The mystery of the Bermuda Triangle may have finally been solved

Over the centuries, theories have abounded over the mystery behind the Bermuda Triangle where more than 75 planes and hundreds of ships are said to have disappeared. Scientists may now have an answer. 

 

It’s thought that hexagonal clouds over the 1.3 million sq km (500,000 square miles) of ocean between Bermuda, Florida and Puerto Rico, could be creating huge 106kph (170mph) wind “air bombs” and these deadly blasts of air can tear down trees, topple over ships and bring planes crashing down.

Similar wind patterns were found underneath the hexagons in the Bahamas and the team believe these “air bombs” are connected.

“These types of hexagonal shapes over the ocean are in essence air bombs,” Dr Randy Cerveny from the University of Arizona told the channel.

“They are formed by what are called micro-bursts and they’re blasts of air that come down out of the bottom of a cloud and then hit the ocean and then create waves that can sometimes be massive in size and they start to interact with each other,” he added.

Researchers will continue to analyze satellite images with the hope of alerting authorities, should an air bomb appear in the future.
Notable disappearances from the area include the USS Cyclops, a US Navy ship that mysteriously disappeared with 309 crew members on board around March 4, 1918, and Flight 19, where five TBM Avenger torpedo bombers vanished on December 5, 1945, over the Atlantic.

Hitler's Secret Nazi Base Discovered In Arctic

Moscow:  Scientists have discovered a secret Nazi base built on direct orders from German dictator Adolf Hitler located 1,000 kilometers from the North Pole.

For decades, the location of the mysterious site known as 'Schatzgraber' or 'Treasure Hunter' on Alexandra Land in the Arctic Circle had remained unknown.

Researchers exploring the isolated island, which is now a Russian Territory, stumbled upon over 500 relics, including the ruins of bunkers, discarded petrol canisters and even paper documents - preserved by the island's freezing climate.

The supposed weather station is believed to have been constructed on direct orders from Hitler in 1942, a year after his invasion of Russia.

It was in service from 1943, before being abandoned in July 1944 when its crew was poisoned after being forced to eat raw polar bear meat infected with roundworms while running low on supplies, the 'Daily Express' reported.

"Before it was only known from written sources, but now we also have real proof," said Evgeny Ermolov, a senior researcher at the Russian Arctic National Park.

Researchers found bullets, scraps of tents and personal items such as shoes; many of which appear to be dated and marked with the swastika.

"About 500 items of historical value have been collected on the grounds of the former Treasure Hunter German station that operated on the Alexandra Land island of Franz Josef Land from September 1943 until July 1944," said Yulia Petrova, National Park press secretary.

An Icelander's autobiography offers glimpses of Danish rule in India

Jon Olafsson's book spans the period between 1618-1679.

 

 

Image credit:  Wikimedia Commons | Cranganore (in present-day Kerala) with Dutch East India Company ships in the harbor 

 Icelander Jon Ólafsson’s autobiography spans the years 1618-1679. It provides information about life in the early years of the Danish settlement in India at Tranquebar. There is also a rare view of early modern Iceland, a country which, with the ending of the age of the sagas at the beginning of the 14th century, had dropped out of the European world view. Ólafsson’s perspective is from the lower deck: he was an assistant gunner from poor peasant stock. He had other publications to his credit: a poem; Icelandic translations of two Danish cycles of ballads; and a Greenland chronicle.

Iceland – Theatrum Orbis Terrarum – Abraham Ortelius (London, 1606) British Library Maps.9.Tab.8, 88-89 Images Online

Ólafsson recounts from hearsay the story of the establishment of a Danish presence in India. The king of Kandy had asked the Dutch for help against the Portuguese. When the Dutch refused, King Christian IV of Denmark took up the opportunity to make a treaty with Kandy in 1618, much to the concern of the English East India Company. Within two years, the Danes were expanding from their base in Trincomalee. By 1622 they were building a base at Tranquebar on the Coromandel coast with the permission of the Raja of Tanjore.

