Showing posts with label World War II. Show all posts
Showing posts with label World War II. Show all posts

Wednesday, 19 February 2014

Nazis 'wanted to use mosquitoes as a weapon'

UPDATE: Nazi scientists worked on ways to use malaria-carrying mosquitoes as a weapon, according to researchers. Until now, experts have disputed whether Germany was working on biological warfare during World War II.

Dr Klaus Reinhardt, who led the study, told The Local that he came across documents at Dachau's Entomology Institute which suggested that “biological weapons [using mosquitoes] could have been developed as an offensive, not defensive, weapon”.

Until now, it had been generally thought by experts that the Nazis only intended ever to use biological weapons defensively.

By 1944 the institute had decided on a specific breed of mosquito most suited to a potential biological attack, said Reinhardt.

Thursday, 21 November 2013

Dinosaur Bone Damaged in WWII Revealed with 3D Printing

The identity of a mislabeled fossil damaged in a World War II era bombing has finally been revealed as part of an enormous long-necked plant-eating dinosaur.

The fossil, tucked inside the plaster jacket paleontologist wrapped around it more than 100 years ago, belongs to the Museum of National History in Berlin. During World War II, a bomb fell on the museum's east wing, collapsing the basement where dinosaur fossils were stored.

Many fossils were reduced to dust in the bombing, and the ones that survived were scattered and mixed up. Making matters worse, bones from two separate expeditions had been housed in the same area. One expedition, in Tanzania, ran from 1909 to 1913 and brought back 235 tons of fossils, labeled with letters based on their locations. The other fossils came from a 1909 discovery in Halberstadt, Germany. Those bones also used a letter-based label system — but the letters referred not to locations, but to individual animals.

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