historys

For several decades, scientists have wondered why giant star-shaped sand dunes found across many modern deserts don't appear in geological records.To date, the count stands at one that grew more than 250 million years ago in what is now north-east Scotland. The fact no others have been found is something of a surprise given they can now be found across Africa, Arabia, China, and North America, and even on extraterrestrial deserts on Mars and Saturn's moon Titan.A new study now offers up a possible explanation: that we…

Prince: SymbolPrince was both a dream and a nightmare for a luthier – astonishingly talented, he would also fling guitars around for some poor stage hand to catch (as at his peerlessly casual yet brilliant 2004 performance honouring George Harrison). The “Cloud” model used in Purple Rain, and built by Dave Rusan, is every bit as insouciantly sexy as the man who played it, with a gorgeous spiral detail around the jack and an actual horn jutting out of the body, ending in its own spiral. But nothing is more iconic than the…

History, in our experience, is rarely ever dull. It’s full of epic moments, witty remarks, and devastatingly dangerous individuals—heroes, villains, and a mix of both. And it seems like many people have a handful of favorite events that they like to bring up at dinner parties and on the internet.In a viral thread, the amateur historians of the r/AskReddit community shared what they think are some of the most dramatic and powerful moments in history. You’ll find our collection of the best of the best below. Scroll down…

Ahmed Ali’s Twilight in Delhi (1940) was the first significant Muslim novel to be published in English. It’s about a family in old Delhi during the first two decades of the 20th century depicting a national, political and cultural decay and its impact on the lives of Indian Muslims. It was seeped in nostalgia — for the Mughal past of the city before the British, for Persian and Urdu poetry. A view of Old Delhi. (Sanchit Khanna/HT PHOTO) In the decades since, there have been only a handful of notable Delhi…

Science is founded on hard evidence, but ironically, many of the stories we tell about scientists and their experiments are not based on much truth.An apple falling on Newton's head didn't suddenly stimulate his idea of gravity; Darwin's theory of evolution wasn't founded on the beaks of finches.And Benjamin Franklin certainly didn't discover electricity by holding a kite in a storm.It's hard enough to imagine a great scientific mind standing in an open field, trying to attract a bolt of lightning to a metal key without…

Cr. Netflix © 2021 There’s no point in even trying to deny that Red Notice wasn’t a hugely successful undertaking on Netflix’s part seeing as it reigns as the streaming service’s most-watched original movie of all-time, but you can also state an equally strong argument that it’s easily one of the most forgettable features to ever come bearing such an eye-watering price tag. Ironically, the exact same sentiment could also be applied to The Gray Man, which also happens to be a costly Netflix exclusive bearing a…

The music of the pianist Emahoy Tsegué-Maryam Guèbrou, who has died at the age of 99, seemed to reflect every area of her extraordinary life. A daughter of Addis Ababa’s upper classes, she was immersed in Ethiopian traditional song, then trained in classical violin and piano, embraced early jazz and later took holy orders. So it’s quite fitting that her compositions were a curious fusion of fin de siècle parlour piano, gospel, ragtime, Ethiopian folk music and the choral traditions of the country’s Orthodox church. A BBC…

Credit: Shutterstock Thirty-seven years ago, on April 26 1986, the reactor of the Chernobyl nuclear power plant suffered a catastrophic meltdown. In the weeks that followed, the deadly event drove hundreds of thousands of people to relocate from the surrounding area, which is still a deserted "exclusion zone" today. The Chernobyl…

Why do we insist on stalling our own technological progress? I think history has some answers. For millennia, inventors have been creating technologies that improve our lives. And for millennia, humans have been resisting, scorning, and mocking these inventions before recognizing them as massive value-adds.We’re seeing the same theme play out today in Bitcoin.Clashes between tradition and new technology tend to lead to negative media campaigns and aggressive efforts to distort public opinion. One notable example is The…

Credit: Pixabay/CC0 Public Domain On December 3, it was International Day of People with Disability, a day dedicated to understanding disability rights, issues and promotion of disability inclusion, in line with the Sustainable Development Goals. A core focus of this day is to recognize both how far we have come, and the remaining…