The grandad, who works 70 hours a week on his farm at Crosby Garrett, Cumbria, said: "My legs went to jelly. When you've been farming for years and made no real money, it's a big amount.
"To think it has been in the ground all those years."
The sale was a disappointment to Cumbrian museum Tulie House, which hoped to land the helmet - described as "an extraordinary example of Roman metalwork at its zenith" - for £1million.
The master modeller, from Brandford, Dorset, has created every ship built in the Royal Navy since 1945, as well as 60 other ships from the US navy and other impressive floating fortresses from 18 other nations. One of the largest ships in his collection is the famous USS Nimitz, the largest aircraft carrier in the world.
Throghout his career as a ship model builder, Phillip Waren created over 400 individual ships, as well as 1,200 airplane models that make his aircraft carriers look more real. The average ship in his collection is made using around 1,500 matchsticks and takes about a month to complete, but for his larger creations he used over 5,000 matchsticks and 200 wooden boxes. These took him about a year to complete. All in all, Phillip Waren used around 650,000 matchsticks, to create his entire fleet.
At the time, animatronic technology wasn't thought to be advanced enough to pull off Yoda.
So, in a solution that would make Karl Pilkington proud, they decided to try putting a trained monkey in a Yoda costume, including a full Yoda face mask. Rinzler showed a picture of the monkey on set, but he explained this idea was quickly abandoned when one of the people who worked on the primate scenes in 2001: A Space Odyssey pointed out "Look, the monkey's just going to pull off the mask over and over again. It's never going to work."
You would have thought one wouldn't need first-hand experience to know that, but the creative team decided to junk the idea and enlist Muppet mastermind Jim Henson to create the world's first animatronic muppet. To show the extent of the character's Muppet origins, Rinzler showed a photo of Yoda hanging out with Kermit and Miss Piggy in the swamps of Dagobah.
This information has already been used to allow the robot to quickly stop after contact before damaging itself or the environment, naturally pass objects to a person, or detect when an object has been set down on a tabletop.
The goal of this work was to allow the robot to understand the sensory information that arises from contact with the environment, intelligently reason about what is happening in the world, and decide what the appropriate robot response should be. Using this tactile approach, the PR2 can delicately grasp a wide range of unknown objects, such as raw fruit, eggs, and heavy liquid-filled containers, all without crushing or dropping them. The PR2 can also quickly detect contacts between its arms and objects in the world, as well as contact between hand-held objects and the world.
“Our data … ends the debate about the etiology of the Black Death, and unambiguously demonstrates that Y. pestis was the causative agent of the epidemic plague that devastated Europe during the Middle Ages,” the authors wrote in the Oct. 7 issue of PLoS Pathogens.[...]
To build their case, the study’s authors extracted DNA from more than 75 skeletons in mass graves or plague pits across Europe. As an added measure, the scientists compared the samples to bones in nearby regions unaffected by the disease. All of this data, according to the study, points to bubonic plague as the cause of the 400-year-long pandemic and not other diseases.
Heider and neighbors heard an explosion-like sound Monday morning. Heider found the nearly 200-yard-long crevice, which measures five-feet deep in parts, Tuesday.
"I was sitting in my recliner and the recliner started to vibrate," said Heider. "And it's not electric."
Trooper Paul Anderson with Michigan State Police was the first to check it out. He said he ruled out a gas line leak, but could not determine much more.
"This would be a first," he said. "You don't learn that at the academy."
Anderson said he called some geological experts. So far none have come to look at the crevice.
There have not been any reported earthquakes in the area.
As the animals swim, the tags record information every few seconds, then relay it via satellite once the seals surface. About 30 percent of the time seals dive all the way to the bottom to forage for food, says Padman, so by studying enough dives for each animal — some 200,000 dives in total — the researchers can deduce where the seafloor lies.[...]
Other researchers might now be inspired to dig through seal data to see what features could be mapped, he adds. Ships can cost tens of thousands of dollars a day to operate in Antarctic waters, whereas there is a wealth of readily available information available on seal tags.
The books form a ready made, insulated building module held in place with sheet metal angles normally used as drywall bead material. Once tensioned, the phone books form a stable wall into which additional layers can be easily screwed. The roof joists are also made of laminated phone books. The finished structure becomes a kind of time capsule, recording the names and numbers of community members.
The Barstow bunker was built to withstand a 50-megaton nuclear blast 10 miles away, 450mph winds, a magnitude-10 earthquake, 10 days of 1,250°F surface fires, and three weeks beneath any flood. Vicino says that a soon-to-be-installed air-filtration system will also neutralize any biological, chemical or nuclear attacks. The Barstow branch will stock enough food and clothing to sustain 135 people for at least a year, and in a lifestyle that Vicino describes as compact but luxurious, like being on a cruise ship.[...]
Vicino says he has 5,000 additional applicants on file but that he is being selective in order to create a balanced community. “You wouldn’t want 200 doctors in one facility and no plumbers,” he says. “If the toilet breaks, that could be a real disaster.” People can bring guns, but they must check them at the door. If someone misbehaves, the security staff will lock him in a detention center. Vicino is also thinking about survival of the species, not just his customers. He plans to stock each Vivos bunker with a freezer full of DNA samples of as many species as he can collect. Whether it’s preserving humanity or reseeding a scorched planet, he asks, “don’t you want to be one of the guys repopulating the Earth?”
