A species of shark rarely seen alive because its natural habitat is 600 metres or more under the sea was captured on film by staff at a Japanese marine park this week.
The Awashima Marine Park in Shizuoka, south of Tokyo, was alerted by a fisherman at a nearby port on Sunday that he had spotted an odd-looking eel-like creature with a mouthful of needle-sharp teeth.
Marine park staff caught the 1.6-metre-long creature, which they identified as a female frilled shark, sometimes referred to as a "living fossil" because it is a primitive species that has changed little since prehistoric times.
The shark appeared to be in poor condition when park staff moved it to a seawater pool where they filmed it swimming and opening its jaws.
"We believe moving pictures of a live specimen are extremely rare," said an official at the park. "They live between 600 and 1000 metres under the water, which is deeper than humans can go."
"We think it may have come close to the surface because it was sick, or else it was weakened because it was in shallow waters," the official said.
The shark died a few hours after being caught.
Frilled sharks, which feed on other sharks and sea creatures, are sometimes caught in the nets of trawlers but are rarely seen alive.
Reuters
On current images used in Google Maps, people appear as indistinguishable dots (see red circle, lower right). The new images promise to be as good as or better than this one (inset) taken over The Hague in the Netherlands.
Here's a chance to make a spectacle of yourself in front of the whole world on Australia Day.
On Friday, an aircraft hired by Google will be doing a series of low-level swoops over parts of Sydney, photographing the ground and waters below.
The three-seater plane, decked out in Google livery, will have special permission to fly at an altitude of 600m.
Providing the photographs turn out to be good enough quality, the images will be integrated into Google Maps, the free online mapping service used by millions of people around the world.
Usually, people aren't aware when they are caught in aerial photographs that later end up being used in Google Maps. This time however Google actually wants Sydneysiders to do whatever they can to make themselves visible.
The company is encouraging people to wear something distinctive, hold up a sign (face-up), draw in the sand, or even arrange themselves into a "fun formation".
According to Mr Lars Rasmussen, head of engineering for Google Australia and one of the lead engineers for Google Maps, the images will be the highest resolution available on the popular mapping service.
He said the images will add a "few more zoom levels" to the local maps and be between three to four times more detailed than are currently available for Australian terrain on Google Maps.
That would put them on par or better than the Google Map images of the Netherlands where, for instance, one of the aerial photographs shows a woman in a swimsuit sunbathing on the balcony of a low-rise block of units.
The best available resolution images on Australian aerial images allows you to see cars clearly, but people are generally visible as pinpricks on the photos.
"This is the first time we have tried this on any scale," said Mr Rasmussen, one of the original developers of Google Maps, who is based in Sydney. "We have no idea whether it will work, but we thought it'd be fun to try."
The plane is scheduled to begin flying over Centennial and Moore parks at 9am from where it will head out to Bronte Beach. The flight will zig-zag it's way across the inner east, the city, Harbour and the lower North Shore, ending at about 2.15pm.
Google says the experiment will depend on fine, clear weather and that the flyover times may vary depending on prevailing conditions.
A map with times of the flyover can be found at http://www.google.com.au/australiaday2007/ and will will be updated with any changes to the schedule on the morning of January 26.
The images, however, will take up to another six weeks to make it on to Google Maps.
"It's a bit of an experiment and if it's a success, we'll probably do it in other places [around the world]," Mr Rasmussen said, indicating that Google would work on organising similar flyovers in places like Paris on Bastille Day or over cities in the United States on Independence Day.
Housing affordability in Australia is among the worst in the world, a further sign that many state and local government polices are inappropriate, the Residential Development Council said.
It said today's release of the Annual Demographia survey rated every Australian city as "seriously" or "severely" unaffordable in a global study of 159 cities, with Sydney, Melbourne, Perth and Hobart among the worst 25 cities.
The Residential Development Council, the residential policy arm of the Property Council of Australia, said Australia's poor result was proof that the current policy mix was a toxic cocktail for housing affordability.
"We have four of our cities in the worst 25 when it comes to affordability - surely the message must get through," said RDC Executive Director Ross Elliott.
The Demographia survey, released by the US-based Wendell Cox Consultancy, attributes restrictive land release policies and excessive regulatory and zoning controls, combined with high housing taxes, for the Australian problem.
The survey rates housing "unaffordable" when the median house price passes three times median household incomes.
Housing is "seriously unaffordable" when it passes four times median household incomes and "severely unaffordable" when it passes five times median household incomes.
The least affordable Australian city is Sydney - where median prices are 8.5 times median incomes - even worse than London at 8.3 times incomes and New York at 7.2 times incomes.
"We have maintained that there are three things largely responsible for the worsening housing affordability in this country. Inappropriate land release policies, excessive housing taxes and unfair infrastructure charges, and dysfunctional systems of development assessment," Mr Elliott said in a statement.
"This report now confirms the magnitude of the problem in this country - where with abundant land, there is no excuse for our housing crisis other than bad public policy."
In a lycra revolution, a cover-all swimming costume is bringing Muslim women on to Australian beaches as lifeguards, unzipping racial tensions which divided parts of Sydney little over a year ago.
The two-piece "burqini", popular in the Middle East, is proving key to a reshaping surf lifesaving - once a bastion of white Australian culture and still a heartland of the country's sun-bronzed, heroic self-myth.
"I am Australian so I always have the Australian life style, but now with the burqini it just allowed me to participate in it more. We used to always go to the beach, but now that I have the burqini I can actually swim," said Mecca Laalaa, 22.
Laalaa is one of 24 young Australians of Arab heritage who recently signed up to a 10-week training course run by Surf Life Saving Australia aimed at widening the racial mix on beaches.
The shift follows race riots between ethnic Lebanese Australians and white Australian youths at Cronulla Beach in Sydney's south in the lead-up to Christmas in 2005.
Cars, shops and churches were damaged in the violence, which followed an attack on a pair of white Australian beach lifeguards.
Laalaa, whose ethnic background is Lebanese-Australian, is relying on a home-grown burqini - a compromise between a burqa and a bikini - to keep her covered on Cronulla's sands.
The full-length lycra suit with hijab head-covering is not too figure hugging to embarrass, but is tight enough to allow its wearer to swim freely. It will soon be manufactured in the iconic red and yellow of Australia's surf life saving movement.
"We are surrounded by water all over Australia, it is totally encouraged for us from all the schools, no matter what school you go to," burqini manufacturer Aheda Zanetti said.
"So when these girls decide and choose to wear the veil, they decide to stop doing that. We didn't want to do that."
The burqini is making its appearance during the 100th anniversary of surf life saving in Australia, which began on Sydney's famous Bondi Beach and has grown to count 115,000 volunteers in more than 300 clubs.
Women were only allowed membership in 1980 and some clubs patrol inland lakes, including Lake Jindabyne near the snow-capped southern Australian Alps.
Zanetti, who sells her burqinis for up to $A200, hopes to widen the garment's appeal beyond Muslim women at the beach.
"We are also encouraged in Australia to cover up not due to modesty but for sun protection, so this is not just a modesty aspect swimming suit, it is also a protection against the sun, surf and sand," she said.
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