There’s something enchanting about ancient tools and instruments. The idea that our forebears were able to fashion precision mechanisms with nothing but the simplest hand tools is fascinating. And ...

The University of Sharjah hosted an astrolabe workshop in which western scientists showed participants how an astronomical instrument made by an ancient Muslim scholar nearly 1,000 years ago measured ...

Across history, ancient civilizations crafted prototypes for many of the modern mechanisms that have become integral to ...

While modern humans tend to think of science in terms of innovations made during the past 100 to 200 years, mankind has always had great scientific thinkers. Over 2,000 years ago, one or more such ...

Astrolabes were astronomical calculating devices that did everything from tell the time to map the stars. This 16th century planispherical astrolabe stems from Morocco. Rama / Wikimedia Commons ...

The Warwick Manufacturing Group, an academic department at the University of Warwick, is usually concerned with the future. Its researchers use high-resolution lasers and 3D visualizations to create ...

In the early 17th century, during the Golden Age of the Mughal Empire, two engineering brothers in present-day Pakistan created a prodigious brass astrolabe for a powerful nobleman. More than 400 ...

Its renown in the last of these fields was tied to the Lahore School, which blended Islamic and Sanskritic astronomical methods and produced peerless astrolabes—brass instruments with interlocking ...

Using scissors, cut out the astrolabe silhouette (heavy black lines) on this sheet. Tape this silhouette onto your manila folder sheet and cut out this figure. Make a tiny hole at the index point ...

A mariner’s astrolabe recovered from the wreck of one of Portuguese explorer Vasco da Gama’s ships is now officially the oldest known such artifact, according to a new paper in the International ...

March 18 (UPI) --Guinness World Records has verified that a mariner's astrolabe recovered from the wreckage of a sunken Portuguese armada ship is indeed the earliest of its kind. Researchers with the ...