Scientific Correspondence Research Articles

Alfredo Magalhães Ramalho’s scientific correspondence: historical connections between oceanography and marine biology from Portugal (1919–1949)

This article presents Alfredo Magalhães Ramalho’s scientific correspondence between 1919 and 1949, both nationally and internationally. It consists of 181 unpublished letters, exchanged with 30 relevant figures belonging to 11 countries, including France, the UK, Croatia, Japan, Germany, Canada, Sweden, Norway, Morocco, Belgium and Spain. This correspondence shows a network among different research institutions devoted to the marine sciences. This includes biological stations, such as the Istituto Italo-Germanico di Biologia Marina, laboratories and museums, e. g. the British Museum of Natural History. At the national level, the correspondence between Ramalho and Augusto Nobre represents a historical axis between Lisbon and Porto, involving two of the most relevant scientists in the fields of oceanography and marine biology. At the international level, Ramalho corresponded with personalities such as Henry Gascoyne Maurice and other members of the International Council for the Exploration of the Sea, including for example the oceanographer Vagn Walfrid Ekman. This correspondence represents an archival discovery of the Portuguese Institute for Sea and Atmosphere in Lisbon, marking a decisive historical scientific moment for both Portuguese and international contexts in the field of marine sciences. This article aims to reconstruct Portugal’s internal and external networks.

Comparison of Authorial Stance Between Professional and Amateur Writers in Scientific Correspondence Writing

Writing argumentative correspondences is an art requiring linguistic and rhetorical skills to bring forth the ultimate effect of persuading the audience. However, instruction of this critical language art has been underrepresented in Thai tertiary educational contexts. This study is based on an interventional experiment of teaching an ESP-Science course to 40 students majoring in science, with a strong emphasis on linguistic devices for academic interaction, consisting of stance and engagement marking, as elaborated in Hyland (2005a, 2005b). The interventional experiment made use of the 240 correspondences taken from the scientific journal Nature with the duration of 30 hours over a 10-week period. This study reports the findings from a comparison of the students’ writing before and after the intervention and a comparison of the students’ post-experiment writing and the experts’ writing. The analysis is based on content analysis, inter-rater assessment, and descriptive statistics, and shows that a meaningful level of progress has been obtained as a result of the intervention. The progress is evident in not only that students’ post-experiment writing exceeds in quality their pre-experiment writing, but also that students’ post-experiment writing has become similar to the expert writing to a great extent, with respect, in particular, to the strategic patterns of stance and engagement marking. The success of a relatively short intervention, i.e., 10 weeks, calls for implementation of courses using authentic correspondences in ESP-Science classes, or more broadly, in ESP courses in diverse disciplines (237/250).

The Effects of Using Scientific Genre to Promote Undergraduate Students’ English Academic Writing in an ESP Course

Argumentative writing is problematic for Thai EFL learners. This study aims to determine the effects of an argumentative correspondence writing course in an ESP for Science classroom. The course was designed from the genre-based approach, including stance and engagement by Hyland (2005) and ESP material design by Hutchinson and Waters (1987). The experiment involved 40 participants studying in a science field in a public university in Thailand. The study used a one-group pretest and posttest design. The research instruments were a knowledge test and a writing test for scientific argumentative correspondence. The results revealed statistically meaningful differences between the pretest and posttest scores, indicating that the students increased their abilities and gained higher test scores through completing the course. The findings suggest that instruction of writing scientific argumentative correspondences is effective and should be included in ESP science courses, especially as a foundation for writing longer texts in scientific genres.

Специфика кадрового комплектования советского акционерного общества «Висмут»: материалы переписки аппарата Первого главного управления при Совете министров СССР и парторганизаций Свердловского обкома ВКП(б) в 1949 г.

The publication introduces into scientific use correspondence of the deputy head of the First Main Directorate (PGU, executing agency of the Soviet nuclear project) under the Council of Ministers of the USSR P. Ya. Meshik with the party organizations of the Sverdlovsk Regional Committee of the AUCP (B) on the issue of recruitment for work abroad. The analysis of references to the resolutions of the Council of Ministers known to researchers establishes that the Soviet Joint-Stock Company “Wismut” located in Germany recruited mining engineers and specialists in the field of geological exploration. Its subordinates were engaged in search and development of uranium deposits in the Soviet zone of occupation of Germany. A raw material base for extraction and processing of uranium-containing ores was formed for implementation of the Soviet nuclear weapons program in the second half of the 1940s. For reasons of state secrecy, researchers are still significantly limited in access to archival documents on the history of the nuclear project. Thus, introduction into scientific use of new historical sources related to the project implementation already seems sufficiently relevant and high-demand scientific task. In this case, it is a selection of five documents deposited in the materials of the Sverdlovsk City Committee of the AUCP (B) Documentation Center of Public Organizations of the Sverdlovsk Region associated with the mass recruitment of mining and exploration workers entrusted to the Sverdlovsk Regional Committee of the AUCP (B) in spring of 1949 in the interests of the nuclear project. At the direction of the Regional Committee (obkom), the Sverdlovsk City Committee selected a number of necessary specialists, and the First Main Directorate began their registration for work abroad. In the autumn of 1949, a request came from the PGU about expediency of such transfer for one of the selected specialists. Doubts were caused by minor flaws indicated in his generally positive characteristic. Responding to the request, the city committee withdrew its decision. The introduction of the identified documents collection into scientific use is due to two reasons. Firstly, at the grassroots stage, it fixes the recruitment system for the Soviet nuclear project, which has been little studied up to date. Secondly, on a hypothetical level, it can be considered an illustration of a mechanism of evasion from mobilization into the atomic project system, which frightened many specialists with its obscurity.

