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The FAA is headed by a pilot, NASA is headed by an astronaut, the US Marine Corps is headed by a Marine but for the fourth time in a row, and during the worst shipping crisis of the century, the US Department of Transportation, has appointed someone to the US Maritime Administration (MARAD) who is not a captain and has no commercial shipping experience. Yesterday afternoon, President Biden announced his intention to nominate Rear Admiral Ann Phillips, US Navy (Retired), as the next US Maritime Administrator, a position that has been vacant since Rear Admiral Mark Buzby stepped down following...

Floating A Big Idea: Ancient Use Of Rafts To Transport Goods DemonstratedMIT students built a small-scale replica of an ancient oceangoing sailing raft to study its seaworthiness and handling. (Credit: Donna Coveney/MIT) ScienceDaily (Mar. 22, 2008) — Oceangoing sailing rafts plied the waters of the equatorial Pacific long before Europeans arrived in the Americas, and carried tradegoods for thousands of miles all the way from modern-day Chile to western Mexico, according to new findings by MIT researchers in the Department of Materials Science and Engineering. Details of how the ancient trading system worked more than 1,000 years ago were reconstructed...