abstract the mosaic art as a decorative element in buildings enjoys several thousand years of age in egypt, mesopotamia, greece, rome and byzantium and is widely usedbut technically speaking, the earliest mosaic forms have poorly made. they were made by insertion of fruit cores or broken pottery pieces in the wet mud mortar of walls. later, the art evolved rapidly and extensively used for archi...

Around the town of Cermik in south-east Turkey there are many deposits of asbestiform minerals, some of which are used to make whitewash or stucco. A sample of 7000 of the population revealed 461 (6.5%) with pleural thickening and calcification, of whom 103 (1.47% of the total) had evidence of interstitial pulmonary fibrosis. Forty-one patients with respiratory cancer were admitted to the Diyar...

Glass mosaic decorations were used throughout the medieval Mediterranean as a powerful medium to convey religious and political agendas, yet we know next nothing about source of materials transmission necessary technical know-how. Mosaics are generally considered Byzantine art form, not least due their prominence in church architecture because Islamic textual sources assert that glass tesserae ...

A novel two-sided Bitter decoration technique was recently employed by Yao et al. to study the structure of the magnetic vortex array in high-temperature superconductors. Here we discuss the analysis of such experiments. We show that two-sided decorations can be used to infer quantitative information about the bulk properties of flux arrays, and discuss how a least squares analysis of the local...