557 Search Results
Got Milk? Historical Molecular and Microbiomic Interventions in the Gene-Culture Coevolution of Lactase Persistence
The ability to digest the key sugar in fresh milk, lactose, owes to the activity of a special enzyme produced during infancy known as lactase. Product
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Our inquiry focuses upon how changing diagnostic tools have either reinforced or countered longstanding scientific understandings about the global dis
Investigating the Human Psyche through Motor Skills: A History of Technical Psychological Testing
Since Antiquity, it has been debated whether the hand or the mind is what makes humans intelligent. My project, situated between the history of techno
Representations of Celestial Maps in the Hellenistic World
This project explores visualizations of the cosmos in writing and objects in the Western Mediterranean region during Hellenistic times (ca&n
Tina Asmussen
Tina Asmussen gained her doctorate in Early Modern History from the University of Lucerne with a...
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Christina Dörfling
Christina Dörfling is a doctoral candidate at the Department of Musicology, Music Theory, Compos...
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Marie-Madeleine Mervant-Roux
Marie-Madeleine Mervant-Roux is Emeritus Research Director (Theater Studies) at the CNRS (INSHS,...
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Ion Gabriel Mihailescu
Ion Mihailescu studied History of Science at Harvard University, obtaining his PhD in 2018 with ...
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Thomas Morel
Thomas Morel is interested in the social history of mathematical sciences and how practitioners ...
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Xun Zhou
I am a historian working at the boundaries of health, medicine, science, religion, and everyday ...
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Visualization and Material Cultures of the Heavens in Eurasia and North Africa (4000 BCE–1700 CE)
No 53
Historian of science Sonja Brentjes reflects on how Sagittarius came to have a feline body and why the tip of its tail is a dragon’s head. Sagittarius, usually a Centaur, suddenly appears in the twelfth century in Eastern Iran with the body of a large cat, probably a tiger. Here, Sagittarius does not shoot his arrow forward but rather aims it at the dragon’s head on the tip of the cat’s tail. More than 1,000 years earlier, a human with a tiger’s body and long tail is depicted on a vase found in a Chinese tomb. The human throws a fire ball towards the tail. In 1188, the same motif appeared in a Georgian translation of a Persian book in the Caucasus Mountains. Could it be that this Chinese motif inspired the feline Sagittarius in Eastern Iran, which then moved westward?