The oldest of all human stories commences with a mistake. It also starts in Africa, of course. Here, in the birthplace of humanity, we see a tribe of Australopithecus species moving across the savannah – hunched down, they are flashing by through the tall grass, covered in sparse, patchy hair, with long jaws, wide cheekbones …
Supposedly, the amount of one mili-Helen beauty is sufficient to launch a ship. This witticism derives from the play ’Doctor Faustus’ by Christopher Marlowe, and it is based on Homer’s depiction of Helen of Troy, who had ’the face that launched a thousand ships.’ Specifically, if Helen was the measure of beauty which launches ships, …
(The 50th anniversary of the Moon landing) You may not know that the Moon has a scent. The 12 astronauts, who landed and took off from the Earth’s satellite in six Apollo missions, in the period 1969-1972, reported the moon dust having an intense smell. Most astronauts said the scent was unpleasant, and it reminded them …
2,500 years ago, a period of unforeseen incubation of ideas occurred across the globe, which has rarely happened in the history of human civilization. Maybe you are unaware that Buddha, Socrates and Confucius lived at the same age, and that in the period of around 100 years, at the turn of the 6th to the 5th century …
In the 1960s, British educator Alexander Sutherland Neill wrote a book ‘Summerhill: A Radical Approach to Child Rearing’ in which he depicted one of the most significant educational-pedagogue experiments of modern times. He founded a school named Summerhill in 1921, which operated on completely new and different principles than traditional European schools. He wrote the book in …
How old could the oldest living tree be? Could it be 300 years? Or maybe 1000 years? The more biologists study our planet, the older trees they discover which push this limit ever further. Until recently, the tree in the photo, the Methuselah tree (Pinus Longaeva) allegedly 4849 years old, thriving in California mountain area, …
The media reported that yesterday night, on 17 December, an earthquake gently shook Kikinda. At the same time, a bit stronger earthquake was recorded in Durrës, an Albanian city hit by a dramatic series of quakes in late November and early December, which claimed the lives of 50 people. The rest of the region has …
3 to 4 million years ago, in the area of present-day’s Ethiopia, there was a dense forest, in places intersected by the savannah. Through a sandy area, a river flowed into a lake in Miro Dora. In the following millions of years, the remnants of volcanic activity and gullies completely changed the appearance of this …
The illustration of the structure and movement of the wings of a blue fly (Calliphora vomitoria) is one of 38 sketches which were published for the first time in London in 1665, in a book called ‘Micrographia’, one of the seminal books in the history of science. Known as the first scientific bestseller, the book …
While you listen to music, parts of your brain process the melody and lyrics of the song – while the left hemisphere deals with words, the right one is in charge of the melody. It is known that left hemisphere injuries may cause problems with speech abilities, while the injuries of the right hemisphere affect …