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.

This entry was posted by Jessica E. Saraceni on Monday, August 22, 2011. Discussion of this blog entry is now closed.

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