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For more than a century, since he captured the spoken words “Mary had a little lamb” on a sheet of tinfoil, Thomas Edison has been considered the father of recorded sound. But researchers say they have unearthed a recording of the human voice, made by a little-known Frenchman, that predates Edison’s invention of the phonograph by nearly two decades.

The 10-second recording of a singer crooning the folk song “Au Clair de la Lune” was discovered earlier this month in an archive in Paris by a group of American audio historians. It was made, the researchers say, on April 9, 1860, on a phonautograph, a machine designed to record sounds visually, not to play them back. But the phonautograph recording, or phonautogram, was made playable — converted from squiggles on paper to sound — by scientists at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in Berkeley, Calif.

“This is a historic find, the earliest known recording of sound,” said Samuel Brylawski, the former head of the recorded-sound division of the Library of Congress, who is not affiliated with the research group but who was familiar with its findings. The audio excavation could give a new primacy to the phonautograph, once considered a curio, and its inventor, Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville, a Parisian typesetter and tinkerer who went to his grave convinced that credit for his breakthroughs had been improperly bestowed on Edison.

Scott’s device had a barrel-shaped horn attached to a stylus, which etched sound waves onto sheets of paper blackened by smoke from an oil lamp. The recordings were not intended for listening; the idea of audio playback had not been conceived. Rather, Scott sought to create a paper record of human speech that could later be deciphered.

But the Lawrence Berkeley scientists used optical imaging and a “virtual stylus” on high-resolution scans of the phonautogram, deploying modern technology to extract sound from patterns inscribed on the soot-blackened paper almost a century and a half ago. The scientists belong to an informal collaborative called First Sounds that also includes audio historians and sound engineers.

David Giovannoni, an American audio historian who led the research effort, will present the findings and play the recording in public on Friday at the annual conference of the Association for Recorded Sound Collections at Stanford University in Palo Alto, Calif.

Scott’s 1860 phonautogram was made 17 years before Edison received a patent for the phonograph and 28 years before an Edison associate captured a snippet of a Handel oratorio on a wax cylinder, a recording that until now was widely regarded by experts as the oldest that could be played back.

Mr. Giovannoni’s presentation on Friday will showcase additional Scott phonautograms discovered in Paris, including recordings made in 1853 and 1854. Those first experiments included attempts to capture the sounds of a human voice and a guitar, but Scott’s machine was at that time imperfectly calibrated.

“We got the early phonautograms to squawk, that’s about it,” Mr. Giovannoni said.

But the April 1860 phonautogram is more than a squawk. On a digital copy of the recording provided to The New York Times, the anonymous vocalist, probably female, can be heard against a hissing, crackling background din. The voice, muffled but audible, sings, “Au clair de la lune, Pierrot répondit” in a lilting 11-note melody — a ghostly tune, drifting out of the sonic murk.

The hunt for this audio holy grail was begun in the fall by Mr. Giovannoni and three associates: Patrick Feaster, an expert in the history of the phonograph who teaches at Indiana University, and Richard Martin and Meagan Hennessey, owners of Archeophone Records, a label specializing in early sound recordings. They had collaborated on the Archeophone album “Actionable Offenses,” a collection of obscene 19th-century records that received two Grammy nominations. When Mr. Giovannoni raised the possibility of compiling an anthology of the world’s oldest recorded sounds, Mr. Feaster suggested they go digging for Scott’s phonautograms.

Historians have long been aware of Scott’s work. But the American researchers believe they are the first to make a concerted search for Scott’s phonautograms or attempt to play them back.

In December Mr. Giovannoni and a research assistant traveled to a patent office in Paris, the Institut National de la Propriété Industrielle. There he found recordings from 1857 and 1859 that were included by Scott in his phonautograph patent application. Mr. Giovannoni said that he worked with the archive staff there to make high-resolution, preservation-grade digital scans of these recordings.

