Modern excavations yielded a distribution of the house areas in the ancient Egyptian city Akhetaten, which was populated for a short period during the 14th century B.C. Assuming that the house area has a power law dependence of the wealth of its inhabitants allows us to make a comparison of the wealth distributions in ancient and modern societies.

Persian painting has usually been studied from historical point of views. But its formation is rooted in a specific social context. In this study, we will try to contextualize it and we will show that this social context has a crucial role regarding its aesthetic. Persian painting is an art of royal courts and it represents the life of princes combined with Persian epic legendes. This social co...

This work shows the benefits of characterizing historic paintings via compositional and microtextural data from micro-X-ray diffraction (μ-XRD) combined with molecular information acquired with Raman microscopy (RM) along depth profiles in paint stratigraphies. The novel approach was applied to identify inorganic and organic components from paintings placed at the 14th century Islamic Universit...

The CCR5-Δ32 mutation present in European populations is among the most prominently debated cases of recent positive selection in humans. This allele, a 32-bp deletion that renders the T-cell CCR5 receptor nonfunctional, has important epidemiological and public health significance, as homozygous carriers are resistant to several HIV strains. However, although the function of this allele in prev...