Visitors are causing so much damage to the tomb of Tutankhamun that Egypt's Supreme Council of Antiquities wants to close it and open a replica instead.

What excites us about the past is being there: feeling the heat as we climb a Mexican pyramid; adjusting our eyes to the light in the Pantheon; watching the paint peel off the walls of Tutankhamun's tomb. Peeling paint? If, in the brief, crushed tour of the Egyptian boy-king's rooms at Luxor we don't actually see it happen, we can certainly return later and note the damaging spread of holes and spots. Zahi Hawass, secretary-general of Egypt's Supreme Council of Antiquities, has had enough of it. He promises that the tomb, and two others, will close by the end of the year. To keep tourists happy, he has commissioned a replica.

It won't be the first. You can already see one in Las Vegas: until recently, Tut's tomb graced the Luxor Las Vegas Hotel, filled with replica treasures. Now it has been installed in the city's Museum of Natural History. So will the Valley of the Kings become a Las Vegas Strip, more tat than Tut? Is there no other way?...

Ed Chlapowski survived the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor and spent the rest of his long life making sure those who died on that infamous day would never be forgotten.

On Sunday, a little more than 69 years after notifying the world that "This is no drill - Pearl Harbor is being bombed by the Japanese - this is no drill," the 88-year-old Navy veteran died at his home in Billings.

He was one of Montana's last survivors of the Dec. 7, 1941, attack that propelled the United States into World War II.

A member of the Pearl Harbor Survivors Association, Chlapowski was frequently asked to speak about his experiences and was often interviewed by reporters pulling together stories commemorating one of the most significant events in U.S. history.

In a 2007 interview, he told a reporter that it was his job to report the deaths of Pearl Harbor survivors to the association and see that plaques are presented to their families. Someone else will have to perform that duty for him now....

They've been extinct for about 10,000 years, but woolly mammoths could be back on Earth in just five years, according to Japanese scientists who plan to use frozen DNA to resurrect the behemoth.

Last summer, researchers plucked skin and muscle tissue from an ancient mammoth's carcass that was found preserved under permafrost in Siberia. A nearly complete body of one of the animals was found there and has since been kept in a special freezer in a Russian research lab.

Researchers from Japan's Kinki University have found a way to isolate DNA from the frozen mammoth's tissue. Now they plan to insert that DNA into the egg cells of a normal, modern African elephant and then plant the resulting embryo into the elephant's womb....

Thanks to a small band of advocates, the fields of medical and public-health history have been paying increasing attention to the visual – to the vast assortment of still and moving images that illustrate and in many cases constitute those histories. In a new book, Imagining Illness: Public Health and Visual Culture (University of Minnesota Press), editor David Serlin gathers contributions about many compelling areas of the latest research on the visual history of illness.

Among manifestations of the increased interest was last year’s popular and well-attended Medical Film Symposium in Philadelphia.

As David Serlin, an associate professor of communication and science studies at the University of California, San Diego, relates here, the collection’s essayists consider the visual culture of public health from seventeenth-century London broadsides about the handling of plague victims’ bodies to YouTube videos about preventing the transmission of STDs. Contributors examine such historical and contemporary visual practices as Chinese health fairs, documentary films produced by the World Health Organization, illness maps, fashions for nurses, and live surgery on the Internet....

FREDERICK, MD - Thousands of people visit historic sites in the our area each year, but few people know about the important roles African Americans played, especially when it comes to the Civil War and medicine. This is why the National Library of Medicine is teaming up with museums across the country to educate the public using a traveling exhibit.

Robert Hartman volunteers at the National Museums of Civil War Medicine on East Patrick Street in Frederick. He believes the contributions of African Americans is am important part of American history....

One hundred years ago, the great African-American scholar W.E.B. DuBois famously wrote, "The problem of the 20th century will be the problem of the color line."

History proved DuBois correct. His century saw the struggles against, and ultimately the victory over, systems that separated and subjugated people based on race — from colonialism in India, to Jim Crow in the U.S., to apartheid in South Africa.

No American did more than Martin Luther King Jr. — whom America pauses to honor today — to address the problem of the color line. He spearheaded the marches that revealed the brutality of segregation, made speeches that reminded Americans that the promise of their nation applied to all citizens and expertly pressured the nation's leaders in Washington to pass landmark civil rights legislation.

But to confine King's role in history only to the color line — as giant as that challenge is, and as dramatic as King's contribution was — is to reduce his greatness. In one of his final books, Where Do We Go From Here: Chaos or Community, King showed that race was one part of his broader concern with human relations at large: "This is the great new problem of mankind. We have inherited ... a great 'world house' in which we have to live together — black and white, Easterner and Westerner, Gentile and Jew, Catholic and Protestant, Muslim and Hindu ... Because we can never again live apart, we must learn somehow to live with each other in peace."...

Bibliographies and maps focused on the activities of black soldiers in the American West were produced in the initial phases of the Warriors Project, a university/government partnership designed to involve African American and Native American students in the exploration and documenting of their "shared history" in the frontier West. The National Park Service has supported this worthy endeavor with funding, training, and other support. A prime example of the agency's involvement is the Buffalo Soldiers Mapping Project, which employed the resources of the National Park Service's CRGIS facility to process student-generated data and produce multivariate maps of more than 200 significant Buffalo Soldier sites.

