Culture

Russian monarchs thought broadly, but often dependently. For example, Peter the Great adopted from the British East India Company not only the scheme for building shipyards for St. Petersburg, but also the strategy of expansion to Asia and Africa. In chess, copying the moves of a stronger opponent will never lead to victory, but in politics this method can sometimes give unexpected results.

On the penultimate day of Maslenitsa they competed in tug-of-war and arm-wrestling, ate pancakes and danced in a circle dance.

The bubonic plague pandemic in the middle of the 14th century in Europe alone killed about 30 million people. People unwittingly began to think about sanitation. In some German duchies orders were issued for the production of exclusively closed vessels. Thus the classic beer mugs with hinged lids appeared. Seventy million years before the plague, the bivalve mollusks rudists evolved in the same direction.

As we know, the wheel was invented by the Sumerians. They are also the authors of the first cuneiform texts in history. Five thousand years ago, scholars in the area of modern Baghdad were scribbling signs of writing with a pointed reed on a clay plane. Two of these discoveries were almost enough to stimulate Emile Berliner’s creative imagination for his main project. The famous native of Lower Saxony modernized Edisson’s phonograph, uncomfortable for widespread use, into the most popular consumer ”toy” of the early 20th century: the gramophone.

The law on regulation of hunting in the Russian Empire (1892) was still 90 years away, when the Emperor Alexander I took over the role of an official in issuing permits for shooting wild animals. It is true that such an order concerned only one area, Belovezhskaya Forest, and one species, the bison (or Bison bonasus in scientific jurisprudence). By the beginning of the 19th century, the vastest tract of forest in Europe remained the only place where these bison could live.

Senegalite, an aqueous aluminum phosphate, is named after the country where it was first found. It happened in 1976. Senegal, independent from France since 1960, had then constitutionally enshrined a multi-party system. The most westernized country on the African continent took another step toward developing its own political culture, which naturally did not cancel out the influence of soft power from the former metropolis. One of its manifestations: the authorship of all the basic scientific materials on Senegalite belongs to the Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Mines de Paris.

On May 3, 1924, Soviet scientist Alexander Oparin reported to the Russian Botanical Society his theory of the origin of life on Earth. The essence of his hypothesis is the chemical transformation of non-living matter into organic matter. The so-called primary broth.

In economics, there is a surefire way to increase income by more than three and a half times in less than four months without doing anything. You just need to become a monopolist in the global iridium market and at the right moment suspend production.

As is well known, projects to turn the rivers southward to the Caspian Sea and the Aral Sea were widely discussed in the post-war USSR. They struck the imagination with their scale. Ordinary people imagined multi-kilometer lines of diggers or, at best, excavators. The official propaganda did not show the details: the construction of channels was supposed to intensify by means of series of directed nuclear blasts of low power.

Waiting by the sea for the weather is about amber mining. Water throws the petrified resin of ancient coniferous trees onto the shore, the more abundant the storm. There is even a special term - amber storms. The Baltic Sea is the richest in amber. It’s estimated that in the three millennia since the beginning of trade between the North and Ancient Egypt, about 125 thousand tons of this precious stone have been collected on its shores.