The tale surrounding the discovery of King Richard III's skeleton beneath an English parking lot is about much more than a pile of 528-year-old bones — all you have to do is look at the face of Philippa Langley as she breaks down during an archaeological autopsy.

"I don't see bones on that table," she says, during an emotional scene in a new documentary about the king's remains. "I see the man."

Langley, a 50-year-old Scottish screenwriter, plays almost as big a role as the much-maligned monarch in "The King's Skeleton: Richard III Revealed." The show airs Sunday night on the Smithsonian Channel in the U.S., after racking up royal ratings on British TV. It was Langley who enlisted the Richard III Society to help jump-start the excavation, and she serves as the on-screen witness for many of the key twists in the excavation.

Medieval CSI
Based on an analysis of the historical records, archaeologists from the University of Leicester obtained a license from the British government to dig into that parking lot next to Leicester Cathedral last year. "The King's Skeleton" traces each step in the CSI-style investigation, leading to February's conclusion that the bones were indeed the mortal remains of the last Plantagenet king.

Richard III reigned for only two years, but his death in the Battle of Bosworth Field in 1485 was a key moment. In fact, many historians consider his fall to mark the end of the Middle Ages in England. A century later, William Shakespeare's play immortalized him as one of literature's greatest villains.

One of the themes of "The King's Skeleton" centers on how Richard III may have gained a blacker reputation than he deserved. The way Richard III's fans see it, the successors to the throne from the House of Tudor had an interest in making their Plantagenet forebears look bad — to the point of portraying Richard III as a misshapen hunchback. "This is propaganda," historian Pamela Tudor-Craig says during the documentary.

So the truth comes as a shock to Langley.

"What we're actually seeing here is that this skeleton in fact has a hunchback," Jo Appleby, a bone expert at the University of Leicester, tells her in one scene.

"No!" Langley answers.

The identification of Richard III's remains drew upon carbon dating and detailed studies of the skeleton, including evidence of wounds that matched up with historical accounts of the king's demise. But the weightiest evidence comes from analysis of DNA extracted from the skeleton: The chemical signature of the mitochondrial DNA matched up with two maternal-line descendants of Richard III's eldest sister, Anne of York.

Stay tuned
Does this mean the case of Richard III is closed? Not yet. Mitochondrial DNA is not as precise an indicator as, say, a paternity test. "The DNA evidence is simply a single strand within the entire analysis procedure," Turi King, the University of Leicester geneticist who conducted the analysis, told NBC News on Friday. "You certainly wouldn't convict somebody on [the basis of this] DNA evidence."

However, King noted that the mitochondrial DNA signature for this particular skeleton is shared by only a few percent of Europeans. "It's quite a rare type, so that adds to the weight of the evidence," she said.

The next step will be to analyze the skeleton's Y-chromosome DNA, which is passed down from father to son. The Y-chromosome signature is far more precise than mitochondrial DNA, which all children get from their mother. Four paternal-line descendants of Richard III's family have already been identified and tested, and King is now waiting to do the much more complicated reconstruction of the skeleton's Y-chromosome DNA signature.

Working on the royal remains has been a "dream project," King said, but not without its drawbacks: "It's been very stressful. You're trying to work quite quietly and calmly. The pressure to make sure everything has been done properly has been intense. ... I feel like I'm still in the middle of it."

The license to work with the skeleton runs out next year, and King will have to finish up her DNA studies by then.

Meanwhile, a potential legal battle is looming over whether the remains will be reburied in Leicester Cathedral, as planned, or in York instead. Thankfully, that's one drama King and the other scientists involved in the Richard III mystery won't have to deal with.

"I just try to tune it out," she said.

More about the Richard III saga:

• Parking-lot skeleton identified as Richard III
• Could Richard III have gotten his spine fixed?
• For some, resting place is human rights issue

To tune in "The King's Skeleton: Richard III Revealed," check your cable provider's TV listings or consult the Smithsonian Channel's website. Britain's Channel 4 aired the show as "Richard III: The King in the Car Park."

Alan Boyle is NBCNews.com's science editor. Connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the log's Facebook page, following @b0yle on Twitter and adding the Cosmic Log page to your Google+ presence. To keep up with Cosmic Log as well as NBCNews.com's other stories about science and space, sign up for the Tech & Science newsletter, delivered to your email in-box every weekday. You can also check out "The Case for Pluto," my book about the controversial dwarf planet and the search for new worlds.

