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Sunstone Unearthed From Sixteenth Century Shipwreck
sciencehabit writes "In 1592, a British ship sank near the island of Alderney in the English Channel carrying an odd piece of cargo: a small, angular crystal. Once it was brought back to land, a few European scientists began to suspect the mysterious object might be a calcite crystal, a powerful 'sunstone' referred to in Norse legends which they believe Vikings and other European seafarers used to navigate before the introduction of the magnetic compass. Now, after subjecting the object to a battery of mechanical and chemical tests, the team has determined that the Alderman crystal is indeed a calcite and, therefore, could have been the ship's optical compass. Today, similar calcite crystals are used by astronomers to analyze the atmospheres of exoplanets—perhaps setting the stage for a whole new age of exploration."
You think that's a discovery? Pffft. My company actually has a point of sale PC that has a Pentium 4 1.6GHz w/PC133 RAM and a 20GB hard drive. So naturally, as you're thinking right now, that sounded really familiar. The sticker indicating it shipped with Windows NT was the dead giveaway. So, I looked into it and yeah, this was Christopher Columbus' navigational computer onboard the Mayflower. I knew it was old but I didn't know it was that old! Now I know why they kept it around so long.