Reprinted from Newsday.

Two brothers in the Medici dynasty of Renaissance Italy likely were not the long-rumored victims of murder, a new analysis of their centuries-old bones has concluded.

Despite the tremendous wealth and power of the Florence-based family, one that produced popes and intellectuals, commissioned art by Michelangelo and protected Galileo from persecution, the two teenagers and their mother instead may have succumbed to a disease that killed without regard to fame or fortune: malaria.

Full story here.