A Brief History of the English Language Part 2 Part 1 of this Brief History of English  describes the suppression of the English language under  the Normans who imposed Norman French as a…

Rita Levi-Montalcini celebrated her 100th birthday this week. The Italian scientist's experiments led to identification of the nerve growth factor (NGF) for which she and American Stanley Cohen…

This is part 1 of 6 in a brief series describing the history of English and its grammar. What is Grammar? A grammar is a set of rules for the communal use of a language. A language can never become a…

Best-Sellers of a Bygone Era In times gone by, if a book sold fifty copies, the author was celebrated as a 'best-seller'. Some of the best-selling authors of that era led their readers to the…

Sanger F, Nicklen S, Coulson AR. 1977. DNA sequencing with chain-terminating inhibitors. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, U S A 74: 5463-7. This paper describes the most important (…

Laurence Arnold has said: The communication between the past and the present is always polluted by interference from the noise of hindsight. So with this ringing in our ears, may I recommend The…

You'll be forgiven if you didn't know Seki Takakazu's work on matrices came out years before Gottfried Leibniz; Japan wanted it that way.  But out-Bernoulli'ing Bernoulli?   He needs to get…

Yes, Charles Darwin did important things for science, but what we really want to know is how he squandered his money as a student.    Did he drink and smoke a lot?   Yeah, actually,…

Recently, walking through the grounds of HASYLAB at the German Synchrotron DESY (we are NOT a Daisy!) I was reminded of my favourite book on radio, namely The Science of Radio, by Paul J. Nahin (ISBN…

Czar Nicholas II, eldest son of Tsar Alexander III, succeeded hs father in 1894 and, while he wasn't the most incompetent leader in the history of Russia, much less all of Europe, he was without…