Enlarge / Considered as a set, the three books Penn State musicologist Marica Tacconi found to be forgeries nonetheless preserve 61 genuine compositions by 26 Italian composers, all written during the period from 1600 to 1678. (credit: Michel Garrett, Penn State) Penn State musicologist Marica Tacconi wasn’t planning on discovering forged music books when she […]
If you’re like us and can’t believe it really happened — that Ariana Grande really tied the knot with beau Dalton Gomez — maybe it’ll help to take a look back at how this happened. Sure, it feels like it was in the blink of an eye. But it’s actually been over a year — and the particular […]
Enlarge / Bill looks over the boycott’s corpse to determine if it’s still a threat… The following piece, originally published in late 2009, looks back at that year’s somewhat quixotic attempted boycott of Left 4 Dead 2—and how that effort eventually fell apart. Flawed as it was, that movement would serve as a precursor to […]
Enlarge / These consoles could eventually be large paperweights if Sony doesn’t fix a problem looming in their firmware. Unless something changes, an issue lurking in older PlayStations’ internal timing systems threatens to eventually make every PS4 game and all downloaded PS3 games unplayable on current hardware. Right now, it’s not a matter of if […]
Enlarge / Egyptian archaeologists have discovered a 3400-year-old city just outside Luxor, dating back to the reign of Amenhotop III, grandfather to King Tut. (credit: Zahi Hawass) A team of Egyptian archaeologists has unearthed what some describe as an industrial royal metropolis just north of modern-day Luxor, which incorporates what was once the ancient Egyptian […]
Enlarge / X-ray image of the mysterious fetus found in the coffin of the 17th-century Swedish Bishop Peder Winstrup. (credit: Gunnar Menander) When Swedish archaeologists in 2015 X-rayed the remains of a 17th-century bishop, they were shocked when the images revealed that the bishop shared his coffin with the remains of a stillborn premature baby. Now, […]
Lonely Boy, by Roman Kroitor Girls chant “We want Paul!”—but it’s not McCartney they’re swooning over. This is the summer of 1961, and the Beatles are still more than a year away from recording Love Me Do. Instead, the heart throb du jour is a 19-year-old kid from Canada named Paul Anka. At the Atlantic […]
Enlarge / University of Birmingham historian Dr. Emma Southon explores murder in ancient Rome in her new book, A Fatal Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum. (credit: Abrams Press) There once was a wealthy Roman man named Vedius Pollio, infamous for maintaining a reservoir of man-eating eels, into which he would throw any […]
Enlarge / “Exploded” view of the new computer model of the Antikythera mechanism, showing how it might have worked. (credit: Tony Freeth) Scientists have long struggled to solve the puzzle of the gearing system on the front of the so-called Antikythera mechanism—a fragmentary ancient Greek astronomical calculator, perhaps the earliest example of a geared device. […]
In 1697, a man named Jacques Sennacque wrote a letter to his cousin, a French merchant named Pierre Le Pers, requesting a certified death certificate for another man named Daniel Le Pers (presumably also a relation). Sennacque sealed the letter with an intricate folding method known as “letterlocking,” a type of physical cryptography—the better to […]