The Academy of Lynxes—a 17th-century science academy—was cofounded by an 18-year-old whose father suspected he was associating with sorcerers and magicians.

Described by the photographer as the "white ghost of the Mediterranean forest," the lynx is a vulnerable species. Catching the genetic anomaly on camera is a testament to conservation efforts that began in 2011.

Bavarian professor Adam Weishaupt founded the group in 1776 as an anti-clerical, anti-royalist sect that used hierarchy, codes, and surveillance as a proto-spy network. Within a decade, it was suppressed, but the mythology never quite died. Today, it functions as an adaptable conspiracy theory, able to fit any era's anxieties about who really holds power.

Once held by icons like Newton, Dirac, and Hawking, the position was founded in 1663. "Star Trek" imagined the Lucasian Chair’s future holder as the android Data, cementing its mythos across scientific and science fiction realms.

Although cave paintings may have depicted them millennia earlier, one of the oldest known references to auroras is a Babylonian cuneiform tablet from about 600 BCE. In 1619, Galileo Galilei named the phenomenon in the northern hemisphere "aurora borealis" after the Roman goddess of dawn—Aurora—and the Greek god of the north wind—Boreas.

Romulus and Remus escaped slaughter by drifting downriver in a basket. Once ashore, the two were nurtured by a wolf and woodpecker, growing strong enough to build Rome. This story may date back to the fourth century BCE and contains Roman and Greek elements.

When the agency was established in 1950, the logo featured an eagle holding a shield with symbols of a pyramid, a test tube, a microscope, and a lamp from which light radiated. Subsequent logos featured variations of a ring composed of people holding hands, which would eventually be redesigned to enclose a globe bearing the "NSF" abbreviation.

The 13th-century physician behind the name (lupus is Latin for wolf) named it after a patient he saw who had facial lesions that looked to him like a wolf's bite. Other common symptoms of the disease include extreme fatigue, painful and swollen joints, fevers, and light sensitivity.

The Roman Emperor Marcus Aurelius is known as one of the most famous Stoic writers or thinkers, penning his classic opus ‘Meditations.’ In 176 CE, he endowed four philosophy chairs in Athens: one for Stoicism, and one for three of Stoicism’s rival schools: Aristotelianism, Platonism, and Epicureanism.

"The scientific man does not aim at an immediate result ... His duty is to lay the foundation for those who are to come, and point the way."

The group was formed in 1800 to find a planet some astronomers believed existed between Mars and Jupiter. Prior to their disbanding in 1815, the group instead discovered Vesta, Juno, and other objects they would call asteroids.

The organization, which votes for the Academy Awards, was founded in 1927 by Louis B. Mayer, head of MGM Studios, to stifle labor disputes and maintain the public image of the film industry. "I found that the best way to handle them was to hang medals all over them,” Mayer said, according to Scott Eyman's biography of the studio head.

Named after its founder, Robert de Sorbon, the former University of Paris was founded in 1253 to teach clerics and agents of royal and ecclesiastical institutions. The school was split into several autonomous universities after protests in May 1968.

Despite its current name, Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity began in Venice and was named after the winged lions found in the city’s St. Mark’s Square.

In founding the Academy Software Foundation in 2018, the Linux Foundation spread its open-source philosophy to the cinema by establishing a neutral forum for sharing animation, visual effects, and audio technologies across projects. Its founding members include DreamWorks Animation, Epic Games, Google Cloud, Intel, and Walt Disney Studios.

The Irish poet and 1923 winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature laid out his beliefs in a 1901 essay, entitled "Magic," and was a member of several organizations dedicated to occult and mystical practices.

The virtual intellectual society exchanged tens of thousands of letters and spanned several continents. Some of its most avid correspondents were Voltaire, Benjamin Franklin, and Saint Ignatius of Loyola, founder of the Jesuits.

A brief survey of how Byzantine scholars changed the course of the Renaissance by introducing Classical Greek literature to Italy. These scholars and their students were responsible for translating, interpreting, and printing many of the most fundamental texts in the Western tradition. Without their efforts, the Italian Renaissance and Western thought would have been immeasurably poorer.

