Natural Scientists Research Articles

Variation in the social composition of the UK academic elite: The underlay of the two-or three-cultures?

In this paper, we complement a previous study of the UK natural science elite, as represented by Fellows of the Royal Society, with a comparable study of the humanities and social sciences elites, as represented by Fellows of the British Academy. We seek to establish how far similarities and differences exist in the social composition of these three academic elites and in the routes that their members have followed into elite positions. We are also concerned with the consequences of the humanities and social sciences elites being brought together in the British Academy, in contrast with the situation in most other countries where elite natural and social scientists are located in the same academy. We pursue these issues in the context of C. P. Snow's discussion of the social underlay of the cultural disjunction that he saw between the natural sciences and the humanities, while also considering how the social sciences fit in. We find that there is support for Snow's position at the time of his writing. However, a notable development in more recent years is that the growing social sciences elite is moving in its social composition away from the humanities elite and closer to the natural science elite. This is primarily due to changes in the social origins and education of Fellows in those sections of the British Academy that are on the borderline between the social and the natural sciences. A widening difference thus arises with Fellows in the humanities sections most representative of Snow's 'traditional culture'.

Methods and approach to the interdisciplinary and cross-cultural Alaska Arctic Salmon Workshop: critical self-reflections from fisheries scientists

Redistribution and shifting habitat envelopes are impacting organisms across many taxa, which in turn are impacting Indigenous ways of life. In Arctic Alaska, Pacific salmon are known to have occurred for at least a century, but in recent years appear to be increasingly common. With the goal of holistically understanding and describing these changes in a way that equitably considers Indigenous, local, and western knowledge, we share our experience and methodologies in facilitating the Arctic Alaska Salmon Workshop. We share our perspective, approach, and methods as fisheries natural scientists convening this workshop, which included community-based knowledge holders from the Iñupiat communities of Kotzebue, Point Hope, Utqiaġvik, and Kaktovik, and western scientists and researchers from universities, fishery management agencies, and local community government. After briefly discussing some of the workshop highlights, we conclude with four key takeaways: 1) that the process of co-production of knowledge is an ideal towards which we must strive, but acknowledge we may rarely, if ever, fully achieve, 2) pursuit of the ‘good science’ should guide our work, 3) examination and assessment of assumptions should occur early and often, and 4) Anglanikina! Make sure you have a good time, (Yup’ik).

Forest certification and economic insights: a European perspective

In recent years, there has been an increasing demand for forest certification and certified forest products in Europe. This trend is related to major worldwide challenges, such as the need to decarbonize the economy and mitigate climate change but also social and consumer demands for wider fair trade. However, whether forest certification influences economic valorization in forestry remains a question. The aim of this study is to analyze forest certification levels across Europe and identify potential relationships between the level of certification in forest areas and relevant economic indicators at country level. This study collected openly available data on total and certified forest areas, economic indicators, and environmental indicators for 28 European countries and explored the correlation between certified forest areas and economic performance in the forestry sector. Findings show that forest certification can significantly improve the economic performance of European forests. It has a more pronounced positive effect on economic incomes than on costs’ reduction. While certification costs do rise with the extent of forest area, they tend to stabilize at larger scales, suggesting that the certification process is economically sustainable and scale is relevant. Czechia and the Netherlands stand out for having the highest net values added related to forest certification, reflecting an effective economic exploration of forest resources. This study offers new perspectives to natural and social scientists, as well as to industry and policy makers, by proving contextualized data to support decision making. Additionally, it provides hints for further studies and policy guidelines on sustainable development and the impact of forest certification schemes.

What can ethnography offer the gastronomic sciences?

In this article, we explore how ethnography—a social-scientific methodology of immersion in specific social or cultural groups to gain insight—can contribute to the gastronomic sciences.1 Our aim is to illustrate the benefits of using ethnography in gastronomic settings for both social scientists and gastronomy practitioners including chefs, and to discuss strategies for addressing practical challenges that may arise. Based on ethnographic research conducted in a restaurant research and development (R&D) kitchen, we identify three key questions relevant for the gastronomic sciences that ethnography is well-positioned to address, and discuss some strategies for doing so. The three questions are: (1) how does the creative process in culinary environments actually work?; (2) how do chefs, producers, and other culinary professionals become able to ‘taste together’ despite different backgrounds, bodies, and preferences?; and (3) how can different media, perspectives, kinds of knowledge, and disciplinary approaches be made legible to each other and brought together to facilitate the gastronomic sciences? With this paper we contribute to the transdisciplinary agenda and practice of the gastronomic sciences by showing chefs and natural scientists how ethnography can contribute to their work, and showing social scientists some ways ethnographic expertise can help develop the field.

