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04:39ότι αυτό είναι ένας ευρύστης κατασυγητός μεταφύγης.
04:43Μετά από μια δημιουργική δημιουργία και την πρόσφαση των αλληλεγύων μερικών γραφείς,
04:48Παρυσίκης παίρνει ένα ραδικό σημαντικό.
04:51Αυτό δεν είναι μοδηνομό.
04:53Αυτό είναι 2,000 χρόνια.
04:56Αυτή είναι μια τεράδια στραγωγή.
04:59Είναι αμφανό να μιλήσω ότι αυτό το είδος τέτοιου τέτοιουργία μπορούσε να γίνει
05:03στον αλληλεγύωμα.
05:06Παίρνε άλλη φράγματα και τελικά φαγητικά χαρακτηριά που είναι μικρή βιβλία.
05:14Και έγινε και περισσότερο αστονισμό πράγμα.
05:20Ήταν ένα κελστικό κοινό.
05:24Όταν έλεγε αυτό, ήταν σκουσία τραγωστική.
05:29Δεν έλεγε αυτό ήταν ουσιαστικό πρόβλημα από αυτό το πρόβλημα.
05:3420 χρόνια πρόεδρε, Προς δημιουργείς όσο υπάρχει αυτούς.
05:39Έχει χρησιμοποιήσει μια συμβαίνεια της X-rays και γαμμα-rays
05:43για να περνάξει μιλενεία της κορονομικής.
05:46Αυτό που βλέπουμε είναι ακόμα πιο αστονισμένοι
05:50από τις πιο σημαντικές συγκεκριμένες.
05:53Μπορεί να δείξει ότι υπάρχει περισσότερες τελευταίες υπάρχει.
05:57Με κάποιες τελευταίες φωτήρες,
05:59και κάποιες τελευταίες υπάρχει από 65 τελευταίες.
06:03Η τελευταία αυτή ήταν καλύτερη.
06:08Και τελευταίους τελευταίους,
06:10το πρόβλημα του Αντικήθραίου έχει δημιουργείται από νέα δημιουργείς.
06:16Ένα από τις δύσκολες για να δημιουργείς αυτό το τελευταίος
06:20και το πρόβλημα έπρεπε,
06:22είναι ότι ήταν τόσο κοροδημένο.
06:25Αλλά κάποια τελευταία έγινε το 2005
06:30που έπρεπε να δημιουργείται από το τελευταίο για το τελευταίο.
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10:19Ωραία αυτοί τελευταία, όπως η ευνομή και η ευθυνή και η ευθυνή συνταγή.
10:23Ωραία ακριβώς υπάρχει στραβή της απόλουσικής ευρωτήριας,
10:28η δεκομένη τελευταία για το μηχάρι, για το τραγητό φορά της μοόν.
10:34Ωραία τεραγηθεί, το μηχάρι δημιουργεί επίσης,
10:37έχει στραγή μοόντωνε να της μηχάσει το μηχάρι.
10:40Ευρώτισμίε το φωρά, είναι χαρήθα μία χωρί, χωρίς χωρίς.
10:44Υπότιτλοι AUTHORWAVE
11:14This is because the Moon is going around the Earth, not in a circular orbit, but in what we call an ellipse, a squashed circle.
11:22So when the Moon is closer to the Earth, it seems to speed up.
11:27And when the Moon is further away from the Earth, it seems to slow down.
11:31It's an incredibly difficult thing to realise with circular gears, but there's a mechanism for doing that.
11:38The changing speed of the Moon pointer works using two gears slightly out of alignment with each other.
11:44The drive gear has a peg that fits in a slot on the Moon gear.
11:49As it goes around, it's fastest when the peg is at either end of the slot, but slows down as the peg slides along the slot.
11:58The kind of precision with which you had to make these gears was extraordinary.
12:02Research in the last 15 years reveals that the Antikythera mechanism can even predict solar eclipses.