Nine distant relatives of King Richard III are demanding that the British government reverse its decision to have his skeleton reburied at Leicester Cathedral, near the parking lot where it was found, and give it a resting place in York instead.

The open letter, published late Sunday by British newspapers such as The Telegraph and the Daily Mail, is just one of several efforts seeking a burial at York Minster for the more than 500-year-old remains, which were discovered last year by researchers from the University of Leicester. This month, the researchers said DNA analysis and other forensic tests proved "beyond reasonable doubt" that the skeleton was that of Richard III.

The English monarch reigned for just two years before he was killed in battle in 1485, but he was immortalized in William Shakespeare's play, "Richard III," in which he was portrayed as a hunchbacked villain. Richard III's legions of modern-day fans say he wasn't really all that bad — and the row over what to do with his bones has added a new twist to the drama.

"We, the undernamed, do hereby most respectfully demand that the remains of King Richard III, the last Plantagenet King of England and our mutual ancestor, be returned to the city of York for formal, ceremonial reburial," the statement from his relatives says. "We believe that such an interment was the desire of King Richard in life and we have written this statement so that his wishes may be fully recognised and upheld. King Richard III was the last King of the House of York and the last of the Plantagenet dynasty which had ruled England since the succession of King Henry II in 1154.

"We, the undernamed blood descendants, unreservedly believe that King Richard is deserving of great recognition and respect and hereby agree to dutifully uphold his memory.

"With due humility and affection, we are and will remain His Majesty’s representatives and voice."

The statement was signed by nine individuals who have traced their ancestry back to Richard III's siblings. The nine signers are Charles E. Brunner, Stephen Guy Nicolay, Vanessa Maria Roe, Jacob Daniel Tyler, Paul Tyler, Raymond Torrence Bertram Roe, Linda Jane Roe, Eleanor Bianca Lupton and Charlotte Jane Lupton. Richard died childless and thus has no direct-line descendants.

Even before the remains were found, the British Ministry of Justice granted a license putting the University of Leicester in charge of the parking-lot dig and the disposition of any remains found there."The University of Leicester specified in its application that reinterment would occur in Leicester Cathedral if the remains were proved to be those of King Richard III," the institution said in a statement.

The university is currently working with the cathedral and Leicester's city council on plans for his reburial by August 2014. In the meantime, researchers are continuing to study the remains.

The long lead time means that the tug of war between Leicester and York, two cities that are 100 miles (160 kilometers) from each other, could continue for months. There are even those who want to see the remains interred in London's Westminster Abbey. But the nine relatives behind this week's open letter have no more standing than the other descendants of Richard III's family, who doubtless number in the thousands by now.

In that light, Leicester seems to have the strongest case, by virtue of legal grounds as well as the less rigorous "finders, keepers" rule and the dictum that possession is nine-tenths of the law. Do you disagree? Feel free to weigh in with your comments below.

More about Richard III:

• Study suggests Richard III spoke with a lilt
• King Richard III's face revealed after 500 years
• Richard III's 'discovery' was reported in 1935, too

Alan Boyle is NBCNews.com's science editor. Connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the log's Facebook page, following @b0yle on Twitter and adding the Cosmic Log page to your Google+ presence. To keep up with Cosmic Log as well as NBCNews.com's other stories about science and space, sign up for the Tech & Science newsletter, delivered to your email in-box every weekday. You can also check out "The Case for Pluto," my book about the controversial dwarf planet and the search for new worlds.

Experts say DNA analysis supports their claim that the bones dug up last year under a parking lot in the English city of Leicester are the last mortal remains of England's King Richard III.

"It's the academic conclusion of the University of Leicester that beyond reasonable doubt the individual exhumed at Greyfriars in September 2012 is indeed Richard III, the last Plantagenet king of England," Richard Buckley, the project's lead archaeologist, said during a Monday news briefing in Leicester.

The project used 21st-century forensic science to solve a 500-year-old mystery surrounding one of William Shakespeare's best-known villains. Shakespeare's play, "Richard III," made the king out to be a scheming monster who killed children to get to the English throne. The bard gave Richard III dramatic lines that are still evoked today, ranging from "the winter of our discontent" to "A horse! A horse! My kingdom for a horse!"

In real life, Richard III's battlefield death in 1485 marked the end of England's Wars of the Roses, a decades-long conflict between the houses of York and Lancaster. Tradition held that he was buried in the choir of Leicester's Greyfriars Church, but the precise location of his remains was lost in the mists of time. Some even speculated that Richard's bones were thrown into the River Soar during Henry VIII's reign.

