Marine scientists have weighed in on the identity of the bizarre golden object removed from the bottom of the ocean off the Alaskan coast. 

The shiny object is delicate to the touch, like skin tissue, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). 

It could be egg casing or the remains of a marine sponge, but DNA tests in the lab could reveal an entirely new animal completely unknown to science. 

NOAA experts compared it to something ‘from a horror movie’ in reference to a scene in ‘Alien‘ where John Hurt’s character discovers the ‘facehugger’ on another planet. 

Dr Tammy Horton at the National Oceanography Centre in Southampton couldn’t say what the mystery object is but agreed it’s ‘potentially a new species’. 

‘It is not unusual to find unknowns in the deep sea – we have a lot to explore,’ she told MailOnline. 

‘They have a sample and will be able to study it more closely and will probably do some genetic analyses to determine at least what sort of animal it came from.’

Notably, the object was found with a gaping hole at the front, suggesting something was birthed from it. 

‘It could indeed be an egg case of some kind (explaining the “exit” hole),’ Dr Horton said. 

Dr Lucy Woodall, associate professor in marine conservation at the University of Exeter, agreed it looks like a sponge – an immobile aquatic invertebrate much like coral. 

‘The hole is probably just damage that has been suffered over time, but then again it could provide a whole new insight as to how life in the deep sea survives and thrives,’ she told MailOnline.

‘However the deep sea is full of wonders that we are only just discovering. 

‘I look forward to learning more about it from the taxonomists who will be working on the collected specimen.’

Kerry Howell, a professor of deep-sea ecology at the University of Plymouth, said that the object is ‘weird’ and is unlike anything she’s encountered. 

‘In my 20 years exploring the deep sea I have not seen anything like that,’ she told MailOnline. 

‘It’s always exciting to see new things and I will wait eagerly for the analysis on the sample to understand what it actually is. 

‘There are many many undiscovered species in the deep sea so this could be related to a new species quite easily.’ 

Professor Howell also said the hole could be where the creature inhales and exhales if it is a sponge, or where the animal hatched from if it is egg casing.

Dr Pierre Josso, a postdoctoral research scientist at British Geological Survey, said the object is ‘intriguing, but not truly surprising’.

‘We discover new biological structures or species during most dives as the seabed has been seldomly explored,’ he told MailOnline. 

‘New species – or relic of development stages of known and unknown species – have been catalogued at an increasing rate over the last decade as the deep ocean is being explored with more scrutiny than ever before.

‘As for its origin, function, and the reason for a hole in its structure, it is too early to tell.’ 

Whilst the ‘golden’ appearance is eye catching, this is mostly due to shine from the headlights from the remotely operated vehicle (ROV) that removed it from its rock, Dr Josso added. 

A later photo of the object in the lab after it had been brought to shore shows it has a light brown-yellowy colour, which is ‘close to many other organic hues’, he said. 

Murray Roberts, a professor of marine biology at the University of Edinburgh, agreed with NOAA scientists that it could be an egg case.

‘Several species, including vulnerable deep-sea fish like sharks and rays, lay their egg cases on seamounts or in cold-water coral habitats,’ he told MailOnline.

‘Hence the hole – something hatched out and swam off.’ 

Meanwhile, a spokesperson at the Natural History Museum in London said: ‘Our experts have said that there are plenty of new species of deep-sea benthic sponge out in the deep sea.’ 

The ‘golden egg’ was found on day eight of NOAA’s Seascape Alaska 5 expedition, which runs from August 23 to September 16. 

Any fans who want to witness any similarly remarkable discoveries can follow the progress of the mission on a dedicated webpage on the NOAA website. 

Have scientists discovered a new species of HUMAN? Ancient skull belonging to a child with no chin who lived 300,000 years ago suggests our family tree ‘needs another branch’

• A fossilised skill, jaw and leg bones were found in Hualongdong, China in 2019
• Interestingly, researchers say the unknown species ‘did not possess a true chin’ 

By Sam Tonkin

Updated: 14:22 EDT, 7 August 2023

They are smarter than your average bear.