In 1622, Ólafsson left Copenhagen on board the Christianshavn. The crew had sworn an oath of obedience to the king and to the Danish East India Company. Ólafsson’s account focuses on life on board the ship, not from the usual perspective of an officer or a merchant but how it was actually experienced on the lower deck. He also describes the unruly and drunken life in the Dansborg fortress at Tranquebar, shadowed by the threat of fearsome punishment.

King Christian IV of Denmark from Det Oldenborgske Kongehus i Denmark af J. H. Billeder og Text (Copenhagen, 1856) British Library 9425.e.3. BL flickr

 

Close encounters

Ólafsson devotes chapters to the social life of Tanjore under its ruler Raghunatha Nayak with some emphasis on Hindu customs: conjuring tricks, hook-swinging and sati. Many reports are a little inaccurate, but they give a sense of life observed rather than enquired into. The perspective is often distinctive. As an Icelander, the only fruits he had previously known were berries. His listed vocabularies show how he had learned many Portuguese and Tamil words. Communication with the local Tamil speakers, however, was generally through a corrupted Portuguese.

During Ólafsson’s time in Tranquebar, the encampment of Prince Khurram (the future Shah Jehan) moved into the neighbourhood. The Prince allegedly showed some interest in these foreigners, perhaps hoping to recruit experienced gunners for the civil war which he was then fighting. Shortly afterwards, an officer of Raghunatha Nayak demanded a large quantity of lead held by the Danes, without making it clear whether this was a seizure or a transaction where payment would be offered later. When the Danes refused, a dangerous confrontation was narrowly averted by the arrival of ships from Copenhagen.

Soon after this, Ólafsson had both his hands maimed when a cannon he was firing exploded. He then returned to Europe after terrifying experiences at sea. He describes Copenhagen at the time of the Danish entry into the Thirty Years War. Finally, he journeyed to Iceland, where his professional expertise as a gunner was needed for the defensive arrangements made after the Turkish raids in 1627 on the Eastern Firths and the Vestmann Islands.

This article first appeared on British Library's Untold Lives blog.

 

                                                                  - Lionel Knight

Hunger is India's greatest problem even today. So why don't we ever hear about it?

Globally, India ranks an abysmal 97th in combatting hunger.

 

 

If there is one thing former President Abdul Kalam can not be accused of, it is a lack of optimism. In his book, India 2020, Kalam laid out a pollyannaish vision for how India could become a superpower by 2020. With less than four years to go for Kalam’s deadline, however, the International Food Policy Research Institute has ranked India at an abysmal 97th place globally in combating hunger.
Called the Global Hunger Index, the report paints a reality very different from India 2020. Far from becoming a superpower, India has failed to provide its people with that most basic of rights: freedom from hunger.
Thirty nine per cent of Indian children under the age of five show stunted growth while 15% are wasted – which means they are getting so little food, it increases their chances of dying significantly. The lack of food available for Indian children, amongst other factors, means that that a shocking one out of every twenty children die before their fifth birthday.
Some of the countries that manage to offer more food security to their people include Kenya, Malawi and even war-torn Iraq. Except Pakistan, all of India’s neighbors – Nepal, Bangladesh, China, Sri Lanka and Myanmar – manage to outrank India on this list. To understand what this means in real terms, if India had managed to reach Sri Lanka's child mortality rate, it could have saved more than an estimated 9 lakh of its children born in 2016 from dying by 2021. That's the size of a town of dead children.
Given these horrific numbers, far from being a superpower, India is yet to reach the average developing country score on the Global Hunger Index.
While Kalam might have got things terribly wrong, it’s not hard to see where he was coming from. Controlled by the prism of caste, public conversation in India rarely focuses on matters of human development. Vital issues such as hunger and public health are almost always superseded by issues which interest upper caste Indians, such as Pakistan or the prime minister’s foreign tours.

