Industrial Revolution iron method ‘was taken from Jamaica by Briton’

An innovation that propelled Britain to become the world’s leading iron exporter during the Industrial Revolution was appropriated from an 18th-century Jamaican foundry, historical records suggest.

The Cort process, which allowed wrought iron to be mass-produced from scrap iron for the first time, has long been attributed to the British financier turned ironmaster Henry Cort. It helped launch Britain as an economic superpower and transformed the face of the country with “iron palaces”, including Crystal Palace, Kew Gardens’ Temperate House and the arches at St Pancras train station.

Now, an analysis of correspondence, shipping records and contemporary newspaper reports reveals the innovation was first developed by 76 black Jamaican metallurgists at an ironworks near Morant Bay, Jamaica. Many of these metalworkers were enslaved people trafficked from west and central Africa, which had thriving iron-working industries at the time.

Archaeologists Find 3,000-Year-Old Sword So Well Preserved It ‘Almost Still Shines’

Designing the First Apple Macintosh: The Engineers’ Story

In 1979 the Macintosh personal computer existed only as the pet idea of Jef Raskin, a veteran of the Apple II team, who had proposed that Apple Computer Inc. make a low-cost “appliance”-type computer that would be as easy to use as a toaster. Mr. Raskin believed the computer he envisioned, which he called Macintosh, could sell for US $1000 if it was manufactured in high volume and used a powerful microprocessor executing tightly written software.

ESA’s BepiColombo probe conducts third flyby of Mercury

The European Space Agency’s (ESA) BepiColombo spacecraft, which is in the midst of its seven-year journey to Mercury, has successfully completed its third flyby of the solar system’s innermost planet.

BepiColombo passed 236 kilometers over the night side of Mercury on Monday, June 19 at 19:34 UTC, and started imaging with its monitoring cameras as it passed into sunlight 13 minutes after its closest approach. The imaging opportunity lasted until 44 hours after closest approach. Beagle Rupes, along with a 218-kilometer diameter peak-ring impact basin that was newly named after Jamaican artist Edna Manley, were notable features in the images.

During the flyby, most of BepiColombo’s science instruments were active. This was the first flyby where BELA (BepiColombo Laser Altimeter) and MORE (Mercury Orbiter Radio-science Experiment) were active, though BELA was only on for functional test purposes. BELA will measure the shape of Mercury’s surface, while MORE will measure Mercury’s core and gravitational field.

Monster gravitational waves spotted for first time

Gravitational waves are back, and they’re bigger than ever.

After the historic first detection of the space-time rattles in 2015 using ground-based detectors, researchers could have now rediscovered Albert Einstein’s waves with an entirely different technique. The approach tracks changes in the distances between Earth and beacon stars in its Galactic neighbourhood called pulsars, which reveal how the space in between is stretched and squeezed by the passage of gravitational waves.

Whereas the original discovery spotted waves originating from the collision and merger of two star-sized black holes, the most likely source of the latest finding is the combined signal from many pairs of much larger black holes — millions or even billions of times the mass of the Sun — slowly orbiting each other in the hearts of distant galaxies. These waves are thousands of times stronger and longer than those found in 2015, with wavelengths of up to tens of light years. By contrast, the ripples detected since 2015 using a technique called interferometry are just tens or hundreds of kilometres long.