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Scientists periodically claim that they have found the lost continent (or island) of Atlantis, even if it’s not even sure it has ever existed. In a conference recently held in the Greek island of Milos, several researchers presented the reasons why Atlantis could have been located in Greece, Malta, Morocco, and even in Ireland, Israel or India. But both Nature and the Geology blog from About.com agree that the most serious candidate is the former island in the Spanish Gulf of Cadiz known today as Spartel Bank. This small island, about 15 kilometers across, which was located near the “Pillars of Hercules” mentioned by Plato, could have been swallowed up by an earthquake, followed by a tsunami, about 10,000 years ago. Even if this makes sense from a geological point of view, this doesn’t mean Atlantis is anything more than a — fascinating — legend.

Lets’s start with Nature.

In a recent paper in Geology, Marc-Andre Gutscher of the European Institute for Marine Studies in Plouzané gives details of one candidate for the lost city: the submerged island of Spartel, west of the Straits of Gibraltar.

The top of this isle lies some 60 metres beneath the surface in the Gulf of Cadiz, having plunged beneath the waves at the end of the most recent ice age as melting glaciers caused the sea level to rise.

Geological evidence has shown that a large earthquake and a tsunami hit this island some 12,000 years ago, at roughly the location and time indicated in Plato’s writings.

And here are some other details from the Geology blog of About.com.

[About 10,000 years ago,] sea level was more than 100 meters below its present elevation and Spartel Bank was an island. In fact, Gutscher’s new mapping of the site shows that it would have been a rather small island at that time, smaller than previously thought. But things change when we add the effects of large subduction earthquakes. As we all know from the Sumatra quake of 2004, large areas of land sink by several meters and more during these events. If we restore the effects of great earthquakes, which Gutscher estimates as recurring every 2000 years or so, then the island would have been higher and larger.

Gutscher proposes that an exceptionally large quake could have dropped Spartel/Atlantis by 10 meters at once, while tsunami waves of 10 meters or greater height would have obliterated any human structures and left the island unrecognizable. A few more subduction earthquakes would have sunk the remaining islets beneath the sea, leaving treacherous muddy shallows, well before Plato’s time.

As it was mentioned above, Gutscher’s latest research work has been published by Geology in its August 2005 issue (Vol. 33, No. 8, pp. 685-688). Here is a link to the abstract of this paper named “Destruction of Atlantis by a great earthquake and tsunami? A geological analysis of the Spartel Bank hypothesis.”

This paper was presented during the Atlantis 2005 conference, held on July 11-13, 2005, in Milos Island, Greece.

Many other papers were also presented and here is a link to all the abstracts. Besides the papers claiming that Atlantis was in one part of the world or another, some of these papers must have been fun to listen to. Here are some examples: “Interpreting Myths: Catastrophism and New Catastrophism” (abstract #29) or “The Novelty of the Atlantis Myth in the Light of Freudian Interpretation” (abstract #9).

Here are some short excerpts from this last paper, presented by Yair Schlein, from the Open University, Israel.

The Atlantis myth illustrates the Ideal regime and serves as a starting point to the description of the state “pathology”, that is to say, the degeneration process of the state that differs from the “physiology” of state that depicts the political structure in a given time. In other words, the myth expresses the inherent causes for the deterioration of the polis.

Freud too, in his book “Civilization and its Discontents”, described society as a self-destructive. The analogous perceptions of the life of an individual to the structure of the state, and the similar characteristics Plato and Freud attributed to the state are surprising.

And for more information on this subject, please read the excellent collection of resources from Wikipedia about Atlantis.

Sources: Andreas von Bubnoff, Nature, July 22, 2005; Andrew Alden, Geology, About.com, July 14, 2005; and various web sites

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In a room that was locked for more than thirty years at the Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida, NASA recently found suits for space spies. The long-forgotten training suits were in good shape, not even eaten by rodents. These suits should have been worn by fourteen astronauts participating in the Manned Orbiting Laboratory program. The goal of this program, initiated during the Cold War era, was to put a manned reconnaissance station in space. The U.S. Air Force wanted to send two men in a Gemini capsule for 40 days to look over U.S. enemies. But when the program was abandoned in 1969, the suits were lost — for 35 years. Read more…

Here is the story as told by NASA.

