A giant aircraft carrier built from ice

Digitising books as objects: The invisible made visible

Technology has improved immensely since then and a lot of ‘ink’ has been spread across physical and virtual pages about the remit, the limitations and the advantages of what is offered to the public through the surrogates uploaded onto countless web portals. This piece is just another little drop into this ocean of ink to share some considerations built upon experience and from the perspective of a book conservator who sees, because of his professional background, the limitations of this, but also the exciting challenges to overcome them.

World War II carrier “Lady Lex” found 2 miles under sea by Allen expedition

The shape of life

Last spring, the geobiologist Dominic Papineau and colleagues reported that fossilised microorganisms were identified in 3.77-4.28-billion-year-old iron-rich rock in Quebec: hematite tubes and filaments whose appearance is similar to microorganisms that today live in hydrothermal vents. Others dismissed their findings as ‘dubiofossils’, a term the geologist Hans Hofmann coined in 1972 to describe controversial fossils. ‘Fossils,’ Hofmann wrote, were proven biological; ‘pseudofossils’ resembled life but were inorganic; ‘dubiofossils’ (also known as Problematica or Miscellanea) were equivocal.