12:11The mechanism isn't just extraordinary because it's complex, but it condenses all the knowledge of Greek astronomy into one very small, convenient box.
12:22It is quite breathtaking.
12:23It's the universe in a box.
12:29No other machine like this will appear for another 1,400 years.
12:34Its inventor must be a genius.
12:37So who is it?
12:39One of the first people that one might think of from this period is Archimedes.
12:49Archimedes was not just someone who was incredibly knowledgeable about how the world worked and about the physics of the heavens.
12:59He was also an inventor.
13:01Archimedes creates large war machines with levers and pulleys.
13:05He designs intricate devices such as the world's first odometer, a portable machine for measuring distance.
13:15And the Archimedes screw, a water pump still used across the world today.
13:23He was really the first port of call when people thought, who could have invented this incredible object?
13:29Who could have encapsulated so many different aspects of Greek science into one thing, into one place?
13:37There are also clues on the mechanism itself.
13:41The inscriptions are written in a distinct form of Greek, only spoken in a few locations, including Archimedes' native island of Sicily.
13:49So, is this another of Archimedes' inventions?
13:57There's one problem with this theory.
14:00The creator of the Antikythera mechanism knows that the moon's speed seems to vary.
14:05The first person we know of that was aware of the apparent speeding up and slowing down of the moon was Hipparchus of Nicaea, around 170 BC.
14:16By that time, Archimedes has been dead for more than 40 years.
14:25So, if not the great Archimedes, who else?
14:28One set of dials tells about the Olympic Games, which we all might expect, but also lesser-known, really more locally-based festivals, like the Halaya.
14:49The Halaya are regional games that only take place on the island of Rose.
14:54It's thought that this might be a special calling card, as if to say, made in Rhodes, because it's a very localized game.
15:03And Rhodes had a long-standing tradition of metalworking, most famously, the Colossus of Rhodes, which was a massive bronze statue that framed the entrance to the harbor.
15:14So, if the mechanism came from Rhodes, did its creator as well?
15:19A prime candidate is the man who discovers the changing speed of the moon, Hipparchus.
15:28Hipparchus lived and worked around the right time, about 170 BC, and in the right place.
15:33He worked in Rhodes.
15:35And it's thought to be likely that that's where this device came from.
15:40It could be Hipparchus, but he dies 60 years before the Antikythera ship sinks, meaning the mechanism would be very old already when it's lost.
15:54And there is one other candidate.
15:57He also lived in Rhodes and at exactly the right time.
16:03The astronomer, Posidonius.
16:05One very enticing reason why it's thought that he might have had something to do with this device is that at one stage he was visited by the Roman writer Cicero, who wrote about it in his diary.
16:19And Cicero said that this man, Posidonius, told him about a device that he'd made to represent the motions of the planets.
16:28Archimedes, Hipparchus, or Posidonius, we may never know for sure.
16:38Whoever makes it is clearly a genius, because he envisions the universe as a clockwork mechanism.
16:45It suggests a kind of thinking that really we don't get familiar with until the age of Newton, the mechanical age, the idea that you can think about the universe as a kind of clockwork system, as a mechanical device.
17:01Clearly someone at that time in ancient Greece already was thinking that perhaps nature works that way.
17:09If not for a group of sponge divers a hundred years ago, the secrets of this strange thing might have remained lost at the bottom of the Aegean forever.
17:19At the National Museum of American History in Washington, D.C. is the nosecone of a World War II bomb.
17:43But this is no ordinary bomb.
17:46On the front are tiny windows for its tiny pilots.
17:53The aim of this technology was to guide a 1,000-pound bomb with a pigeon.
18:04Now, using state-of-the-art digital imaging, we can reveal it in all its glory.
18:13This is the pigeon bomb.
18:15In some ways, it might be one of the smarter bombs that we've ever invented.
18:21Measuring roughly 60 centimeters long and over half a meter wide, it's just large enough to carry three tiny kamikaze pilots.
