Astrolyricism in Popular Science and Contemporary Cinema

Background: This study aims to investigate the needs of child caregivers for popular science about safe medication for children, to deeply explore the characteristics of child caregivers’ demand for safe medication and the shortcomings of current popular science work, and then to seek better coping strategies to ensure children’s safe medication.Methods: A questionnaire was designed based on Lasswell’s “5W” communication model to investigate the needs of child caregivers in terms of content, channels, and forms of popular healthcare science on the safe usage of children’s medication.Results: The primary ways caregivers receive popular healthcare science education concerning safe medication usage knowledge are through medical institutions, notification by medical staff, and personal media. The caregivers of children have a high demand for the presentation of text, pictures, and videos in three forms of popular healthcare science content. Caregivers placed significant importance on the popularization of safe medication usage for children. The survey results showed that the top 3 ways for caregivers to think that the quality of popular healthcare science content was “very good” came from medical institutions, medical staff notifications, and personal media, effectively increasing popular healthcare information accuracy. The intelligibility and pertinence of content expression are urgently needed within the caregiver population.Conclusion: Caregivers are very concerned about the popular science of safe medication for children, and are willing to learn about relevant content. Guided by the demand, we should actively disseminate accurate and easy-to-understand popular science about safe medication for children to caregivers through online or offline channels so as to promote safe medication for children.

Postmetaphysical Conundrums: The Problematic Return to Metaphysics in Horkheimer’s Critique of Instrumental Reason

Introduction:

The Problem of Fictionality and Factuality in Lyric Poetry Peter Hühn (bio) The term “fictional”—as logically opposed to “factual”—normally refers to “the species of literature which is concerned with the narration of imaginary events and the portraiture of imaginary characters,”1 comprising novels, short stories, novellas, and also—by implication—dramas and films. Applying the terms fictionality and factuality to lyric poetry is uncommon and usually considered inappropriate or irrelevant. But implicitly most poetological concepts by poets, critics, or theorists do in fact contain statements that opt either for the fictional or the factual status of poems, without using these terms. However, explicitly applying these terms to lyric poems is apt to highlight specific and distinctive features and functions of poetry. Comparing the poetic genre in this respect with the other two genres can be justified by the observation that, like fiction and drama, poetry in principle also features narrative elements, albeit with significant differences. Poems contain narrative sequences predominantly of a mental kind such as thoughts, perceptions, emotions, recollections, imaginings, or generally experiences, and they present them typically in an abbreviated, condensed, compact form, as micro-narratives so to speak, relying on the narrative competence and world-knowledge of readers to fill in gaps and provide missing links. [End Page 155] Pointing out such basic similarities between poems on the one hand and novels and dramas on the other does not presuppose a comparable definition of the generic status for poetry. As recent critics have argued,2 poetry cannot be considered a genre in the same sense in which narrative fiction or drama are genres, definable by a single central criterion such as the mode of representation, according to which happenings are mediated through a narrator in a written or spoken text in the epic genre and performed by live actors on a stage in the dramatic genre.3 Poetry can employ either mode of representation; poems may indirectly mediate mental processes through the report of a speaker (analogous to a narrator), or they may perform such sequences directly, in a quasi-dramatic manner, in other words, either on the story level as a condensed rendering of a course of action or experience—mostly in the past tense—or on the discourse level performatively enacted as an ongoing process in the present tense. Poetry thus basically shares the constitutive features of both genres, leaning either in the one or the other direction.4 This participation in the basic structures of narrative fiction and drama can be taken as a defining feature of the genre of lyric poetry. The Opposition of Fictionality and Factuality The opposition between factual and fictional concerns the doubleness of sign systems and semiotic media, such as language in verbal texts, visual images in photographs and paintings, or their combination in films, that is, the mode of representation, in the relation between signifier and signified. Considered from this perspective, it appears to be relatively uncontroversial to explicate what is basically designated by these terms. The commonsense understanding is that this opposition concerns the question of referentiality, in other words, the ontic status of the signified, of the represented entities and happenings (characters, situations, places, points in time, changes of state as well as attitudes, emotions, experiences), namely, whether the representation refers to something that exists independently of the act of representation or whether the represented is (wholly or predominantly) invented, fictive, and projected by the semiotic representation in the first place. This opposition is, however, less clear-cut and less discriminating with respect to texts than it purports to be. For, on the one hand, even unquestionably fictional texts, such as novels, contain numerous references to entities that do exist outside the specific text—not only places and institutions (e.g., London, the New York Stock Exchange, Oxford University, South Africa) and persons with proper names (e.g., Napoleon, Caesar, Shakespeare), but also historical conditions and events (e.g., the French Revolution, the British colonial empire, the establishment of slavery in America)—and, on the other hand, factual texts may include fictional elements, albeit to a lesser degree, such as the mediation of people’s thoughts in a history book. Consequently, these two...

