Oct 27, 2015 Easter eggs are not unique to Christendom, but find a match in the eggs painted by ancient Zoroastrians and modern Persians on occasion of Nowruz – the beginning of the new year, celebrated on the spring equinox. For the student of ancient religions they are a bit…
Oct 22, 2015 In 1742, the French natural philosopher John Theophilus Desaguliers (1683-1744) formulated some of the first generalisations regarding the electrification of air. That – as well as Halley’s work, presumably, although he did not cite it – inspired Pontoppidan, writing in 1755, to propound an electric nature…
Oct 20, 2015 Astronomical bodies such as the earth, the moon, the sun or any other moons, planets and stars are too large or too distant for direct experimentation with their global properties, even in the Space Age. A terrella (Latin for ‘earthlet’, ‘earthkin’ or ‘little earth’) is an artificial…
Oct 15, 2015 The astronomical subdiscipline of comparative planetology is an offspring of the wealth of in situ measurements obtained by space probes. An improved understanding of the physical and chemical conditions prevailing on other planets and moons in the solar system not only helps to place terrestrial systems in…
Sep 7, 2015 That mythology has an appetite for bizarre imagery is hardly a secret. A remarkable motif in the world’s creation myths, rarely even recognised, is that of the ‘edible sky’. A few examples will suffice to give a flavour of the theme. A 19th-century Greek myth concerning…
Sep 2, 2015 Scholarly discourse on the significance of creation myths seems as lacklustre today as ever. Scores of recurrent themes remain undiscovered or unexplored – mostly buried in dust-gathering reams on forlorn library shelves or in scanned digital books seldom downloaded. This is deplorable, because diligent compilation and…
Jul 02, 2015 The melting of the glacial ice sheets in North America, Europe and elsewhere was a stochastic process. Long periods of slow melting alternated with bursts of accelerated melting. Between the Late Glacial Maximum and the early Holocene, global sea level rose by 100 to 130 metres,…
Jun 30, 2015 On the surface, the idea that the sun could reverse its apparent direction and be seen to move from west to east might seem bizarre in the extreme, but exactly this is what several ancient traditions claim to have happened in the past. In the 5th century…
Jun 8, 2015 An international group of scientists, led by Shyeh Tjing Loi of the University of Sydney, has made the first direct measurements of what appears to be a set of field-aligned “density ducts” or plasma tubes in the inner layers of the earth’s magnetosphere, some 400 to…
Apr 9, 2015 What did the ancient people think of the axis mundi (world axis)? In the footsteps of Mircea Eliade, mythologists and anthropologists tend to think of the axis mundi or ‘world axis’ as a straight object running through the cosmos vertically. While this is, of course, correct for the…
