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From today's featured article

Illustration with Aeneas holding the Golden Bough

The Golden Bough is a fantastical object in the Aeneid, an epic poem by the 1st century BCE Roman poet Virgil. The Trojan hero Aeneas is tasked to find the bough and remove it from its host tree to prove his divine favour before his journey into the Underworld. It briefly resists as he does so – the implications of which have been widely debated in scholarship. In the medieval period, commentators often interpreted the bough allegorically and as a symbol of wisdom. More recent scholars have viewed the episode as reflecting Virgil's ambivalence towards the Roman Empire, and connected it to the deaths of two of Aeneas's antagonists, Dido and Turnus. The bough has been widely referenced in art and literature. It was used by James Frazer for the title of his 1890 work on comparative religion, is recalled in Dante's Divine Comedy, and was the subject of an 1834 painting by J. M. W. Turner. It is also a recurring motif in the "Byzantium" poems of W. B. Yeats and in the poetry of Seamus Heaney. (Full article...)

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Did you know ...

Raven on the Yaxté totem pole

... that the Yaxté totem pole (detail pictured) has survived being shot at, set on fire, and pecked by woodpeckers?
... that a private WeChat group coordinated harassment against a Chinese diver, including a rule that banned personal attacks on everyone except her?
... that a rights dispute meant that two different actors played Quicksilver in two competing film franchises at the same time?
... that the 1994 video game Apocalypse, about combat helicopter operations, also involves transporting medical personnel and evacuating the wounded?
... that Momoko Seto said that she received her first voice-acting role after only four months of training?
... that a rare plant blocked Ballymun United from building more pitches?
... that gay rights activist Sergey Androsenko sued the Belarusian government over his arrest and beating at the 2010 Minsk Pride?
... that the lead actor of Cold War 1994 said he almost got hit by a plane during its filming?

In the news

MV Hondius

Passengers from the cruise ship MV Hondius (pictured) disembark in Tenerife after being quarantined due to a hantavirus outbreak.
The education platform Canvas goes offline, affecting thousands of educational institutions, after a ransomware attack by the group ShinyHunters.
American media proprietor and philanthropist Ted Turner dies at the age of 87.
Wu Yize defeats Shaun Murphy to win the World Snooker Championship.
An explosion at a fireworks factory in Liuyang, Hunan, China, kills 37 people.

On this day

May 12 :

Roald Amundsen's airship Norge

1510 – Zhu Zhifan, the Prince of Anhua (in modern Shaanxi, China), began an unsuccessful rebellion against the reign of the Zhengde Emperor.
1846 – The Donner Party, an American pioneer group which became known for resorting to cannibalism when they became trapped in the Sierra Nevada, left Independence, Missouri, for California.
1926 – The crew of the airship Norge (pictured), led by Roald Amundsen, became the first people to make a verified trip to the North Pole.
1941 – German engineer Konrad Zuse presented the Z3, the first working programmable and fully automatic computer, to an audience of scientists in Berlin.
2015 – A train derailment killed eight people and injured more than 200 others in Philadelphia.

Fergus of Galloway (d. 1161)
Indra Devi (b. 1899)
Marilyn Knowlden (b. 1926)
Vasilije Adžić (b. 2006)

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Today's featured picture

Shale is a fine-grained, clastic sedimentary rock formed from mud that is a mix of flakes of clay minerals and silt-sized particles of other minerals, especially quartz and calcite. It is characterized by fissility, the tendency to split into thin layers less than 1 centimetre (0.39 in) in thickness, and is the most common sedimentary rock. This photograph shows a shale formation with numerous horizontal beds of rock at Marble Canyon in Kootenay National Park, in the Canadian province of British Columbia.

Photograph credit: Chris Woodrich

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