In the recent years, as the development of China’s STCP effort was constantly pushed on, especially with the implementation of The Outline of the National Scheme for Scientific Literacy, China’s STCP enterprise has made great achievements: conceptual breakthroughs have taken place, the SP (Science Popularization) policy environment has been constantly optimized, SP practice has gained extensive practical fruits, Civic Scientific Literacy has made important progress and the theoretical system of SP has been initially built. But there are still a lot of problems to be solved. we need to improve the policies and regulations system, strengthen mechanism to improve the science capacity, improve the regulation and policy system, strengthen mechanism construction, advance the SP ability and equalization, do more science popularization work by use of science resources, inspire SP practice innovation and develop the SP industry. SP research is still facing with difficulty and complicated tasks, a lot of work needs to be done on the basic theory, Civic Scientific Literacy, SP resources, SP capability, national system, non-profit SP and SP industry. This chapter provides an overview of the characteristics of China’s recent STCP effort and analyses its important issues.

The translation practice report, based on excerpts from Shi Jun’s popular science book China’s Food: A History of Grain, aims to facilitate a profound global understanding of Chinese civilization. It investigates translation strategies for addressing challenges across three dimensions: vocabulary, syntax, and discourse. At the lexical level, the explanatory translation method is employed to tackle the absence of established equivalents for many specialized terms and the difficulty of accurately transmitting their profound cultural and historical connotations. At the syntactic level, a combined strategy of explanatory translation and adaptive translation is proposed to address the challenges posed by classical Chinese expressions and colloquialisms. At the discourse level, an explicit cohesion strategy—characterized by the appropriate addition of connectors or explanatory clauses—is adopted to enhance logical coherence; additionally, a flexible style adaptation approach is applied to balance the text’s academic rigor with its accessibility as a popular science work. Overall, the translation of food-related Chinese popular science texts is of great practical significance for the dissemination of Chinese culture.

Reviewed by: Fairy Tales, Natural History and Victorian Culture by Laurence Talairach-Vielmas Jessica Campbell Laurence Talairach-Vielmas, Fairy Tales, Natural History and Victorian Culture (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), pp. xii + 217, $90/£55 cloth. In her persuasive and lively book, Fairy Tales, Natural History and Victorian Culture, Laurence Talairach-Vielmas argues that Victorian literary fairy tales and constructions of natural history were mutually influential. She clearly positions her project in relation to previous works by Carole Silver and Nicola Bown (which probed Victorians’ cultural preoccupations via fairies and fairy tale narratives) and studies by Gillian Beer and George Levine (which explored how the methods and metaphors of literature and science intermingled in the age of Charles Darwin). The book abundantly demonstrates how fairies “emblematized the transformations of the meanings of nature” in the period and liaised between the visible and the invisible (161). The three middle chapters—on Mary de Morgan’s “A Toy Princess,” Anne Thackeray Ritchie’s “Cinderella,” and several versions of “Little Red Riding Hood”—tease out how literary fairy tales commented on the Victorian positioning of “woman’s nature” in relation to culture and the natural world. But the most noteworthy chapters are the four focused on Victorian pedagogy. Chapter 1 compares Charles Kingsley’s The Water-Babies to popular science works. Because theories like Darwin’s were impossible to visualize, they demanded “to be conceived through the use of the imagination” instead of empirical verification (19). Talairach-Vielmas’s argument foregrounds how the sense of open-mindedness and wonder produced by fairy stories also facilitated new scientific discoveries. Hence, Kingsley infused his science writings with appeals to children’s imagination and used fairies and fairy tales to convey science lessons. Chapter 2 investigates Arabella Buckley’s approach to writing popular science for children. In The Fairy-Land of Science (1879), for instance, “ice is conceived as spellbound water and is compared to Sleeping Beauty” (53). Readers of Victorian Periodicals Review will be interested in the juxtaposition between Buckley’s books and contemporaneous magazines such as Aunt Judy’s Magazine and the Monthly Packet. Talairach-Vielmas observes that such publications used fairy tales for didactic purposes; however, over the course of the century, they also increasingly used these stories to allegorize and condemn the damage being done to nature by industrialization and urbanization. Chapter 6, the first of two strong final chapters on children’s fiction, presents Maria Molesworth’s Christmas-Tree Land as a fusion of fairy story and animal story which imagines a nearly utopian ecosystem of noncompeting [End Page 283] species. Talairach-Vielmas begins the final chapter with a crucial rhetorical question once posed by Edith Nesbit: “Who wants to know about pumpkins until he has heard of Cinderella?” (142). Accordingly, Nesbit habitually courted children’s interest by merging fairies with prehistoric creatures, resulting in a discourse unmistakably evocative of contemporary popular science books. Throughout, Talairach-Vielmas’s book offers the fruits of thorough research and nuanced interpretation. Arabella Buckley once asked her readers, “How are you to enter the fairy-land of science?” Today a reader would do well to begin with Fairy Tales, Natural History and Victorian Culture. Jessica Campbell University of Washington Copyright © 2015 The Research Society for Victorian Periodicals

