At the height of opulence in Second Empire France, Napoléon and Haussmann’s restructuring of Paris called for the construction of a new opera house, selecting from a smorgasbord of competitors the architectural design of the virtually unknown Charles Garnier. The plan employed all manner of techniques in order to present its decoration and composition as a veritable litany of formal styles, com...

Many social networks exhibit some kind of community structure. In particular, in the context of historical research, clustering of different groups into warring or friendly factions can lead to a better understanding of how conflicts arise, and if they could be avoided. In this work we study the crisis that started in 1225 when the Emperor of the Holy Roman Empire, Frederick II entered a confli...

Computer games have long been a fruitful and challenging area for the application of AI technologies. The empire-based strategy game is one genre that presents unique challenges to the implementation of an AI-based player due to the extremely large search space. Consequently, a majority of AI systems utilize ad hoc strategies such as hand-built finite state automata. While practical, this appro...

And we discovered subspace. It gave us our galaxy and it gave us the universe. And we saw other advanced life. And we subdued it or we crushed it.. . With subspace, our empire would surely know no boundaries.

Bankers owed 800 million pounds meet this morning to consider a breathing space for the tottering Maxwell empire, as Ian and Kevin Maxwell struggle to hold their inheritance against potential buyers eyeing assets such as Mirror Group Newspapers.

Ancient Mesoamerican polities are an important source of data for considerations of state development, despite internal debate over their size and complexity. We review complex political units, usually referred to as “states” and “empires,” in ancient Mesoamerica and reach the following conclusions: these polities tended to be hegemonic, rather than territorial, in composition; they melded ritu...

Chrysanthemum stunt viroid (CSVd) is a damaging pathogen attacking Argyranthemum plants. Our study attempted to reveal distribution patterns of CSVd in shoot apical meristems (SAM) and to explore reasons for differential ability of CSVd to invade SAM of selected Argyranthemum cultivars. Symptom development was also observed on greenhouse-grown Argyranthemum plants. Viroid localization using in ...

This paper examines the status afforded old age in the Byzantine Empire. Frequently neglected in accounts of state formation or comparative history, this Christian imperial state transformed the moral ordering of the lifecourse. In contrast to both classical Greek and Roman society, old age acquired a distinct moral authority in Byzantine society. This status was not confined to a few members o...

The drug quinine figured as an object of enforced consumption in British India between the late 1890s and the 1910s, when the corresponding diagnostic category malaria itself was redefined as a mosquito-borne fever disease. This article details an overlapping milieu in which quinine, mosquitoes and malaria emerged as intrinsic components of shared and symbiotic histories. It combines insights f...