The National Park Service's Cultural Resources Geographic Information Systems (CRGIS) facility was established in 1989 "to institutionalize the use of GIS, Global Positioning Systems (GPS), and Remote Sensing (RS) technologies in historic preservation within the National Park system as well as with State Historic Preservation Offices (SHPO) and Tribal Historic Preservation Offices (THPO)." Having been designated the Park Service's lead agency in the development of standards for the collection, management, and distribution of cultural resource spatial data, CRGIS bears a heavy responsibility to apply these relatively new and powerful technologies to very good effect.

CRGIS has proven up to the task and is well respected. During the past two decades, CRGIS has: produced GPS surveys of hundreds of historic places throughout the U.S., provided GIS database development assistance to more than 20 National Park System units, State Historic Preservation Offices, and Tribal Historic Preservation Offices; provided GIS and GPS training for hundreds of federal, state, and local government employees; undertaken numerous GIS analyses related to disaster situations, created map atlases for clients such as the National Register of Historic Places, and performed other important work....

ScienceDaily (Jan. 12, 2011) — Analysis by a UCLA-led team of scientists has confirmed the discovery of the oldest complete wine production facility ever found, including grape seeds, withered grape vines, remains of pressed grapes, a rudimentary wine press, a clay vat apparently used for fermentation, wine-soaked potsherds, and even a cup and drinking bowl.

The facility, which dates back to roughly 4100 B.C. -- 1,000 years before the earliest comparable find -- was unearthed by a team of archaeologists from Armenia, the United States and Ireland in the same mysterious Armenian cave complex where an ancient leather shoe was found, a discovery that was announced last summer.

"For the first time, we have a complete archaeological picture of wine production dating back 6,100 years," said Gregory Areshian, co-director of the excavation and assistant director of UCLA's Cotsen Institute of Archaeology....

BUCHAREST, Romania – Tears run down Elena Bocanu's careworn cheeks as she lights a candle and places it on the grave, next to chrysanthemums left by another admirer.

The object of her devotion is Nicolae Ceausescu, the communist dictator most Romanians associate with hunger, state paranoia, AIDS-ridden orphanages, and chronic power outages. Today, as the new EU member grapples with economic havoc and widening gaps between rich and poor, more people remember not the dysfunctional final years of Ceausescu's regime but an earlier time in which his state provided basics in exchange for obedience.

"You gave us homes, you gave us gas for heating," says Bocanu, a 72-year-old former cleaning lady who scrapes through on the equivalent of $70 a month.

"Now we are miserable, like dogs."...

An art form of French resistance at the height of Nazi occupation has come to the fore after it emerged that Adolf Hitler was portrayed as blood-thirsty King Herod killing a Jew in a church's stained glass window created during World War II.

The extraordinary work of art, depicting a black fringed Hitler as Herod, the infamous biblical king renowned for slaughtering children, remained unnoticed for 70 years at St Jacques Church in Montgeron, south of Paris, Britian's Daily Mail reported....

Klaus Barbie, the Nazi war criminal known as the ‘butcher of Lyon’ for his hideous treatment of Jewish prisoners, was paid by the German intelligence services for political information during the 1960s, according to Der Spiegel.

Barbie fled to Bolivia after the war, in which he had served as the head of the SS in Lyon, and lived there under the name Klaus Altmann from 1951. It was there that he was recruited by the BND intelligence service, the magazine reported on Saturday.

A file on Barbie, whose codename was Eagle, says he was of ‘complete German attitude’ and a ‘committed anti-Communist’. He delivered at least 35 reports and was seen as a political source, although it is not yet known what kind of information he gave the agents.

Payments for his work were made to him via a branch of the Chartered Bank of London in San Francisco.

A few weeks after he was recruited, he took over the Bolivian arm of a German company which operated globally, selling left-over weapons from the German army. ...

When you think of Martin Luther King Jr.'s formative years, you think may think of Atlanta, where he grew up and attended Morehouse College. You may think of Montgomery, Ala., where he got his first pastor job and led the bus boycott. But who would ever think of Simsbury, Conn.?

"It seemed like it wasn't possible that he would come to, of all places, this town," said Richard Curtiss.

Curtiss is a history teacher at Simsbury High School. Last summer he worked with a group of students who took it upon themselves to investigate this mystery.

The legend was that young Martin Luther King Jr. spent several months working in the tobacco fields. He would have been part of a group of Morehouse students who used to spend their summers in this Connecticut valley to earn money for school.

That part was common knowledge. But King?

"There is proof that he was here," said John Conard-Malley.

Silicon Valley now has a museum dedicated to the human penchant for making objects to augment our already remarkable brains, in a continuum from the dawn of the abacus to the continuing evolution of the Internet.

"If you love baseball, you have Cooperstown; if you love art, you have the Louvre," said John Hollar, president of the Computer History Museum in Mountain View.

"Now if you love computing, you have a place to go," said Hollar, who presided over the museum's permanent opening Thursday with an exhibition titled "Revolution: The First 2000 Years of Computing."

With more than 1,100 objects, video displays and other interactive offerings, spread over 25,000 square feet of exhibition space, Hollar said a quick browser could get the gist of the show in 45 minutes while the aficionado could spend hours poring over the exhibits....