Getty won't give up Fano Athlete

The J. Paul Getty Trust is appealing against the decision by an Italian judge that a key antiquity in the Los Angeles museum’s collection is Italian state property. The Getty owns the Greek bronze, and it will stay in the US, the museum says. The work, a 2,500-year-old bronze statue of the Fano Athlete, also known as the Victorious Youth, is a star object in the Getty Villa, Malibu. In February, an Italian appeals court judge, Lorena Mussoni, based in Pesaro, ordered that the work be seized and returned to Italy (The Art Newspaper, March 2010, p13). But the Getty says the work was found in the 1960s outside Italian waters, and Italy has no claim on it. The museum has asked that the confiscation order be stayed pending the appeal to Italy’s highest court.

From the Art Newspaper. The Getty's case, in this instance, looks quite strong.

Italian home cooking, for all

Home Food [is] an Italian organization dedicated to, as its promotional literature states, “the protection and increase of the value of typical Italian gastronomic and culinary legacy.” That is, it’s all about preserving and showcasing the cooking of individual Italian families. . .

Home Food seeks out exceptional home chefs, puts them through a training course and dubs them Cesarinas — little Caesars, emperors of the kitchen. Then, a few times a month, the Cesarinas host dinner parties at which they open their homes to strangers.

All an intrepid eater has to do is register with Home Food, pay a membership fee (3.50 euros for foreigners, or about $4.60 at $1.31 to the euro; 35 euros for Italians) and scour the monthly listings for a meal that appeals. Would you like goose-meat salami in Lombardy? Fried chicken bones with red chicory in Emilia-Romagna? Rabbit in a pot in Tuscany? All are part of dozens of meals on offer throughout April, with participation fees typically 34.90 or 39.90 euros per person.

From the NY Times. The Home Food website is here.

You are what you eat

A traditional Japanese diet could transfer the genes of "sushi-specific" digestive enzymes into the human gut. . .

These findings show, the scientists say, that food and the way we prepare it has the potential to influence the microbial environment (or the flora) in our guts.

From the BBC.

Giant lizard discovery

A new species of giant lizard has been discovered in the Philippines.

The 2m-long reptile is a monitor lizard, the group to which the world's longest and largest lizards belong.

The monitor, described as spectacular by the scientists who found it, lives in forests covering the Sierra Madre mountains in the north of the country.

The striking reptile has bright yellow, blue and green skin, and survives on a diet of just fruit, yet until now it has escaped the eyes of biologists.

But predictably, this is no news at all to the locals:

The giant lizard is actually well known to resident Agta and Ilongot tribespeople living in the forests of northern Luzon Island.

The tribespeople regularly hunt the lizard for its meat, a vital source of protein.

From the BBC.

Sports injuries advice

Some good advice in this NY Times article about what to do when your athletic activities are leaving you with aches and pains. Basically, know thyself -- and don't be too quick to head to a doctor when it seems that the problem is overdoing it, rather than something actually broken. And scans may not be as useful as one might think:

Sometimes going to a doctor for a diagnostic workup can be precarious, with scans that can show all sorts of apparent abnormalities and injuries that are not causing any problems.

For example, in a study reported at a recent meeting of the American Orthopedic Society, Dr. Matthew Silvis, an orthopedist in Palmyra, Pa., did M.R.I.’s of the hips of 21 professional hockey players and 21 college players. They showed abnormalities in 70 percent of the athletes, even though these hockey players had no pain or only minimal discomfort that did not affect their playing. More than half had labral tears, rips in the cartilage that stabilizes the hip.

“M.R.I.’s are so sensitive,” Dr. Musahl said. “They frequently show little tears or fraying everywhere. And it is very, very common to have a small labral tear in your hip — it doesn’t mean you have to have the particular symptoms.”

The same is true for rotator-cuff tears, rips in the tendons that help stabilize the shoulder. Studies have found that about half of all middle-age people with no shoulder pain have these tears, although they are unaware of them and have no symptoms.

So one could easily end up being treated for an "injury" that in fact has nothing to do with the pain that prompted the trip to the doctor in the first place. Experience suggests that the article is correct in looking at athletes and nonathletes as different species, with athletes well-advised to seek out orthopedists who are themselves athletes.

