Brand new images of the Titanic reveal unprecedented views of the shipwreck and may shed new light on how the iconic liner sank more than a century ago.
The first ever full-sized digital scan of the ship liner's wreckage, which lies 12,500 feet below water on the floor of the Atlantic Ocean, has been developed using deep sea mapping.
Analysts hope that the images will provide fresh insight into how the Titanic went down on April 15, 1912 after the liner struck an iceberg during its ill-fated maiden voyage.
The disaster — which has been immortalized in popular culture through documentaries, books and a Hollywood blockbuster — killed more than 1,500 people on board – roughly 70% of the ship's passengers and crew.
The scan was carried out last year by Magellan Ltd, a deep-sea mapping company, in partnership with Atlantic Productions, a London-based company that is currently making a film about the project.
when Michelangelo scrawled, he scrawled with both a craftsman’s practical precision and an artist’s evocative flair. “Because the servant he was sending to market was illiterate,” writes the Oregonian‘s Steve Duin in a review of a Seattle Art Museum show, “Michelangelo illustrated the shopping lists — a herring, tortelli, two fennel soups, four anchovies and ‘a small quarter of a rough wine’ — with rushed (and all the more exquisite for it) caricatures in pen and ink.”
Many readers buy books with every intention of reading them only to let them linger on the shelf.
Statistician Nassim Nicholas Taleb believes surrounding ourselves with unread books enriches our lives as they remind us of all we don't know. The Japanese call this practice tsundoku, and it may provide lasting benefits.
tsundoku. Tsundoku is the Japanese word for the stack(s) of books you’ve purchased but haven’t read. Its morphology combines tsunde-oku (letting things pile up) and dokusho (reading books).
The word originated in the late 19th century as a satirical jab at teachers who owned books but didn’t read them. While that is opposite of Taleb’s point, today the word carries no stigma in Japanese culture. It’s also differs from bibliomania, which is the obsessive collecting of books for the sake of the collection, not their eventual reading.
THE VALUE OF TSUNDOKU
Granted, I’m sure there is some braggadocious bibliomaniac out there who owns a collection comparable to a small national library, yet rarely cracks a cover. Even so, studies have shown that book ownership and reading typically go hand in hand to great effect.
One such study found that children who grew up in homes with between 80 and 350 books showed improved literacy, numeracy, and information communication technology skills as adults. Exposure to books, the researchers suggested, boosts these cognitive abilities by making reading a part of life’s routines and practices.
Many other studies have shown reading habits relay a bevy of benefits. They suggest reading can reduce stress, satisfy social connection needs, bolster social skills and empathy, and boost certain cognitive skills. And that’s just fiction! Reading nonfiction is correlated with success and high achievement, helps us better understand ourselves and the world, and gives you the edge come trivia night.
In her article, Jessica Stillman ponders whether the antilibrary acts as a counter to the Dunning-Kruger effect, a cognitive bias that leads ignorant people to assume their knowledge or abilities are more proficient than they truly are. Since people are not prone to enjoying reminders of their ignorance, their unread books push them toward, if not mastery, then at least a ever-expanding understanding of competence.
“All those books you haven’t read are indeed a sign of your ignorance. But if you know how ignorant you are, you’re way ahead of the vast majority of other people,” Stillman writes.
Whether you prefer the term antilibrary, tsundoku, or something else entirely, the value of an unread book is its power to get you to read it.
“Mary Anne chose to pass into the eternal love of God”
Born and raised in Virginia—often a swing state, we might add—Mary Anne Alfriend Noland, a wife, mother, grandmother and 1970 graduate of the University of Virginia School of Nursing, up and died just six months before the 2016 presidential election, timing her obituary references as an extreme aversion to the choice of candidates.
And just in case this sounds maybe a little too much like poetic justice to be an actual obit, please know that Mrs. Noland’s obituary has passed the Snopes test and been deemed legit.
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“If someone wants to contact me, that would be nice”
Clearly, Mrs. Mary “Pink” Mullaney was a giver of reliably pithy life advice, because when the widow died in 2013, one (or more) of her many loved ones crafted an obituary for the Milwaukee Journal Sentinal that featured what we can only guess to be a mere handful of Pink’s chestnuts.
In addition to the above-quoted message-in-a-bottle-style advice, Mullaney had a suggestion for dealing with uninvited critters trespassing in your out-buildings: “If a possum takes up residence in your shed, grab a barbecue brush to coax him out. If he doesn’t leave, brush him for 20 minutes and let him stay.”
As for why you might be craving a chicken sandwich after church, it might be because Pink advised her loved ones to bring one to Sunday service and give it to a “homeless friend” after mass.
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“Tell them that check is in the mail”
“Waffle House lost a loyal customer on April 30, 2013” begins the New York Times obituary of Antonia “Toni” Larroux of Bay St. Louis, Mississippi. And it only gets more amusing from there. Larroux’s children from her marriage to Jean F. Larroux Jr., Jean Larroux III and Hayden Hoffman, decided to honor their mother with an obituary that reads like a standup comedian’s tight-five.
