Before the World Wide Web, There Was the World Wide Silk Web
In 1892, Vicente Sanjuán, a Spanish agricultural engineer, arrived in Padua on a government mission: to revive his country’s struggling silk industry.…
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BJHS Themes
(26)
Biomedicine, Scientific Internationalism, and the Containment of Soviet Power
By the end of the Second World War, Britain and the United States discontinued their scientific and technological collaboration with the Soviet Union.…
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Zoological colour on HMS Beagle: Charles Darwin’s chromatic language
On 25 April 1832 the Royal Navy vessel HMS Beagle was anchored in the blue waters of Botafogo Bay, Brazil. The naturalist Charles Darwin (1809–1882) was leaving the Beagle in a small boat, en route to a temporary residence on the mainland, when a series of waves swamped the vessel and scattered his ‘most useful’ possessions into the sea.…
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A conversation with the historian of science Lorraine Daston
Lorraine Daston is an American historian of science whose work spans a broad range of topics in the early modern and modern history of science.…
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How Globalization Disrupted the Stars
Early modern globalisation—particularly maritime expansion and the discovery of the southern hemisphere—posed significant challenges to the traditional framework of astrology inherited from Ptolemaic cosmology.…
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The Fronde, the Court, and the Cosmos: Morin, Gassendi, and Astrology’s Decline in XVII Century France
Astrology today is often seen as the epitome of pseudoscience. Yet, until the 17th century, it was considered a legitimate scholarly discipline, serving as the practical branch of astronomy.…
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William Petty’s survey of Ireland and the role of natural history in the development of statistics
William Petty (1623-1687) is well known as a pioneer of political economy and statistics. He has been often celebrated as an ingenious thinker who was among the first to grasp that certain information, like data on different categories of landowners or the number of births and deaths, could be used to describe trends and tendencies occurring on the level of what he called the ‘political body’ – or what we would nowadays call ‘population phenomena’.…
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Anti-voluntarism, natural providence and miracles in Thomas Burnet’s Theory of the Earth
In his Telluris Theoria Sacra and its English translation The Theory of the Earth (1681–90), the English clergyman and schoolmaster Thomas Burnet (c. 1635–1715) constructed a geological history in which he proposed various natural causes to explain biblical events and their effects on the Earth and life on it.
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Embedding science scrutiny mechanisms in the UK Parliament
At times during the past few years, evidence sessions of the UK’s House of Commons Science and Technology Select Committee have made headline news, for example Dominic Cummings’ account of his time advising the Prime Minister during the COVID-19 pandemic, or controversial witness statements about diversity and inclusion in STEM careers.…
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Medicine and the heavens in Padua’s Faculty of Arts, 1570–1630
After over two years of living in a pandemic, most everyone is familiar with COVID-19’s periods of incubation, progression and contagion. Similar issues were of great concern to physicians in early modern Europe.
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Imperial Entomology: Locusts
In the first half of the twentieth century, locust plagues were managed by imperial governments, advised by their scientific institutions.
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‘The most important time in your life’: quotations in recent science
The history I tell in [my article] exemplifies how indispensable quotations can become... They invoke tradition, generating a sense of belonging and inspiring the young, and are involved in innovation, too.
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‘The troubles of collecting’: William Henry Harvey and the practicalities of natural history collecting in Britain’s nineteenth-century world
By focusing on the example of William Harvey and his travels, my article explores the difficulties encountered by those involved in collecting, preserving and transporting natural history specimens from the field to the museum or laboratory in the nineteenth century.
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Catalogues, Categories, and Computers: Unpacking a ‘Legacy System’ of Human Genetics
My article contributes to this line of inquiry by considering how an information infrastructure for keeping track of human genes was built and changed across the latter decades of the twentieth century.
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The Society of Astrologers (c.1647-1684): Promoting Astrology in Church and in the Pub
People facing plague and quarantine in early modern Europe also turned to astrologers. But rather than being chastised for supporting a ‘pseudoscience’, these people were more likely to be reprimanded for engaging with paganism.
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When Life Interrupts Science: Precarity, Pranks, and Discipline at the Royal Observatory, Greenwich
...the observatory staff, the largest portion of whom were adolescent boys hired to do computational work, had to be managed too. Airy worked hard to deskill their positions, turning the observatory into a sort of factory...
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A Quiet Landmark in Biology: How Pus from Discarded Bandages led to DNA
Almost a century before Watson and Crick, Miescher had been working in the freezing cold former kitchen of Tübingen Castle that had now been converted into laboratories for the University, where he was carrying out investigations into the chemical composition of white blood cells...
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From Under the Elbow to Pointing to the Palm: Learning “medicine by the book” in premodern China
My article thus focuses on transformations in the main metaphors in ancient to late medieval titles of Chinese medical books used to convey to potential readers their ‘learning-by-the-book’ contents.
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Eating game: proteins, international conservation and the rebranding of African wildlife, 1955–1965
My article discusses how this approach of ‘conservation by slaughter’ – as one high-profile ecologist called it – managed to gain traction.
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Cultivating famine: data, experimentation and food security, 1795–1848
In the eighteenth century, the potato was viewed by many European countries as an exotic vegetable, introduced with numerous purposes: as animal feed, as a delicacy, and as a crop suitable for peasants and farm labourers to cultivate in small gardens and allotments.
