#taken by: janille

[lesfleursfortes-a]

tagged by: @allroundlostcause​

tagging: whoever is reading this RIGHT NOW. that means you. yes you.

BASICS:

Name: janille Age: 23 and a half :P Preferred pronouns: she/her. Sexuality: heterosexual Zodiac sign: aries Taken or single:  single. not all that interested in dating right now since I’m still in a bit of a transitioning stage of my life Three mun facts:   I collect spoons and have a collection of 114 of them.  I have a younger sister, a mom, and a dad, as well as a shit ton of cousins, aunts, uncles, etc..  While I love writing, I’m a math major and intend to become a middle school math teacher.

EXPERIENCE:

How’d you start: before even joining tumblr, I used to write fanfiction on - WAIT FOR IT - youtube.  I roleplayed on twitter for a RPF a friend of mine wrote.  it wasn’t until I joined tumblr (can’t honestly remember when) for Glee that I started writing fanfiction and discovered the roleplaying community.  Platforms you’ve used: twitter, tumblr... does neopets boards count? xD Worst experience: a couple years ago, a roleplay I helped to run went downhill due to a terrible person who turned around and blasted our roleplay with a bunch of false information.  people found out that I had been involved and began to attack me anonymously.  I believe by the end, I received 46 anonymous hate messages.  I nearly deleted all of my accounts and gave up completely, and would have if it wasn’t for my friends standing by me.

MUSE PREFERENCES:

Original or canon: canon mostly.  it’s easier, and it’s more fun for me to explore different sides of characters I already love than try to figure out how to shape one from scratch. Favourite face: I think that’s a tie between EBR and Sabrina Carpenter, because they’re my babies and I love them haha when it comes to people I don’t play, I love Joseph Morgan and Cole Sprouse more than is healthy lmfa Least favorite face: Because of the worst experience above, Matt Ryan was that for a while, but I’m over it, and Matt’s a hottie so *le shrug* Multi or single: ...do I really have to answer that? xD

WRITING PREFERENCES:

Plots or memes: I don’t think I have a preference.  plots are great because everything is all fleshed out and it’s just a matter of seeing how it turns out.  memes are fun because they might open me and my writing partners to situations we might not have considered. Best time to write: when I’m not bogged down with other shit?  idk I’m basically writing whenever I’m free. Do you like your muse(s): I love my muses, not just because I think they’re amazing, but because they’re also hella flawed.  they’re broken in different ways, and that’s what makes them relatable.  they have motives behind their mistakes, and being able to play them, I get to figure out what those motives are. How long (months/years?): on tumblr?  I think six years?  I’ve been writing fanfiction for nearly seven years, and I did that for a little longer than I began roleplaying Fluff, angst or smut: all of the above??  fluff is great because it gives you the warm fuzzies and makes you squeal.  angst is great because it just makes you FEEL.  I can’t even count the number of times I’ve cried from angst I’ve been writing.  and yeah, smut is great because wink wonk lmfao

[dorcasrempel]

How to make a book last for millennia

First discovered in 1947 by Bedouin shepherds looking for a lost sheep, the ancient Hebrew texts known as the Dead Sea Scrolls are some of the most well-preserved ancient written materials ever found. Now, a study by researchers at MIT and elsewhere elucidates a unique ancient technology for parchment making and provides new insights into possible methods to better preserve these precious historical documents.

The study focused on one scroll in particular, known as the Temple Scroll, among the roughly 900 full or partial scrolls found in the years since that first discovery. The scrolls were found in jars hidden in 11 caves on the steep hillsides just north of the Dead Sea, in the region around the ancient settlement of Qumran, which was destroyed by the Romans about 2,000 years ago.

The Temple Scroll is one of the largest (almost 25 feet long) and best-preserved of all the scrolls, even though its material is the thinnest of all of them (one-tenth of a millimeter, or roughly 1/250 of an inch thick). It also has the clearest, whitest writing surface of all the scrolls. These properties led Admir Masic, the Esther and Harold E. Edgerton Career Development Assistant Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering and a Department of Materials Science and Engineering faculty fellow in archaeological materials, and his collaborators to wonder how the parchment was made.

