University of Cincinnati archaeologists are turning up discoveries in the famed Roman city of Pompeii that are wiping out the historic perceptions of how the Romans dined, with the rich enjoying delicacies such as flamingos and the poor scrounging for soup or gruel.

Steven Ellis, a University of Cincinnati associate professor of classics, will present these discoveries on Jan. 4, at the joint annual meeting of the Archaeological Institute of America (AIA) and American Philological Association (APA) in Chicago.

UC teams of archaeologists have spent more than a decade at two city blocks within a non-elite district in the Roman city of Pompeii, which was buried under a volcano in 79 AD. The excavations are uncovering the earlier use of buildings that would have dated back to the 6th century.

Ellis says the excavation is producing a complete archaeological analysis of homes, shops and businesses at a forgotten area inside one of the busiest gates of Pompeii, the Porta Stabia.

The area covers 10 separate building plots and a total of 20 shop fronts, most of which served food and drink. The waste that was examined included collections from drains as well as 10 latrines and cesspits, which yielded mineralized and charred food waste coming from kitchens and excrement. Ellis says among the discoveries in the drains was an abundance of the remains of fully-processed foods, especially grains.

Archaeologists in Siberia have discovered a 3,500-year-old burial site containing skeletons of men and women buried together, some facing each other and holding hands. Dozens of tombs had skeletons caught in these "post-mortal hugs;" some also had skeletons of men and women buried with a child. Some 600 of these tombs dating back to the Bronze Age were unearthed in the Staryi Tartas village near the city Novosibirsk in Russia.

Many theories have been fielded by the archaeologists who found them, in order to explain why the skeletons were buried in such a manner. One such theory is that, between 17th and 14th century BC, couples were probably buried together to emphasize the importance of nuclear families as a unit, even in death. Another theory suggests links to reincarnation beliefs.

"We can allege that husband died and the wife was killed to be interred with him as we see in some Scythian burials, or maybe the grave stood open for some time and they buried the other person or persons later, or maybe it was really simultaneous death... we can raise quite a variety of hypotheses, but how it was in fact, we do not know yet," Vyacheslav Molodin, Director of the Institute of Archeology and Ethnography, Siberian Branch of the Russian Academy of Sciences, told the Siberian Times.

You know you're doing something wrong when the Nazis use your behavior as proof that they weren't doing anything wrong. Or do you? The Stateville Penitentiary Malaria Study became a focal point for debates over the ethics of experimenting on prisoners. Guess which side won.

The Stateville Penitentiary Malaria Study was prompted by the need to get effective anti-malarial drugs to troops fighting in the Pacific during World War II. Animals were proving inadequate for testing purposes, but few people would volunteer to take untested drugs.

So prisoners were told they could potentially shave years off their sentences, earn privileges and get special treatment, if they took part in the study. But they also might die of a fatal heart attack, after experiencing a 106 degree fever.

Between 1923 and 1951, a diminutive Floridian single-handedly and without heavy machinery moved 1,000 tons of limestone, creating out of it a castle. This is his story.

The Builder

Very little is known of the mysterious creator of the Coral Castle, Ed Leedskalnin. Born in Riga, Latvia in 1887 to a family of stonemasons, Ed immigrated to the U.S. sometime around 1913 after his fiancée broke off their engagement (and a large piece of his heart). During a bout with tuberculosis around 1919, he moved to Florida, where magnets were apparently used to treat his condition. This experience seems to have had a life-changing effect, as you'll see later.

After he bought a parcel of land in Florida City, Florida, Ed began to work on the Castle. A loner, one hundred pound, five-feet tall Ed refused to let anyone even watch him work, and no one is known to have helped him move, carve or place the massive stones. When asked how he manipulated such large blocks alone, Ed would explain that he had "discovered the secrets of the pyramids."

The Egyptian-Spanish archaeological mission unearthed on Thursday a large granite head of a statue of an unidentified New Kingdom king during routine excavation at King Thutmose III's funerary temple on Luxor's west bank.

Mohamed Abdel-Maqsoud, head of the Ancient Egyptian Antiquities Section at the Ministry of State for Antiquities (MSA), explained that the head is 29.6cm high, 24.3cm wide and 26.9cm deep. The head depicts a round face of a royal figure, not identified yet, wearing a wig, with traces of a broken nose, and two long ears that each reach 8cm. The eyes, he continued, have traces of kohl, with thick eyebrows.

Abdel-Maqsoud said that the head was found buried in sand in a pit on the northern side of the second court of the temple. Studies are underway in an attempt to determine which New Kingdom king it belongs to.

The temple of Thutmose III is a vey small temple located beside the temple of Queen Hatshepsut at Al Deir Al-Bahari. It was first discovered in February 1962 during routine restoration work carried out by a Polish excavation mission of the Polish Centre of Mediterranean Archaeology led by archaeologist Kazimierz Michalowski.

The temple is poorly preserved and was dedicated to god Amun-Re. Although Thutmose III's actual funerary temple Henkhet-Ankh is located a short distance away, such a temple had played some role within the king's funerary cult.

When a damaging earthquake struck the area of L'Aquila in central Italy in 2009, it was the latest in the region's long history of strong and persistent quakes. The rich recorded history of settlement in the area, along with oral traditions, archaeological excavations, inscriptions and medieval texts, and offer insight into how often the region might expect destructive earthquakes.

But according to a new study by Emanuela Guidoboni and colleagues, the historical record on ancient and medieval earthquakes comes with its own shortcomings that must be addressed before the seismic history of L'Aquila can be useful in assessing the current seismic hazard in this area.

