Word: artifacts
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...Shroud of Turin were faulty. Although many of the attacks upon them verge on the crackpot, questions regarding the typicality of the sample swatch cannot be summarily dismissed. They are, moreover, unlikely to be settled soon. Far from being eager to hack another piece off his ever more delicate artifact for purposes of a radiocarbon rematch, Cardinal Saldarini called in all outstanding threads and samples without explanation two years ago, announcing only that the church would disown any testing on unreturned remnants. That is bad news, given 20th century humanity's ravenous hunger for literal certainty. Transubstantiation is well...
Radiocarbon dating works by measuring an artifact for an isotope called carbon 14, traces of which are contained in all organic substances, including the flax plants from which the shroud's linen was made. Carbon 14 is unstable and decays over time into another isotope. The amount present in living organisms remains nearly constant because it is continually replaced through the intake of food and air. But when animals and plants die, their level of carbon 14 begins to decrease at a known, fixed rate. Thus the amount of residual carbon 14 in an object provides a measurement...
...DECEPTIVE COAT OF VARNISH? One challenge to the radiocarbon dating that has received a good deal of publicity is that of Dr. Leoncio Garza-Valdes, a San Antonio, Texas, pediatrician with interests in microbiology and archaeology. In 1983, while examining a Mayan jade artifact that art experts claimed was a recent forgery, Garza-Valdes discovered that it was covered by a lacquer-like coating produced by bacteria. Since it also had traces of ancient blood on it that should have been datable by the radiocarbon method, he took it to the University of Arizona dating lab, where scientists scraped...
...over Lazarus that Jesus wept. In a more modern tribute to the girls, Celine Dion's My Heart Will Go On was played over and over at the funerals. It is the theme song of Titanic, a favorite movie of the children's, and their most poignant artifact of love after death...
...sculptors and architects still defined themselves largely in terms of European models, whether of "traditional" art or of Modernism. But the decade also saw the emergence of a genius of American design who was perhaps the greatest architect of the century: Frank Lloyd Wright. The decade's supreme collective artifact, in steel and stone, was, of course, Manhattan itself, with its immense towers--Chrysler, Empire State and the rest--rising like blasts of congealed and shining energy from the bedrock, a spectacle of Promethean ambition and daring...