The perks of being a railway engineer- water jets for landslides and digging up black death skeletons!

What with the thick smog that Britain has suffered from all week its surprising that anyone has been able to work outside without developing asthma or making their existing asthma even worse! But the guys at Network Rail have managed to rebuild the main railway line running through Dawlish that connects Devon with Cornwall. it took a 300-strong team and a whopping £35 million to rebuild the line, and also involved setting off a controlled landslide using water jets- you have to see the pictures-http://bbc.co.uk/newsround/26889145

Now lets move a couple hundred miles over to the east into London... here, excavations are underway putting in the infrastructure for London's Crossrail (a 73 mile rail link connecting more than 30 stations), and what do engineers unearth? Last year, 25 skeletons dating back to the middle ages when the Black Death claimed the lives of almost 60% of the population were discovered, and it has been confirmed through forensic testing that almost half of these skeletons had suffered from the plague. I think most of us have heard of the bubonic plague, or the Black Death http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/british/middle_ages/black_01.shtml, which is caused by the bacterium Yersinia Pestis, but did you know that this bug is also responsible for the septicemia and pneumonic plagues too? The bubonic plague still remains a serious public health problem in some parts of the world, like in Madagascar, where plague is endemic in the animal population. Fortunately today we don't see pandemic outbreaks like we did in the 14th Century, and thanks to modern science, we also have antibiotics to treat the disease when caught in time.

These plague-victim skeletons also tell forensic archaeologists how people lived their lives in the 14th Century. Just by examining teeth and bones, forensic scientists can tell what types of jobs these people did, what their diets were like and even where they grew up! The oxygen that makes up our teeth and bones comes from the water we drink, which normally comes from the water in our rivers or sea, therefore scientists can use the 3 different oxygen isotopes (an isotope is a different form of the same element) found in our teeth enamel and our bones to discover whereabouts we lived. An isotope of carbon, Carbon-14, is used in the famous radiocarbon dating technique... why don't you try to find out why scientists use Carbon-14 to date bones and other organic material?

Happy researching!