Art · Museums · Science · Saint Petersburg

AI Declares Caravaggio a Painting Long Thought to Be a Copy

There are three versions of the painting "The Lute Player". One is kept in the Hermitage in Saint Petersburg. The second belongs to the collection of the Wildenstein family, the well-known French art dealers. The third was until recently considered a copy. In 1969 specialists from Sotheby&

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Matryona Rasputina, Newton's forecast, Notre-Dame's bells and other topics in the digest

I have put together a digest of the most interesting posts that appeared on the channel in September:. 📌 The story of the circus performer Matryona Rasputina, daughter of Grigory Rasputin 📌 666 degrees Celsius. The forecast of the end of the world by Isaac Newton 📌 The financing of the 1917 revolution

Archive · Books · Observations · Science · Paris

In an eighteenth-century alchemical manuscript, "The Wisdom of the Ancient Philosophers, or Their Teaching on the Supreme and Universal Medicine", once kept in the Capuchin library on the Rue Saint-Honoré and describing a universal medicine capable of pre

Let us take four from the many scenes: Fermentatio, Putrefactio, Solutio, Calcinatio. They show, first, the substance: a toad half-submerged in water and speckled with rising bubbles. This is the textbook visual representation of the "putrefaction of matter, often accompanied by the release of gas. Putrefaction is followed

NB! · Geography · Science

A sailing chariot, invented in the early seventeenth century by the mathematician Simon Stevin for Prince Maurice of Nassau, allowed swift travel, by the standards of the day, along the shores of the North Sea

Faith · Books · Science

Virgil's line that all is full of Jupiter and its meaning in alchemy

Tell me, Damoetas, whose flock is this? Is it Meliboeus'? "You are mistaken, Aegon: it is another's. But let it be, for often Thyrsis himself called out to me, and Aegon answered." <a lengthy, bantering conversation of the shepherds> With Jove, Muses, let

Coming Up · Geography · Science

Replica of the locomotive Locomotion No. 1 to run again between Stockton and Darlington

In September, the World's First Public Railway Turns 200. On 27 September 1825, the locomotive Locomotion No. 1, designed by George Stephenson, drew a train along the Stockton and Darlington line in the north-east of England. The name Locomotion soon became a common noun: the word "

Faith · The East · Books · Observations · Science · People · Humour

René Guénon on buddhi as the perception of the transcendent and his life in Cairo

René Guénon writes that "intellect" once meant the perception of transcendent realities, and introduces the Sanskrit term buddhi, all but forgotten in the West. He explains that buddhi is the faculty of glimpsing another world, whose traces appear in the soul as intellectual intuitions. Apparently, the term is

Museums · Observations · Heritage · Science · Paris

Four gold nuggets stolen from the National Museum of Natural History in Paris

Shocked to Learn That Several Gold Nuggets Were Stolen Last Week from a Paris Mineralogy Gallery. The theft took place in the early hours of 17 September. The perpetrators entered the hall of mineralogy and geology at the National Museum of Natural History in Paris by disabling the security system

Faith · Science · Society · People · Rome

The head of the Roman Catholic Church must not have a virtual double, Pope Leo XIV declared, commenting on the abandonment of the idea of creating an AI pope-consultant

In May, Leo XIV named artificial intelligence as one of the most important problems facing humanity. He observed that AI may create obstacles to “human dignity, justice and labour”

Science · Education · Society · Humour

The White List includes 3,120 Russian journals, among them an Astrakhan University publication

The Russian part of the Unified State List of Scientific Publications, the "White List", has recently been compiled. In all, 3120 journals have made it onto the list, which is to say practically the whole of the former "VAK list". We are told that "the

Books · Moscow · Science · Pop Culture

Yandex Maps adds a Tolstoy profile with quotations from his diaries and letters about Moscow

The "Tolstoy's Word" project and Yandex Maps have joined forces for the classic's birthday. As a result, Maps now has a Tolstoy profile, with genuine quotations from his diaries and letters about places in Moscow. It looks as though the writer were sharing his

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Newton identified 2060 as the year of God's judgment from prophetic chronologies

Isaac Newton, according to his manuscripts of 1704, basing himself on his own interpretation of the Bible, above all the Book of Daniel, calculated that the end of the world would come in 2060. Sir Isaac Newton's prediction of the end of the world in 2060 rests on