Catching Colds with Canguilhem: Culturing Relations with Common Cold Viruses

This paper draws on the thought of the historian of science, Georges Canguilhem, to explore how the practice of making medical knowledge brings into question accepted understandings of (ill)health and contagious disease. Drawing out how the lively materialities of both humans and viruses shape human experience of viral infection, the analysis focuses on written and oral histories of the UK’s Common Cold research Unit (CCU), associated scientific papers and correspondence between 1961 and 1965, and press cuttings and visitors’ books from the CCU archives, in order to offer multiple readings of the relationship between humans and cold viruses at this site. These alternative post-natural histories challenge our preconceptions about the costs and benefits of living-with-viruses and the role of infection and associated symptoms in drawing lines between the normal and the pathological. The archives of the CCU offer new ways of encountering viruses and their histories, and evidence that that infection can be, as Canguilhem suggests, a “positive, innovative experience,” while at the same time questioning the novelty of recent posthumanist accounts of human-virus relations.

Listy Gottloba Fregego. Uwagi o polskim wydaniu [rec. Gottlob Frege: Korespondencja naukowa

The present article reviews the Polish-language edition of Gottlob Frege’s scientific correspondence. In the article, I discuss the material hitherto unpublished in Polish in relation to the remainder of Frege’s works. First of all, I inquire into the role and nature of definitions. Then, I consider Frege’s recognition criteria for sameness of thoughts. In the article’s third part, I study letters devoted to the principle of semantic compositionality, while in the fourth part I discuss Frege’s remarks concerning the context principle.

Imperial Ruin and Military Waste on Johnston Atoll

In 1970, the United States military was ordered to halt the use of herbicides in the Vietnam War. The suspension pre-empted a series of considerations by the military to determine what to do with the millions of gallons of surplus herbicides, such as Agent Orange, White, and Blue. In 1972, in response to a directive to return all Agent Orange stock to the continental United States for disposal, officials moved the herbicides to Johnston Atoll in the Pacific Ocean. In the 1980s, Johnston Atoll was slowly transformed into the site of the US military's first chemical munitions incineration facility. The military's use of the Atoll as a munitions waste site offers material and historical traces of the vast and continued global circulation of US military waste, how the military conceptualized the ‘destruction’ of such waste, and where it was deemed acceptable to house and carry out these attempts of waste removal. Drawing from primary sources including military scientific studies and correspondence, and situated within environmental justice and postcolonial science studies scholarship, I offer a reading of the Atoll as a place that was used to obscure, yet laid bare, several unattended histories and contemporalities of US empire.

What mysteries lay in spore: taxonomy, data, and the internationalization of mycology in Saccardo's Sylloge Fungorum.

Italian mycologist Pier Andrea Saccardo is best remembered for his monumental Sylloge Fungorum, the first 'modern' effort to compile all identified fungi within a single classification scheme. The existing history of mycology is limited and has primarily focused on developments within England, but this article argues that Saccardo and his collaborators on the Sylloge supported a vital transnational expansion of mycological knowledge exchange and played a crucial role in stabilizing the tangled knot of local naming and identification among the world's amateur and professional mycologists. Written in the 'universal' scientific language of Latin, the Sylloge served as an early database of fungal knowledge and symbolized a broader unification of mycological inquiry in a moment of expanded scientific correspondence. The article situates this proto-database in broader histories of big data in biology and shows how the Sylloge formed a globalizing foundation for the twentieth century's major collecting and taxonomic advances in mycology.

The First Publication on Contraception in a US Medical Journal, 1928: Hannah Mayer Stone's Case for Contraceptive Care Before the Pill.

Today, as access to women's reproductive health care in the United States has proven less than ensured, it behooves scholars of public health to explore how US medical contraceptive care was successfully established and perpetuated initially in the early to mid-twentieth century. This article highlights the work of Hannah Mayer Stone, MD, in building and advocating such care. From the moment she accepted the position of medical director for the first contraceptive clinic in the country in 1925 until her untimely death in 1941, Stone campaigned relentlessly for women's access to the best contraceptive regimes available, all the while navigating extensive legal, social, and scientific challenges. In 1928, she published the first scientific report on contraception in a US medical journal, thereby legitimating the provision of contraception as a medical endeavor and providing empirical grounds for clinical contraceptive work in the years that followed. Her scientific publications and professional correspondence provide insight into the processes through which medical contraceptive care became increasingly available in US history and offer guidance for a contemporary era when reproductive health care hangs in the balance. (Am J Public Health. 2023;113(4):390-396. https://doi.org/10.2105/AJPH.2022.307215).

