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Purchased cheaply at auction as a second edition with extensive Latin "marginalia" by an unknown hand, this copy of "De humani corporis fabrica" was found to have been Andreas Vesalius' personal copy, and the thousands of autograph notes were his revisions for a third edition that never saw publication, offering rare insight into the mind of one of history's most important scientists and teachers.Purchased cheaply at auction as a second edition with extensive Latin "marginalia" by an unknown hand, this copy of "De humani corporis fabrica" was found to have been Andreas Vesalius' personal copy, and the thousands of autograph...

A team of scientists at the University of Basel, Switzerland, has discovered that a 1,800-year-old papyrus from the Basel Papyrus Collection is an ancient medical text from late antiquity and that it was likely written by the famous Roman physician Galen. The University Library in Basel possesses a collection of 65 papyri, mostly in Greek and several in Coptic, Hieratic and Latin. Less than half of this collection was published by Ernst Rabel in 1917 in Papyrusurkunden der Öffentlichen Bibliothek der Universität zu Basel. With mirror writing on both sides, one of the Basel papyri — dubbed P.Basel 1A —...

If you’re a history buff, you might not know much particle physics. But the two fields share more in common than you’d think. X-rays from a high-energy lab have revealed ancient Greek medical texts that had been stripped and covered with religious writing. Scientists at the Department of Energy’s SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory have long been using high-powered x-rays at their Stanford Synchrotron Radiation Lightsource (SSRL) to analyze ancient texts. This week, they’ll be revealing the text beneath 10th-century psalms from the St. Catherine’s Monastery on the Sinai Peninsula. The hidden words were a translation of writings by the ancient...

In Germany, in 1933, two men came to power... The first man, of course, was Adolf Hitler... The other man was Clemens August Graf von Galen, a towering giant of a man who later in 1933 was named bishop of Münster. Under the Nazis, he battled racial bias, the Nazi corruption of Church teaching and most notably the state-sanctioned program of euthanasia to kill off so-called “useless eaters” and burdens on the state.

My first thought when I turned on my TV Sunday morning and found that the Orlando shooting had occurred in a gay nightclub was: They're dead because they were gay. I have a lot of gay friends. I tried to come up with words that would express my feelings for what they must have been going through. I couldn't. I assume they were going through the same feelings I had - and will have again, I fear - when Jews are attacked in shops and restaurants. Those attacks occurred not because they were in the wrong random place at the...

I am not cheering as I write this column. The Presidency of Barack Obama is spiraling downward largely because of Obamacare and it is not clear to me that Mr. Obama can avoid a Presidential face plant. Earlier this week Secretary of Health and Human Services, Kathleen Sebelius testified before a House committee about the ongoing disaster that is the Obamacare website. She didn't know who was responsible or what went wrong any more than she could have pulled out a stack of code three feet high and walked the Committee Members through it line-by-line. Republicans were ugly to her....

Anyone old enough to remember Viet Nam can remember how the country felt toward the man and women who were sent to Southeast Asia to prosecute that war. They were treated like [as this is a family column] garbage. We have discussed before how, in the National Guard during those days, it was suggested that we wear civilian clothes to and from drills. Of all the dumb things the federal government has done during this partial shut down was to have shut down national parks, and national monuments. Some of the national monuments that have been shut down are the...

The New York Times had an amazing front page story yesterday which I would have thought would have jumped to the top of every cable news cycle except for the Senate's confirmation of Justice Sonia Sotomayor. The headline of the story was: "White House Affirms Deal on Drug Cost" by David Kirkpatrick. I want you to read the lead paragraph very slowly: Pressed by industry lobbyists, White House officials on Wednesday assured drug makers that the administration stood by a behind-the-scenes deal to block any Congressional effort to extract cost savings from them beyond an agreed-upon $80 billion. Whoa! Check...

Atlas is done with merely shrugging. Atlas is raging. The Ayn Rand novel, "Atlas Shrugged" is much in the news this week because of the absolutely fantastic rant on CNBC the other morning by on-air editor Rick Santelli. I happened to be watching CNBC when this all took place, although I suspect this may become one of those thinks like Woodstock which, over the years, seven million baby boomers have proclaimed they were in attendance. This was the morning after President Obama had announced his plan to save the housing industry by helping bail out people who weren't making their...

One of the songs from the 1959 Rodgers & Hammerstein musical "The Sound of Music" is, "How do you Solve a Problem like Maria?" Republicans are asking themselves the same question about President Obama. According to RealClearPolitics.com, the new President's approval ratings average 73% ranging from a high of 79% (Pew and ABC news/Washington Post) to a low of 60% (CBS News/New York Times). Note, though, that all of those polls were taken before last Tuesday's inauguration. Republicans in the House and Senate have to find a voice without getting in between a 70+ percent President and the American people....