Climate risk maps as boundary objects for future forests

Climate change poses significant threats to ecosystems and biodiversity. Conventional management strategies often fall short, leading to uncertainties in addressing these challenges. Natural and environmental scientists play a crucial role by providing evidence-based guidance. Social science research, at the same time, highlights the complexity of transferring and applying knowledge across different social and professional groups and shows that further research is needed. Using a German case study, my research addresses this issue by examining the dynamics between predictive climate risk maps, intended as decision-support tool for forest management, the developing scientists, the receiving environmental managers and further political actors. Semi-structured qualitative interviews with representatives from these groups were conducted and analyzed, revealing that climate risk maps can function as predictive boundary objects, balancing flexibility and robustness. With their high level of visual and epistemic power, these maps generate knowledge tensions, facilitate interactions, and foster the implicit co-production of broader environmental management discourse. At the same time the maps are continuously contested, discussed, and updated through feedback, becoming themselves part of an ongoing informal co-productive process. This dual role creates ambiguity: they provide concrete answers to specific management related questions while highlighting simultaneously limitations that prompt more fundamental inquiries, driving an overall societal learning process. Hence, future efforts should enhance formal support for co-productive processes to ensure evidence-based advisory tools are scientifically robust, contextually adapted, and democratize knowledge dynamics through continuous dialogue, mutual learning, and integration of scientific as well as local knowledge.

An integrative paradigm for building causal knowledge

AbstractA core aspiration of the ecological sciences is to determine how systems work, which implies the challenge of developing a causal understanding. Causal inference has long been approached from a statistical perspective, which can be limited and restrictive for a variety of reasons. Ecologists and other natural scientists have historically pursued mechanistic knowledge as an alternative approach to causal understanding, though without explicit reference to the requirements of causal statistics. In this paper, I describe the premises of an expanded paradigm for causal studies, the Integrative Causal Investigation Paradigm, that subsumes causal statistics and mechanistic investigation into a multi‐evidence approach. This paradigm is distinct from the one articulated by causal statistics in that it (1) focuses its attention on the long‐term goal of building causal knowledge across multiple studies and (2) recognizes the essential role of mechanistic investigations in establishing a causal understanding. The Integrative Paradigm, consequentially, proposes that there are multiple methodological routes to building causal knowledge and thus represents a pluralistic perspective. This paper begins by describing the crux of the problem faced by causal statistics. To understand this problem, it should be recognized that the word causal has multiple meanings and a variety of evidential standards. An expanded vocabulary is developed so as to reduce ambiguities and clarify critical issues. I further show by example that there is an important ingredient typically omitted from consideration in causal statistics, which is the known information related to the mechanisms underlying relationships being evaluated. To address this issue, I describe a procedure, Causal Knowledge Analysis, that involves an evaluation and compilation of existing evidence indicative of causal content and the features of mechanisms. Causal Knowledge Analysis is applied to three example situations to illustrate the process and its potential for contributing to the development of causal knowledge. The implications of adopting the proposed paradigm and associated procedures are discussed and include the potential for advancing ecology, the potential for clarifying causal methodology, and the potential for contributing to predictive forecasting.

Blue Carbon as a Nature-Based Mitigation Solution in Temperate Zones

Concern for the future requires local steward-led cooperation between natural and social scientists and decision-makers to develop informed and policy-relevant nature-based mitigation solutions, including blue carbon (BC), which can help secure the future. Salt marshes, kelp forests, and seagrass meadows (and to a lesser extent mangroves) are significant BC ecosystems in temperate areas. We discuss the concept of blue carbon stocks and the scientific approaches to building BC stocks considering the variability in local conditions and the co-benefits of blue carbon ecosystems to improve climate change mitigation and adaptation mechanisms. The study examines (1) methods to assess the potential of BC ecosystems and the impact of disturbances, while (2) building relevant policy based on socio-economic assessments of impacted communities. We highlight economic and social approaches to rebuilding BC using financial tools such as blue bonds, development plans, cost-benefit analyses, cross-ecosystem restoration projects, AI and blockchain, and economic accounts of coastal ecosystems, while emphasizing that cutting carbon emissions is more important than (re)building BC stocks.