The results of that study, carried out with former doctoral student Roman Schuetz (now at Israel’s Weizmann Institute of Science), MIT graduate student Janille Maragh, James Weaver from the Wyss Institute at Harvard University, and Ira Rabin from the Federal Institute of Materials Research and Testing and Hamburg University in Germany, were published today in the journal Science Advances. They found that the parchment was processed in an unusual way, using a mixture of salts found in evaporites — the material left from the evaporation of brines — but one that was different from the typical composition found on other parchments.

“The Temple Scroll is probably the most beautiful and best-preserved scroll,” Masic says. “We had the privilege of studying fragments from the Israeli museum in Jerusalem called the Shrine of the Book,” which was built specifically to house the Dead Sea Scrolls. One relatively large fragment from that scroll was the main subject of the new paper. The fragment, measuring about 2.5 centimeters (1 inch) across was investigated using a variety of specialized tools developed by researchers to map, in high resolution, the detailed chemical composition of relatively large objects under a microscope.

“We were able to perform large-area, submicron-scale, noninvasive characterization of the fragment,” Masic says — an integrated approach that he and Weaver have developed for the characterization of both biological and nonbiological materials. “These methods allow us to maintain the materials of interest under more environmentally friendly conditions, while we collect hundreds of thousands of different elemental and chemical spectra across the surface of the sample, mapping out its compositional variability in extreme detail,” Weaver says.

That fragment, which has escaped any treatment since its discovery that might have altered its properties, “allowed us to look deeply into its original composition, revealing the presence of some elements at completely unexpectedly high concentrations,” Masic says.

The elements they discovered included sulfur, sodium, and calcium in different proportions, spread across the surface of the parchment.

Parchment is made from animal skins that have had all hair and fatty residues removed by soaking them in a lime solution (from the Middle Ages onward) or through enzymatic and other treatments (in antiquity), scraping them clean, and then stretching them tight in a frame to dry. When dried, sometimes the surface was further prepared by rubbing with salts, as was apparently the case with the Temple Scroll.

The team has not yet been able to assess where the unusual combination of salts on the Temple Scroll’s surface came from, Masic says. But it’s clear that this unusual coating, on which the text was written, helped to give this parchment its unusually bright white surface, and perhaps contributed to its state of preservation, he says. And the coating’s elemental composition does not match that of the Dead Sea water itself, so it must have been from an evaporite deposit found somewhere else — whether nearby or far away, the researchers can’t yet say.

The unique composition of that surface layer demonstrates that the production process for that parchment was significantly different from that of other scrolls in the region, Masic says: “This work exemplifies exactly what my lab is trying to do — to use modern analytical tools to uncover secrets of the ancient world.”

Understanding the details of this ancient technology could help provide insights into the culture and society of that time and place, which played a central role in the history of both Judaism and Christianity. Among other things, an understanding of the parchment production and its chemistry could also help to identify forgeries of supposedly ancient writings.

According to Rabin, an expert in Dead Sea Scroll materials, “This study has far-reaching implications beyond the Dead Sea Scrolls. For example, it shows that at the dawn of parchment making in the Middle East, several techniques were in use, which is in stark contrast to the single technique used in the Middle Ages. The study also shows how to identify the initial treatments, thus providing historians and conservators with a new set of analytical tools for classification of the Dead Sea Scrolls and other ancient parchments.”

This information could indeed be crucial in guiding the development of new preservation strategies for these ancient manuscripts. Unfortunately, it appears that much of the damage seen in the scrolls today arose not from their 2,000-plus years in the caves, but from efforts to soften the scrolls in order to unroll and read them immediately after their initial discovery, Masic says.

