Nepenthe

Next, taking a handful of the flowers [of garlic], he rubbed them all over the sashes, as though to ensure that every whiff of air that might get in would be laden with the garlic smell.  –Dracula, Bram Stoker Vampires, evil beings that fed on blood, have been particularly prevalent in in the 18th century. Although superstition may have originated from Western Europe, fear of vampires became wides spread and sent the whole of Europe into mass hysteria. A well-known  defense against vampires is to chew garlic  and have cloves of garlic around you at all times. Of course chewing garlic release a putrid smell that is almost impossible to get rid of. This is because upon chewing garlic a sulphur containing chemical called allicin is produced, and sulphur containing compounds (thiols) are well known to smell nasty. The smell is often associated with rotting eggs or rotting meat, and it this is exactly what people wanted as surrounding oneself with thi...

The Origin Of The Word 'Robot' Federal Theatre Project presentation of "R.U.R. (Rossum's Universal Robots)" by Karel Čapek (1890-1935). WPA image. Robot is a relative newcomer to the English language. It was the brainchild of the Czech playwright, novelist and journalist Karel Čapek, who introduced it in his 1920 hit play,  R.U.R. , or Rossum's Universal Robots . Science historian Howard Markel discusses how Čapek thought up the word. For many, the word robot conjures an image of a mechanical being clad in metal, adorned with all sorts of blinking lights and buttons, and even a funny-sounding voice. Indeed, such robots have become stock characters in science fictions stories, novels, films and television shows. More recently, robots—and the derived term robotics—have come to represent the most modern engineering technologies for a myriad of functions ranging from artificial intelligence experiments and building automobiles to performing delicate surgical proc...

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From the TLS : The vampire first sank its fangs into the British imagination in the early eighteenth century when accounts began to emerge from remote parts of Habsburg Europe of the superstitions of its recently colonized subjects. Austrian administrators, in control of new territory south of the Carpathians, encountered panic-stricken locals full of tales of the rapacious undead, of mysterious infirmities ravaging the peasants and suspicious coffins containing cadavers with fresh blood on their lips. Roger Luckhurst, in his introduction to the new Oxford World’s Classics edition of Bram Stoker’s Dracula , notes the notorious case of Peter Plogojowitz, in 1725, who “had been dead and buried for ten weeks” but was nonetheless blamed by villagers for a spate of sudden deaths, apparent strangulations. When the Imperial Provisor finally agreed to open the grave, lest the peasants “be obliged to forsake the village”, his delegation observed, along with “other wild signs”, a bloodied mou...