Evolution, Through the Lens of a Physicist

With the following considerations, the author intends to enrich the discussion about chance and the formation of new organisms in biological evolution. As a physicist, he knows that he has already crossed a boundary of disciplines by discussing the occurrence of chance. The natural scientist or biologist leaves the field of natural science to enter the world of ideas, humanities, and metaphysics. A second argument considers the relation between the whole and its parts. Decomposing biological systems to the smallest building blocks (molecules and atoms) does not mean the whole can be constructed from these particles without additional causal agents. This may indicate that the evolutionary process may involve more than changes in a DNA string.

Bioactivity-driven fungal metabologenomics identifies antiproliferative stemphone analogs and their biosynthetic gene cluster

IntroductionFungi biosynthesize chemically diverse secondary metabolites with a wide range of biological activities. Natural product scientists have increasingly turned towards bioinformatics approaches, combining metabolomics and genomics to target secondary metabolites and their biosynthetic machinery. We recently applied an integrated metabologenomics workflow to 110 fungi and identified more than 230 high-confidence linkages between metabolites and their biosynthetic pathways.ObjectivesTo prioritize the discovery of bioactive natural products and their biosynthetic pathways from these hundreds of high-confidence linkages, we developed a bioactivity-driven metabologenomics workflow combining quantitative chemical information, antiproliferative bioactivity data, and genome sequences.MethodsThe 110 fungi from our metabologenomics study were tested against multiple cancer cell lines to identify which strains produced antiproliferative natural products. Three strains were selected for further study, fractionated using flash chromatography, and subjected to an additional round of bioactivity testing and mass spectral analysis. Data were overlaid using biochemometrics analysis to predict active constituents early in the fractionation process following which their biosynthetic pathways were identified using metabologenomics.ResultsWe isolated three new-to-nature stemphone analogs, 19-acetylstemphones G (1), B (2) and E (3), that demonstrated antiproliferative activity ranging from 3 to 5 µM against human melanoma (MDA-MB-435) and ovarian cancer (OVACR3) cells. We proposed a rational biosynthetic pathway for these compounds, highlighting the potential of using bioactivity as a filter for the analysis of integrated—Omics datasets.ConclusionsThis work demonstrates how the incorporation of biochemometrics as a third dimension into the metabologenomics workflow can identify bioactive metabolites and link them to their biosynthetic machinery.

300 Years of the Russian Academy of Sciences: Vladimir Vernadsky — Universal Natural Scientist, Thinker and Organizer of Science. (Exhibition Review)

300 Years of the Russian Academy of Sciences: Vladimir Vernadsky — Universal Natural Scientist, Thinker and Organizer of Science. (Exhibition Review)

An Inclusional-Dialogic Approach to Qualitative Inquiry

My research looks into collaborative learning and co-creativity in educational contexts. This paper presents my research trajectory towards inclusional-dialogic perception, discernment, and expression. I understand this phenomenon as thinking from presence: a natural inquiry process that is immersive, dialogic, and inherently embodied; a creative dialogue between self and habitat. I combine Natural Inclusionality and dialogism as my philosophical foundations. Importantly, I extend the notion of thinking from presence to the research inquiry itself, broadening the scope of scientific explorations of experience. Thus, the inquiry becomes a dance in between extraspection (outward perception) and introspection (inward sensing), brought together in an empathic second perspective. The natural inclusional approach entails a move away from the logic and language of definition into the logic and language of flow. This article discusses how fluid logic has shaped my research approach and my writing, with three emergent features. First, the inquiry and its documentation constitute an open-ended and serendipitous dialogue with the phenomena in focus. Second, research analysis and writing moves away from the predominance of the textual, recognizing that the translation of the experience into language is not an unavoidable necessity. It also underlines the significance of the visual and poetic expression of philosophy, methods, and findings, fusing science and art into partnership. Third, the disseminative writing is immersive. It openly brings forth an interplay between subjective and objective. My own lived, personal experience of the researched phenomena is a central layer of experiential meaning making, affording contemplative insight. Centering my research approach around the notion of thinking from presence is not a purely epistemological issue. It speaks to the nature of reality and captures the overarching desire to contribute to a deeper human understanding of the self in the context of its natural neighborhood.

