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This paper compares changing patterns of science news over a period of 50 years. The study analyses a biannual corpus of 2800 news articles in Britain (the Daily Telegraph) and 5800 in Bulgaria (Rabotnichesko Delo), and shows divergent and convergent trends. Britain carries considerably more science news than Bulgaria all through the period, while the coverage shows parallel swings: increasing intensity during the 1950s, a turning point in the early 1960s, declining into the 1970s, and rising again in the 1980s and 1990s. Media coverage in both countries shows similar swings in public appeal. The trends in the medicalization of science news, the reporting of controversy and the evaluation of science diverge in the two contexts. The paper concludes with speculative explanations of these results. Similarities and differences in these long-term trends point to common factors and specific differences at work on either side of the (former) 'Iron Curtain'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines how feminist politics are made to ‘stick’ to appropriated technologies in the context of a contemporary feminist women’s health clinic in the US. Feminist clinics such as ‘FemHealth’, founded as part of 1970s women’s health movements, put medical tools and knowledge into lay women’s hands, making the appropriation of medical technologies a centerpiece of their political project. In the process, they rejected the authority of physicians and gave new politicized meanings to the tools they claimed as their own. As lay healthworkers at FemHealth continued the project of appropriation, they also continued to negotiate their dependence on physicians to perform tasks that required a medical license. Drawing on participant observation and interviews with healthworkers, I argue that struggles over the role and authority of physicians in this clinic play out through debates over two similar and competing tools used in the abortion procedure: the single-tooth tenaculum and the cervical stabilizer. Many healthworkers invested in the stabilizer as ‘inherently feminist’ in hopes that it would maintain its politics even when passed into physicians’ hands. While appropriation depends on the ability of users to alter a technology’s meanings, actors may feel invested in the new politics taken on by appropriated tools and work towards making those meanings persist, or ‘stick’. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]