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#histsci

4 posts4 participants0 posts today
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Ele Willoughby, PhD

New scientist portrait block! Neuroscientist Rita Levi-Montalcini (1909-2012) has long been on my radar for a portrait, being so well-known for many years, the oldest surviving Nobel laureate. Pictures abound online of her apparently living her best life, with a knowing smile & signature swirled updo, often with a glass of wine in hand into her 90s & beyond. I had imagined a fun portrait of this delightful, 🧵

Photo of my carved Lino block portrait (on green vinyl, against a white background) of neuroscientist Rita Levi-Montalcini in 1940, at a desk with compound binocular microscope, leaning on an incubator, holding an egg and looking at the viewer. Behind her is a large circular image of a photograph of nerve cells she took with this microscope.
#linocut#printmaking#sciart
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The Inquisitive Biologist

This week's #NewBooks at the library: Two academic books

- "Science for All: The Popularisation of Science in Early Twentieth-Century Britain" from the University of Chicago Press; and
- "The Creation of Inequality: How Our Prehistoric Ancestors Set the Stage for Monarchy, Slavery, and Empire" from Harvard University Press.

Completely unrelated, won at auction, a vintage artbook from #GamesWorkshop by John Blanche and one of my favourite illustrators, Ian Miller.

#HistoryOfScience #ScienceHistory #HistSci #Anthropology #Books #Scicomm #Bookstodon @bookstodon

A photo of three books standing on a small, brown, wooden table. On the left, standing up, Science for All, showing a collage of vintage science book covers. In the middle, lying down, Ratspike, showing two surrealistic drawings of human figures by Ian Miller and John Blanche. On the right, standing up, The Creation of Inequality, showing a yellow-tinted drawing of human figures, some naked, some wearing loincloths, in a savannah landscape. Most are kneeling in a large circle and have geometric figures painted on their chests, with some seemingly having some sort of bags or coverings on their heads and faces. Several other figures are standing behind the kneeling figures, bent over them and holding on to the coverings. The out-of-focus background shows black shelves full of books and part of the beech-coloured laminate floor.
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🌈 Dr Ross Brooks

WOW! My 2021 article 'Darwin's Closet: The Queer Sides of The Descent of Man (1871),' published in the Zoological Journal of the Linnean Society, has now been viewed over 50K times!

I'm working hard on the book. For more about that, watch this space! 🏳️‍🌈🐒

academic.oup.com/zoolinnean/ar

#history #histodons @histodons #histsci #histbio #HistSTM #HSTM #STS @histstm #QueerInSTEM #queer #lgbtq #lgbtqia #pride #pridemonth #queerhistory #histsex #sex #biology #nature #naturalhistory #science #animals #Darwin

Photograph of the statue of Charles Darwin in Shrewsbury viewed through progress pride flag-coloured filter.
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Ele Willoughby, PhD

Happy birthday #physicist Chien-shiung Wu (1912-1997), who came up with a truly beautiful experiment to test whether the weak force conserves parity (whether beta decay would be the same if reflected in the mirror)! In my print on the left I show Wu in her lab & a schematic diagram of her experiment. On the right I show her reflection, as in the mirror, & the mirror reflection of the experimental set-up & the shocking result, 🧵1/n

Linocut print of Chien-shiung Wu in indigo wearing a lab coat and holding a schematic diagram of her famous violation of parity experiment (in blue and indigo) on the left side. The right side shows the mirror image except in the schematic diagram. The left side schematic shows a C shaped electromagnet open to the left. The top is labeled S, the bottom is labeled N and the middle is wrapped in wire drawn as a circuit diagram schematic with parallel lines to indicate a power source and left arrow on top wire, right arrow on bottom. Between the poles of the magnet is a big blue dot to designate Cobalt-60 with many tiny dots as beta-decay electrons, the majority going downwards to N pole. On the right, everything is flipping except most electrons go upwards (and and N and S poles are flipped).
#linocut#sciart#physics
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ThierryJ :mastodon:

Emmy Noether : la plus célèbre des mathématiciennes inconnues | La science CQFD France culture

radiofrance.fr/franceculture/p

Avec Sylvie Benzoni, mathématicienne, professeur à l’Université Lyon, et directrice de l’Institut Henri Poincaré ; Annalisa Panati, maître de conférences en physique mathématique au Centre de Physique Théorique de l'Université de Toulon ; et Roger Mansuy, professeur de mathématiques au lycée Saint-Louis.

