Month: August 2019

Enlarge / Physicists at the BESSY-II synchrotron radiation facility in Germany used multiple methods to reveal hidden text in supposedly blank patches on ancient papyri from Elephantine Island in Egypt. (credit: Helmholtz-Zentrum Berlin)

A team of German scientists has used a combination of cutting-edge physics techniques to virtually "unfold" an ancient Egyptian papyrus, part of an extensive collection housed in the Berlin Egyptian Museum. Their analysis revealed that a seemingly blank patch on the papyrus actually contained characters written in what had become "invisible ink" after centuries of exposure to light.

Most of the papyri in the collection were excavated around 1906 by an archaeologist named Otto Rubensohn, on Elephantine Island, near the city of Aswan. They've been gathering dust in storage for much of the ensuing decades, and because they are so fragile, more than 80% of the text within remains undeciphered. “Today, much of this papyrus has aged considerably, so the valuable texts can easily crumble if we try to unfold or unroll them,” said co-author Heinz-Eberhard Mahnke of Helmholtz-Zentrum Berlin and Freie Universität Berlin. That makes noninvasive imaging methods essential to the project.

In 2016, an international team of scientists developed a method for "virtually unrolling" a badly damaged ancient scroll found on the western shore of the Dead Sea, revealing the first few verses from the book of Leviticus. The so-called En Gedi scroll was recovered from the ark of an ancient synagogue destroyed by fire around 600 CE. To the naked eye, it resembled a small lump of charcoal, so fragile that there was no safe way to analyze the contents. The team's approach combined digital scanning with micro-computed tomography—a noninvasive technique often used for cancer imaging—with segmentation to digitally create pages, augmented with texturing and flattening techniques. Then they developed software (Volume Cartography) to virtually unroll the scroll.

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Welcome to Ars Gaming Week 2019! As a staff full of gamers and game-lovers, we'll be serving up extra reviews, guides, interviews, and other stories all about gaming from August 19 to August 23.

While it's exciting (and a bit overwhelming) to think about all the new games we want to play, it's fun to occasionally walk down memory lane and remember the first games we ever played. For the Ars staff, our lists of nostalgic games are exhaustive, but a few titles still stand out as the true gateways to the years of gaming that followed.

These might not be the very first games we played, or even the games we played the most during our youth, but they do hold a special place in our hearts for sparking something inside of us that made us continue to seek out games to feed our needs for action, adventure, strategy, escape, and more.

Enlarge / It's never a bad time to bust out your wheel—here's the T-GT wheel. (credit: Jonathan Gitlin)

Welcome to Ars Gaming Week 2019! As a staff full of gamers and game-lovers, we'll be serving up extra reviews, guides, interviews, and other stories all about gaming from August 19 to August 23.

Have your gaming tastes changed as you age? Mine have. Back in the early days, before starting an accidental love affair with the car, I'd play anything. In fact, I don't even remember my first racing game, although Outrun is probably a safe guess considering my age and where I grew up. But as I've gotten older and time for gaming has become scarce, that's all gone, and I exist on a diet that's almost exclusively racing. Console racing at that. Blame fear of having to learn something new if you like.

So when I was asked to write something for Ars Gaming Week, it seemed like a good opportunity to make a list—in this case, the ten best console racing games of all time. There is no scientific method behind my ranking. We did not assemble a crack panel of industry experts to stank-rank the field. I don't have celebrity anecdotes. And if a particular game was on a platform I never had, it won't be on the list, either.