As the smallest of the bear family, sun bears are often not remarked for their size, but are more well known for their above average intelligence. 

Experts told MailOnline that the animals are ‘incredibly clever’ as they are able to remember the locations of food and mimic each other’s facial expressions to communicate. 

And while they have no special evolutionary link to any primates, their ability to stand upright and their unusually straight limbs can trick some into believing they are more human-like than they really are. 

It therefore comes as no surprise that the behaviour and looks of one sun bear in China have left people around the world debating whether she really is a bear or a person in a costume.  

Kim Vaughan, Section Leader of Primates and Small Mammals at Paradise Wildlife Park told MailOnline: ‘All ursids [members of the bear family] can stand due to their strong physique. 

‘Their limbs are straighter unlike terrestrial carnivores, Plantigrades disturb their weight to their back feet which provides excellent balance and standing.

‘Sun bears are incredibly clever, they can remember locations of food and have complex facial expressions to communicate.’

The creatures will often stand up right for a greater view of their surroundings or to help them smell far-off objects. Like other bears it can also be a defence behaviour to protect their territory.

Ironically, sun bears are nocturnal creatures and instead get their name from the yellow cresecent shape on their chest, which is said to resemble a setting sun.

The species is also known as the ‘honey bear’ due to its love for honey – which it extracts by using its long tongue. 

They are found living in forests across Southeast Asia, from southern China to eastern India and as far south as Indonesia, and while they are playful with other sun bears they are largely solitary animals.

Sun bears are omnivores and eat a mixture of fruits, berries and roots as well as instects, small birds and lizards. 

Sun bears have extremely long claws, which can exceed four inches, making them well adpated for climbing as well as ripping open trees and termite nests in search for food. 

They have also been known to use their claws to pick open locks, with one captive bear having used its claws to open a cupboard locked by a key to retrieve some honey inside.

Sun bears have also been observed opening their mouths to match their playmates when they are interacting face-to-face.

In the behavioural study, researchers found that bears can use facial expressions to communicate with others in a similar way to humans and apes.

Researchers claim that such facial mimicry has not been seen in primates outside humans and gorillas. 

They said that this ‘strongly suggests’ that other mammals could also perform this complex social skill and, in addition, have a degree of social sensitivity.

Sun bears are listed as Vulnerable on the IUCN Red List due to the illegal bear bile farm trade found in Southeast Asia. 

Bear bile farming is an illegal trade that sadly has devasted sun bears, moon bears and brown bears across Asia and parts of Europe.

The increasing rate of deforestation across Southeast Asia has also lead to a decline in the species’ populations as they are largely forest dependant.

One sun bear in Hanzhou Zoo, in China, has this week left people around the world baffled since footage of the human-like zoo animal first emerged – with fans debating whether she really is a bear or a person in a costume.

Suspicion around the bear’s human-like ways first arose online after the sun bear was seen standing, begging for food, and seemingly waving like a person might.

The camera angle also showed an unflattering view of sagging fur around the cretaure’s behind – which many suggested made it look like a costume.

Dr Wong Siew Te, a Malaysian wildlife biologist and sun bear specialist, added he ‘didn’t know whether to laugh or cry’ when he heard the allegations about the human-like bear, named Angela, which lives in Hanzhou Zoo, China.

‘There is no doubt that it is a sun bear. I currently have four rescue sun bears in my centre and it shows that people know very little about them,’ he told The Mirror.

Dr Wong did sympathise with people who mistook the bear, named Angela, for a human however, pointing out that zoos in China have previously ‘made up fake stuff’.

When Dr Wong himself first saw a sun bear, he said, ‘I… was like: ‘Wow and yes it looks like a human’s wearing a bear suit’, but this is just sun bear and that is what is amazing’. 

Dr Ashleigh Marshall, an expert from Chester Zoo, also weighed in on the clip. She told the BBC that the animal ‘is definitely a real bear’.

She explained that the folds on its back, assumed to be evidence of an ill-fitting costume, help protect the bear from predators, as the looseness allows the bear to ‘turn around in their skin’ and fight back if grabbed.

