Pieces of Titanic transformed into luxury watches

Steel and coal from the Titanic have been transformed into a new line of luxury wristwatches that claim to capture the essence of the legendary oceanliner which sank in 1912.

Geneva watchmaker Romain Jerome SA billed its "Titanic-DNA" collection as among the most exclusive pieces showcased this week at Baselworld, the watch and jewellery industry's largest annual trade fair.

"It is very luxurious and very inaccessible," said Yvan Arpa, chief executive of the three-year-old company that hopes the limited edition watches will attract both collectors and garrulous luxury goods buyers.

"So many rich people buy incredibly complicated watches without understanding how they work, because they want a story to tell," he said. "To them we offer a story."

The North Atlantic wrecksite of the Titanic, which hit an iceberg and sank on its first voyage from the English port of Southampton to New York, have been protected for more than a decade but many relics were taken in early diving expeditions.

Romain Jerome said it purchased a piece of the hull weighing about 1.5 kg (3 pounds) that was retrieved in 1991, but declined to identify the seller. The metal has been certified as authentic by the Titanic's builders Harland and Wolff.

To make the watches, which were offered for sale for the first time in Basel for between $7,800 and $173,100, the Swiss company created an alloy using the slab from the Titanic with steel being used in a Harland and Wolff replica of the vessel.

The gold, platinum and steel time pieces have black dial faces made of lacquer paint that includes coal recovered from the debris field of the Titanic wrecksite, offered for sale by the U.S. company RMS Titanic Inc.

Arpa said the combination of new and old materials infused the watches with a sense of renewal, instead of representing a reminder of the 1,500 passengers who drowned when the oceanliner met her tragic end off the coast of Newfoundland.

"It is a message of hope, of life stronger than death, of rebirth," he said in an interview in Romain Jerome's exposition booth in Basel, where more than 2,100 exhibitors are flaunting their latest wares amid a boom for the luxury goods sector.

The company will make 2,012 watches to coincide with the centenary anniversary of the Titanic's sinking in 2012.

Arpa said the young watchmaker would unveil a new series next year commemorating another famous legend, but declined to offer clues of what is to come.

"For a new brand, you have to find something different to be interesting," he said. Asked if the next collection would be based on Scotland's legendary Loch Ness monster, he smiled and said: "Ooh. Have you found it?"

Source: http://www.reuters.com/article/wtMostRead/idUSL1310422320070415?pageNumber=2

Two British helicopters crash north of Baghdad

Two British personnel died and another was seriously injured when two helicopters crashed north of Baghdad on Sunday, Britain's ministry of defence said.

"Now that next of kin have been informed, I can confirm that the two helicopters reported this morning as having crashed north of Baghdad earlier today were, in fact, both UK helicopters," Defence Secretary Des Browne said in a statement.

"Sadly, two personnel have died and one is very seriously injured. All of these were UK personnel," he said.

The statement said initial reports indicated the crash was an accident and not the result of an attack by insurgents.

It was earlier reported that the two helicopters were U.S. military helicopters.

Source: http://www.reuters.com/article/newsOne/idUSPAR34073020070415

Space storm disrupted GPS, experts say

A solar eruption in December disrupted the Global Positioning System, a satellite-based navigational system used widely by the military, scientists and civilians, researchers reported on Wednesday.

The solar flare created radio bursts that traveled to the Earth, covering a broad frequency range, the researchers said, affecting GPS and other navigational systems.

Solar flares have been known to knock out satellites and even electricity grids, but the researchers told the Space Weather Enterprise Forum this was an unexpectedly serious new effect.

"In December, we found the effect on GPS receivers were more profound and widespread than we expected," said Paul Kintner, a professor of electrical and computer engineering at Cornell University in New York.

"Now we are concerned more severe consequences will occur during the next solar maximum," Kintner said in a statement.

Dale Gary of the New Jersey Institute of Technology said the burst created 10 times more radio noise than the previous record.

"Measurements with NJIT's solar radiotelescope confirmed, at its peak, the burst produced 20,000 times more radio emission than the entire rest of the Sun. This was enough to swamp GPS receivers over the entire sunlit side of Earth," Gary said in a statement.

Forecasters from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration observed two powerful solar flares on December 5 and 6, 2006, emanating from a large cluster of sunspots.

A giant radio burst followed, causing large numbers of receivers to stop tracking the GPS signal.

"NASA wants to better understand this solar phenomenon so we can limit the adverse impacts on real-time systems," said Tony Mannucci of the U.S. space agency's Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

Anthea Coster of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology said the findings showed solar radio bursts can have global and instantaneous effects. "The size and timing of this burst were completely unexpected and the largest ever detected. We do not know how often we can expect solar radio bursts of this size or even larger," she said.

Source: http://www.reuters.com/article/technologyNews/idUSN0438594720070404?pageNumber=2

Google lets users create own maps

Google Inc. is out to make map-making simpler, giving away tools for ordinary users to pinpoint locations, draw routes and attach photos or video to existing online maps, the company said on Wednesday.

The Web search leader, which set off an explosion of creative map-making among professional programmers after introducing Google Maps two years ago, is now offering MyMaps, tools for everyday users to create maps in a few mouse clicks.

Let your imagination run wild, spatially speaking: Pinpoint your favorite restaurant locations. Return from a world tour and plot out landmarks along the way. Take photos from a recent hike and use MyMaps to illustrate locations along the trail.

"Who better to create maps than local experts?" Jessica Lee, product manager for Google Maps, said in an interview. "MyMaps makes map-making universally accessible to anyone."

Creators of custom maps can publish them so other users can find them when searching Google Maps. Users of Google Local search will now see relevant user-generated MyMaps show up in a special section along with traditional commercial results.

Or they can choose to leave their MyMaps unlisted for personal use or to share with a select group of friends.

See the new features by clicking on the MyMaps tab now available at Google Maps (http://maps.google.com/).

MyMaps can also feature YouTube videos or other snippets of Web content in small windows that appear when a user clicks on pinpointed location. Anyone comfortable with the trick of adding small bits of hypertext code to a Web site or blog or MySpace profile can add video to MyMaps in just a few clicks.

Feeling uninspired? Just search out an address on Google Maps and add MyMaps locations automatically to anyone of your existing maps by clicking the button that appears saying "Save to MyMaps."

Instead of telling stories in chronological fashion using text or pictures, map-making this easy allows people to narrate their lives location-by-location.

Lee describes how one Google employee recreated their resume on MyMaps, where each job or educa

Leave it to a Google engineer to create a map featuring the locations where great computer languages were invented in recent decades: http://tinyurl.com/2n5or3/. Another employee created a map of life around Google's Silicon Valley headquarters at http://tinyurl.com/ytwvnw/.

Another more fanciful example charts monster sightings worldwide, from Godzilla to Dracula, Mummy, the Blob, King Kong and Bigfoot, Lee said. (http://tinyurl.com/2lkqhu)

MyMaps is initially available in the United States and the national versions of Google in nine other countries including Australia, Britain, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the Netherlands and Spain.

Source: http://www.reuters.com/article/technologyNews/idUSN0436837620070405?pageNumber=2

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