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The mysteries of Rapa Nui – or Easter Island – have puzzled explorers, tourists and scientists for centuries. When was it first settled? Where did the settlers come from? How did they carve and move the moai – the giant statues they carved from volcanic rock? What did these figures represent? And what became of these people and their culture – which had dwindled so dramatically by the time the Europeans came across this remote yet inhabited island? Over the years, theories have been vigorously asserted then replaced by the discovery and interpretation of new evidence.
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A team of archaeologists from the University of Southampton have used the latest in digital imaging technology to record and analyze carvings on an Easter Island statue. And those body scanners the TSA uses at the airport are having a major impact in the art world too: they are revealing what may lie underneath the surface of great works of art. For instance, researchers have used them to detect the face of an ancient Roman man hidden below the surface of a wall painting in the Louvre Museum in Paris. Scientists and art historians think he image say may be thousands of years old.
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It’s not those mysterious statues, it’s something in the dirt that surrounds them. When researchers added rapamycin to the diet of healthy mice throughout their life span, their learning and memory was enhanced when they were young and actually IMPROVED when they ere old. Rapamycin is a bacterial product first isolated from soil on Easter Island.
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Scientists are fond of trying to break codes–and sometimes they succeed. One manuscript they’ve been working on seems straight out of fiction: a strange handwritten message in abstract symbols and Roman letters meticulously covering 105 yellowing pages, hidden in the depths of an academic archive. Now, more than three centuries after it was devised, the 75,000-character "Copiale Cipher" has finally been broken.
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