Antarctic crocamander

An enormous amphibian that lived 240 million years ago in Antarctica could really sink its teeth -- all three rows of them -- into prey, considering it had an extra set of large, sharp teeth on the roof of its mouth.

Its tooth-packed mouth, 2.75-foot-long head and 15-foot body help to explain how this beast, Kryostega collinsoni, was Antarctica's top known Triassic predator.

The animal resembled a modern crocodile but was actually a temnospondyl, a prehistoric amphibian that was an early relative of salamanders and frogs.

From Discovery News.

Rosenbergs revisited

In 1951, Morton Sobell was tried and convicted with Julius and Ethel Rosenberg on espionage charges. He served more than 18 years in Alcatraz and other federal prisons, traveled to Cuba and Vietnam after his release in 1969 and became an advocate for progressive causes.

Through it all, he maintained his innocence.

But on Thursday, Mr. Sobell, 91, dramatically reversed himself, shedding new light on a case that still fans smoldering political passions. In an interview, he admitted for the first time that he had been a Soviet spy.

And he implicated his fellow defendant Julius Rosenberg, in a conspiracy that delivered to the Soviets classified military and industrial information and what the American government described as the secret to the atomic bomb.

As this NY Times article notes, this is no news to historians. Even though many who learned the "facts" of the case years ago still believe in the Rosenbergs' innocence, declassified documents from both the US and the USSR leave no doubt that however aggressive the prosecution, the spy ring was real. Nonetheless, the Times article retains more than a hint of a desire to minimize their guilt, perhaps less out of direct sympathy than out of a reluctance to let go of the witch-hunt meme:

Echoing a consensus among scientists, Mr. Sobell also maintained that the sketches and other atomic bomb details that the government said were passed along to Julius Rosenberg by Ethel's brother, David Greenglass, were of little value to the Soviets, except to corroborate what they had already gleaned from other moles. Mr. Greenglass was an Army machinist at Los Alamos, N.M., where the weapon was being built.

"What he gave them was junk," Mr. Sobell said of Julius Rosenberg, his classmate at City College of New York in the 1930s.

Duplicate intelligence is manifestly not "junk". As we have been reminded too often recently, single-source information is often unreliable or incomplete -- that is, when it isn't a complete fabrication, or deliberately misleading. Corroboration is golden: though in hindsight it is easy to say that the Soviets had all the pieces of the puzzle in hand, on the spot you have to have both the pieces and the confidence that they all belong. As it happens, I recall that Soviet documents did indicate that the Rosenbergs' Kremlin spymasters did not think so highly of the information provided -- but it certainly wasn't for lack of trying on the part of the spies.

The grand jury testimony released on Thursday by the National Archives appeared to poke even more holes in the case against Ethel Rosenberg, who was 34 and the mother of two young sons when she appeared before the grand jury and was arrested on the courthouse steps after her testimony.

The crux of the matter, however, is that she too was a committed Communist and well aware of the overall conspiracy -- as the Times reluctantly admits. From what I have read about the investigation and trial, all the conspirators, indicted and not, lied continually and often inconsistently, so a fine parsing of details tends to obscure the big picture -- which is that those found guilty were indeed guilty, as were a large number of those who managed to escape prosecution, by either flight or absence of sufficient evidence (some of which only came to light decades later, in the wake of the fall of the Soviet Union).

UPDATE: The Washington Post gives the story a short summary today, and misspells "Venona" as "Vanona".

Providence's Russian submarine afloat again

It's been raised from the bottom of the harbor, but will it be restorable?

Where it will be towed, however, is not yet clear. Lennon said it is still not certain what will become of the sub, which has deteriorated badly after so much time flooded at the bottom of the harbor. It could be restored if money is found, or it could end up as a sunken reef somewhere, or as scrap metal.

There is significant rust on the inside of the boat, and the red stars of the Soviet Union once prominent on the hull are now faded and barely identifiable.

Juliett 484 was commissioned by the Soviet Union in 1965 and served in the Soviet Baltic and Northern fleets as a ballistic-missile submarine until its decommissioning in 1994.

From the Providence Journal.

Noctilucent clouds

If you're a skywatcher in the U.S., you have something new to look for in this new century. A rare and mysterious cloud type has been sighted for the first time in the heart of the nation. It's called a noctilucent cloud . . .

