* Astronomy

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RE: Antikythera Mechanism

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Marcellus and his men blockaded Syracuse, in Sicily, for two years. The Roman general expected to conquer the Greek city state easily, but the ingenious siege towers and catapults designed by Archimedes helped to keep his troops at bay.
Then, in 212 BC, the Syracusans neglected their defences during a festival to the goddess Artemis, and the Romans finally breached the city walls. Marcellus wanted Archimedes alive, but it wasn't to be. According to ancient historians, Archimedes was killed in the chaos; by one account a soldier ran him through with a sword as he was in the middle of a mathematical proof.
One of Archimedes's creations was saved, though. The general took back to Rome a mechanical bronze sphere that showed the motions of the sun, moon and planets as seen from Earth.

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Antiquitys most sophisticated technology tracked the Olympic games along with celestial events. The four-year wait between each set of competitions in the modern Olympics is based on the original four-year cycle of games in ancient Greece. A research paper in Nature magazine now links an ancient device known for tracking and predicting celestial events- to the original quadrennial observance of the games.
Called the Antikythera Mechanism, this device is a bronze machine built around the first or second century B.C. Possibly the most advanced ancient scientific device, it was fished out of the sea in 1901.

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A 2,100-year-old "computer" found in a Roman shipwreck may have acted as a calendar for the Olympic Games, scientists report in Nature journal.

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Inscriptions on a mysterious 2000-year-old clockwork device suggest that the artefact was inspired by earlier devices made by the great Greek mathematician Archimedes.
The so-called "Antikythera mechanism" has puzzled historians since it was salvaged from an ancient shipwreck near the Greek island of Antikythera in 1901. It dates back to about 100 BC, and consists of more than 30 bronze gear wheels and pointers, enclosed in a wooden case.
The device is by far the most advanced scientific instrument to survive from antiquity - nothing else close to its complexity shows up in archaeological records for more than 1200 years, when mechanical clocks appeared in medieval Europe.

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A 2,000-year-old mechanical computer salvaged from a Roman shipwreck has astounded scientists who have finally unravelled the secrets of how the sophisticated device works.
The machine was lost among cargo in 65BC when the ship carrying it sank in 42m of water off the coast of the Greek island of Antikythera. By chance, in 1900, a sponge diver called Elias Stadiatos discovered the wreck and recovered statues and other artefacts from the site.

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Old Greek Computer

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Scientists have finally demystified the incredible workings of a 2,000-year-old astronomical calculator built by ancient people.

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Imagine tossing a top-notch laptop into the sea, leaving scientists from a foreign culture to scratch their heads over its corroded remains centuries later. A Roman shipmaster inadvertently did something just like it 2,000 years ago off southern Greece, experts said late Thursday.

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The most sophisticated mechanical device of ancient Greece may finally be giving up its secrets. Researchers have long known the so-called Antikythera mechanism was a calendar of sorts that represented the positions of the sun and moon using a series of gears. In its complexity it outshined all other objects for a thousand years following its creation sometime around the first century B.C. Now an international consortium of researchers has probed the machine's corroded fragments with sophisticated x-ray and light imaging tools to uncover the true sophistication of this geared wonder.

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