Fifteen items recovered from Ground Zero, the site of the attacks on the World Trade Center towers on September 11, 2001, are on display at the Penn Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology in Philadelphia. The exhibit, “Excavating Ground Zero,” will be open through November 6 and features items, such as a compute keyboard and broken spectacles, that will eventually be housed in the National September 11 Memorial & Museum in New York.

New images of a 2,500-year-old Egyptian mummy that were produced by a CT scanner show that its vital organs had been removed and replaced with rolls of linen.

A 3-D optical survey of World War II-era shipwrecks in deep water off the coast of North Carolina will eventually produce detailed maps for researchers. Scientists will also be looking for the wreckage of the last of the known German U-boats.

Students from Queen’s University, Belfast, and the University of Massachusetts, Lowell, are working together to learn about Irish immigrants to the United States, both before and after they left home. “These people don’t get the credit they deserve. Without them, there would have been no Industrial Revolution,” said Lowell resident John McLaughlin.

In Ireland’s County Meath, students are assisting in the excavation of the Black Friary, which was built in the thirteenth century near Trim Castle. “This was a busy town and there was a constant bustle and activity here for a couple of hundred years,” said Finola O’Carroll, director of the field school.

A lack of rat skeletons indicates that the Black Death was spread through London in 1348 and 1349 by person-to-person contact, according to historian Barney Sloane. “All the evidence I’ve looked at suggests the plague spread too fast for the traditional explanation of transmission by rats and fleas,” he said.

The Romans who built the fort of Vindolanda in northern England fortified the swampy ground with unneeded household objects, including scraps of cloth. “The fabrics were very soft and comfortable,” said archaeologist Annette Schieck. The article goes on to explain Roman fashions.

A backyard in Tennessee where artifacts and mastodon bones have been found has been added to the National Register of Historic Places. The site “has the potential to provide important new information on initial human migration into North America, the tools these earliest Americans used, the food they ate and how they adapted to the changing environment at the end of the last ice age,” said state prehistoric archaeologist Aaron Deter-Wolf.

A 7,000-year-old village in Des Moines, Iowa, has yielded more than 6,000 artifacts and the remains of two people. “This site is important because it was intensively occupied and very quickly river floods sealed the deposits and very quickly preserved items that otherwise could have been lost,” said state archaeologist John Doershuk.

The remains of 12 children and 20 llamas have been unearthed on Peru’s northern coast, near the UNESCO World Heritage site of Chan Chan. Head excavator Gabriel Prieto says they were probably sacrificed some 800 years ago.

There’s more information on recent research into dog domestication at National Geographic Daily News.

A toxic substance has been indentified in a lotion flask belonging to Egypt’s Queen Hatshepsut. Researchers at the University of Bonn said other ingredients in the flask may have treated a skin disease.

Paleoanthropologist Sandi Copeland talked to Live Science about her career and the nuts and bolts of research.