The zoo was quick to dismiss claims the animal playing dress-up and has insisted that Angela is a real bear, explaining that sun bears can look a little different to what people might expect.

A spokesperson said: ‘When it comes to bears, the first thing that comes to mind is a huge figure and astonishing power.

‘But not all bears are behemoths and danger personified.’

They were also careful to dismiss claims Angela was a person in a suit, adding: ‘If you get someone to wear such thick fur in this summer heat, they won’t last more than a few minutes before they need to lie down.

‘We are a government-operated zoo. There will never be situations like that.’

Climate change may have propelled the evolution of humanity forward by giving humanity’s ancient ancestors bigger brains, a new study has suggested.

Researchers from Washington University in St Louis found increases in the brain sizes of ancient hominins (humanity’s ancestors) aligned with glacial phases more than 600,000 years ago.

The team developed a computer simulation to mathematically show how new mating habits and ‘parental cooperation’ needed to survive during an inhospitable Ice Age would have ‘sped up’ the evolution of the human brain.

The simulation suggested that hominins sought mates similar to themselves due to the rising importance of necessities like fire, food, and shelter to survive the deadly cold. 

The new mating habits, which the researchers call ‘positive assortative mating,’ could have also helped advance critical human abilities — like the development of language-based communication and fire.

Plus, greater ingenuity and a willingness to cooperate between parents, according to their study, would have vastly helped humanity’s ancestors prevent cold-related deaths, including hypothermia.

‘It has long been argued that climate change was an important driver of hominin evolution, with considerable attention given to glacial phases,’ according to the new study’s lead author, economist Bruce Petersen.

‘In The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex, Charles Darwin placed great emphasis on sexual selection for hominin evolution,’ Petersen said. 

‘However, its role as an evolutionary force was then largely ignored for over a century.’

In other words, an Ice Age truce in the war between the sexes improved the chances for intelligent parents who got along with each other and taught their children well. 

Petersen used anthropological and climate data to develop the simulation and found that ‘periods of severe climate change’ beginning with a major glacial freeze 676,000 to 621,000 years ago would have led to a period of increased sexual pickiness.

This ‘Ice Age within an Ice Age,’ dubbed MIS 16 after the marine isotopes used to identify it, would have led to what Petersen calls ‘positive assortative mating.’

‘This means that mates are less specialized,’ Petersen said, ‘in part because complementarities arise only when mates work together.’  

‘An efficient mating system surely became ever more important with the lengthening of offspring dependency and the start of the severe glacial phases,’ he noted.

The research team’s simulation pitted three categories of early men against each other: first, a group that was the most intelligent but physically weak, a second ‘intermediate’ group and lastly, a third that was the strongest but least intelligent.

Their mathematical models found that the positive assortative mating of pairs from the first category not only produced the fittest offspring — but was often the only pairing with enough children for their genes to survive the brutal glacial freeze.

‘Many scientists have argued that the enormous advantages of both language and fire would have placed strong selective pressures on these behaviors,’ Petersen said.

Using economics models, Petersen described these as ‘home-produced family public goods’ which were ‘demanding to produce’ and included fire, language, shelter, and child training.  

The new research also suggests that survival pressures due to climate change would have spurred physical changes, reducing ‘dimorphism’ or body differences between the sexes.

‘Finally, this paper suggests that the economics of the family, particularly the focus on assortative mating, can be useful for future research on the evolution of sexual dimorphism in Homo [early hominins more broadly, not just Homo sapiens or others].’  

‘A prediction of this paper’s model,’ Petersen noted, is a ‘decline in body size dimorphism.’ 

These changes in sex-based difference — height, weight and strength — ‘may have continued well into the time period of Homo heidelbergensis: an extinct species of human known from fossils dating from 600,000 to 200,000 years ago in Africa, Europe, and possibly Asia,’ he said.

Petersen believes that extreme Ice Age hardship was a key instance in which ‘positive’ natural selection, meaning co-parenting choices, had a bigger impact on human evolution than ‘negative’ natural selection, from deaths and competition. 

