The world’s oldest synthetic pigment, Egyptian blue, has been recreated by a team of researchers from Washington State University. This breakthrough, published in the journal NPJ Heritage Science, provides valuable insights for archaeologists and conservation scientists studying ancient Egyptian materials.

Led by John McCloy, director of WSU’s School of Mechanical and Materials Engineering, the research team collaborated with the Carnegie Museum of Natural History and the Smithsonian’s Museum Conservation Institute to develop 12 recipes for the pigment. These recipes utilized a variety of raw materials and heating times, replicating temperatures available to ancient artists.

Egyptian blue was highly valued in ancient times due to its unique properties and versatility. It was used as a substitute for expensive minerals like turquoise or lapis lazuli and applied to wood, stone, and cartonnage – a papier-mâché-type material. Depending on its ingredients and processing time, the pigment’s color ranged from deep blue to dull gray or green.

The researchers’ work aimed to highlight how modern science can reveal hidden stories in ancient Egyptian objects. After the Egyptians, the pigment was used by Romans, but by the Renaissance period, the knowledge of how it was made had largely been forgotten.

In recent years, there has been a resurgence of interest in Egyptian blue due to its intriguing properties and potential new technological applications. The pigment emits light in the near-infrared part of the electromagnetic spectrum, which people can’t see, making it suitable for fingerprinting and counterfeit-proof inks. It also shares similar chemistry with high-temperature superconductors.

To understand the makeup of Egyptian blue, the researchers created 12 different recipes using mixtures of silicon dioxide, copper, calcium, and sodium carbonate. They heated the material at around 1000 degrees Celsius for between one and 11 hours to replicate temperatures available to ancient artists. After cooling the samples at various rates, they studied the pigments using modern microscopy and analysis techniques that had never been used for this type of research.

The researchers found that Egyptian blue is highly heterogeneous, with different people making the pigment and transporting it to final uses elsewhere. Small differences in the process resulted in very different outcomes. In fact, to get the bluest color required only about 50% of the blue-colored components, regardless of the rest of the mixture’s composition.

The samples created are currently on display at Carnegie Museum of Natural History in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania and will become part of the museum’s new long-term gallery focused on ancient Egypt. This research serves as a prime example of how science can shed light on our human past, revealing hidden stories in ancient objects and materials.

The article you provided is a fascinating study on a groundbreaking method for extracting and identifying proteins from ancient human soft tissues. Here’s a rewritten version, maintaining the core ideas but improving clarity, structure, and style:

Unlocking the Secrets of Ancient Human Remains: A New Method for Accessing Proteins in Soft Tissues

A team of researchers at the University of Oxford has developed a revolutionary method that could soon unlock the vast repository of biological information held in the proteins of ancient human soft tissues. This discovery, published in PLOS ONE, opens up a new era for palaeobiological discovery and promises to vastly expand our understanding of ancient diet, disease, environment, and evolutionary relationships.

Up until now, studies on ancient proteins have been confined largely to mineralized tissues such as bones and teeth. However, the internal organs – which are a far richer source of biological information – have remained inaccessible due to the lack of an established protocol for their analysis. This new method changes that.

A key hurdle was finding an effective way to disrupt cell membranes to liberate proteins. The team discovered that urea successfully broke open cells and released proteins within. After extraction, the proteins were then separated using liquid chromatography and identified using mass spectrometry. By coupling this step with high-field asymmetric-waveform ion mobility spectrometry (which separates ions based on how they move in an electric field), the researchers found that they could increase the number of proteins identified by up to 40%.

This technique makes it possible to recover proteins from samples that are hard to analyze, including degraded or very complex mixtures. The team was able to identify over 1,200 ancient proteins from just 2.5 mg of sample – a feat that has never been achieved before.

Using the combined method, the researchers identified a diverse array of proteins that govern healthy brain function, reflecting the molecular complexity of the human nervous system. They also identified potential biomarkers for neurological diseases such as Alzheimer’s and multiple sclerosis. This new technique opens a window on human history we haven’t looked through before.

The vast majority of human diseases – including psychiatric illness and mental health disorders – leave no marks on the bone, making them essentially invisible in the archaeological record. This discovery promises to transform our understanding of ancient human health and disease.

Senior author Professor Roman Fischer, Centre for Medicines Discovery at the University of Oxford, added: “By enabling the retrieval of protein biomarkers from ancient soft tissues, this workflow allows us to investigate pathology beyond the skeleton, transforming our ability to understand the health of past populations.”

This method has already attracted interest for its applicability to a wide range of archaeological materials and environments – from mummified remains to bog bodies, and from antibodies to peptide hormones. As Dr Christiana Scheib, Department of Zoology at the University of Cambridge, noted: “Ancient soft tissues are so rarely preserved, yet could hold such powerful information regarding evolutionary history.”

The largest predatory fish to have ever existed, Otodus megalodon, was thought to be primarily focused on whales as their main source of food. However, new research has revealed that these massive creatures had a much broader range of prey than previously assumed.

According to Dr. Jeremy McCormack from the Department of Geosciences at Goethe University Frankfurt, who conducted this study together with scientists from Germany, France, Austria and the US, megalodon’s diet was not as specialized as previously thought. By analyzing fossilized teeth, which are all that remains of these cartilaginous fish, researchers found that megalodon had a flexible enough to feed on various prey from different levels of the food pyramid.

The researchers extracted zinc from the fossil teeth and compared its ratio with other prehistoric and extant shark species, as well as other animal species. This analysis provided insights into predator-prey relationships 18 million years ago. The findings suggested that megalodon was an ecologically versatile generalist, capable of adapting to different food sources depending on availability.

Comparisons between fossils from Sigmaringen and Passau showed regional differences in the range of prey or changes in its availability at different times. This study not only shed new light on the diet of megalodon but also provided valuable insights into how marine communities have changed over geologic time.

As Kenshu Shimada, a paleobiologist at DePaul University in Chicago, USA and coauthor of this study noted, even “supercarnivores” like megalodon are not immune to extinction. Previous studies had suggested that the rise of the modern great white shark was partly responsible for the demise of Otodus megalodon.

In conclusion, this research has revised our understanding of the diet of megalodon and has shown that these creatures were more adaptable than previously thought. The analysis of tooth zinc isotope ratios has proven to be a valuable tool for paleoecological reconstructions and will continue to provide insights into how marine communities have changed over time.