NB! · Archive · Science · Humour
It is hard to believe this invention did not become the most popular in history. A contrivance for descending from the upper floors without a staircase! GE-NI-AL!
Monarchies · Science · People
Scientists at Southern Methodist University in the United States link the difficulties Henry VIII's wives had in carrying children to the presence in the king's blood of a particular antigen, belonging to that group of peptides on red blood cells which, when present in a man&
London · Monarchies · Science · People
Could Syphilis Have Been the Cause of Henry VIII's Foul Temper? By the age of fifty Henry VIII was almost immobile, though legends were still told of his former prowess and might. Standing 186 centimetres tall, by the end of his life the king weighed 180 kilograms and
Science · Society · Nature
The Plague of the Twentieth Century. The Third Pandemic flared up in Asia in 1855 and claimed millions of lives; several decades later it found an echo in Europe: in 1900, in Glasgow, 48 recorded cases of bubonic plague led to at least 16 deaths. Only a couple of years
The East · Science · Ethnography
This mysterious dragon-shaped boat is a Chinese fire clock, known since the 6th century. The principle is simple: an incense stick is placed in the dragon's hollow body and lit at the head. As it burns, it consumes the threads from which small weights are suspended at
Architecture · The East · Science · Rome
Time's up! The expression comes from the water clocks so popular in antiquity. Devices for measuring time, based on the properties of water and vessels, were much in vogue both in Ancient Rome and in the East. But in the Dark Ages the European art of building clepsydras
Faith · The East · Observations · Science
Irina Vasilyevna Pozdeyeva used to say that Saint Nicholas of Japan taught the Japanese language to Academician Huber, but only 12 years passed between the birth of the latter and the death of the former. That leaves the possibility that Huber studied Japanese as a child, given his noble origins;
Museums · Observations · Science · Mores
Can a dead body be sexually attractive? The makers of this anatomical model of the 1800s, from the Museum of the History of Medicine of Catalonia, expressed themselves on the matter quite unequivocally. It looks ghastly, of course, that this macabre woman with her disembowelled belly should have such a
NB! · Archive · Art · Books · Science
A flayed angel? From Jacques-Fabien Gautier d'Agoty's book "General Anatomy of the Internal Organs"
Archive · Science · Society
Jurists call the written-protocol form in the Russian, and before that the Soviet, criminal process a relic of earlier preliminary judicial procedures. It turns out that the modern rules for drawing up protocols are inherited from the Statute of Criminal Procedure of 1864, which entrenched the written character of
Faith · Science · Mores · Society · Rome
Pope Gregory XIII was an enterprising persecutor of the Jews. He came up with the idea of compelling Jews to attend Sabbath sermons in Catholic churches, where they were to be imbued with the bright ideas of Christianity. Many, it is true, stopped up their ears with wax. Gregory'
Science · Mores
By the 1840s American bartenders had already shown the British cocktails with ice, but the use of ice in Victorian bars remained a curiosity all the same. Strange as it may seem, many sensible people were extremely wary of drinking water, and equally of adding it to their drinks, even