MPJ

After the Second World War, another tide of the arms race slowly but surely began to develop in the world. With the first nuclear power plant built in Obninsk back in 1954 in the former Soviet Union, it became clear that atomic weapons and the nuclear industry overall would mark the second half of the twentieth century. Today, about 80 years after the first nuclear reactor ever built, "Chicago Pile-1", the current numbers for the commercial use of nuclear power indicate that 50 countries operate about 220 research reactors with as many more operating power plants in the majority of these countries. The military numbers are expected to be even higher, and the fact is that nuclear submarines and ships can be equipped with multiple nuclear reactors on board. Some of the aircraft carriers can have up to eight of them.

I have no sailor material in me. At all. I don't mean qualified skills that are fascinating and easily acquired through study and experience. I mean literally and physically, my body is simply not built for the navy. I realized that when I entered those 4D/5D theaters for the first (and last) time, about dozens of years ago. I remember anxiously waiting for that sophisticated motion ride system built into movie theater seats to come to my city, and when it finally arrived, I was among the first in the ticket line... And I was the first to get out of the small theater with a terrible motion sickness thundering throughout my entire body. I should have guessed what was going to happen after seeing the title of the short film had the word "rollercoaster" in it. I fully recovered more than 24 hours later. After that, I never stepped into any movie theater with more than a 3D label on its front gate. Sometimes, even in those, I check if the chair is fixed solid. To be honest, I...

It is hard to pinpoint the exact period in human history when the religiosity we are all familiar with today emerged and started to form itself with all of the colorful myths, supernatural stories, vivid deities, and numerous superpowered entities. It happened probably at some point around 10,000 BC in the same period of time when humans slowly progressed from being pure hunters and gatherers into the next stage of civilization and started to build modern settlements with domesticated animals and cultivated plants. No doubt, religiosity, superstition, and spiritualism existed all the way from the beginning in history when our ancestors started to paint cave walls, but only the Neolithic revolution and the invention of agriculture gave us enough free time to start daydreaming and to think outside pure survival. If we compare all previous beliefs with vignettes, we can safely say that the evolution of religiosity after Neolithic revolution began to fill volumes of graphic novels. Acc...

Among all religious beliefs, the Greek pantheon of colorful gods is perhaps the best described in the history of all human religiosity. There is literally no piece of Greek land, portion of the sea, or the tiniest island that has no origin in radiant old mythology. The island of Corfu is no exception as well. Apparently in the mythological history, it was one of those unnamed islands in the region of Scheria where the mighty Poseidon spent a portion of his eternity with the freshwater nymph Korkyra. Their descendants, the Phaeacians, as described by Homer in Odysseus' adventures, inherited the island and named it after Poseidon's lover. The final shape of the island owes its appearance to Poseidon as well when he separated Paxos from Corfu with his trident in order to create a love nest for him and his wife Amphitrite (sea nymph this time). I don't blame him; both Korkyra and Paxos are beautiful and colorful islands, and he obviously knew his craft well. I understand his af...

Part of Serbia below the Danube River is pretty mountainous, with complex geology, especially in the eastern parts where the Carpathian and Balkan mountains collided and over eons formed the Serbian Carpathians, with a total of 14 independent mountain ranges in existence today. These rocks date back to the Proterozoic Eon (2.5 billion–541 million years ago), with limestones and dolomites mainly formed from the late Jurassic to early Cretaceous, around 100 million years ago. There are dozens of large caves within these mountains, and many have tourist paths built to visit and admire their beauty and history. Two of them we visited last week, and they both gave us extraordinary experiences and impressions. However, the first cave in this blog story belongs to the one formed in the foothills of an ancient volcano of the nowadays mountain of Bukulja in western Serbia, although the recent paper posted a theory that the mountain is much younger (15 million years ago) and instead form...

It doesn't happen often that after reading a book, you can compare most of the places and some of the portrayed characters with real sites and buildings along with real protagonists from the historical story. Actually, this never happened to me before, and after I'd reached the last cover of 'Beneath a Scarlet Sky', a novel written by Mark Sullivan, published in 2017, I saw the rare opportunity of visiting the city where it all happened and where all the sites still stand today. Not much later, and after my entire family read the novel or at least got familiar with the story, we packed our backpacks and hit the road. In the aftermath, the result is this blog post along with an embedded video story as a documentary of the half-day walking tour of Milan in Italy, where everything happened more than 70 years ago. In the spirit of a fair warning, I advise you to read the book first before watching the video since it might spoil the reading for you or to wait for an upcoming...

Geographically lying in the heart of the Balkan peninsula, the small town of Svrljig is acting as the capital of a relatively small Serbian land surrounded by exactly 38 villages that are, demographically speaking, living their lives on the edge of extinction. In just half a century, the human population of the area is more than halved, with more and more 'haunted-like' villages containing more empty houses than those with smoked winter chimneys, in which more people die than are born. The past of the area went through numerous changes over time and was pretty colorful, to say the least. Like everywhere else, ever since the written literacy spread its wings only a millennium ago, the history of Svrljig is pretty well documented ever since the great Schism of the 11th century, and we pretty much know what it was like to live here down to that time. But history goes even further in the past—to those times we know little about, and all we have are a ruin here and there we ca...

In pre-Christian mythologies of the western and northern tribes and their pagan beliefs, female deities were not uncommon. Take, for instance, old Gaul's Matres or Valkyries of the old Norse mythology and, of course, all the goddesses from the history of all polytheistic religions around the globe. But perhaps the most interesting of them all are, you guessed it, the fairies. They are not actually deities per se and rather belong to the spirit realm of the afterlife and dead, but still you can find them, in one form or another, in almost all religious legends and myths. The city where I was born, the valley it resides in, and the river that splits it in half are no different. The history of this area is, metaphorically speaking, very colorful and full of wonders, all the way to the beginning of the Neolithic era, and over the centuries this valley literally saw lots of different cultures and deities. One of them dates way back to the Celtic Gauls and their tribe named Scordisci, wh...

Genetics is, relatively speaking, a very young science. After the discovery of DNA only a couple of decades ago, it stopped being solely a statistical and psychological study of heredity, and ever since then it has been given a very important component in its labs: a microscope. In simple words, we are now able to dive more deeply into the world of genes and their government of the human body and behavior. In this short time we learned a great deal about human genetics and how it works. Many genes are already identified in relation to how we act and interact with others and our environment. Let's discuss some of them that already earned cool nicknames in relation to what they are capable of or what we think and suspect they do. The mixture of genes we own is given to us by our parents, who inherited them from their parents, who were gifted with the same from their own mothers and fathers, and so on. What is our DNA finally composed of? It basically defines us and not just our looks...

Last year, during our visit to the Cretan site of Knossos and their wonderful museum in Heraklion dedicated in large part to one of the greatest peaceful periods in human history, I didn't hide my admiration for the old Minoans and their way of life. I even said I would move to Crete without second thoughts if I had a time machine, mainly to avoid the hostility of the world order we are currently living in today. At the time, considering only the European continent, I was under the impression that cultures like Minoan were rare and the Bronze Age society we glimpsed on Crete was maybe walking on the edge of being the only one in the history of mankind. To say the least, I couldn't be more wrong. Only a couple of millennia before the late Neolithic period, known as the Chalcolithic or simply the Copper Age, there was an old European society that lived for centuries and also flourished in peaceful harmony and perfect equilibrium with nature, themselves, and their immediate land, ...