In the legend of Odysseus, the hero hails from Ithaca, a Greek island in the Ionian Sea. The myth was famously told by the Ancient Greek poet Homer in The Odyssey and first written down sometime in ...

Russian Yuri Knorozov cracked the previously undecipherable Maya code, and remarkably, did it long before he ever visited ...

Experts from around the world are in Seattle this week to discuss how best to deal with the threats of black fever, kala azar, dumdum fever, Baghdad boil, malady of demons or, in Zulu, nagana, loss of ...

NARRATOR: Up next on NOVA, Cracking the Maya Code. NARRATOR: In the 16th century, the flames of the Spanish Inquisition scorched the New World, decimating the Maya civilization. One blaze was ignited ...

NPR's Melissa Block talks to Oliver and Sheila Lawn, former code-breakers in World War II who have been called in to try to decipher the meaning of mysterious letters carved into a monument at ...

From bizarre ancient markings to random numbers and letters, codes and ciphers have been used for millennia to send secret messages, hide identities and operate outside the law. Unravelling these ...