Science Stories Research Articles

Black face in hyperspace

ABSTRACTThe use of Black people in popular Western science fiction narratives indicates unspoken desires in authors and readers to create and accept fictional, and by extension, real worlds, where the absence or presence of blackness marks differing types of human-ness. The persistent retention of perceived ‘universal’ bodies, which qualify to represent Humanity in response to alien bodies and considerations, are not ultimately accidental. Where the Black body is present, its role remains suspect, as extant stereotypes and allusions of dispensability remain in place, and its absence allows the continuation of normality. This paper will explore these concerns, interrogating how widely accepted science fiction films and stories reproduce racialised conceptions of the future.

Realizing the Witch: Science, Cinema, and the Mastery of the Invisible by Richard Baxstrom and Todd Meyers

Reviewed by: Realizing the Witch: Science, Cinema, and the Mastery of the Invisible by Richard Baxstrom and Todd Meyers Oliver Gaycken Oliver Gaycken, Richard Baxstrom, Todd Meyers, witchcraft, science and magic, magic and cinema, early modern magic, early modern witchcraft, history of cinema richard baxstrom and todd meyers. Realizing the Witch: Science, Cinema, and the Mastery of the Invisible. New York: Fordham University Press, 2016. Pp. x + 286. Realizing the Witch is an unusual, intriguing, and demanding book. It is made so in part by a heady interdisciplinary mix of, to use the authors' inventory, cinema studies, film theory, anthropology, intellectual history, and science studies (9). The authors see this array of approaches as necessary in order to engage with an unusual, intriguing, and demanding film. Benjamin Christensen's Häxan (1922) deserves, but has not—until the publication of this book—received a critical account equal to its ambitious peculiarity. The authors' rich account of Häxan's fields of reference involves delving deeply into the medieval sources to which Christensen had recourse, as well as surveying contemporary scholarship on European witchcraft. Baxtrom and Meyers are a social and a medical anthropologist respectively, and many of their striking and original insights about Häxan are indebted to considering the film in relation to anthropology. For instance, they provide a keen analysis of the film's negotiation of evidence. As they write, Häxan "stands as one of the most powerful, unsettling expressions of the aspiration to produce evidence of forces unseen" (19). In this sense, the film is in a similar position as the witch-hunters themselves, and the authors posit a "conceptual link" between sixteenth-century theologians and the nineteenth-century human sciences (18). So Malinoswky's definition of anthropology as inhabiting another's point of view proves capable of providing evidence of otherwise invisible forms of experience. Likewise, in psychiatry, Charcot's investigations of hysteria share "procedural elements" with those of the witch-hunters (28). Instead of a narrative where modernity dispels superstition, then, Häxan participates in (and not always willingly) a story of modern science as continuous with older epistemic regimes, a haunted objectivity. [End Page 419] The strong form of interdisciplinarity that Realizing advances is not without its perils, however, since multiple approaches multiply scholarly responsibilities. Here I should make clear that my own expertise is that of a cinema historian who has worked to integrate the history of science into my work, so I am familiar with both the intellectual dividends and debts that an investment in an interdisciplinary approach brings. One drawback to Realizing as seen from the perspective of cinema studies is its commitment to a strategy of close reading, which involves an almost shot-by-shot commentary on the film. The authors justify this decision by contending that it allows them "to think alongside Christensen" (9). In the best case, this form of analysis works for a DVD commentary track, but as a method for a monograph, it leads to extended passages of description that could have been eliminated with a different organizational scheme. Relatedly, a different structure could have amplified a particularly promising aspect of the book that this approach mutes, namely, the demonstration of how Häxan evinces what the authors claim is a Warburgian approach, a fascinating thesis that is more stated than proven. There are other moments in Realizing where a more detailed account of film style could have nuanced the book's argument. The close-up of Christensen at the beginning of the film, for instance, constitutes a familiar gesture in silent-era film and is thus not as unusual as the authors suggest. Indeed, a discussion of this shot informed by similar sequences could have led to an exploration of how it frames what cinema scholars would term Christensen's enunciative agency. This position (filmmaker-as-Devil) puts Christensen in league with other modern tricksters such as Louis Feuillade's Fantȏmas, and taking note of this confederacy could have nuanced the authors' claims for Häxan's being "a singular film" (4). Similarly, a better sense of the traditions of early nonfiction filmmaking likely would have tempered the estimation of the film's...