 

Blind spot

There are few topics that generate more emotion than that of hunger. In India’s democratic space, the country’s alarming hunger problem should therefore be a prime issue. But, surprisingly, that’s not the case. Hunger and malnutrition are fairly unimportant topics in Indian politics. The BBC ran a word frequency analysis of Narendra Modi’s speeches for the 2014 Lok Sabha elections and the top issues discussed were Gujarat, security, Congress, development, jobs and change. Food, hunger, malnutrition and related concepts simply didn’t feature in the soon-to-be-prime minister’s speeches.
Things weren’t much different after Modi took office. While the prime minister is a master communicator, skilfully channelling issues such as cleanliness in India, Balochistan and “Make in India” - the Union government’s pitch to push manufacturing in India - yet, conspicuously, hunger and malnutrition remain absent from his messaging. And this isn’t only an issue with Narendra Modi or the Bharatiya Janata Party. One study found that only 3% of questions in Parliament related to children while only 5% of these questions related to early childhood care and development. This, in a country which has one of the highest rates of child mortality in the world.
This isn’t only a problem with India’s politics – the media is complicit too. Hunger and, more broadly, health rarely makes the news with the same sort of urgency as, say, the prime minister addressing non-resident Indians in a Western nation.
Economists Jean Drèze and Amartya Sen actually went through editorials in India’s major newspaper for the last six months of 2012 and found that only 1% dealt with health. In their book An Uncertain Glory: India and its Contradictions, Drèze and Sen write that, “outside sub-Saharan Africa, one has to go to conflict-ravaged countries like Afghanistan, Haiti, Iraq or Papua New Guinea to find lower immunisation rates than India’s”.
Yet, this alarming failure of governance in India produces no outrage either in India's newspapers, television channels or its social media.

 

Caste considerations

There are few issues as emotive as hunger or dying children. Yet, both politics and the media ignore them. The reasons are many but maybe the most important is the elite capture of the national narrative by upper castes. India might have an alarming health crisis on its hands but its unique caste system also means that upper castes are hermetically sealed off from the problem.
India's wasted and dying children are largely Adivasi, Dalit and Shudra. This 2011 study published in the Economic and Political Weekly, for example, shows that underweight rates are 53% higher for Dalit children as compared to Hindu Upper Castes. The figure is even higher for Adivasis at 69%. Shudra children have underweight rates 35% higher than Upper Caste groups – better than Dalits and Adivasis but still significantly worse than India's elites.
It is not surprising then that India's hunger problem goes mostly unreported: Dalits and Adivasis and Shudras have almost no voice in India’s media and a very small one in national politics. A 2006 survey of 300 media decision-makers in India could not find a single Dalit or Adivasi in that group.
Politics is actually slightly better but even here Dalit and Shudra issues feature far below the priority list as compared to, say, urban upper caste issues. Narendra Modi's Union cabinet, for example, is heavily weighted in favor of upper castes, far outstripping their share in the population.
This stratification is causing immense harm to Indians who seem to be stuck in a poverty trap. As an illustration of just how slow India’s development is, it might be worthwhile to compare with neighbours Bangladesh and Nepal. In 2000, Bangladesh was ranked one place below India. In just 15 years, however, it shot past India and got itself placed 7 ranks ahead. In 2000, Nepal was only six ranks ahead of India. In 2016, however, Nepal was 25 places above India. India’s inability to offer its people the same development opportunities as those available to Nepalis or Bangladeshis is alarming. Moreover, the fact that the country’s elites don’t even realise that their country is falling behind is a sign that the situation doesn’t even look like it’s going to change soon.

                                                                         - Shoaib Daniyal

Mount Everest: World's Highest Mountain

Reaching 29,029 feet (8,848 meters) above sea level, Mount Everest is the highest mountain on Earth. Located in the Mahalangur section of the Himalayas, the mountain's summit straddles the border separating China and Nepal.
The mountain's height was first determined in 1856. The Great Trigonometric Survey of British India pegged the mountain, known to them as Peak XV, at 29,002 feet (8,840 meters). But those surveyors were at a disadvantage because Nepal would not grant them entry due to concerns that the country would be invaded or annexed. The current accepted elevation was determined by an Indian survey in 1955 and backed up by a 1975 Chinese measurement.

