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the End of the World by Tom Kleines. In between the many hours of field work, the researchers enjoy moments of play, ultimate frisbee, beach, volleyball, guitars, and bonfires under the never ending twilight of Alaska summer nights. After three seasons on the island, I can confidently say that the place is sacred, says former crew leader Sierra Ni nisanie E Pete. I think about it every day. The cool science, the grueling physical days, and the lifeline friends I made.

Middleton humbles people in the best ways. Next The Buried Treasure That Might Have Changed History by Julian Sancton. Two thousand years ago, the Roman Army embarked on a far flung hunt for silver. Thanks to a persistent dark yell the gi buff we're now learning how close they came to finding an empire altering fortune. The passage is easy

to miss. A paragraph long anecdote in the Annals by the Roman historian Tacitus, It tells a story found nowhere else about an unpopular legate forcing legionaries into a treacherous mine at the frontier of the empire. It takes place during the reign of Claudius eighty forty one through fifty four, a time of furious expansion when Rome sought to swallow

up the border lands and their resources. The location mentioned in the Tacitus pachsage is vague, described as in the district of Mattium, just outside of Roman occupied Germania Superior, but the goal is clear, to find more of a metal that powered the realm. Silver trickled down from pratitious patricians, officers, and soldiers to the rest of the economy in the

form of coins and ingots and jewelry. Coins were not merely currency, stamped with the profile of the emperor, each one served as a symbol of his power as it circulated across the land. The bulk of Rome's mined silver had until then come from Hispania modern days Spain and Portugal, but prospectors had long sought other deposits across the dominion.

In Tacitus's stelling, the legionaries were worn out by the arduous, dirty and dangerous task of mining, of digging out water courses and constructing underground workings, which would have been difficult enough in the open, let alone in the stifling darkness, broken only feebly by the glow of oil lamps. To voice their displeasure, the legionaries rode letter to the Emperor asking him to recognize the efforts of their unpopular commander,

courteous Rufus, with triumphal honors. Such an acknowledgment, they hoped, would permit Rufus to drop the largely fruitless effort. Eventually, the search for silver was abandoned and the army's encampment destroyed. Tacitus's story long intrigued classical scholars, who could find no evidence nor any other mention of such an undertaking. Some

scholars dismissed it as a colorful but unverifiable aside. Alfred Heart of the University of Liverpool, a specialist on Rome's economy and mining operations, called it an example of so called mirabelia, which are these kind of wondrous stories that are being told just to regale readers. But a recent discovery that as electrified the archaeological world suggests that Tacitus

was outlining a real episode. Rufus and his men indeed searched for silver, it seems, but decamped before hitting the motherload. We now know there was enough silver in the region to have altered the course of the empire, but the enormity of their near miss would not become clear until millennia later, after a persistently curious German hunter put all

the pieces together. On a crisp evening in April twenty sixteen, a seventy two year old former paratrooper named Urgen Eigenbrut was stalking bore in the hills around the historic spa town of bod Ems in Rhineland Palatinate. He noticed an unusual pattern in a grain field, two parallel yellowish strips cutting across a blanket of green. Few other passers by would have made anything of it. They were too wide to have been trunk or tank tray tracks. Conspiracy theorists

might have suggested an extraterrestrial origin Eisenbrodt knew better. He had served with the Blue Helmets in Somalia and as a defense attache until eve, but since retiring from the German military in two thousand three, he had turned his attention to going zon closer to home. A far distant in time, Eigenbrout had become fascinated with the archaeology and history of the bad Ms environs, and had even led a number of small scale excavations of the Lawn Valley

as a volunteer amateur. Though he was he recognized the crop marks as the sure sign of a human made structure, keeping in mind a core tenet of archaeology there are no straight lines in nature. Something beneath the ground had changed the density of the soil, causing the visitation at the service to mature at a different rate. But what

to get a clear view? He asked his old friend Hans Joachim de Roy, a retired frigate captain and fellow history buff, to photograph the field from above with his drone. The ariel shot revealed that the parallel lines made a right angle turn. The corner was rounded like a playing card. Eisenbrodt's pulse quickened when he viewed the image, he had seen depictions of such configuration before. There it was only

