Search

The article discusses the recurring issue of water shortages and droughts at the Panama Canal, which has led to restrictions on ship traffic and disruptions to global trade. The construction and expansion of the canal, along with the increase in maritime traffic, have contributed to this problem. The article challenges the narrative of the canal as a triumph of human conquest over nature, highlighting the negative environmental consequences and the displacement of marginalized communities. It emphasizes the need to understand the complex relationship between infrastructure, water supply, and socioeconomic demand in order to address the issue effectively. [Extracted from the article]

Greater labor migration can establish more channels for information flows, directly contributing to faster economic growth and improved innovation and work. It can also expand international remittances, which can be invested by recipient households in home countries in education, entrepreneurship, and improved and sustainable agricultural technologies. At the same time, however, increased emigration of medical professionals and technical workers from poor countries can reduce quality of local services, innovation, health status, and productivity. This analysis attempts to quantify the economic benefits and costs of permitting an immediate 10% increase in the bilateral migration of skilled workers (physicians, engineers or science, engineering, technology, and mathematics workers, and other persons with advanced educations) among the nations of the African Continental Free Trade Area and, more broadly, among 25 global regions. Economic benefits include higher migrant incomes abroad, welfare gains in destination countries associated with higher economic efficiency, spillover productivity gains, and an improved ability of the younger and more skilled working force to support the needs of the wider population, resulting in higher national production. Benefits in source countries include productivity enhancements from two sources: (a) greater access to knowledge associated with more bilateral trade and investment and (b) the ability of local households to invest remittances in productivity-enhancing activities. Welfare losses in source nations include static efficiency reductions and a worsened demographic support capability. In Africa, the benefit-cost ratios range from 3.7 to 6.9; in the global analysis, 17 to 38. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

During the First World War, the American home front was awash with conspiracy theories alleging that internal German enemies were intentionally spreading disease among both human and animal populations, most egregiously in the case of the influenza epidemic. While false, these stories nonetheless revealed Americans' shifting relationships to the environment, warfare, and the federal state. They channeled immediate fears over what type of war, and what type of enemy, the nation faced, as well as deeper, Progressive-era anxieties related to the dramatic expansions of government and scientific expertise in American life. As an unexplored vernacular archive, they underline how the war permitted individuals to discuss, denounce, and contest state and scientific authority at this moment in the early twentieth century. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The twentieth century saw unprecedented efforts to measure, analyze, and control the world's population. Particularly after World War II, population control and demography—the social science of human population dynamics—developed in tandem and largely through the impetus of U.S.-based philanthropies. This article explains how U.S. actors exercised power over population in sovereign nations throughout the Global South and how demographic theory came to shape population policy worldwide. It contends that U.S.-based philanthropies gained global traction for their population control projects by developing demography as an ally and then leveraging its scientific authority to put population control on the foreign policy agenda of the U.S. government and on the nation-building and economic development agendas of countries in the Global South. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Brazil has encouraged an ambitious set of policies towards the pharmaceutical industry, aiming to foster technological development while meeting health requirements. We characterise these efforts, labelled the 'Complexo Industrial da Saúde' (Health-Industry Complex, CIS), as an outcome of incremental policy change backed by the sustained efforts of public health professionals within the federal bureaucracy. As experts with a particular vision of the relationship between health, innovation and industry came to dominate key institutions, they increasingly shaped government responses to emerging challenges. Step by step, these professionals first made science and technology essential aspects of Brazil's health policy, and then merged the Ministry of Health's new focus on science, technology and health with industrial policy measures aimed at private firms. We contrast our depiction of these policy changes with a conventional view that relies on a partisan orientation of the executive. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In January 2018, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists (BAS) moved its Doomsday Clock closer to midnight: it now reads 11:58. The last time the minute hand was this close to the hour of Armageddon was 1953, just after the United States and Soviet Union tested thermonuclear bombs. Since then the stylized clock has ticked backward and forward, each year metaphorically registering civilization's proximity to global catastrophe. "To call the world's nuclear situation dire," the group warned in its January statement, "is to understate the danger—and its immediacy." [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article describes the collective viewing of images projected from an eighteenth-century solar microscope at the Deutsche Museum in Munich. The act of collective viewing encouraged discussions between the observers and generated new understanding in science and history either through controversy or through consensus.

