How Your Embryo Knew What To Do | Nautilus
“It took Proescholdt 259 trials over two years to repeat this result five times, enough to warrant publication, in 1924. To her annoyance, Spemann insisted on adding himself as first author on the paper, even though his male students enjoyed solo bylines. He would later win the Nobel Prize for the discovery; Proescholdt would be all but forgotten for more than 60 years.”
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.”
Untold Stories of the Apollo 13 Engineers | OUP Blog
“As it was, the engineers had just enough time to work the myriad, entangled problems and get them home. The triumph of Apollo 13 highlighted the work of engineers for the general public like no other mission. With the astronauts mainly just shivering for a few days, broadcasts had to at least attempt covering technical challenges, clever emergency fixes, and the years of careful planning that had paid off.”
America’s Never-Ending Battle Against Flesh-Eating Worms | The Atlantic
“As Knipling watched screwworms churn through their life cycle in his government laboratory, he made an observation whose importance he could intuit but not yet put to use: Female screwworms mate only once in their entire life. If a female screwworm mates with a sterile male, she will never have any offspring. So if the environment could somehow be saturated with sterile males, Knipling surmised, screwworms would very quickly mate themselves out of existence.
But Knipling did not know how to sterilize male screwworms.”
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.”
A Jarring Revelation | Damn Interesting
“Over time, however, Dr. Andrews grew even more unconventional. He eventually bade adieu to Jones by telling her that he wanted to devote himself to thoughts of colonizing Mars.
The ever-curious Jones also took up a new interest: inventing. “
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.”
Who Invented Radio: Guglielmo Marconi or Aleksandr Popov? | IEEE Spectrum
“Now, it’s not always the case that museums know what’s in their own collections. The origins of equipment that’s long been obsolete can be particularly hard to trace. With spotty record keeping and changes in personnel, institutional memory can lose track of what an object is or why it was important.”
The Carouser and the Great Astronomer | Nautilus
“Had history turned out differently, we would know hardly any of these details. A young man with a dubious idea about invisible Platonic solids hovering in space, anxious to prove that there could only ever be six planets; and another young man, the disgraced father of an illegitimate son, on his way to battle the Turks: The litter of history could easily have blurred the outlines of their lives.”
Through the First Antarctic Night (1900) | The Public Domain Review
“Precisely at twelve o’clock a strange rectangular block of fire appeared in the east-south-east. Its size was that of a small tabular iceberg, but it had a dull crimson glow which made the scene at once weird and fascinating. Its base rested on the horizon and it seemed to rise, brighten, and move northerly. […] We watched this with considerable awe and amazement for ten minutes before we could determine its meaning. It passed through several stages of forms, finally it separated, and we discovered that it was the moon. It was in fact a sort of mirage of the moon, but the strange rectangular distortion, the fiery aspect, and its huge size, made a sight long to be remembered.”
This Vast Photo Archive Is Hidden Inside a Cold, Heavily Guarded Limestone Mine | Atlas Obscura
“But by 2001 the collection could no longer remain in New York. With fluctuating temperatures in a city with four distinct seasons (including hot, humid summers), “the conditions were pretty terrible,” Ahern says. “They had to place this collection somewhere where it’d be preserved, and that place is one-and-a-half hours out of Pittsburgh, 220 feet down a limestone mine.”
A lot of additional details about the collection in this article from 2003
Collecting the Maps of the Coronavirus Pandemic | CityLab
“Lately those librarians have had their hands full. John Hessler, a specialist in modern cartography and GIS at the Library of Congress, is collecting the maps of the coronavirus pandemic.”
"Beating the Bounds" | JSTOR Daily
“And when they came to a boundary-stone, the children would be flipped upside down, to have their heads knocked against it. In some spots, though, more pleasant memories would be created, by pausing for a glass of beer or a snack of bread and cheese. Finally, they would finish with a party on the village green.
The most practical reason for this tradition was to create a living record of the parish’s boundaries, which could serve as evidence in disputes.”
Put A Propeller On It: the Golden Age of Tinkering | The Appendix
“Alberto Santos-Dumont is beloved in Brazil as the inventor of the airplane (his heart is even preserved in formaldehyde at Rio de Janeiro’s Air and Space Museum). But it was in Paris, the global capital of ballooning, that the debonair Brazilian made his name. In 1898 he decided that he was not satisfied with the haphazard nature of navigation in his balloon. So he put an engine and a propeller on it. Soon, he was the only man in the world flying a dirigible—even winning a prize for maneuvering around the Eiffel Tower.”
The Nurse Who Introduced Gloves to the Operating Room | Distillations/Science History Institute
“We’re still reaping the benefits of these innovations today, of course, benefits that have been made all the more obvious during our current pandemic. And for this we can thank a brilliant, drug-addled surgeon who fell for his whip-smart nurse.”
Science History: Nathaniel Kleitman Helps us Rest Easier | COSMOS Magazine
“When Kleitman died in California on 13 August 1999, aged 104, a University of Chicago obituary described him as “the world's first scholar to concentrate entirely on sleep” and “universally recognised as the father of sleep research”.
It says that before him, “few scientists had systematically investigated the intricacies of sleep, which had previously been dismissed as a state of quiescence”.
“Invisible Little Worms” Athanasius Kircher’s Study of the Plague | The Public Domain Review
“Although the epidemic continued for more than a year, many of these tactics did help prevent the spread of the disease. The effects of the plague in Rome were much less devastating than in Naples — only about fifteen thousand people died. But living through it was frightening. One figure who did: the fairly eccentric, extremely prolific Jesuit scholar Athanasius Kircher.”
A Complete History of Pandemics | The MIT Press Reader
“As far as unpredictable discontinuities are concerned, only one somatic threat trumps all of this: we remain highly vulnerable to another episode of viral pandemic. “
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 Food That Could Las 2,000 Years | BBC Future
“Even in their emaciated condition, the botanists at the institute defended the stores with their lives. They feared desperate people would storm the gene bank and eat their way through their life’s work, or invading forces would destroy the building to prevent its contents being used.
When the Red Army of the Soviet Union finally managed to lift the siege on 18 January 1943, almost two and a half years after it began, the seed bank was still intact.”