one thing it could be. The markings were the unmistakable traces of the defensive double trenches Roman troops commonly dug around military camps at the fringes of their empire. Eigenbrodt's work had only just begun. He had to convince the archaeologists of Rhineland Palatinate in Koblenz to do some digging, and fortunately he did it like a pain in the ass, said de Roy. It was like the work of Sissyphus

worn down by Eigenbrot. The state's archaeology department eventually agreed to conduct a geomagnetic survey of the surrounding area on what is known as the Erlich Plateau, measuring infinitesimal variations in the Earth's magnetic field. The survey revealed several other stretches of the double trench, confirming that had marked the perimeter of a nineteen acre Roman encampment with fortifications of

soil and wood. Excavation of the Erlich Camp began in twenty seventeen, led by the archaeologist Thomas Mauer and supervised by Peter Heinrich of Rhineland State Museum in Trier and Marcus Schultz of Gerta University in Frankfurt. They initially believed the site to be from the time of Augustus twenty seven b BC through a d fourteen, perhaps one of countless temporary marching camps Roman troops erected while on the move.

Such camps have been found across Europe, often thanks to Krop marks, but Frederick Auth, a doctoral student supervised by Schultz, put it bluntly. As archaeological finds go, they were not so spectacular. However, Eigenbrot wondered whether Erlich might not instead have been a more noteworthy encampment. He was familiar with the enematic passage from Tacitus. The mention of the Matisichi was an early clue, as they were a Germanic tribe

who had settled near bod Ems. Eigenbrodt, who knew that the surrounding area had long been mined for silver, grew ever more convinced that the camp he had discovered was related to the mining operation. Tacitus noted perhaps it was where the disgruntled legionaries had been stationed. He thought to the professional archaeologist, Eisenbrodt's hypothesis reflected the touching naivete of a dambler. The archeologist told the enthusiast, this wasn't how

the discipline worked in real life. It's quite difficult to connect archaeology and historical literature, ath said, and we tend to be very careful to not overinterpret that literature, because Tacitus has never seen Roman Germany. The hunter's undiminished enthusiasm nourished the excavation, literally, as he kept the workers fed

with home made boar sausage. Those sausages are quite the legend of the student's oath, recalled, I was giving a talk in bot Ems, and my monetary compensation was actually more sausages from sad Bore. The dig unearthed, among other artifacts, a brass ring from a horse's harness, iron nails, and slag, but precious little that might have allowed a precise date

for the site. The archeologist's best clue was a heavily corroded bronze coin depicting a barely decipherable profile of Emperor Caligula, evidently minted in Rome in thirty seven or thirty eight. Then a coin of copper alloy from the subsequent Claudian period was discovered at the bottom of a former well.

Coins could circulate for a long time, especially during Claudius's reign when few were minted, making it difficult to narrow down the time frame, But when combined with recovered shreds of pottery, including plates and drugs characteristic of the mid first century, the finds led the team to date the early camp to the forties or Ela, in other words, smack in the period Tacitus was writing about in the Annals.

Eigenbrodt's theory wasn't yet vindicated. The time frame of Erlich may have aligned with Tacitus, but without evidence of a contemporaneous Roman silver mine, it could have merely been an intriguing coincidence. Finding such evidence would not be simple. The area around bod Ems had been mined for various metals from biblical times up until the Second World War, and is consequently riddled with pits, shafts, and tunnels, several of

which are still accessible. Some of these pits may be of Roman origins, says Schultz, but they were reshaped in medieval times or during the last few centuries. In addition, the region had been heavily bombed in the war, making it difficult to distinguish craters from ancient minds. We're quite glad that Eigenbrot was ex military, so he can tell

them apart set oth. Rather than ampt to find an undiscovered mine in a landscape full of holes, Eigenbrought insisted that the archaeologists shift their efforts to a nearby Roman site that had been known about for a long time, the remains of a small fortification on a barren hilltop less than a mile and a half away called Bluskof

literally bear Head. The site had been the subject of an eighteen ninety seven study by retired lieutenant Colonel Otto Dam, who, like Eigenbrot, had thought he'd found the elusive silver mine mentioned by Tacitus. Dom concluded that Bluskov had indeed been a smelting facility if he dated back to the end of the second century, far too late for Tacitus. At

