Iron and ceramic scraps from the Nantucket whaling ship Two Brothers were located in shallow waters nearly 600 miles from Honolulu in the remote chain of islands and atolls that make up the Northwestern Hawaiian Islands. The ship, which struck a reef and foundered in 1823, was skippered by Captain George Pollard Jr. Two years earlier, Pollard commanded another ship that was rammed by a whale and sank in the South Pacific in a saga immortalized in Melville's 1851 novel "Moby-Dick." The discovery was unveiled on Friday by researchers from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, which led the initial 2008 expedition to the wreck and subsequent explorations of the site during the past two years. NOAA said it marks the first discovery of a sunken whaler from Nantucket, Massachusetts, birthplace of a U.S. whaling industry that played a key role in America's economic and political expansion into the Pacific. http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/02/11/us-hawaii-shipwreck-idUSTRE71A7DS20110211

Groupon says it has pulled the ads first aired on Super Bowl XLV that struck many viewers as making light of the plight of the people of Tibet to plug Groupon's services. "We hate that we offended people, and we're very sorry that we did - it's the last thing we wanted," CEO Andrew Mason wrote in a blog post on February 10: "We will run something less polarizing instead. We thought we were poking fun at ourselves, but clearly the execution was off and the joke didn't come through. I personally take responsibility; although we worked with a professional ad agency, in the end, it was my decision to run the ads." One of the 30-second spots, for which Groupon paid close to $3 million, opens with picturesque scenes of Tibet, as actor Timothy Hutton calls attention to the troubles of its people. "Mountainous Tibet," he somberly intones, "one of the most beautiful places in the world. This is Timothy Hutton. The people of Tibet are in trouble, their very culture in jeopardy." His mood then shifts abruptly to one of jaunty surprise. "But they still whip up an amazing fish curry. And since 200 of us bought on Groupon.com, we're getting $30 worth of Tibetan food for just $15." The other Groupon spots made fun of saving whales and the devastation of Brazil's rainforest. Mason had said the ads were intended only as a "spoof" of celebrity-endorsed public service announcements. Ironically, Groupon first came into life as a website called The Point, whose purpose was to help activists and others organize and raise money for worthy causes. Though the Super Bowl ads did not say it, Groupons' own website currently encourages users to donate to the three causes its ads lampooned: the Tibet Fund, Greenpeace and RAN (the Rainforest Action Network). Moreover, Groupon offers to match donations in part.
http://abcnews.go.com/Business/groupon-pulls-contoversial-super-bowl-commercials/story?id=12895249

Looking like a massive computer chip or the disc of the sun rising up from the Mediterranean coast, the hypermodern successor to the ancient library of Alexandria stands out as a beacon of hope, efficiency and enlightenment among the crumbling buildings of Egypt's second-largest city. This revived storehouse of knowledge, destroyed at least twice in classical antiquity, has been spared damage in the country's current violent unrest after Egyptian youths held hands last week to form a human cordon around the massive building on the Alexandria Corniche. "Not a single stone has been thrown at the glass facade," said Ismail Serageldin, the Harvard-educated polymath who directs the library, by phone February 7 from his office inside the building. In 2002, the complex opened in a soaring structure, designed by the Norwegian architectural firm Snøhetta, on roughly the same site where the ancient library disappeared 1,600 years earlier. The new library, funded largely by Unesco, the Egyptian government and other Arab nations, was initially greeted with skepticism from human-rights activists, academics and foreign observers. In less than 10 years of operation, the library has introduced information technology considered cutting edge anywhere on the globe. Its researchers have devised optical character-recognition software for Arabic and digitized key manuscripts for dissemination over the Internet. With some 1.5 million visitors and 700 events last year, the Bibliotheca Alexandrina (the library is formally known by its Latin name) has become a gathering place for scientists, literary figures and other thinkers from around the world. The reincarnated library contains four museums, a planetarium, a children's science center, a library for the blind and eight research institutes. It holds some 1.6 million volumes at present, including a recent gift of 500,000 books from the Bibliothèque Nationale de France. The library has access to 50,000 electronic journals, and it houses one of the few archives in the world of every web page on the Internet, which apparently has managed to remain operative despite the Egyptian government's shutdown of Internet access during the current unrest. http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704709304576124100786047160.html

