Archaeology · Science · Nature

A team of researchers from Oxford, let us call the collective MacLeod and colleagues, has found traces of the plague bacillus about 5,500 years old in the DNA of the hunter-gatherers of the Baikal region

A team of researchers from Oxford, let us call the collective MacLeod and colleagues, has found traces of the plague bacillus about 5,500 years old in the DNA of the hunter-gatherers of the Baikal region. This is the earliest outbreak of plague recorded in archaeological material. The Plague

Heritage · Science · Palaeontology · Nature

Triceratops skull named Sophia, valued at $600,000–800,000, goes to auction in the US with a starting price of $360,000

Sophia is a juvenile, that is, an individual incapable of reproduction at the time of death. Her skull, about two metres long from snout to frill, was recovered five years ago from the Hell Creek Formation in North Dakota. The same site yielded the skull of a pachycephalosaurus, recently bought

Architecture · Geography · Heritage

The Acropolis restoration service completes the west pediment of the Parthenon

The Acropolis Restoration Service has announced that it has completed the western pediment of the Parthenon. The external scaffolding has been removed from the western façade for good, for the first time in several decades. The Minister of Culture, Lina Mendoni, says that the façade now stands in its full

Art · Madrid · Museums

"Venus and Cupid" by Peter Paul Rubens, painted in 1606-1611 under the impression of the same subject as executed by Titian

Collection of the Thyssen-Bornemisza National Museum in Madrid

Archive · Architecture · Moscow · Heritage

The Dovecote Dacha, or Simply the Dacha Behind the Donskoy Monastery: One of Old Moscow's Unusual and Enigmatic Buildings

The Dovecote Dacha, or simply the dacha behind the Donskoy Monastery, is one of the unusual and enigmatic buildings of old Moscow. A great deal is known about it, but just as much has been invented, as so often happens, by city tour guides and mere lovers of historical sensations.

NB! · Cinema · Society · Pop Culture

Helen of Troy in Nolan's Film, Once White People Appear in Shot

A boy in a dark cap and a floral shirt holds a large plant with huge leaves in front of a tent.

Archive · Observations · Nature

Dima Sukhanov in a photograph by Vladimir Karlov, 1992

A Boy with Burdock Leaves from the Kaluga Region Will Bring You Summer. 1992, photograph by Vladimir Karlov, featuring Dima Sukhanov

NB! · Art · People

David Hockney and His Painting "Peter Getting Out of Nick's Pool" in Los Angeles in 1966

Art · Museums · People · Rome

Jan Gossaert's 1508 journey to Rome and his four surviving Roman drawings

The outstanding Netherlandish painter and draughtsman of the 15th and 16th centuries Jan Gossaert, also known as Mabuse or Johannes Malbodius, travelled to Rome in the autumn of 1508 in the retinue of Philip of Burgundy. Margaret of Austria, Regent of the Netherlands, had sent Philip as ambassador to Pope

NB! · Faith · Observations · Heritage · Society

Vandalism in Venice

Vandalism in Venice. The damage done to a sacred aedicule with an image of the Virgin Mary, not far from the Papadopoli Hotel, is the thanks of Christian Europe from the hordes of Afro-Arab "doctors and engineers". The Reconquista is inevitable

Listings · Moscow · Coming Up · Art · Cinema · Museums

This week's five exhibitions on time, and on how the living and the man-made deceive it

This week's five exhibitions are about time, and about how the living and the man-made deceive it. There is an artistic dynasty across four generations, newsreel film that stopped the moment, the faces of the theatre, deception as an engine of evolution and, to make up the

Science · Palaeontology · Nature · Humour

Next time, before you kill a centipede at home, remember that its ancestors came ashore 80 million years before the vertebrates

Next time, before you kill a centipede at home, remember that its ancestors came ashore 80 million years before the vertebrates. The first myriapods appeared some 460 million years ago. That is 35 million years earlier than the oldest known myriapod fossils. In the world onto which they crawled, or

Alexandr Radayev