Bacteria on an Ancient Bronze Implement

Bronze, Jade, Gold, and Ivory: Valuable Objects in Ancient Sichuan

If negotiations about value are essentially political (Graeber 2001:115), our understanding of past political systems is illuminated by an understanding of how and through what processes value is attributed to objects in a particular context. We cannot examine this “object value” through a focus on only one attribute or set of attributes, such as scarcity of raw material or labor investment, bu...

Chemical Investigation of Two Ancient Bronze Statuettes Found in Greece

An Egyptian Bronze

bronze handle, believed at 3astet holding that time to be the handle of ,t of Mrs. Mary a menyet, another ceremonial Draper, I9I5 object, but it is obvious now that it belonged to an aegis instead, and undoubtedly to an aegis of Isis, since it is she who is represented in the decoration on its upper part. The counterpoise is almost identical in shape and decoration with the one at the back of t...

Ancient bacteria–amoeba relationships and pathogenic animal bacteria

Long before bacteria infected humans, they infected amoebas, which remain a potentially important reservoir for human disease. Diverse soil amoebas including Dictyostelium and Acanthamoeba can host intracellular bacteria. Though the internal environment of free-living amoebas is similar in many ways to that of mammalian macrophages, they differ in a number of important ways, including temperatu...

Ancient bacteria show evidence of DNA repair.

Recent claims of cultivable ancient bacteria within sealed environments highlight our limited understanding of the mechanisms behind long-term cell survival. It remains unclear how dormancy, a favored explanation for extended cellular persistence, can cope with spontaneous genomic decay over geological timescales. There has been no direct evidence in ancient microbes for the most likely mechani...