history of science

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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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• SOURCE: Boston Globe
  4/16/2022
  

  Darwin's Enduring Hold on Our Imaginations

  by Tom Chaffin

  The excitement that greeted the return of missing notebooks by the British naturalist reflect the fact that his work, while foundational, remains both controversial and poorly understood. 

• 
• SOURCE: The Atlantic
  2/10/2022
  

  Why Following Joe Rogan Seems Easier than Following the Science

  by Yair Rosenberg

  "But in order for this science to be followed, it has to include the science of how people interact with each other. In other words, there has got to be a science of the virus, and there’s also got to be a science of society."

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• SOURCE: New York Times
  1/3/2022
  

  Richard Leakey, Finder of Fossils Key to Story of Human Origins, Dies at 77

  Leakey's discoveries were foundational both to the study of human origins and the model of scientific investigation. 

• 
• SOURCE: New York Times
  10/12/2021
  

  History of Past Pandemics Shows COVID Will Be an Era, not an Event

  Medical and Science Historians Allan Brandt, Jeremy Greene, Frank Snowden and Jonathan Moreno argue that we are unlikely to experience any clear end of the COVID pandemic. 

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• 10/3/2021
  

  Latitude: The Pioneering International Mission to Measure the Earth

  by Nicholas Crane

  The scientists and technicians of the Geodetic Mission to the Equator did more than measure a degree of latitude; they showed how a disparate group of human beings from different countries and backgrounds could pool their collective resources and solve problems.

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• SOURCE: The Nation
  9/7/2021
  

  Carl Zimmer's Planet of Viruses and the Politics of Popular Science Writing

  by Danielle Carr

  Carl Zimmer's work as a science popularizer has been hailed as a key to bringing Americans on board with public health measures in the pandemic. But does his approach to writing about the science of viruses obscure the context of politics in which science unfolds? 

• 
• SOURCE: Times of Israel
  8/27/2021
  

  Researchers Work on Mystery Uranium Cubes to Better Understand Nazi Progress on Atomic Bomb

  New forensic research techniques could fill in missing details of the progress of Nazi nuclear weapons programs and improve contemporary efforts to enforce nuclear nonproliferation. 

• 
• SOURCE: Chicago Tribune
  8/25/2021
  

  Noel Swerdlow, U. of C. Professor who Won a Macarthur ‘Genius Grant,’ Dies at 79

  Noel Swerdlow wove together the humanities and the sciences through his study of the history of science.

• 
• SOURCE: Inverse
  8/4/2021
  

  Proto-Geometry Found in Babylonian Tablet, a Thousand Years Older than Pythagoras

  "It’s generally thought that trigonometry — a subset of geometry and what’s displayed on the tablet in a crude sense — was developed by ancient Greeks like the philosopher Pythagoras. However, analysis of the tablet suggests it was created 1,000 years before Pythagoras was born."

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• SOURCE: Boston Review
  8/4/2021
  

  UFOs and the Boundaries of Science

  by Greg Eghigian

  The history of the UFO phenomenon is a lens on to the process by which scientists police the bounds of respectable inquiry. 

• 
• 6/20/2021
  

  Recovering the Stories of Pioneering Frenchwomen of Science

  by Nina Gelbart

  The stories of six French women of science show that women have been part of the scientific revolution from the beginning, and that moving toward gender parity in professional science is imperative.

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• SOURCE: Boston Review
  5/25/2021
  

  The Feminist Past History Can't Give Us

  by Paula Findlen

  "What it really meant to be a woman of science three centuries ago is not so easily conscripted into contemporary narratives of feminist liberation."