Shipwreck treasure found off Namibia

Shipwreck treasure found off Namibia

Namibia’s diamond company, Namdeb, said Wednesday it had discovered a 500-year-old shipwreck containing a treasure of coins, ivory, copper and weapons.

The company came across the wreck April 1 after finding some copper ingots and the remains of three bronze cannons during mining operations at sea, Namdeb spokesman Hilifa Mbako said.

“The site yielded a wealth of objects including six bronze cannons, several tons of copper, more than 50 elephant tusks, pewter tableware, navigational instruments, weapons and thousands of Spanish and Portuguese gold coins, minted in the late 1400s and early 1500s,” Mbako said.

Company sources said human remains and ornaments linked to royalty found on the ship raised speculation it could be the caravel of Portuguese explorer Bartolomeu Dias, which went missing off the Cape of Good Hope in 1500.

Last NASA trip to Hubble delayed

Delays in producing space shuttle fuel tanks, which were substantially redesigned after the 2003 Columbia disaster, will postpone NASA’s final service mission to the Hubble Space Telescope by a month or longer, agency officials said Thursday.

The shuttle mission was originally scheduled to launch Aug. 28. To fly to Hubble, NASA decided it needed a second shuttle ready to launch as a rescue craft in case the first one became too damaged to return home.

Needing two tanks ready for launch has strained the manufacturing process, resulting in the delay.

Breast-feeding at a 20-year high

More than 3 out of 4 new moms now breast-feed their infants, the highest rate in the U.S. in at least 20 years, according to a government report released Wednesday.

About 77% of new mothers breast-feed, at least briefly, up from 60% in 1993-94, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said.

The percentage of black infants who were breast-fed rose most dramatically, to 65%. Only 36% were ever breast-fed in 1993-94, the new study found. For whites, the figure rose to 79% from 62%. For Mexican Americans, it increased to 80% from 67%.

Siberian lake is warming rapidly

Russian and American scientists have demonstrated for the first time that Lake Baikal in frigid Siberia has warmed rapidly over the last half a century, at a rate almost three times that of the average global air temperature.

An international team reported Wednesday in the journal Global Change Biology that the water temperature of Lake Baikal, the world’s largest freshwater lake by volume, had increased 2.18 degrees Fahrenheit and the amount of chlorophyll had grown by 300%.

Baikal, which the U.N. has declared a World Heritage Site, contains 20% of the world’s freshwater.

GPS system rival sent into orbit

An experimental satellite for the much-delayed European Union rival to the U.S. GPS navigation system blasted into orbit Sunday after a successful launch atop a Russian rocket, the Russian and European space agencies said.

The Giove-B satellite shot into space atop a Soyuz-FG rocket launched from the Baikonur facility in Kazakhstan.

Giove-B is the second satellite launched for the Galileo navigation system. It will test technologies to be used in the system, including an atomic clock that the EU says will be the most accurate in space. Touted as technologically superior to GPS, Galileo is scheduled to be operational by 2013.

From Times Staff and Wire Reports