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  Smithsonian Magazine Ella Feldman Daily Correspondent, Edited by -Amal Udawatta, The forged manuscript in the university’s collection  Courtesy of the University of Michigan Library The fake document at the University of Michigan was likely created by a famous 20th-century forger For nearly a century, the  University of Michigan  possessed a piece of paper that it  considered  “one of the jewels” of its library. Believed to have been written in 1609 and 1610 by astronomer and physicist  Galileo Galilei , it features a letter signed by the scientist describing a new telescope and sketches of moons orbiting Jupiter. The university  held  that it was the “first observational data that showed objects orbiting a body other than the earth.” Galileo did use a new telescope in 1610 to discover that moons orbit around Jupiter—a finding that helped substantiate  Nicolaus Copernicus ’  heliocentric theory —but he did not write the manuscript, the university announced last week following an inve

  Mongabay Magazine Meilan Solly  ( Smithsonian  magazine's associate digital editor, history.) Edited by Amal Udawatta, A new Starz series, “The Serpent Queen,” dramatizes the life of the much-maligned 16th-century ruler When  Francis II , the 16-year-old king of France, was  on his deathbed  in 1560, his mother,  Catherine de’ Medici , realized she was about to lose her tenuous grasp on power. She’d enjoyed some political influence during Francis’ reign, but his heir, her younger son  Charles , was just 10 years old, meaning a regent would need to be appointed to govern in his stead until he came of age.  Catherine —a woman at a court dominated by ambitious men—was unlikely to be the first choice. The queen mother came up with an ingenious plan to secure her position as the kingdom’s preeminent politician. Summoning members of two rival factions, the  Guise  family and the House of  Bourbon , she accused  Antoine de Bourbon , the leading candidate for the regent role, of treason—