Free Republic

The French invented the term film noir – it's supposed to have been coined in 1946 by the critic Nino Frank – but it took them years to come up with their own contributions to the genre, by which time it was very nearly played out in Hollywood. That American film noir was essential to the earliest films by most directors of the French New Wave is generally accepted; that something critical was lost in translation is just as certain. Louis Malle had a strange relationship with his peers in the nouvelle vague; like the very different Eric Rohmer, he...

"The amazing thing is the mechanical engineering aspect," says James Evans, a physicist and science historian at the University of Puget Sound in Tacoma, Wash. He is part of an international group working to crack the puzzle of the device's origins and purpose. Evans recently added a new twist with an analysis that suggests it dates to 205 B.C. -- as much as a century earlier than previously believed. If he's right, it is more likely that the Antikythera Mechanism was inspired by the work of the legendary Greek mathematician Archimedes. It would also mean the device was built at...

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Apparently laid to rest more than 10,000 years ago in a fiery ritual, one of the oldest skeletons in the Americas has been retrieved from an undersea cave along Mexico's Yucatán Peninsula, researchers say. Dating to a time when the now lush region was a near desert, the "Young Man of Chan Hol" may help uncover how the first Americans arrived—and who they were. About 80 miles (130 kilometers) south of Cancún, the cave system of Chan Hol—Maya for "little hole"—is like a deep gouge into the Caribbean coast. In 2006, after entering the cave's opening, about 30 feet (10...

From the Department Of People In Glass Houses . . . Early in his MSNBC show this evening, Ed Schultz mocked Karl Rove's performance in filling in for Rush Limbaugh today. In particular, Schultz slammed Rove for his brief problem in providing the show's call-in number. But later in the show, Ed himself ran head-first into a rhetorical roadblock, stumbling badly when it came to pronouncing the most famous name in the world of ocean studies: Cousteau. View video here.

Watery grave awaits famous vessel in dispute over its future For 40 years it was the mythical flagship of that most emblematic - and heavily-accented - of Frenchmen, the undersea explorer Jacques Cousteau. Under his command it sailed the Mediterranean, the Red Sea, the Antarctic, the Nile, the Amazon, and the Yangtze, revealing their murky secrets to captivated television viewers around the world. Now the Calypso, its superstructure riddled with rust and its timbers rotten, languishes unrecognised and all but unrecognisable in the dock of La Rochelle's maritime museum, as a legal wrangle threatens to send it to the place...