A trail of clues, including a cryptic reference in Scott’s writings to phonautogram deposits made at “the Academy,” led the researchers to another Paris institution, the French Academy of Sciences, where several more of Scott’s recordings were stored. Mr. Giovannoni said that his eureka moment came when he laid eyes on the April 1860 phonautogram, an immaculately preserved sheet of rag paper 9 inches by 25 inches.

“It was pristine,” Mr. Giovannoni said. “The sound waves were remarkably clear and clean.”

His scans were sent to the Lawrence Berkeley lab, where they were converted into sound by the scientists Carl Haber and Earl Cornell. They used a technology developed several years ago in collaboration with the Library of Congress, in which high-resolution “maps” of grooved records are played on a computer using a digital stylus. The 1860 phonautogram was separated into 16 tracks, which Mr. Giovannoni, Mr. Feaster and Mr. Martin meticulously stitched back together, making adjustments for variations in the speed of Scott’s hand-cranked recording.

Listeners are now left to ponder the oddity of hearing a recording made before the idea of audio playback was even imagined.

“There is a yawning epistemic gap between us and Léon Scott, because he thought that the way one gets to the truth of sound is by looking at it,” said Jonathan Sterne, a professor at McGill University in Montreal and the author of “The Audible Past: Cultural Origins of Sound Reproduction.”

Scott is in many ways an unlikely hero of recorded sound. Born in Paris in 1817, he was a man of letters, not a scientist, who worked in the printing trade and as a librarian. He published a book on the history of shorthand, and evidently viewed sound recording as an extension of stenography. In a self-published memoir in 1878, he railed against Edison for “appropriating” his methods and misconstruing the purpose of recording technology. The goal, Scott argued, was not sound reproduction, but “writing speech, which is what the word phonograph means.”

In fact, Edison arrived at his advances on his own. There is no evidence that Edison drew on knowledge of Scott’s work to create his phonograph, and he retains the distinction of being the first to reproduce sound.

“Edison is not diminished whatsoever by this discovery,” Mr. Giovannoni said.

Paul Israel, director of the Thomas A. Edison Papers at Rutgers University in Piscataway, N.J., praised the discovery as a “tremendous achievement,” but called Edison’s phonograph a more significant technological feat.

“What made Edison different from Scott was that he was trying to reproduce sound and he succeeded,” Mr. Israel said.

But history is finally catching up with Scott.

Mr. Sterne, the McGill professor, said: “We are in a period that is more similar to the 1860s than the 1880s. With computers, there is an unprecedented visualization of sound.”

The acclaim Scott sought may turn out to have been assured by the very sonic reproduction he disdained. And it took a group of American researchers to rescue Scott’s work from the musty vaults of his home city. In his memoir, Scott scorned his American rival Edison and made brazen appeals to French nationalism. “What are the rights of the discoverer versus the improver?” he wrote less than a year before his death in 1879. “Come, Parisians, don’t let them take our prize.”

SEATTLE — The worn parachute that children found while playing on their family’s property in rural southwestern Washington this month may be the one that D. B. Cooper used on that mysterious night in 1971 when he carried out what the authorities call the only unsolved hijacking in United States history.

Then again, maybe not.

“It’s the right place, it’s the right color and it appears to be the right size,” said Special Agent Robbie Burroughs of the F.B.I. office in Seattle.

Then again, Ms. Burroughs said, “it’s hard to say that because it’s so tied up in knots and it’s quite deteriorated.”

On a flight to Seattle from Portland, Ore., on Nov. 24, 1971, Mr. Cooper handed a flight attendant a note saying he had a bomb in his suitcase. He allowed the plane to land in Seattle and the other passengers to get off in return for $200,000 in $20 bills, four parachutes and new leg of the trip — to Mexico. On the flight south, Mr. Cooper parachuted out the rear door.

“Flight paths, prevailing winds, the weight of Cooper holding the money — they came up with possible landing zones and they ranked them, the most likely being Zone A,” Ms. Burroughs said of investigators who worked on the case. “And this parachute was found in Zone A.”