Dr. Best . . . said that when an athlete has an injury that does not go away in the expected time, skilled doctors could help by finding the cause of the injury in the first place. Knee pain, for example, might actually be caused by a tight iliotibial band, which stabilizes the knee, and weak gluteus muscles. He always watches athletes move to see if he can spot biomechanical problems. And, he said, doctors who do not watch athletes move may never understand the causes of their injuries.

“You as a runner, coming into my office and lying down on a table — that’s a pretty nonfunctional exam” . . .

. . . when Dr. Thompson had plantar fascitis . . . [he] went to a podiatrist, who gave him expensive orthotics and cortisone injections, but they did not help.

Then a podiatrist for the Celtics basketball team told him to tape his foot, and the problem went away. While a review by the Orthopedic Section of the American Physical Therapy Association classified the evidence for taping as “weak,” Dr. Thompson swears by it.

“The fact that experts think the taping evidence is weak means they are not seeing enough runners and is the best argument for not seeing them,” he said. “If I stop taping,” he added, the problem “comes back in a month.”

As for Dr. Musahl, he says he never sees a doctor for his sports injuries. When he feels pain, he cross-trains awhile until the pain goes away.

That last bit of advice is one of the best: I don't think it's an accident that many of the sports that have the lowest rate of wear-and-tear injuries are essentially self-cross-training, in that they work all of the body in all different directions. This is also addressed earlier in the article, though not in the clearest way:

Rigorous studies have shown that eccentric contractions, in which a muscle lengthens as it works, seem to speed the healing of tennis elbow and of injuries to the Achilles tendon, which attaches the calf muscles to the heel. They involve, for example, doing heel drops for an Achilles tendon injury — standing on a step and dropping your heel, then raising it to the level of the step again.

In fact, the key characteristic of heel drops (and, for that matter, pretty much anything you can do with weights, resistance machines, or most calisthenics) is not so much their "eccentricity", but their symmetry: the muscles are worked as they both contract and extend. It's only when actually playing sports that this symmetry is (sometimes) lost, as when a ball is thrown, a racquet swung, or a leg forcefully extended.

Partial collapse at Domus Aurea

A huge chunk of a 2,000-year-old gallery in the complex including Emperor Nero's fabled Golden Palace collapsed on Tuesday, Rome's art officials said.

Firefighters searched the area, but found no victims, leading officials to say they believed nobody was inside when the structure collapsed around 10 a.m. Nero's nearby Palace had been closed as workers were doing repairs. . .

About 60-80 square meters (645-860 square feet) of vault ceiling in one of the galleries crumpled beneath a garden frequented by tourists and passers-by.

Full article here.

Tyrannosaurs Down Under

Scientists have found the first evidence that tyrannosaur dinosaurs - relatives of the famous T. rex - existed in the southern hemisphere.

Previously, tyrannosaurs had only been known from fossil finds in northern continents, the team of researchers write in Science journal.

Now, a hip bone found in Australia has been identified as belonging to a southern relative of T. rex.

From the BBC.

Ned Kelly rides again

A painting of the notorious Australian outlaw Ned Kelly has become the country's most expensive work of art ever bought at auction.

The work by Australian artist Sidney Nolan went for $4.8m (A$5.4m; £3.2m), smashing previous records. The buyer has not been named.

First Class Marksman shows the 19th Century bandit walking through the Australian bush with rifle raised. . .

In a country that likes to pride itself on its anti-authoritarianism, it is perhaps fitting that its most expensive piece of artwork should feature its most celebrated anti-hero, Ned Kelly - a rogue who regularly defied the colonial authorities.

From the BBC.

Xinjiang mummies

In the middle of a terrifying desert north of Tibet, Chinese archaeologists have excavated an extraordinary cemetery. Its inhabitants died almost 4,000 years ago, yet their bodies have been well preserved by the dry air.

The cemetery lies in what is now China’s northwest autonomous region of Xinjiang, yet the people have European features, with brown hair and long noses. Their remains, though lying in one of the world’s largest deserts, are buried in upside-down boats. And where tombstones might stand, declaring pious hope for some god’s mercy in the afterlife, their cemetery sports instead a vigorous forest of phallic symbols, signaling an intense interest in the pleasures or utility of procreation.

From the NY Times.

