The East · Books · Science · Mores · Ethnography
Modern medicine holds that birth inside the amniotic sac, or caul, occurs in roughly one case in eighty thousand, which is why such deliveries tend to become a significant news item for specialist journalists. In former times, children born in such a bubble, with the waters not yet broken, were
Archive · Science · Humour
No, this is not a device for readjusting to normal locomotion after emerging from a three-month sofa quarantine. All the more so as we have no such emergence to look forward to just yet. This is an advertisement for an apparatus of 1882 devised by Lewis Sayre. The American
Cinema · Science · People
Oksana Kiyanskaya, Doctor of Historical Sciences, Professor at the Russian State University for the Humanities, specialist on the Decembrists and academic consultant to the film "The Union of Salvation", has confirmed that the Chevalier Guard friends will return to the ranks. The team is working on the series
Archive · Faith · Science · People
Father Georges Lemaître explains the Big Bang theory to Pope Pius XII. The Belgian priest Georges Lemaître was an astronomer and mathematician, a doctor of sciences, a professor of astrophysics, who worked at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, became the author of the theory of the expanding Universe and made
Books · Science · People · Nature
Strange as it may seem, Pushkin's Boldino Autumn, so often recalled of late in connection with coronavirus isolation, may also be linked to the volcanic eruptions of the 1810s, which had such a profound effect on the Earth's climate. It is believed that the gigantic cloud
Geography · Science · Nature
Eighteen Hundred and Froze to Death, or The Year Without a Summer: such is the name under which 1816 entered history, when snow fell every month in Western Europe and parts of the USA, temperatures stayed at winter levels, and rain and hail never ceased. A century later, climatologists explained
The East · Science · Ethnography
Kohl, the eye-liner pencil known in the East since the 4th millennium BC, etymologically precedes the word alcohol, borrowed by Europeans from the Arab world. Alcohol derives from the Arabic al-kuħl, meaning "made of antimony", or, literally, of kohl. The word entered Arabic from Assyro-Babylonian,
Science · Society · People
In 1952, Alan Turing, without exaggeration one of the most outstanding British scientists of his time, was convicted of gross indecency: he was obliged to admit to a homosexual relationship, unlawful in the United Kingdom, after his flat was burgled by a 19-year-old labourer with whom Turing had
Observations · Science
Malaria (mal'aria) is Italian for "bad air", as opposed to buon'aria, good air. The disease was originally thought to arise from foul miasmas in the atmosphere, so the quality of the air was the key to defining it. The malarial plasmodium, which in fact
Science · Education · People · Saint Petersburg
In 1736 the Saint Petersburg Academy of Sciences sent twelve talented young men to Europe, where they were to study languages, the technical and natural sciences, get to know European life and all that sort of thing. Among these gifted students was the 25-year-old Mikhail Lomonosov, who studied
Moscow · Science · Society
In September 1771, plague was killing 1,000 people a day in Moscow. The pestilence had first appeared in the city back in December 1770.
Archive · Science · Society
A standard metre reached Russia as early as the late eighteenth century, but the metric system began to be used there only after 1875, when Russia, together with 16 other countries, signed the international Metre Convention. The law permitting the use of the metric system of measures in Russia was