‘The paper applies core economic principles, rarely used to explain human evolution prior to Homo sapiens,’ Petersen added. 

‘Sexual selection and parental cooperation, in conjunction with severe glacial phases, helped drive hominin intelligence in the Middle Pleistocene.’

Scientists can now control human DNA with electricity using new tech that ‘sparks genes back to life’

By Matthew Phelan For Dailymail.Com

Updated: 18:13 EDT, 1 August 2023

Animal experts have rubbished claims a Chinese sun bear is, in fact, a man in a suit.

Speculation broke online after a viral clip showed the strange bear standing on two legs, drawing attention to its saggy bottom fur and stumpy little legs.

Now, a video from another angle sheds new light on the bizarre story. 

The Hangzhou Zoo in China quickly responded, writing as the four-year-old Malayan bear named Angela, ‘it seems you don’t understand me very well’.

They stressed that such deception would not happen at a state-run zoo.

Now, animal experts have weighed in on the issue. Dr Ashleigh Marshall, an expert from Chester Zoo, told the BBC that the animal ‘is definitely a real bear’.

She explained that the folds on its back, assumed to be evidence of an ill-fitting costume, help protect the bear from predators, as the looseness allows the bear to ‘turn around in their skin’ and fight back if grabbed.

The story has circulated world-over, with the zoo itself seeing a 30 per cent jump in visitors.

Mr You told a local news outlet: ‘After seeing this bear standing up on the internet, I wanted to see how it looks in real life, so I came here.’ 

Qian Ming, one of 20,000 a day now making the pilgrimage, told local TV he had travelled 150 miles by train, from Suzhou, to see the bear.

‘We travelled overnight last night to get here,’ he said. 

Hangzhou Zoo was quick to address the bear’s unusual appearance, stating: ‘When it comes to bears, the first thing that comes to mind is a huge figure and astonishing power.

‘But not all bears are behemoths and danger personified.’

A spokesperson from the zoo dismissed claims the bear was a man in a suit, adding: ‘If you get someone to wear such thick fur in this summer heat, they won’t last more than a few minutes before they need to lie down.

‘We are a government-operated zoo. There will never be situations like that.’

Temperatures in the region can reach as high as 40C (104F) in summer. 

Angela has nonetheless captured the world’s attention since Sunday, racking up more than 30 million views online. 

The zoo said that she is ‘dating’ a male bear named Dalu but ‘wants to take things slow’. 

They also asked visitors to refrain from feeding the bears. 

Sun bears have distinct features, such as a short, sleek black coat, a pale yellowish crescent on their chests (which gives them their name), and a light-colored muzzle.

They are also known as honey bears – due to their love of honey – and dog-faced bears… for their dog-like faces.

Big paws with hairless soles may look like feet, but are adapted to help them climb.

Sun bears are the size of large dogs, standing at most 1.3 meters (4ft 3′) tall on their hind legs.

Grizzlies and other species can be as tall as 2.8 metres (9ft), according to the zoo.

They are the smallest of the bear species and are native to Southeast Asia.

Although no actors have been caught dressing up as bears in this way before, in 2019 two zoo workers at Yancheng Wild Animal World in Changzhou, China, were seen wearing gorilla costumes and jumping around.

The zoo said it was an April Fools’ prank after receiving a number of complaints. 

MailOnline contacted Hangzhou Zoo for comment.

FOOD

THE FOOD ADVENTURERS 

by Daniel E. Bender (Reaktion Books £20, 352pp)

When I lived in France and my parents-in-law came to visit from Wyre Piddle in Worcestershire, they would fill their car with trusted groceries — Robertsons jelly, Bird’s custard, Heinz ketchup, Branston pickle, sliced white bread and Cheddar cheese.

They weren’t going to risk any fancy foreign muck, like garlic or olive oil.

