Observations · Science
Came across some interesting statistics on Napoleon's marshals. The average age at which they died, for instance, was a little over 65. The youngest to go was Marshal Lannes, who caught a bullet in the neck in Egypt, was wounded in Italy, fell from his horse in Spain,
Moscow · Museums · Observations · Science
In a natural-scientific frame of mind, I share today a photograph of the microscopes of Hooke and Leeuwenhoek from the exhibition of the Darwin Museum. Leeuwenhoek is that same Dutch naturalist whose experiments with magnifying lenses laid the foundation of scientific microscopy. Over the course of 50 years he
Science · Nature
A grisly photograph from the Utah Conservation Officers Association. The story unfolded in North Carolina some 35 years ago: a hunter shot a deer and, when he began to butcher the carcass, discovered a strange formation in the region of the ribs. The later reconstructions were carried out by scientists
Museums · Science · People
On 12 June 1817 the German inventor Baron Karl von Drais created the first bicycle, or rather a self-propelled two-wheeled carriage. It looked almost exactly like this specimen of 1820, made of cherry and walnut, from the Kurpfalz Museum in Heidelberg, and weighed about 20 kg. Yes, the
Science · Society · Nature
In the 1940s, Finnish botanists began recording plants in Finland that had never grown in those habitats, and, curiously enough, they were found at the sites where units of a foreign army had been stationed. For such plants, introduced into an ecosystem as a result of military action, a term
NB! · Archive · Science · Pop Culture · Humour
In the future you will be able to carry a telephone in your pocket. A prediction from 1963
Archive · In the Press · Science · Society · People
“I live in a flat whose doors are guarded by the police round the clock. Nobody is admitted to see me except members of my family. The price my old friend from Gorky pays for knowing us is an interrogation by the KGB after every visit. There is no telephone
Archive · Faith · Science · Mores · Society
Once again I find entries on vaccination in nineteenth-century diaries. Our old acquaintance Willem de Clercq, poet, thinker and memoirist from the Netherlands, was in May 1827 extremely troubled by the subject of the smallpox vaccine. Today we know that the discovery of this vaccine changed the world and
NB! · Archive · Science · Society · Humour
NB! · Monarchies · Observations · Science · Humour
Observations · Science
Attention. If any of you are admirers or owners of antique watches, the following information will be of use to you. This applies especially to owners of such makes as Patria, Lancet, Leonidas, Laco-Durowe, Longines, Kienzle, Weisco, Hanhart, Glashutte, Helvetia, Helma, Era, Atima-Sport, the Japanese Seikosha, the Soviet
Art · Science
One of ::vtol::'s "robots" is a sound installation that works as follows: if you connect to its access point (there are four of them), it begins to react to whatever you do on your phone, altering the sound environment around it. The artist himself describes the