18:31Could this bizarre contraption really work?
18:34And why on earth does anyone need a pigeon-guided bomb in the first place?
18:45Most of the history of modern aerial bombing has been a history of bombs missing their targets.
18:56And now, if you're thinking about naval bombing, it becomes an even dicier proposition because you're trying to drop a large piece of metal unguided onto a moving object that is going to be pretty small relative to where you are.
19:15It's estimated that during World War II, as few as 1% of bombs dropped on ships hit their targets.
19:23The need for more accurate bombing strategies becomes top priority.
19:30There's a couple of different possible solutions.
19:34One is use torpedoes.
19:36Drop torpedoes from planes because torpedoes are actually meant to hit ships.
19:41Another is use a guidance system of some sort.
19:44Something to make these dumb bombs at least a little bit smarter.
19:47As an alternative to simply dropping a bomb and hoping it would plummet to its target, both sides develop glide bombs.
19:58The intent of the glide bomb is that there's enough control, so as opposed to just doing a free fall, you can do some adjustments and increase the probability that you're going to hit your target.
20:12The Germans have some success with the first glide bomb, the Fritz X.
20:17However, the Fritz X has a weakness.
20:26It's radio-controlled, and this creates two potential problems.
20:30Number one, you have to keep the plane that launched it flying at the same time so it can steer it, and that puts the plane and its crew in danger.
20:38And two, as a radio-guided bomb, the radio signal can be jammed, and later on in the war, the Allies were able to jam that signal quite successfully.
20:47The perfect glide bomb would not only need to be unjammable, it would also need to be autonomous, able to guide itself to a target without the need for external control.
21:01So, how do you create a guided bomb without radio guidance?
21:07Well, you want to put the guidance package inside the bomb itself and make something that's not dependent upon a radio signal.
21:16Hence, the pigeon bomb.
21:18But of all the animals in the world, why pigeons?
21:21Pigeons have been useful to us for sending messages for centuries because they have this incredible ability to navigate, in particular to home, to navigate back from where they were sent out from.
21:37And so they've been used for this purpose for millennia.
21:43The ancient Egyptians used them.
21:46The ancient Greeks used them.
21:49In fact, one of the messages the Greeks trusted to pigeons was the results of the Olympics.
21:56The use of pigeons in warfare really came into its own in the modern age.
22:05In World War I, half a million pigeons were used to send messages back and forth.
22:11And one pigeon even became a hero.
22:16This was a pigeon that served the French and was named Cher Ami.
22:20And it delivered its message despite the fact that it lost an eye and was severely wounded in the process.
22:25It was actually given a military commendation for its heroic service in wartime.
22:33Pigeons also saw very important uses in the Second World War.
22:37The Allies dropped homing pigeons with requests for information over German-occupied territory.
22:44And the pigeons had little cards on them that resistance fighters could use, fill out the information, put it back in the pigeon, and then the pigeon, of course, would fly straight home.
23:00And there is one other pigeon characteristic that would be essential to becoming a bomb guidance system.
23:07Birds generally are actually a lot smarter in many ways than they're given credit for.
23:13You know, this notion of bird brain is really unfair.
23:16But even among birds, pigeons are among the smartest.
23:23Pigeons are very good, it seems, at learning a task.
23:26So, pigeon pilots do make a strange sort of sense.
23:33But that still leaves one big question.
23:37How on earth do you teach them to fly this bomb?
23:44Enter pigeon fancier B.F. Skinner.
23:47B.F. Skinner is one of the fathers of modern psychology, and he's particularly famous for developing various methods of what we now call behavior psychology.
23:59Really trying to understand the basic impulses by which thinking creatures operate, how they respond to stimuli.
24:07This idea that you can get a response according to some particular stimulus, that goes back at least to the experiments that Pavlov did, famously with dogs.
24:21He found that, you know, dogs would start to salivate if they were shown food.
