I'm wondering whether we need to establish a new stand-alone category of Darwin Award just for ancient Chinese monarchs...

Zhao Mei, known as "the King of Nanyue (South China)", may have been a victim of his own "pills of immortality." The king may have died after taking the elixir of life he tried to make more than 2,000 years ago, senior archaeologists said Monday.

Archaeologists found many "pills of immortality" inside Zhao's tomb yesterday in Guangzhou, capital of South China's Guangdong Province, after they dug out the ancient tomb for archaeological studies
The five-colour pills which reach a diameter of 1.8 centimetres are actually made of sulphur, crystal, red realgar, calaite and alunite, archaeologists said. Two large stoves used to make "the pills of immortality" were also found.

The pills which ancient Chinese kings and emperors used to take to avoid growing old were actually poisonous, said Wang Fang, a professor from Zhongshan University, in South China. Archaeologists and experts will continue testing Zhao's bones and the pills to prove the king did in fact die of the elixir, Wang said. [link]

There is a theory that it was an elixir of immortality just like this that carried off the most fearsome Chinese monarch of them all, Qin Shi Huangdi.


More about the tomb of Zhao Mei.

One of the great difficulties of directly detecting extra-solar planets with space-based infrared nulling interferometry is the requirement to have long baselines.

Nulling interferometry works by taking the signal from two or more telescopes and combining them in such a way as to cancel out the light comes from the star that the planets are orbiting around. The baseline is the distance that separates each pair of telescopes and the longer the baseline the more localized and deeper the nulling pattern is around the star while at the same time not diminishing the light from nearby planets. This is important because stars are (depending on the wavelengths used) anywhere between a million and a billion times brighter than the planets which orbit them and the most interesting planets to study are the ones that, just like the earth, lie in the so-called "habitable zone" close to the star.

The difficulty is that in order to achieve the long baselines that are required (more than 100 metres) current plans for space-based nulling interferometers envisage that a separate spacecraft would be needed in order to carry each telescope and that all of these spacecraft would need to fly in precision formation. While this approach is a very flexible arrangement and offers many benefits, the difficulties involved in getting this to work mean that the actual precision flying techniques are still ... (ahem) ... " currently being developed

" so it may be quite some time before we see the working version. NASA is still considering its technology options at this time with the plan to launch its Terrestrial Path Finder (an array of five spacecraft) in 2012 at the very earliest.

There is hope, however, that a simpler approach to planet detection via nulling interferometry may be possible. A recent paper suggests that it may be possible to detect planets with a two telescope system using a baseline as little as 12 metres. This is short enough to consider mounting two telescopes on a single rigid structure (the International Space Station, by way of comparison, is 108.5 metres across and 88.3 metres long). The short baselines can be achieved because even though the shorter baseline results is a wider fringe pattern of nulled light reducing the effective brightness of the planets that fall within it, if one takes into account the increased infrared intensity of planets that are close to stars (due to their heating by the star) there may be just enough light to break through the nulling effect and enable detection.

With a modest baseline of only 12 metres it should be possible to detect 7 of the known 100 extrasolar planets but with a slightly larger baseline of between 20 and 30 metres it should be possible to fulfill all of the basic goals of the Terrestrial Path Finder mission. These goals include analyzing the composition of planetary atmospheres, an essential part of the search for planets with life.

The life and work of Johannes Kepler straddles the transition in science from mediaeval to modern. He was one of the most outstanding mathematicians of his day and yet his work eventually helped to fatally undermine the entire field of mathematical astronomy, a mediaeval dicipline which ultimately derived from Aristotle and which sought to describe the heavens purely in abstract terms based on compounds of uniform circular motions.

Kepler worked within this tradition but became so convinced of the fundamental truth of the Copernican model that he explored a vast array of mathematical approaches in order to demonstrate its superiority to geocentrism. This ultimately led him to discover his famous three laws of motion which were in the hands of Isaac Newton many years later to transform astronomy from being merely predictive into a science with unprecedented explanatory power.

But along the path his mathematical explorations led him down a number of wrong turns and blind alleys. The most delightful and aesthetically pleasing of these is, in my opinion, his polyhedra model of the solar system, the one incidentally which inspired the most praise from his contemporaries but was also completely and utterly wrong.

Kepler proposed that the distance relationships between the six planets known at that time could be understood in terms of the five Platonic solids. His 1596 book, Mysterium Cosmographicum, proposed the model illustrated below, in which one Platonic solid fits between each pair of planetary spheres. (Note the use of Leonardo's style of open faces.)

The outer sphere is that of Saturn; inside it is the sphere of Jupiter. Kepler made two prototypes in colored paper hoping to have it fabricated in silver. His original plan was that it would also function as a punchbowl dispensing assorted beverages.

The image at right is a closeup of the spheres of inner planets, Mercury, Venus, Earth, and Mars. This is a beautiful astronomical model. For example, it explains why there are only six planets: How could there be a seventh planet, when Euclid proved that there are only five Platonic solids! Of course, the model is completely false, the interplanetary distances it predicts are not sufficiently accurate, and Kepler was scientist enough to accept this eventually. But it an excellent example of how truth and beauty are not always equivalent.

The above excerpt comes from the George Hart's exquisite Virtual Polyhedra : The Encyclopedia of Polyhedra site. Be sure to also visit the sections of Da Vinci and Pacioli (who were also collaborators on surely the classiest mathematics textbook ever). Another interesting section is the enigma of the Neolithic Polyhedra found in Scotland.

A long forgotten9th century manuscript of verses written in Greek and originally from a Syrian monastery has been found in the Vatican library. The verses are by the ancient Greek author, Menander, who was born in Athens in 342 BC and was a prolific writer of comedies. He was a very highly regarded author in antiquity and considered a master of the New Comedy genre which emerged during the time of Macedonian hegemony and conquest.

Despite being quoted by numerous ancient authors (including the Apostle, St Paul), it was believed that none of the over one hundred plays that he wrote had survived. However in 1957, a nearly complete copy of his play Dyskolos ("The Grouch", written in 316 BC) was discovered on a recovered manuscript, a very readable translation of which may be read online here.

This latest find, which was made by Francesco D'Aiuto, a specialist in Greek manuscripts, also contains 200 verses from Dyskolos and hopefully will be able to fill in the missing fragments that appear toward the end of the play. Also the newly discovered manuscript contains another 200 verses which are unfamiliar and scholars are hoping that these will contains extracts from previously unknown works by the author.

by Edgar Allan Poe

This word is properly spelt Daguerréotype, and pronounced as if written Dagairraioteep. The inventor's name is Daguerre, but the French usage requires an accent on the second e, in the formation of the compound term.

Five hundred years older than the Great Pyramids of Giza and a thousand years older that Stone Henge, the passage tomb of Newgrange in Ireland is the oldest roofed structure in the world.

It's purpose was to act as a gnomon to mark the Northern winter solstice, the shortest day of the year. At dawn on that day every year (either December 21st or 22nd), the sun rises from its most Southern point and shines directly onto the dazzling white quartz outer wall of Newgrange asd well as passing through a hole and illuminating its inner chamber. The construction of Newgrange was a remarkable feat of engineering demonstrating an advanced knowledge of astronomy and geometry on the part of its Neolithic builders.