World War 2 - A Photo Album

www.wwiidaybyday.com/

Today’s Web site offers a fascinating look into the German side of affairs in World War II. The apolitical site tries to capture a daily account of the war, focusing on the Third Reich’s perspective. A great resource for history buffs!

Explore THEOI GREEK MYTHOLOGY

www.theoi.com/

Those who like mythology might want to check out the Theoi Project. The resource is dedicated to exploring Greek mythology with the aim of providing a free reference guide to the gods (theoi), spirits (daimones), and fabulous creatures (theres) of ancient Greece. The project profiles each deity and creature on a dedicated page, which also incorporates an encyclopaedia summary, quotes from ancient Greek and Roman literature, and illustrations from ancient art. The site presently contains more than 1,500 pages profiling the Greek gods and other characters from Greek mythology and 1,200 full sized pictures. Great fun reading, this.

Unravelling the Secrets of the Dead Sea Scrolls

For centuries, the Dead Sea Scrolls remained unread, keeping their secrets about the earliest years of Christianity.

Even after their discovery in caves by the Dead Sea in 1947, many scrolls were too brittle to be read without destroying them.

Now research at the School of Optometry and Vision Sciences at the UK-based University of Cardiff could provide the key to unlocking those secrets.

The Head of School, Professor Tim Wess, has been working with Diamond Light Source – a new scientific facility in Oxfordshire, UK – and developed techniques to read the written words without unrolling the fragile documents.

The Diamond machine is the size of five football pitches and fires electrons at close to the speed of light to generate what is known as synchrotron light, in the form of X-rays, ultraviolet and infrared beams.

The X-rays generated can be 100 billion times brighter than a standard laboratory X-ray tube.

Professor Wess and his team are now working on the full scale imaging and “virtual unravelling” of documents too fragile to unroll.

They will also use the Diamond synchrotron to examine the nanoscopic structure of parchments such as the Dead Sea Scrolls, which are at risk of degrading to gelatine over the centuries. They hope to develop a simple test to determine the proportion of gelatine in a historical sample.

Professor Wess said: “In addition to identifying ways to prevent the loss of important records from our past, our research aims to understand how we might recover documents damaged in natural disasters across the ages – such as the fire at the Library of Alexandria, or more recently, flooding in the Czech Republic, Italy and Poland, which could leave such archives lost forever.”

Curious Expeditions

www.curiousexpeditions.org

Mankind’s past is full of the wondrous, the macabre and the obscure, and today’s resource seeks to catalogue such events from across the globe. Updated regularly and written with a panache that would make many a historian jealous, this one should be bookmarked for posterity.