And it was white, as was the Navy Backpack 6 parachute with a 26-foot canopy that Mr. Cooper is thought to have used. But where the parachute was found conflicts with theories developed after a boy found cash tracked to Mr. Cooper on a Columbia River beach in 1980. There’s no statute of limitations on the case, Ms. Burroughs said. Mr. Cooper “would be in his late 80s right now, pushing 90, if in fact he survived, which I really don’t think anybody thinks he did.”

TALLAHASSEE, Fla. — The Florida Legislature formally apologized Wednesday for the state’s “shameful” history of slavery, joining five other states that have expressed public regret for what Senator Barack Obama, the Democratic presidential candidate, recently called America’s “original sin.”

The two-page resolution passed overwhelmingly in the Senate and then the House, bringing at least one lawmaker to tears. Gov. Charlie Crist, a Republican, called it a “significant step” toward reconciliation.

“All that is necessary for evil to prevail is for good people to do nothing,” Mr. Crist said in an interview, quoting the philosopher Edmund Burke. “I think we are reminded of that today because it takes courage to do the right thing, and it’s not always easy.”

Several black lawmakers, especially Senator Anthony C. Hill Sr., Democrat of Jacksonville, have been pushing for a public apology since last year. What eventually passed on Wednesday resembled statements issued by North Carolina, Alabama, Virginia, Maryland and New Jersey, the last state to apologize for slavery with a resolution in January.

The Florida resolution expressed “profound regret” for the state’s role “in sanctioning and perpetuating involuntary servitude upon generations of African slaves.” It did not use the word apology, but Mr. Hill said the statement’s intent was clear.

“At the end of the day we said three words: ‘I am sorry,’ ” he said. “I think now we can begin the healing process of reconciliation.”

Florida’s history with slavery is unusual. Its roots stretch back to the settlement of St. Augustine in 1565, and slaves here took part in a wide array of industries, including cattle ranching in central Florida and sugar cane harvests in Tampa.

“From 1845 to 1860, it was one of the fastest-growing slave states in the union,” said Larry E. Rivers, author of “Slavery in Florida” and president of Fort Valley State University in Georgia. “When things were slowing down in Virginia and still going in South Carolina and North Carolina, slavery in Florida was growing in leaps and bounds.”

The state’s first slave laws were enacted by the Territorial Legislative Council in 1822. Mirroring the laws of other Southern states, they included such punishments as nailing slaves’ ears to posts if they were caught stealing.

Some of this history was recounted before the Legislature, and was included in the resolution. It was enough to draw clear sobs from Senator Arthenia L. Joyner, Democrat of Tampa.

The governor said such emotions were understandable.

“I don’t think you could listen to some of the punishments that were meted out in the past before Florida became more enlightened without being moved by it,” Mr. Crist said.

Florida has made other efforts to address the consequences of institutional racism; in 1994, the state allocated $2.1 million to surviving victims of the Rosewood massacre, the 1923 attack on a black town in North Florida.

And on Wednesday, Mr. Crist said he was open to evaluating whether broader reparations for slavery would be worth pursuing. He warned, however, that this was not the year, given Florida’s looming $3 billion budget deficit.

Some black leaders said they hoped that the addition of another state’s resolution would lead Congress to offer an apology of its own — if only to document regrets expressed in speeches by President Bush and President Bill Clinton.

At the very least, they said, Florida’s statement is likely to continue the country’s amplified conversation about race, inspired in part by Mr. Obama’s candidacy.

“It’s a good time for the whole nation to address race in a different way,” said Carol M. Swain, a professor of political science and law at Vanderbilt University who supports a national apology for slavery. “We do need to have the conversation. And it’s a much broader conversation than Barack Obama was able to introduce in his speech.”

Damien Cave reported from Miami, and Christine Jordan Sexton from Tallahassee.

WASHINGTON — A landmark Supreme Court decision 33 years ago gave criminal defendants the right to represent themselves at trial.