It was only in the past few years that archaeologists have been able to zero in on the location of the Greyfriars site again. Last year, a team led by the University of Leicester excavated a city parking lot and found a wealth of intriguing evidence — including a skeleton with a battle-scarred skull and a spine that was curved due to scoliosis. There was no evidence of a coffin, a shroud or clothing that was buried with the body.

All those clues suggested that the skeleton could have been that of the historical Richard III, but to firm up the connection, scientists put the bones through genetic tests, radiocarbon dating and more detailed osteological analysis.

"The skull was in good condition, although fragile, and was able to give us detailed information about this individual," University of Leicester archaeologist Jo Appleby reported Sunday in a news release. During Monday's news briefing, Appleby said experts identified 10 injuries to the bones, including eight wounds to the skull and "postmortem humiliation injuries." Such wounds are "highly consistent" with the accounts of Richard III's death, she said.

"Historical sources tell us that Richard's body was stripped," hacked and put on public display after the battle, Appleby noted.

The skeleton's relatively delicate structure was consistent with descriptions of Richard III's physical appearance, University of Leicester historian Lin Foxhall said. 

University of Leicester

A photo shows the Greyfriars skeleton lying in the site where it was found.

University of Leicester

The Greyfriars skeleton is laid out for forensic analysis. Experts believe the foot bones were separated from the rest of the body after burial.

University of Leicester

The Greyfriars skull was found by researchers during a search for the remains of King Richard III.

Buckley told journalists that the position of the hands suggested that they might have been bound together. Initially, the team reported that an arrowhead was found among the bones, but Buckley said a closer look determined that the object was a nail that was apparently mixed in with the remains.

Radiocarbon dating showed that "the individual could have died in 1485," Buckley said. Two tests yielded dates possibly ranging from 1455 to 1540.  

The team's genetic analysis reinforced the link to Richard III: DNA was extracted from bone samples and compared with modern-day mitochondrial DNA from two direct descendants of Richard III's family, including an anonymous donor as well as Michael Ibsen, a Canadian-born cabinetmaker who is a 17th-generation descendant of Richard III's eldest sister, Anne of York.

"The DNA evidence points to these being the remains of Richard III," said Turi King, a geneticist at the University of Leicester. She said additional DNA tests were still in progress.

Genetic matches based on mitochondrial DNA aren't as clear-cut as, say, a paternity test — but a mismatch would have ruled out any family connection. Similar techniques were used to identify the remains of Czar Nicholas II and other members of Russia's royal family, who were killed in 1918 during the Russian Revolution.

A documentary about the Leicester project, "Richard III: The King in the Car Park," is to be aired by Britain's Channel 4 on Monday night. But this isn't the end of the story. For one thing, the results announced on Monday will have to go through review and publication in scientific journals. The announcement also could lead to a reassessment of Richard III's reign, which some historians say wasn't nearly as terrible as Shakespeare made it out to be.

"I think this could be the moment where Richard III's reputation actually turns," British historian Andrew Roberts told NBC News. "This could be the moment where we look at his achievements and the positive aspects of Richard III, and don't just see him as one of the old Dark Ages kings."

And then there's the matter of reburying the remains: Authorities said the skeleton would get a proper interment in Leicester Cathedral, not far from the parking lot where it was found. The cathedral's canon chancellor, David Monteith, said planning for an interment ceremony in 2014 has already begun, and he expressed the hope that after more than 500 years, Richard III "may come to rest in peace, and rise in glory."

More about the search for Richard III:

• PhotoBlog: Reconstruction reveals Richard III's face
• Skeleton was almost destroyed in 19th century
• Dispute erupts over skeleton's future resting place
• Hunt for king's grave turns up garden

Alan Boyle is NBCNews.com's science editor. Connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the log's Facebook page, following @b0yle on Twitter and adding the Cosmic Log page to your Google+ presence. To keep up with Cosmic Log as well as NBCNews.com's other stories about science and space, sign up for the Tech & Science newsletter, delivered to your email in-box every weekday. You can also check out "The Case for Pluto," my book about the controversial dwarf planet and the search for new worlds.

The "unsinkable" Titanic was sunk by an iceberg, but there are other reasons why the tragedy that occurred 100 years ago this month was as tragic as it was. Even a century later, the case of the Titanic illustrates how technological failures often result from a succession of omissions, missteps and bad luck rather than one big mess-up.