This article examines the reception of the British Association for the Advancement of Science (BAAS) annual meetings in different urban locations. It also explores how different location and section within the BAAS influenced the associations main aim of promotion of science.

This article investigates the history of the development of the radio echo-sounding technique used to examine the sub-glacial morphology of Antarctica. Even though accidents were responsible for the development of the RES programme, its exploitation depended on international scientific and political relations for creating interest in newfound scientific methods and technical tools.

This article examines the projections from a solar microscope and discusses the reasons for the popularity of solar microscope in the eighteenth century. These instruments produce projections of superior quality that can be viewed and discussed in a group and does not need any previous experience in microscopic images.

This article uses the terms science, techniques and technology as tool for analyzing the working of power and governmental practices in the field of agriculture in late imperial China. These three terms are not separate activities but overlapping phases of matter and ideas of an organic process used in the production of knowledge.

The importance of natural philosophy in Masonic rhetoric is illustrated and material from Masonic sources, lodge records and secondary works is used to demonstrate that scientific lectures were often delivered in some lodges. Other sources of inspiration for Freemasonry besides Newtonianism, such as antiquarianism are acknowledged.

Contemporary assessments of Mary Somerville's scientific worth are as mixed as those in the 1830s. Somerville's unique position as a popularizer and an educator of science is examined with the aid of the literature of the time including her own writings.

In spite of contributing greatly to thermodynamics and to the metaphysical interpretation of heat theory, The Alsatian physicist-engineer and philosopher Gustave-Adolphe Hirn did not quite get the recognition he deserved and desired in his lifetime. This was partially due to his living in the relatively isolated Alsace but more likely it was the result of Hirn's particular scientific practice conflicting with the well-established practices of other French scientists and engineers.

The extent to which professional scientists were involved in popular science writing in early twentieth-century Britain is examined along with the role played by publishers. Parallels are drawn between popular science writing in this period and the present state of popular writing about the history of science.

Albertus Magnus who drew his inspiration from Avicenna introduced the forma fluens/fluxus formae debate to the Latin West. The argument that Magnus misclassified Avicenna's position is followed by a detailed treatment of Avicenna's analysis of motion at an instant.

The staff of the Dublin National History Museum began a rearrangement of their collection to include an educational display and zoological collection to include cases on the history and geographical distribution of animals. These cases explicitly depicted the main arguments of Charles Darwin's 'On the Origin of Species' where they invited the visitor to examine the remainder of the collection in terms of evolution by natural selection.

The Woodwardian professorship of geology at the University of Cambridge was once again vacant after more than half a century in 1873. Nine geologists stepped forward to fill the vacancy and prove their geological respectability by collecting testimonials from estimable geological acquaintances.

A case study of an early Dutch meteorological society that helped to determine the weather of Netherlands and the kinds of instruments used to measure meteorological parameters is presented. An analysis of this process revealed that limits on the advancement of meteorology were not only imposed by instrumentation and organization, but financing and the scientific infrastructure of the old-eighteenth century Dutch Republic were also crucial factors that hampered meteorological development in Netherlands.

Flemming Jenkin's swamping argument is re-examined in relation to subsequent criticisms of its assumptions. Jenkin's argument depended on the assumption of blending inheritance; when modified to remove the 'flaw' in his model, it ceased to present a barrier to the operation of natural selection with a lineage, provided that the mutuation rate was high enough to maintain adequate genetic variability under blending.