France Culture · Emmy Noether : la plus célèbre des mathématiciennes inconnuesEn 1918, Emmy Noether publie un théorème aujourd’hui éponyme. De la relativité générale à la physique des particules : comment les travaux de cette mathématicienne ont-ils débloqué DES problèmes en physique ? Comment Emmy Noether a-t-elle participé au développement de l’algèbre moderne ?
#ConseilPodcast#histmath#histsci
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Dr Surekha Davies

On Weds 28 May between 9-11am and 12-2pm Eastern Time, the AskHistorians subreddit on the Reddit online news and discussion platform will host a live AMA (Ask Me Anything) event with me around my new book, HUMANS: A MONSTROUS HISTORY (University of California Press, 2025).

Check the Upcoming Events section on the AskHistorians "About" page where the text-based, asynchronous event will take place.

#histodons #books #histsci #politics #ancient #medieval #earlymodern 1/n
reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/abo

Bright red book cover showing: an oval, silver-coloured mirror with a black frame comprised of sci-fi and fantasy monsters, with yellow lettering for the title, “HUMANS”, around the top of the mirror, in a stylized font with details that resemble whale-tails and bats’ wings. Subtitle just inside the mirror: A Monstrous History. Inside the bottom curve of the mirror: Surekha Davies. Along the left-hand edge of the cover crawls a xenomorph: a humanoid creature with an insect-like head and a long, sinuous, menacing, pointy tail.
Continued thread
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Abie

"I recently read The Secrets of Alchemy by Lawrence Principe, which I loved, especially because he tries to replicate ancient alchemical recipes in his own lab. And sometimes he succeeds!
For instance, he attempts to make the “sulfur of antimony” by following the instructions in The Triumphal Chariot of Antimony (Der Triumph-Wagen Antimonii), written by an alchemist named Basil Valentine7 sometime around the year 1600. At first, all Principe gets is a “dirty gray lump”.
Then he realizes the recipe calls for “Hungarian antimony,” so instead of using pure lab-grade antimony, he literally orders some raw Eastern European ore, and suddenly the reaction works! It turns out the Hungarian dirt is special because it contains a bit of silicon dioxide, something Basil Valentine couldn’t have known."
#histsci #histchem #alchemy
press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/b

University of Chicago PressThe Secrets of AlchemyIn The Secrets of Alchemy, Lawrence M. Principe, one of the world’s leading authorities on the subject, brings alchemy out of the shadows and restores it to its important place in human history and culture. By surveying what alchemy was and how it began, developed, and overlapped with a range of ideas and pursuits, Principe illuminates the practice. He vividly depicts the place of alchemy during its heyday in early modern Europe, and then explores how alchemy has fit into wider views of the cosmos and humanity, touching on its enduring place in literature, fine art, theater, and religion as well as its recent acceptance as a serious subject of study for historians of science. In addition, he introduces the reader to some of the most fascinating alchemists, such as Zosimos and Basil Valentine, whose lives dot alchemy’s long reign from the third century and to the present day. Through his exploration of alchemists and their times, Principe pieces together closely guarded clues from obscure and fragmented texts to reveal alchemy’s secrets, and—most exciting for budding alchemists—uses them to recreate many of the most famous recipes in his lab, including those for the “glass of antimony” and “philosophers’ tree.” This unique approach brings the reader closer to the actual work of alchemy than any other book.
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Ele Willoughby, PhD

Happy birthday to #entomologist Margaret Fountaine (1862-1940), here in my #linocut with many #butterflies from her collection.