"No one thing sent the Titanic to the bottom of the North Atlantic," Richard Corfield writes in a Physics World retrospective on the disaster that caused 1,514 deaths on April 14-15, 1912. "Rather, the ship was ensnared by a perfect storm of circumstances that conspired her to her doom. Such a chain is familiar to those who study disasters — it is called an 'event cascade.'"

The iceberg that the Titanic struck on its way from Southampton to New York is No. 1 on a top-10 list of circumstances. Here are nine other suggested circumstances from Corfield's article and other sources:

Climate caused more icebergs: Weather conditions in the North Atlantic were particularly conducive for corralling icebergs at the intersection of the Labrador Current and the Gulf Stream, due to warmer-than-usual waters in the Gulf Stream, Richard Norris of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography told Physics World. "Oceanographically, the upshot of that was that icebergs, sea ice and growlers were concentrated in the very position where the collision happened," Norris said. 

Tides sent icebergs southward: Last month, astronomers at Texas State University at San Marcos noted that the sun, the moon and Earth were aligned in such a way that could have led to unusually high tides in January 1912. They speculated that the tides could have dislodged icebergs that were stuck in the Labrador Sea, sending more of them toward the waters traversed by the Titanic a couple of months later.

The ship was going too fast: Many Titanicologists have said that the ship's captain, Edward J. Smith, was aiming to better the crossing time of the Olympic, the Titanic's older sibling in the White Star fleet. For some, the fact that the Titanic was sailing full speed ahead despite concerns about icebergs was Smith's biggest misstep. "Simply put, Titanic was traveling way too fast in an area known to contain ice; that's the bottom line," says Mark Nichol, webmaster for the Titanic and Other White Star Ships website.

Iceberg warnings went unheeded: The Titanic received multiple warnings about icefields in the North Atlantic over the wireless, but Corfield notes that the last and most specific warning was not passed along by senior radio operator Jack Phillips to Captain Smith, apparently because it didn't carry the prefix "MSG" (Masters' Service Gram). That would have required a personal acknowledgment from the captain. "Phillips interpreted it as non-urgent and returned to sending passenger messages to the receiver on shore at Cape Race, Newfoundland, before it went out of range," Corfield writes.

The binoculars were locked up: Corfield also says binoculars that could have been used by lookouts on the night of the collision were locked up aboard the ship — and the key was held by David Blair, an officer who was bumped from the crew before the ship's departure from Southampton. Some historians have speculated that the fatal iceberg might have been spotted earlier if the binoculars were in use, but others say it wouldn't have made a difference.

The steersman took a wrong turn: Did the Titanic's steersman turn the ship toward the iceberg, dooming the ship? That's the claim made in 2010 by Louise Patten, who said the story was passed down from her grandfather, the most senior ship officer to survive the disaster. After the iceberg was spotted, the command was issued to turn "hard a starboard," but as the command was passed down the line, it was misinterpreted as meaning "make the ship turn right" rather than "push the tiller right to make the ship head left," Patten said. She said the error was quickly discovered, but not quickly enough to avert the collision. She also speculated that if the ship had stopped where it was hit, seawater would not have pushed into one interior compartment after another as it did, and the ship might not have sunk as quickly.

Reverse thrust reduced the ship's maneuverability: Just before impact, first officer William McMaster Murdoch is said to have telegraphed the engine room to put the ship's engines into reverse. That would cause the left and right propeller to turn backward, but because of the configuration of the stern, the central propeller could only be halted, not reversed. Corfield said "the fact that the steering propeller was not rotating severely diminished the turning ability of the ship. It is one of the many bitter ironies of the Titanic tragedy that the ship might well have avoided the iceberg if Murdoch had not told the engine room to reduce and then reverse thrust." 

The iron rivets were too weak: Metallurgists Tim Foecke and Jennifer Hooper McCarty looked into the materials used for the building of the Titanic at its Belfast shipyard and found that the steel plates toward the bow and the stern were held together with  low-grade iron rivets. Those rivets may have been used because higher-grade rivets were in short supply, or because the better rivets couldn't be inserted in those areas using the shipyard's crane-mounted hydraulic equipment. The metallurgists said those low-grade rivets would have ripped apart more easily during the collision, causing the ship to sink more quickly that it would have if stronger rivets had been used. Other researchers have contested that claim, however.

