Integrated Calendar

Damage and repair are ubiquitous across all of biology. The multiple network systems that sustain life are typically dissipative, leading to "wear and tear" at all scales. Metabolism fuels repair to combat the consequent entropy production, yet is itself dissipative and a major source of damage. These ideas will be discussed in the context of three examples: sleep, aging and nucleotide substitution rates. What sets the scale of our sleep time, our lifespan and our rate of evolution and how do these fundamental phenomena depend on organismic size?

The Mycenaean civilization of Late Bronze Age Greece (ca. 1700/1600-1050 BCE) was discovered through Heinrich Schliemann’s quest for the historicity of the Homeric Epics that led him to the Peloponnesian region Argolid. When he found at Agamemnon’s capital Mycenae gold-rich graves and in close-by Tiryns a palace richly decorated by wall paintings and strongly fortified by Cyclopean walls, he was sure to have uncovered the remains of the “heroic age” so vividly described in the epics. The confidence in Homer as a primary source for understanding Mycenaean culture has been severely shattered, ever since archaeological research and the decipherment of the Mycenaean Linear B script enabled research to assess this culture on the basis of its own sources and thus realize the striking differences to the descriptions in the Iliad and Odyssey. Roughly 130 years after Schliemann Tiryns remains one of the key sites for understanding Mycenaean culture in one of its core regions. The palace and fortification of Tiryns are among the best examples of imposing architecture in the 2nd Millennium BCE East Mediterranean, and its function as the most significant harbor of Mycenaean Greece secured the site a central position in a trade network that reached as far as Cyprus and the Levant. Excavations of the last 15 years have shed new light on these far-reaching connections and on the long-term changes in the social and political structure of Mycenaean Greece during the crucial transition from the palatial period (ca. 1400-1200 BCE) to the “Dark Ages” (ca. 1200-1050 ) that were not as dark as is often believed.