* Astronomy

A Duke University-led research team will use an $814,000 grant from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to develop collaborative online editing tools for ancient documents preserved on papyrus.
The new electronic editing environment, when completed, will enable scholars - regardless of their location -- to research, retrieve and display ancient texts, supplementary data and digital images of papyri.

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A 3-foot-tall tablet with 87 lines of Hebrew that scholars think dates from the decades just before the birth of Jesus is causing a quiet stir in biblical and archaeological circles, especially because it might speak of a messiah who will rise from the dead after three days.
If such a messianic description really is there, it will contribute to a developing re-evaluation of both popular and scholarly views of Jesus, because it suggests that the story of his death and resurrection was part of a recognized Jewish tradition at the time.

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The Mabinogi, also commonly referred to as Mabinogion, is regarded by many as Wales' greatest contribution to European literature.
Mabinogi comes from the word mab, which originally meant boyhood or youth but gradually came to mean a tale of a hero's boyhood and eventually, simply, a tale.

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A year after the Romans packed up their shields in AD410 and left Britain to the mercy of the Anglo-Saxons, a scribe in Edessa, in what is modern day Turkey, was preparing a list of martyrs who had perished in defence of the relatively new Christian faith in Persia.
In a margin he dated the list November 411. Unfortunately for the martyrs, history forgot them. At some point, this page became detached from the book it belonged to. Since 1840, the volume has been one of the treasures of the British Library. It is known only by its catalogue code: ADD 12-150

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