It was April 1956, and the No. 1 song was Elvis Presley’s Heartbreak Hotel. At the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution on Cape Cod, scientist Dean Bumpus was busy releasing glass bottles in a large stretch of the Atlantic Ocean.

Nearly 58 years later, a biologist studying grey seals off Nova Scotia found one of the bottles in a pile of debris on a beach, 300 miles from where it was released.

“It was almost like finding treasure in a way,” Warren Joyce said.

The drift bottle was among thousands dumped in the Atlantic Ocean between 1956 and 1972 as part of Bumpus’s study of surface and bottom currents. About 10 per cent of the 300,000 bottles have been found over the years.

He contacted scientists at Woods Hole and dutifully gave them the time and place information Bumpus had asked for in a postcard inside the bottle. His reward will be exactly what Bumpus promised in 1956 to anyone who returned a bottle: a 50-cent piece.

“I didn’t want the reward, but they said they are sending it to me anyway,” Joyce said, chuckling. (AP)

Ambulance man is carjacked

An ambulance worker catching some sleep in the back of his vehicle woke up to find himself the victim of a carjacking in Albuquerque, New Mexico.

Police have arrested a man and a woman accused of driving off in the ambulance early on Sunday morning, while it was parked outside Lovelace Medical Centre in downtown Albuquerque.

Police spokesman Elder Guevara said the employee was asleep in the vehicle’s rear but was able to jump out when the ambulance slowed near an intersection. (AP)

Nun killed in cathedral shooting

A gunman opened fire in a cathedral on Russia’s Sakhalin Island off the Pacific coast, killing a nun and a parishioner and wounding six others. The Federal Investigative Committee said police detained the man, who works as a security guard.

Concerns about security in Russia are especially high because of the Winter Olympics in Sochi, but there was no apparent connection to the Games. (AP)

Oldman did job for a sandwich

Gary Oldman took part in his friend David Bowie’s video for his single The Next Day “for a sandwich and a bottle of pop”, he said.

The pair have been friends for 25 years and he did the video for him last year as a favour.

“Dave just shot me an e-mail, out of the blue, saying, ‘Do you want to come and play a priest for a day?’

“It was all done for a sandwich and a bottle of pop. We actually shot it in a place that’s about 10 minutes from my house. There was no money in it,” Oldman said.

The video featured Bowie as a Christ-like figure with Oldman as a clergyman leading a woman into what appears to be a brothel, punching a beggar at the door and picking up a prostitute, played by scantily clad Marion Cotillard.

It attracted criticism in some quarters but Oldman said: “People can make what they want of it, that’s the point of a video like that. He’s an artist, he makes you think. (PA)

Giraffe put down despite appeal

Copenhagen Zoo has killed a healthy giraffe because of rules imposed by a European zoo association to deter inbreeding despite a wave of online protests to save it.

Zoo spokesman Tobias Stenbaek Bro said it put down the male giraffe, named Marius, using a bolt pistol and will feed its meat to carnivores in the zoo. The zoo was recommended to put down the giraffe by the European Association of Zoos and Aquaria because there were already a lot of giraffes with similar genes in their breeding programme.

An online petition to save Marius had received more than 20,000 signatures. (AP)