Nearly all clouds form in the troposphere, the lowest 10 miles of our atmosphere. But noctilucent clouds develop in the mesosphere, about 50 miles up. Noctilucent means "glowing at night", and these clouds DO glow with a distinctive white or pearly-blue cast. They look a bit like streaks of cirrostratus or "mare's tails."

Read more here and here. There are also numerous links (including pictures and video) at Wikipedia.

Big California art theft

The FBI are offering a $200,000 reward for the recovery of 12 "world class" artworks that were stolen from an elderly couple's home in the US.

Paintings by Marc Chagall and Emil Nolde are among the missing items, with one worth as much as $4m (£2.27m).

The theft took place at the house in California's San Fernando valley on 23 August, and police hope the reward will prevent them from being sold on.

Every work is "museum calibre", a Los Angeles art expert said.

From the BBC.

Virtual seabed archeology

People will soon be able to operate their own virtual submersibles to explore hidden treasures at deep underwater archaeological sites.

Shipwrecks and their priceless cargoes remain under threat from erosion, deep-sea trawling activity and looting.

The Venus project team has generated 3D digital records of underwater European shipwrecks that can act as a permanent record of these sites.

The simulator is being unveiled at the BA Science Festival in Liverpool.

From the BBC. The Venus website is here.

It's not just Oetzi

Some 5,000 years ago, a prehistoric person trod high up in what is now the Swiss Alps, wearing goat leather pants, leather shoes and armed with a bow and arrows.

The unremarkable journey through the Schnidejoch pass, a lofty trail 9,000 feet above sea level, has been a boon to scientists but it would never have emerged if climate change were not melting the nearby glacier.

So far, 300 objects dating as far back as the Neolithic or New Stone Age -- about 4,000 B.C. in Europe -- to the later Bronze and Iron Ages and the Medieval era have been found in the site's former icefields. . .

The leather samples are also the oldest of their kind ever found, said Grosjean. "Leather decays easily in ambient temperatures. We know there were villages by the lakes in Switzerland but we've never found such leather objects". . .

"The leather pieces are the oldest such finds now but maybe in the coming years, with other glaciers retreating around the world, they may not be the oldest for long," said Grosjean.

From Discovery News.

Giant Buddha find near Bamiyan

A giant statue of a Buddha has been discovered in central Afghanistan, near to the ruins of the world-famous Bamiyan Buddhas.

Archaeologists say the 19m (62ft) statue is in a sleeping position and dates back to the Third Century.

Other relics such as coins and ceramics were also found.

Full story here, with video.

Forests primeval

Spectacular fossil forests have been found in the coal mines of Illinois by a US-UK team of researchers.

The group reported one discovery last year, but has since identified a further five examples.

The ancient vegetation - now turned to rock - is visible in the ceilings of mines covering thousands of hectares.

These were among the first forests to evolve on the planet, Dr Howard Falcon-Lang told the British Association Science Festival in Liverpool.

"These are the largest fossil forests found anywhere in the world at any point in geological time," he told reporters.

"It is quite extraordinary to find a fossil landscape preserved over such a vast area; and we are talking about an area the size of (the British city of) Bristol."

From the BBC.

The medievalists are talking . . .

What are they talking about? Why, Blogenspiel's "You Might Be A Medievalist If . . ."

George Zarnecki

Word has just reached us of the death of one of the greats of medieval art history, George Zarnecki. No obituaries yet, but a good synopsis of at least part of his contribution is found at the Corpus of Romanesque Sculpture in Britain and Ireland:

Professor Zarnecki began researching English Romanesque sculpture at the suggestion of Fritz Saxl of the Warburg Institute in 1945, resulting in his 1950 dissertation at the Courtauld Institute entitled Regional Schools of English Sculpture in the Twelfth Century. This has never been published, but his two slim but lavishly illustrated volumes English Romanesque Sculpture 1066-1140 (1951) and English Romanesque Sculpture 1140-1210 (1953) have served to introduce the subject to generations of scholars. He was responsible for the major exhibition English Romanesque Art 1066-1200 (Arts Council 1984), and his Gislebertus, Sculptor of Autun (London 1961) with photographs by Denis Grivot, set the standard for a biography of a twelfth-century sculptor. Most of his publications have been admirably short and pithy, and the best of them are collected in Studies in Romanesque Sculpture (1979) and Further Studies in Romanesque Sculpture (1992).