The right to proceed without a lawyer, the court said then, was a logical corollary to the Sixth Amendment right to the assistance of counsel. If the Constitution gave people the right to a lawyer, the justices reasoned, then it necessarily gave them to right to dispense with one, as well.

But what about a defendant who is mentally ill and who, although technically competent to stand trial, has come to the perhaps delusional conclusion that he is better off without a lawyer?

That was the question for the court during an argument on Wednesday. The court’s precedents suggest that the standards for competence to stand trial and competence to represent oneself are one and the same. But at least some justices appeared convinced that the issue required a fresh look.

The case is an appeal by the State of Indiana from a ruling by its State Supreme Court that a judge violated a defendant’s right to self-representation by refusing to let him proceed without a lawyer.

The defendant, Ahmad Edwards, was a schizophrenic who was originally deemed incompetent to stand trial on a charge of attempted murder. After two prolonged hospitalizations over nearly three years, Mr. Edwards was found competent to stand trial.

Represented by a court-imposed lawyer, he was convicted by a jury and sentenced to 30 years in prison.

The Indiana Supreme Court held that Mr. Edwards’s competency to stand trial meant that he was competent to represent himself. In its appeal to the United States Supreme Court, Indiana v. Edwards, No. 07-208, the state included in its brief excerpts some motions Mr. Edwards filed with the trial court that led the judge to conclude that he should not be permitted to represent himself.

For example, one “motion to dismiss” included this sentence: “Defendant prays Psalm 15.5 for innocent of court property to be dismissed wherefore, so shall it be done.”

Addressing the justices, the Indiana solicitor general, Thomas M. Fisher, said the judge was “justified in requiring a higher level of competency for self-representation in order to prevent the trial of Ahmad Edwards from descending into a farce.”

Justice Antonin Scalia, the member of the court who takes the broadest view of various rights under the Sixth Amendment, challenged Mr. Fisher to explain why the judge could not have waited to see how Mr. Edwards would actually handle himself.

“By waiting to see if in fact he will turn the trial into a farce,” Justice Scalia said, “you avoid the risk of depriving him of his right to represent himself, which is certainly a very important constitutional right.”

Justice Scalia had a similar exchange with Michael R. Dreeben, a deputy United States solicitor general, who argued for the federal government on Indiana’s behalf. Mr. Dreeben said the court should not adhere to a rigid rule that would “force the state to have the train wreck occur when the evidence is very firm and reliable that it will occur.”

He said the state’s interest lay in “starting the trial from the beginning in a coherent and orderly way and not subjecting the defendant to the risk of an unfair trial based on the defendant’s own incompetence.”

Justice Stephen G. Breyer was among the justices most sympathetic to the state’s argument. Defendants representing themselves “do surprisingly well,” Justice Breyer said, citing a study noted in a brief filed by the American Psychiatric Association. But, he added, “there is a small subclass” of defendants who fare badly on their own.

Why not have “a rule which permitted a state to deal with this subclass of disturbed people who want to represent themselves?” Justice Breyer asked Mark T. Stancil, the lawyer for Mr. Edwards. “This is a perfect instance where the states should experiment.” Mr. Stancil replied that such an approach “undermines the fundamental premise of the Sixth Amendment, which is it’s his defense.”

He offered examples of his client’s evident understanding of the proceedings. That provoked a dismissive comment from Justice Anthony M. Kennedy, who said, “There are all kinds of nuts who could get 90 percent on the bar exam.”

The standard for competence to stand trial, formulated in a 1960 Supreme Court decision, Dusky v. United States, is fairly basic. It requires that a defendant have “sufficient present ability to consult with lawyer with a reasonable degree of rational understanding” and a “rational as well as a factual understanding of the proceedings against him.”

Mr. Fisher, the Indiana solicitor general, said the standard for competency to represent oneself should require more, “that it is within the state’s authority to override this right where the defendant cannot communicate coherently with the court or the jury.”

