New From Scientific American 奇奇奇！古埃及珠寶所使用的材料，竟來自外太空！
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有時候我覺得考古學跟天文學根本就是同一家啊。誰會想到古埃及的珠寶(鐵珠)裡面所含的金屬成分，竟然是外太空來的？這篇60秒科學新知，考古天文學一次全包，記得下載多練習，學英文之餘還可以充實背景知識喔！
Ancient Jewelry Had
Extraterrestrial Origin
The metal in a
set of 5,000-year-old Egyptian beads came from an iron meteorite.
From Scientific American
Sophie
Bushwick reports
Iron
is a great material for making tools. But
the oldest known iron artifacts手工製品 were
actually intended for decoration: nine
Egyptian beads that date back to 3200 B.C. 西元前And now we know that this ancient
jewelry has an even more impressive origin—the iron out of which it was crafted
came from space外太空.
The
metal cylinders筒狀物 were discovered in Egypt
in 1911. To analyze the structure and chemical composition of the beads, researchers bombarded衝擊 them with neutrons中子 and gamma rays伽馬射線(以高能量的粒子或是放射能衝擊.)
The tests revealed that the jewelry contained trace elements not present in
Earthly ores礦石—but
that are found in iron-rich meteorites富含鐵的隕石.
The study is in the Journal of
Archaeological Science.
The
meteoric metal was hammered flat 以榔頭槌至扁平and rolled into beads捲成珠形狀 more than 5,000 years ago. This date is some 1,500 years before the invention of smelting熔煉術.
That technique made it possible for terrestrial iron地球上的鐵
to be shaped into tools, and to supplant取代 copper and bronze as civilization's metal of choice.
The new finding shows that long before
smelting revolutionized tool use, some humans were already iron men.
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