Jose Carillo's Forum

TIME OUT FROM ENGLISH GRAMMAR

This section features wide-ranging, thought-provoking articles in English on any subject under the sun. Its objective is to present new, mind-changing ideas as well as to show to serious students of English how the various tools of the language can be felicitously harnessed to report a momentous or life-changing finding or event, to espouse or oppose an idea, or to express a deeply felt view about the world around us.

The outstanding English-language expositions to be featured here will mostly be presented through links to the websites that carry them. To put a particular work in better context, links to critiques, biographical sketches, and various other material about the author and his or her works will usually be also provided.

I hope you’ll enjoy the new selections that will be presented here each week.

Joe Carillo

Did Mona Lisa have high cholesterol; is Newton’s apple story true?

If this Italian medical expert is to be believed, Leonardo Da Vinci’s Mona Lisa must have suffered from high levels of cholesterol. This, at least, is how Vito Franco, pathological anatomy professor at the University of Palermo, interprets the glint in Mona Lisa’s eye, which he says is “the result of a build-up of fatty acids around her eye socket, a sure sign that she wasn’t watching her cholesterol.” What’s more, Prof. Franco says, he found that “not only aristocrats but also Madonnas, angels and mythical heroes—or at least the sitters [for some famous portraits]—revealed telltale signs of illness.”

The Mona Lisa
From TimesOnline.com

These claims may forever remain as intelligent conjectures, of course, but the anecdote about Newton’s falling apple—reputed to be the inspiration for his famous Theory of Universal Gravitation—has been proven to be authentic. In fact, Britain’s Royal Society will soon post on the web a manuscript written by William Stukeley, a contemporary of Newton, recounting a spring afternoon in 1726 when Newton shared the story with him over tea “under the shade of some apple trees.” Stukeley wrote: “He told me, he was just in the same situation, as when formerly, the notion of gravitation came into his mind.”

Read Richard Owen’s “Behind the Mona Lisa smile” in TimesOnline.co.uk now!

Read “Story of Newton’s encounter with apple goes online” in RoyalSociety.org now!

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