Tracking Roman shipwreck repairs
Back in 2016, archaeologists found a shipwreck from the Roman Republic, the Ilovik–Paržine 1. The wreck has been the topic of a lot examine of the particular ship, enabling scientists to find out it was constructed in what’s now Brindisi on Italy’s south-eastern coast. Most just lately, evaluation of pollen trapped within the ship’s waterproofing layers have yielded perception into repairs made successively in different areas all through the Adriatic Sea, in keeping with a paper printed within the journal Frontiers in Materials.
Per the authors, prior analysis had largely ignored learning non-wooden supplies like seawater-resistant coatings, so that they used mass spectrometry and related strategies to look at the molecular make-up of ten coating samples. The outcomes confirmed that pine tree resin or tar (pitch) was the principle part. But one pattern was a mixture of beeswax and tar, a mix distinctive to Greek shipbuilders often called zopissa. The mixture makes the coating simpler to use when heated and in addition makes the pitch adhesive extra versatile.
Because pitch’s adhesive nature simply traps and protect pollen, the researchers had been additionally capable of establish which vegetation had been current when the coating was utilized, so they may in flip establish the areas the place the pitch had been produced. They discovered pollen from a variety of environments, comparable to forests of holly oak, pine, and matorral, all typical of the Mediterranean and Adriatic coastal areas. Other samples contained alder and ash, extra widespread to rivers, in addition to fir and beech extra typical of the mountain areas of Istria and Dalmatia. This gives concrete proof of mid-voyage repairs to the ship.
DOI: Frontiers in Materials, 2026. 10.3389/fmats.2026.1758862 (About DOIs).
Crushing soda cans for science
Who doesn’t love to look at these YouTube movies of individuals utilizing hydraulics to crush quite a lot of objects? That contains physicists on the University of Manchester, who had been intrigued by the distinction between crushing an empty soda can versus one which is filled with liquid. An empty can collapsed instantly; a full can collapses progressively in a collection of round rings. The Manchester physicists needed to know why a full can behaves this manner. They investigated through a mixture of mathematical modeling and laboratory crushing experiments, describing their findings in a paper printed within the journal Communications Physics.
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