24:26Pavlov was much more interested in very, very simple responses to stimuli and physical responses, whereas Skinner is taking it a bit farther.
24:36He's actually trying to, in some ways, control the way you respond consciously to various signals.
24:46Skinner devised this apparatus.
24:48It was really just a box.
24:50It's often now called a Skinner box.
24:52So the animal is put inside it and then given a particular stimulus, and once it happens to make the response you're after, then the animal gets a reward.
25:06Food, for example.
25:08And quite quickly, relatively intelligent creatures like pigeons will figure out what it is that's being expected of them.
25:17They will remember the behaviour that created the reward, and they'll do it again and again and again.
25:26In initial tests, the pigeons respond even better than expected.
25:31Skinner found that you could actually train pigeons to do some pretty complicated things, things that certainly you'd never find birds doing normally.
25:41So, for example, he trained them to play ping pong.
25:44Encouraged by the results of his pigeon training experiments, Skinner goes to the government, seeking money to develop his pigeon bomb.
26:00B.F. Skinner comes to the U.S. military with what, on the surface, would seem like an utterly absurd idea.
26:07But you have to understand that World War II was a time of great experimentation, and it is hardly the craziest idea that is tried out.
26:15Amongst those crazy ideas are bats carrying napalm.
26:19And my personal favourite, which was the Soviet-trained dogs carrying anti-tank bombs.
26:27They were trained to climb underneath the German tanks to set off their bombs.
26:34Just one tiny miscalculation, they were trained on Russian tanks.
26:39So as soon as these dogs were let loose, the first thing they did with their bombs was dive right under the Russian tanks.
26:44So not going as according to plan with the whole bomb dog thing.
26:48Using animals as bomb delivery systems clearly has a poor track record.
26:55But B.F. Skinner is convinced his pigeon bomb concept is, well, bomb-proof.
27:03But how would it actually work?
27:05The idea was to take a glide bomb, and at the front had a pressure-sealed nose cone, where the pigeon could actually be mounted.
27:21There's a little screen in front of the pigeon onto which an image of their target is being projected.
27:28And the pigeon is trained to peck at the image, and then the steering system responds to the pigeon's movements and aims the bomb at the target.
27:40To minimize the chance of one pigeon guiding the bomb off course, each bomb would carry three pigeon pilots.
27:49The three pigeons would actually operate so that the majority vote would always end up controlling the trajectory of the glide bomb.
27:58Skinner was clearly on to something.
28:01This idea is still used today in modern avionics.
28:05In the control and navigation software of many airplanes, there are three independent systems that work together,
28:11and a majority vote still determines the control of the airplane.
28:15That protects against any one of them going awry, preventing the plane from being compromised.
28:21Understandably, the idea of putting a high-explosive bomb under the control of three pigeons does not initially go down well with the U.S. military.
28:33But Skinner is adamant it can work.
28:36So in 1943, Skinner receives $25,000 to explore his idea, which was a princely sum at the time.
28:49Skinner is given basic details of the glide bomb.
28:52It's known as a pelican.
28:54His experiment is given the perfect codename, Project Pigeon.
29:01Having settled on the idea of projecting the image from a lens onto a tilting screen that could sense where the bird was pecking,
29:09Skinner begins testing them on realistic images.
29:14And the results are startling.
29:16When someone describes the pigeon bomb to you, it just sounds ludicrous.
29:21But when you see footage of these pigeons pecking at the image of the ship projected onto the screen in front of you,
29:29you see, no, this is actually working.
29:32But as far as we know, the pigeon bomb never takes flight.
29:38So what goes wrong?
29:40In 1944, Skinner turns up to demonstrate his solution to a team of scientists.
29:52And he's ready to go.
29:53He's got the film.
29:54He's got his little pigeon pilots.
29:56He's got the mock-up of the capsule.
29:58And it works.
29:59He has solved the problem.
