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 The genealogies of European royalty are genuinely terrifying in their complexity. No matter which history book you open, someone is always marrying some cousin of the third degree. To give you an idea: there are at least 4,010 different lines of descent from William the Conqueror to Prince William. Go figure. Protein families might rival [...]  The figure below comes from Helmets and Body Armor in Modern Warfare, a book written by the medieval armour expert Bashford Dean (1867 – 1930). The similarities between the evolution of these European war helmets and ‘proper’ biological evolution are striking. At the base we can see the ancestor of this clade of helmets: the [...]  Every high school student now learns that plate tectonics slowly drive our continents in different directions. Since only the most uncontroversial scientific knowledge finds its way to high school text books, it’s hard to imagine that when the theory of continental drift was proposed by Alfred Wegener in 1912, it was firmly rejected by the [...] If one and a half years ago you would have told me that I would still be actively maintaining this blog and that people were actually reading it, I probably wouldn’t have believed you. There’s one problem though: while I can see that a couple of thousand people visit this blog every month, I’ve got [...]  In the early September days of 1941, the German Luftwaffe started a prolonged bombardment of London which would later become known as ‘the Blitz‘. As the bombs continued to drop for months, thousands of Londoners sought refuge in the underground railway system. During the most intense periods of bombardment, the London Underground was home to [...]  An easy task: from the two parrots above, pick the one that you think is the most beautiful. Made your pick? If you are like most people, you will prefer the Blue-and-yellow macaw on the left over the Red-bellied macaw on the right. This might seem like a trivial question of judging animal beauty, but [...] |
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