The Gene: An Intimate History by Siddhartha Mukherjee

Reviewed by: The Gene: An Intimate History by Siddhartha Mukherjee Jobin M. Kanjirakkat (bio) Siddhartha Mukherjee, The Gene: An Intimate History. New York: Scribner, 2016, 608 pp. $20.32 cloth. The Gene: An Intimate History by Siddhartha Mukherjee, in a sense, is structured like a double helix. It is a chronological account of the major discoveries in the story of the science of heredity. Running parallel to it is a narrative of the engagement with ethical and social questions raised by eugenics. The Eurocentric narrative of the science of heredity is peppered with concepts from the Sanskrit tradition, and neatly woven into the narrative are descriptions of events from the author’s own personal history, which raises questions about the extent to which genes determine people’s lives. Although Mukherjee’s narrative leads us to believe that there has been a progression of scientific knowledge from the time of the pathbreaking findings of Mendel and Darwin, the author clearly indicates that the eugenic mindset has remained fairly constant throughout. While reading Siddhartha Mukherjee’s extremely lucid The Gene: An Intimate History, I remembered sitting in a philosophy talk in which the speaker, a well-known analytic philosopher who is much influenced by Gandhi, made an extremely powerful pedagogical statement: “we cannot move forward unless everyone in this room has understood this point.” Although his very clearly written scientific account is chronological and situated geographically in Europe and America, Mukherjee adds a special charm to the scientific narrative by bringing in concepts from Indian intellectual traditions and by weaving into his narrative a poignant family story. It is the story of a family whose members went through traumas of migrations caused by historical events such as the partition of Bengal around the time of Indian independence and who faced debilitating mental illnesses. However, despite a neat weaving together of the scientific and the personal, the two strands remain clearly distinct. This might indicate that even if the Western scientific rationality and Eastern storytelling styles coexist, they may remain in separate cognitive boxes. The Sanskrit word abheda metaphorically relates to a distinct unit inseparable from an individual, thus standing for something almost like a gene. It is the composition of such indivisible units that build the human genome, which interacts with the environment and determines the appearance, the constitution, the behavior, and the illnesses of an individual organism. The idea of gene therapy is basically to identify the damaged units and repair them, if possible, so that the individual organism gets to live a relatively trouble-free life. The word abheda occurs in the family strand of the story; the author’s father uses it to refer to some factor that is responsible for mental illness in their family. Mukherjee focuses special attention on schizophrenia and bipolar disease, which seem to have a significant genetic component. He also suggests that certain special abilities may go hand in hand with such illnesses and autism. The narration comes closer to home when he relates the occurrences of schizophrenia and bipolar disease in his own family. His own identity as a Bengali-American doctor-scientist-writer is also intertwined—he interweaves a troubling historical narrative of the partition of Bengal into a largely biomolecular scientific story. Along with this illustration of how genetic and environmental factors interact to produce complex conditions like schizophrenia, the author expresses—perhaps unusually for a science writer—his own anxiety about being predisposed to it. Perhaps the vividness of his writing gives glimmers of certain unusual talents that may accompany such predispositions. The Gene summarizes a major chunk of the research that has happened in relation to the gene in the last many decades. In the initial part, the author clearly draws out the relationship between evolution and genetics, thus showing how variations in [End Page 260] genes lead to natural selection, which is the engine of evolution. Later, one notes that he stays away from theoretical controversies such as debates about the target of natural selection: the view that natural selection targets a complex entity, an aggregation of different organisms that functions in a symbiotic manner and not a single organism. The ethical questions concerning scientific curiosity and intervention...