Daniel Bender, a professor of food studies in Toronto, suggests people are quite right to be nervous of new eating experiences, especially the ‘fiery torments’ of curries and spices, which can burn the mouth ‘like a live coal’ and ’cause tears to flow’. Exactly. The most intense pain I ever endured was in Borneo, when I chewed what I thought was a humble broad bean. It was a chilli.

Who really wants to go all the way to Australia for kangaroo tail stew, or to Bali for minced sea turtle? And it’s never a good idea to drink the water. Typically, ‘worms of various kinds invaded the lymph, circulatory and urinary systems. All from a glass of water carelessly consumed’.

In 1923, the American Centre for Disease Control and Prevention told travellers to expect ‘diarrhoea, nausea and fever’, and people were informed not to be surprised if most places overseas served meals which were ‘unwholesome, dirty, smelly, inedible and contaminated’.

Nevertheless, there have always been hardy souls who positively enjoy tracking down bizarre lunches and dinners, e.g. Anthony Bourdain, who in 2013 swallowed a beating cobra heart in Vietnam.

Bender finds accounts of 18th- and 19th-century travellers who cheerfully tucked into ‘mouldy fish and eggs ready to hatch into chicks’. In Canton (now Guangzhou), people have eaten ‘hashed dog, sinews of whale and rat croquettes’. As Bender argues, though tourists always say they intend ‘to seek out restaurants and food stalls where locals eat’, in practice they prefer to rely on guide-book recommendations, and enter premises where health and safety inspections have been carried out.

Thomas Cook, Cunard, the Hilton hotel chain and other holiday businesses have developed a successful formula, in effect moving passengers from their home environment to foreign parts, while keeping them in isolation. When I went on a Saga cruise up the Amazon with Maureen Lipman for a travel story, our meals had been assembled in Southampton.

Of course, not everyone could be protected by holiday company guarantees. The chief drawback of being European soldiers, administrators, tea and rubber planters and residents, in the days of the empire and the Raj, was the food. Sooner or later everyone ‘succumbed to a variety of illnesses, to dysentery and malaria’.

But you can’t subsist forever on tins and packet soups. If I myself spent more time on the lavvy when I returned from India than I’d spent in the country in the first place, no wonder — bottled water often comes from the kitchen hose pipe, the plastic caps re-sealed with a heated pin.

It’s at this juncture Professor Bender gets a bit woke and political. He’s unhappy with the traditional view about the ‘ignorance, superstition and filthiness of the natives’.

Bender doesn’t like the way ‘tourists enjoyed the racial privilege of servants’, and he’s dismissive of the Hilton hotels’ Trader Vic’s bars, as they represented a false, kitsch idea of Polynesia as ‘a primitive paradise of sensuous women’. He’ll be glad to know, therefore, that the London branch closed last December after 60 years. It was where Peter Sellers took Britt Ekland on their first date.

Where I see travel as involving fantasy, grand hotels, says Bender, were a continuation of imperialism — the demand for comfortable rooms with telephones and private bathrooms ‘a relic of imperialism’.

He is one of those authors, of whom there is an increasing number, encouraged by progressive publishers, who can’t stop fretting about ‘the legacies of race and racism that had produced not only the empire but fascism’. Which is a lot to deduce from a mention of bamboo salad.

A Florida congressman revealed he has seen an image of ‘an orb’ hanging over the skies of the Gulf of Mexico, and he said it was ‘not of any human capability.’

Representative Matt Gaetz made the shocking revelation Wednesday during a House Oversight Committee hearing related to UAPs that heard first-hand accounts from military veterans after they swore under oath.

Gaetz told the panel that he saw an image of a UAP and spoke to pilots who snapped the photo while he and other representatives visited the Eglin Air Force Base in Florida 

‘They saw a sequence of four craft, in a clear diamond formation, for which there is a radar sequence that I, and I alone have observed in the United States Congress,’ he said during the first-of-its-kind hearing Wednesday.

‘One of the pilots goes to check out that diamond formation and sees a large, floating, what I can only describe as an orb. Again, like I said, not of any human capability that I’m aware of.’ 