Chinese vase at auction

A vase thought to have belonged to an 18th Century Chinese emperor turned up an auction in rural Ireland earlier this month and sold for more than 70 times its asking price.

The 12-inch tall blue and white porcelain vase had an asking price of just $200, but caught the attention of two top international antique collectors from China and England. Both saw it online and, recognizing it as an authentic vase from Imperial China, flew in especially for the auction in Durrow, a small town in the Irish midlands with a population of just over 1,000 people.

After an opening bid of just $70, dealers Rong Chen and Richard Peters got into a bidding war to the astonishment of those present. Bids jumped in an intense frenzy of hundreds and thousands of euro at a time. Peters, who was seated, bid by nodding discreetly, while Chen stood as she took instructions on a mobile phone from her husband.

Peters, above, won the auction at a final price of $150,000 over Chen, who later said she had been told by her husband to drop out at $135,000. Afterwards, 48-year-old Peters insisted: “I got a bargain.”

And if the item is right, it will likely be resold at auction in Hong Kong for several times what it went for in Ireland. Full article here.

Are terrorist cells really so hard to infiltrate?

For nearly a year, a middle-aged woman from suburban Philadelphia used her computer to fashion a new, frightening identity, federal court documents say.

The stream of Internet messages in which she sought assistance to wage violent jihad in Asia and Europe literally transformed her, the documents allege, from 46-year-old Colleen LaRose to "Jihad Jane."

Let's get this straight: in less than a year, this woman, with no special background, training, or qualifications, (allegedly) managed to convince real terrorists that she was one of them -- all from the comfort (and anonymity) of her own suburban home.

I sincerely hope our counterterrorism agents are no less efficient and intrepid.

From USA Today.

Italy embraces library digitization

The Italian government has signed a deal with Google to put the contents of two national libraries on the internet.

Up to one million antiquarian books - including works by Dante, Machiavelli and Galileo - will be scanned and made available free on Google Books.

There is no copyright issue as all the works were published before 1868.

The Italian authorities welcomed the scheme as budget pressures have cut the amount that can be spent on preserving the collections in Rome and Florence.

From the BBC.

iSlave

Researchers have produced a mobile phone that could be a boon for prying bosses wanting to keep tabs on the movements of their staff.

Japanese phone giant KDDI Corporation has developed technology that tracks even the tiniest movement of the user and beams the information back to HQ.

It works by analysing the movement of accelerometers, found in many handsets.

Activities such as walking, climbing stairs or even cleaning can be identified, the researchers say.

Not clear if it's the phone or the software that's the key technology here. Some form of this could work with any phone with iPhone-type motion sensors -- though it sounds as if something even more intrusive is intended:

. . . the KDDI mobile phone strapped to a cleaning worker's waist can tell the difference between actions performed such as scrubbing, sweeping, walking an even emptying a rubbish bin

But assuming that the company monitoring its employees so closely would then have to require them to wear the phones, why bother with the phone at all, and just have done with it and have them wear electronic slave collars?

It is not the first time remote spying technology has been enlisted by employers to keep an eye on their workforce in Japan or elsewhere.

Lorry drivers are regularly monitored through mobile phones in Japan, while salespeople have been regularly tracked by their employers using GPS since it was introduced to Japanese mobiles in 2002.

Full article here.

Baltic shipwrecks

A dozen centuries-old shipwrecks — some of them unusually well-preserved — have been found in the Baltic Sea by a gas company building an underwater pipeline between Russia and Germany.

The oldest wreck probably dates back to medieval times and could be up to 800 years old, while the others are likely from the 17th to 19th centuries, Peter Norman of Sweden's National Heritage Board said Tuesday.

"They could be interesting, but we have only seen pictures of their exterior. Many of them are considered to be fully intact. They look very well-preserved," Norman told The Associated Press.

Thousands of wrecks — from medieval ships to warships sunk during the world wars of the 20th century — have been found in the Baltic Sea, which doesn't have the ship worm that destroys wooden wrecks in saltier oceans.

From the Associated Press. Also noted:

The Nord Stream project, in which Russia's OAO Gazprom holds a 51 percent stake, has uncovered scores of other objects during seabed searches of the route, including about 80 sea mines and a washing machine, she said.

DNA from ancient eggshells

Researchers have found that eggshells of extinct bird species are a rich source of preserved DNA.