This article examines the evolution of the spirit of sports before the modern era through the lens of historical materialism, focusing on ancient Greek civilization and the Middle Ages. Building on previous research, it applies Marxist stage theory and Althusser’s concept of the Ideological State Apparatus to analyze how the spirit of sports emerged under different material and social conditions. The article argues that ancient Greek sports embodied a form of spirituality, not rooted in ethical ideals but as a mechanism to mediate political tensions. Greek mythology, especially in the Olympic Games, reinforced social hierarchies and class divisions, with the spirit of sports serving as an ideological tool linked to state power. Sports were institutionalized and used to assert dominance rather than embodying universal virtues. In contrast, during the Middle Ages, no unified ‘spirit of sports’ ideology emerged. Unlike the structured sports of ancient Greece, medieval sports were informal, sporadic, and lacked institutionalization. The dominant influence of the Catholic Church, which viewed bodily activities as sinful, further hindered the development of a cohesive sports ideology during this period. The article argues that the spirit of sports is not a timeless or metaphysical concept but a product of specific historical and material conditions. By treating the spirit of sports as an ideology shaped by these conditions, the article challenges modern idealizations, particularly those promoted by the International Olympic Committee. The conclusion suggests that future research should explore how the spirit of sports has evolved in the modern era, shaped by changing political, economic, and social dynamics. This would deepen our understanding of sports as a social construct and its ethical implications. Keywords: historical materialism, spirit of sports, ideology, Althusser, ancient Greece, Middle Ages

This thesis explores the contrasting practices and discourses through which African and Mexican Americans were managed and marked as supposedly racial populations. It focuses primarily on Los Angeles and on the first four decades of the 20th century. This focus, however, often shifts temporally and widens geographically, as I excavate the historical roots of each of these processes. I argue that the rigid exclusion of African Americans and the more flexible boundaries placed around Mexican Americans cannot be understood as resulting from variant racial differences but must be examined within the specific historical and material conditions from which they emerged, namely slavery, on the one hand, and conquest and immigration, on the other. After an initial consideration of these circumstances, I trace their ideological and practical consequences in three areas. First, I examine how black and Mexican people were inversely defined within the regime of racial classification and anti- miscegenation law. Next, I examine how black and Mexican ‘difference’ was spatially imposed in the city of Los Angeles. Finally, I consider how patterns of collective violence, and the related segregatory practices of the World War II military reinforced substantially different social boundaries around each group. I base this examination upon a wide range of primary sources, including official documents such as court transcripts, congressional hearings, and FBI reports, as well as popular and academic works from the period. Underlying my argument is the notion that race is produced within historically specific social relations; as such, it demands rather than provides explanation. Though historical in perspective, I believe the questions raised here, and the approach with which I attempt to answer them, will be relevant to more recent debates about the workings of racism, particularly those that focus on multiethnic contexts.

The widespread use of on-line computer games makes the medium a prime vehicle for communicating information and their scalability is especially conducive for facilitating global collaboration focused on developing a better understanding of the underpinnings and complexities of planetary systems beginning with climate change. Game engines generally provide an intuitive interface allowing focus to be shifted to the understanding of scientific elements rather than hiding them between a wealth of menus and other counterintuitive user interface components. Unconventional interaction and visualization techniques are introduced as a method to experience geophysical environments. Players are provided with dynamic visualization “assets,” which enable them to discover, interrogate and correlate scientific data in a game space. The spirit of exploration is to give players the impetus to truly understand how complex Earth and planetary systems work and their intrinsic beauty, the impact of humans, and a sense of responsibility to serve as caretakers of those systems.Keywordsscientific visualizationedutainment game enginesEarth system science

The widespread use of on-line computer games makes this medium a valuable vehicle for information sharing, while scalability facilitates global collaboration between players in the game space. Game engines generally provide an intuitive interface allowing attention to be shifted to the understanding of scientific elements rather than hiding them between a wealth of menus and other counterintuitive user interfaces. These strengths are applied towards promoting the understanding of planetary systems and climate change. Unconventional interaction and visualization techniques are introduced as a method to experience geophysical environments. Players are provided with dynamic visualization assets, which enable them to discover, interrogate and correlate scientific data in the game space. The spirit of exploration is to give players the impetus to conceptualize how complex Earth and planetary systems work, understand their intrinsic beauty and the impact of humans, while providing a sense of responsibility for those systems.

