{"id":76897,"date":"2018-03-13T16:23:05","date_gmt":"2018-03-13T23:23:05","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2018\/03\/particle-accelerator-reveals-ancient-greek-medical-text-beneath-religious-psalms-on-parchment"},"modified":"2018-03-13T16:23:05","modified_gmt":"2018-03-13T23:23:05","slug":"particle-accelerator-reveals-ancient-greek-medical-text-beneath-religious-psalms-on-parchment","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2018\/03\/particle-accelerator-reveals-ancient-greek-medical-text-beneath-religious-psalms-on-parchment","title":{"rendered":"Particle Accelerator Reveals Ancient Greek Medical Text Beneath Religious Psalms on Parchment"},"content":{"rendered":"

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If you\u2019re a history buff, you might not know much particle physics. But the two fields share more in common than you\u2019d think. X-rays from a high-energy lab have revealed ancient Greek medical texts that had been stripped and covered with religious writing.<\/p>\n

Scientists at the Department of Energy\u2019s SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory have long been using<\/a> high-powered x-rays at their Stanford Synchrotron Radiation Lightsource (SSRL) to analyze ancient texts. This week, they\u2019ll be revealing the text beneath 10th-century psalms from the St. Catherine\u2019s Monastery on the Sinai Peninsula. The hidden words were a translation of writings by the ancient Greek doctor Galen.<\/p>\n

Synchrotrons might sound complex, but they\u2019re a relatively common kind of particle accelerator. Rather than crash particles together like researchers do at the Large Hadron Collider, the SSRL just accelerates electrons to nearly the speed of light and keeps them traveling around a many-sided polygon. Magnets on the straightaways and bends change the electrons\u2019 directions, which produces a beam of high-energy x-rays.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

If you\u2019re a history buff, you might not know much particle physics. But the two fields share more in common than you\u2019d think. X-rays from a high-energy lab have revealed ancient Greek medical texts that had been stripped and covered with religious writing. Scientists at the Department of Energy\u2019s SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory have long [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":396,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-76897","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-biotech-medical"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/76897","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/396"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=76897"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/76897\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=76897"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=76897"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=76897"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}