To that, Justice Scalia responded: “Cannot communicate coherently? I sometimes think that the lawyers cannot communicate coherently.”

WASHINGTON (Reuters) — The basic ingredients for life — warmth, water and organic chemicals — are in place on Saturn’s small moon Enceladus, scientists said on Wednesday, detailing the content of huge plumes erupting off its surface.

The scientists described observations made by the Cassini spacecraft when it flew over the surface of Enceladus (pronounced en-SELL-ah-dus) on March 12 as part of an exploration of Saturn and its moons.

Scientists working on the mission did not say they had found actual evidence of life on this moon, where geysers at the south pole continuously shoot watery plumes some 500 miles off the icy surface into space. But they said the building blocks for life were there, and described the plumes as a surprising organic brew, sort of like carbonated water with an essence of natural gas.

“Water vapor was the major constituent,” said Hunter Waite of the Southwest Research Institute in San Antonio. “There was methane present. There was carbon dioxide. There was carbon monoxide. There were simple organics and there were more complex organics.”

Organic molecules contain carbon-hydrogen bonds and can be found in living things. Dr. Waite said the material bursting out of the geysers was like a comet’s chemistry. “The question that one would ask is, Where did the organics come from?” Dr. Waite said.

“Of course, natural gas comes from decaying biological matter on Earth,” he said. “But this is not the conclusion we reached for Enceladus. Another possibility is the geochemistry going on in the interior can also produce organics.”

Cassini was about 120 miles above the surface of Enceladus as it flew through a plume. Scientists said future flybys in the project, which is run by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration and European space agencies, would examine whether the moon’s interior contains liquid water and whether that water could be a habitat for life.

Excavations in a cave in the mountains of northern Spain have uncovered the oldest known remains of human ancestors in Western Europe, scientists reported Wednesday.

The fossils of a lower jaw and teeth, more than 1.1 million years old, were found in sediments along with stone tools and bones of animals that appeared to have been butchered. The remains have been attributed to the previously known species Homo antecessor, a possible ancestor of Neanderthals and modern humans.

The discovery is described in the current issue of the journal Nature by Spanish and American scientists led by Eudald Carbonell of the Catalan Institute of Human Paleontology and Social Evolution at Tarragona, Spain. The scientists, noting that the earliest presence of human ancestors in Europe is “one of the most debated topics in paleoanthropology,” said the site, Sima del Elefante in the Atapuerca Mountains, held the “oldest, most accurately dated record” of both fossils and artifacts of human occupation in Western Europe.

Other sites on the Continent yielded artifacts of a roughly comparable age, but no fossil bones. Until now, the earliest remains of Homo antecessor, from the same mountains, were 800,000 years old.

“It’s great to have confirmation that there was early human penetration in Western Europe this early,” said Ian Tattersall, a paleonanthropologist at the American Museum of Natural History in Manhattan, who was not involved in the research.

Dr. Tattersall said in an interview that it was too soon to tell where these cave occupants “fit in the larger scale” of early human settlement in Europe.

Dr. Carbonell’s group conceded that the identification of the fossils as Homo antecessor was provisional. But those in the cave had been busy making crude tools from chert, a tough rock. A few pieces survived, along with knapping flakes. The animal bones showed cut marks and other signs of processing.

SEOUL, South Korea — Rhee Han-soo has spent a lifetime pursuing a passion that he refuses to discuss even with his closest friends.

Mr. Rhee, an 82-year-old retired dentist, is one of a small group of Koreans who still write traditional Japanese poetry — a pursuit that many people of his generation consider just short of sacrilegious because of the indignities inflicted on their country during Japan’s colonial rule.

“Here, people look up to you if you write poetry in English and publish it in America or England,” Mr. Rhee said. “But if you write Japanese poems, they despise you or dismiss you as a fool.”

Mr. Rhee has published thousands of haiku, minimalist 17-syllable poems, but only in Japan.

