pretty good rant

Fairly deranged I would say. The weak second grade rivets problem was identified some while ago not long after metallurgical samples were recovered. It is only news again now because of the anniversary.

It was also shown that other ships of similar compartmentalised design of that era could withstand a head on with a large iceberg. Made a real mess of the bow and rearranged all the furniture but they survived.

Unclear if the Titanics rivets would have stood up to the shock loading, but we know with absolute certainty that the outcome could be no worse then ripping a huge gash down the starboard side.

The scientific press do demand prime position for their publications and do have a near monopoly. ArXiv has a fair amount of free stuff on.

Methinks the Register doth protest too much. They hate science.

Its not a rant, its an advertisement for Titanic 3D! Soon to avoid in theatres nearby.

No doubt, but if you ever get a chance to visit the Titanic exhibit at the Atlanta Aquarium, it's well worth the money and time (not so sure the Aquarium itself is, though).

Like this?

That isn't science. That's just ill-informed ooh-aahing. If The Register's science reporter had a clue, we wouldn't have been treated to this sentence.

"The astronomers also verified that the star-wreckage had clumps of almost pure iron, which must have been made by nuclear reactions at the centre of the star before the supernova."

Anybody who knew what they were talking about would realise that "must have been made" doesn't exactly do justice to our understanding of the process by which a sufficiently massive star becomes a super-nova, by progressively turning most of it mass into increasingly heavier nuclei, until you end up with an iron core.

Since the iron nucleus has the highest mass defect of any nucleus, the progression stops there with the supernova explosion. If the star's core hadn't turned to iron, there wouldn't have been a supernova.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen