Was the Baghdad Battery Actually a Battery?: An Archaeologist Demystifies the 2,000-Year-Old Artifact

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Image by Ironie, via Wiki­me­dia Com­mons

The aver­age Open Cul­ture read­er may well be aware that there is such a thing as Archae­ol­o­gy YouTube. What could come as more of a sur­prise is how much back-and-forth there is with­in that world. Below, we have a video from the chan­nel Arti­fac­tu­al­ly Speak­ing…

Isaac Asimov Predicts the Future on The David Letterman Show (1980)

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In 1980, Newsweek pub­lished a can­tan­ker­ous and sad­ly on-the-nose diag­no­sis of the Unit­ed States’ “cult of igno­rance” — writ­ten by one Isaac Asi­mov, “pro­fes­sor of bio­chem­istry at Boston Uni­ver­si­ty School of Med­i­cine” and “author of 212 books, most of them on var­i­ous sci­en­tif­ic sub­jects for the gen­er­al pub­lic.” Giv­en this intim­i­dat­ing biog­ra­phy, and the…

See What the Original Mona Lisa Likely Looked Like

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If you want to see the Mona Lisa in real life, your first thought may not be to head to the Pra­do. But accord­ing to a school of thought that has emerged in recent years, the Mona Lisa in Madrid has a greater claim to artis­tic faith­ful­ness than the one in Paris. That’s because

Read the Uplifting Letter That Albert Einstein Sent to Marie Curie During a Time of Personal Crisis (1911)

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Marie Curie’s 1911 Nobel Prize win, her sec­ond, for the dis­cov­ery of radi­um and polo­ni­um, would have been cause for pub­lic cel­e­bra­tion in her adopt­ed France, but for the near­ly simul­ta­ne­ous rev­e­la­tion of her affair with fel­low physi­cist Paul Langevin, the fel­low stand­ing to the right of a 32-year-old Albert Ein­stein…

How Frank Gehry (RIP) and the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao Changed Architecture

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It felt, for quite some time there, like the age of Frank Gehry would nev­er end. But now that the lat­est defin­ing fig­ure of Amer­i­can archi­tec­ture — or tech­ni­cal­ly, Cana­di­an-Amer­i­can archi­tec­ture — has died at the age of 96, the time has come to ask when, exact­ly, his age began. Or rather, with which…