Cortés ordering his fleet to be destroyed may be one of the iconic moments in history. In 1519, Hernán Cortés led an expedition of 11 ships from Cuba to Mexico. On arriving in Mexico, the crews found themselves vastly outnumbered by the Aztecs and many were on the verge of mutiny, intending to sail back to Cuba. Cortes ordered the 10 remaining ships of his fleet destroyed. (One ship had already been sent back to Cuba with news of the landing.) There is disagreement as to whether the ships were burned, scuttled or run up on the beach. When reinforcements and supplies arrived a year later, Cortés had those 16 ships destroyed as well.
500 years later, where the ships were destroyed remains a mystery. Now, however, an international team of archaeologists is searching for the wreckage of the lost fleets. They may have found the first clue in an anchor with a well-preserved wooden stock. Wood samples from the stock were sent to two different laboratories, and their testing suggests the samples came from a tree felled between 1417 and 1530, the general time period of the conquest of Mexico. The wood of the stock may also be a type of red oak indigenous to northern Spain.
Just after Midnight, on April 1, the river cruiser 
Are you interested in acquiring a 
For several months now, 
If you happen to have been on the Hudson or East River waterfront in Manhattan recently, there is a good chance that you might have seen a 
Last weekend, the cruise ship Viking Sky, with over 1,300 passengers and crew aboard, 
When the 
Horseshoe crabs are an ancient variety of arthropods, which are not actually crabs. Having remained largely unchanged in about 450 million years, the horseshoe crab is considered by many to be a living fossil. One of the reasons that horseshoe crabs have survived so long is that they have a highly robust immune system. Indeed, the horseshoe crab’s bright blue blood has remarkable antibacterial properties. 
Last month we 
On Maryland’s Eastern Shore and in a handful of other ports around the country, there is a sailors’ tradition of burning your socks on the vernal equinox, the first day of Spring. If you have been wearing the same woolen stockings all winter, this may be a good time to commit them to the flames.
If a science fiction writer wanted to create a really bizarre alien space creature, using an octopus as a model would not be a bad place to start. After all, an