January 1st, New Year’s Day, is often ushered in with fireworks and festivities beginning on December 31st. Although this practice is the norm in many places around the world, not every culture has...
The myth and folklore of ancient cultures speak of a vast cycle of time with alternating dark and golden ages; Plato called it the Great Year. Most of us were taught that this cycle was just a myth...
The technical sophistication of the Middle Ages tends to be underestimated. Near the end of the High Middle Ages, mechanical technology such as clocks and water mills, for example, were becoming...
From our humble hunter-gatherer beginnings to the most advanced of ancient civilizations, the sun and moon have always held a particular fascination for humanity. Several forms of tools, monuments,...
Radiocarbon dating, invented in the late 1940s and improved ever since to provide more precise measurements, is the standard method for determining the dates of artifacts in archaeology and other...
Earth turned faster at the end of the time of the dinosaurs than it does today, rotating 372 times a year, compared to the current 365, according to a new study of fossil mollusk shells from the late...
The number 666 has been linked to scary scenes and hideous demonic beasts which have spooked the fraught nerves of the laity for almost two thousand years. Superstitions have abounded at the sight of...
Have you ever seen Star Trek? If so, you must be familiar with characters being ‘beamed’ from one spacecraft to another, or to a planet. While Star Trek is fictional, there are some concepts...
A new study, coordinated by Sapienza, claims to have discovered the oldest lunar calendar in the world in a pebble that was carved during the Upper Paleolithic period. The remarkable find has been...
Most of us have seen the science fiction series Star Trek and are familiar with their concept of teleportation, in which characters are ‘beamed’ off the ship to another spacecraft or to the surface...
The calendar is one of mankind’s most important inventions. Calendars allowed societies to organize time for religious, social, economic, and administrative purposes. The calendar, or rather, two...
The Aztec or Mexica calendar wheels have been a source of fascination for centuries. It was not just a way to keep time - it was a complete philosophy of time in which every day had a religious...
New Year’s resolutions are a popular practice. Countless people begin to consider them every year as December 31st rolls around. Although the big plans and ambitious goals can be difficult to follow...
There used to be a fable, commonly imposed as fact on schoolchildren in the United States, that in Columbus' time nearly everyone believed the Earth was flat. Fortunately, this untruth has been...
A 2,000-year-old intact and inscribed sundial – one of only a handful known to have survived – has been recovered during the excavation of a roofed theatre in the Roman town of Interamna Lirenas,...
Back in 4000 BC women of the ancient Aegean civilization may have used a calendar tracking the movement of the planet Venus to follow their pregnancy milestones. This is an intriguing explanation for...