Adding to these existing concerns, the new data now clearly demonstrate that these unique mineral coatings are also highly hygroscopic — they readily absorb any moisture in the air, and then might quickly begin to degrade the underlying material. These new results thus further emphasize the need to store the parchments in a controlled humidity environment at all times. “There could be an unanticipated sensitivity to even small-scale changes in humidity,” he says. “The point is that we now have evidence for the presence of salts that might accelerate their degradation. … These are aspects of preservation that must be taken into account.”

“For conservation issues and programs, this work is very important,” says Elisabetta Boaretto, director of the Kimmel Center for Archaeological Science at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel, who was not associated with this work. She says, “It indicates that you have to know very well the document needing to be preserved, and the preservation has to be tailored to the document’s chemistry and its physical state.”

Boaretto adds that this team’s study of the unusual mineral layer on the parchment “is fundamental for future work in preservation, but most importantly to understand how these documents have been prepared in antiquity. This work certainly sets a standard for other researchers in this field.”

The work was partly supported by DFG, the German Research Foundation.

How to make a book last for millennia syndicated from https://osmowaterfilters.blogspot.com/

[sciencebulletin]

Study of Dead Sea Scroll sheds light on a lost ancient parchment-making technology

First discovered in 1947 by Bedouin shepherds looking for a lost sheep, the ancient Hebrew texts known as the Dead Sea Scrolls are some of the most well-preserved ancient written materials ever found. Now, a study by researchers at MIT and elsewhere elucidates a unique ancient technology of parchment making and provides potentially new insights into methods to better preserve these precious historical documents. The study focused on one scroll in particular, known as the Temple Scroll, among the roughly 900 full or partial scrolls found in the years since that first discovery. The scrolls were, in general, placed in jars and hidden in 11 caves on the steep hillsides just north of the Dead Sea, in the region around the ancient settlement of Qumran, which was destroyed by the Romans about 2,000 years ago. To protect their religious and cultural heritage from the invaders, members of a sect called the Essenes hid their precious documents in the caves, often buried under a few feet of debris and bat guano to help foil looters. The Temple Scroll is one of the largest (almost 25 feet long) and best-preserved of all the scrolls, even though its material is the thinnest of all of them (one-tenth of a millimeter, or roughly 1/250th of an inch thick). It also has the clearest, whitest writing surface of all the scrolls. These properties led MIT assistant professor of civil and environmental engineering and Department of Materials Science and Engineering faculty fellow in archaeological materials, Admir Masic, to wonder how the parchment was made. The results of that study, carried out with former graduate student Roman Schuetz (now at Israel's Weizmann Institute of Science), MIT graduate student Janille Maragh, and two others, were published today in the journal Science Advances. They found that the parchment was processed in an unusual way, using a mixture of salts found in evaporites—the material left from the evaporation of brines—but one that was different from the typical composition found on other parchments. "The Temple Scroll is probably the most beautiful and best preserved scroll," Masic says. "We had the privilege of studying fragments from the Israeli museum in Jerusalem called the Shrine of the Book," which was built specifically to house the Dead Sea Scrolls. One relatively large fragment from that scroll was the main subject of the new paper. The fragment, measuring about 2.5 cm (1 inch) across was investigated using a variety of specialized tools developed by researchers to map, in high resolution, the detailed chemical composition of relatively large objects under a microscope. "We were able to perform large-area, submicron-scale, non-invasive characterization of the fragment," Masic says—an integrated approach that he and co-author of this paper James Weaver, from the Wyss Institute at Harvard University, have developed for the characterization of both biological and non-biological materials. "These methods allow us to maintain the materials of interest under more environmentally friendly conditions, while we collect hundreds of thousands of different elemental and chemical spectra across the surface of the sample, mapping out its compositional variability in extreme detail," Weaver says. That fragment, which has escaped any treatment since its discovery that might have altered its properties, "allowed us to look deeply into its original composition, revealing the presence of some elements at completely unexpectedly high concentrations" Masic says. The elements they discovered included sulfur, sodium, and calcium in different proportions, spread across the surface