Five claims to the same title
"The Grand Canyon of the East," Ausable Chasm, New York, has been open to the public as a tourist attraction since 1870. http://www.roadsideamerica.com/story/11882
Letchworth State Park in Castile, New York, renowned as the "Grand Canyon of the East," is one of the most scenically magnificent areas in the eastern U.S. http://nysparks.state.ny.us/parks/79/details.aspx
Often called the "Grand Canyon of the East," Little River Canyon in Mentone, Alabama, is more than 11 miles long and reaches depths of nearly 700 feet. http://www.exploresouthernhistory.com/desotofalls1.html
A 50-mile gorge, now known as the "Grand Canyon of the East" or the "Pennsylvania Grand Canyon" or "Pine Creek Gorge" near Wellsboro Pennsylvania http://www.shgresources.com/pa/symbols/festival/
The New River in West Virginia is the oldest river on the continent, flowing northward through deep canyons to form what is commonly referred to as ‘The Grand Canyon of the East.’ http://www.raftinginfo.com/rafting/rivers/new-river.php

Ohio may yet get on track with President Obama's newly announced $53 billion initiative to build a nationwide, high-speed rail network. A bipartisan group of northern Ohio congressmen met February 10 with Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood to discuss building a high-speed rail line along Lake Erie that would link Cleveland with Chicago, Detroit, Toledo, and Buffalo, and also include routes to Youngstown and Pittsburgh. Building a line along the lake is a top-tier part of Mr. Obama's rail program. Rep. Marcy Kaptur (D., Toledo) said the meeting lasted about an hour and described it as “a very, very productive discussion.” She said she did her best to impress upon Mr. LaHood and the other officials the importance of rail to the economy of northwest Ohio. “I told him that transportation for us is destiny,” she explained. Miss Kaptur said she outlined her dream project of separating freight and passenger trains so the passenger trains don't get delayed when there is a conflict between the two. She said she touted modernizing passenger rail with high-speed, 200 mph service so, “You could live in Toledo and work in Chicago if you wanted to.” She said she also brought up the idea of a tunnel under Lake Erie connecting northern Ohio to Ontario, which she called “Canada's most productive province.” http://www.toledoblade.com/article/20110211/NEWS16/302119997/-1/RSS

Top ten uncracked codes
1. The Phaistos Disk
2. Linear A
3. Kryptos
4. Chinese Gold Bar Cipher
5. Beale Ciphers
6. Voynich Manuscript
7. The Dorabella Cipher
8. Chaocipher
9. The D’Agapeyeff cipher
10. Taman Shud Read their stories at: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/howaboutthat/8293375/Top-10-uncracked-codes.html

Don't believe everything you hear from tour guides
Amsterdam: "Sugar cane is grown in Canada." Savannah: "George Washington was 5' 2" tall."

The sugar industry has been a source of debate for many years. In fact, it started after the War of 1812--which if you didn’t know, lasted a bit longer than a year. To encourage the growth of sugar in Louisiana, the United States government imposed a steep tariff on imported sugar. This tax was put into effect to provide an artificial floor price for sugar grown in the US, as a means to try to make the industry profitable. So the American sugar industry has always had a lot of artificial support. Sugar refining has been around a long time, since the seventh century at least. Sugar beets are grown commercially in twelve states, as a summer crop in northern states like Michigan and Minnesota and as a winter crop in warmer climates like California. Sugar cane is only grown commercially in four states: Florida, Texas, Louisiana, and Hawaii. Anecdotally, I see sugar cane grown by small farmers in South Carolina, but it isn’t on the grand scale of commercial production. http://www.home-ec101.com/beet-sugar-v-cane-sugar-august-2010/

The term sugar usually refers to sucrose, which is also called "table sugar" or "saccharose." Sucrose is a white crystalline disaccharide. It is often obtained from sugar cane or sugar beet. Sucrose is the most popular of the various sugars for flavoring, as well as properties (such as mouthfeel, preservation, and texture) of beverages and food. The etymology reflects the spread of the commodity. The English word "sugar"originates from the Arabic word سكر sukkar, itself derived from Sanskrit शर्करा sharkara. It most probably came to England by way of Italian merchants. The contemporary Italian word is zucchero, whereas the Spanish and Portuguese words, azúcar and açúcar respectively, have kept a trace of the Arabic definite article. The Old French word is zuchre - contemporary French sucre. The earliest Greek word attested is σάκχαρη [sákχari]. A satisfactory pedigree explaining the spread of the word has yet to be done. The International Commission for Uniform Methods of Sugar Analysis sets standards for the measurement of the purity of refined sugar, known as ICUMSA numbers; lower numbers indicate a higher level of purity in the refined sugar. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sugar

ProMelt is an eco-friendly deicer that combines salt with a byproduct from sugar beet processing. The product has a slightly tacky texture so there’s no need to mix it with sand. This will decrease the amount of dirt tracked into buildings, reducing damage to tiles and carpets and lowering clean-up. The product will provide better anti-icing and deicing performance than rock salt alone, reducing the number of applications and quantity needed. http://sustainability.uiowa.edu/blog/?p=308