Architecture · Museums · Science · Paris · Saint Petersburg

The world's largest Foucault pendulum in St Isaac's Cathedral operated until 1986

In 1931, a Foucault pendulum, the invention of a French astronomer of 1851 that demonstrates the rotation of the Earth, was installed beneath the dome of Saint Isaac's Cathedral. And if the pendulum that Jean Foucault hung beneath the dome of the Paris Panthéon on a 67-metre

Observations · Science · People

A reminder from Carl Jung:

Life really begins only at 40; until then, you are merely conducting research

Science · People

Kekulé, the dream of the ouroboros and the dispute over who conceived the benzene ring

German chemist August Kekulé is said to have made the greatest discovery of his life in a dream. Kekulé had long supposed that the valency of carbon was four, but could not understand how, this being so, a benzene molecule could consist of 6 atoms of tetravalent carbon and 6

NB! · Books · Science · Education

Euler diagrams showing which identical letters are shared by the Greek, Latin and Cyrillic alphabets

Close-up of the lunar surface in warm tones, with small craters, rugged lit terrain at the bottom and a dark area at the foot of the frame.

NB! · Observations · Science · Nature · Humour

Astrophotographer Andrew McCarthy has published a new photograph of the Moon

The American astrophotographer Andrew McCarthy has shared a new picture of the Moon. She is, in principle, a beauty in our own skies too, only not quite so cheerful

NB! · Science

How "artificial intelligence" really works

NB! · Geography · Maps · Science

1000 km on the Mercator projection are not what they seem

NB! · Archive · Science · People

Einstein outside a hut near Cromer in Norfolk, England, where Oliver Locker-Lampson gave him refuge from the Nazis in 1933

Archive · The East · Geography · Books · Science · People · Ethnography

The 1914 Pamir expedition of Gauthiot and Zarubin and Paléologue's memoir of the scholar

In the memoirs of Maurice Georges Paléologue, French Ambassador to Russia, there is a curious recollection of meeting the well-known linguist Robert Edmund Gauthiot, who explored the Russian territories of the Pamirs together with the young Russian schola. The story runs as follows. In 1914 Zarubin, as a linguist

NB! · Art · Science

Solar Eclipse in Venice on 6 July 1842, by the Artist Ippolito Caffi

Science · Education · Society

A US student demanded her tuition money back after catching her professor using ChatGPT

Ella Stapleton, a student at Northeastern University, has demanded the return of $8,000 in tuition fees after discovering that her lecturer had used AI to produce teaching materials and prepare for classes, even though students are forbidden to use neural networks. The student noticed obvious signs of AI use

Art · Books · Science · Nature · Humour

I don't know why, but pineapples are trying to escape from the pages of one of the greatest botanical books of the eighteenth century

The hand-coloured botanical atlas Plantae Selectae by Christoph Jacob Trew, 1771. The engravings were made after drawings by the outstanding botanical draughtsman Georg Dionysius Ehret