An intact German World War I submarine containing the bodies of 23 people has been found off the coast of Belgium, authorities said Tuesday.

Western Flanders Governor Carl Decaluwe told The Associated Press that the find on the floor of the North Sea "is very unique."

"It's quite amazing that we found something like this," Decaluwe said. "The impact damage was at the front, but the submarine remains closed and there are 23 people still onboard."

The UB II-type dive boat that was found is 27 meters (88 feet) long and 6 meters (almost 20 feet) wide, and is lying at about a 45 degree angle, between 25-30 meters (82-98 feet) below the surface.

Our February issue, which focused on Petrified Forest National Park, generated a lot of reader interest in this Northern Arizona gem. And a few readers wrote to ask about something we didn't mention in the magazine.

"If the age of the trees and, I assume, tree pieces are more than 200 million years old, why is it that many of the petrified tree sections appear to have been sawed cleanly apart?" asked Bob Klages of Oxford, Michigan. "A bit more of the scientific explanation of the actual process of petrification would also have been fascinating to read about."

To answer Mr. Klages' question, we turned to Bill Parker, the park paleontologist we featured in the issue. "The fossilization process itself is fairly complex," he says, but it goes something like this:

A tree dies, falls over and is buried in a river channel or floodplain, under layers of mud, sand and gravel. In the groundwater table, the tree becomes saturated like a sponge and expands. The water, sand and gravel cut off exposure to oxygen, so the tree doesn't rot. Volcanic ash in the water breaks down, and the silica that was in the ash goes into solution - forming silicic acid, which enters the waterlogged tree and interacts chemically with the wood, altering it to silica and replicating the features of the wood. Over time, you end up with a silica replica of the tree.

How many citizens have ever asked themselves what the United States is doing in Korea in the first place?

In November of 1945, two months after the surrender of Japan, Army Chief of Staff General George Marshall spoke to President Truman and the chief figures of his cabinet about his fears of a "the tragic consequences of a divided China" as Chinese Nationalist forces and Communists resumed their struggle for power and Soviet forces seized control of large areas of Manchuria. The resumption of Soviet power in Manchuria, Marshall emphasized, would result "in the defeat or loss of the major purpose of our war with Japan" (emphasis added).

What could the general have meant by such a statement? What WAS the "major purpose" of the Pacific war? Most Americans are taught that the foremost reason the United States went to war with Japan was the attack on Pearl Harbor. But the reality was that the U.S. and Japan had been on a collision course since the 1920s, and by 1940, in the midst of the global depression, were locked in a mortal struggle over who would ultimately benefit most from the markets and resources of Greater China and East Asia. Japan's Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere was steadily closing the "Open Door" to American penetration of and access to the profitable riches of Asia at the critical moment. As Japan militarily took control of East Asia, the U.S. moved the Pacific Fleet to Hawaii in striking distance of Japan, imposed economic sanctions, embargoed steel and oil, and in August 1941 issued an overt ultimatum to quit China and Vietnam "or else." Seeing the latter as the threat it was, Japan undertook what to Tokyo was the pre-emptive strike at Hawaii. The real reason the U.S. opposed the Japanese in Asia is never discussed and is a forbidden subject in the establishment media, as are the real motives of American foreign policy writ large.

A year or two ago, I saw the much-touted science fiction film Interstellar, and although the plot wasn't any good, one early scene was quite amusing. For various reasons, the American government of the future claimed that our Moon Landings of the late 1960s had been faked, a trick aimed at winning the Cold War by bankrupting Russia into fruitless space efforts of its own. This inversion of historical reality was accepted as true by nearly everyone, and those few people who claimed that Neil Armstrong had indeed set foot on the Moon were universally ridiculed as "crazy conspiracy theorists." This seems a realistic portrayal of human nature to me.

Obviously, a large fraction of everything described by our government leaders or presented in the pages of our most respectable newspapers-from the 9/11 attacks to the most insignificant local case of petty urban corruption-could objectively be categorized as a "conspiracy theory" but such words are never applied. Instead, use of that highly loaded phrase is reserved for those theories, whether plausible or fanciful, that do not possess the endorsement stamp of establishmentarian approval.

Forty years ago, the front page of the Chicago Tribune featured astrologer Jeanne Dixon, and a warning that the West Antarctic Ice Sheet was going to collapse and drown us all. That was during the global cooling scare.
It was one of the coldest winters on record in the US. It snowed in Miami, and they blamed the Polar Vortex and California drought on global cooling.