Two security officers were doing a check of a facility known as the Launch Complex 5/6 museum. NASA Special Agent Dann E. Oakland and Security Manager Henry Butler, of the company that oversees the museum, Delaware North Parks and Resorts, discovered a locked room — and they had no key.

They eventually were able to unlock the door using a master key. With no power, the room had evidently not been accessed by people in many years. The officers used flashlights to explore the room and make their noteworthy find.

But Oakland and Butler weren’t the first visitors. Rodents had clearly explored the room over the years. Still, two blue spacesuits were “complete and in remarkable shape,” according to the suits’ manufacturer, who examined them.

The NASA press release shows a picture of the spacesuit found in 2005. But here is another picture of the Manned Orbiting Laboratory Suit, dating from 1968 and shown at the National Museum of the United States Air Force (Credit: U.S. Air Force).

“The Manned Orbiting Laboratory program (MOL, 1963-69) was a U.S. Air Force program for studying long-duration spaceflight. This model MH-7 training suit, produced by United Aircraft’s Hamilton Standard Division, was a durable, cost-effective tool for preparing USAF astronauts for MOL missions in more advanced suits. MOL was to use USAF-modified NASA Gemini spacecraft to put two crewmen in a space station for up to a month.”

The manufacturer of the suits, Hamilton Sundstrand (HS), who declared that the recently found spacesuits were in good shape, is still maintaining a site about the MOL Suit Program. Here is a short excerpt about this specific spacesuit.

“In pursuit of the MOL space suit contract, HS developed, fabricated, and evaluated seven suit designs in 18 months. HS won the MOL suit competition at Wright Paterson Air Force Base in January of 1967. Under the MOL suit contract, HS delivered 22 suits between September 1967 and July 1969. This effort culminated with the flight MH-8 (MOL-Hamilton Standard, 8th suit design) configuration. The MH-8 Emergency Oxygen System was a strap-on assembly located on the front of the right upper leg that offered 10 minutes of backup life support.” (Image credit: Hamilton Sundstrand)

If you’re interested by this dead MOL program, here is a site with an exhaustive history of the Manned Orbiting Laboratory. On the left is a rendering of the Manned Orbiting Laboratory in space idf it had be launched (Credit: U.S. Air Force).

In his introduction, Steven R. Strom writes: “In the mid to late ’60s, an ambitious project to launch an orbital space laboratory for science and surveillance came to dominate life at Aerospace.”

Finally, if you’re interested by technological details as well by historical ones, you should read this page from Encyclopedia Astronautica. You’ll discover that two astronauts embarked for a surveillance mission of 40 days should have shared a volume of 11.30 m3. Here are some details about the mission.

The MOL Mission Module took up most of the spacecraft. It had a length of 11.24 m and was divided into two major bays, the forward section 4.42 m long, and the aft section 6.82 m long. The military experiments it would carry remain classified even 25 years later. On most missions it is believed that the KH-10 optical surveillance system would be carried. This consisted of a telescope with a 1.8 m diameter mirror. This was said to be capable of a 4-inch theoretical ground resolution, 9 inch effective. Film would have been returned in four re-entry capsules during the course of the mission.

I’m wondering how many other treasures are still hidden in other space centers.

Sources: NASA Press Release, June 2, 2005; and various websites

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You probably don’t bother to convert an old cassette or a VHS tape to a CD or a DVD. Most of you just buy a new copy — at least if it’s available. But if you’re a museum, such as the Field Museum in Chicago, and that you own dozens of hours of invaluable information recorded more than 50 years ago, this is another story. You want to rescue these ‘endangered’ recordings. In order to give visitors some insights about over 6,000 artifacts of its permanent Pacific collection, the museum needed to read audio tapes named ’sonobands.’ Now, these voices which have been recorded on a state-of-the-art Walkie RecordAll system — in 1958 — have been saved to digital format with some creative engineering help. Read more…

Let’s first look at a picture of this Walkie RecordAll device, which dates from 1954.

