Archaeology · Observations · Science · Humour
I read a funny item in the newsletter of the Prehistoric Society of Great Britain: for forty years Ireland believed that the oldest bones of a domestic cow, dated to before 4000 BC, had been found at the Ferriter's Cove site in County Kerry, and that this was
NB! · Science
It turns out that our home galaxy, the Milky Way, grew to its present size partly by swallowing smaller galaxies. New data from the Hubble telescope offer compelling evidence of a dwarf galaxy merging with the young Milky Way at its very earliest stages
Archaeology · Observations · Science · Humour
Read in a newspaper 19 years old how a British history teacher, Adrian Targett, learned that he shares mitochondrial DNA with Cheddar Man, found in Gough's Cave in 1903 and some 10,000 years old. What is more, Targett and his family had lived all their lives literally
Archaeology · Science
A burial of 79 adult men with shackled wrists, discovered in 2016 in the Phaleron necropolis near Athens. The burial has been named the Esplanade. To this day there is no unambiguous answer to who they were and why they died together. The burial is dated to the turn of
Archive · Science · People · Nature · Saint Petersburg
Professor Georgy Konradi recalled that Ivan Petrovich had quite literally grown into one with the dog as an object of study, and that when demonstrating a frog to an audience he regularly slipped and called it a dog. But the atmosphere of the laboratories was described in most detail by
Observations · Science · Society · Nature
I have already told in detail how the last Turan tiger of the Great Steppe was killed by hunters in the last century. In 2025 I wrote that the actual release of tigers into the wild of Kazakhstan was still a long way off, and now it has come to
Books · Observations · Science
There was such a good book, if you remember, by the Russian and American anthropologist Alexei Yurchak
Science · Society
Until 1936, Soviet citizens directly elected only the representatives of local town and village soviets, which in turn sent delegates to the higher congresses, all the way up to the Central Executive Committee of the USSR. In the 1920s voting was open and conducted by a show of hands. The
Archaeology · Architecture · Faith · The East · Art · Moscow · Museums · Heritage · Science · Paris · Nature · Saint Petersburg
Fet begged to “drive the living boat off with a single push”, to catch the fleeting before it vanishes. The monthly digest has a more modest task, though the same one: to hold on to what matters before the flood of news washes it away. Here is the main news
Archaeology · Science
Researchers from Trinity College Dublin have for the first time reconstructed and analysed genomes of the smallpox virus from remains found in the Americas. The material was obtained from two people who lived in the colonial era in the north of present-day Chile. The analysis showed that the viruses
Art · Observations · Science · Society
Participants in the experiment were asked to assess a work of art, then told that its author stood accused of one crime or another, and asked to assess the work afresh, being asked along the way whether the display of this work ought to be restricted. The upshot was that
Coming Up · Faith · Museums · Science · Paris
At the Paul Éluard Museum of Art and History in Saint-Denis, housed within the walls of a former Carmelite convent of 1625, 400 metres from the Basilica of Saint-Denis, the burial place of the kings of France, the exhibition "Believing and Healing. And Deliver Us from Evil&