An international team isolated the delicate DNA molecules of species including the massive "elephant birds" of the genus Aepyorni. . .

"Researchers have tried unsuccessfully to isolate DNA from a fossil eggshell for years," said Charlotte Oskam at Murdoch University in Western Australia, who authored the research.

"It just turned out that they were using a method designed for bone that was not suitable for a fossil eggshell."

From the BBC.

Cycling Nazis

Summer 1937. What could be more fitting in the cool afternoon of an English country lane than a group of cycling tourists steadily pedalling their way from one historic site to another, stopping to camp overnight in fields along the way.

The only problem was, that summer, some of those groups of teenage boys were Hitler Youth.

In an era without satellite photography, when detailed ordnance survey maps could be hard to come by and when tension in Europe was rising, MI5 were worried that this innocent cyclo-tourism was a cover for spying.

Full article here.

Stupid security questions

It was bad enough in phone-banking days when banks and credit card companies asked for one's mother's maiden name as a so-called security measure, but why re-embrace such easily-guessed queries nowadays -- where a simple genealogical search can find most people's family members in an instant, and Facebook is likely to reveal many of the other "secrets" the online gatekeepers are relying upon?

The BBC has an article today on yet another study demonstrating this obvious security hole, the focus in this case on webmail:

A study has shown how easy it is to guess the answer to common questions, such as someone's mother's maiden name.

It found attackers will be able to break into 1 in 80 accounts if they get three chances to guess answers. . .

In the case of many e-mail providers, they can be used to overwrite an existing password without knowing what it is. . .

One study by researchers from Microsoft and Carnegie Mellon looked at how easy it was for friends and family members to guess answers to security questions. They found that 17% of the answers could be guessed by those who knew a target.

A good strong password should be all you need. The problem is in providing a convenient backdoor for those who forget their passwords. What ticks me off is that this backdoor has been so generally adopted, and with no opt-out option. So instead of having to store one strong password (securely, mind you -- using the absolutely free Password Safe, and keeping encrypted backups), I effectively have to manage four: one for each inane "secret" -- first pet, favorite teacher, school mascot -- each of which is necessarily a long, random string of letters (and numbers and characters, where accepted).

Great White sharks vs giant squid?

If not Giant Squid, at least very big squid:

In what could be the ultimate marine smack-down, great white sharks off the California coast may be migrating 1,600 miles west to do battle with creatures that rival their star power: giant squids.

A series of studies tracking this mysterious migration has scientists rethinking not just what the big shark does with its time but also what sort of creature it is. . .

For more reserved scientists, the possible link between sharks and squid, suggested by marine ecologist Michael Domeier of the Marine Conservation Science Institute in Fallbrook, is just one part of emerging research that has altered their understanding of the great whites. . .

Domeier said he believes the animals "are not a coastal shark that comes out to the middle of the ocean. They are an ocean shark that comes to the coast. It is a complete flip-flop."

Picture them not as a dorsal fin off the beach but rather as an unseen leviathan swimming through black depths where the oxygen thins and fish glow in the dark, and maybe pouncing on a 30-foot squid.

Full article here.

Stolen Descartes letter rediscovered

It was the Great Train Robbery of French intellectual life: thousands of treasured documents that vanished from the Institut de France in the mid-1800s, stolen by an Italian mathematician. Among them were 72 letters by René Descartes, the founding genius of modern philosophy and analytic geometry.

Now one of those purloined letters has turned up at a small private college in eastern Pennsylvania, providing scholars with another keyhole into one of the Western world’s greatest minds. . .

As soon as Haverford’s president, Stephen G. Emerson, understood the letter’s history, he contacted the Institut de France (coincidentally on Feb. 11, the anniversary of Descartes’ death in 1650) and offered to return the item. “I was frankly shocked because I didn’t know we had the letter at all,” said Mr. Emerson, who was a philosophy major in college. “But it’s really not ours.”

An honorable but, sadly, exceptional response.

Gabriel de Broglie, chancellor of the Institut de France . . . awarded Haverford a prize of 15,000 euros (slightly more than $20,000), writing to Mr. Emerson that the offer “honors you and exemplifies the depth of moral values that you instill in your students.”

