Around the World November 1, 2011
NEW JERSEY: Sometimes an artifact isn't a pot or a skull, but a woman singing "Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star" to a child. Scientists recovered the unidentified voice from a tin phonograph record that would have been part of a 123-year-old talking doll. Because the record, made by Thomas Edison, was bent, it was optically scanned to make a digital model of the recorded surface. Edison's talking dolls, an early attempt to commercialize his phonograph, never found a market.
Letter from Philadelphia March/April 2017
An unusual industrial history emerges from some of the city’s hippest neighborhoods
Features July/August 2026
How a trailblazing ruler pulled her realm back from the brink
Features July/August 2026
Is a Native American origin story embedded in Ohio’s colossal earthwork?
Features July/August 2026
Greek and Roman soldiers fired pointed barbs at their enemies
Features July/August 2026
Archaeologists are rethinking how kings shared power beyond the great capitals of medieval Zimbabwe
Features July/August 2026
Discovering the origins of the peculiar racket game that swept sixteenth-century France
Features May/June 2026
Discovering the surprising inspirations behind Homer’s great tales of the Trojan War
Features May/June 2026
Why Neolithic and Bronze Age farmers in the Alps built their villages on stilts
Features May/June 2026
On the shores of a lake in Guatemala, the Itzá people defied the Spanish for nearly 200 years