of the parchment. Parchment is made from animal skins that have had all hair and fatty residues removed by soaking them in a lime solution (from the middle ages onwards) or through enzymatic and other treatments (in antiquity), scraping them clean, and then stretching them tight in a frame to dry. When dried, sometimes the surface was further prepared by rubbing with salts, as was apparently the case with the Temple Scroll. The team has not yet been able to assess where the unusual combination of salts on the Temple Scroll's surface came from, Masic says. But it's clear that this unusual coating, laced with these salts, on which the text was written, helped to give this parchment its unusually bright white surface, and perhaps contributed to its state of preservation, he says. And the coating's elemental composition does not match that of the Dead Sea water itself, so it must have been from an evaporite deposit found somewhere else—whether nearby or far away, the researchers can't yet say. The unique composition of that surface layer demonstrates that the production process for that parchment was significantly different from that of other scrolls in the region, Masic says: "This work exemplifies exactly what my lab is trying to do—to use modern analytical tools to uncover secrets of the ancient world". Understanding the details of this ancient technology could help provide insights into the culture and society of that time and place, which played a central role in the history of both Judaism and Christianity. Among other things, an understanding of the parchment production and its chemistry could also help to identify forgeries of supposedly ancient writings. According to Ira Rabin, one of the paper's co-authors from Hamburg University in Germany, "this study has far-reaching implications beyond the Dead Sea Scrolls. For example, it shows that at the dawn of parchment making in the Middle East, several techniques were in use, which is in stark contrast to the single technique used in the Middle Ages. The study also shows how to identify the initial treatments, thus providing historians and conservators with a new set of analytical tools for classification of the Dead Sea Scrolls and other ancient parchments." This information could indeed be crucial in guiding the development of new preservation strategies for these ancient manuscripts. Unfortunately, it appears that much of the damage seen in the scrolls today arose not from their 2,000-plus years in the caves, but from efforts to soften the scrolls in order to unroll and read them immediately after their initial discovery, Masic says. Adding to these existing concerns, the new data now clearly demonstrate that these unique mineral coatings are also highly hygroscopic—they readily absorb any moisture in the air, and then might quickly begin to degrade the underlying material. These new results thus further emphasize the need to store the parchments in a controlled humidity environment at all times. "There could be an unanticipated sensitivity to even small-scale changes in humidity," he says. "The point is that we now have evidence for the presence of salts that might accelerate their degradation. ... These are aspects of preservation that must be taken into account." Provided by: Massachusetts Institute of Technology More information: Roman Schuetz et al. The Temple Scroll: Reconstructing an ancient manufacturing practice. Science Advances (2019). advances.sciencemag.org/content/5/9/eaaw7494 Image: Light microscopy of the TS, showing its layered structure from the macroscale to the microscale. (A) Photographs of the TS showing damage to the upper part of the scroll (left). The reverse side of the preserved section (right) shows the follicle pattern of the hairs removed from the skin, which indicated that the text is written on the flesh side of the treated skin. (B) Column 54 of the unrolled TS. The enlarged inclusion (inset) shows that some parts of the bright, text-carrying inorganic layer have been detached. (C) Fragment of TS showing inorganic layer on text side (left) and reverse side (right). The organic layer has partially detached, revealing the inner surface of the inorganic layer. (D) The same fragment in light transmittance from the back differentiating the thinner lower part, where the detachment has occurred from the thicker upper part. (E) Enlarged optical micrograph of the boxed region in (C). Credit: Science Advances (2019). https://advances.sciencemag.org/content/5/9/eaaw7494 Read the full article

[todaynewsstories]

East-West Line delay due to problem with switch mechanism: Janil Puthucheary

SINGAPORE: A track fault near Clementi MRT station that caused delays along the East-West Line (EWL) on Wednesday (Sep 19) was due to a problem with the switch mechanism, said Senior Minister of State for Transport Janil Puthucheary. 

The fault was rectified and train services resumed more than six hours after SMRT first tweeted about the problem at 7.10am.

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Throughout the morning rush hour, commuters faced delays and SMRT said to add about 30 to 40 minutes travel time between Boon Lay and Queenstown MRT stations. Free bus services were provided between the two stations.