There were too few lifeboats: Perhaps the biggest tragedy is that there were not enough lifeboats to accommodate all of the Titanic's more than 2,200 passengers and crew members. The lifeboats could accommodate only about 1,200 people — which was still in excess of the 1,060-person capacity that was the legal requirement for that time. "It seems that in 1912, in a way not dissimilar to our own box-ticking, responsibility-avoiding culture today, lack of effective oversight on the part of the authorities caused the consequences of the disaster to be much worse than they might have been," Corfield wrote.

Do these 10 causes cover everything, or are there still more factors I'm forgetting? Are there some lessons still unlearned from the Titanic tragedy? Feel free to weigh in with your reflections on the Titanic centennial in the comment space below.

More about the Titanic:

• Titanic's legacy: a fascination with disasters
• New images of Titanic shipwreck revealed
• PhotoBlog: More amazing pictures from the site
• Last lunch menu from Titanic sells for $120,000
• Events mark 100th anniversary of Titanic's sinking
• Slideshow: Titanic Belfast museum makes debut  
• Full Titanic wreck site mapped for first time  
• Cosmic Log archive on the Titanic

Alan Boyle is msnbc.com's science editor. Connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the log's Facebook page, following @b0yle on Twitter or adding Cosmic Log's Google+ page to your circle. You can also check out "The Case for Pluto," my book about the controversial dwarf planet and the search for other worlds.

Lefteris Pitarakis / AP

People raise their hands in meditation during the 2010 summer solstice at Stonehenge.

Researchers say they've found two pits to the east and west of Stonehenge that may have played a role in an ancient midsummer ceremony. The discovery suggests that the 5,000-year-old circle of stones we see today may represent just a few of the pieces in a larger geographical, astronomical and cultural puzzle.

The previously undetected pits could provide clues for solving the puzzle.

"These exciting finds indicate that even though Stonehenge was ultimately the most important monument in the landscape, it may at times not have been the only, or most important ritual focus, and the area of Stonehenge may have become significant as a sacred site at a much earlier date," Vince Gaffney, an archaeology professor at the University of Birmingham, said in a news release issued over the weekend.

The pits, which measure about 16 feet (5 meters wide) and at least 3 feet (1 meter) deep, have been covered over for centuries and can't easily be spotted on the ground. But they showed up in a survey that was conducted using non-invasive mapping techniques such as ground-penetrating radar and magnetometry. The survey is part of the Stonehenge Hidden Landscape Project, which was initiated last year with backing from the University of Birmingham's IBM Visual and Spatial Technology Center and the Ludwig Boltzmann Institute for Archaeological Prospection and Virtual Archaeology in Vienna.

The placement of the pits is intriguing: They were found on the eastern and western sides of the Cursus, a racetrack-style enclosure north of Stonehenge itself that spans 1.5 miles (2.5 kilometers) from east to west and is up to 100 yards (meters) wide. From the perspective of an observer standing at the Heel Stone, a massive upright stone just outside Stonehenge's main circle, the sun would rise just above the eastern pit on the day of the summer solstice, which is the longest day of the year. The same observer would see the sun set that evening in line with the western pit.

National Geographic

A map of the Stonehenge area shows the placement of the stone circle and the Cursus, as well as another monument known as Woodhenge and a suggested ceremonial route between the monuments.

Archaeologists have previously noted that the Cursus was apparently created several hundred years before Stonehenge's 5,000-year-old stone circle was erected. The newly detected pits may have been part of a grand layout that guided the placement of the standing stones.

But to what end?

Gaffney, who led the survey project, speculated that the Cursus was the central stage for a midsummer ritual that was enacted long before Stonehenge's heyday. "The perimeter of the Cursus may well have defined a route guiding ceremonial processions which took place on the longest day of the year," he said.

In addition to the pits, Gaffney and his colleagues found a previously undetected gap in the middle of the northern side of the eroded earthwork that defines the sides of the Cursus. They propose that ceremonial leaders entered the Cursus through that gap, and then gathered at the eastern pit to conduct sunrise rituals. Over the course of the day, participants in the rituals might have made their way westward, ending up at the western pit at sunset.

"Observers of the ceremony would have been positioned at the Heel Stone, [with] which the two pits are aligned," Gaffney said.

