Group items tagged

"With the help of enhanced imagery and an expert in Elizabethan script, archaeologists are beginning to unravel the meaning of mysterious text and images etched into a rare 400-year-old slate tablet discovered this past summer at Jamestown, Virginia, the first permanent English settlement in America. Digitally enhanced images of the slate are helping to isolate inscriptions and illuminate fine details on the slate-the first with extensive inscriptions discovered at any early American colonial site, said William Kelso, director of research and interpretation at the 17th-century Historic Jamestowne site (Jamestown map). (Explore an interactive guide to colonial Jamestown.) The enhancements have helped researchers identify a 16th-century writing style used on the slate and discern new symbols, researchers announced last week. The characters may be from an obscure Algonquian Indian alphabet created by an English scientist to help explorers pronounce the language spoken by the Virginia Indians. "Just like finding the Rosetta Stone led to a better understanding of the Egyptians, this tablet is beginning to add significantly to our understanding of the earliest years at Jamestown," Kelso said. It conveys messages about literacy, art, symbols and signs personally communicated by the colonists who used it, he explained. "What other single artifact has been found that has so much to tell?" Both sides of the scratched and worn 5-by-8 inch (13-by-20 centimeter) tablet are covered with words, symbols, numbers, and drawings of people, plants, and birds that its owner or other users likely encountered in the New World. There are differences in the style of handwriting, which may mean that more than one person used the tablet as a sketch pad and possibly for writing rough drafts of documents, Kelso noted. Enhanced Images To help researchers decipher the inscriptions, curators at the Smithsonian Institution's Museum Conservation Institute recently produced enhanced images

"A Academia Brasileira de Letras anunciou hoje os vencedores do sua premiação literária anual. O prêmio Machado de Assis (conjunto de obra) de 2011 foi dado ao historiador Carlos Guilherme Mota, que receberá R$ 100 mil. Pelo romance "Nada a Dizer" (Companhia das Letras), a escritora e tradutora Elvira Vigna recebeu o prêmio de ficção. Ela, como os demais vencedores em outras categorias, ganhará R$ 30 mil. O prêmio de poesia foi para Salgado Maranhão, pelo livro "A Cor da Palavra" (Imago). O de tradução ficou com Sergio Flaksman, por "O Amante de Lady Chatterley", de D.H. Lawrence (Penguin-Companhia). A premiação será entregue em julho na sede da ABL, no Rio. "

"Scientists have finally solved the mystery of how one tiny creature has flourished for up to 50 million years without sex: it dries up. Bdelloid rotifers, microscopic asexual freshwater invertebrates (animals without spines) are the ultimate escape artists, able to outpace their enemies by drying up and blowing away."