[EWL] UPDATE: Our staff is rectifying the fault, train service on the EWL is available. However, please add 40 mins travelling time between #BoonLay and #Queenstown. Free regular bus and bridging bus service are available between #BoonLay and #Queenstown.

— SMRT Corporation (@SMRT_Singapore) September 19, 2018

SMRT tweeted that the fault was rectified at 1.35pm and trains were progressively returning to normal speed.

[EWL] UPDATE: The fault has been rectified. Trains are progressively returning to normal speed. Do continue to add 15 mins train travel time between #BoonLay and #Queenstown. Free regular and bridging bus services are available between #BoonLay and #Queenstown.

— SMRT Corporation (@SMRT_Singapore) September 19, 2018

At 1.50pm, it said that services had resumed and free bus services had ended.

[EWL] CLEARED: Train services have resumed. Free regular & bridging bus services have ended.

— SMRT Corporation (@SMRT_Singapore) September 19, 2018

Photos showed large crowds at the affected MRT stations during the morning rush hour, and commuters were advised to use the North-South Line via Woodlands and Ang Mo Kio to get to the city instead.

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Speaking on the sidelines of the launch of an engagement exercise for the next land transport master plan, Dr Puthucheary, said: “We’ve identified where the problem is, it’s with the switch mechanism. 

“We could have taken a decision to stop services and allow (authorities) to concentrate just on repairing the problem, but that would have been a very big impact on the commuter experience. So the decision we took now allows trains to pass (but it’s) slowing down the commute.”

Dr Puthucheary added that slowing down the movement of trains – rather than stopping them – was “on balance better” for commuters. 

But he emphasised that both SMRT and the Land Transport Authority (LTA) needed “a little time to ascertain exactly what the problem is with the switch mechanism”. 

“SMRT and LTA engineers are on the ground and I expect this will be resolved in a matter of hours,” he added. 

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[dorcasrempel]

How to make a book last for millennia

First discovered in 1947 by Bedouin shepherds looking for a lost sheep, the ancient Hebrew texts known as the Dead Sea Scrolls are some of the most well-preserved ancient written materials ever found. Now, a study by researchers at MIT and elsewhere elucidates a unique ancient technology for parchment making and provides new insights into possible methods to better preserve these precious historical documents.

The study focused on one scroll in particular, known as the Temple Scroll, among the roughly 900 full or partial scrolls found in the years since that first discovery. The scrolls were found in jars hidden in 11 caves on the steep hillsides just north of the Dead Sea, in the region around the ancient settlement of Qumran, which was destroyed by the Romans about 2,000 years ago. It is thought that, to protect their religious and cultural heritage from the invaders, members of a sect called the Essenes hid their precious documents in the caves, often buried under a few feet of debris and bat guano to help foil looters.

The Temple Scroll is one of the largest (almost 25 feet long) and best-preserved of all the scrolls, even though its material is the thinnest of all of them (one-tenth of a millimeter, or roughly 1/250 of an inch thick). It also has the clearest, whitest writing surface of all the scrolls. These properties led Admir Masic, the Esther and Harold E. Edgerton Career Development Assistant Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering and a Department of Materials Science and Engineering faculty fellow in archaeological materials, and his collaborators to wonder how the parchment was made.

The results of that study, carried out with former doctoral student Roman Schuetz (now at Israel’s Weizmann Institute of Science), MIT graduate student Janille Maragh, James Weaver from the Wyss Institute at Harvard University, and Ira Rabin from the Federal Institute of Materials Research and Testing and Hamburg University in Germany, were published today in the journal Science Advances. They found that the parchment was processed in an unusual way, using a mixture of salts found in evaporites — the material left from the evaporation of brines — but one that was different from the typical composition found on other parchments.

“The Temple Scroll is probably the most beautiful and best-preserved scroll,” Masic says. “We had the privilege of studying fragments from the Israeli museum in Jerusalem called the Shrine of the Book,” which was built specifically to house the Dead Sea Scrolls. One relatively large fragment from that scroll was the main subject of the new paper. The fragment, measuring about 2.5 centimeters (1 inch) across was investigated using a variety of specialized tools developed by researchers to map, in high resolution, the detailed chemical composition of relatively large objects under a microscope.

