Art historians have long debated the mystery behind Mona Lisa’s smile—or if, in fact, she’s smiling at all—but the subject of Leonardo da Vinci’s 1503 painting didn’t get her first medical diagnosis until 1987. According to a February 28 article in Physician’s Weekly, Mona Lisa’s smile is actually a symptom …
Not everyone sees time in terms of past, present and future. The Kipsigis of the Nile region have three types of past tense: today’s past, yesterday’s past and the distant past. Several American Indian languages divide the past tense into the recent past, remote past and mythological past; other languages …
Possibly the most essential word in all languages is ‘hello’, the word that allows people to talk to each other. For example: • aa (Diola, Senegal) • beeta (Soninke, Mali, Senegal and Ivory Coast) • bok (Croatian) • boozhoo (Ojibwe, USA and Canada) • daw-daw (Jutlandish, Denmark) • ella (Awabakal, …
The European starling is a major pest in North America today thanks to Eugene Schieffelin, a well-intentioned but misguided Shakespeare fan from Germany. On this day in 1890, Schieffelin let loose 60 starlings into New York’s Central Park in an attempt to introduce all of the birds mentioned in the …
For most of human history, scales used comparison weights; an object was weighed against a counterweight to determine its relative heft. In order to make the calculations consistent, counterweights needed to be uniform and predictable, which is why the ancients relied on grains of wheat or seeds. Seeds from the …
People in the Middle Ages, like the ancients before them, used pins to fasten their clothing. Originally fashioned from wood or bone, pins were eventually made of metal, particularly after the invention of wire drawing. A pin is an apparently uncomplicated item, so it is surprising just how much labour …
To protest the corruption of the Catholic Church, twelve Anabaptists ran naked through the streets of Amsterdam on February 26, 1535, in the first recorded instance of streaking as political protest. The seven men and five women stripped off and burned their clothing under order of Hendrik Hendriksz, a self-styled …
The Greek verb egkaiein literally meant ‘to burn in’, being a compound of en-, ‘in’, and kaiein,‘to burn’. In fact the term denoted a particular method of painting which was practised by the ancients. According to a first-century account in the writings of Pliny the Elder, the process involved mixing …
On this day, Bassett Digby, an esteemed British scientist, published the following Letter to the Editor in the Times newspaper: Sir, A little light might be shed, with advantage, upon the highhanded methods of the Passport Department at the Foreign Office. On the form provided for the purpose, I described …
When God created the English language He very sensibly took several words and made them nearly unrhymable. He did this to stop bad poets going on about love, life and the world. Though you can make it to hurled, you then get stuck with curled and furled. You can’t even …
