History of science

Nineteenth-century paleontologists boasted that, shown a single bone, they could identify or even reconstruct the extinct creature it came from with infallible certainty-"e;Show me the bone, and I will describe the animal!

Questions of national identity have long dominated China's political, social, and cultural horizons.

Neither Donkey nor Horse tells the story of how Chinese medicine was transformed from the antithesis of modernity in the early twentieth century into a potent symbol of and vehicle for China's exploration of its own modernity half a century later.

The nineteenth century was an age of transformation in science, when scientists were rewarded for their startling new discoveries with increased social status and authority.

Galileo never set foot on the Iberian Peninsula, yet, as Enrique Garcia Santo-Tomas unfolds in The Refracted Muse, the news of his work with telescopes brought him to surprising prominence-not just among Spaniards working in the developing science of optometry but among creative writers as well.

The last decades of the Ming dynasty, though plagued by chaos and destruction, saw a significant increase of publications that examined advances in knowledge and technology.

The end of the eighteenth century saw the start of a new craze in Europe: tiny portraits of single eyes that were exchanged by lovers or family members.

Of all the senses, touch is the most ineffable-and the most neglected in Western culture, all but ignored by philosophers and artists over millennia.

"e;Kuhn has the unmistakable address of a man, who, so far from wanting to score points, is anxious above all else to get at the truth of matters.

These days, hysteria is known as a discredited diagnosis that was used to group and pathologize a wide range of conditions and behaviors in women.

The most prominent naturalist in Britain before Charles Darwin, Richard Owen made empirical discoveries and offered theoretical innovations that were crucial to the proof of evolution.

Between 1949 and 1955, the State Department pushed for an international fisheries policy grounded in maximum sustainable yield (MSY).

What does it mean to hear scientifically?

This handbook features essays written by both literary scholars and mathematicians that examine multiple facets of the connections between literature and mathematics.

Why do we eat?

Between the 1890s and the early 1920s, the boll weevil slowly ate its way across the Cotton South from Texas to the Atlantic Ocean.

Are our identities attached to our faces?

While there is enormous public interest in biodiversity, food sourcing, and sustainable agriculture, romantic attachments to heirloom seeds and family farms have provoked misleading fantasies of an unrecoverable agrarian past.

The injuries suffered by soldiers during WWI were as varied as they were brutal.

In recent years, emotions have become a major, vibrant topic of research not merely in the biological and psychological sciences but throughout a wide swath of the humanities and social sciences as well.

Why-against his mentor's exhortations to publish-did Charles Darwin take twenty years to reveal his theory of evolution by natural selection?

Plant breeders have long sought technologies to extend human control over nature.

Mice are used as model organisms across a wide range of fields in science today-but it is far from obvious how studying a mouse in a maze can help us understand human problems like alcoholism or anxiety.

This book, in language accessible to the general reader, investigates twelve of the most notorious, most interesting, and most instructive episodes involving the interaction between science and Christianity, aiming to tell each story in its historical specificity and local particularity.

Does science aim at providing an account of the world that is literally true or objectively true?

What did the Romans know about their world?

This book provides a general introduction to fluid mechanics in the form of biographies and popular science.

This book seeks to understand what bring to pass the birth of modern physics by focusing upon the formation of the concept of force.

In 1957 two young scientists, Matthew Meselson and Frank Stahl, produced a landmark experiment confirming that DNA replicates as predicted by the double helix structure Watson and Crick had recently proposed.

An award-winning science writer presents a captivating collection of cosmological essays for the armchair astronomerThe galaxy, the multiverse, and the history of astronomy are explored in this engaging compilation of cosmological tales by multiple-award-winning science writer Marcia Bartusiak.

In 1952, Martin Gardner wrote the book Fads and Fallacies in the Name of Science, which has become a modern classic of the skeptical movement.

A unique, beautifully illustrated exploration of our fascination with our closest primate relatives, and the development of primatology as a discipline This insightful work is a compact but wide-ranging survey of humankind’s relationship to the great apes (chimpanzees, bonobos, gorillas, orangutans), from antiquity to the present.

This book is indexed in Chemical Abstracts ServiceThis book offers a comprehensive sketch of the tools used in material research and the rich and diverse stories of how those tools came to be.

During the last years of his life Einstein tried unsuccessfully to unify electromagnetic force with gravitational force geometrically.

This unique story offers an introductory conversation to genetics, embryology and evolution, taking us on a historical journey of biology through the ages.

Science has its roots in human curiosity.

Finding Places tells the story of the ground-breaking discovery of the cells that constitute the brain's positioning system - its GPS.

A gripping tale of 150 years of scientific adventure, research, and discovery at the Yale Peabody Museum This fascinating book tells the story of how one museum changed ideas about dinosaurs, dynasties, and even the story of life on earth.

This book is a superposition of two distinct narratives: the first is historical, discussing the evolution of astronomical knowledge since the dawn of civilizations; the second is scientific, conveying mathematical and physical content of each advancement.

Science, with its inherent tension between the known and the unknown, is an inexhaustible mine of great stories.

In Inventing Chemistry, historian John C.

Synthesizing Hope opens up the material and social world of pharmaceuticals by focusing on an unexpected place: iThemba Pharmaceuticals.

By focusing on chromosomes, Heredity under the Microscope offers a new history of postwar human genetics.

An ambitious new model of experimentation that will reorient our understanding of the key features of experimental practice.

Mount Vesuvius has been famous ever since its eruption in 79 CE, when it destroyed and buried the Roman cities of Pompeii and Herculaneum.

How do cats land on their feet?

Joseph Dalton Hooker (1817-1911) was an internationally renowned botanist, a close friend and early supporter of Charles Darwin, and one of the first-and most successful-British men of science to become a full-time professional.

Databases have revolutionized nearly every aspect of our lives.

A short and entertaining introduction to thermodynamics that uses real-world examples to explain accessibly an important but subtle scientific theory   A romantic description of the second law of thermodynamics is that the universe becomes increasingly disordered.