As South Korea’s new president, Lee Myung-bak, and Prime Minister Yasuo Fukuda of Japan prepare to meet next month to chart what they say will be a new relationship between their countries, Mr. Rhee’s experience helps illustrate what Japanese and Koreans mean when they call each other “close yet distant neighbors.”

Like other Koreans who grew up under Japanese colonial rule, from 1910 to 1945, Mr. Rhee was forced to learn Japanese, rather than Korean, at school. When the Japanese withdrew after their defeat in World War II, many of these Koreans found themselves without a true mother tongue — ashamed to speak Japanese but unable to read Korean well.

Some like Mr. Rhee could not shake their love of the Japanese arts, including poetry and traditional music, which they learned as children.

For that, they paid a price: a lifetime of disregard or disapproval from fellow Koreans. Although the culture gap is closing somewhat — young Koreans cannot seem to get enough of Japanese pop culture — even many of them carry some animosity toward Japan.

The best known of the obscure group of Korean writers of Japanese poetry was Son Ho-yun, who died in 2003 at the age of 80. She had published six volumes of tanka, Japanese poems of 31 syllables, in Japan and had been invited to a New Year’s poetry reading at the Imperial Palace in Tokyo.

Despite this, in 2005, when Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi of Japan recited one of her poems during a news conference with Roh Moo-hyun, then South Korea’s president, most Koreans were baffled as to who she was. In the poem, Ms. Son dreamed of better relations between the countries.

“They say art transcends all borders,” Ms. Son wrote when some of her poetry was translated into Korean in 2002. “But I was mired in despondency because the path I chose was blocked by a border.

“Almost every day, I have lived with doubt, wondering, should I continue?”

Once, a Korean editor who was invited to speak at one of her book parties humiliated Ms. Son by reproaching her for writing Japanese poetry.

“No sooner do Koreans eat sushi or buy Japanese chocolate for their kids than they bad-mouth the Japanese,” Mr. Rhee said. “Both Koreans and Japanese are too narrow-minded when it comes to dealing with their neighbors. How are we going to catch up and compete with Japan without studying Japan?”

Mr. Rhee is a regular at the Seoul Haiku Club, where since 1993 about 20 Koreans and Japanese living in Seoul have met twice a month, to read and write haiku.

“I know that writing haiku is not a proud thing for a Korean to do,” said Takeshi Ushijima, a Japanese chemical factory executive who heads the club. “So I am grateful to our Korean members for trying to appreciate Japanese culture. They make me feel ashamed that I am not trying as hard to learn Korean poetry.”

Reiko Yamaguchi, a Japanese hotel manager and another club member, said writing haiku with Koreans had enhanced cultural understanding.

“Japanese and Koreans have different ways of perceiving nature,” she said. “Japanese tend to find maximum beauty when they see cherry flowers falling. Koreans’ hearts exult when the flowers are in full blossom.”

Mr. Rhee agreed: “It’s the same moon. But in haiku, Koreans sing the moon with our heart. To Japanese, our haiku may sound too subjective and hard to understand. Japanese sing the moon with their eye. They prefer realism. Koreans may find their haiku bare and superficial.”

Ms. Son is thought to have been the last tanka poet in South Korea. It is unclear how many South Koreans write haiku. Fewer than 10 Koreans, most of them in their 70s and 80s, regularly contribute to Japanese haiku magazines, said Kwak Dae-ki, 52, director of the Korea Haiku Institute, which he founded two years ago.

Since 1997, Mr. Kwak has been the host of an annual haiku competition that attracts more than 1,000 submissions from about 200 Koreans. Last year, he also staged a competition in “K-haiku” or haiku written in Korean.

But his enterprise has not been without criticism.

Younger generations in Japan and Korea, less shackled by wartime and colonial-era memories, eagerly trade popular culture trends. In Japan, Korean pop idols and TV series command large followings. Translations of Japanese novels sprinkle best-seller lists in South Korea.