Hypatia of Alexandria was a secular philosopher in Egypt who headed a university, improved scientific instruments, penned textbooks, and advised the city's leaders. As a Neoplatonist, she approached numbers as a sacred language. Religious fervor and her visible advisory role led to her brutal dismemberment by rogue monks.

Picasso’s talent was evident from an early age. With the encouragement and instruction of his father, an artist and art instructor, he developed classical techniques that often surprise those only familiar with his abstract works.

Classics with a capital "C" probably doesn't bring to mind erotically charged diss poetry. Gaius Valerius Catullus would like to change that. Instead of mythical epics, Catullus wrote poetry about his personal life as part of the 1st century BCE's "new wave" of Roman poets embracing the lyrical and everyday. The focus of his poetic work ranges from serenades to spiteful insults.

The feline family is a hugely diverse group of lions, panthers, and kitties that have spread all over the world. The ancestors of the cats we love today helped solve rodent problems when humans first invented agriculture. They've been worshipped, loved, and scorned by humans since.

Beginning in 1901, the Wardenclyffe Tower was built on Long Island, New York to transmit electrical power through Earth's atmosphere. The project was abandoned before becoming operational due to limited funding, and was demolished for scrap in 1917 to help pay off Tesla's debts.

Modern astronomy relies on making discoveries without being present on the planets, stars, galaxies, and other objects studied. Imagine the difficulty the ancient Greeks had studying them without computers and telescopes. Yet somehow they calculated precise measurements of planetary distances, sizes, and more. Read this page to learn more about early triumphs in astronomical science.

Around 50 B.C.E., Roman poet and philosopher Lucretius shared the idea that alien life was possible, which was put forth by Greek philosopher Epicurus. The writing is believed to be the first straightforward assertion in Western literature that aliens must exist.

After becoming an NCAA Division III school, UC Santa Cruz ditched its informal mascot, the banana slug, for a sea lion. Students protested and eventually held a straw vote to reinstate the old name, which they saw as an antidote to the hypercompetitive nature of college athletics.

Out with green puppets living in trash cans, and in with ancient Greek philosophers living in barrels. This article details the life and beliefs of Diogenes the Cynic, a philosopher who reportedly lived in a barrel. According to this peer-reviewed article, it's unclear if Diogenes recorded any of his beliefs in writing. If he did, no texts have been recovered.

He was the first psychologist to call himself one, and he influenced a whole generation of early psychologists. Learn about the life and works of Wilhelm Wundt with this thorough entry from a philosophy encyclopedia.

The word appeared in 1950's "If I Ran the Zoo," but there are theories that the word (or forms of it) were already part of popular slang before the book was published.

Norwegian prodigy Magnus Carlsen won the World Chess Championship in 2013 at age 22, one of the youngest champions in history. He went on to dominate for a decade, peaking at an Elo rating (a modern measure of chess ability) of 2882—the highest ever recorded.

A committee established a contest for King Oscar II's 60th birthday, featuring four unsolved problems in mathematics, including one on proving the stability of a system of more than two objects held together by gravity. Focusing on three celestial objects, Henri Poincaré won the prize for his proof, which he later learned was incorrect and, upon correcting it, instead proved these systems to be unstable.

Founded in 1980 by Carl Sagan, Louis Friedman, and Bruce Murray in response to public interest in space not adequately reflected in government investment, it is now the world’s largest nonprofit space organization, with more than 2 million members.

The philosopher and novelist was one of the youngest writers to win the award, at just 44. In his acceptance speech, he spoke on the role of an artist in a world that seemed increasingly bleak. "Each generation doubtless feels called upon to reform the world," he said. "Mine knows that it will not reform it, but its task is perhaps even greater. It consists in preventing the world from destroying itself."

In ancient Rome, boys between the ages of 14 and 17 underwent a traditional ceremony marking their transition from childhood to adulthood. This article explores what we know about this common practice and its significance. Learn about the ritual celebration, which included a new white toga, sacrifices, and becoming registered as a citizen.