Science History

Due to a loss of scientific relevance, which has led to scarcity of personnel and thus decreasing government funding, Italian natural history museums are on the verge of collapse.  A new paper in Zookeys proposes that the existing museums associate and collaborate to form a diffused structure, able to better manage their scientific collections and share resources and personnel. Basically, they need to be a little more corporate and start consolidating rather than relying on government to some day boost funding. Countries like America, England and France have a national museum acting as…

Instead of dying out, Anti-Semitic myths have withstood the test of time. By Asa Simon Mittman, California State University, Chico 800 years ago, a monk named Thomas of Monmouth wrote a bogus account of the life of St. William, a Christian boy supposedly abducted by “the Jews” of Norwich. A boy – “like an innocent lamb” – is lured into the Jewish community, bound, and tortured in a horrific fashion that mimics the torture of Jesus in the Gospels. William is crucified, stabbed in the side, and dies. Thomas tells us the boy is inducted into the ranks of martyrs. This story should be a footnote…

Abraham Lincoln. Wikipedia By Joanna Cohen, Queen Mary University of London Voters going to the polls in Illinois’s 12th congressional district in this year’s US midterm elections have a choice to make: Do they want a Congressman who is reserved, calm, the model of a modern politician? Or do they want one who’s earned the nickname “Meltdown Mike”, thanks to an outburst of uncontrollable rage on the floor of the Illinois House of Representatives in 2012? This is not as clear a choice as it might seem. Republican Mike Bost and his supporters have not tried to shrug off the tirade, in which Bost…

Not the one we have fixed in our imaginations. Peter Paul Rubens, 1638 By Helen King, The Open University Hippocrates is considered the father of medicine, enemy of superstition, pioneer of rationality and fount of eternal wisdom. Statues and drawings show him with a furrowed brow, thinking hard about how to heal his patients. And today, the Internet is full of claims that if you follow a supposedly Hippocratic diet of raw organic foods or concentrate on one of his alleged favorite foods, such as watercress, you will be healed. The most famous of the treatises linked to his name over time is…

Since the dawn of time, man has interacted with the environment. Observation without interaction is and always was a logical impossibility. Questions ensue; answers have not always been forthcoming, although they do emerge through incremental shifts and the occasional bout of sudden inspiration. Scientists and researchers look for answers every day. It is the very pervading core and definition of our vocation; much like that of a Philosopher. We pursue an almost primal need to understand the universe and thereby make people’s lives easier. The scientific knowledge accumulated in the last…

The Tambora volcanic eruption in 1815 is famous for its impact on climate worldwide. As a result, the year 1816 was given memorable names such as 'Eighteen-Hundred-and-Froze-to-Death', the 'Year of the Beggar' and the 'Year Without a Summer' because of cold weather and unseasonable frosts, crop failure and famine across Europe and North America.  Some even claim the conditions inspired literary works such as Byron's 'Darkness' and Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. What is known is that the global deterioration of the 1810s into the coldest decade of the last 500 years actually started six…

Richard III, in better days. Credit: Lex Photographic, CC BY-NC By Sarah Hainsworth, University of Leicester The discovery of Richard III’s skeletal remains under a car park in Leicester revealed the final resting place of the last English monarch to die in battle. We know that he was killed at the Battle of Bosworth Field on August 22 1485 but not about what ultimately proved fatal. Using modern forensic examination, we have now discovered that Richard’s skeleton sustained 11 wounds at or near the time of his death – nine of them to the skull, which were clearly inflicted in battle. The…

Or abandon hope? Credit: chrisdorney By Tim Crook, Goldsmiths, University of London The Old Bailey’s Central Criminal Court is an Edwardian building that bears the inscription “Defend the children of the poor and Punish the wrongdoer.” An Italian visitor more than 100 years ago suggested it should be replaced with an aphorism from Dante’s Inferno: “Abandon All Hope Ye Who Enter here.” A sobering thought. And we can eavesdrop on such hopeless cases in a BBC radio show called Voices From The Old Bailey, which is now online for at least a year. The most recent episode dramatized the courageous…

By Mark Beeson, Murdoch University Like him or loathe him, the late Samuel Huntington was one of the towering figures in political science and international relations. Even those who disagreed with his ideas were forced to engage with them. He helped shape a number of key debates about areas as diverse as civil-military relations, political order, institutional development and the spread of democracy. But if there is one ‘big idea’ for which he is likely to be remembered more than any other it is the now infamous claim that the future was going to be defined by a looming ‘clash of…

A 13th century bishop’s theory about the formation of the universe has intriguing parallels with the theory of multiple universes. This was uncovered by the the Ordered Universe project at Durham University, which has brought together researchers from humanities and the sciences in a radically collaborative way. The project explores the conceptual world of Robert Grosseteste, one of the most dazzling minds of his generation (1170 to 1253): sometime bishop of Lincoln, church reformer, theologian, poet, politician, and one of the first to absorb, teach and debate new texts on natural phenomena…