Fidelity to Fact

Fidelity to Fact Anna Lena Phillips Bell April—every day a new flower scent to try to identify; every day warmer—and I'm thinking yet again about a perennial conundrum. Amid distraction, and amid so much information, how to hold in mind the many present threats to ecological balance? How to remember all we have lost of the beyond-human world, all we might lose? In her essay "Metamorph," Anya Groner talks about the chytrid pandemic that's devastating frog populations, and how her twin sister, a biologist, has devoted her life to studying it. "Even after Maya explained her research," she writes, it took me a long time to understand the stakes. Though amphibian decline had gotten a decent amount of press, to laypeople like me, the scientific rhetoric obscured the severity of the crisis. And with so many scary stories populating the news, a disease that didn't directly impact humans had serious competition for my attention. To keep feeling the import of so many catastrophes and potential catastrophes is challenging even if one has considerable economic and social privilege. Add health troubles, financial strain, threats to personal dignity and safety, and environmental harms—all likely to affect large numbers of people in this affluent country—and it can be even harder to keep the plight of frogs dying from chytrid, or bats dying from white-nose syndrome, or redbay trees dying from laurel wilt disease, in mind. Partly what's needed is systems awareness—the realization and re-realization that those white-nosed bats might be feeling environmental stressors that could affect people too, or people's food supplies. Partly what's needed are good explications of scientific work, in all its slow, messy complexity. (Friends in science, I hope y'all know I would apply that phrase just as readily to poetry.) And partly it's writing and art that show us the personal effects of engaging with and understanding ecological interactions—both for scientists themselves and for people trying to understand their work better. So it makes me happy to have, in Ecotone's pages, essays like "Metamorph"—work by writers who are engaging with scientific research, bringing both fascination and patience to the task of illuminating that research for our readers. Just as important as conveying the winding trails of scientific stories is bringing to the page a sense of the wonder earthly phenomena can inspire. Linda Hogan writes, in this issue's Poem in a Landscape department, about Pablo Neruda's love of stone, and about her time working in the Laboratory of Chemical Evolution at the University of Maryland, not long after the first moon voyage. A moon rock kept [End Page 5] in a glass case in the lab draws her and fascinates her, as does the work of the researchers she supports. What Hogan discovers for herself—a lifelong path of exploring the universe in poetry and fiction—she appreciates in the paths of scientists. The impulse behind both kinds of work, she suggests, may be the same—a love for Earth's places and phenomena that instills the desire to know them more fully. The danger, of course, with writing about science (not to mention doing it) is that it's so easy to get it wrong, or incomplete. How we talk about data and statistics, how many and which studies we cover, which researchers we talk to on which days of the week—all these factors affect scientific storytelling. This is part of the reason our staff diligently fact-checks the work that will appear in Ecotone. We dive deep into databases, available thanks to our university library (bless you, library, and thank you, databases). When we can't discern what's what, we find somebody who knows, and we call them. Even with hours spent on a single essay or story, we may still not get it right every time, but we can try. And we must try. At the risk of sounding alarms that have been ringing continuously this past year, telling stories well and truthfully and completely—finding, you know, facts, and presenting them in contexts that are both clear and accurate and also...

Mentalistic and Scientific Stories about Human Behavior, Biomimetic Heuristics and Psychology's Confusions

Mentalistic and Scientific Stories about Human Behavior, Biomimetic Heuristics and Psychology's Confusions

An Analysis of Earth Science Pre-service Teachers’ Observation, Inference, and Science Stories in the Context of the Inference Problem about Footprints

An Analysis of Earth Science Pre-service Teachers’ Observation, Inference, and Science Stories in the Context of the Inference Problem about Footprints

Bioactive chitosan based coatings: functional applications in shelf life extension of Alphonso mango – a sweet story

Abstract Chitosan-based coating (M4F2) was used successfully to delay ripening and prolong shelf-life of rapidly perishable and expensive Alphonso mango fruits stored at 30 ± 3°C and 40–50% RH for 15 days. Matured raw Alphonso mango fruits were simple dip treated/coated and air dried with our newly developed chitosan based formulation (for industry) with additives. Samples were taken at regular intervals for routine analysis of fruits. Results indicated that M4F2 coating could decrease the decay incidence loss along with delay the change in color of mango fruit during storage but not physiological steady weight loss. Interestingly, sensory evaluation indicated that quality of mango was enhanced slight significantly to more sweetness and better aroma by M4F2 coating compared to uncoated control fruits. Further, our M4F2 coating formulation may act as an important potentiator of flavor compounds of mango as well as controlling organic acids and sugars, which are key components in the perception of mango flavor. Understanding the chemical components that contribute to flavor perception of the fruit is necessary for post-harvest storage technology. This information is also important to study chitosan/derivatives elicitation in molecular level to improve mango flavor as well as in identification of genes responsible for flavor quality. The scientific story behind this effective chitosan based coating formulation development has been discussed.

Health Narratives in the Greek Translated Press

This paper looks see how meaning is constructed in translated news texts about health and science and awards a narrative potential to unforced translation shifts, moving along the theoretical lines of Baker's Narrative Theory (2006). The thematic thread of health zooms in on “emotional frames” (Nabi, 2003) of risk and fear of human health that is narrated as being 'under attack’ by potentially dangerous diseases. Themes also orbit around schemas that promote hope and optimism about science represented as coming to the rescue of man from fear of the disease. The data consists of 21 pairs of English-Greek health news articles culled from the Greek newspapers I Kathimerini, To Vima and Ta Nea. Findings point towards translation as a process that employs lexicogrammatical and intrasentential configurations to a) give emphasis to the risk or hope dimensions underlying a heath or science story, b) enable the reflection or emergence of a cascade of public, conceptual and master narratives.

In Memoriam: Dr Graham Jackson, 1947-2016.

In Memoriam: Dr Graham Jackson, 1947-2016.

Louis Pasteur's three artist compatriots—Henner, Pointelin, and Perraud: A story of friendship, science, and art in the 1870s and 1880s

Biographers have largely ignored Louis Pasteur's many and varied connections with art and artists. This article is the second in a series of the authors' studies of Pasteur's friendships with artists. This research project has uncovered data that enlarge the great medical chemist's biography, throwing new light on a variety of topics including his work habits, his social life, his artistic sensibilities, his efforts to lobby on behalf of his artist friends, his relationships to their patrons and to his own patrons, and his use of works of art to foster his reputation as a leader in French medical science. In a prior article, the authors examined his unique working relationship with the Finnish painter Albert Edelfelt and the creation of the famous portrait of Pasteur in his laboratory in the mid-1880s. The present study documents his especially warm friendship with three French artists who came from Pasteur's home region, the Jura, or from neighboring Alsace. A forthcoming study gives an account of his friendships with Max Claudet and Paul Dubois, both of whom made important images of Pasteur, and it offers further illustrations of his devotion to the fine arts.

Parasites, politics and public science: the promotion of biological control in Western Australia, 1900-1910.

Biological control of arthropods emerged as a scientific enterprise in the late nineteenth century and the orchard industry of California was an early centre of expertise. In 1900, as the Australian colonies prepared for federation, each had a government entomologist attached to its agriculture department. The hiring of George Compere from California by the Western Australian Department of Agriculture began a controversial chapter in the early history of biological control that was linked to a late, local popularization of acclimatization. Compere became known as the 'travelling entomologist' and for a decade brought 'parasites' of pest insects from overseas and released them in Perth. His antagonistic disciplinary rhetoric and inflated claims for the 'parasite theory' created conflict with his counterparts in the eastern states. The resulting inter-state entomological controversy was played out in the press, revealing the political use of science for institutional and even state identity. It is a story of transnational exchanges, chance discoveries and popular public science: popular because of the promise of a simple, natural solution to agricultural insect pests and because of the public nature of the disputes it generated between the experts. This microcosm contributes to the global historiography of acclimatization, biological control, scientific exposition and the professionalization of agricultural science.

From the Communications Office: Science Communication Themes from the AAAS Meeting

From the Communications Office: Science Communication Themes from the AAAS Meeting

Between Sinification and Internationalization: Chinese Political Science in the Post-Reform Era

The story of Chinese political science since Reform and Opening-up is one that parallels China itself: rapid and remarkable development. This article poses a series of questions regarding the current standing of Chinese political science, its relevance and future as a discipline within China, its contributions to Chinese academia, policy making, and society, and it place within a global discipline.

