history of science 
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SOURCE: Made By History at the Washington Post
7/11/2023
Ozempic is the Latest Vain Pursuit of a Scientific Solution to Addiction
by Simon Torracinta
Now that the diabetes drug has been used off-label to suppress appetite, scientists are speculating about its use to suppress neurological aspects of addictive behavior. History suggests this is misguided.
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SOURCE: New York Times
6/9/2023
Science Historian: Apollo 11 Quarantine after Moon Landing For Show
Dagomar DeGroot's research shows that NASA scientists were aware of the tiny, but potentially catastrophic, risk of moon-earth contamination, and that quarantining the spacecraft and crew would do little to mitigate the risk but could convince the public that authorities were taking precautions.
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SOURCE: TIME
5/9/2023
There's Never Been a Right Way to Read
by Adrian Johns
The intellectual work and play of reading has always competed with other demands on attention; only recently have science and commerce converged to sell remedies for distraction and proprietary methods for reading.
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SOURCE: Nature
4/17/2023
Medical Drawings of Pregnancy Have Centered Fetuses and Uteruses—While Erasing Women
Early depictions of the fetus in utero—imaginative as much as descriptive—were a boon to obstetric medicine, but also placed the fetus above the mother in terms of the medical system's concern, contends medical historian Rebecca Whiteley
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SOURCE: The Conversation
4/5/2023
Racist Interpretations of Human Evolution Remain Prevalent in Popular Culture, Museums, and Textbooks
by Rui Diogo
Science has never been immune from the prejudices and assumptions of the society around it. Much of the received wisdom about human origins and evolution rests on flawed assumptions about group hierarchies.
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SOURCE: The Guardian
3/19/2023
Stephen Hawking to Collaborator: "Brief History of Time" was All Wrong
Now, five years after the prominent cosmologist's death, his collaborator Thomas Hertog will release a book updating the wildly popular book that explained cutting-edge theories of the origins of the universe to the reading public.
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2/12/2023
Scientists: The Unsung Heroes of the American West
by Elliott West
From animal husbandry to epidemiology, the work of scientists was critical to America's conquest of the west, while the region also provided critical evidence in the debate over Darwin's theory of natural selection.
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SOURCE: Distillations
2/7/2023
Origin Stories: How Science Invented the Idea of Race
The Science History Institute presents a new podcast series on the development of the idea of race in the context of Enlightement, colonialism and empire.
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SOURCE: New York Times
1/12/2023
Exxon's Scientists Predicted Warming for Decades While Exxon Executives Sowed Doubt
Predictions made by Exxon's own scientists beginning in the 1970s accurately tracked the actual progress of subsequent warming, and those scientists explicitly contradicted dismissals of anthropogenic climate change linked to fossil fuels.
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SOURCE: Science
1/13/2023
Historians of Science: What Exxon Knew About Oil and the Climate, and When
Exxon Mobil's internal documents show that since the late 1970s the company's researchers agreed with academic scientists' predictions of global warming—but continued for decades to pretend that the science was too uncertain to justify constraining the industry.
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SOURCE: Zócalo
12/19/2022
Today's Tech Bro and the Victorian Genius Both Reflect a False Narrative of Progress
by Iwan Rhys Morus
The cults of "disruption" and genius obscure the fact that innovation is typically cooperative, and dependent on a society that sustains and implements new knowledge.
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SOURCE: Science
12/2/2022
Human Geneticists Begin Moving Away from Using "Race" to Identify Human Populations
Recognizing the social construction of "race" categories, geneticists have largely stopped using the term. Is this because they have abandoned the idea of profound divisions among human populations, or have they adapted other terminology to perform the same function?
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SOURCE: Washington Post
10/17/2022
Physicist's Side Project: 1,750 Wikipedia Bios for Overlooked Women Scientists
Popular understanding of the history of science and the contemporary role of women in STEM is undermined by the further underrepresentation of women in Wikipedia biography pages. Jess Wade is working to change that.
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SOURCE: Chronicle of Higher Education
9/29/2022
How Fossil Fuel Dollars Warped University Climate Research
Fossil fuel profit "secures favorable white papers, journals, societies, public-policy comments, courtroom testimony, and front groups that attack what the industry sees as damaging science," copying the 1950s playbook of the tobacco industry with more money and higher stakes.
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SOURCE: Boston Review
9/26/2022
Just Wear Your Smile: The Gender Politics of Positive Psychology
by Micki McElya
Positive Psychology, a supposed science of producing happiness, is part of a multibillion-dollar publishing market. Unfortunately, it's helped enshrine patriarchal values into the popular practice of psychology.
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SOURCE: Chronicle of Higher Education
9/8/2022
Steven Shapin on the Trust Inherent in Science
The historian of science has examined the social relationships of credibility that must prevail for scientific expertise to exist, and also critiqued the evolving conventions of wine-tasting terminology from "Old BS" to "New BS."
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SOURCE: Boston Review
9/12/2022
Review: Scientific Thought and Windows on Reality
by Philip Kitcher
The fierce debates over vaccines, masking, and other COVID mitigations have unsettled the security of "science" as a source of authoritative knowledge. A new book discusses the long debates about how scientific knowledge is produced, and how it becomes "The Science."
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SOURCE: Boston Review
5/17/2022
What if Mental Illness Isn't All In Your Head?
by Marco Ramos
A historian of mental health reviews two new books and concludes that pharmaceutical and neurological approaches to mental health have failed and it's time to turn the lens onto society.
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SOURCE: The Atlantic
4/28/2022
Dog Breed Stereotypes are Poor Guides to Behavior; Historian Explains Why they Are So Common
Science Historian Michael Worboys explains that the Victorian craze for dog breeding enshrined both a focus on dogs' outward appearances and the idea that heredity was all-important to a dog's quality, leading to frequent disappointment for owners who find their pets don't fit expectations.
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SOURCE: The Atlantic
4/19/2022
These Books Tell of Change Happening Slowly, then Suddenly
Historians Lynn Hunt, Adam Hochschild, Kate Clifford-Larse and Keenaga-Yamahtta Taylor are among the authors whose books dig beneath the surface of famous leaders to describe how social movements built the strength to change laws, institutions and ideas.
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