A Sunni Muslim child plays in the rain as she arrives for Eid al-Fitr prayers at the shrine of cleric Sheikh Abdul Qadir al-Gailani in Baghdad, Iraq on March 31, 2025. (Photo by Thaier Al-Sudani/Reuters)

A woman poses for a souvenir photo with a cat statue on display at the Shenzhen Bay commercial district, in Shenzhen, China's Guangdong province, Monday, September 15, 2025. (Photo by Andy Wong/AP Photo)

Do you think that history is a science? Well, not exactly. First, and foremost, history is the state's “legend of wars”, it’s official regalia. Of course, public historians are not interested in scientific truth – quite the opposite. In this respect, any attempt to present a state’s history as altruistic and benevolent as possible is welcomed and encouraged – as opposed to any revisionism attempts that may be more accurate. In this matter, Chinese have surpassed us all – they revised in highly creative manner (but rather shamelessly) the technology already invented by Europeans, a process that resulted in oldest state on the planet. Here is an interesting paradox: ask any sinologist about the Middle Kingdom during second century B.C., and he will describe it to you in such a vivid manner as if he has been living there all his life – but as soon as you will ask him to describe Chinese history in the 19-20th centuries… let's say, his eagerness will be greatly diminished. However, we will discuss China in a different article, and in the meantime we will try to understand how exactly historic “legend of wars” is formed and functions – based on a specific and well-known example. A great example is Ferdinand Magellan's first voyage around the world.

Military school cadets take part in a ceremony commemorating the 56th anniversary of the death of Camilo Cienfuegos who, along with Fidel Castro and Che Guevara, was a chief commander of the Cuban revolution in Havana, Cuba on October 28, 2015. (Photo by Xinhua/REX Shutterstock)

Most people know Nikon as a purveyor of pro and consumer-grade digital cameras. But the company's expertise with optics bleeds over into related markets – it's one of the science community's major suppliers of microscopes. And each year the company asks the community to send it some of their favorite images of tiny objects. A panel of scientists and journalists have chosen the best of this past year's submissions, which Nikon has placed on its Small World site.

Photo: Honorable Mention. “Snow crystal, illuminated with colored lights (5x)”. (Photo by Dr. Kenneth Libbrecht, California Institute of Technology (Caltech), Department of Physics, Pasadena, California, USA)

While communism, collectivism, worms, dry rot and casual looting failed to destroy the majestic wooden churches of Russia, it may be ordinary neglect that finally does them in. Dwindled now to several hundred remaining examples, these glories of vernacular architecture lie scattered amid the vastness of the world’s largest country. Just over a decade ago, Richard Davies, a British architectural photographer, struck out on a mission to record the fragile and poetic structures. Austerely beautiful and haunting, “Wooden Churches: Traveling in the Russian North” (White Sea Publishing; $132) is the result. Covering thousands of miles, Mr. Davies described how he and the writer Matilda Moreton tracked down the survivors from among the thousands of onion-domed structures built after Prince Vladimir converted to Christianity in 988.

Vintage wine bottles dated from 1946 lay down in the wine cellar of the Massandra winery near Yalta, 28 March 2014 (Yalta is a resort city on the north coast of the Black Sea in the Autonomous Republic of Crimea, a territory recognized by a majority of countries as part of Ukraine and incorporated by Russia as the Republic of Crimea). Massandra winery has one of the largest wine collections in the world. (Photo by Sergei Ilnitsky/EPA)

A member of the Palace staff arranges Queen Victoria's Stuart Ball costume which is part of an exhibition to mark the 200th anniversary of the birth of Queen Victoria (1819–1901) this year at Buckingham Palace in London, Tuesday, April 2, 2019. The exhibition, Queen Victoria's Palace at the Summer Opening of Buckingham Palace from 20 July – 29 September 2019, will tell the story of her 62-year reign and her life at Buckingham Palace, which began when she ascended to the throne in June 1837. (Photo by Frank Augstein/AP Photo)