Andy Carol, a software engineer at Apple, has recreated with Lego pieces the Antikythera mechanism , a primitive artifact developed in Greece approximately 2,000 years ago and found among the remains of a shipwreck in the Mediterranean (between Kythera and Crete) in 1901.
As an Anglo-Greek team of scientists managed to explain in 2006, the device was designed to follow the movements of the celestial bodies , calculating the movements of the Sun, the Moon and the planets, as well as to predict eclipses. Using X-ray scans, the researchers discovered that it contained intricate machinery of at least 30 handcrafted bronze gears.
The original reconstruction of the Antikythera mechanism with Lego took exactly 40 days. The process has been filmed entirely with the stop-motion technique, and can be seen on the video channel of the Nature group.