Prescriptive Laws, Uncertain Science, and Political Stories: Forest Management in the Sierra Nevada

In the late 1990s, national forests in California's northern Nevada became centrally involved in two competing trends in natural resource management. One, a trend toward increased community-based resource management, produced the Herger-Feinstein Quincy Library Group Act, a law designed to govern logging and forest restoration in the Northern Nevada. The law was championed by the Quincy Library Group, a local organization that became one of the most visible examples of community-based planning. The other, a trend toward increased ecological sensitivity in forest management, produced a Forest Service plan, known colloquially as the Sierra Nevada Framework, which purported to govern the same lands. Both plans were backed by compelling narratives, and both would apply in contexts of contested politics, demanding legal obligations, and pervasive scientific uncertainty. This article explores the interrelationships between those plans, and the related interrelationships among conflicting narratives, uncertain science, and the legal superstructure. It concludes that in such contexts of uncertainty, environmental managers will be prone to allowing narrative rather than scientific criteria to drive policy, but that taking such a course of action is problematically inconsistent with a legal structure ostensibly demanding decision-making grounded in science.

Sundance Filmmakers Overlook Top Science Stories, Focus on History of Planet’s Destruction

Sundance Filmmakers Overlook Top Science Stories, Focus on History of Planet’s Destruction

Germ cell neoplasia in situ (GCNIS): evolution of the current nomenclature for testicular pre-invasive germ cell malignancy.

The pre-invasive lesion associated with post-pubertal malignant germ cell tumours of the testis was first recognized in the early 1970s and confirmed by a number of observational and follow-up studies. Until this year, this scientific story has been confused by resistance to the entity and disagreement on its name. Initially termed 'carcinoma in situ' (CIS), it has also been known as 'intratubular germ cell neoplasia, unclassified' (IGCNU) and 'testicular intraepithelial neoplasia' (TIN). In this paper, we review the history of discovery and controversy concerning these names and introduce the reasoning for uniting behind a new name, endorsed unanimously at the World Health Organization (WHO) consensus classification 2016: germ cell neoplasia in situ (GCNIS).

A Topical Trajectory on Survival: an Analysis of Link-Making in a Sequence of Lessons on Evolution

This study explores the concept of link-making in relation to communicative strategies applied in the teaching and studying of biological evolution. The analysis focused on video recordings of 11 lessons on biological evolution conducted in a Swedish 9th grade class of students aged 15 years. It reveals how the teacher and students connected classroom conversations, the frequency of references to conversations in whole-class settings, and the development of a theme focusing on species survival and extinction. Detailed examples from the data illustrate how this theme developed from its initiation during the first lesson, through discussion and clarification, to its wrapping up during the last lesson. They further illustrate how students made sense of what the teacher said and wrote, and how the teacher postponed issues, explained and developed topics, provided opportunities for link-making, organised the class, motivated students, and checked their understanding. The study’s methodological approach offers a way of including several time dimensions within research. Based on our findings, we conclude that the excerpts examined here did succeed in building ‘islands of coherence’ in the co-construction of curricular content. Moreover, the topical trajectory in relation to species survival provided opportunities for constructing a ‘scientific story’ in the classroom.

Fifteenth Century Saints, Nineteenth Century Neurologists, and Twentieth Century Immunotherapy: The Eccentric History of Multiple Sclerosis

Multiple sclerosis has a long, fascinating, serendipi- tous, and well-documented history. The first recorded mention of the disease can be dated back to the fifteenth century, while a truly exhaustive investigation of the disorder began with the nineteenth century’s burgeoning neurologists. These records reveal a fascinating story of meticulous science aimed at comprehending a truly perplexing illness, one that even today is not completely understood. The great nineteenth century French neurologist Jean-Marie Charcot became very interested in studying this disease, and through his celebrity garnered much attention to a previously unknown affliction. Here we review a story of pioneering research that grants brief tribute to some of the more remarkable experiments, wondering if ideas born in the past may help develop solutions in the future.

Generation Image: Why Photos Are Important in Explaining Your Research

Generation Image: Why Photos Are Important in Explaining Your Research

Origins: the scientific story of creation

Origins: the scientific story of creation