Category archives: History

Extracting the stone of madness: the art of brain surgery in the Renaissance

Extracting the stone of madness: the art of brain surgery in the Renaissance

HistoryMedicine

By Invited Researcher

madness Authors: Chiara Bressan, student of the European Master’s in Clinical Linguistics & Adrià Rofes, assistant professor of neurolinguistics at the University of Groningen Imagine yourself tied to a chair. You cannot move, you are fully conscious, and a strange individual behind you is about to carve into your skull. No, you are not an […]

A founder event left its genetic mark in Ashkenazi Jews

A founder event left its genetic mark in Ashkenazi Jews

AnthropologyArchaeologyEthicsGeneticsHistory

By Invited Researcher

About two-thirds of Jews today – or about 10 million people – are Ashkenazi, referring to a recent origin from Eastern and Central Europe. They reside mostly in the United States and Israel. Ashkenazi Jews carry a particularly high burden of disease-causing genetic mutations, such as those in the BRCA1 gene associated with an increased […]

The dawn of what?

The dawn of what?

AnthropologyHistory

By Jesús Zamora Bonilla

For the intellectual history of our century, one of the most important books published in 2021 will probably be David Graeber’s and David Wengrow’s The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity , a monumental description of the evolution of the first human societies and of our understanding thereof. The book is conceived as […]

How snake oil got a bad name

How snake oil got a bad name

History

By Invited Researcher

During the pandemic, the pejorative term “snake-oil salesman” has been bandied about a lot. It’s been used, perhaps with a tinge of 1980s nostalgia, to describe convicted fraudster and serial opportunist Jim Bakker, whose colloidal Silver Solution required only some deft rebranding to become a specific curative for COVID-19. For this, the televangelist found himself […]

Exploring the Indian Ocean as a rich archive of history – above and below the water line

Exploring the Indian Ocean as a rich archive of history – above and below the water line

GeosciencesHistory

By Invited Researcher

Isabel Hofmeyr, University of the Witwatersrand and Charne Lavery, University of Pretoria On many beaches around the Indian Ocean, keen observers may spot bits of broken pottery. Washed smooth by the ocean, these shards are in all likelihood hundreds of years old, from centres of ceramic production like the Middle Eastern Abbasid caliphate and the […]

The death of History

The death of History

History

By Jesús Zamora Bonilla

Doing Ancient History is a difficult job. You may be thinking about the lot of hard work historians have to perform in order to learn just a little bit of what happened millennia ago, but I would like to invite you to consider another more fundamental obstacle in a discipline like this: the fact that […]

The road to quantum gravity (4): The flow of time for massive objects

The road to quantum gravity (4): The flow of time for massive objects

CosmologyHistoryTheoretical physics

By Daniel Fernández

We started this series discussing the basic ingredients of the Universe: events, spacetime, causality. In the last chapter , we introduced massive objects (and thus, matter), which appear as a generalization of the so-called photon box. As it moves, any object traces a path. Physicists call it worldline . We established that a massive object […]