Book Review: The Mirage of a Town Without Cellphones | Undark
“Kurczy grounds readers with a brief but compelling history of radio astronomy: In 1931, scientist Karl Jansky accidentally discovered radio waves from space and presented his findings two years later. The field took off after World War II, and by the mid 1950s the National Science Foundation was ready to create a radio-astronomy research center — but where?”
Go to the board | Joseph Fourier (1768-1830)
“My mind and my heart were much disposed to admire all, to respect all, that was connected with him who had discovered the cause of the secular equation of the moon, had found in the movement of this planet the means of calculating the ellipticity of the earth, had traced to the laws of attraction the long inequalities of Jupiter and of Saturn, &c. &c. But what was my disenchantment, when one day I heard Madame de Laplace, approaching her husband, say to him, "Will you entrust to me the key of the sugar?”
Hashime Murayama and the Art of Saving Lives | Distillations | Science History Institute
“There’s an old adage that says life is short, art long. And in certain circles Murayama’s wildlife art remains celebrated to this day. But even though he took Papanicolaou’s assignment under duress, Murayama’s work on cervical cancer had the more lasting legacy—art that helped make millions of women’s lives longer.”
The Fascinating History of Clinical Trials | The Conversation
“These clinical trials largely fall into two groups. With observational studies, researchers follow a group of people to see what happens to them. With experimental studies, people are assigned to treatments, then followed.
These study designs have come about from centuries of people trying out different ways of treating people.”
In a Global Health Crisis, Science Museums Have a lot to Offer – Even While Shut | Apollo Magazine
“The museum doors are firmly shut. Yet this is also an opportunity for great institutions to enrich our personal stories. Thanks to a quarter of a century of digitisation and enthusiastic experimentation, not to mention the improvements of the internet, museums are allowing online visitors to wander through collections, past exhibitions and virtual displays.”
Reginald Fessenden and the Invention of Sonar | Distillations | Science History Institute
“Uncharacteristically, Fessenden compromised. As his wife and biographer, Helen, would later explain, he couldn’t resist the challenge of outwitting “those soundless perils of rock and shoal, of iceberg and fog, dumb agencies of Nature to menace and destroy.” Also, he needed a job.”
The Dual Legacies of Henry Moseley | Science History Institute
“In the spring of 1914 Moseley was invited to share his research at the annual meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science, held that year in Australia. When war broke out in the summer, Moseley cut the trip short and rushed back to England, where he volunteered as a signaling officer, responsible for sending communications in Morse code and semaphore. After training at a military base in the town of Aldershot, he shipped out with his unit to Gallipoli on June 13, 1915.”
The Rise and Fall of Polywater | Science History Institute
“In April 1970 the American Chemical Society held a symposium at Lehigh University, in the steel town of Bethlehem. An entire session focused on water, including anomalous water. A news conference was scheduled to follow. Reporters and the 300 attendees all wanted to better understand the nature of polywater. Passions were high among both skeptics and believers: a fight was simmering.”
The Sensitive Plant | Lapham's Quarterly
“Sometime around the late eighteenth century, the French botanist René-Louiche Desfontaines took a plant on an outing around Paris in a horse-drawn carriage. At the time, botany was just emerging as an independent science separate from medicine and herbalism. Desfontaines, who’d been elected to the Académie des Sciences at the age of thirty-three and appointed professor of botany at the Jardin des Plantes a few years later, was a leading practitioner in the new field.”
The Accidental Experiment That Changed Men’s Lives | The Atlantic
“Now, 50 years later, the Vietnam draft lotteries have become the drosophila of the social sciences: the model organism for researchers to discern how a life-changing intervention carries implications for the individuals who experienced it, versus those who escaped it by chance.”
Throwback Thursday |The Transfermium Wars: Scientific Brawling And Name Calling During the Cold War | Science History Institute
“The naming of elements 95, americium, through 101, mendelevium, went uncontested. Trouble began to simmer in 1957 when a collaboration among three research institutions—the Argonne National Laboratory in Illinois, the Harwell Laboratory in Britain, and the Nobel Institute for Physics in Sweden—announced the creation of element 102. They proposed the name nobelium, which was swiftly accepted by the International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry (IUPAC), the international body in charge of christening new elements.”
Nicolas-Jacques Conté and the Pencil | Scihi.org
“As well as his process for mixing leads, Conté is also generally credited with inventing the machinery needed to make round leads, and he can truly be said to be the creator of the pencil. Indeed, for about 100 years, pencils in France were known as the crayons Conté and of course pencils continue to be made with the Conté brand name to this day.”
Music of the Squares | The Public Domain Review
“The fact that we derive pleasure from hearing certain concordant intervals, that derive from what is known as the overtone series, for Hay demonstrates that nature and humanity are governed by the same principles.3 He takes this further: the physiological affinity between seeing and hearing means that these laws extend not only into music but into the visual world too.4 After all, he observes, “the eye and the ear are various in their modes of receiving impressions; yet the sensorium is but one, and the mind by which these impressions are perceived and appreciated is also characterised by unity.”5Since both sight and hearing are processed by the mind, they should be governed by similar principles.”
