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Kiara Advani’s brother Mishaal shares priceless pictures from her Haldi ceremony – Indiatimes.com
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Scientists find way to read priceless letters sealed 300 years ago and never opened
Three hundred years ago, before envelopes, passwords and security codes, writers often struggled to keep thoughts, cares and dreams expressed in their letters private.
One popular way was to use a technique called letter locking — intricately folding a flat sheet of paper to become its own envelope. This security strategy presented a challenge when 577 locked letters delivered to The Hague in the Netherlands between 1689 and 1706 were found in a trunk of undelivered mail.
The letters had never reached their final recipients, and conservationists didn’t want to open and damage them. Instead, a team has found a way to read one of the letters without breaking its seal or unfolding it in any way. Using a highly sensitive X-ray scanner and computer algorithms, researchers virtually unfolded the unopened letter.
This is a computer-generated unfolding sequence of a sealed letter from 17th-century Europe. Virtual unfolding was used to read the letter’s contents without physically opening it. Credit: Courtesy of the Unlocking History Research Group archive
“This algorithm takes us right into the heart of a locked letter,” the research team said in a statement.
“Sometimes the past resists scrutiny. We could simply have cut these letters open, but instead we took the time to study them for their hidden, secret, and inaccessible qualities. We’ve learned that letters can be a lot more revealing when they are left unopened.”
The technique revealed the contents of a letter dated July 31, 1697. It contains a request from Jacques Sennacques to his cousin Pierre Le Pers, a French merchant in The Hague, for a certified copy of a death notice of Daniel Le Pers.
The details may seem prosaic, but the researchers said the letter gives fascinating insight into the lives of ordinary people — a snapshot of the early modern world as it went about its business.
This 17th century trunk of undelivered letters was bequeathed to the Dutch postal museum in The Hague in 1926. A letter from this trunk was scanned by X-ray microtomography and virtually unfolded to reveal its contents for the first time in centuries. Credit: Courtesy of the Unlocking History Research Group archive
The trunk of correspondence belonged to a postmaster called Simon de Brienne and his wife, postmistress Marie Germain. It was acquired by the Museum voor Communicatie in The Hague in 1926.
In addition to the unopened letters, it contains 2,571 opened letters and fragments that for one reason or another never reached their destination.
At that time, there was no such thing as a postage stamp and recipients, not senders, were responsible for the postal and delivery charges. If the recipient was deceased or rejected the letter, no fees could be collected and the letters weren’t delivered.
A new way to mine historical documents
The X-ray scanners were originally designed to map the mineral content of teeth and have been used in dental research — until now.
“We’ve been able to use our scanners to X-ray history,” said study author David Mills, a researcher at Queen Mary University of London, in a statement.
“The scanning technology is similar to medical CT scanners, but using much more intense X-rays which allow us to see the minute traces of metal in the ink used to write these letters. The rest of the team were then able to take our scan images and turn them into letters they could open virtually and read for the first time in over 300 years.”
The letter contains a message from Jacques Sennacques dated July 31, 1697, to his cousin Pierre Le Pers, a French merchant. Also visible is a watermark in the center containing an image of a bird. Credit: Courtesy of the Unlocking History Research Group archive
The new technique has the potential to unlock new historical evidence from the Brienne trunk and other collections of unopened letters and documents, the study said.
One tantalizing application could be to virtually unfold sealed items and letters in the Prize Papers — an archive of documents confiscated by the British from enemy ships between the 17th and 19th centuries.
“Using virtual unfolding to read an intimate story that has never seen the light of day — and never even reached its recipient — is truly extraordinary,” the researchers said in the statement.
The research was published in the journal Nature Communications on Tuesday.
Long-Lost, Priceless Fossil Turns Out to Be a 30-Million-Year-Old Vampire Squid
Vampire squid have been lurking in the dark corners of the ocean for 30 million years, a new analysis of a long-lost fossil finds.
Modern-day vampire squid (Vampyroteuthis infernalis) can thrive in deep, oxygen-poor ocean water, unlike many other squid species that require shallower habitat along continental shelves.
