In the legend of Odysseus, the hero hails from Ithaca, a Greek island in the Ionian Sea. The myth was famously told by the Ancient Greek poet Homer in The Odyssey and first written down sometime in ...

Decoding ancient scripts is a remarkable journey into humanity’s past, unearthing forgotten tales and cultures. The cryptic symbols, etched onto stone, parchment, or clay, often remain as the only ...

Russell has a PhD in the history of medicine, violence, and colonialism. His research has explored topics including ethics, science governance, and medical involvement in violent contexts. Russell has ...

More than a billion years ago, in a shallow basin across what is now northern Ontario, a subtropical lake much like ...

NPR's Melissa Block talks to Oliver and Sheila Lawn, former code-breakers in World War II who have been called in to try to decipher the meaning of mysterious letters carved into a monument at ...

NARRATOR: Up next on NOVA, Cracking the Maya Code. NARRATOR: In the 16th century, the flames of the Spanish Inquisition scorched the New World, decimating the Maya civilization. One blaze was ignited ...

The encrypted initiation rite of an ancient German secret society preoccupied with ophthalmology has fallen to modern language analysis tools including an online automatic translator. The 19th Century ...

From bizarre ancient markings to random numbers and letters, codes and ciphers have been used for millennia to send secret messages, hide identities and operate outside the law. Unravelling these ...

New research on a clump of hair found buried deep in the ice of Greenland has revealed a snapshot of what ancient man looked like. To date DNA sequencing has used modern samples from living people, ...