Word: patinas
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...late-night screening of Paranormal Activity in Times Square this past week didn't need gore effects to be scared witless. Yes, they knew it was only a movie - one that, like The Blair Witch Project and Cloverfield and plenty others before it, used "found footage" to give a patina of realism to the fanciful events that were dreamed up by writer-director Oren Peli and are endured by actors Micah Sloat and Katie Featherston (using their real names). But when that door moved, the crowd's collective gasp just about sucked all the oxygen out of the theater...
...easily outgrossed the other three new entries in wide release. Shane Acker's visually imaginative animated feature 9, which finished second with $10.9 million, benefited from being presented by Tim Burton, as District 9 had by its Peter Jackson connection, but is unlikely to escape its art-house patina. The other two newbies - the horror film Sorority Row and Kate Beckinsale's Antarctica killer-hunt drama Whiteout - got the theatrical equivalent of a window display in a video store before their imminent DVD releases; each took in just over $5 million...
...Matthews, however, argues the data from her later study are "irrelevant" to the ossuary trial. She and her colleagues say that the very low values representing wet seasons were "noise" that should not be taken in isolation since patina takes many years to form. Patina's isotopic value would represent an average figure, not just the low winter results. "It's like comparing tomatoes and gloves," Bar-Matthews told TIME. "There is no scenario where we can get light isotopic values below -6 permil also in Jerusalem under natural conditions...
...defense is likely to point out that the tests on the ossuary carried out by Bar-Matthews and Ayalon also found traces of patina in at least two other letters of the inscription with isotopes of -4.65 and -5.82 permil - well within the original range they suggested. Bar-Matthews and Ayalon discounted these results, saying the results had been corrupted either from the limestone of the box or from a nearby crack that had been recently repaired...
...trouble with this kind evidence is, of course, that the formation of patina isn't yet explainable in science everyone can agree on. The patina on one letter could be the result of one particularly wet winter that happened to leave its evidence on the ossuary - but perhaps not in a stalagmite in a cave. Or vice versa. "The analogy between the formation of cave deposits and the formation of patina on archeological objects is imprecise and more work is needed," says Professor Aldo Shemesh, an isotope expert at the Weizmann Institute who was also called as a defense expert...