“The family started to write a normal obit,” Larroux III told HuffPost, before realizing that their mom wouldn’t want it that way. Some of the obituary’s greatest hits include a suggestion that Larroux III and Hoffman might be illegitimate (we assume from the context that folks had been speculating for years) and a spoiler alert to the effect that Toni and her sisters were not, in fact, natural blondes.
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“Your father is a very sick man”
When Connecticut native Joe Heller, a chemist and former Yale Law School librarian, died in 2019 at the age of 82, he left behind a legacy of humor—literally, in the form of three witty daughters. They begin their dad’s Hartford Courant obituary as follows: “Joe Heller made his last undignified and largely irreverent gesture on September 8, 2019, signing off on a life, in his words, ‘generally well-lived and with few regrets.'” They go on to say, “When the doctors confronted his daughters with the news last week that ‘Your father is a very sick man,’ in unison they replied, ‘You have no idea.'”
He was a lifelong prankster, according to the obit, and when Heller was born “God thankfully broke the mold.”
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“She loved [her family] more than anything else in the world, except …”
Jan Lois Lynch of Boston was a single mother who loved her family, including her four sons and eight grandkids—albeit maybe not quite as much as some of life’s other pleasures. When she died in 2018 at age 75, her loved ones authored this good-hearted Courier Press obituary, specifying exactly what those other pleasures were, and we quote: “the New England Patriots, the Boston Red Sox, Tom Brady, cold Budweiser, room temperature Budweiser, cigarettes, dogs, mopeds, clam chowder, boating, fishing, Florida, the Atlantic Ocean, grouper sandwiches, adventures, road trips, the beach, Sunday Night Football, Monday Night Football, fall foliage, airplane food, ingrown toenails, the O.J. chase and the O.J. trial—in that exact order.”
Jason Statham's 2018 and 2023 movie may be a work of fiction, but there is a real-life monster behind The Meg: the 60-foot-long prehistoric sea creature known as the Megalodon. The movie paints the shark-like monster as something that still lives in the ocean, but this apex predator likely died out millions and millions of years ago - or did it?
In this video, which has since gone viral, the children are seen going up and down the playground equipment again and again, joined by an equally energetic pup — partaking in the amusement more as a peer than a pet.
The clip, believed to have been shared originally by Facebook user Reed Esme, contains a hint as to their relationship:
“[My husband said] bring the dog to look after the kids,” the caption reads.
New York's Central Park has astatuededicated to him, and there's even been a movie about him: asled dog named Balto. Now he is the focus of a DNA study, 90 years after he died, to see what made the canine so famously tough.
In 1925, this Siberian husky was part of an expedition in Alaska called the serum run, the goal of which was to bring life-saving medicine to young people in the remote town of Nome that were threatened by diphtheria.
The mission in horrendous blizzards conditions involved a series of sled dog teams transporting the anti-toxin relay-style from the city of Anchorage -- a more than 600-mile-long trek.
On February 2, 1925, the Siberian Husky Balto led his relay team of sled dogs to the end of a 674-mile journey, delivering desperately-needed diphtheria serum to the children of Nome, Alaska.CBS NEWS
Though more than 150 dogs in all took part in the record-breaking run, it was Balto who led the final 53-mile stretch, and wound up getting most of the glory. He went on to tour the country, a bona fide celebrity.
"Balto's fame and the fact that he was taxidermied gave us this cool opportunity 100 years later to see what that population of sled dogs would have looked like genetically and to compare him to modern dogs," said Katherine Moon, a postdoctoral researcher at the University of California, Santa Cruz and the main author of the study.
Her team took skin samples from the dog's belly and reconstructed its genome -- the complete set of genes in an organism.
They compared this genetic material with that of 680 contemporary dogs from 135 breeds.
Contrary to a legend that held that Balto was half wolf -- as suggested in an animated Universal Pictures film that came out in 1995 -- this analysis found no evidence he had wolf blood.
It turned out Balto shared ancestors with modern day Siberian Huskies and the sled dogs of Alaska and Greenland.
Moon's team also compared Balto's genes with the genomes of 240 other species of mammals as part of an international effort called the Zoonomia Project.
This allowed researchers to determine which DNA fragments were common across all those species and have not therefore changed over the course of millions of years of evolution.
This stability suggests that these stretches of DNA are associated with important functions in the animal, and that mutations there could be dangerous.
The bottom line from the research was that Balto had fewer potentially dangerous mutations than modern breeds of dogs did, suggesting he was healthier.
"Balto had variants in genes related to things like weight, coordination, joint formation and skin thickness, which you would expect for a dog bred to run in that environment," Moon wrote in a statement.
This Dec. 15, 1925 photo shows a closeup of Gunnar Kasson and Balto, with the statue which was unveiled in honor of Balto is in the rear. Kasson lead the dog team which saved many lives in Nome when he arrived there with the serum, when the people of that old city were suffering from diptheria. Balto was the leader of the dogs.BETTMANN VIA GETTY IMAGES Read more
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