Her posthumous books featured her “wild and fearless life,” but she was also a trailblazing famous #Victorian #lepidopterist, published in The Entomologist’s Record and Journal of Variations, expert on tropical butterflies, discovering, documenting, breeding & gathering specimens 🧵

My linocut portrait of Margaret Fountaine, a Victorian woman in elaborate hat with wings, blouse with lace collar, skirt and fur stole, printed in burgundy ink. Behind her are diagonal rows of butterflies with little labels, printed in various combinations of orange, black, yellow and brown white white.
#printmaking#womenInSTEM#MargaretFountaine
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Dr Surekha Davies

On May 28 I'm doing an AMA on Reddit on the r/AskHistorians subreddit !

Ask Me Anything about monsters or my new book, HUMANS: A MONSTROUS HISTORY, just out from the University of California Press.

I’ll be live on the AskHistorians subreddit on Wed May 28, at 9-11am and 12-2pm ET. I'll check in intermittently after that for a few days.

The r/AskHistorians page (under Upcoming Events).

#histodons #history #histsci #histmed #ancient #medieval #earlymodern #politics

reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/abo

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Ele Willoughby, PhD

Happy birthday to x-ray crystallographer Dorothy Mary Crowfoot Hodgkin (née Crowfoot, 1910-1994), Nobel laureate in #chemistry for her models of biomolecules like penicillin, vitamin B12 & insulin.

She was “captured for life by chemistry and crystals," in childhood, 1 of 2 girls allowed to study chemistry rather than domestic science at her school with a small lab in her attic. On her 16th birthday her mother gave her W.H. Bragg's 🧵1/n

My Lino block portrait progress is mostly carved and shows a young Dorothy Crowfoot Hodgkin in cobalt blue from chest up in a blouse tied with a bow. Her ball-and-stick molecular model for penicillin appears over her shoulder (with atoms in red, pink, pale blue, dark blue and black) and her blouse has a specific repeating pattern of circles and nested broken circles like a labyrinth on bronze circles within a hexagonal while area on a pink background. Overlapping her hair is her model of vitamin B12 complete with electron density contour lines and 3 Angstrom scale bar from one of her papers.
#womenInSTEM#linocut#printmaking
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Ele Willoughby, PhD

Happy birthday to founder of modern nursing, social reformer, statistician, data visualization innovator and writer Florence Nightingale (1820 – 1910)!⁠
Nightingale earned the nickname “The Lady with the Lamp” during the Crimean War, from a phrase used by The Times, describing her as a “ministering angel” making her solitary rounds of the hospital at night with “a little lamp in her hand”. 🧵
⁠
#linocut #printmaking #sciart #womenInSTEM #datavis #nursing #statistics #mathart #histsci #mastoArt

My linocut portrait of Florence Nightingale in blue with her oil lamp in gold with orange flame with her rose diagram of mortality for 1855 and 1856 clearly showing that lack of hygiene was the biggest killer of those injured in the Crimean War
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Ele Willoughby, PhD

Happy birthday to #mathematician Maryam Mirzakhani (1977-2017)! The Fields Medal, one of the most prestigious #math awards, is awarded to mathematicians < 40. In 2014, she became 1st woman to win. Her research included Teichmüller theory, hyperbolic geometry, ergodic theory, & symplectic geometry, and Fields committee cited her work in “the dynamics and geometry of Riemann surfaces and their moduli spaces”.⁠
⁠🧵1/n
⁠
#sciart #mathart #linocut #printmaking #womeninSTEM #histsci #mastoArt

Linocut portrait on 11”x14” white washi paper of Maryam Mirzakhani in a gradient of deep red at the bottom to dark blue at the top, 3/4 view from the top of her shoulders up. She has short hair, wears a tshirt and looks at the viewer. She is surrounded by mathematical doodles and diagrams in light blue.
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