In 1865, Andrew Waugh, the British Surveyor General of India, suggested that the mountain be named after his predecessor in the job, Sir George Everest. The Tibetans had referred to the mountain as "Chomolungma," or Holy Mother, for centuries, but Waugh did not know this because Nepal and Tibet were closed to outsiders.


Climbing Mount Everest

Mount Everest attracts experienced mountaineers as well as less-seasoned climbers who typically enlist guides known as sherpas. Climbing more than 8,000 feet is no easy feat. Altitude sickness, weather and wind are the major roadblocks to making the summit for most climbers. More than 5,000 people have climbed Everest and 219 have died trying. About 77 percent of those ascents have been accomplished since 2000. In 2007, a record number of 633 ascents were recorded.
Mount Everest has two main climbing routes, the southeast ridge from Nepal and the north ridge from Tibet. Today, the southeast ridge route, which is technically easier, is more frequently used.
The northern approach was discovered in 1921 by George Mallory during the British Reconnaissance Expedition, which was an exploratory expedition, not intended to attempt the summit. Mallory was famously, perhaps apocryphally, quoted as answering the question "Why do you want to climb Mount Everest?" with the reply "Because it's there."
In 1922, Brit George Finch attempted an ascent using oxygen for the first time, but the expedition was thwarted by an avalanche.
In June 1924, Mallory and Andrew Irvine did not survive their attempt to reach to the summit. A 1999 expedition found Mallory's body.
Early expeditions in the 1920s and 1930s attempted to make the ascent from the Tibetan side but access was closed after Tibet came under Chinese control in 1950. This spurred Bill Tilman and a small party that included Charles Houston, Oscar Houston and Betsy Cowles, to approach Everest through Nepal along the route that has developed into the standard approach to Everest from the south.
In 1952, members of a Swiss expedition led by Edouard Wyss-Dunant, were able to reach a height of about 28,199 feet (8,595 meters) on the southeast ridge, setting a new climbing altitude record. Tenzing Norgay, a member of this expedition and a Nepali sherpa, took part in the British expedition the following year.
In 1953, a British expedition led by John Hunt, returned to Nepal. Hunt selected two climbing pairs to attempt to reach the summit. The first pair (Tom Bourdillon and Charles Evans) came within 300 feet (100 meters) of the summit but were turned back due to oxygen problems. Two days later, the second pair, Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay, reached the summit, took some pictures and left some sweets and a cross.

Life on Everest

Mount Everest is surrounded by a number of substantial peaks, including Lhotse, (27,940 feet/8,516 meters); Nuptse, (25,771 feet/7,855 meters); and Changtobse, (24,870 feet/7,580 meters).
Those higher altitudes cannot support animal life or vegetation; however, birch, juniper, blue pines, firs, bamboo and rhododendron grow in the lower areas. There are no plants above 18,690 feet (5,750 meters).
Musk deer, wild yak, red panda, snow leopard and Himalayan black bears inhabit lower altitudes. There are also small numbers of Himalayan thars, deer, langur monkeys, hares, mountain foxes, martens, and Himalayan wolves.

Mountain milestones

Other milestones among Mount Everest expeditions include:

• May 20, 1965: Sherpa Nawang Gombu becomes the first person to reach the summit twice.

• May 16, 1975: Junko Tabei of Japan becomes the first woman to summit Everest.

• May 3, 1980: Japanese climber Yasuo Kato is the first non-Sherpa to reach the summit a second time, following his original 1973 summit.

• Aug. 20, 1980: Reinhold Messner is the first person to reach the summit solo.

• 1996 climbing season: 16 people die while climbing on Mount Everest, the highest number of fatalities in a single year. Eight climbers die on May 10 during a storm. One of the survivors, Jon Krakauer, a journalist on assignment for "Outside" magazine, wrote the bestseller "Into Thin Air" about his experience.

• May 22, 2010: Apa Sherpa, who first summitted on May 10, 1990, reaches the summit a 20th time.

  
                                                                                   By Kim Ann Zimmermann, Live Science