Whewell’s Gazette
Your weekly digest of all the best of
Internet history of science, technology and medicine
Editor in Chief: The Ghost of William Whewell
Volume #6
Monday 28 July 2014
EDITORIAL:
Another week and another edition of the history of science, medicine and technology weekly digest for your delectation. This weeks featured birthday is British biophysicist and X-ray crystallographer Rosalind Franklin who was born 25 July 1920 and gained fame chiefly for her picture of the DNA crystal. Now it might have been the case in earlier decades that Franklin did not receive the acknowledgement for her scientific achievements that she deserved but that is now history and Franklin’s contribution to the discovery of the structure of DNA and the injustice that was possibly done to her has been written about, lectured on, broadcast in TV and radio and generally made very, very public, so could the Franklin fan club please stop moaning about it and instead maybe emphasise some of her other equally important scientific work; she wasn’t just a one trick pony.
ON THE WEB BLOGS AND WEBSITES:
BIRTHDAYS OF THE WEEK: Rosalind Franklin
Chemical Heritage Foundation: James Watson, Francis Crick, Maurice Wilkins, and Rosalind Franklin
The Primate Diaries: Rosalind Franklin and the Discovery of DNA
Yovisto: Rosalind Franklin and the Beauty of the DNA Structure
PHYSICS & ASTRONOMY:
AEON: Cognitive celebrity: Albert Einstein was a genius, but he wasn’t the only one
Corpus Newtonicum: Newton’s Working Practices (2) – I did it my way …
Symmetry: Exploratorium exhibit reveals the invisible
Yovisto: Friedrich Bessel and the Distances of Stars
Blink: Newton on the Ganges
New York Times: TV preview: Testing the Big Kaboom Theory: ‘Manh(a)ttan’, Atomic Bomb Drama on WGN
Science News: Logarithms celebrate their 400th birthday
Slate The Vault: A physicist eyewitness sketches the first atomic test
EXPLORATION:
NOAA Coast Survey: Whistler hints at artistic flair during Coast Survey stint
Yovisto: Joseph Nicollet and the Upper Mississippi River
The Journals of the Lewis and Clark Expedition
MEDICINE:
Ask the Past: How to Improve Hearing, 1658
Nursing Clio: Desertion, Martial Manhood, and Mental Illness
Othmeralia: A Movable Atlas Showing the Mechanism of Vision
Circulating Now: The “Wound Man” in Two Recent Acquisitions
Boing boing: This is a 19th-century breastpump
The Recipes Project: A Peculiar Late Babylonian Recipe for Fumigation Against Epilepsy
Science made Easy: What can we learn from the Liverpool Cholera Riots?
Social History of Medicine Virtual Issue: Disease, Health & the State
Conciatore: Francesco and Bianca: were they poisoned?
CHEMISTRY:
Chemical Heritage Society: Chemical Heritage Magazine
EARTH & LIFE SCIENCES:
The Embryo Project: Edward B Lewis
The Embryo Project: Charles Darwin’s Theory of Pangenesis
Discover: Inkfish: How to Lose a Finger, and Other Things I Learned from Darwin’s Library
Yovisto: Thomas Say and his Love for Beetles
Scientific American: 250-Year-Old Eyewitness Accounts of Icier Arctic Attest to Loss of Sea Ice
Chemical Heritage Foundation: True Science, Fake History: Francesco Redi
Parks & Gardens UK: Elephants and the royal menagerie…
Trowel Blazers: Annie Pirie Quibell
Robert Hooke’s London: Micrographia inspires artists and creative writers
New York Academy of Medicine: Robert Hooke’s Micrographia (Item of the Month)
TECHNOLOGY:
Go East London: Dr John C Taylor OBE Contributes to Greenwich ‘Ships, Clocks and Stars’ Exhibition
Conciatore: True Colour Reprise
Slate The Vault: 19th-century Japanese prints showing the trials of Western inventors
Medieval manuscripts blog: Conservation in the 17th Century
Video: Diana and Stag Automaton (c 1610) in Motion
Classically Inclined: The vexed question of the departmental photocopier, circa 1903
Epoch Times: 1600-Year-Old Goblet Shows Romans Used Nanotechnology
Yovisto: It’s a computer! – The fabulous Commodore Amiga
Yovisto: Isaac Singer and the Sewing Machine
Fornax Chimiae: Geared to the Stars
Retronaut: 1931: Airport on top of King’s Cross Station London
Laughing Squid: A Brief History of the Theremin, An Eerie-Sounding Early Electronic Instrument That Gave Rise to the Synthesizer
National Museum of American History: Are these John Wilkes Booth’s field glasses?
META:- HISTORIOGRAPHY, THEORY, RESOURCES and OTHER:
Leila Write Stuff: Creating an Inderdisciplinary Syllabus: The Moon as a Cultural Phenomena
The Appendix: Honey, You’re Scaring the Kids
Brain Flapping: Great moments in science (if Twitter had existed)
Guardian: From Roots to Riches: the power of plants – podcast
Books and Culture: The Two Cultures, Then and Now
Conciatore: Don Giovanni in Flanders
Ptak Science Books: On Historical Equalities of Garbage
The Daily Beast: The Scopes Monkey Trial 2.0: It’s Not About the Stupid Science-Deniers
The Royal Institution: Spotlight on Harriet Jane Moore
The Royal Society: Podcast: Cultivating Eureka
Social Minds: Cultivating Eureka written summary
Brain Pickings: Amelia Earhart on Marriage
io9: Einstein’s Advice to Women in Science Still Relevant More Than 60 Years Later
Uncertain Principles: Ten Inessential Papers in Quantum Physics
Ether Wave Propaganda: From Biosocial Anthropology to Social Biology: Some Thoughts on Intellectual Communities in the Post-war Sciences
Compass Wallah: Reading list: A Garden of Stars
ESOTERIC:
Leaping Robot: Timothy Leary SMI2Les at Carl Sagan
Medievalists Net: Murder, Alchemy and the War of the Roses
BOOK REVIEWS:
OSWEGO State University of New York: New book traces science advances to ancient Asian culture
NPR Books: How Scientists Created a Typhus Vaccine In a ‘Fantastic Laboratory
The Lancet: We are the dead: The Sick Rose: Or, Disease and the Art of Medical Illustration
Social History of Medicine: Hilary Marland, Health and Girlhood in Britain, 1874-1920
ANNOUNCEMENTS:
New Book: UBC Press: Daniel Macfarlane ‘Negotiating a River
Early Modern Experimental Philosophy: Colloquium: Principles in Early< Modern Thought
Darwin Correspondence Project: Letters Course: Letters as a Primary Source
Television: WGN’s “Manhattan” series premiere to scintillate viewers with science, secrets & sex
American Museum of Natural History: Exhibition: Natural Histories: 400 Years of Scientific Illustrations from the Museum Library
Heterodoxology: Lecture: August 6th: Andreas Kilcher lectures on “Materialization: Occult Research on the Soul”.
Jurassic London: New Book: “Irregularity” is about the tension between order and chaos in the 17th and 18th centuries
Gravity Fields: 17th Century Masterchef 28 September
LOOKING FOR WORK?
British Science Association: New vision, new structure, new opportunities:- New Jobs!
Max Planck Institute for the History of Science: Head Librarian
Lancaster University: Part-time Senior Research Associate Working on the MHRA funded Davy Letters Project
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