IRIS

Every Monday, the LiveScience website publishes an article on a discovery, event, or character that influenced the course of history. This week’s note is “How the Eruption of Thera [modern Santorini] Changed the World”:
The world map might look differently had the Greek volcano Thera not erupted 3,500 years ago in what geologists believe was the […]

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The BBC has a nifty slide show documenting the very cool hi-tech cleaning of the Parthenon Marbles in Athens, which has removed decades of pollution.

Since the damage to the Athenian reliefs turned out to be less severe than previously thought, the cleaning has fueled the debate over whether the rest of the marbles, (in)famously known […]

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John Seabrook has penned a major article on the Antikythera Mechanism for the New Yorker. The incipit:
In October, 2005, a truck pulled up outside the National Archeological Museum in Athens, and workers began unloading an eight-ton X-ray machine that its designer, X-Te Systems of Great Britain, had dubbed the Bladerunner. Standing […]

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A new special on the BBC will address new finds that indicate a massive tsunami generated by the eruption of Santorini devestated the Minoan civilization on Crete:
The legend of Atlantis, the country that disappeared under the sea, may be more than just a myth. Research on the Greek island of Crete suggests Europe’s earliest civilisation […]

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Modern science weighs in on the old debate about which disease afflicted the Athenians at the start of the Peloponnesian War. DNA tests on material extracted from skeletons found in a mass grave dating to 430 BCE point to… Typhoid Fever.
From the Journal of Infectious Diseases:
BACKGROUND: Until now, in the absence of direct microbiological evidence, […]

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