“We were able to perform large-area, submicron-scale, noninvasive characterization of the fragment,” Masic says — an integrated approach that he and Weaver have developed for the characterization of both biological and nonbiological materials. “These methods allow us to maintain the materials of interest under more environmentally friendly conditions, while we collect hundreds of thousands of different elemental and chemical spectra across the surface of the sample, mapping out its compositional variability in extreme detail,” Weaver says.

That fragment, which has escaped any treatment since its discovery that might have altered its properties, “allowed us to look deeply into its original composition, revealing the presence of some elements at completely unexpectedly high concentrations,” Masic says.

The elements they discovered included sulfur, sodium, and calcium in different proportions, spread across the surface of the parchment.

Parchment is made from animal skins that have had all hair and fatty residues removed by soaking them in a lime solution (from the Middle Ages onward) or through enzymatic and other treatments (in antiquity), scraping them clean, and then stretching them tight in a frame to dry. When dried, sometimes the surface was further prepared by rubbing with salts, as was apparently the case with the Temple Scroll.

The team has not yet been able to assess where the unusual combination of salts on the Temple Scroll’s surface came from, Masic says. But it’s clear that this unusual coating, on which the text was written, helped to give this parchment its unusually bright white surface, and perhaps contributed to its state of preservation, he says. And the coating’s elemental composition does not match that of the Dead Sea water itself, so it must have been from an evaporite deposit found somewhere else — whether nearby or far away, the researchers can’t yet say.

The unique composition of that surface layer demonstrates that the production process for that parchment was significantly different from that of other scrolls in the region, Masic says: “This work exemplifies exactly what my lab is trying to do — to use modern analytical tools to uncover secrets of the ancient world.”

Understanding the details of this ancient technology could help provide insights into the culture and society of that time and place, which played a central role in the history of both Judaism and Christianity. Among other things, an understanding of the parchment production and its chemistry could also help to identify forgeries of supposedly ancient writings.

According to Rabin, an expert in Dead Sea Scroll materials, “This study has far-reaching implications beyond the Dead Sea Scrolls. For example, it shows that at the dawn of parchment making in the Middle East, several techniques were in use, which is in stark contrast to the single technique used in the Middle Ages. The study also shows how to identify the initial treatments, thus providing historians and conservators with a new set of analytical tools for classification of the Dead Sea Scrolls and other ancient parchments.”

This information could indeed be crucial in guiding the development of new preservation strategies for these ancient manuscripts. Unfortunately, it appears that much of the damage seen in the scrolls today arose not from their 2,000-plus years in the caves, but from efforts to soften the scrolls in order to unroll and read them immediately after their initial discovery, Masic says.

Adding to these existing concerns, the new data now clearly demonstrate that these unique mineral coatings are also highly hygroscopic — they readily absorb any moisture in the air, and then might quickly begin to degrade the underlying material. These new results thus further emphasize the need to store the parchments in a controlled humidity environment at all times. “There could be an unanticipated sensitivity to even small-scale changes in humidity,” he says. “The point is that we now have evidence for the presence of salts that might accelerate their degradation. … These are aspects of preservation that must be taken into account.”

“For conservation issues and programs, this work is very important,” says Elisabetta Boaretto, director of the Kimmel Center for Archaeological Science at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel, who was not associated with this work. She says, “It indicates that you have to know very well the document needing to be preserved, and the preservation has to be tailored to the document’s chemistry and its physical state.”

Boaretto adds that this team’s study of the unusual mineral layer on the parchment “is fundamental for future work in preservation, but most importantly to understand how these documents have been prepared in antiquity. This work certainly sets a standard for other researchers in this field.”

The work was partly supported by DFG, the German Research Foundation.

How to make a book last for millennia syndicated from https://osmowaterfilters.blogspot.com/