Code

Another rare example of Alan Turing's handwritten notes, which went to auction in 2015

British Government Places Export Ban on Alan Turing's World War II-Era Notebooks

The mathematician took careful notes while working on a portable voice encryption system in the mid-1940s

Members of the Voyager 1 flight team celebrate after receiving health and status data from the spacecraft. Next, engineers need to enable the probe to start sending science data again.

Voyager 1 Sends Clear Data to NASA for the First Time in Five Months

The farthest spacecraft from Earth had been transmitting nonsense since November, but after an engineering tweak, it finally beamed back a report on its health and status

The silk dress, which dates to the mid-1880s, in which the pieces of paper containing the code were found. They were tucked in a hidden pocket, the opening of which was hidden by an overskirt.

'Unsolvable' Code Hidden in Antique Dress Pocket Is Finally Cracked

Short, handwritten lines of unrelated words contained coded weather reports to send via telegraph in the late 19th century

All but seven of the letters were previously thought to be lost.

Code Breakers Discover—and Decipher—Long-Lost Letters by Mary, Queen of Scots

The deposed monarch wrote the 57 encrypted messages during her captivity in England

The entrance to the CIA Museum in Langley, Virginia

See Inside the Rarely Seen and Newly Reimagined CIA Museum

Off-limits to all but a few in-person visitors, the museum is starting to welcome the public, online at least

“The first people to look at the Rosetta Stone thought it would take two weeks to decipher,” says Edward Dolnick, author of The Writing of the Gods: The Race to Decode the Rosetta Stone. “It ended up taking 20 years.”

Two Hundred Years Ago, the Rosetta Stone Unlocked the Secrets of Ancient Egypt

French scholar Jean-François Champollion announced his decipherment of Egyptian hieroglyphs on September 27, 1822

Alan Turing’s class photo at King’s College, Cambridge in 1931

King's College, Cambridge Will Install Abstract Memorial to Alan Turing

Despite pushback, plans for a sculpture honoring the visionary mathematician have been approved

Experts were unable to pinpoint a cause of death, but three medical witnesses who testified during an inquest into the Somerton Man case agreed that his passing “was not natural.” 

Have Scholars Finally Identified the Mysterious Somerton Man?

New DNA analysis suggests a body found on a beach in Australia in 1948 belongs to Carl Webb, an electrical engineer from Melbourne

Literary scholar Vanessa Braganza suggests that Catherine commissioned the pendant design as "a sign of her conviction of her own enduring legitimacy."

The Secrets of a Long-Overlooked Cipher Linked to Catherine of Aragon

Henry VIII's first wife may have commissioned the design as an act of defiance during the Tudor king's attempt to divorce her

Ingeborg Hornkjøl poses with a piece of wood inscribed with Nordic runes. 

Archaeologists Discover—and Start to Decode—Rare Medieval Runes

One of the newly unearthed objects, an inscribed bone, is the first of its kind found in Oslo in decades

The bold, brilliant Mary Wroth with a string instrument called a theorbo, circa 1620.

The Secret Codes of Lady Wroth, the First Female English Novelist

The Renaissance noblewoman is little known today, but in her time she was a notorious celebrity

Elizebeth Friedman was a star cryptanalyst who cracked hundreds of ciphers for the U.S. government.

How Codebreaker Elizebeth Friedman Broke Up a Nazi Spy Ring

A new PBS documentary traces her extraordinary life, from her Quaker upbringing to her career as the U.S.' first female cryptanalyst

A team of divers found this rusted—but still recognizable—Enigma cipher machine at the bottom of the Baltic Sea. The Nazis used the device to encode secret military messages during WWII.

Divers Discover Nazi Enigma Machine Thrown Into the Baltic Sea During WWII

German forces used the device—likely cast into the water to avoid falling into Allied hands—to encode military messages

Purdue University’s INSPIRE Research Institute for Pre-College Engineering works with pre-school, school-age, college undergrads, engineers and parents to test and rate science- and tech-themed products.

The Ten Best STEM Toys to Give as Gifts in 2019

Stretch young learners’ minds with everything from card games to robotic spheres

The indecipherable text carved in a rock found in the Brittany village of Plougastel-Daoulas.

A French Town Is Offering $2,250 Reward to Anyone Who Can Decipher This Mysterious Inscription

The inscription was probably made during the 18th century

The 1938 Christmas greeting would've only held significance for those "in the know"

Christmas Card Addressed to Bletchley Codebreakers Discovered

The lost holiday message features the only known photograph of operatives’ September 1938 meeting, the enigmatic “Captain Ridley’s shooting party”

How to Cipher Like a Soviet

See if you can figure out how the American code-breakers unraveled the complexities of the Russian codebook

In the spring of 2018, Angeline Nanni revisited Arlington Hall, where the Venona team got cracking. It is now on the National Register of Historic Places.

The Women Code Breakers Who Unmasked Soviet Spies

At the height of the Cold War, America’s most secretive counterespionage effort set out to crack unbreakable ciphers

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