National Geographic News, Reporting Your World Daily

Monday, November 23, 2009

Photo: Archimedes' Secrets Revealed by Atom Smasher


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Three generations of writing cover this page from the Archimedes Palimpsest, a much battered medieval manuscript (right). Under a 20th-century painting are 13th-century prayers. Under the prayers is part of a text by the scholar Archimedes.

Scientists are using a procedure called x-ray fluorescence—using x-rays from an atom smasher—to uncover the mathematician's lost works (left).

Photographs courtesy the Archimedes Palimpsest Project and the Walters Art Museum, © the owner of the Archimedes Palimpsest