Also on today’s menu:
The Dinosaur Embryo
The Philosopher’s Stone
Having recently visited Kaua’i and driven past the Pacific Missile Range Facility on the way to some spectacular scenery on the Garden Isle, the news that at least four people died when a civilian-contracted helicopter crashed in Hawaii on Tuesday caught my eye. (We had left the island on Sunday.) The crash occurred while the helicopter was flying in support of a range training operation.
The Pacific Missile Range Facility Barking Sands is the world’s largest instrumented, “multi-dimensional” testing and training missile range, according to the U.S. Navy. “PMRF is the only range in the world where submarines, surface ships, aircraft, and space vehicles can operate and be tracked simultaneously.”
The Sikorsky S-61N helicopter was optimized for use over water, for example to support oil rig operations. Versions were also used by all branches of the U.S. military. Licensees in the United Kingdom and other countries have also built the aircraft.
The Dinosaur Embryo
Another connection with Kaua’i was its role in the history of film, including several scenes in Jurassic Park, which we had to watch again after returning from Hawai’i. Sure enough, we recognized several of the sites where key scenes were filmed, and it reminded us the article we saw last December when scientists announced the discovery of a perfectly preserved dinosaur embryo that was preparing to hatch from its egg.
The embryo, estimated to be at least 66 million years old, was discovered in Ganzhou in southern China, and is believed to be a toothless theropod dinosaur, or oviraptorosaur. It has been named Baby Yingliang. Dr. Fion Waisum Ma, a researcher, said it is “the best dinosaur embryo ever found in history.”
The discovery has given researchers a greater understanding of the link between dinosaurs and modern birds, a key point in the 1990s film. The fossil shows the embryo was in a curled position known as “tucking”, which is seen in birds shortly before they hatch.
The Philosopher’s Stone
Raiders of the Lost Ark also was filmed in part on Kaua’i, which leads us to the next story: Megan Piorko, who got interested in the 16th- and 17th-century alchemist and physician Arthur Dee during her studies at Georgia State University, was intrigued by an alchemical notebook in the archives of the British Library, to which both Dee and his famous alchemist, polymath father, John Dee, had contributed. The fabric and leather-bound manuscript has 31 leaves of both parchment and paper, with certain pages written upside-down. On one of those inverted pages, she found a puzzling passage written in code. On an opposing page was a strange-looking table filled with letters. She later discovered that the coded text had been hiding the alchemists’ recipe to the elixir of life, or the “Philosopher’s Stone.”
Piorko, Sarah Lang, and Richard Bean eventually decoded text that describes the specific procedures to create the elixir of life in three universal alchemical phases: black, white, and red. If all the steps are followed correctly, “then you will have a truly gold-making elixir by whose benevolence all the misery of poverty is put to flight and those who suffer from any illness will be restored to health,” the text states.
The trio is working on an academic journal article about the cipher and its secrets, which will include the experiment procedures and more about the man behind the cipher, Arthur Dee. Piorko said Dee “found himself to be in his dad’s shadow a lot” and discovering the recipe to the Philosopher’s Stone gave him a chance to step out of John Dee’s shadow. While Piorko is not confident that Dee’s formula will amount to anything, she admires the “search for higher meaning” that he and other alchemists aspired to.
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