In the mid-1980s a number of ships, containing enormous hoards of Chinese porcelain, gold and silver, were found by foreign treasure hunters.

Their valuable cargoes were sold at auction houses in the West. At the time, China was too poor to bid for the artefacts.

The loss of such an important part of its history spurred the government into action.

Nanhai 1 will be the first major project to be undertaken by Chinese underwater archaeologists.

The scale of the project is truly staggering. Normally, underwater wrecks are excavated in place. Here, the wreck site appears to have been lifted from the seabed en bloc, to be brought to a new, specially-built museum with a tank in which the wreck site will be stored and displayed while being excavated at leisure. From the BBC.

São Paulo museum raid

Thieves in Brazil have stolen two paintings said to be worth $100m (£50m) in a dawn raid on Latin America's most renowned museum.

Pablo Picasso's Portrait of Suzanne Bloch, and The Coffee Worker by Brazil's Candido Portinari, were taken from the Museum of Art of Sao Paulo.

The theft lasted about three minutes and was caught on security cameras.

From the BBC.

Tunguska, recalculated

The stunning amount of forest devastation at Tunguska a century ago in Siberia may have been caused by an asteroid only a fraction as large as previously published estimates, Sandia National Laboratories supercomputer simulations suggest.

"The asteroid that caused the extensive damage was much smaller than we had thought," says Sandia principal investigator Mark Boslough of the impact that occurred June 30, 1908. "That such a small object can do this kind of destruction suggests that smaller asteroids are something to consider. Their smaller size indicates such collisions are not as improbable as we had believed". . .

"Our understanding was oversimplified," says Boslough, "We no longer have to make the same simplifying assumptions, because present-day supercomputers allow us to do things with high resolution in 3-D. Everything gets clearer as you look at things with more refined tools."

Full article here.

Whales' oldest ancestor

The whale is descended from a deer-like animal that lived 48 million years ago, according to fossil evidence.

Remains found in the Kashmir region of India suggest the fox-sized mammal is the long-sought land-based ancestor of whales, dolphins and porpoises.

Research in Nature suggests the animal lived mainly on land but dived into water to escape predators.

Read the rest here.

Magna Carta at auction

Not the original, of course, but an important early copy:

A rare copy of the Magna Carta has been sold for £10.6m ($21.3m) in an auction at Sotheby's in New York.

The 1297 copy, which is one of only 17 of the document still in existence, went to an unknown bidder.

The auction item had been owned by American billionaire Ross Perot's Perot Foundation since 1984 and was on view at the National Archives in Washington . . .

The auctioned copy, the only one in private hands, had been expected to fetch £9.94m ($20m) when it went under the hammer.

From the BBC. More detail in the Times of London:

The 1297 example, described as the most important document to come up for sale, was acquired by David Rubenstein, the founder of the Carlyle Group, at Sotheby's in New York. He has paid $8,528 a word. . .

Four of the surviving 17 copies date from the reign of John, eight from that of Henry III and five from that of Edward I. The Sotheby's example bears the wax seal of King Edward I hanging from a ribbon at the bottom of the parchment -- one of only five that still carry the royal seal. . .

The only other original outside Britain was a gift by the country to "The People of Australia". It is on display at the Parliament in Canberra. . .

Mr Rubenstein, the founder of the Carlyle private equity group and a former deputy domestic policy adviser to President Carter, said that he would put the document back on public view at the National Archives in Washington, where it had been on loan. . .

He admitted that he could not actually read it because he had avoided learning Latin at school -- a decision he now regrets.

Also a bit more on Perot's acquisition of the document:

Mr Perot acquired it for $1.5 million in 1984 from relatives of James Thomas Brudenell, the 7th Earl of Cardigan, who led the Charge of the Light Brigade during the Crimean War. Magna Carta had been at the Brudenells' family seat at Deene Park, Northamptonshire, for more than half a millennium.

Ancient superglue

Ask any craftsman who is familiar with older techniques, and you'll find that new isn't always better -- glues being just one example. Odd thing about this story is that such a good and widely-used recipe would have been lost. Or was it?

Roman warriors repaired their battle accessories with a superglue that is still sticking around after 2,000 years, according to new findings on display at the Rheinischen Landes Museum in Bonn, Germany.

Running until Feb. 16, 2008, the exhibition "Behind the Silver Mask" presents evidence that the ancient adhesive was used to mount silver laurel leaves on legionnaires' battle helmets.

And here's a chance for you intrepid basement experimenters:

"Analysis shows that the Roman glue was made of bitumen, bark pitch and animal grease," Willer said.

The finding confirms studies done by researchers at the University of Bradford and Liverpool, U.K., in the 1990s.

Analysis carried at that time on an ancient Roman jar showed that when Roman people broke their pots, they glued them back together with a compund "derived largely from birch bark."

So far, the German researchers have failed to recreate the Roman superglue.

From Discovery News. The British discovery was written up in New Scientist here.

Backyard ice rink tips

Our backyard is too small, but our neighbors have been talking about setting up a backyard rink for several winters. We'll see if the project gets off the ground this year; in any event, I just ran across this site which offers detailed and practical instructions and advice -- including on maintenance of the surface with a homebuilt Rink Rake.

What I still haven't found is a link to a homebuilt Zamboni for use on larger surfaces, like a pond. I'm sure some inventive soul has adapted a lawn tractor or mower at some point. If anyone can provide a link, please do so!

In the interim, the official Zamboni company history can be found here; our local newspaper ran a Zamboni article today, as well, noting that Providence got one of the very first batch of production machines:

After building about 15 experimental machines, Zamboni was issued a patent in 1953 and built 10 standardized machines in 1954, with the Rhode Island Auditorium being one of the first customers along with the Boston Garden, Boston Arena and Worcester Arena.

Giant rat discovered

A giant rodent five times the size of a common rat has been discovered in the mountainous jungles of New Guinea.

The 1.4kg Mallomys giant rat is one of two species of mammal thought to be new to science documented on an expedition to an area described as a "lost world".

Conservationists also found a pygmy possum - one of the world's smallest marsupials - on the trip to the remote north of Papua province, Indonesia.

The giant rat apparently has no fear of humans, and walked right into the explorers' camp. From the BBC.

Always greener . . .

This isn't the first article touting diets then vs diets now. But enough already: do we really want to emulate a style of eating, drinking, and working that outdid the worst of present-day Africa in the nasty, short, and brutish department?

If they managed to survive plague and pestilence, medieval humans may have enjoyed healthier lifestyles than their descendants today, it has been claimed.

Their low-fat, vegetable-rich diet - washed down by weak ale - was far better for the heart than today's starchy, processed foods, one GP says.

Crucial concession follows:

"If you put this together with the incredible work load, medieval man was at much less risk of coronary heart disease and diabetes than we are today," said Dr Henderson.

However, he did acknowledge that people today did have one advantage over their ancestors when it came to staying alive.

"If you got to 30 in those days you were doing well, past 40 and you were distinctly long in the tooth," he concedes.

Yes, dying young is certainly one highly effective method of avoiding all the leading modern-day killers: heart disease; stroke; cancer; diabetes. No takers? From the BBC.