For instance, at Kyoto railway station, there’s a statue of Astro Boy. And as you see above, in the home town of sci-fi special effects supremo Eiji Tsuburaya (famous for his work on Godzilla), the electric transformer boxes are painted with silhouettes of Ultraman monsters in his honour. [Pink Tentacle] via [Tokyomango].

It has numerous LED light sources, moving parts and sound effects, and along with awe, inspires some sort of Godzilla-like instinctual response to crush it’s little buildings and trains right down into its wooden pedestal. And smack down a giant moth. [Bandai via Akihabaranews]

[Digital Gadgets Freak via Technabob]

The two ships, the MV Hounslow and MT Ann, were rounded up back in February by the UAE police and coastguard after Reliance Globalcom, the parent company of Flag Telecoms, whose snapped cables they were, provided satellite pictures of shipping in the area of the cables at the time they were severed.

The Korean ship was allowed to go over the weekend, having paid a rather large fine (thought to be around US$60,000) to Flag Telecom, whose customers suffered two weeks of disruption to their internet services. Meanwhile, two crew members of the Iraqi boat have been arrested, and their boat looks nowhere closer to being released. [The Economic Times via National Terror Alert—thanks Mike Wahlman]

•There probably isn’t a fifth cable, according to his sources and the Khaleez Times in the UAB seems to have double counted one.
•One cable is officially not cut, but is suffering a power outage.
•Likely, the rest of the cables have been damaged by fishing nets or boat anchors (those two causes account for 65% and 18% of all undersea cable problems).
•Officially, he believes the chances of the cables being cut by “sharks with laser beams on their fricking heads” is unlikely.
•While two cables cut in a week is a bit higher than average, its not unusual: Last year, 50 cables were damaged in the Atlantic alone.

Why are we still talking about this? Because I somehow find it fascinating, although Beckert’s explanations make it less so. [WSJ Blog, thanks Ben Worthen. Previously on Giz]

The first thing you’re gonna need is an Optical Time Domain Reflectometer. Engineers on shore use it to send light pulses down the cable, which reflect back at the breakage point, providing a measurable delay that can translate the distance within “tens of metres”.

Once you get your location guestimation, you posse up your team of about 50 people and pile them onto—what else?—a cable ship. This ship will need remotely operated vehicles ROVs (see James Cameron) that you drive down to the sea floor, roving around until you spot your breakage.

When the ROV finds the affected cable segment, it may snip off the nasty bits (just leaving them there to become part of somebody’s new habitat) and bring up the two new ends. On board the ship, operators can splice a new segment between the cleanly trimmed ends of the cable break, and drop it back down.

Sometimes the ROV can’t find the segment, or can’t get the right grip on it. In these cases, the technicians send down a centuries-old device called a grapnel. The grapnel snags the cable wherever it can, and yanks it up to the boat for the end trimming and the repair job.

The cable itself is a tricky fix, because it is made up of nine layers, which you can see in the BBC’s diagram below. If you are an experienced undersea-cable repairman who would like to add anything to this admittedly brief primer, I encourage you. And for the love of Pete, don’t try any of this cable repair stuff at home! [BBC News]

The cables, branded Flag Telecom and SEA-ME-WE 4, for “Southeast Asia, Middle East, Western Europe”, were severed in their runs between Palermo, Italy and Alexandria, Egypt. Data is being rerouted, in some cases “around India and back through Asia to the U.S.” Outages or lousy connections have been experienced in India as well as Egypt, Dubai, Kuwait, Bahrain, Qatar and Saudi Arabia. (Insert sheik-surfing-the-porno joke here.)

According to the AP story, “There has been speculation…that an illegally or improperly anchored ship caused the problem. Our best guess is Godzilla of course, but some sort of Bond villain may be to blame. (Insert Dick-Cheney-not-ruling-out-terror joke here.)

Update: Mystery solved? This article, dated Jan. 30, seems to have clear information on the shipping debacle that caused the havoc:

“For some reason ships were asked to anchor in a different place to normal – 8.3km from the beach. One of the ship’s anchors cut our cable but there are multiple cuts—we’re not the only company having problems,” says a Flag Telecom spokesman.

[AP; More from AP; The Internet Patrol]

Video by Sarah Meyers and Richard Blakeley