Silver fueled the rise of the Roman Empire. But the ancient process of mining and extracting silver was also making the air thick with lead, scientists found.

The Roman Empire's pervasive influence once reached across land, sea, and even sky. During the golden age of Roman ...

Roughly 2,000 years ago, the Roman Empire was flourishing. But something sinister was in the air. Literally. Widespread pollution in the form of airborne lead was taking a toll on health and ...

Lead air pollution spiked during this time and resulted in elevated blood lead levels and cognitive decline, a new study shows (Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. 2024, DOI: 10.1073/pnas.2419630121).

Millions of pounds are to be reallocated from council efforts to fight climate change. Leicestershire County Council’s new ...

They identified the level of pollutants in three ice cores that dated between 500 B.C.E. through 600 C.E. — the era spanning the rise of the Roman Republic through the fall of the Roman Empire. Then ...

In 2019, a team compared skeletons from the Roman empire to skeletons from the Iron Age, before lead was popular. Skeletons from the iron age contained 0.3 to 2.9 micrograms of lead per gram.

An ancient lead coffin unearthed in a previously-undiscovered 1,600-year-old Leeds cemetery, thought to contain the remains of a late-Roman aristocratic woman.. City of Leeds ...

Its author, a chemist named Jerome Nriagu, was probably the first to claim lead poisoning precipitated the Roman Empire’s fall. There’s little evidence to back up his claims, ...

You could fill a book with theories on why the ancient Roman Empire declined and fell—which, in fact, is what the 18th British historian Edward Gibbon did in his magisterial Decline and Fall of ...

LONDON — Newly revealed human remains could offer a rare glimpse into life in Britain through the decline of the Roman Empire and the establishment of Anglo-Saxon kingdoms. Experts have hailed ...