In 1947, an American chemist named Willard F. Libby developed a system of dating most organic remains. These include charcoal, bones, shells, and plants. Known now as carbon-14 dating, this method made it possible to date fossils and archaeological specimens quite accurately. After Libby proved that all living matter contains radioactive C14, he then determined that from the moment an organism dies, the carbon within diminishes at a known, fixed rate every year. Using Libby's system of measuring the amount of carbon in a dead organism, scientists can tell how old it is! Libby won the Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 1960 for his discovery.

Why is George Washington compared with Cincinnatus? Who is Cincinnatus?

Cincinnatus was a fifth-century B.C. Roman statesman. When a Roman delegation came to his farm to ask him to help save Rome from advancing enemy troops, he immediately stopped plowing his fields and hastened to the battlefield. After leading the Romans to victory, he relinquished his powers and returned to his farm. The comparison of the two men actually began in George Washington's time. Washington, like Cincinnatus, owned a farm and loved the land. He, too, left his farm to assume the position of commander in chief of the Revolutionary forces in the newly formed United States. And like Cincinnatus, Washington did not abuse the power entrusted to him. When the Revolutionary War ended, Washington unhesitatingly offered his commission back to the Continental Congress.

Do you know who Jean-Francois Champollion is/was?

At age 17, Jean-Fran'§ois Champollion had already mastered several languages, including Arabic, Hebrew, Sanskrit, and Persian - all in addition to English, German, Greek, Italian, and Latin. Best known for his work solving the mystery of Egyptian hieroglyphs, this French historian and linguist was the first to notice that the signs could be both symbolic and phonetic. His brother, a librarian, had first stimulated his interest in the ancient language, but it was the Rosetta Stone, brought back to France by the emperor Napoleon, with its inscription in Greek, demotic (a simpler form of Egyptian writing), and hieroglyphs, that made Champollion determined to decipher the Egyptian writing. In 1821, Champollion started to publish papers on this strange "language of symbols." Within a few years, he was publishing dictionaries and primers on Egyptian grammar and language.

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