No world government has ever confirmed the use of numbers stations, but none have flatly denied it either. The stations date back to the Cold War, perhaps earlier, and many are still transmitting. Often, it's a string of numbers recited by a computerized female voice- sometimes the voice of a child.

According to the thousands of enthusiasts who monitor them, the broadcasts could be coded messages sent from intelligence agencies to their spies. They cover vast distances, and they're impossible to decode. When the public asks, government officials and bureaucrats typically respond with something like, "We don't intend to discuss these stations, if any exist at all."

For London photographer Lewis Bush, that's not enough. He's devoted two years to investigating and locating possible stations. He spoke to some of the dedicated "numbers monitors" who have spent much of their lives scrutinizing the broadcasts. He also studied declassified documents, history books, interviews, and first-person accounts by former agents.

Archaeologists excavating a market square in Trondheim, Norway, have discovered the remains of a boat grave and possible human remains dating to around the time the Vikings started exploring and raiding lands across Europe.

The boat was at least 13 feet (4 meters) long and was buried in the ground in a roughly north-south direction, according to archaeologists from the Norwegian Institute for Cultural Heritage (NIKU). It's not clear why the boat was oriented in a north-south direction.

Though the wood from the boat wasn't intact, the archaeologists found nails and lumps of rust that allowed them to confirm that the buried object was, in fact, a boat, NIKU archaeologist Ian Reed said in a statement.

Archeologists and other scientists have long known that intoxicating gases emanating from water flowing from deep within the earth likely produced the visions of the oracle of Delphi, a seer who guided ancient Greeks with her prophecies from around 800 BC through the 4th century AD from her temple on Mount Parnassus.

Now new research suggests many other Greek sacred sites were built on similar fissures created by earthquakes throughout the Eastern Mediterranean.

"The ancient Greeks placed great value on hot springs unlocked by earthquakes," said Iain Stewart, professor of geoscience communication and director of the Sustainable Earth Institute at the University of Plymouth in Britain. "But perhaps the building of temples and cities close to these sites was more systematic than has previously been thought."

In a study published recently in the Proceedings of the Geologists' Association, Stewart showed how temples and other structures at Mycenae, Ephesus, Cnidus, and Hierapolis were, like Delphi, built and rebuilt over earthquake faults.

In one of the most secluded places in the world - Easter Island - the rongorongo writing was invented a few hundred years ago. Attempts to read it are currently being made. Among the few people who have taken up this challenge is a Polish researcher, Dr. Rafał Wieczorek.

25 artefacts with rongorongo inscriptions have been preserved to our time. Rongorongo is a system of glyphs known only from Easter Island - none of the other Polynesian peoples have invented writing.

"There is a lot of evidence that Easter Island is one of the few places in the world where writing was invented independently of other recording systems. Why it was created in such an isolated location, remains a mystery" - told PAP Dr. Rafał Wieczorek from the Faculty of Chemistry, University of Warsaw.

Deciphering the glyphs is the more difficult that only a few people in the world are working on it, non of them "full time". For all involved it is a side project. "In order to move things forward, it is necessary to set up a research team that would focus on just that" - believes the researcher.

Dr. Wieczorek specialises in astrobiology, but many years ago he joined the international group, whose goal is to attempt to decipher rongorongo. The researcher admits that he devotes more and more time to this passion - he is also the author of several articles on rongorongo published in scientific journals.

Despite many question marks, investigators of the mysterious writing established several facts. First and foremost, it is known that rongorongo was used by the aristocracy living on the island - it was not a commonly used writing. Sentences were read in the reverse bustrofedon system - the medium had to be rotated while reading. How could this be determined even though the writing still has not been deciphered? "Sequences of characters are repeating on a few tablets. In some cases they go to the next line of text, and in others, they continue in one line" - said Wieczorek.

The Voynich manuscript is not an especially glamorous physical object. It is slightly larger than a modern paperback, bound in "limp vellum" as is the technical term. But its pages are full of astrological charts, strange plants, naked ladies bathing in green liquid, and, most famously, an indecipherable script that has eluded cryptographers to this day.

What could be so scandalous, so dangerous, or so important to be written in such an uncrackable cipher?

This week, the venerable Times Literary Supplement published as its cover story a "solution" for the Voynich manuscript. The article by Nicholas Gibbs suggests the manuscript is a medieval women's-health manual copied from several older sources. And the cipher is no cipher at all, but simply abbreviations that, once decoded, turn out to be medicinal recipes.