Books · Observations · Science · Society · Pop Culture

As early as 1903, the German philosopher and sociologist Georg Simmel described the effect of scrolling through a social-media feed:

This results in the nerves reacting with maximum intensity for so long a time that they finally cease to react at all. [ ... ] Thus there arises an incapacity to react to new sensations with the appropriate energy

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Mendeleev on a professor's salary in 1890 and its conversion into modern roubles

In the old days, when I lectured, a professor's salary of 3000 roubles was so ample that I could even keep a footman – I took on Alyosha, you know. But does it provide so well now? If I were a minister and were asked to name what a

Archive · Observations · Science · Mores · Humour

Darwin listed the pros and cons of marriage and wed his cousin Emma

A reminder that Darwin was not merely drawing up a list of the advantages and drawbacks of marriage before deciding to wed, but following the ideas of Benthamism then in vogue, and specifically Jeremy Bentham's schemes of "moral arithmetic" The Darwin archive holds an amusing sheet

Archive · In the Press · Science · Society

Sedov's Copenhagen promise and American newspapers on the first satellite in 1957

On 29 July 1955 American scientists announced their intention to launch the first artificial satellite of the Earth within the next two years. On 2 August, at the Sixth Congress of the International Astronautical Federation in Copenhagen, Academician Sedov promised that the USSR would launch an Earth satellite before the

NB! · Science · Nature

Andrew McCarthy Captures the Onset of a Solar Flare

Science · Education · Society · People

Robert Maxwell and the subscription model of peer review in scientific journals

And do you know what else hardly anyone is discussing? That Robert Maxwell, father of Epstein's partner in crime, was the architect of the peer review system. So. A media magnate, about whom there are quite serious and widely discussed allegations of ties to Israeli intelligence, or at

NB! · Geography · Science · Nature

Welcome to the Anthropocene

Archaeology · Geography · Observations · Science

Wooden tools about 430,000 years old found on a lake shore in Greece

Wooden tools found on the shore of a lake in Greece are believed by scholars to be the oldest known to date. Their age is estimated at roughly 430,000 years. I remain convinced, all the same, that half a million years is a rather modest figure beside the true

Three-dimensional image of a red piece of amber with the white silhouette of an ant inside, near the top edge.

Heritage · Science · Palaeontology · Nature

Ant about 40 million years old found in amber from Goethe's collection

A fossilised ant has been found in amber from the collection of the poet Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. Its age is approximately 40 million years. The ant proved to be a representative of the extinct species Ctenobethylus goepperti. A black fly and a fungus gnat were also found in the

Archive · Architecture · Books · Moscow · Museums · Science

Daniele Barbaro's marginalia found in the 1511 Vitruvius edition at the Pushkin Museum

The Pushkin Museum has summed up the results of the "Moscow Vitruvius" project. At the centre of attention of art historians, bibliographers, historians, palaeographers and even graphologists was a rare folio: an edition of Marcus Vitruvius Pollio's treatise Ten Books on Architecture, printed in Venice in

Geography · Science · Society

As recently as 10,000 years ago, Greenland was joined to Eurasia by a land bridge; today that stretch of land is the submerged Lomonosov Ridge, which extends for roughly 1,800 km from the New Siberian Islands to Ellesmere Island in…

For the past several decades this has been one of the key and most contentious themes of the Arctic dialogue. And now, in connection with the discussions about Greenland, the ridge that divides the Eurasian and Amerasian parts of the Arctic Ocean basin is again being talked about. The limits

Old black-and-white photograph of a bespectacled man holding the head of a tiger figure frame with bared teeth.

Archive · Science · People · Nature

A craftsman works on the frame of a stuffed Amur tiger at a nature reserve, Primorsky Krai, 1960s

Mikhail Yakovlevich Volkov, Taxidermist of the Sikhote-Alin Nature Reserve. Most likely with the frame for a future figure of a tiger: the reserve is, after all, one of the world's principal centres for the study and protection of the Amur tiger Primorsky Krai, 1960s