{"id":61215,"date":"2025-09-06T07:52:01","date_gmt":"2025-09-05T21:52:01","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.tomgrimshaw.com\/tomsblog\/?p=61215"},"modified":"2025-09-06T08:44:49","modified_gmt":"2025-09-05T22:44:49","slug":"the-lycurgus-cup","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.tomgrimshaw.com\/tomsblog\/?p=61215","title":{"rendered":"The Lycurgus Cup"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"The<\/p>\n

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The colorful secret of a 1,600-year-old Roman chalice at the British Museum is the key to a super\u00adsensitive new technology that might help diagnose human disease or pinpoint biohazards at security checkpoints.<\/p>\n

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The glass chalice, known as the Lycurgus Cup because it bears a scene involving King Lycurgus of Thrace, appears jade green when lit from the front but blood-red when lit from behind\u2014a property that puzzled scientists for decades after the museum acquired the cup in the 1950s. The mystery wasn\u2019t solved until 1990, when researchers in England scrutinized broken fragments under a microscope and discovered that the Roman artisans were nanotechnology pioneers: They\u2019d impregnated the glass with particles of silver and gold, ground down until they were as small as 50 nanometers in diameter, less than one-thousandth the size of a grain of table salt. The exact mixture of the precious metals suggests the Romans knew what they were doing\u2014\u201can amazing feat,\u201d says one of the researchers, archaeologist Ian Freestone of University College London.<\/p>\n

Finish reading:\u00a0https:\/\/www.smithsonianmag.com\/history\/this-1600-year-old-goblet-shows-that-the-romans-were-nanotechnology-pioneers-787224\/<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The colorful secret of a 1,600-year-old Roman chalice at the British Museum is the key to a super\u00adsensitive new technology that might help diagnose human disease or pinpoint biohazards at security checkpoints. The glass chalice, known as the Lycurgus Cup because it bears a scene involving King Lycurgus of Thrace, appears jade green when lit … <\/p>\n

Continue reading “The Lycurgus Cup”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-61215","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general-interest"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.tomgrimshaw.com\/tomsblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/61215","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.tomgrimshaw.com\/tomsblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.tomgrimshaw.com\/tomsblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.tomgrimshaw.com\/tomsblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.tomgrimshaw.com\/tomsblog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=61215"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.tomgrimshaw.com\/tomsblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/61215\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":61221,"href":"https:\/\/www.tomgrimshaw.com\/tomsblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/61215\/revisions\/61221"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.tomgrimshaw.com\/tomsblog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=61215"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.tomgrimshaw.com\/tomsblog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=61215"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.tomgrimshaw.com\/tomsblog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=61215"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}