Follow @yaleSCIbooks Sarah Underwood— A thousand years from now, casual readers of history probably will not see too much distinction between the people of 1890 and those of 1990. I wonder if they will look at the giant stone angels of Victorian graves and assume that our generations wore black
Follow @yaleSCIbooks Sarah Underwood— For ninety-five percent of human’s existence on earth, people generally respected each other’s dignity. As hunter-gatherers, humans had to protect themselves from wild animals and the elements. It made little sense for others of our own species to become extra enemies. For the last five percent
Follow @yaleSCIbooks Michelle Stein— Notes from the Ground: Science, Soil & Society in the American Countryside, by Benjamin R. Cohen is primarily the story of the merger of agriculture and science in early America, and all the attendant debates and developments in agricultural life. But in the spirit of
Follow @yaleSCIbooks The early days of scientific investigation resulted in extraordinary collaborations between the artistic community and the scientific one. Many examples of these concerted efforts to explore, chart, map, test and record are beautifully documented and eloquently explained in Prints and the Pursuit of Knowledge in Early Modern Europe,
Follow @yaleSCIbooks For nearly two decades Donna Hicks, Ph.D. has been in the field of international conflict resolution facilitating dialogue between communities in conflict in the Middle East, Sri Lanka, Colombia, Cuba, and Northern Ireland. She was a consultant to the BBC where she co-facilitated a television series, Facing the
Photographs from this month’s Perseid meteor shower from the International Space Station follow a long tradition of science and art blurring boundaries between each other. As curator Susan Dackerman argues in Prints and the Pursuit of Knowledge in Early Modern Europe, the catalog for Harvard Art Museums’ exhibition opening September 6, art and science often have a close relationship with only vaguely definable boundaries.
If the perfect crime is one that never gets discovered, then the perfect spy is one whose identity is never revealed. Edward Bancroft came close to becoming the latter: a century passed before the public realized that he had engaged in espionage. Many Americans do not even recognize Bancroft’s name,
Follow @yaleSCIbooks Europe took a very long time to get used to the spud, according to John Reader in Potato: A History of the Propitious Esculent. The Bible never mentions potatoes, so European clergymen in the 1700s banned the consumption of the suspiciously anonymous tuber. Doctors in the previous century
Follow @yaleSCIbooks No matter where you are in the U.S. this summer, you have probably felt the effects of the record-setting heat. While most of us are just sweating a little more than usual, our country’s agricultural community faces a depressing situation. The heat arrived with an extreme drought throughout