France has recovered only 45 of the 72 stolen Descartes letters, Mr. de Broglie explained. One was offered at an auction in Switzerland in 2006 and 2009. “After I protested vociferously and publicly on both occasions in the name of the Institut, the letter didn’t find a buyer,” Mr. de Broglie wrote, “but it proved impossible for us to raise the very large sum that the seller demanded, and even though it can’t be sold, this 1638 letter remains in private hands.”

From the NY Times.

Jewish tribes of Africa

This has been written up before, but here's yet another article:

In many ways, the Lemba tribe of Zimbabwe and South Africa are just like their neighbours.

But in other ways their customs are remarkably similar to Jewish ones.

They do not eat pork, they practise male circumcision, they ritually slaughter their animals, some of their men wear skull caps and they put the Star of David on their gravestones.

Their oral traditions claim that their ancestors were Jews who fled the Holy Land about 2,500 years ago.

It may sound like another myth of a lost tribe of Israel, but British scientists have carried out DNA tests which confirm their Semitic origin.

From the BBC.

Dinosaur ancestry discovery

Scientists have discovered a dinosaur-like creature 10 million years older than the earliest known dinosaurs.

Asilisaurus kongwe is a newly discovered herbivore that lived during the middle Triassic period - about 245 million years ago.

The scientists say that its age suggests that dinosaurs were also on the Earth earlier than previously thought.

From the BBC.

It was a snake-eats-dinosaur world back then

Scientists say they have identified the fossilised remains of a snake that dined on dinosaur eggs.

The 67-million-year-old skeleton was found in a dinosaur nest.

The study, published in the journal Plos One, is said to show the first direct evidence of feeding behaviour in a fossilised primitive snake.

This 3.5m fossil snake is believed to have fed on the hatchlings of sauropods, as it was found wrapped around a baby titanosaur.

Full article here.

Comic books crack $1 million

A comic showing the debut of superhero Batman has been sold for more than $1m (£655,000) at an auction in Dallas.

The rare 1939 copy of Detective Comic No 27 was bought by an anonymous bidder from a seller who also wished to keep their identity secret.

The sale comes just days after an early edition of a Superman comic sold for $1m - only to be outdone by Batman.

The seller apparently bought the record-breaking copy for $100 in the 1960s. From the BBC.

Giant Cretaceous sharks, and more

The fossilised remains of a gigantic 10m-long predatory shark have been unearthed in Kansas, US.

Scientists dug up a gigantic jawbone, teeth and scales belonging to the shark which lived 89 million years ago.

The bottom-dwelling predator had huge tooth plates, which it likely used to crush large shelled animals such as giant clams.

Palaeontologists already knew about the shark, but the new specimen suggests it was far bigger than previously thought.

The scientists who made the discovery, published in the journal Cretaceous Research, last week also released details of other newly discovered giant plankton-eating fish that swam in prehistoric seas for more than 100 million years.

Full article here.

The "Chemist's War"

A horrifying episode from Prohibition, yet virtually forgotten:

Frustrated that people continued to consume so much alcohol even after it was banned, federal officials had decided to try a different kind of enforcement. They ordered the poisoning of industrial alcohols manufactured in the United States, products regularly stolen by bootleggers and resold as drinkable spirits. The idea was to scare people into giving up illicit drinking. Instead, by the time Prohibition ended in 1933, the federal poisoning program, by some estimates, had killed at least 10,000 people.

Although mostly forgotten today, the "chemist's war of Prohibition" remains one of the strangest and most deadly decisions in American law-enforcement history. As one of its most outspoken opponents, Charles Norris, the chief medical examiner of New York City during the 1920s, liked to say, it was "our national experiment in extermination."

From Slate.

As a side note, I was recently studying up on denatured alcohol. Interestingly enough, the "denaturing" process is quite different in the USA and other countries, such as the UK. In the USA, color isn't added, which would seem to increase the danger of unintended ingestion. Nor, apparently, anything that gives the stuff an awful taste -- another safety measure. What I was actually looking for, however, was any exemption for industrial or workshop applications where the addition of the usual denaturing ingredients -- methanol, in particular -- might be problematical. Couldn't find any, so it appears any craftsman wanting to use pure ethanol has to pay the Federal booze excise tax on the stuff (and I do know several fine woodworkers who do just that).