The vast Indo-Gangetic Plain in South Asia has been home to some of the world's oldest civilizations, whose fortunes ebbed and flowed with time-plausibly driven in part by shifts in the spatiotemporal patterns of the Indian summer monsoon rainfall. We use speleothem oxygen isotope records from North India to reconstruct the monsoon's variability on socially relevant time scales, allowing us to ...

Vernacular architecture based on bioclimatism concepts was developed and used through the centuries by many civilizations across the world. Different civilizations have produced their own architectural styles based on the local conditions. This study is carried out on the vernacular buildings of north-east India across all the bioclimatic zones. A survey of 42 houses, more than 70 years old was...

thinking also led to the development of symbolic logic, geometry and various branches of mathematics in ancient Greece, India, Islam and other civilizations. These advances provided a set of rules for the manipulation of concepts, ideas and other

Physics limits information processing, and hence the possible forms of intelligent beings and their civilizations. In this review I discuss physical limitations on density, speed, size, energy dissipation and communication, sketching the constraints on very powerful information processing objects.

The land of Turkey has hosted various civilizations throughout history, and it has diverse architectural heritages left from these civilizations. Rural areas and settlements can be seen as the pure reflection of geographical and cultural environment as well as historical and economical. However, today as a consequence of modernisation, the traditional architectural pattern in the rural settleme...

Received ; accepted – 2 – ABSTRACT It is shown that, contrary to an existing claim, the near equality between the lifetime of the sun and the timescale of biological evolution on earth does not necessarily imply that extraterrestrial civilizations are exceedingly rare. Furthermore, on the basis of simple assumptions it is demonstrated that a near equality between these two timescales may be the...