Eigenbrodt's urging, auth took another look at Bluskof. He found that Dom's nineteenth century publication was pretty much full of errors, showing feufines and methodologically sloppy, with far more archaeological rigor and technology unknown in Dom's day, including lidar to map the underground. Outh led a new excavation that unearthed a pair of coins from the time of Claudius or earlier, and none from the following reign of his adopted son Nero.

The coins confirmed it the large Erlich Camp and the smaller Bluskoff outpost were in fact contemporaneous and most likely related. What's more, the Bluskoff structure lay in an area now known to be a rich source of silver. Roman prospectors probably would have used several ques in the landscape to determine that Bluskov could be a fruitful place to mine. The larger Erlich Camp most likely served as the main Roman base in the area, which supplied the legionaries who

worked to the Blushkoff mine and manned the outpost. Based on this suspicion, Outh brought Eisenbrot to the tunnel that pierced through Bluskof Hill along with Roman mining specialist Marcus Helfert, who confirmed it was almost certainly of Roman origin. This was enough for the archeologists to admit that Eigenbrot had been right all along. These were likely the places Tacitus

was writing. About Several weeks into the Blushkov excavation, auth and his team made a discovery that corroborated yet another passage from Roman history. In one pit, nearly six feet down, athen As team found what looked like the spiky backbone of a prehistoric monster. They cleared the reddish earth around it, revealing a series of sharpened wooden stakes jutting out at staggered angles and embedded in the bottom of a trench that once surrounded the outpost, designed to thwart any would

be attackers. The obstacle appeared analogous to a defense Julius Caesar had described in his writings on the War and Gaul a century before the Bluskov fort built. Whoever entered within them were likely to impale themselves on very sharp steaks. Caesar's troops called the spikes chipi Oth and his colleagues would call the version they found pila posata, or trench steaks. Such dangerous devices are believed to have surrounded camps around the Roman world, but they have never been found in

situ before or since. Just as thrilling as the discovery of the steaks was the miracle of their preservation for too millennia. The dense, oxygen poor soil had remained just moist enough to keep the stakes water logged and structurally stable. The Pila fosata were extracted in twenty nineteen and may have been conserved, according to auth just in time. Increasingly dry soil, he said, would have caused the wood to finally begin decaying, eventually destroying this precious testament to Roman

ingenuity and ruthlessness. One can imagine the murderous spikes protecting the camp indefinitely. The empire not abandoned its mining effort. The likely confirmation of Tacitus account raised the question how much silver had rufous Men missed. Oth's study of Blushkov revealed that the Romans got tantalizingly close to a source of silver bearing ore that may have rivaled the richest minds of Hispania, the so called emser gangzug or ems Vane, which spans ten miles from the north of bod Ems

to the Rhine River. It is estimated that more than two hundred metric tons of silver were extracted in the modern era before mining operations in bod EM's were finally shuddered. In the last weeks of World War II. If they had known about the silver, and if they had found the right spot, Auth noted, the Romans would have had the opportunity to exploit the bod Ms silver for around two hundred years until they abandoned their possessions on this

side of the Rhine. Altogether, Roman forces had a secure hold on jru Germania Superior, but not on Blushkov itself. They retreated west over the Rhine around two sixty two, centuries before the fall of the Western Empire. It is tempting to imagine how such a silver bonanza could have extended the reach or duration, or even hastened the decadence of Rome. Such counterfectuals are a perennial parlor game for historians,

speculative as they may be. Had the legionaries succeeded in extracting all the silver that lay beneath their sandals, it would not have sufficed to fund the whole Roman Empire for centuries, but it certainly would have made a difference, said Auth. He cautioned that the silver bearing ore was likely too deep for Roman technology of the time. The Roman authorities would have had no reason to linger in an area, if they didn't find a resource they could

easily exploit. If we don't succeed effectively, Schultz summarized Roman thinking, then we drop it and go elsewhere. Yorgen Eigen and Wrought died of a heart attack in twenty twenty three, less than a week after a flurry of breathless press reports focused on the irony of the overlooked silver and mother load. He lived to bask for a few short days in the glory of his contributions to archaeology and history.

