Zulu
The Z Machine is a laboratory in Albuquerque that produces temperatures found inside stars. Its famous 1998 photograph was taken with a battered film camera, since the machine’s X-rays would destroy digital equipment. The shutter was triggered from a distance using 86 feet of surgical tubing and an air compressor. Lightning filled the room for one hundred-billionth of a second. The photographer got the picture on his first and only attempt.
In the 1960s, teacher and independence activist Edward Makuka Nkoloso founded Zambia’s unofficial National Academy of Science, Space Research and Philosophy. He intended to beat the United States and Soviet Union to the Moon, then send teenager Matha Mwamba, two cats and a missionary to Mars. Outside Lusaka, his “Afronauts” trained with oil drums and rope swings intended to simulate weightlessness. The programme had no government support, its proposed funding never arrived and its homemade rocket remained on Earth. Whether Nkoloso was entirely sincere, satirising the space race and colonial attitudes, or doing both at once remains unresolved.
Silks from Gustav Zumsteg’s Abraham company in Zurich were loved by designers such as Yves Saint Laurent for being bold, beautiful and glamorous.
From 1831 until his death in 1887, the obscure Austrian dyer and amateur artist Aloys Zötl produced an extensive series of very large and beautifully drawn watercolours of exotic animals, known as the Bestiarium. This massive project was to be his life’s work, although its purpose remains unknown. The watercolours of the Bestiarium, characterized by a brilliant technique and rich colouring, allied to the unbridled imagination of the artist, do not seem to have ever been reproduced in Zötl’s lifetime, either as prints or in the form of a book. While the animals are generally depicted with a high degree of accuracy, they are given a sort of added symbolism in the way in which the artist has depicted them on the page. Most of the watercolours show the animals in some form of natural habitat, although this at times seems to verge on the imaginary. It is not known if these spectacular watercolours were the result of a commission or - as is perhaps most likely, given the fact that they were part of a project that seems to have lasted over fifty years - simply an astonishing, and lifelong, labour of love.
The Z machine is the largest X-ray generator in the world and is designed to test materials in conditions of extreme temperature and pressure. Operated by Sandia National Laboratories, it gathers data to aid in computer modeling of nuclear weapons.
Zingmagazine is a contemporary art magazine founded in 1995 by artist Devon Dikeou.
Bottom's Dream is a novel published in 1970 by West German author Arno Schmidt. Schmidt began writing the novel in December 1963 while he and Hans Wollschläger began to translate the works of Edgar Allan Poe into German. The novel was inspired by James Joyce's novel Finnegans Wake. The gargantuan novel was published in folio format with 1334 pages. The story is told mostly in three shifting columns, presenting the text in the form of notes, collages, and typewritten pages.
A zoetrope is an animation device that produces the illusion of motion by displaying a sequence of drawings or photographs showing progressive phases of that motion.
Zouave was the title given to certain infantry regiments in the French Army, normally serving in French North Africa between 1831 and 1962.
Ziggurat of Ur is a Neo-Sumerian ziggurat in what was the city of Ur in present-day Iraq. The structure was built during the Early Bronze Age but had crumbled to ruins by the 6th century BCE of the Neo-Babylonian period when it was restored by King Nabonidus. The ziggurat was damaged in the Gulf War in 1991 by small arms fire and the structure was shaken by explosions. Four bomb craters can be seen nearby and the walls of the ziggurat are marred by over 400 bullet holes.