Things don’t usually fall apart completely in Britain and the centre holds. In the mid-seventeenth century, however, civil war raged across the islands. Military rule in England was followed by the conquest of Ireland and Scotland, paving the way for the Union. Michael Braddick, reviewing Ian Gentles’s The New Model Army, thinks there are lessons here for our “dysfunctional” democracy. This week the TLS features several meditations on times of civil war.
By Martin Ivens
Science Magazine – June 3, 2022: A 10th-century Maya structure at Chichen Itza, Mexico, is often called the Observatory for its expansive view of the sky and a design seemingly guided by key positions of the Sun, Moon, and planets. The historic Maya anchored their calendars and rituals to celestial events, and their astronomical knowledge is now coming into sharper focus thanks to new analyses of archaeological relics and insights from today’s Maya.
Some 3 million people live in French overseas territories – islands like Guadeloupe, Martinique, Polynesia, New Caledonia, Réunion, and Saint Pierre and Miquelon, remnants of France’s colonial empire. We explore these distant lands that are regularly pushing for independence. Also in this issue, meet the French community of Hawaii, read about Alma de Bretteville Spreckels – the “great-grandmother of San Francisco” and a friend of Rodin – and discover our interview with U.S. historian Stephen Bourque on the “the Allied war against France” during the Normandy landings. Lastly, we bring you the story of Disneyland Paris, which revived fears of Americanization in France when it opened 30 years ago.
Eat, drink, mix & mingle. Mama Rooftop is the perfect refuge for those looking for a unique experience and evening in Rome.
Eric Drooker’s “Uvalde, May 24, 2022” – Gun violence and the American way of life.
By Françoise Mouly, Art by Eric Drooker
• Off the grid: a messier side to Mondrian
• Picasso’s obsession with El Greco
• An interview with Isaac Julien
• How Gio Ponti jazzed up Padua
Plus: William Kent’s heavenly ceilings, New York’s terrible new skyscrapers, the market’s obsession with young painters, the artists who channel their inner child, and reviews of Walter Sickert, Raphael and Winslow Homer
Florentine Magazine, June 2022 – Sighing over Florence
There’s a garden on a hillside overlooking Florence where it feels like you’ve struck the pot of gold—and all the colours of the rainbow. This art park is the life’s work of Alice Esclapon de Villeneuve, who started to expand the family’s plot of land just off viale Michelangelo on the occasion of her daughter’s birth over 20 years ago. Finding the art park is something of a treasure hunt, however, hence the enlistment of bilingual guide Elena Fulceri for tours in Italian or English.
Cilia are characterized by slender, threadlike projections, which are used by biological organisms to control fluid flows at the microscale. Attempts to mimic these structures and engineer cilia-like systems to have broad applications have proved problematic. In this week’s issue, Wei Wang and colleagues present electronically controlled artificial cilia that can be used to create flow patterns in near-surface liquids. The researchers use surface-mounted platinum strips, each about 50 micrometres long, 5 micrometres wide and 10 nanometres thick, and capped on one side with titanium. Applying an oscillating potential with an amplitude of around 1 volt to the cilia drives ions on to and off of the exposed platinum surface. These ions create asymmetric forces that generate a beating pattern that can be used to pump surface liquids in various flow geometries. The cover shows an artist’s impression of the artificial cilia in action.
Boomers Daily 