C.A. Coulson's teaching activities, writing textbooks and delivering popular science lectures, as well as his popular lectures on religion and the scientific sermons delivered in his capacity are explored. Coulson wove the threads of a world view uniting science and religion, but chose to redefine the terms of the dialogue in a way that made it independent from considerations stemming from a particular set of scientific theories, or from a specific denominational viewpoint.

The usefulness of the category 'interest' in the history of technology through a case study of the failed attempt to introduce atmospheric railway traction in the Britain in the 1840s is discussed. The history of atmospheric traction demonstrates the interlocking of railway 'interests', and their utility in explaining the success or failure of railway technologies.

The bridges that Banus built between the experimental culture of organic chemistry at the ETH and the University of Barcelona have been analyzed. A case study, which aims to provide new historical data for the general analysis of groups who conducted their work in the European periphery, has been presented.

The position of portraiture as inherently linked to nobility has been explored and an explanation as to why the original oil painting of Elias Allen might have been made has been sought. The possible reasons for Wenceslaus Hollar's production of the engraving some twenty years after the original have been discussed.

Francesco Algarotti's Newtonianism for ladies (1737), a series of lively dialogues on optics, has been a landmark in the popularization of Newtonian philosophy. Algarotti's sociocultural world, his aims and the meaning attached to his work have been explored.

Silvanus Phillips Thompson supported scientists who did science for their own personal edification, in their free time. He believed that such work was edifying, and valuable to society, which reflected his Quaker religious views. The scientific career is seen as not just a job, but a way of life.

Ralph Howard Fowler and Nevil Vincent Sidgwick supported the combination of physics and chemistry into the new discipline of quantum chemistry in early 20th century Britain. They encountered substantial opposition to their movement, which would eventually result in a fruitful marriage of the two disciplines.

Denis Diderot's writings in his Encyclopedie are investigated views on the legality of intellectual property in 18th-century France, especially his response to a pamphelet about painting with wax. He regarded artwork as exclusive to the artist, while seeing inventions as part of the public domain.

Alfred Russel Wallace's theories of natural selection, and how they influence and are affected by Robert Owen's socialism, are described. The role of animal instinct in society, as opposed to learned activities, is debated.

John Playfair's Elements of Geometry is analyzed for its treatment of the notions of analysis and synthesis in mathematics. Nineteenth-century students learned math with this book, whose information was taken from Euclid.

Franz Joseph Gall measured the size and shape of skulls in order to determine human personality traits. He started the field of phrenology by lecturing in Germany in the late 19th century.

Antoine Laurent Lavoisier's elementary chemical analysis of the 18th century is analyzed and compared to that of his contemporaries. His categorical and elementary analysis preceded the chemistry of today.

Karl Friedrich Zollner invented the first widely used astronomical photometer. The instrument provided a way for scientists to share their findings with others, and to conduct research. It was used to throw images of stars on ceilings, and to enlarge views of small, organic processes.

Isaac Newton's philosophy supported the idea of a pure, original religion and working of nature that is degraded with time, and then reinforced by the hand of God. With this idea, he formed the basis for a mathematical representation of fluxions, or calculus.

Isaac Newton adhered to the Christian world view, which stated that all natural phenomena were the will and reflection of God. His theory of color follows in this vein, with illumination and the colors of illumination divinely created, and following specific rules.

Francis Bacon's philosophy outlines a theory of 'idols of the mind,' or those things which keep humans from seeing the truth. These idols come in several forms, including cultural, personal, and philosophical ideas which are false. His idols of the mind are shown to coincide with the beginnings of a philosophy of objectivity.

Francis Galton studied twins in an effort to discover how different traits are given to a person, and how many are learned. In particular, he investigates the relation of social class and intellect to the environment and heredity of a child.

Eighteenth-century brewer John Richardson measured the pounds-per-barrel extract measurement of alcoholic quantity in the brewing industry by using a saccarometer. The number of pounds per barrel, or alcohol level, had been set at certain levels for taxation purposes, but there was no way to ascertain strength. Richardson was able to prove that a certain amount of alcohol was actually contained in each barrel.