The story of Laocoön, the Trojan priest who was attacked and killed along with his two sons by giant serpents for attempting to expose the ruse of the Trojan Horse, is well-known in Greek mythology. Laocoön’s tragic tale has been retold by numerous Greek poets such as Apollodorus and Quintus Smyrnaeus. The latter gave a detailed description of Laocoön's grisly fate in his epic poem Posthomeri
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Published News » Amazing Pics
The Curious Tale of The Laocoön And His Sons’ Missing Arm
Posted by runbholarun 18 days ago (http://feedproxy.google.com)
The city of Saint Petersburg is one of the most beautiful cities in Russia and in eastern Europe, with a great ensemble of historic buildings, gilded palaces, and baroque bridges and churches. Founded by Peter the Great as a “window to Europe” Saint Petersburg’s has a very cosmopolitan character, unique among Russian cities, but behind all the gilt and glory lurks a darker past, going back by les
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Flettner Rotor: Sailing Ships Without Sails
Posted by runbholarun 18 days ago (http://feedproxy.google.com)
In 1926, a 2,000-ton steel-hulled schooner named Buckau made an extraordinary crossing across the Atlantic. Although the Buckau was technically a sailing ship, it had no sails—at least, not conventional ones. Rather than thin masts and billowing sheets of white, the Buckau had two huge cylinders that rose from its deck and spun. By a physical phenomenon called the Magnus Effect, the spinning pol
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The Ingenuity of The ‘Ha-Ha’
Posted by runbholarun 18 days ago (http://feedproxy.google.com)
What’s in a wall but a simple structure to keep intruders out, you might say. But a surprising amount of thought goes behind the construction of some. One example is the crinkle-crankle wall, popular in the county of Suffolk, in east England. The alternating curves of the crinkle-crankle wall prevents the wall from toppling over without the need for buttressing. Another unusual wall is the quirki
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The Mad World of Hat Making
Posted by runbholarun 18 days ago (http://feedproxy.google.com)
Hat-making in the 18th and 19th centuries was a hazardous business, because it involved the use of many chemicals, one of which was the toxic substance mercury. Working in poorly ventilated rooms, hat-makers breathed in so much mercury fumes that a good number of them were driven out of their wits by mercury-induced brain damage. Mercury poisoning among hat-makers is widely believed to be the ori
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Johann Josef Loschmidt And Avogadro’s Number
Posted by runbholarun 18 days ago (http://feedproxy.google.com)
Johann Josef Loschmidt is a name that might not ring many bells, yet everyone who took chemistry in junior college had surely come across Loschmidt’s groundbreaking contribution to science. Loschmidt calculated the exact number of elementary units (atoms or molecules) that one mole of a substance contains—a number that bears the name of an Italian scientist, which is unfortunate, because even thi
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The Great Smog of 1952
Posted by runbholarun 18 days ago (http://feedproxy.google.com)
Londoners are no stranger to the cold, but on the morning of December 5, 1952, the sting of winter was felt worse than ever. The cold had the British capital on a grip for weeks, and that morning a temperature inversion had caused the chilled and stagnant air to get trapped close to the ground, causing temperature to drop even further. As the city began to wake up, coal fireplaces were lighted
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Hitler’s Monster Railway
Posted by runbholarun 18 days ago (http://feedproxy.google.com)
Hitler’s megalomaniac plans for Germany included a monumental new railway. This railway was supposed to connect the most important cities in Greater Germany with trains 7 meters high, carrying up to 4,000 passengers, at speeds of 200 kilometers per hour. Breitspurbahn, or broad-gauge railway in German, was typical of every project the small-mustached sociopath had ever dreamed of—massive in scop
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Boot Scrapers
Posted by runbholarun 18 days ago (http://feedproxy.google.com)
In the days before automobiles, when streets were meant for horses and their carts mostly, walking through mud and excrement was an unavoidable part of life in the cities. However, what was unacceptable then, and is still now, is treading into homes with muddy boots. But a simple doormat was not enough to get rid of the filth that stuck to ones shoes. What was needed was a shoe scraper. These wer
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The Pumps That Keep Germany Dry
Posted by runbholarun 18 days ago (http://feedproxy.google.com)
The Ruhr valley in North Rhine-Westphalia was once Germany’s industrial heartland producing coal and steel, the two very essential raw materials of industrialization itself. Coal was mined here for at least four hundred years, usually from shallow drift mines along the Ruhr river. But with the start of the Industrial Revolution in the 19th century, the demand for coal and steel increased and the
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