House lawmakers held the hearing to pressure the executive branch to release more information about unidentified anomalous phenomena (UAP) or UFOs, as Burchett prefers.

The main witnesses were David Grusch, a former high-ranking intelligence official, Ryan Graves, an esteemed former pilot, and Navy veteran fighter pilot Commander David Fravor, who witnessed the 2004 ‘Tic Tac’ UFO.

The three men sworn in at the start of the hearing revealed bombshell after bombshell, but Gaetz also shared a story of an incident a few months ago.

He and Tennessee Representative Tim Burchett visited the Florida Air Base but were initially met with obstacles when they attempted to look into the information.

‘We were not afforded access to all of the flight crew and, initially, we were not afforded access to images and to radar,’ Gaetz said during the hearing.

‘Thereafter, we had a bit of a discussion about how authorities [work] in the United States of America and we did meet with one of the flight crew who took the image.’

He continued to explain the image as lawmakers listened in their seats.

‘The image was of something that I am not able to attach to any human capability, either from the United States or our adversaries,’ said Gaetz, who reminded the room that he has served on the arms service committee for seven years and the committee that oversees technologies with DARPA.

According to Gaetz,  the pilot encountered a fleet of UAPs in diamond formation over the Gulf of Mexico during a flight test designed in open air space.

The pilot flew closer to the formation and spotted the orb floating in the center. 

‘When he approached, he said his radar went down and he had to take this image from one of the lenses manually,’ said Gaetz.

Gaetz also stated that pilots involved in the incident said ‘that if they have a UAP experience, the best thing to do for your career is to forget it.’

That statement echoed the testimony of Grusch when he suggested the US government has murdered people as part of the conspiracy to keep UFOs a secret.

Grusch also claimed that he had been told by multiple credible intelligence officials that the US government had recovered non-human aircraft that had ‘nonhuman’ biological pilots inside them. 

The former US Intelligence agent added that he knows of ‘multiple colleagues’ who were physically injured by UFOs either after encountering them or working on them as part of these special access programs. 

Grusch also said he had faced brutal retaliation after coming forward about his firsthand accounts of UFOs.

‘I do have knowledge of active planned reprisal activity against myself and other colleagues.

‘There were certain colleagues of mine that were brutally administratively attacked. It makes me very upset as a leader to see that happen to other co-workers and superiors of mine in the last three years,’ Grusch added.

‘How do you account for that response? That seems like a bizarre response,’ Maryland Democrat Jamie Raskin asked.

‘I call it administrative terrorism. That’s in their quiver or tool in the toolbox to silence people, especially the career government servants who care about their career, care about their clearance, their reputation, to climb the ladder, and when you threaten that flow, that career path, a lot of people back off, but I’m here to represent those people,’ Grusch said.

‘Presumed human remains’ have been found in the wreckage of the Titan submersible on Wednesday, the US Coast Guard announced.

Several identifiable parts of the ship were lifted ashore on Wednesday afternoon, including the sub’s nose and a large panel which appears to be from its tail end.

Amid those recovered pieces, Coast Guard officials said they discovered human remains, which will now be transported aboard a ship to a port in the United States where they will undergo testing and analysis.

The discoveries surprised experts who suspected Titan was destroyed when it suffered a ‘catastrophic implosion‘ with five people on board during a journey to the wreckage of the Titanic.

In fact, earlier on Wednesday a coroner told DailyMail.com she believed the remains of those onboard — including British billionaire Hamish Harding, French explorer Paul-Henri Nargeolet, OceanGate CEO Stockton Rush and father and son Shahzada and Suleman Dawood — would likely never be recovered.

Officials said Wednesday the remains were ‘carefully removed within the wreckage’ that was recovered earlier in the day.

‘I am grateful for the coordinated international and interagency support to recover and preserve this vital evidence at extreme offshore distances and depths,’ Marine Board of Investigation Capt. Jason Neubauer said in a statement.

‘The evidence will provide investigators from several international jurisdictions with critical insights into the cause of this tragedy,’ he added.