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Sociability, radium and the maintenance of scientific culture and authority in 20th century Ireland: a case study of the Royal Dublin Society
The discovery of radium in 1898 spurred a range of public, industrial and scientific reactions. The public were enthralled by this near mystical element. Its ability to produce its own energy soon gave rise to a ‘radium craze’ in which promises of its health-giving properties were prominent. A range of supposed radium-based products, such as creams and fortified water, were quickly on sale.
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How collections end: objects, meaning and loss in laboratories and museums
The open access 2019 issue of BJHS Themes addresses the ‘endings’ of scientific collections, telling stories of dispersal, destruction, absorption, re-purposing and repatriation.
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STEM frenzy: teaching science to children and young people, 1830 – 1991
We live in interesting times for those seeking to inspire children and youth to take up science, technology engineering, and mathematics (STEM).…
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Reproduction in Blade Runner 2049
Reproduction on Film, the recently published special issue of The British Journal for the History of Science, investigates the theme of biological reproduction in the history of cinema, television, and other screen media.…
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How to write about China and India
How to write about China and India – Jahnavi Phalkey As BJHS Themes, the new, fully open access, peer-reviewed journal from the British Society for the History of Science, publishes its first issue, one of the volume’s editors, Jahnavi Phalkey, gives her observations on the opportunities and challenges on writing about China and India.…
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BJHS Themes – subject of inaugural issue is announced
I’m delighted to be able to announce that the subject of the inaugural issue of the new open access, edited-collection journal of the BSHS, called BJHS Themes, will be: “Intersections: Science and Technology in Twentieth Century China and India” The special issue editors will be Jahnavi Phalkey (King’s College London) and Tong Lam (University of Toronto) In the open competition held to select the issues of BJHS Themes, proposals are judged according to standards of focus, originality, timeliness, and breadth of appeal to readers.…
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Trending
How the Digital Curation Crisis is endangering archaeology
Archaeology and cultural heritage work have fully entered the digital age. Today, researchers rely on tools like 3D scanners, a variety of GIS software, and Lidar equipped drones to document the past in ways that were unimaginable just a few decades ago.…
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Race Isn’t Biological — So Why Do So Many Still Think It Is?
Even though findings from genetics and other sciences unequivocally refute biological conceptions of race, this erroneous viewpoint remains widespread among the general public.…
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Sluts, Bitches, and Battle-axes: women and insults
The English language contains a wealth of insults and terms of abuse. Personal insults attack the core and immutable aspects of a person, such as their race, ethnicity, appearance, age, or a disability.…
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The National Archaeology Plan and the future of Spanish archaeology
A critical milestone for the archaeological ecosystem has been the publication this April of the National Archaeology Plan (NAP), part of a larger framework for cultural heritage that the Spanish Ministry of Culture has been developing for almost 40 years.…
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Reflections on House of Secrets: The Burari Deaths
The March article of Muses – the arts blog from BJPsych International is the first blog of the series. The blog is written by Dr Dami Ajayi, Specialty Doctor, Barnet Enfield and Haringey Mental Health NHS Foundation Trust and Trainee/Blog Editor, BJPsych International.…
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How did Down syndrome get its name?
Some disability-related names have dropped out of usage, because they are now considered to be offensive due to their origins. Down Syndrome (Trisomy 21) is one example.…
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When Chocolate Calls Louder: What PMS Really Does to Women’s Appetite
The paper “The role of premenstrual syndrome in hedonic hunger and food craving during the menstrual cycle“, published in Journal of Nutritional Science, has been chosen as the latest Editorial Highlight and is freely available to download for one month.…
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Most Read
The need of an ethics of planetary sustainability
How long will humankind survive? Besides the fact that we have been able to eliminate ourselves with nuclear weapons for decades, even without a third world war, the challenge to take care of the resources of our planet remains; we need to use them in a way that our children and their children can have a place on Earth as well. In this blog post Andreas Losch discusses his recent review article in the International Journal of Astrobiology, The need of an ethics of planetary sustainability
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Nothing-Burger? U.S. Obligation to Defend the Philippines in the South China Sea – Part 1
It is an article of faith among ordinary Filipinos that American troops will die with Filipino troops defending Philippine claims to the Spratly Islands in the South China Sea (SCS).…
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The 33%: Q&A with Dame Anna Dominiczak
Q&A with Editor-in-Chief of the Precision Medicine Journal, Dame Anna Dominiczak, for International day of Women and Girls in Science
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The impact of parasite infection on mental illness
More and more research is finding inflammation as a potential contributing factor towards to the development of various mental illnesses. A systematic review was conducted to determine the association between parasitic infection and mental illnesses in various African populations. Two parasite groups were evaluated; helminths and protozoans, and four mental illness classifications; depressive disorders, anxiety disorders, schizotypal disorders and unspecified mental illnesses.
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Reflections on House of Secrets: The Burari Deaths
The March article of Muses – the arts blog from BJPsych International is the first blog of the series. The blog is written by Dr Dami Ajayi, Specialty Doctor, Barnet Enfield and Haringey Mental Health NHS Foundation Trust and Trainee/Blog Editor, BJPsych International.…
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Conversations with Authors: Institutionalized Police Brutality
This is the first post in our new series: “Conversations with Authors.” For our inaugural post, we asked Dr. Vesla Weaver to meet (virtually) with Dr.…
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Sluts, Bitches, and Battle-axes: women and insults
The English language contains a wealth of insults and terms of abuse. Personal insults attack the core and immutable aspects of a person, such as their race, ethnicity, appearance, age, or a disability.…
Read more
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