Henry Chapman, another archaeologist at the University of Birmingham, said Stonehenge's position would have added to the symbolism. "If you measure the walking distance between the two pits, the procession would reach exactly halfway at midday, when the sun would be directly on top of Stonehenge," he said in the news release. "This is more than just coincidence, indicating that the exact length of the Cursus and the positioning of the pits are of significance."

The researchers suggested that the pits may have contained tall sighting stones, or wooden posts, or even fires to symbolize the sun. Just imagine how it would feel to watch the sun rise from a fire lit before dawn, follow its movement across the sky in time with a daylong procession, and then see it fall into the flames at sunset.

"Stonehenge may have been emerging as an important area for quite a long time, and sometimes you can't necessarily see that in the standing archaeology," Gaffney said in an MP3 podcast provided by the University of Birmingham. "The stones themselves, which are generally later, don't give you that information. You have to infer it from relationships between multiple monuments."

The researchers aren't anywhere close to finishing the puzzle: Gaffney figures there's at least another two years' worth of survey work to do. Even then, the full story of Stonehenge and its environs may remain wrapped in mystery. How much can stones and earth tell? Stay tuned ...

More about Stonehenge:

• Did Stonehenge start out as a cemetery?
• ... Or was it a place of healing?
• Gallery: Secrets of Stonehenge
• Gallery: Seven mysteries of archaeology

Connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the log's Facebook page, following @b0yle on Twitter and adding the Cosmic Log page to your Google+ presence. You can also check out "The Case for Pluto," my book about the controversial dwarf planet and the search for new worlds.

Researchers have used state-of-the-art machine translation software — and some old-fashioned hunches — to crack the code used by a secret society in Germany three centuries ago. The results shed light on the tricks of the cryptographic process as well as on the bizarre history of such societies, which were all the rage in the 18th century.

It turns out that the 105-page, 75,000-character manuscript, known as the Copiale Cipher, provided a detailed description for setting up initiation ceremonies — including the techniques used to throw a scare into the initiates. It also revealed the methods that members used to identify each other in the outside world, and delved into the comparisons and rivalries surrounding Masonic-like rites in different countries.

"This opens up a window for people who study the history of ideas and the history of secret societies," Kevin Knight, a computer scientist at the University of Southern California's Information Sciences Institute, said in a news release issued today. "Historians believe that secret societies have had a role in revolutions, but all that is yet to be worked out, and a big part of the reason is because so many documents are enciphered."

Knight and his colleagues are now turning their attention to other, better-known cryptographic puzzles — such as the brain-teasing Kryptos sculpture on the CIA's grounds, the cipher used by the Zodiac Killer in 1969, and the totally baffling 15th-century Voynich Manuscript. But veteran code-breakers say those puzzles will be far tougher to solve. "Generally, that type of decryption has already been tried on those ciphers," said Elonka Dunin, whose website keeps tab on the world's top cryptological puzzles.

Knight said the work could eventually lead to better translation tools for non-Latin languages such as Pashto, Arabic, Chinese, Japanese and Korean, "which have been a big challenge for machines."

How the code was cracked
Tracking down the handwritten Copiale manuscript (which gets its name from one of the two readable words on the pages) was the first challenge facing Knight and two colleagues from Sweden's Uppsala University, Beata Megyesi and Christiane Schaefer. The book, bound in green and gold paper, turned up in the East Berlin Academy after the Cold War and is now in a private collection.

The researchers transcribed a machine-readable version of the coded text and put it through computerized statistical analysis. The software looked for patterns in the different combinations of coded characters, including Roman and Greek letters as well as abstract symbols.

At first, Knight and his colleagues focused on the Roman and Greek characters and tried to match them up with words from 80 different languages. "It took quite a long time, and resulted in complete failure," Knight said.

Then they played a hunch: Maybe those characters were actually meaningless "nulls," and the true code was contained in the abstract symbols. When they ran the symbols through statistical analysis, they came up with a German text titled "Ceremonie der Aufnahme" ... "Ceremonies of Initiation." Soon they had pages and pages of deciphered lore.

What the manuscript says
The text, apparently written in the 1760-1780 time frame, is "obviously related to an 18th-century secret society, namely the 'oculist order,'" the researchers say. The volume is inscribed "Phillipp 1866," perhaps suggesting that it passed into the hands of an owner named Phillipp in that year.

The manuscript, available in several formats from Uppsala University's website, describes the procedure for initiating new members of the society. At one point, candidates are asked to read the writing on a blank piece of paper. When they can't, they're told to put on eyeglasses, and then they undergo an "operation" that involves plucking a hair from the eyebrow. After the operation, the blank paper is replaced by a document laying out "the entire teaching for the apprentices."