To illustrate some of these potential gaps in knowledge, the researchers combed through written records and information from archaeological excavations, covering the period from ancient Roman occupation in the first century A.D. to the late Middle Ages of the 15th century A.D. The authors say, researchers must piece together information ranging from collapsed roofs within an ancient Roman city, to the evidences of rebuilding damaged baths and cisterns. In later years, better written records offer more detail on the specific location and size of earthquakes occurring in 1349, 1456, and 1461 (a long seismic sequence).

The authors say that the early to middle Middle Ages, in particular, have a dearth of information that needs to be addressed to have a more complete picture of the region's seismic history. Overall, the records confirm that the region appears to have been host to a high number of strong earthquakes. The authors also point out a tendency in the area to produce multiple and nearly simultaneous seismic events that vary considerably in their impact.

As Guidoboni and her colleagues note, the earthquakes have had a strong influence in the region's economy and culture. It is a impact that can be seen clearly in the historical records, such as a written account of a large earthquake in 1315. During that quake, warring factions in the town came together after they "were struck with fear at the strong shaking when a frightening earthquake soon afterwards struck that place in a terrible way," the official account says, "and they abandoned their wrongdoing and returned to the narrow path of their conscience."

The British Museum's 2013 show of artefacts from the Roman cities of Pompeii and Herculaneum, buried in ash during an explosive eruption of Mount Vesuvius, was a sell-out. But could even greater treasures - including lost works of classical literature - still lie underground?

For centuries scholars have been hunting for the lost works of ancient Greek and Latin literature. In the Renaissance, books were found in monastic libraries. In the late 19th Century papyrus scrolls were found in the sands of Egypt. But only in Herculaneum in southern Italy has an entire library from the ancient Mediterranean been discovered in situ.

On the eve of the catastrophe in 79 AD, Herculaneum was a chic resort town on the Bay of Naples, where many of Rome's top families went to rest and recuperate during the hot Italian summers.

It was also a place where Rome's richest engaged in a bit of cultural one-upmanship - none more so than Lucius Calpurnius Piso Caesoninus, a politician and father-in-law of Julius Caesar.

• Man is thought to have first settled to grow crops for food 10,000 years ago

• But some scientists say it was brewing that drove agriculture

• Beer provided early farmers with a number of benefits, experts say

Some scientists claim beer - not bread - is the reason early man adopted a society based on farming around 10,000 years ago, a key moment in our evolution.

The cultivation of grain saw the transition away from a hunter-gatherer lifestyle and a widely-accepted theory is that the crops were used to bake bread, but experts claim it was the prospect of a brew that drove the desire to settle down and start a farm.

One of them is Patrick McGovern, the director of the Biomolecular Archaeology Project for Cuisine, Fermented Beverages, and Health at the University of Pennsylvania.

He says beer has a number of advantages beyond the intoxicating effects and taste, such as a high B vitamin content, the essential amino acid lysine and the fact it was safer to drink than water as the brewing process killed off bacteria and viruses.

Brain surgery is a procedure so complicated that we use the term as shorthand for something almost unfathomably complex.

However, surgically opening a person's skull isn't a recent phenomenon, as a new study in the American Journal of Physical Anthropology has revealed that people living in ancient Peru spent time learning how to conduct such a delicate operation.

In the new study, University of California, Santa Barbara researcher Danielle Kurin described how native people living in Peru 1,000 years ago surgically removed a section of the cranium, a process called trepanation, for a variety of reasons.

"When you get a knock on the head that causes your brain to swell dangerously, or you have some kind of neurological, spiritual or psychosomatic illness, drilling a hole in the head becomes a reasonable thing to do," said Kurin, a visiting assistant professor at UCSB and specialist in forensic anthropology.

In her study, Kurin notes trepanations first appeared between 200 and 600 A.D. The medical procedure continued until Spanish conquistadors put an end to the practice in the early 16th century.

"For about 400 years, from 600 to 1000 AD, the area where I work - the Andahuaylas - was living as a prosperous province within an enigmatic empire known as the Wari," she said. "For reasons still unknown, the empire suddenly collapsed."

"But it is precisely during times of collapse that we see people's resilience and moxie coming to the fore," Kurin added. "In the same way that new types of bullet wounds from the Civil War resulted in the development of better glass eyes, the same way IED's are propelling research in prosthetics in the military today, so, too, did these people in Peru employ trepanation to cope with new challenges like violence, disease and depravation 1,000 years ago."

Aaron Adair received his first taste of the Star of Bethlehem mystery when he worked as a planetarium-show presenter while an undergraduate student at Michigan State University.

A decade later, after exploring dozens of star theories dating back centuries, he's a skeptic.

In the newly published The Star of Bethlehem: A Skeptical View, the Ohio State University scholar says the star was most likely the literary creation of the author of the Gospel of Matthew, meant to convey a message of salvation.

None of the other hypotheses he has encountered can explain it, Adair said, and at least one - that the star was a "fantastic" conjunction of Jupiter and Venus in either 3 or 2 B.C. - would have to change history to fit the story.

"I found out that pretty much all the hypotheses failed to really conform to what the Gospel actually said," noted Adair, who has a master's degree in physics and a doctorate in physics education at Ohio State.

The story, told only in Matthew, says the star appeared upon Jesus' birth and guided wise men, or magi, from the East to worship him.

"A lot of the literature of the time is ultimately not to say what happened but is ultimately some sort of symbolic tale," Adair said. "It's supposed to be an important legend or myth that ... tries to explain points of theology in the way of storytelling."