RENO, Nev. & MILPITAS, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--May 24, 2023--

The Pentagon has withheld payments of $7 million a piece on the first four F-35s upgraded by Lockheed

A massive shipwreck which hasn’t been seen since it sank 128 years ago has been discovered by a crew making a nature documentary. Filmmakers were working on a project about a mussel species which lives in the Great Lakes in the US when they made the unexpected find. Yvonne Drebert and Zach Melnick were researching the invasive quagga mussel when they stumbled upon the steamship Africa, Fox Weather reports. The ship was sunk in 1895 after travelling from Ohio to Ontario on Lake Huron in dangerous conditions. The wreck was found after the filmmakers’ underwater drone detected something big and a camera was sent down to take a look. “It got more and more definition as we got closer and closer, and all of a sudden, we could see, ‘Wow, this is a steamship, a wooden steamship!'” Melnik said. “So this is old, and it is incredibly well intact.” The discovery was made possible due to the mussel species, which had covered the wreckage. The ship was identified as the Africa. Since the discovery, families of the people who were lost on board have been in touch with the filmmakers. “One of the incredible things that’s happened since this story has come to light just a couple of weeks ago is that several of the descendants of family members who died on this wreck so many years ago have reached out to us,” Melnick said. “We’re working with those families to try to find a way to remember those sailors who had died 128 years ago.” The mussel species will eventually destroy the wreckage, and the quagga can be hugely damaging to natural environments. The Center of Invasive Species Research in Riverside, California, reports that quagga [and zebra mussels] invasions “have had catastrophic impacts in the ecosystems in which they have established.” “These organisms clog water intake structures (e.g., pipes and screens), which greatly increases maintenance costs for water treatment and power plants,” the organization adds on its website. “Recreational activities on lakes and rivers are adversely affected as mussels accumulate on docks, buoys, boat hulls, anchors and beaches can become heavily encrusted.” “Interestingly, invasions by quagga and zebra mussels have been documented as having some positive affects on receiving ecosystems. For example, filtration of water by mussels as they extract food removes particulate matter. This filtration has improved water clarity, and reduced the eutrophication of polluted lakes.” Sign up for our free Indy100 weekly newsletter Have your say in our news democracy. Click the upvote icon at the top of the page to help raise this article through the indy100 rankings

German Chancellor Olaf Scholz brushed off the latest bid by his Free Democrat coalition partners to reverse the

Genesis Global Trading, an affiliate of Barry Silbert’s Digital Currency Group, will wind down its spot trading crypto

Analysts have a more precise measurement of how much US natural gas goes directly into the atmosphere, worsening

As part of Microsoft's acquisition of Activision Blizzard, the developer and publisher's titles could come to Ubisoft's streaming platform instead of Xbox Cloud Gaming.

PLANO, Texas--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Jul 13, 2023--

If you thought Australia’s spiders were scary, wait until you see the prehistoric version. Scientists have found a fossilised giant trapdoor spider in New South Wales, only the fourth specimen of its kind to be found in Australia. The creature would have roamed and hunted in the surrounding areas which were once a lush rainforest, researchers said in a recently filed report. Last year, scientists unearthed fossils of the rainforest area from millions of years ago, teeming with specimens including plants, trapdoor spiders, giant cicadas and wasps. Now the area is a grassland region known as McGraths Flat. Researchers have named the spider fossil ‘Megamonodontium mccluskyi’. It would have lived in the Miocene period 11m to 16m years ago. “Only four spider fossils have ever been found throughout the whole continent, which has made it difficult for scientists to understand their evolutionary history,” said palaeontologist Matthew McCurry of the University of New South Wales and the Australian Museum. “That is why this discovery is so significant, it reveals new information about the extinction of spiders and fills a gap in our understanding of the past. “The closest living relative of this fossil now lives in wet forests in Singapore through to Papua New Guinea. “This suggests that the group once occupied similar environments in mainland Australia but have subsequently gone extinct as Australia became more arid.” The spider was found among many other Miocene fossils. In some of them, the fossils were so well preserved that subcellular structures could be made out. “Scanning electron microscopy allowed us to study minute details of the claws and setae on the spider's pedipalps, legs and the main body,” said virologist Michael Frese of the University of Canberra. The details meant scientists could confidently place it near the modern Monodontium, or trapdoor spider. However, it is five times larger than its modern day relatives. Megamonodontium mccluskyi's body is 23.31 millimetres long – that is just over an inch. The discovery of the species also tells us something of the past climate of Australia, the report added. The fact that it was found in a layer of rainforest sediment means the region was once much wetter than it is now. That could, in turn, help scientists understand how a warming climate has already altered the country’s life forms – and how it might change them again. "Not only is it the largest fossilized spider to be found in Australia but it is the first fossil of the family Barychelidae that has been found worldwide," said arachnologist Robert Raven of Queensland Museum. "There are around 300 species of brush-footed trapdoor spiders alive today, but they don't seem to become fossils very often. "This could be because they spend so much time inside burrows and so aren't in the right environment to be fossilized." The findings were published in the Zoological Journal of the Linnean Society. Sign up to our free Indy100 weekly newsletter Have your say in our news democracy. Click the upvote icon at the top of the page to help raise this article through the indy100 rankings.

TOKYO--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Jul 18, 2023--

President Joe Biden will announce how much money each state is set to receive from the largest-ever federal investment in broadband expansion

South Africa is setting up an office to facilitate private investment in the water industry in a bid