Here is a link to a larger picture. And you also can see another image of the Walkie RecordAll device at the bottom of this page devoted to the history of sound recording technology.

Now, let’s go back to the Field Museum news release for an explanation of the problem it was facing.

In 1958, Field Museum curator of the Pacific, Roland Force, sat down with Captain A.W.F. Fuller to record more than 100 hours of comprehensive information about the 6,622 artifacts in Fuller’s Pacific collection that had been acquired over the previous half century. They used a Walkie RecordAll, then a state-of-the-art recording device, and write-able media tapes called sonobands. Today, the Museum is having these recordings converted to a digital format, which is proving to be quite a challenge.

Much as reel-to-reel tape recorders and eight-track cassettes have been relegated to the technological dustbin, the Walkie RecordAll and the sonoband medium on which the device etched sounds fell out of use in the 1970s. Today this technology is as imperiled as an endangered species, such as the panda or snow leopard. In fact, the full-service archival lab that the Museum contracted to preserve the recordings did not possess a machine of this type.

So what to do to save these ‘endangered’ recordings?

Fortunately, The Field Museum had kept the two Walkie RecordAll machines used for the Fuller-Force recording sessions. It has loaned these semi-functioning devices to the contractor, The Cutting Corporation (Macromedia Flash format), an audio production facility with a renowned sound preservation laboratory in Bethesda, Md., for this project. After studying and restoring the Museum’s Walkie RecordAll machines, The Cutting Corporation had to re-engineer its own Walkie RecordAll machine.

The sound preservation engineers at The Cutting Corporation have found that the most challenging part of preserving these recordings digitally is that the sonobands have become brittle over time. As a result, the grooves on the recordings have altered, making tracking difficult but achievable. Thus, through creative engineering, the voices describing the masks and skulls, weapons and tools, idols and boomerangs, will be saved.

Now, if you happen to visit the Field Museum, you’ll be able to see the entire Fuller’s Pacific permanent collection of artifacts and learn about them by listening to the restored voice of Captain A.W.F. Fuller.

Sources: The Field Museum, via EurekAlert!, May 3, 2005; and various websites

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The Barbary Apes who live on Gibraltar’s Rock are the only semi-wild monkeys in Europe. And for decades, nobody knew where they came from. Now, after studying mitochondrial DNA from 280 individual samples, an international group of scientists from Germany, Switzerland and the U.S. has solved the mystery of the origin of Gibraltar’s macaques. Their study reveals that they descended from founders picked in both Morocco and Algeria. Of course, another mystery needs to be solved. You might not know that a local story says that if the monkeys disappear from Gibraltar, so will the British. So when the population of these Barbary Apes was almost reduced to zero sixty years ago, did British Prime Minister Winston Churchill order to capture some of them in nearby Africa? Read more…

Before going further, here is a great photograph of one of these Gibraltar’s Barbary Apes.

Now, let’s return to this news release from the Field Museum in Chicago.

An analysis of mitochondrial DNA from 280 individual samples reveals that the macaques on Gibraltar descended from founders taken from forest fragments in both Morocco and Algeria. The embargoed research will be published in the Early Edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (http://www.pnas.org/papbyrecent.shtml) .

[Note: this research should have been published online on April 25, 2005 by the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, but is not yet available.]

Now, here are some more scientific details.

In mammals, mitochondrial DNA is inherited exclusively from the female, so it can be analyzed to determine matrilineal origins. This is especially relevant with mammals, such as macaques, that practice female philopatry, a social system in which females remain in their birth groups while males migrate between groups.

The research first identified 24 different haplotypes in the Algerian and Moroccan colonies of macaques. Each mitochondrial haplotype is identified by means of a specific DNA sequence.