30:01He has created an unjammable guidance system, assuming no one has breadcrumbs handy.
30:05But convincing the skeptical scientists proves impossible.
30:11In fact, the meeting ended by someone pulling Skinner aside and suggesting to him that he just go out and get drunk,
30:18which he interpreted accurately as a very bad sign.
30:23Unknown to Skinner, while he's busy training pigeons,
30:26a rival project is developing an alternative solution to the problem.
30:31Skinner's solution works.
30:32He has the guidance system all set up.
30:36The problem is by the time he's perfected it,
30:39the other solution that was being explored,
30:41the radar guidance system, has also advanced considerably.
30:44And that's the one that the military goes with.
30:47And they end up making 2,600 of these bombs, which are known as the bat bombs.
30:52And you can say this about the radar guidance system.
30:55There's a lot less cleanup afterwards.
30:56But is that really the end for pigeon warfare?
31:07In 2019, a top-secret CIA report was declassified.
31:14In it were details of an operation from the 1970s called Project Takana.
31:19And the most successful part of Takana was based on pigeons.
31:25The idea was we strapped tiny, lightweight cameras to pigeons,
31:33and we released them inside the Soviet Union,
31:36and they fly taking pictures with their cameras.
31:39And if you have enough of them,
31:41presumably some of them will take pictures of stuff that's very important.
31:45The plan was to secretly ship the pigeons to Moscow
31:50for use against priority targets.
31:54The pigeon would be released a few miles from whatever facility
31:58the Americans were interested in,
32:00and it would fly over, it would take its pictures,
32:02and it would return to a known point where then the film could be developed.
32:07The first target was one of the most secure sites in the entire Soviet Union.
32:13the Leningrad shipyards where the Soviet nuclear submarines were built.
32:21However, we still don't know whether that project
32:24was actually carried forth to fruition.
32:27So, just like the awesome pigeon bomb,
32:31these birds have been denied the chance to prove they have the right stuff.
32:35It's tough being a war pigeon.
32:43In the depths of the British Museum in London
32:47is one of the strangest Roman artifacts ever discovered.
32:52At first glance, this 1700-year-old cup looks decorative,
32:56but otherwise unremarkable.
32:59Now, carefully reconstructing it
33:03with the latest digital imaging technology
33:06reveals its secrets.
33:09Standing roughly 16 centimeters tall,
33:12this is the Lycurgus cup.
33:16It's an ancient relic
33:17with a mystifying party trick.
33:19It changes color.
33:23This is such an incredible artifact.
33:25It's not an optical illusion.
33:26It really does change color from red to green
33:29as you move it around in the light.
33:31How does it work?
33:33How is it made?
33:35And what exactly is it?
33:37The Lycurgus cup is a cup from about 1700 years ago,
33:46from around 300 AD to a late Roman period,
33:50a time when glass technologies
33:52have been fairly well developed at this point
33:53and getting more complex.
33:57Mythical figures seem to float above the inner glass chalice.
34:02Archaeologists call this a cage cup.
34:04In fact, it's the most well-preserved caged cup
34:08in the ancient world.
34:10Even in the Roman days, in the 4th century,
34:13when this cup was actually made and used,
34:15this would have been a rare piece.
34:21Microscopic examination shows the cup
34:23and its floating cage are made
34:25from a single piece of glass.
34:28Glass is a really brittle and breakable material,
34:31so the delicacy involved
34:33is quite incredible.
34:36They would have used tiny tools
34:38to file away very carefully
34:40the areas of glass that they didn't want.
34:43They actually undercut the design
34:44so that there's areas under the person
34:47where there's air gaps
34:49and just little legs that attach it to the cup.
34:55The terrifying thing about this
34:57is one slip up or one sneeze
34:59from the person that was doing this
35:01would have meant melting the whole thing down
35:03and starting again from scratch.
35:06But it's the glass itself
35:08that is truly spectacular.
