Posted on Wednesday 26 November 2003 to Miscellanea

Some highlights from the archive for November 2002

The Perils of Reading Chinese, Japanese and Korean Characters in English
In an interesting essay, George Leonard discusses the problems of transliterating Asian languages into the English. In the process he discusses the more noteworthy features of each of these languages and their various writing systems.

Maps of the Roman Empire from 1 AD until the fall of Byzantium
The title says it all.

Memento Mori
The British sociologist Geoffrey Gorer makes some interesting observations on the difference between cultural attitudes toward death in the Victorian era and our own. In his 1955 article, "The Pornography of Death," Gorer points out that death is treated in twentieth century society much like sex was treated in the nineteenth century. The subject is avoided, especially with children, or spoken of in euphemisms if it cannot be avoided. Death now, like sex then, is hidden, an event which takes place behind closed doors.

Ancient proteins
A lot of recent progress in paleontology has been based on analysis of DNA taken from ancient bones but DNA has one problem, it is an extremely complex and fragile molecule and it deteriorates rapidly over time. Estimates of the maximum useful for age for DNA range from 50,000 to 100,000 years. However, a new approach which focuses on sequencing proteins instead of DNA promises to open a window in to species development over millions of years.

Colour photography in Pre-Revolutionary Russia
Sergei Mikhailovich Prokudin-Gorskii was a chemist turned photographer ahead of his time who undertook an ambitious photographic survey of the Russian Empire for Tsar Nicholas II. Between 1909 and 1915, he completed tours of eleven regions, traveling in a specially equipped train carriage which had been provided by the Ministry of Transportation. But what made this project remarkable was his use of an innovative technique for taking photographs in full colour.

Migration Routes
A visibility map showing the possible migration routes taken by Ice Age humans to the Australian continent some 40,000 years ago.

Ice Age
A map of the world during the peak of the last ice age about 18,000 years ago when sea level was 110 meters below its present level.

Sharpest ever view of the Sun
The first images from the Swedish 1-m Solar Telescope on the Canary Island of La Palma are presented in Nature on November 14. The images are the most detailed ever obtained of the Sun - among the new solar features uncovered are hitherto unknown phenomenae in sunspots.

Network motifs
An international team of scientists said Thursday they have used a mathematical algorithm to detect recurring patterns in the networks making up everything from food webs to the Internet to gene regulation in cells.