Since the Algerian and Moroccan haplotypes are clearly distinct, evidence of any given haplotype in the mitochondrial DNA of Gibraltar macaques would indicate that they descended from the geographical population with that haplotype. [...] In fact, both Algerian and Moroccan haplotypes were found among the Gibraltar macaques, indicating that the Gibraltar colony was founded by female macaques from both regions.

The study is still speculating about when these apes were introduced in Gibraltar.

Some scientists believe the Barbary macaques were first brought to Gibraltar by the Moors, who occupied Spain between 711 and 1492. On the other hand, it’s possible that the original Gibraltar macaques were a remnant of populations that had spread throughout Southern Europe during the Pliocene, up to 5.5 million years ago.

So was it 5 million years ago or 60 years ago? A future study will tell.

In the mean time, you might want to read two additional pages from Wikipedia about Gibraltar and the Barbary Ape.

Sources: The Field Museum news release, April 25, 2005; and various websites

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If you happen to be around Ohio this coming fall, don’t miss an exhibit at the Mansfield Memorial Museum featuring the 7-foot-tall Elektro, the oldest U.S. robot with its 65 years. “Elektro is the only survivor of a group of eight robots created by Westinghouse in Mansfield between 1931 to 1940 for several hundred thousand dollars each,” according to this article from the Plain Dealer, Cleveland (free reg. is sometimes necessary). Back in 1939, Elektro was able to walk, talk, raise and lower his arms, turn his head and move his mouth as he spoke. It used a 78-rpm record player to simulate conversation and had a vocabulary of more than 700 words.Thousands of people enjoyed Elektro at the New York World’s Fair in 1939. It even appeared in a long-time forgotten movie, “Sex Kittens Go to College,” also known as “The Beauty and the Robot.” Read more…

Other information about this exhibit is featured on this page at the Mansfield & Richland County Convention & Visitors Bureau website.

“Elektro was the first true robot ever built in the United States,” said museum director, Scott Schaut. “Built in total secrecy by Westinghouse, Elektro was promoted as the ultimate appliance. In fact, it was thought that Elektro would one day be able to cook, do laundry and entertain the children.”

But let’s return to the Plain Dealer article.

[After being restored for $500 by Jack Weeks, whose father, John, helped create the robot in Mansfield for Westinghouse,] Elektro is back home — repaired, polished and drawing crowds to the Mansfield Memorial Museum. Recently, he was taken off display for repairs, but he will return in September.

“We had more than 4,000 people come to the museum to see Elektro since September,” said Schaut. “It was wildly popular, and a good way to get people to visit the museum.”

Elektro, like the other robots built by Westinghouse seventy years ago, was pretty expensive, but also brought back money.

Elektro is the only survivor of a group of eight robots created by Westinghouse in Mansfield between 1931 to 1940. The company predicted the robots — built for an estimated cost of several hundred thousand dollars each — would be the ultimate household appliances, handling daily drudge work such as washing dishes and cutting the grass.

[But] “they made millions off him,” Schaut said. “People came in from all over the world to see him at the New York World’s Fair. In the late 1940s and through the 1950s, Elektro traveled around the country from appliance store to store. People flocked to see him. It was a hugely successful promotion.”

Later, Elektro went to Hollywood.

Elektro did what many Californians do — he wound up in the movies. He played Thinko, a giant robot that handicapped horses, in the 1960 film “Sex Kittens Go to College (1960),” also known as “The Beauty and the Robot,” with Mamie Van Doren and Tuesday Weld.

Now that you’re a fan of Elektro, you might want to buy an image. From this page, you can buy one from Corbis. But be sure to have your credit card with you. A small version (7.29 x 9.11 cm) costs $90 while a larger one (17.09 x 21.36 cm) goes for $200! Personally, I think these prices are outrageous.

Sources: Michael Sangiacomo, The Plain Dealer, Cleveland, February 9, 2005; and various websites

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