Curses! Boston Fan Foiled in Jinx Plot

Sports fans and athletes can be very superstitious. For them the idea of a curse is no laughing matter, especially when the teams involved are long-time rivals like the New York Yankees and the Boston Red Sox.

A brand new Yankee Stadium will greet players and baseball fans in 2009, without the bad mojo one Boston fan tried to inject. A construction worker at the new stadium site wanted to do a little something for his favorite team, the Red Sox.

Last summer, Gino Castignoli tossed a replica Boston jersey into wet concrete in the foundation of the Yanks’ new home. He thought that by entombing David Ortiz’s number 34 jersey in the stadium he could curse the Yankees. Castignoli must have bragged to the wrong person, because Yankee management caught wind of the shenanigans and the jersey was jackhammered out and removed in April at a cost of about $50,000.

The battered jersey was donated to The Jimmy Fund, a Boston charity that supports cancer research. The organization auctioned the jersey on eBay and raised $175,100. The winning bidder, Massachussetts businessman Kevin Meehan, will also receive a Yankees T-shirt and two tickets to a Red Sox game. Meehan says he plans to display the jersey in one of his car dealerships.

The Yanks and the Sox are no strangers to curses—the two teams started one of the most famous curses in sports history. When the Red Sox sold Babe Ruth to the Yankees in 1920, the Curse of the Bambino was born. The Yankees saw their fortunes rise. The current stadium even sports the nickname “The House that Ruth Built.”

Some Boston fans blamed “the curse” for the ball club’s 84 years without a World Series Championship. During that time, the Yankees won 26 World Series titles.

In 2004, the curse was finally broken when the Red Sox swept the St. Louis Cardinals to win the World Series. They won last year in a sweep over Colorado.

Swedish Kid Finds Big Stash of Treasure

LUND, Sweden—A Swedish kid and his grand-father recently undertook a project that they’ll never forget.

Nine-year-old Alexander Granhof and his grandfather are into archaeology. While researching the Battle of Lund, which was fought in 1676 on the outskirts of their town, the two decided to visit the battlefield to look for cannonballs.

This was the site of a famous yet bloody battle in which the Swedish army, led by King Charles XI, defeated the invading army of Denmark. About 9,000 soldiers died in the day-long battle.

As Alexander and his grandpop searched for war artifacts, Alexander spotted a metal fragment. “I found a piece of metal and thought at first it was shrapnel from a shotgun,” he told a Swedish newspaper.

But what Alexander found was much, much older and a lot more valuable than a bullet fragment. It was a silver coin from the end of the 13th century. “I shouted to grandfather…We discovered more and more coins!” he explained to the paper. The field had recently been ploughed, bringing thousands of valuable coins to the surface! Alexander and his grandpop gathered more than 4,000 coins.

At first Alexander didn’t recognize them as coins because they were coated in verdigris, a crust that forms as the silver reacts with acid in the soil.

The two discoverers called in real archaeologists from the National Heritage Board. With metal detectors, they discovered two clay vessels wrapped in cloth and filled with thousands of coins! In all there are at least 7,000 coins, all from about the same period. Most came from Denmark and England, but some are rarer coins from Germany and the Netherlands. Archaeologists are still digging around for more loot, looking for clues about who buried the treasure and why they did it.

The silver alone is worth more than $250,000! Alexander is still waiting to find out what his reward will be.

Is Shaq Sinking Suns?

There's a new big man in town; the Phoenix Suns are betting he's the spark they need to win the playoffs.

One of the biggest stars in the NBA universe, Shaquille O'Neal, is now wearing purple and orange. And both Shaq and the Suns have a lot to prove. Shaq, who just turned 36 and has endured knee and hip injuries, wants to show he's still a big force in the NBA. His critics say that the Diesel is too old and too slow for a high-octane, blazingly fast team like the Suns.

During the regular season, the Suns are one of the toughest teams in the West. And while fans love the Suns' exciting and high-scoring brand of basketball, led by two-time League MVP point guard Steve Nash, the team has never won the NBA Finals.

The Suns believe that Shaq is the piece that's been missing. At 7 feet 1 inch tall and 325 pounds, Shaq gives the Suns a true center who grabs rebounds, plays tough defense and passes the ball well. Up till now, Amare Stoudamire has been stuck playing center for the Suns, even though he's really one of the best power forwards in the game. With Shaq in at center, Stoudamire is freed up to do what he does best!

"Psychologically it really helps us out. Guys are much more willing to go to the boards and fight around the basket with Shaq in there," explains Head Coach Mike D'Antoni.

Fans love Shaq's superstar qualities. The big guy has won four NBA Finals and was MVP for three of them! But the Suns have lost their winning ways since Shaq started playing on Feb. 20. In the trade for Shaq, the Suns gave up All-Star forward Shawn Marion, who said he wanted to be traded at the beginning of the season. For years, Marion had been a clutch scorer. As of press time, the Suns have won just two of their last six games and have fallen to fifth place in the Western Conference. Fans wonder whether it's growing pains with the big guy or could it be a bad fit?

'Doomsday Vault' Opens for Business!

SVALBARD ARCHIPELAGO, Norway-Imagine a bank that's so far north that polar bears outnumber the people living there! The bank is located on Norway's Svalbard archipelago just 620 miles from the North Pole. As you may have guessed, it's cold there. During winter's around-the-clock darkness, temperatures can fall to -22° Fahrenheit.

The bank was blasted into the side of an arctic mountain and has reinforced concrete walls to help protect its valuable deposits from natural disasters, global warming and even a nuclear explosion. Welcome to the Svalbard Global Seed Vault-also called the "Doomsday Vault" by the press!

You can find seedbanks all over the world. Native Seeds/SEARCH is a seedbank here in Arizona. Its mission is to protect the diversity of local seed used in farming and their wild relatives. "We have nearly 2,000 varieties in our seedbank, mainly corn, beans and squash," explains Carolyn Owens, who works on grants for the seedbank. "Just like the seedbank in Norway, the seeds need to be kept cold, so they're stored in a freezer," she says. Seeds for the bank come from southwestern states and northern Mexico.

Seedbanks help protect our food supply from the "what ifs" in life-like what if there's drought; what if a disease attacks a certain kind of wheat, or what if global warming changes what can grow around here?

Modern farming has led to fewer and fewer varieties of crops. This has brought about many varieties of food crops being lost forever, and Owens says it's alarming. "It's just more cost effective to grow a single variety...but you don't know what disease is going to come along down the road," she says. A disease could wipe out an entire variety of a crop, leading to food shortages. But if there are enough other seed varieties, like wheat for instance, one of those types of wheat may turn out to be resistant to the disease.

Owens points out that a lot of seedbanks are in politically unstable areas like Somalia, Afghanistan and Iraq, and have been looted or destroyed. In the Phillipines, a flood wiped out the country's seedbank.

That's why the Svalbard Global Seedbank was created-to protect the diversity of seeds no matter what happens in the world. Countries can "deposit" different varieties of seeds. If a disaster jeopardizes crops, the country can make a "withdrawal" of seeds.

The vault was built by Norway at a cost of about $3 million. Because seeds are so small, the "Doomsday Vault" can hold up to 2 billion seeds!