Hublot Antikythera mechanism,100-year-old clockwork relic

It's a story of gigantic scientific upheaval, of adventure and shipwreck on the high seas, of war and death.

A story of amazing intellect, lost riches and impossible chance - a sunken treasure that Jaques Cousteau once described as "more valuable than the Mona Lisa" - and it's connected with an ancient celebrity whose star shone so brightly that he's still a household name more than 2200 years after his death.

There are few scientific or historic discoveries more significant than the one made by a Greek sponge diver in October 1900, on the Mediterranean sea bed.

Captain Kondos sent a team down to see if they might be able to pick up any more sponges while they waited for the storm to pass.

Within a short time, diver Elias Stadiatos resurfaced, raving like a lunatic. He reported finding a shipwreck on the sea bed 60 meters (197 feet) below, with hundreds of corpses and horses strewn about, in various stages of decay.

Far from a stack of corpses, what Kondos found made his sponge gathering mission pale in comparison.

A sunken ancient vessel, loaded with all kinds of loot and treasure. What Stadiatos had reported as rotting bodies were actually bronze statues that had been covered over by centuries' worth of sea floor debris.

The team scavenged what they could carry and took it back to Greece, where the Greek Education Ministry and Hellenic Navy quickly put together an expedition to explore the wreck more thoroughly.

Early indications were that the material on board dated back more than 2,000 years, into the fascinating historical period of the Roman Republic.

The collection itself was a celebrated find, but one anonymous chunk of rock sitting in a storage room had further riches to offer, when it broke apart and a caretaker noticed metallic gears within.

The Antikythera mechanism
Historians at the time largely ignored the device for one simple reason - the technology required to make such complex metallic gear systems simply didn't exist back in 100 B.C.

It appeared to have an epicyclic, or planetary gear system in it - and those hadn't popped up anywhere else in history for another 1900 years or so.

It was assumed that the machine had been misplaced, accidentally left with the wreckage, or wrongly catalouged, so it was shelved for another 49 years, until an English physicist called Derek Price decided to have a closer look in 1951.

With better technology and plenty of time at hand, Price soon realized that this was indeed an ancient device - in fact, there was some kind of instructive script carved into it, faded almost to obscurity, that put it right in the 100-300 B.C. period. This was a true Eureka moment - it put amazingly advanced technology in the hands of the Ancient Greeks.

In fact, it instantly became not only the world's earliest known use of planetary gears, but the first known mechanism that used clockwork gears at all. Various civilizations earlier than the Ancient Greeks had used wooden peg-in-hole gear systems to transfer motion, but this was an order of magnitude more complex than anything before it, and indeed anything for a millennium and a half after it.

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WSU Researchers Use a 3D Printer to Make Bone-like Material - YouTube

It looks like bone. It feels like bone. For the most part, it acts like bone and it came off an inkjet printer.

A ceramic powder and 3D printer have been paired to create a bone-like material that could be used in surgery within the next decade.

The material, which has already been tested in vivo tests on rats and rabbits, could be created to order for dental and orthopedic procedures.

Once inserted in the body, it acts as a scaffold for new human bone cells to grow upon after just a week.

The manmade scaffold will eventually dissolve "with no apparent ill effects".

The material was created following a four-year effort by chemistry, materials science, biology and manufacturing researchers at Washington State University.

The main "ingredient" is calcium phosphate but silicon and zinc were added, which "more than doubled the strength of the main material," the team explained.

Inside the printer, an inkjet nozzle sprays a plastic binder liquid over a bed of the powder in layers of 20 microns.

Susmita Bose, co-author of the paper revealing the results of the project and professor in WSU's School of Mechanical and Materials Engineering says that custom-ordered replacement bone tissue could be in common use in the next ten years.

"If a doctor has a CT scan of a defect, we can convert it to a CAD file and make the scaffold according to the defect," she said.

Turing Machine: Scrap metal and wood

A mechanical machine that can solve the same algorithms as a modern computer has now been built out of wood and scrap metal.

Created by software engineer Jim MacArthur it works by using levers and cams and only requires electricity to power a small motor (see video above).

The machine is a close physical model of the theoretical Turing machine - a device first described by Alan Turing in 1937 as a thought experiment to understand the limits of mechanical computation.

According to the theory, the machine performs calculations using a set of rules to manipulate symbols on an infinite strip of tape.

Instead of using tape, this machine's memory uses ball bearings placed on a steel grid. A ball can represent one of five different symbols based on its position on the grid.

The machine reads and writes data by repositioning the balls into different cells. It does this by moving along the grid, lifting ball bearings with magnets and then depositing them into a new position based on a set of rules.

A true Turing machine requires an infinite track or tape to run on but according to MacArthur, his machine is as close as you can get to a physical replica.

It has no practical computing applications and would take months to add a few numbers together but MacArthur says it was fun to build. "Since you can see this computer working, it could be useful for educational purposes," he says.

World's first computer; Like Grandad, older than you thought

From Swiss Army knives to iPhones, it seems we just love fancy gadgets with as many different functions as possible. And judging from the ancient Greek Antikythera mechanism, the desire to impress with the latest multipurpose must-have item goes back at least 2000 years.

Clockwork Computer
This mysterious box of tricks was a portable clockwork computer, dating from the first or second century BC. Operated by turning a handle on the side, it modelled the movements of the Sun, Moon and planets through the sky, sported a local calendar, star calendar and Moon-phase display, and could even predict eclipses and track the timing of the Olympic games.

The Origin
One new clue to the origin of the mechanism comes from the Olympiad dial, there are six sets of games named on the dial, five of which have been deciphered so far. Four of them, including the Olympics, were major games known across the Greek world but the fifth, Naa, was much smaller, and would only have been of local interest.

The Naa Games
The Naa games were held in Dodona in northwestern Greece, so Alexander Jones of the Institute for the Study of the Ancient World in New York has suggested that the mechanism must have been made by or for someone from that area.

Older than the Romans
Intriguingly, this could mean the device is even older than at first thought. The inscriptions have been dated to around 100 BC, but according to Jones the device may have been made at latest in the early second century BC, because after that the Romans devastated or took over the Greek colonies in the region, so it's unlikely that people would still have been using the Greek calendar there.

Highlights
The highlight for most audiences, was this breathtaking new animation (Click on the Picture) of the gearing inside the mechanism. It has been made by Mogi Vicentini, an Italian astronomer and computer scientist, and it brings the device to life brilliantly.



Judge for yourself. It shows that the mechanism would hold its own against the best of today's luxury gadgets.