The Antikythera Mechanism, a computer from 2,000 years ago

The Antikythera Mechanism was discovered in 1902 in the wreckage of a sunken ancient Roman ship. Reconstructed from the 81 fragments and gears found, it has been studied for several years by an Anglo-Greek team of scientists.

Now they have published their conclusions in the journal Science:it could have been used to predict solar and lunar eclipses and obtain some kind of planetary information.

Its origin seems to be between 100 and 150 BC, many years before the first known similar instruments.

Photographs of the Antikythera Mechanism
The mechanism in the National Archaeological Museum of Athens
Animation of the Sun and the Moon in the Mechanism

New research strengthens link between glaciers and Earth's Great Unconformity

The 300 most famous in history

Ciampate del Diavolo, the fossilized footprints in lava of hominids fleeing from a volcano 350,000 years ago
Near the Italian town of Foresta in the province of Caserta, and very close to the extinct volcano Roccamonfina, there is an area called Ciampate del Diavolo (literally footprints of the devil ). It is named like this due to a trail of fossilized footprints, divided into three sections, clearly visi
The last giant camels and archaic humans coexisted in Mongolia until 27,000 years ago
A species of giant two-humped camel, Camelus knoblochi is known to , lived for about a quarter of a million years in Central Asia. A new study published in Frontiers in Earth Science shows that the last refuge of C. knoblochi it was in Mongolia, until about 27,000 years ago. In Mongolia, the latter
8,000 years ago in Siberia, hunter-gatherers danced to the sound of elk teeth
The use of animal tooth pendants in rituals more than 8,000 years ago could have encouraged prehistoric hunters to dance, thanks to the sounds produced by the movements of the body. Reconstruction of an adult man found in tomb 76a of the prehistoric cemetery of Yuzhniy Olenliy Ostrov, northwestern
The first organisms "breathed" oxygen on Earth 3.1 billion years ago
The first organisms that breathed oxygen appeared about 3.1 billion years ago, according to new scientific estimates. The new Israeli genetic analysis of several different families of microorganisms came to the rather unexpected conclusion that the use of oxygen by living microorganisms began nearly