Editorial: A case for honest and purposeful interdisciplinary dialogue in research: insights from social and natural scientists' experiences

Editorial: A case for honest and purposeful interdisciplinary dialogue in research: insights from social and natural scientists' experiences

What is race? Epistemic ambiguity and liberal international order

Abstract There is increasing interest in how anticolonial actors advanced a norm of racial equality in mid-century formations of liberal international order (LIO). Less attention, however, is afforded to simultaneous epistemic conflicts over the scientific object of ‘race’ and their political effects. During postwar order-building and alongside political struggles for racial equality, there was wide and deep scientific debate on the analytical utility of race as a means to categorize human diversity. Race, I demonstrate, was rendered as epistemically ambiguous, caught between social scientists and philosophers who understood it as a social construct akin to ethnicity and natural scientists who maintained a biological basis. This split was not confined to academic debate but shaped political and normative struggles over the institutionalization of racial equality in LIO. Adopting an object-oriented approach, I argue that the epistemic ambiguity of race generated political effects, at once permitting the reproduction of colonial logics in LIO as well as providing latitude for strategies of resistance. Rather than a linear causal effect, I empirically map the work that epistemic ambiguity performed in the creation of mid-century international order.

What drives public engagement by scientists? An Australian perspective

There is an increasing expectation for more scientists to engage with industry, government, and communities to solve climate change. A group for whom these calls are now prevalent are marine (natural and social) scientists working on environmental change, including climate change. Yet, there is limited empirical evidence of what drives them to embrace or avoid engaging distinct publics, including policymakers. Here, we examined via twenty-eight in-depth qualitative interviews factors affecting how Australian scientists engage the public about climate change. We found that nineteen contextual variables constrain and enable public engagement by scientists. These variables co-occur and interact at the individual, organizational, and systemic levels to affect how they prioritize, mobilize resources, and decide to engage the public. We found that while the scientists saw it rewarding to share their findings with others, they found it hard to deal with conflict, face skeptics, and navigate organizational politics and structures to engage others in a public-facing role. Also, a lack of institutional support and engagement culture, role ambiguity, unequal power relations, and a legacy of past encounters led many scientists to engage in tokenism. These findings and insights have implications for individual scientists, institutional policy, and the practice of engaging others about global environmental change. They reveal why scientists might not engage others in a public-facing role and what might be needed to transform engagement.

Hedging the climate change risks of China's brown assets: Green assets or precious metals?

A large discrepancy exists between the dire impact of climate change projected by most natural scientists and the modest estimates of damages calculated by mainstream economists. In this article, we first measure the climate risk, including the transition and physical risks, in China using textual analysis. Then, considering the heterogeneity of climate change's effect, we investigate the impact of climate risks on the brown and green assets of China (including price, volatility, and correlation) for the period from February 2012 to April 2022. In addition, the performance of China's green assets and international precious metal assets is examined in hedging the climate risk exposure of China's brown assets. The results reveal that transition and physical risks lead to contrary changes in the prices of brown and hedging assets. Transition risk causes the volatility of brown and green assets to change in the opposite direction, while physical risk causes the volatility of the two types of assets to change in the same direction. Under extreme climate risk conditions, the correlation between brown and hedging assets decreases. Finally, the findings show that the performance of international precious metals in hedging climate risk exposure is better than that of China's green equity assets.

Centering relationships to place for more meaningful research and engagement

Research has the potential to simultaneously generate new knowledge and contribute meaningful social–ecological benefits; however, research processes and outcomes can also perpetuate extractive patterns that have manifested the climate, biodiversity, and social justice crises. One approach to enhance the societal value of research processes is to strengthen relationships with places of study and the peoples of those places. Deepening relational engagement with the social–ecological context and history of a place can lead to more accurate results and improved public trust in the scientific process and is particularly important for natural scientists who work at the interface of nature and society. We provide three actionable pathways that range from individual to systemic change to enhance place-based relationships within research systems: 1) deepen reflection and communication about relationships with places and peoples; 2) strengthen collaboration among research teams and partners; and 3) transform systems of knowledge creation to foster place-based roots. Action on any of these proposed pathways, but especially action taken across all three, can build empathy and connections to place and people, strengthening the meaningful impact of research both locally and globally.

Entropy and the Limits to Growth.