Science popularization research serves as a fundamental role in the work of science popularization, which requires the guidance of the theory. The research on science popularization is a process to explore and understand laws of science popularization work, and also the rational thinking and summary of science communication experience. Based on the description of China’s studies on science popularization theories, three fundamental problems in China’s modern science popularization theory are given priority to discussion and some relevant reflections about further development are proposed.

The genesis of scientific popularization in the Russian provincial press of the 19th century is considered based on the material of the Gubernskiye Vedomosti newspaper in the united Orenburg Governorate with its center in Ufa and subsequently Ufa Governorate, as well as publications of the Belebeyevsky district. It is shown that before the opening of Ufa Teachers’ Institute (1909), it was the local press that was the most effective educator of the local population. The relevance of the work is due to the fact that it is difficult to accurately determine when scientific popularization emerged in the history of Russian journalism: the ways of its development in different provinces of the Russian Empire were very different, because in the vast empire local and metropolitan periodicals were in disparate historical and civil conditions. But exploring this issue, one can find general patterns: for the 19th century, the main and dominant type of provincial publication was the state-owned provincial newspapers Gubernskiye Vedomosti, all of which, regardless of location, went through approximately the same development path. Initially, educational publications in a provincial newspaper did not perform any social functions, filling the remaining empty spaces on the pages. The unofficial part of Gubernskiye Vedomosti published free texts of articles sent by mail from the capital or reprints from the journals of the Imperial Free Economic and Geographical Societies, including stories by metropolitan authors about their travels. This led to an expansion of the reader’s personal world and confirmed his knowledge that the world is vast not only on the globe in the classroom and in the school atlas of the world. Later, articles by Ufa authors and representatives of the local intelligentsia began to be published here. Finally, at the turn of the century, specialized newspapers and magazines appeared, in which journalism began to teach its readers new knowledge and technologies. The analysis of the material demonstrates how scientific popularization became a part of journalism in the Russian Empire and contributed daily to transforming its people from patient and hardworking to knowledgeable and able. The aviation designer Sikorsky emerges from the ranks of these people, Tsiolkovsky creates a scientific theory of rocket science, and the engineer Zvorykin creates a technology for television broadcasting.

Abstract. The purpose of the study is to generalize multifaceted popular science works of M. Korduba in the diversity of its thematic manifestations and taking into account the peculiarities of the Bukovina period scientist’s work. The methodology of the study is based on the tradition of historiographic work combining the principles (ones of historicism and objectivity) and methods (general and specific historical ones) of scientific work. The scientific novelty of the article is an attempt to comprehensively reconstruct the work of Korduba-populariser in the early twentieth century. Conclusions . According to the design of M. Korduba, his popular works created among the broad circles of the Ukrainian community a sense of community, national awareness and dignity, taught to know and love their past, called to honour heroes and plan for a common future. The works of the Korduba-populariser are marked by respect for its reader, manifested in the refusal from popular retelling of mythological stories as the most «suitable» for the peasant community. Having been responsible, the scientist deliberately broadcast to the readers a purely scientific knowledge of the past, however complicated it might have been. In addition, the historian spoke to his readers in a language they understood, while at the same time not indulging in an instructive tone and vulgar didacticism. All this made his popular science studios extremely popular among the general public, as evidenced by their considerable circulation and approving professional reception.

The presented article analyzes the scientific and popularization activities of the famous Soviet microbiologist, academician of medicine, professor, Honored Scientist of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic Z.V. Ermolyeva, one of the founders of the Russian antibiotic industry. The main directions and forms of the scientist's popularization work are being reconstructed: giving lectures to doctors and ordinary citizens, publishing educational notes in periodicals, publishing popular science brochures, as well as participating in a number of events aimed at preserving and popularizing famous Russian scientists of the past. Unpublished documents from the Russian State Archive of Economics, the State Archive of the Russian Federation, the Russian State Archive of Socio-Political History, and the Russian State Archive of Scientific and Technical Documentation were used as sources for the article. Popular science pamphlets by Z.V. Ermolyeva, as well as her articles and notes in the periodical press of the period under study, were used from the published sources.