“When my friends talk soccer, history and territorial disputes with Japan, they brim with patriotism,” said Ahn Jong-seok, 27, a student who won last year’s haiku competition. “But when they talk about Japanese comic books, movies and pop stars, they change completely and all rave.”

But traditional Japanese poetry is seen as a symbol of Japan in a way that pop culture is not, and that has encouraged its enthusiasts to maintain low profiles.

On March 1, a national holiday marking the anniversary of a 1919 Korean uprising against Japan, President Lee vowed to abandon “myopic nationalism” and urged the two countries to “foster a forward-looking approach in line with the principles of pragmatism.” Mr. Lee was born in 1941, in Osaka, Japan, where his parents were working at the time.

Political leaders on both sides had made similar overtures in the past.

But they also were accused of pandering to nationalism for domestic political gain when they stoked disputes over territory or Japanese textbooks that Koreans believe whitewash Japan’s militarist past.

“I am still afraid to move my institute downtown,” said Mr. Kwak, who runs the Korea Haiku Institute from his home in the southern city of Gyeongju. “If politicians stir up emotions again, my institute could become a target. People are already saying bad things about me behind my back.”

Akita Kitade, the Japanese author of a biography of Ms. Son, said Ms. Son was introduced to tanka when she won a scholarship to a Japanese university in 1940. Ms. Son sat in the front row of her first poetry class and did not realize that the other Korean students had boycotted it, refusing to learn a poetry form said to exemplify the Japanese national spirit.

Although her native country ignored her poems, she gave five of her six volumes of poetry the running title of “Rose of Sharon,” for the South Korean national flower.

“She kept stubbornly to Korean themes in her poems,” Mr. Kitade said. “There is a poem where she describes how she and her husband, when they were refugees during the Korean War, slept hugging each other to keep warm in winter. It’s hard to find such passion in Japanese poems, which tend to be more self-possessed and even cold.”

BUNDORAN, Ireland — It was a typical late-winter day on the Irish coast, no worse than usual. Bands of black clouds sailed ominously across the sky. Rain bucketed down in freezing torrents. Icy winds pummeled and churned the ocean.

Joanne Fulton sat in her wet suit with a group of friends in a van in the parking lot above the beach, ashen and shivering.

This is après-surf, Irish style, and the whole enterprise has a unique and subtle appeal. “It is very, very cold,” Ms. Fulton observed. “But once you get in, the wet suit keeps you warm. Although my hands actually have no feeling. Or my face and feet.”

Ms. Fulton, 25 and from Dublin, said she had come to Bundoran to surf, “not to hang on the beach.” And that is the key to surfing in this little corner of Ireland, in the northwest: it is not about the scene. No one is playing “Surfin’ Safari” or posing in a skimpy bathing suit. No one is in it for the sun, or even the pleasantness.

How could anyone be, when there is no sun and the natural impulse upon emerging from the water is to move as quickly as possible to the nearest indoor location?

“You’re not going to get some Irish kid walking around talking about ‘dude’ and ‘man,’ ” said Richie Fitzgerald, 33, one of Ireland’s best-known surfers and the owner of a local surf shop. “We don’t have that surf-bum, hang-around culture. If you come here in February, you’re going to get pelted by hailstorms, and the only chick you’re going to see is a seagull.”

Pete Craig, who owns a competing shop, said: “It’s not like it’s cool to walk around. People are either in the water or in the pub.”

Even its biggest fans admit that Bundoran might not seem like an obvious place to surf. “We live on the Atlantic coast; the winters are harsh and the weather is brutal,” Mr. Fitzgerald said. “Some guys go: ‘You surf in Ireland? What the hell’s that about?’ ”

Surfing aficionados have known about Ireland’s northwest coast for years, situated in a pleasantly volatile stretch of the Atlantic, making it the first port of call for any promising nasty storms brewing out in the ocean. Its position, as well as its rocky, serrated coastline, full of reefs and point breaks, makes it an ideal place for the sort of surfer who seeks a good wave, forget the creature comforts.

