Richard III, RIchard Crookback, the figure behind the nursery rhyme “Humpty Dumpty” was buried after the Battle of Bosworth Field…” a horse, a horse” and all that. Actually, Dickie was yelling for a steed so that he could clear out when the battle turned out not to be going his way. Richard III is best known through Shakespeare’s play of the same name, and he is painted as a supreme villain, rat, murderer, and all around bad guy. For many, many years the whereabouts of the king’s corpse was unknown.  But he seems to have surfaced, sort of.  A skeleton was discovered near the field, just dumped into a grave and lacking any ornaments or signs of royalty. So, it looked like some ordinary guy. It did, until somebody noticed the odd cure in the spine. Hmmmmmm! Could it be? No way, mate. But the circumstances were so suggestive that it was impossible to dismiss the possibility. Expert opinion now accepts that the skeleton is that of Richard III.

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/05/world/europe/richard-the-third-bones.html?_r=0

For a long time, people have doubted that Richard was as bad as Shakespeare made him out to be.  The playwright, after all, was working in the era of the Tudor monarchs, who just happened to be the group that got rid of Richard and took the throne for themselves. And Shakespeare wanted to be in good with the rulers, so it was wise to portray him as cruel, ambitious, scheming louse and unwise to mention some of the other things about him. There even is, or at least was, an Anti-defamation of Richard III Society , devoted to re-habing the king’s image and place in history. A great deal depends on who’s writing the history and why.

sBiochemist Rita Levi-Montalcini passed away recently at her home in Rome. She was the Nobelist in Physiology or Medicine for 1986, along with Stanley Cohen. They had isolated and characterized nerve growth factor.  Active scientifically will into her 10 decade, Levi-Montalcini came from a background in which a domineering father ruled his wife and daughters completely. She rebelled, and at first in defiance of her father but finally with his consent, began to study medicine. After medical school and an attempt to specialize in neurology which was frustrated when Mussolini’s racial laws barred Jews from professional careers, she went to Belgium than back to Italy and after WWII, to the USA in St. Louis, at Washington University, where she remained for thirty years. In addition to her research contributions to the understanding of neural functioning, she was an ardent partisan of education for women, helping numerous women from Africa enter colleges.

At 100 she claimed she had a better brain than at age 20, because gained experience  helped balance any loss.  Maybe. I hope so. At any rate, she was a formidable lady.

http://www.latimes.com/news/custom/scimedemail/la-me-rita-levi-montalcini-20121231,0,4732404.story

Sir Isaac, as everyone knows, is the pre-eminent scientist of the Scientific Revolution. That’s the rep since Voltaire and, I guess, Pope: God said ‘Let Newton Be, and all was Light’.  So there was shock and astonishment when J.M. Keynes used a part of his not inconsiderable fortune to buy Newton’s papers, examine them and then say that our Isaac was a mystic, a numerologist and an Alchemist! Horrible dictu! No, that! Anything but that! But Keynes persisted. Many, many pages of Newton’s manuscripts were devoted to alchemical pursuits and that was all there was to it. He donated the papers to Cambridge, but the distinct impression was left that much, most in fact of Newton’s active life was devoted, not to real science, but to chasing fables. Because we all know that alchemy was a phonus bolonus operation with no scientific value.  Don’t we?  Until a few years ago, most researchers, and certainly most scientists, would have said: “absolutely”.  But a recent and somewhat subtler understanding of alchemy and its literature has been growing in the past twenty years or SO.  Nobody is claiming that the alchemists had it right. But the scholars who have been leading the new investigations suggest that not all of alchemy was baloney. There was, for example, a very strong and enduring body of practical knowledge on how to melt, smelt, isolate, mix, blend, reduce and otherwise manipulate metals. Alchemists devised nifty pieces of laboratory gear, and learned a lot about substances from the craftspeople who worked with them. Then, as now, an offer to buy a drink and listen to what the guy has to say without dismissing him as a cretin or boob could go a long way in helping to find out how things work. Alchemical writings are full of what seem like bizarre and fanciful stories, riddles, puns, maps, charts and other things which are miles away from the terse,direct, unornamented prose of today’s scientific paper. But they were written that way deliberately. Their  purpose was NOT to inform, but to conceal, to misdirect (especially competitors or those unworthy). And some alchemical lit has no practical or scientific purpose at all. It’s to be understood as an allegory of transformation of human character into something better than the original ingedients.  A new book by one of the leaders in the New Alchemy Studies movement is reviewed in SCIENCE.

http://www.sciencemag.org/content/338/6114/1540.full