But, Neubauer noted there is a ‘substantial amount of work’ still to be done to understand what happened to the Titan sub and to ‘help ensure a similar tragedy does not occur again.’

The MBI will continue its evidence collection and witness interviews to inform a public hearing about the incident, and Pelagic Research Services — whose remote operating vehicle discovered the debris fields — said its team is ‘still on mission’.

‘They have been working around the clock now for 10 days, through the physical and mental challenges of this operation, and are anxious to finish the mission and return to their loved ones,’ the company said in a statement. 

On Wednesday, a debris field was found on the seafloor, 1,600 feet (500 meters) from the bow of the Titanic, which sits more than two miles (nearly four kilometers) below the ocean’s surface and 400 miles off the coast of Newfoundland, Canada.

The Canadian-flagged Polar Prince cargo vessel towed the Titan out to sea last weekend but lost contact with it about an hour and 45 minutes after the submersible launched into the ocean depths.

News of the missing ship spurred a multinational search-and-rescue operation, which ended when officials announced the sub likely imploded, killing all those onboard instantly.

As a result, Richland County Coroner Naida Rutherford told DailyMail.com it was unlikely human remains would ever be recovered in the search.

She said: ‘When you have any sort of explosion or implosion, there are remains or traces of remains.

‘There is a possibility but given the environment that this happened in it is highly unlikely that they will find remains.

‘Even on land you have animal activity, and in an expansive ocean, so many animals and creatures, and the pressure down there.

‘I think it is unlikely to find remains, certainly in whole parts. It would be very difficult to ID the remains given the conditions in which the implosion happened – and it will be difficult to ascertain who they belonged to.

‘Their bodies would have sustained extensive thermal damage and blunt force trauma from the implosion. Those are things we know as fact.’

For years prior to the implosion, experts had warned that Stockton Rush’s self-designed submersible was not capable of safely reaching the Titanic wreckage on the ocean floor.  

They said its carbon fiber hull, which housed the five crew, was its ‘Achilles heel’ because the material is not considered suitable for dives at the depths reached by the vessel. 

Titanic director James Cameron, a renowned deep sea explorer and submersibles expert, said previously that the hull was likely broken into ‘very small pieces’ in the incident.

‘If I had to put money down on what the finding [of the investigation] will be, the Achilles heel of the sub was the composite cylinder that was the main hull that the people were inside,’ he said.

‘There were two titanium end caps on each end. They are relatively intact on the sea floor. But that carbon fiber composite cylinder is now just in very small pieces. It’s all rammed into one of the hemispheres. It’s pretty clear that’s what failed.’

Carbon fiber is prone to delamination, the process whereby a material fractures into layers while put under pressure.

It is thought the craft’s titanium components better withstood the disaster, while the weaker carbon fiber parts – including the hull – are more likely to have been crushed into tiny pieces.

The parts lifted from the ocean appear to align with Cameron’s observations, including that the larger piece was the vessel’s titanium shell. Investigators will now work to confirm what each piece is.

But, despite these incessant warnings from naval experts, OceanGate had assured the public for year that its Titan submersible was safe. 

The company had boasted in promotional material about Titan’s ‘Real Time Hull Health Monitoring’, which constantly checked the integrity of the vessel throughout the dive.

The system used acoustic sensors and strain gauges to ‘analyze the effects of changing pressure on the vessel as the submersible dives deeper, and accurately assess the integrity of the structure’.

But legal filings reveal a former director of marine operations ‘expressed concern that this was problematic because this type of acoustic analysis would only show when a component is about to fail—often milliseconds before an implosion—and would not detect any existing flaws prior to putting pressure onto the hull.’

Pensioner turns neighbour into human fireball with home-made flame thrower and shoots a woman through the neck with a speargun in argument over an allotment

• ***GRAPHIC CONTENT WARNING***
• Shocking footage shows the moment a man is set alight by a pensioner in Russia
• A woman was also shot in the neck with a speargun during the dispute 

By Arthur Parashar

Published: 10:48 EDT, 26 June 2023 | Updated: 13:02 EDT, 26 June 2023