The USNO Millennium Time Ball
Last night in New York City, people watched, primarily on-line or on television, as a jeweled ball dropped in Times Square at exactly midnight to mark the arrival of the New Year, 2021. In past years, the crowd in Times Square numbered up to a million people. This year, as a result of the pandemic, there were literally only a few dozen people in attendance.
Nevertheless, the ball still dropped at midnight. The six-ton Waterford crystal ball covered in 32,276 LED lights was not actually “dropped” but lowered from a flag pole on the roof of One Times Square. In New York City, the tradition dates back to 1907. But where did the tradition of dropping a ball to mark the time originate? The practice dates back to 1829 and was related to helping sailors calculate their position at sea. Here is an updated repost.
A few years ago, we posted about the 
The pandemic has been brutal to the restaurant industry. Likewise, the small-scale oyster growers of Barnegat and Delaware bays have been extremely hard hit as restaurants cut back on their orders or shut down altogether. 
A new blue whale population has been discovered in the Arabian Sea and Western Indian Ocean according to a 
Almost a decade ago, the container ship
Every year, the 
Ship scrapping is a slow and methodical process. A ship is typically run up on the scrapping ways, which can be a concrete platform or a sloping sandy beach. As burners cut away the upper sections of the ship, it gets lighter and floats a little higher allowing winches to pull the ship a bit farther up the ways. As more steel is cut away the ship is pulled progressively farther ashore until the entire structure is reduced to scrap metal to be hauled away for resmelting in a local steel mill.
According to an ancient sailors’ legend, we are in the middle of the 
On Monday night, December 21, the planets 
Severe weather off the east coast of Australia has left beaches in the Northern Rivers region of New South Wales and on the Gold and Sunshine coasts covered in a thick layer of sea foam, attracting crowds of curious locals, and, at least potentially, venomous sea snakes. 
At roughly this point in the last sailing of the Vendee Globe in 2016-2017, 
Sail-assist propulsion on commercial ships is developing rapidly, featuring a range of technologies including rotor sails, rigid wing sails, ventilated turbo sails, and even conventional fabric sails.
Today, steel was cut for the first 
A year ago we 
Today, the first doses of the