NB! · Observations · Science · Ethnography · Humour

What talent and imagination Soviet scholars must have possessed to contrive to insert a quotation from Lenin into, say, an article on the social anthropology of pre-class societies

Archive · Observations · Science

Do you think the prediction of the Soviet scientist Vsevolod Zubakov about the emergence of a cybernetic organism, made back in the 1990s, has begun to come true?

Do you think the prediction of the Soviet scientist Vsevolod Zubakov about the emergence of a cybernetic organism, made back in the 1990s, has begun to come true? After all, advanced artificial intelligence is not so very far from the state described. Be that as it may, I love infographics

Archaeology · Science · Ethnography

Theories of the origin of the Karakachans and the view of Aris Poulianos

Many of the Greek shepherds belong to the once numerous Karakachan or Sarakatsani people, settled from Epirus and the Peloponnese to North Macedonia, Serbia, Bulgaria and Romania. There are several versions of the origin of the Sarakatsani. Their history is traced back to the Middle Ages and linked with a

Architecture · Moscow · Science · People

99 years ago today, the first radio signal was transmitted from Engineer Shukhov's tower

99 years ago today, the first radio signal was transmitted from Engineer Shukhov's tower. The first broadcast of the Comintern Television Tower was a concert of Russian music featuring Nadezhda Obukhova and Boris Evlakhov. As you pass this tower on Shabolovka, know that its engineering solution, devised and

NB! · Archive · Science · People · Humour

The manuscript of an article by Yury Valentinovich Knorozov, co-authored by the cat Asya

Monarchies · Science · Humour

At last genetics is being put to serious use (not), for instance to establish whether Richard III was a good king or a scoundrel, and to shed light on the origin of the hump with which Thomas More and William Shakespeare endow him: was that barely noticea

At last genetics is being put to serious use (not), for instance to establish whether Richard III was a good king or a scoundrel, and to shed light on the origin of the hump with which Thomas More and William Shakespeare endow him: was that barely noticeable scoliosis hereditary? Besides

Archaeology · Observations · Heritage · Science

A post of pride in our archaeologists!

A post of pride in our archaeologists! Scholars of the Centre for Palaeoart at the Institute of Archaeology of the Russian Academy of Sciences have launched the long-awaited project “Petroglyphs of the Lower Amur and Ussuri”, which has been in preparation since 2015 jointly with the Remote Sensing and

Books · Science

...As best I can put it, I cannot find the word: Not quite ill, not quite well, but so... neither one thing nor the other... as though not herself, She says to her husband: "Listen, my life, I need a new outfit for the holiday: Pray buy a turban from Mada

The poem "The Fashionable Wife" by the Russian sentimentalist poet Ivan Ivanovich Dmitriev (1760-1837) appeared in three versions during his lifetime. And three times the form of the adjective "English" changed in it. In the first, in 1792, we read: "And from her it&

Geography · Books · Science · Nature

Dutch origin of the words sluice and dam and land drainage in the Netherlands

The words "sluice" and "dam" exist in many languages of the world, and they came from Dutch, as did certain other hydraulic terms such as "polder" and "crane". The concepts owe their wide diffusion to the invention of land-drainage technologies and

NB! · Archive · Books · Science

Anatomical Pamphlet, 1559

Archaeology · Interviews · Science · People

The lovely Maria Dobrovolskaya, head of the Laboratory of Contextual Anthropology at the Institute of Archaeology of the Russian Academy of Sciences, has spoken on a most unusual subject: vegetarianism and ancient people

The lovely Maria Dobrovolskaya, head of the Laboratory of Contextual Anthropology at the Institute of Archaeology of the Russian Academy of Sciences, has spoken on a most unusual subject: vegetarianism and ancient people. Besides such questions as vegetarians among the ancestors of modern man and the influence of diet on

Books · Science · Ethnography

Birth with teeth in Shakespeare’s “Henry VI” and in European folklore

When you were born, the owl screamed, Foretelling ill times, the horned owl wept, Dogs howled, a hurricane tore down the trees, An ominous raven settled on the chimney, And a chorus of magpies chattered out of tune. And your mother, though she suffered more Than other mothers do, bore