Few fossil ancestors of today’s vampire squid survive, though, so scientists aren’t sure when these elusive cephalopods evolved the ability to live with little oxygen.
The new fossil analysis helps to fill a 120-million-year gap in vampire squid evolution, revealing that the ancestors of modern-day vampire squid already lived in the deep oceans during the Oligocene, 23 million to 34 million years ago.
These squid probably evolved adaptations to low-oxygen water during the Jurassic, said study co-author Martin Košťák, a paleontologist at Charles University in Prague.
“Life in stable low-oxygen levels brings evolutionary advantages — low predation pressure and less competition,” Košťák wrote in an email to Live Science.
Related: Photos of the vampire squid from hell
A rediscovered fossil
Košťák and his colleagues found the long-lost fossil in the collections of the Hungarian Natural History Museum in 2019 while looking for fossils of cuttlefish ancestors. The fossil was originally discovered in 1942 by Hungarian paleontologist Miklós Kretzoi, who identified it as a squid dating back around 30 million years and named it Necroteuthis hungarica. Later researchers, though, argued that it was a cuttlefish ancestor.
In 1956, during the Hungarian Revolution, the museum was burned, and the fossil was thought to be destroyed. The rediscovery was a happy surprise.
“It was a great moment,” Košťák said of the rediscovery, “to see something previously suggested to be definitely lost.”
The fossil. (Košťák et al., Communications Biology, 2021)
Košťák and his colleagues studied the fossil with scanning electron microscopy and conducted a geochemical analysis. They first found that Kretzoi’s initial identification was right: The fossil is from a squid, not a cuttlefish ancestor.
The animal’s internal shell, or gladius, which forms the backbone of its body, was about 6 inches (15 centimeters) long, suggesting the squid grew to about 13.7 inches (35 cm) long with arms included. That’s just a bit bigger than modern vampire squid, which reach about 11 inches (28 cm) in total body length.
The sediments surrounding the fossil showed no traces of microfossils often found on the seafloor, suggesting that the squid was not living in shallow waters. The researchers also analyzed levels of variations in carbon in the sediment and found that the sediment likely came from an anoxic, or low-oxygen, environment.
Those conditions are characteristic of the deep ocean floor. By looking at rock layers above where the fossil was deposited outside of what is today Budapest, the researchers were also able to show that the squid probably couldn’t have survived in the shallower seas of the time.
The shallow-sea deposits showed very high levels of a particular plankton that blooms in low-salt, high-nutrient environments – conditions that modern-day vampire squid can’t tolerate.
(Researchers from the Monterey Bay Research Institute discovered that while lurking in the deep sea, these squid don’t behave like the nightmare predators their name suggests; rather, they wait in their dark habitats for crumbs of organic matter to flutter down. Then, they capture those bits with mucus-covered suckers, MBARI found.)
Adapting to the deep
The new research, published Thursday (Feb 18) in the journal Communications Biology, hints at how vampire squid ancestors learned to live where other squids couldn’t.
Looking deeper in the fossil record, the oldest fossils from this group of squid are found in the Jurassic period, between 201 million and 174 million years ago, Košťák said, and they are typically found in anoxic sediments.
“The major differences is that these oxygen-depleted conditions were established in the shelf, [a] shallow water environment,” he said. “This means that the ancestors were inhabitants of shallow-water environs, but they were already adapted to low-oxygen conditions.”
There’s a gap in the fossil record in the Lower Cretaceous, starting about 145 million years ago. The squid may have already shifted to the deeper ocean by this point, Košťák said, primed by their experiences with anoxic conditions in the Jurassic. This deep-water lifestyle might explain why the squid survived the crisis that killed the nonavian dinosaurs at the end of the Cretaceous period, he added.
The deep-living squid from 30 million years ago helps link recent history with the deep past, Košťák said. He and his colleagues are now attempting to make similar connections for cuttlefish, a group of cute, color-changing cephalopods whose origins are similarly murky.
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This article was originally published by Live Science. Read the original article here.