In its business-as-usual scenario, the 1972 Club-of-Rome report-The Limits to Growth-describes the collapse of the world economy around the year 2030, either because of the scarcity of natural resources or because of pollution. Mainstream economists, the high priests of secular societies, condemned it fiercely. Their gospel of perpetual economic growth, during which technological progress would solve all problems, promises a bright future for all mankind. On the other hand, engineers, natural scientists, and mathematicians realized that the breakdown scenario is due to the inclusion of the First and the Second Law of Thermodynamics in the Club-of-Rome's world model. According to these laws, nothing happens in the world without energy conversion and entropy production. In 1865, Rudolph Clausius, the discoverer of entropy, published the laws as the constitution of the universe. Entropy is the physical measure of disorder. Without a proper understanding of energy and entropy in the economy, all efforts to achieve sustainability will fail.

Life at the interface: Engineering bio-nanomaterials through interfacial molecular self-assembly.

Interfacial self-assembly describes the directed organization of molecules and colloids at phase boundaries. Believed to be fundamental to the inception of primordial life, interfacial assembly is exploited by a myriad of eukaryotic and prokaryotic organisms to execute physiologic activities and maintain homeostasis. Inspired by these natural systems, chemists, engineers, and materials scientists have sought to harness the thermodynamic equilibria at phase boundaries to create multi-dimensional, highly ordered, and functional nanomaterials. Recent advances in our understanding of the biophysical principles guiding molecular assembly at gas-solid, gas-liquid, solid-liquid, and liquid-liquid interphases have enhanced the rational design of functional bio-nanomaterials, particularly in the fields of biosensing, bioimaging and biotherapy. Continued development of non-canonical building blocks, paired with deeper mechanistic insights into interphase self-assembly, holds promise to yield next generation interfacial bio-nanomaterials with unique, and perhaps yet unrealized, properties. This article is categorized under: Nanotechnology Approaches to Biology > Nanoscale Systems in Biology Therapeutic Approaches and Drug Discovery > Emerging Technologies.

A simple, accurate, and explicit form of the Green–Ampt model to estimate infiltration, sorptivity, and hydraulic conductivity

AbstractFinding an explicit solution to the widely used Green–Ampt (G–A) one‐dimensional infiltration model has been subject of efforts for more than half a century. We derived an explicit semiempirical approach that combines accuracy with simplicity, a concept that has been generally neglected in previous studies. The equation is , with F (L), Ks (L/T), S (L/T0.5) and t (T) being cumulative infiltration, saturated hydraulic conductivity, sorptivity, and time, respectively. Relative errors (ɛ) by the application of this equation generally do not exceed ±0.3% in most applied infiltration problems faced by water resources engineering today. We show both numerically and mathematically that │ɛ│> 0.3% could only occur if Kst/F > 0.904, a criterion that could apply to sand and loamy sand soils (i.e., coarse texture) and if they experience infiltration rates for over 6 h and 19 h, respectively. Hence, we also derived a simple linear adjustment in the model as Fadj ≅ 0.9796 F + 0.335 S2/Ks to address these longer infiltration rates, and to assure that ɛ remains within the expected ±0.3% range of uncertainty. A linearized regression technique was also developed to accurately estimate S and Ks when the G–A model is used. We numerically demonstrated that our fitting method could be used even when the G–A approach is less valid (diffusive soils), provided that the actual value of the capillary length (λ) is initially known. An added benefit of our approach is that by setting λ equal to 1/3 and 2/3, it can significantly limit the range of initializing, unknown, a priori values of S and Ks, as these two parameters are estimated through the inverse solution of implicit infiltration models. Due to the model's simplicity and accuracy, our solution should find application among hydrologists, natural resource scientists, and engineers who wish to easily derive accurate estimations from the G–A infiltration approach and/or estimate sorptivity and hydraulic conductivity without encountering divergence problems.

A Convergence Science Approach to Understanding the Changing Arctic

AbstractScience, engineering, and society increasingly require integrative thinking about emerging problems in complex systems, a notion referred to as convergence science. Due to the concurrent pressures of two main stressors—rapid climate change and industrialization, Arctic research demands such a paradigm of scientific inquiry. This perspective represents a synthesis of a vision for its application in Arctic system studies, developed by a group of disciplinary experts consisting of social and earth system scientists, ecologists, and engineers. Our objective is to demonstrate how convergence research questions can be developed via a holistic view of system interactions that are then parsed into material links and concrete inquiries of disciplinary and interdisciplinary nature. We illustrate the application of the convergence science paradigm to several forms of Arctic stressors using the Yamal Peninsula of the Russian Arctic as a representative natural laboratory with a biogeographic gradient from the forest‐tundra ecotone to the high Arctic.