Just as the Romans had two thousand years before. He had gazed upon the land with an eye for the wealth that lay beneath. But unlike them, he had found what he'd been looking for. A difficult, dangerous job, mining at Blushkov was carried out by Roman soldiers who were accustomed to foraging materials and building forts, but not the backbreaking work of digging underground, filled with threats from floods,

noxious fumes, lack of air, and cavens. Mining was typically the work of civilian laborers silver processing in the Roman era, mining workers used iron tools to chip away pieces of rock, which were taken out, crushed, washed, sordid and roasted before smelting. If gallery walls were especially hard, laborers could build fires to weaken their surface smelting. Next, the metal ore and charcoal were placed in a furnace bellows pumped in air, causing the temperature to rise and melt the lead, which

flowed out into a mold coupilation. The lead was placed in a couple and heated to more than eighteen hundred degrees fahrenheit one thousand degrees celsius. The metals separated as lead was oxidized, impurities were absorbed, and silver was collected. Next television. When Jaws hit theaters fifty years ago this summer, filmmaker Laurent Bossureau was a thirteen year old budding cinophile in suburban Paris whose obsession with Laden de la Maire The Teeth of the Sea set him on his career path.

My bedroom was basically wadewall Jaws, says Bossureau, whose new national geographic documentary Jaws at fifty The Definitive Inside Store features a wide range of voices weighing in on the film's impact. We hear from Stephen Spielberg, of course, also Hollywood types from director Guillermo del Toro, to actress Emily Blunt and locals on Martha's vineyard, where the movie was shot.

Most surprising are the scientists who say they see Jaws driving interest in sharks and marine habitats today, years after provoking trophy hunts, that this movie can still be celebrated in inspire careers, not only in film, but in ocean and shark conservation. Bozerro says, I can't think of any other film that has that kind of power. Next article

is from National Geographic History magazine Epidemics. A constant plague to Rome from its founding to its imperial heyday, Rome's politics, religion, and eventual decline were shaped by the ravages of disease. The plague that spread across the Eastern Mediterranean in AD four five forty two was unlike any scene before. It was a pestilence by which the whole human race came near to being annihilated, wrote the Byzantine historian Procopius, a

calamity impossible to express in words. A human race. Procopius meant, of course, the world he knew, the Eastern Roman empires centered around Constantinople today's Istanbul. But the horror that abused Procopius's account was no exaggeration. The plague of Justinian, as it became known, was likely bubonic plague, whose sufferers developed swollen lymph nodes and vomited blood. It killed more than

twenty five million people in the region. Since the rise of Rome as a republic over a millennium before and its rapid growth as an intercontinental empire after the first century A, d Romans had always lived closely with deadly epidemics. For Roman leaders, plague was as feared as civil war or a natural disaster. Outbreaks of pestilence devastated the economy

and triggered widespread famines, civil unrest, and political turmoil. Plague would later be a key contributory factor to the Western Roman Empire's collapse in the mid fifth century and just after Dustinian, the waning of power in the East punishment from the gods founded after the expulsion of the last Roman kings in five O nine BC, the Roman republic was repeatedly battered by epidemics. Historians rely on two principal sources for early Roman history, written by Livy and Dionysius

of Halicarnassus. Both were writing in the early Empire under Emperor Augustus, who supported efforts to chronicle the history of the Long Roman Republic. In Book ten of Roman Antiquities, Dionysus of Halicarnassus described the terrible consequences of an outbreak during the eighty second Olympiad calculated to be four fifty one BC. All the enslaved people in half the citizens of Rome died. The plague raged for a year, wiping out whole families, either from illness or the secondary effects

of famine. When it abated the following year, official acts of thanksgiving were made by the Roman authorities in the hope that pestilence would not return. A few years later, it did. The grim Psycho was repeated, and the authorities came under pressure to act. Lacking a modern understanding of the role of microorganisms in the origin and spread of plagues,