This winter, the area gained worldwide surfing renown when low-pressure systems coursing offshore created a series of gigantic waves, as big as anything found in Indonesia, Australia or Hawaii. Several surfers, including Mr. Fitzgerald, were recorded on waves of 45 to 55 feet tall in Mullaghmore Head, near Bundoran. And “Wave Riders,” a documentary about surfing in Ireland, won the audience award at the 2008 Jameson Dublin International Film Festival.

The sport has become increasingly popular in an Ireland that has been riding an economic boom for 15 years. In the old days, equipment was hard to come by. As a child, Mr. Fitzgerald was reduced to wearing mittens covered by rubber dishwashing gloves and to sharing a wet suit with his brother — he took the top half, his brother the bottom.

Now surfers use all the latest gear, including high-tech wet suits that can, temporarily at least, mask the frigidity of the water during the peak surfing season, in the dead of winter.

“The gear has got so good that you shouldn’t ever feel the cold,” said Killian O’Reilly, a co-owner of the Surf and Turf shop in town.

Danny Tourish, curled up like a shrimp around the back of his car, as if contorting his body would drive up his temperature, was not so sure. He had just emerged from the afternoon sea; he did not feel so toasty. “There’s a severe lack of sunshine around here,” he said, as rain beat on his head and dripped in sheets down his T-shirt.

Enduring a similar ordeal in the next car, Sharon McHugh said, “It’s a great cure for a hangover.”

It is not just the Irish here. Now that the word is out, Bundoran and nearby towns, with their unusual masochistic appeal and promise of huge, storm-tossed swells, have become international surfing destinations.

Jesse McNamara, for instance, lives near Santa Barbara, Calif., and reverse-commutes here every March for a weekend of winter surfing. Last year, he noted happily, “there was snow on the mountains, and it was hailing on the beach.”

“People are friendlier here, and they share the waves,” said Mr. McNamara, who works for the United States Defense Department. He had a theory as to why: “They’re just happy to have other people in the water.”

Josh McCrea, who moved here two and a half years ago from, of all places, New Zealand, said that he, too, liked the friendliness and, of course, the enormous waves. On the other hand, he said: “I never experienced such cold water. It nearly made me throw up the first time I got in.”

PERGAMINO, Argentina (Reuters) — Farmers in Argentina who have been on strike for two weeks to protest a tax increase on the export of grains said Wednesday that they would continue their protests until the government gave in.

The strike has led to shortages of meat and dairy products, paralyzed local grain and livestock trade and forced major exporters of Argentine soy products to renege on some contracts. Thousands of people rallied nationwide on Tuesday evening in support of the farmers. The protesters banged on pots outside the presidential palace after the center-left president, Cristina Fernández de Kirchner, said she would not give in to “extortion.”

Hector Boldrini, a farmer, said, “The government tried to put out the fire with gasoline.”

“There’s no way we will cede ground,” he said at a roadside protest in Pergamino, in the fertile northern region of Buenos Aires Province.

Elsewhere in Argentina, farmers blockaded highways to keep trucks from transporting agricultural goods. The government said it would clear the roads by force if necessary to get food to market.

Several suppliers of Argentine soy and soy oil declared force majeure to back off from sending cargoes to China as a result of the protest, following a similar move on soy meal shipments to Europe, traders and industry officials said.

The strike has slashed foreign currency inflows from agricultural exports, sending the local peso currency to its weakest level against the dollar in five months.

Argentina has been one of the world’s main beneficiaries of a global surge in commodities prices. But farmers abhor government measures like export bans and price controls, which are being put into effect to stem inflation and to increase revenue. The farmers say they intend to continue the strike as long as necessary, demanding that the government repeal a new sliding-scale export tax regime that raises levies on soy and sunflower products at current prices.

Ms. Kirchner has said the taxes help redistribute wealth in a country where nearly a quarter of people are poor.