Last night President George W. Bush gave his final scheduled speech as President of the United States. At noon next Tuesday, a new President will take the oath of office and the peaceful transfer of power from one American to another will take place as it has 44 times before. President Bush had been in office for less than eight months when the terrorists struck on September 11, 2001. Ten days later, a relatively untested President said of terrorism, we will "Stop it. Eliminate it. And destroy it where it grows." The President threw down the gauntlet to the rest...

From Merriam-Webster's Third Unabridged dictionary: Sedition: Conduct tending to treason but without an overt act. The United States House of Representatives went into their nearly two-week-long President's Day recess without acting on a Senate Bill which would have re-authorized the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act or FISA (pronounced here in Washington with the I as in EYE.) FISA was first passed in 1978 -- keep that date in mind -- and, according to the Liberal Federation of American Scientists website: "prescribes procedures for requesting judicial authorization for electronic surveillance and physical search of persons engaged in espionage or international terrorism against...

In the Democratic Party there are 796 "Super Delegates." These are men and women who are delegates to the Democratic National Convention in Denver by virtue of their position, not because they were elected in primary or chosen in a party caucus. Officially, within the Democratic National Committee rules they are known as "Party Leaders and Elected Officials" (PLEOs) but Super Delegates stuck. PLEOs did not. Mullpal Lanny Davis has reminded us that Super Delegates were never intended to be pledged to one candidate, but were the insiders who could undo a bad decision by those pesky voters in primaries...

 Non-News From IraqBy Rich Galen  There is an old saying: "What if a tree fell in the forest and nobody came?" Or, as Samuel Johnson once wrote, words to a like effect.The news out of Iraq, Wednesday, was that there was no news out of Iraq. At least no news that the New York Times wanted to particularly feature, doing everything it could to be certain that readers would not be around to hear that tree fall.We have previously discussed the matter of the Times editorializing by placement. As another example, this was the squib in the teaser box on...

Clinton Campaign Vows To Check Contributions Solicited by Supporter BRISTOW, Va. -- When Hillary Rodham Clinton held an intimate fund-raising event at her Washington home in late March, Pamela Layton donated $4,600, the maximum allowed by law, to Mrs. Clinton's presidential campaign. But the 37-year-old Ms. Layton says she and her husband were reimbursed by her husband's boss for the donations. "It wasn't personal money. It was all corporate money," Mrs. Layton said outside her home here. "I don't even like Hillary. I'm a Republican." The boss is William Danielczyk, founder of a Washington-area private-equity firm and a major fund-raising...

GOP Strategist Rich Galen called Howard Dean "How Weird" Dean today on the FNC. Anyone catch it?

* The United States was deemed "stingy" in its immediate promise of $15 million in aid to the post-tsunami relief effort in Southeast Asia by United Nations Undersecretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs and Emergency Relief Jan Egeland. * I have two words for the U-G for HA & ER Egeland: Get out. * In fact, I have the same two words for the whole United Nations: Get out. * The United States -- the "stingy" United States -- contributes 20 percent of the entire budget to run the United Nations. Out of every five dollars of Egeland's salary, the taxpayers of...

RUSH: I talked to Rich Galen yesterday for an hour, he of Mullings.com fame, for an interview in the upcoming issue of The Limbaugh Letter. Now, I can't give away the whole interview because then there would be no reason for you to subscribe and become a purchaser of the newsletter, but we did talk about the current climate, future and the election and so forth and how the various candidates, political operations, are working in his view. And he has hands-on experience with political operations for candidates, Newt Gingrich, Dan Quayle, and others. He's been intimately involved. He just...

Mullings An American Fifth-Column A Scamp Abroad Rich Galen Wednesday December 11, 2002 From Villa Tatiana Geneva, Switzerland One of the things about writing from Europe is you read European newspapers – not just on the web as you can from Mullings Central in Alexandria, Virginia – but really read the International Herald Tribune as a newspaper.As an example on page 4-II in yesterday’s IHT a piece by John Vinocur has this lede:“Scratch an anti-American in Europe and very often all he wants is a guest professorship at Harvard or to have an article published in the New York Times.”The...

Nature photographers Galen, Barbara Rowell killed in plane crash LOS ANGELES (AP) — Friends and admirers lined up at the gallery of nature photographers Galen and Barbara Rowell to express grief over their deaths in a plane crash. The Rowells, whose works were published in National Geographic and several books, were passengers in a charter plane that crashed in the eastern Sierra Nevada while they were returning home from a photo workshop Sunday...See link for rest of article.