Later, "the left part of the chest and the right knee get uncovered, the eyes are being tied, and all sorts of words of comfort are spoken, which raise even more fear." The candidates are told, "Prepare yourself to die" — but that's just a scare tactic.  No injuries are inflicted in the course of the ceremony.

USC / Uppsala University

The Copiale Cipher, used in an 18th-century book on secret society practices, used Roman and Greek characters as well as abstract symbols. The Roman and Greek characters proved to mere place-holders.

Another section of the book describes how members can recognize each other. When one member asks how "Hans" is, the other should respond by mentioning a name that begins with the second letter of the first name — for example, "He's with Anton."

Other passages discuss how much members at various levels of the secret society should know about the codes and customs. The manuscript notes that secret societies were established in England during the reign of Queen Elizabeth, "but because they practiced more evil than good, they have been destroyed." In Germany, societies in different cities are associated with different hand signs: a forefinger on the mouth for Berlin; the middle finger on the right eye and a thumb on the ear for Frankfurt; a forefinger on the chin for Marburg.

Some passages even take on political issues, referring to a three-headed monster as symbolizing "rule and governance which, by means of power and perfidy, deprive man of his natural freedom and enjoyment of the timely things and [that which] we human beings need." Such passages could help historians trace the influence of secret societies on the political movements of the time, which were notable for their focus on natural rights. The natural-rights concept set the stage for the American Revolution as well as the French Revolution.

What next?
Knight wants to use his machine-translation software on the Kryptos, Zodiac Killer and Voynich ciphers, but the cryptographers who have been working on those puzzles for years suspect that machines alone can't crack the code. Nick Pelling, an expert on the Voynich Manuscript and other ciphers, pointed out that human intuition played a big role in figuring out the Copiale Cipher.

"The story they outline in the paper is a classic hunch-based cipher-cracking sequence," Pelling told me. "They guessed one way, and then it turned out to be the other way. These are great hunches, and they tell a great story about how they followed these hunches and got to the end of the line."

He doubted that the work done on the Copiale Cipher could be adapted easily for the Voynich Manuscript. "It's pretty clear that it's a different type of cipher from the Copiale Cipher," he said. In fact, he suspects the manuscript, whose content is completely unknown, may be a combination of ciphers and idiosyncratic abbreviations that would be devilishly hard to untangle.

Dunin, who is the co-leader of a group trying to crack the Kryptos code, was similarly pessimistic about the researchers' chances for success. "They're welcome to try, but many machines have already been pointed at Kryptos," she told me.

Klaus Schmeh, a German crypto expert, said that even though the Copiale Cipher has been around for 250 years or so, it hadn't gotten much attention in the past. "In my view, this cipher wasn't known at all to the public," Schmeh said. He saluted the researchers for their work, but echoed Pelling's view that the effort fit the standard pattern for breaking secret codes.

"It's pretty much the way cryptography is done," he said. "It was certainly not an easy puzzle, but I'm sure that other cryptographers would have solved it."

Update for 6:55 p.m. ET: Knight responded via email to a few follow-up questions I sent him:

Cosmic Log: The Daily Mail suggests that the cipher was solved using the Google Translate software, but I'm assuming that it was a more specialized program.

Knight: The Daily Mail made a mistake.  Anyway, we used a bunch of software derived from our own statistical language translation algorithms.  We apply those original algorithms to the translation of Chinese and Arabic into English.

Q: Was the Copiale Cipher a straight substitution cipher, or was it something more complex?

A: It was a substitution cipher, but not a simple one-for-one type.  The cipher alphabet has many more than 26 letters.  So there are many ways to encode "E," for example.  Also, sometimes whole sequences of plaintext letters, for example "SCH," are encoded with a single cipher letter.  Lastly, there are some "logograms," cipher letters that stand for whole words, such as the name of the secret society.

Q: How could this method be applied to Voynich, Kryptos and other ciphers? Are there any wider applications for military code-making and code-breaking? Are there particular types of ciphers that the machine translation software is best suited for?

A: When you think about language translation, you can think about substituting a word in one language (like "boy" in English) with a word in another language (like "nanhaizi" in Chinese).  But sometimes whole phrases are substituted for whole phrases.  Also, there is reordering -- "transposition," in cryptographic jargon.  We pretend Chinese is a code for English -- a substitution/transposition cipher.  So there is a deep connection between translation and classical cryptography.  Of course, modern militaries use new cipher systems based on number theory now, so a lot of the classical work is not relevant anymore to them.  But it's super-relevant to us working on more accurate language translation algorithms.