35:14What's remarkable about this glass
35:16is the fact that it changes colours
35:17and that I've never seen outside of this cup.
35:21If you look at the cup just under normal light,
35:23then the cup appears green.
35:27But if you put the cup in front of the light,
35:29the light that's shining through it appears red.
35:31No one would have really seen these things,
35:37even in the Roman days,
35:38a cup changing colour.
35:39It would have been an extremely rare piece.
35:41Most people would have just been completely amazed.
35:46Possession of such a unique object
35:47would broadcast the owner's status.
35:49This is the kind of piece
35:54you really want to show off.
35:56Here you are, you built your fancy house,
35:58you have your fancy parties,
35:59but finally the sort of center showpiece
36:01would be this cup.
36:08It's known as dichroic glass,
36:11which means two-coloured.
36:13For centuries,
36:15its secrets remained a mystery.
36:16studying the cup
36:20under a normal microscope reveals
36:22nothing.
36:26It appears to be
36:27like any other Roman glass.
36:39So how can a 1700-year-old cup
36:42change colour?
36:44For centuries,
36:46this unique ability
36:47defies explanation.
36:53In 1990,
36:55scientists used
36:56an electron microscope
36:57to have a look at
36:58what was going on
36:58inside the glass itself.
37:02They discover
37:03tiny particles of gold,
37:05silver and copper
37:06suspended in the glass.
37:08These are nanoparticles,
37:11so they're about
37:11a thousandth of the width
37:13of a human hair.
37:14It's these tiny metallic particles
37:19that hold the secret
37:20to the amazing colour-changing effects
37:23that we see in this glass.
37:24And it's all because
37:26of quantum effects,
37:27which happen down
37:28at the sub-atomic level.
37:32The effect works
37:33because white light
37:34is not just one colour.
37:36White light is actually a mixture
37:38of all the colours of the rainbow.
37:40Red, orange, green, blue,
37:41indigo, violet.
37:43The smallest particles of light
37:45are called photons.
37:47And each colour of light
37:49is caused by photons
37:50of a different energy.
37:53The magic happens
37:54when these photons
37:55enter the glass
37:56and hit the nanoparticles
37:57of metal.
37:58And because they're metal particles,
38:02they've got like a cloud
38:04of electrons
38:04around the outside of them.
38:06And when the photon
38:09hits the cloud of electrons,
38:11it's absorbed
38:12and it sets up
38:14a sort of vibration
38:15in the cloud of electrons.
38:16It's like a jumper
38:17hitting a trampoline.
38:19The whole thing flexes
38:20and a wave runs around it.
38:21And then when it flexes
38:22back out again,
38:23it spits out the photon
38:25back the way it came.
38:28Scientists discover
38:31that the precise diameter
38:32of the nanoparticles
38:33in the glass
38:34causes only green photons
38:36to bounce back.
38:38By very carefully
38:39varying the quantities
38:40of the ingredients
38:41when you're making this glass,
38:42you can make these particles
38:43exactly the right size
38:44to scatter the green light,
38:46allow the other colours through
38:47and create this beautiful effect.
38:51When you look at the light
38:52reflected by the cup,
38:53you see green.
38:56The rest of the light
38:57goes right through the cup
38:59and white light minus green
39:02is that kind of plummy red colour.
39:06So when the light is shining
39:07through the glass,
39:08you see red.
39:10What's incredible about this glass
39:12is that in order to produce
39:13these nanoparticles,
39:15the maker would have had
39:16to have ground up the metals
39:18into a really, really fine powder,
39:20much, much finer
39:21than talcum powder, for example,
39:23and then embedded that
39:25into the glass
39:26and dispersed it evenly,
39:28so it was evenly distributed
39:29throughout
39:30in a very, very specific amount.
39:34The effect is caused
39:35by a minute amount
39:37of the metals.
