Bibliolater 📚📜🖋📐 @bibliolater@social.cleverlibre.org

Venetian merchant, explorer & writer who travelled through Asia along the Silk Road between 1271 & 1295 Marco Polo died #OTD in 1324. His travels are recorded in The Travels of Marco Polo, a book that described to Europeans the then mysterious culture & inner workings of the Eastern world, including the wealth and great size of the Mongol Empire and China in the Yuan Dynasty, giving their first comprehensive look into China, Persia, India, Japan and other Asian cities and countries.

#books
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@bibliolater @freemo if the aim is "make it work with all Tusky features" that'd be a win

Go gallant ship, and be thy fortune fair!
Myles Birket Foster, from "Odes and Sonnets, Illustrated," collective work, Boston: 1866 #art illustration https://www.oldbookillustrations.com/illustrations/stately-vessel/

Study in Arxiv that finds there about 10K daily active AI-generated accounts (based on profile pictures being computer generated/GAN) on Twitter. #AI #spam #Twitter #bots #GAN https://arxiv.org/abs/2401.02627

Friendly reminder: the Finnish Journal of Linguistics is accepting submissions for its 2024 volume 🇫🇮 The deadline is 31 January.
Languages: English, Finnish, French, German, Swedish.
Fully open access, no article processing fees. All areas of (general) #linguistics welcome.
https://journal.fi/finjol/about

New open-access publication:

Gabriel Harvey and the History of Reading
Essays by Lisa Jardine and others

Edited by Anthony Grafton, Nicholas Popper, and William H. Sherman

London: UCL Press, 2024

Free download:
https://www.uclpress.co.uk/products/182702

#earlymodern #renaissance #bookhistory #bibliography #bookstodon

Italian mathematician, philosopher, theologian, and humanitarian Maria Gaetana Agnesi died #OTD in 1799.

She was the first woman to write a mathematics handbook. The most valuable result of her works was the Instituzioni analitiche ad uso della gioventù italiana (1748) and "was regarded as the best introduction extant to the works of Euler". The goal of this work was to give a systematic illustration of the different results and theorems of infinitesimal calculus.

#mathematics #womeninscience

1,500-year-old gold buckles depicting ruler 'majestically sitting on a throne' discovered in Kazakhstan

https://www.livescience.com/archaeology/1500-year-old-gold-buckles-depicting-ruler-majestically-sitting-on-a-throne-discovered-in-kazakhstan

On the origin of synapses:

"The pre-synaptic machinery emerged through modification of calcium-regulated large vesicle release, while the postsynaptic machinery has different origins: the glutamatergic postsynapse originated through the fusion of a sensory signaling module and a module for filopodial outgrowth, while the GABAergic postsynapse incorporated an ancient actin regulatory module. The synaptic junction, in turn, is built around two adhesion modules controlled by phosphorylation, which resemble septate and adherens junctions."

by Arendt, 2020 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0960982220304887

#neuroscience #synapse

@bibliolater old school! I like it. :)

The Nag Hammadi Codices and their Ancient Readers (Open Access)
https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/nag-hammadi-codices-and-their-ancient-readers/9B2AEA9141B7E747BA33277AE8D9D187
"Linjamaa's research supports the hypothesis that the Nag Hammadi texts had their origins in Pachomian monasticism. He shows how Pachomian monks used the texts for textual edification, spiritual development and pedagogical practices."
h/t @bibliolater

#OTD in 1610. Galileo Galilei makes his first observation of the 4 Galilean moons: Ganymede, Callisto, Io and Europa, although he is not able to distinguish the last two until the following night.

As a result of improvements Galileo made to the telescope, with a magnifying capability of 20×, he was able to see celestial bodies more distinctly than was previously possible. This allowed him to observe in either December 1609 or January 1610 what came to be known as the Galilean moons.

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