Q: It sounds as if humans still played a key role...

A: Yes, it was a human/machine collaboration.  The machine has incredible patience, but it only looks for what you tell it.  We could tell it to decipher against 80 possible plaintext languages (Latin, English, German, etc.), and it had a slight preference for German, but it didn't know, for example, that a single cipher letter could stand for a sequence of three plaintext letters ("SCH"), because we didn't tell it that could happen.  But as a human, you are very flexible and can spot what is happening.

More secret messages:

• FBI can't crack murder code — can you?
• Computer program helps decode ancient texts
• Voynich Manuscript dated to the 15th century
• CIA sculpture still baffles cryptologists
• Has amateur cracked Zodiac Killer code?

Connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the log's Facebook page, following @b0yle on Twitter or adding me to your Google+ circle. You can also check out "The Case for Pluto," my book about the controversial dwarf planet and the search for other worlds.

Univ. of Dundee

A forensic reconstruction shows the face of Simon of Sudbury, a 14th-century archbishop of Canterbury who was beheaded by English rebels.

More than 600 years after he was beheaded, Simon of Sudbury has his face back,  thanks to a 21st-century virtual forensics project.

Sudbury was the archbishop of Canterbury when he lost his face, along with the rest of his head, in 1381. It was a mighty fall from grace for the man who made his way up to the top of England's ecclesiastical ladder and crowned King Richard II. But when Sudbury introduced the third Poll Tax as Lord Chancellor in 1380, the country's peasants had had enough. Sudbury was said to be so unpopular that the guards at the Tower of London just let rebels rush in during the Great Rising of 1381 and drag the bishop to his execution on Tower Hill.

Sudbury's head was put on a spike on London Bridge. Under cover of darkness, a man from the bishop's native Suffolk supposedly had it taken down and brought to St. Gregory's Church at Sudbury. (The bishop's body, meanwhile, ended up in a grave in Canterbury Cathedral, and the legend was that his ghost haunted the cathedral's tower.)

Now fast-forward six centuries: A Suffolk school worker named Ian Copeman worked with church officials to have Sudbury's partly mummified skull (with bits of facial tissue still attached) put through a CT scan at a local hospital. The readings from the skull were sent along to the University of Dundee's Center for Anatomy and Human Identification. In the past, the center has helped reconstruct the faces of other personages such as Johann Sebastian Bach. the sister of Cleopatra and the son of Ramses II. 

Under the guidance of center director Caroline Wilkinson, forensic artist Adrienne Barker took on the project. She digitally removed the extra facial tissue and had the CT data turned into a cast of the skull, using rapid prototyping. Using that cast as her foundation, Barker built up layers of clay to simulate muscle, fat and skin. The teeth were missing from the skull, perhaps because they were sold off as relics, so Barker had to use a bit of artistry to fill out the face. But she told me she followed "the current most accurate standards" to complete the project.

Barker acknowledged that the result, unveiled last month at St. Gregory's Church, shows that Sudbury was "strange-looking fellow." She told Discovery News that some onlookers at the church gasped when they saw his visage. "He was compared to characters such as Spock and Shrek," she said.

For better or worse, this is probably how Simon of Sudbury will be known from now on. Barker noted that the only other depictions to come to light are found in two stained-glass windows in Canterbury Cathedral.

"Both of them were done in Victorian times, a good 400 years after Simon was killed, so they're not really accurate," Barker said. "This is the most accurate reconstruction."

Now she's filling out an educational website about the Simon of Sudbury project that she hopes will get kids interested in forensics.

Barker acknowledged that "a lot of people think that it's morbid" to put make-believe flesh on the shape of a 600-year-old skull. But she thinks it's "really fascinating," and I'm betting a lot of kids will as well.

Other faces from history:

• Was this the face of Jack the Ripper?
• Scans reveal the face of King Tut
• Archaeologists identify Copernicus' skull
• Experts try to reconstruct 'the real face of Jesus'

Tip o' the Log to Discovery News' Rossella Lorenzi.

Connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the log's Facebook page, following @b0yle on Twitter or adding me to your Google+ circle. You can also check out "The Case for Pluto," my book about the controversial dwarf planet and the search for other worlds.