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After Leonardo da Vinci's death, his manuscripts first passed to his last pupil, Francesco Melzi. But years later Melzi's children decided to sell the da Vinci archives, and they were acquired by the Tuscan sculptor Pompeo Leoni. Leoni reassembled part of the notebooks, unstitched the quires,
Archaeology · Observations · Science
It seems that, for the tenth time this month, I shall have to propose rewriting the textbooks on prehistory. This time the culprit is a high-profile study by an international team of scientists, which pushes back the timeline of the mastery of fire by hundreds of thousands of years!
Science · Palaeontology · Nature · Humour
The first: the European fallow deer bears the Latin binomial name Dama dama. And this Dama has nothing whatever to do with the word dame, "woman". Dama was used in ancient Rome for small hoofed animals that grew easily accustomed to people, and is thought to go back
Archaeology · Heritage · Science
In 1990, off the coast of Benicarló, at the underwater site of Piedras de la Barbada in eastern Spain, 43 iron helmets were raised from a depth of six metres. For over thirty years they were held to be Roman, if only because helmets are a commonplace Roman find in
Archaeology · Geography · Heritage · Science
In the Skagerrak off the coast of Norway, at a depth of some 600 metres, an eighteenth-century merchant ship has been found almost intact. Usually a shipwreck leaves behind little but potsherds, yet here whole stacks of well-preserved tableware lie on the seabed, and alongside the plates and
Archaeology · Science · Humour
While some look for traces of extraterrestrials in ancient monuments, others are establishing what ordinary mortals were capable of. A new study deals with the Altar Stone of Stonehenge, a six-tonne sandstone slab at the centre of the circle. The stone hails from the north-east of Scotland, from
Archaeology · Art · Heritage · Science
In Bacon Hole Cave in South Wales, red horizontal bands have been recognised as a cave painting more than 17,000 years old. They were found as long ago as 1912, but in 1928 they were written off as a natural seepage of iron oxide, and for almost a century
Archaeology · Science · Humour
For a hundred years El Mirón Cave in the Cantabrian mountains was judged of no promise to science and used to keep goats. In 1996 Lawrence Straus and Manuel González Morales began to dig at a spot abandoned since 1903, and over thirty years they drew out of this one
Archaeology · Art · Books · Monarchies · Museums · Observations · Heritage · Science · Society
“What is our life? A tale we shall not recall twice, once it has been told,” runs the thought from Byron’s “Don Juan”, and so at the end of every month we reassemble the key publications that can be reread and kept in memory. Archaeology and the origins of
Faith · Books · Observations · Science
IMLI RAN has published a two-volume study, "F.M. Dostoevsky's Novel Crime and Punishment: The Current State of Scholarship", edited by T.A. Kasatkina. It is the fourth book in the "current state of scholarship" project on Dostoevsky: before it came The Idiot
Science · Education · Society
In Vietnam, Fabrication of Research Data and Plagiarism Are to Be Punished with a Lifetime Ban from Science. On 25 May the Ministry of Science and Technology announced the penalties awaiting dishonest scholars: the return of grants, a public apology, and an entry recording the violation on the national digital
Archive · Books · Science · People
The librarian of the Rumyantsev Museum and philosopher of the "Common Task" Nikolai Fyodorov held that humanity is obliged to resurrect literally all its dead ancestors. By what means? By technical effort, or rather by the collective effort of reason. Tolstoy knew him, read him, argued with him,