39:37We think that the amount
39:40of silver and gold
39:41in this cup
39:42is about 300 parts per million
39:45for the silver
39:45and about 40 parts per million
39:47for the gold.
39:48So if you were to clump
39:49all of that silver and gold together,
39:51it would still be a particle
39:53that is too small
39:54for the naked eye to see.
39:59Scientists call the quantum effect
40:01that causes the colour change
40:02surface plasmin resonance.
40:04This is nanotechnology,
40:09the manipulation of matter
40:10at an atomic
40:11or near-atomic scale.
40:14It's probably pretty safe
40:16to say that the Romans
40:17didn't understand
40:18the quantum effects
40:19of what was going on
40:20inside their glass,
40:21but clearly someone
40:23knew enough to know
40:24that if you added
40:25these metals
40:26in these quantities
40:27into this material,
40:29then you could create
40:30these amazing
40:31colour-changing effects.
40:34With its extraordinary
40:36quantum glass,
40:37the Lycurgus cup
40:38may well be
40:39the most spectacular
40:40cage cup ever created.
40:44Who is this unique object
40:46made for?
40:51It would have been
40:52certainly a wealthy individual,
40:54a high-class individual,
40:55maybe even someone
40:56associated with the emperor
40:57or the emperor's family.
40:58The cup is probably made
41:02in the early 4th century AD
41:04when the Roman Empire
41:05is divided
41:06between two warring emperors,
41:09Constantine and Licinius.
41:13Crucially, Licinius
41:15is based in Thrace
41:16in the Eastern Empire.
41:18The cup shows
41:19the mythical king,
41:20Lycurgus,
41:21who is a Thracian king
41:23battling Dionysus,
41:25god of wine.
41:26In the myth,
41:29Lycurgus of Thrace
41:30is defeated
41:31by Dionysus,
41:33also known
41:34as the Roman god
41:35Bacchus.
41:38And it could be
41:39symbolic for Licinius,
41:41the Western Roman emperor
41:41who moved to Thrace.
41:44During this time,
41:45the emperor Constantine,
41:46who was the ruler
41:47of the Eastern Roman Empire,
41:48did defeat Licinius,
41:50and this may be
41:51a kind of symbolism,
41:51if you will.
41:52So it's possible
41:54the cup's decoration
41:56is symbolic
41:57of Licinius' defeat
41:58by Constantine.
42:01If it is made
42:02to celebrate his victory,
42:04Emperor Constantine
42:05may have drunk
42:06from this very cup.
42:11Whoever owned it,
42:12the survival
42:13of this extraordinarily
42:14fragile ancient wonder
42:16through 2,000 years
42:17of turmoil
42:18is nothing short
42:20of a miracle.
42:31Today,
42:32our understanding
42:33of the cup's unique
42:34color-changing ability
42:35is helping develop
42:36pioneering new technology.
42:38Inspired by these
42:42beautiful,
42:42brightly colored
42:43nanoparticles
42:44in the Licurgus cup,
42:45scientists at the
42:46University of Illinois
42:47have been able
42:47to develop incredibly
42:48sensitive sensors.
42:50So in the Licurgus cup,
42:52all of those little
42:52gold and silver nanoparticles
42:53are surrounded by glass.
42:55But if instead of glass,
42:56you put these nanoparticles
42:57into something like water,
42:59you can detect tiny changes
43:00in the concentration
43:01of different things
43:02dissolved in the water
43:03by looking for changes
43:04in the color of the sensor.
43:08This means that this
43:10technology has applications
43:11from medicine
43:12where you can detect
43:12tiny quantities of things
43:14in people's bodily fluids
43:15to detecting explosives
43:16where you can detect
43:17trace amounts of signature
43:18chemicals that give away
43:19the presence of a bomb.
43:23It seems that sometimes
43:25discovering the secrets
43:27of the ancient world
43:28may unlock the secrets
43:29of our own future.
43:38in the Licurgus cup.
44:08Ευχαριστώ.
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