their causes were attributed to moral and supernatural forces. A plague, it was decided, was the punishment that the gods inflicted on the city because it had failed to maintain the paxt deorum, the peace between gods and humans dependent on following religious rituals with the utmost rigor. The city of Rome in a sudden visitation of divine displeasure was ravaged by disease. Livy wrote in his account of one of the fifth century Bass pestilences, this belief in causation could

have cruel consequences. In four seventy two BC, for instance, a wave of infectious illness proved especially deadly for pregnant women. Dionysius described how the root cause of the disaster was deemed to be the loss of the virginity of Urbinia, was a vessel virgin sworn to chastity and service to vesta goddess of the hearth. As punishment, Urbinia was buried alive. The plague abated. When a new epidemic swept through Roman three ninety nine BC, the senators devised a ritual of

religious atonement to be performed in the capitolium. According to Livy, this rite, known as the Lecternium, was a banquet offered to Jupiter, Juno and Minerva. In three sixty five BC, as plague raged again, the Lysisternium failed to appease the gods. According to Livy, Roman statesmen recalled a ceremony in which a pestilence had once been allayed by the driving of a nail by a dictator. Lucius Manlius Imperiosus, was consequently appointed as a temporary dictator to re establish the peace

with the gods. He drove the ritual nail into the wall at the temple of Jupiter Optimus Maximus. The pestilence apparently ceased. Despite the widespread belief in the divine causes of epidemics, some Roman writers reflected on the practical first century b C. Philosopher Lucretius believed as seas was spread through seeds in the air. The Augustine writers were aware of the role of poor hygiene in prolonging an epidemic.

In his account of a fifth century b C. Plague, Dionysius asserted that the pestilence did not quickly abate because of the way in which they cast out the bodies into the river. Livy also linked on sanitary conditions to transmission. During an election, he wrote, the city filled with people from the countryside, increasing the virulence of the disease. This conflux of all kinds of living things distressed the citizens with its strange smells and mere contact. Spread the infection

plague on the empire. Although accounts of plagues were to Libyan Dionysius, part of the fabric of Rome's republican history. Epidemics also deeply marked the imperial period. The idea of Rome's imperial greatness played major emphasis on the civilizing influence, in part by spreading the building of washing facilities fed by aqueducts. Imperial Rome boasted hundreds of public baths and

two hundred public toilets. Rome officials understood the link between hygiene and health, while also acknowledging that the gods played a role. Statues were placed near public conveniences to ward off pestilence. Neither gods nor baths, however, could have the epidemics that scourged the later Empire. Although aqueducts brought clean water, another key piece of imperial infrastructure, the road system, facilitated the rapid spread of disease with the movement of goods, troops,

and merchants. At the end of the second century AD, the Antennine plague killed up to five million people. It hampered operation of the Roman army, who had brought the disease into the Empire. Roman troops returning from battles in Asia picked up the infection likely carried from China by merchants along the trading routes of the Silk Road. Described by the Roman Greek physician Galen, who witnessed its ravages, The Antennine plague struck its victims with coughing, internal bleeding,

and ulceration. Epidemiologists think it and Cyprian plague of the next century were caused by smallpox or measles, but the exact ailment has not yet been identified. The effect of recurrent epidemics led to a lower population, contributing to a series of cycles that reduced the empire's tax base, agricultural output, and military force, among other factors. Epidemics played an important role in the eventual collapse of the Western Roman Empire.

In the mid fifth century, the center of Roman power shifted east to Constantinople, the upper center of the Justinian plague that to Procopius felt like the death of the human race. Many factors led to Byzantine decline, but the ravages of the Justinian plague lowered the empire's preparedness when the Great Armies of the Islams swept in triumph through the Byzantine lands in the seventh century, epidemics and pandemics continued to cause catastrophic upheaval even after the seventeenth century,

when scientists discovered disease causing microorganisms. This concludes readings from National Geographic Magazine for today. Your reader has been Marcia. Thank you for listening, Keep on listening, and have a great day.