In her Piece of Stuff this week (Episode 17), Ashley looked at a statue of a cocoa merchant from Aztec Mexico. Chocolate is of course a delicious, sweet treat and pick-me-up if you are feeling physically or emotionally a little down. But does chocolate have real superpowers besides being a yummy caffeine/sugar combo? Chocolate, specifically dark chocolate, seems to have been in and out of the media a lot in the last few years as it was being touted for having all kinds of health benefits. Maybe we are so jaded by too-good-to-be-true diet claims that it is easy dismiss those that show real data behind the hype. Chocolate, however, in its dark form of at least 85% cocoa solids does seem to have real benefits to your mood according to a slew of reports.

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Ancient Robots: From Science Fiction to Science Fact in the Classical and Medieval World

In her piece of stuff this week, Ashley discussed the Antikythera Mechanism, an Ancient Greek clockwork computer about the size of a carriage clock (Episode 16). It was able to compute the position of astral bodies at various times and work out the correct time to hold religious festivals like the Olympic Games. In the episode, we wondered why more mechanical devices like this had not been found, or even their parts.

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Conspicuous Consumption (pun intended): Why the Victorians  were so obsessed with dying and elaborate mourning?

In Episode 15 of The Past and Stuff, Tracey was talking about creepy little dolls, that were found buried in creepy little coffins, in a creepy make-shift sepulcher, in the creepy environs of Arthur’s Seat above Edinburgh. Many theories that have put forth over the years, but Tracey added a new one – creepy kids morbidly obsessed with death in the wake of a major pandemic of a new deadly disease: cholera. This Wednesday-of-the-Adam’s-family type child would not have been alone in her/his/their fixation on the funereal in this period, however, because Victorian society as a whole had a strange fascination with dying, death and the dead.

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Why Commit An Archaeological Hoax?

In her Piece of Stuff this week, Tracey talked about the faked fossils that made up the Piltdown Man assemblage that were “discovered” by hoaxer Charles Dawson in 1912-13 and accepted as real by most of the academic archeological community until 1956. After this, the search for the culprit of the Piltdown hoax occupied the press periodically and at one point even Sir Arthur Conan Doyle author of the Sherlock Holmes mysteries was implicated. In 2016, Dawson was exposed as the culprit after years-long research by Isabelle de Groot (among others).

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