A whole piazza comes upside down through a hole the size of a millet grain. If the eye is such a chamber, what turns the world the right way up? I boil an eye in egg white to find out.
Leonardo darkens a room, works out how the hole trades sharpness for light, and models the eye with a second crossing that Kepler later disproved.
Leonardo da Vinci
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November 8, 2026
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28 min
A white ball, a candle and a window: the shadow on the body and the shadow it sends away, why the half-shadow widens, the light the floor gives back, and smoke at the edges.
Leonardo's Manuscript C on light and shade: primary and derived shadows, the three forms, why the penumbra widens, reflected light, lustre and sfumato.
Leonardo da Vinci
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November 8, 2026
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28 min
Why the far hills turn blue and then pale, why dry smoke is blue before black velvet and ashen before linen, and what I saw above me on Monboso.
Leonardo's aerial perspective: five times as far, five times bluer, the smoke and velvet test, the Codex Leicester blue sky, and what Tyndall and Rayleigh found.
Leonardo da Vinci
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November 8, 2026
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28 min
The glass, the pyramid of lines and the point of diminution, from Brunelleschi's panel to my own first rule, which was wrong.
Leonardo on linear perspective: the pyramid of sight and the pane of glass, why twice the distance looks half as tall, and the error in his first rule.
Leonardo da Vinci
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November 8, 2026
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31 min
How a 'phantom element' once found in coal ash became the invisible backbone of modern warfare and the AI revolution.
Once dismissed as industrial soot, germanium has emerged as a high-stakes strategic metal essential for night vision, fiber optics, and the future of semiconductors.
Prospector Hale
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April 10, 2026
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5 min
by Marie Curie 