Inaugural Editorial: Welcome to ASCE OPEN

Much time has passed since Newton wrote to Robert Hooke in a 1675 letter, “If I have seen further, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants”—a metaphor that predates even Newton by more than four centuries. His distinct acknowledgment of others who paved the way for his own revolutionary work is remarkable in both its simplicity and humility. It was clear that others also deserved recognition, but in that statement, he implicitly acknowledged the power of scientific correspondence as well because, without it, he might not have even known there were giants around from whom he could learn. It is thus how science and engineering, including our own—and arguably the most senior of them all—civil engineering, make progress. We, often without personal acquaintance and almost always asynchronously, communicate and learn from each other, with sometimes decades or even centuries separating us. The conduits of these interactions are manifold, but the main one today is our peer-reviewed journals. The moniker implies printed matter, yet that format has all but evolved out of existence. Needless to say, just like our science, our journals do evolve. The latest development we are experiencing in the world of science and engineering communications is a steady migration toward open publishing. Simply put, open publishing is the practice of making information and creative works available to the general public without restrictions or cost. This mode of publishing offers many virtues that benefit both the creators and the consumers of knowledge and information. Open publishing spurs creativity and knowledge development by removing access barriers and bringing more people from diverse backgrounds into collaboration and cocreation. Otherwise, you might be less inclined to access an article from a neighboring discipline, or from the same discipline but a different country, if it required additional subscriptions. Open publishing can also benefit creators by giving them broader exposure and recognition (citations). By the same token, constructive criticism from a wider audience can help authors improve their work. Finally, open publishing reduces the barriers that prevent marginalized groups from accessing knowledge, which is a prerequisite for participating in knowledge production. In all, open publishing should accelerate the pace of inventions and discoveries in our community, and supporting and promoting it will enable a more informed, creative, and just society.

Correction: Applying Records in Contexts in Portugal: the case of the scientific correspondence from António de Barros Machado and Dora Lustig archive

Correction: Applying Records in Contexts in Portugal: the case of the scientific correspondence from António de Barros Machado and Dora Lustig archive

The Most-Cited Publications in Gender-Affirming Surgery: A Cross-Sectional Bibliometric Analysis.

Background: Gender-affirming surgery is becoming more common among reconstructive surgeons. Bibliometric analyses are statistical evaluations of published scientific correspondence and are a validated method of measuring influence in the scientific community. As no such bibliometric analysis has been done as of yet, the purpose of this study is to identify the characteristics of the 50 most-cited peer-reviewed articles on gender-affirming surgery. Methods: The Scopus abstract and citation database was utilized in April 2020 to search for English-language publications related to gender-affirming surgery. The 50 most-cited publications that met inclusion criteria were reviewed for various metric tabulations. Results: The 50 publications have been cited a total of 4402 times. Thirty-one (62%) were published in 2000 or later. Phalloplasty was the most discussed surgical technique, and 18 of the articles focused on female-to-male (FtM) patients. Case series (46%) and review articles (24%) were most common and there were no Level I or Level II studies. The Netherlands contributed the most, with 13 articles. Among the most frequent keywords in the 50 abstracts were "flap" and "complication". The earliest author keywords used were "transsexual" and "sex reassignment". Conclusions: The keyword usage in these abstracts over time seems to follow the trend of a more socially inclusive lexicon. A focus on studies with a higher level of evidence may optimize surgeon education and more appropriately guide clinical practice. This study reveals that the most influential and commonly referenced studies may not be sufficient to appropriately guide clinical practices.

A Man and His Minnows: The Introduction of Gambusia affinis to Mandatory Palestine

While the ecological aspects of aquatic introductions have been thoroughly researched, lesser attention has been given to the social, historical, cultural, and ideological contexts of such intended introductions. The introduction of Gambusia affinis to Palestine was made quickly by one person, who documented the process—and hence may serve as an excellent case study: Israel Kligler's scientific reports and personal correspondence from the late 1920s and early 1930s provide us with an opportunity to witness the thoughts and ideas behind that introduction process. We find that the swift and quick introduction was facilitated by a combination of three factors: Zionist institutions' desire to test new scientific tools and methods, the colonial desire to control the environment and actively “ameliorate” it, and Kligler's close working ties with US-American institutions. We argue that histories of introductions should be regarded and analyzed by examining such technical-political conjunctures.

Rukopisnoe nasledie Nasir ad-Dina at-Tusi v oblasti matematiki i astronomii

The article is devoted to the manuscript heritage of great Azerbaijani thinker, Nasir al-Din al-Tusi in the field of mathematics and astronomy. His manuscripts are stored in various scientific repositories around the world. The number of scientific works, translations, commentaries and correspondence reaches 190. This study contains facsimiles of some manuscripts written by Nasir al-din al-Tusi. The author firstly investigates the main themes of “Tahrir Iglidis fi ilmi Handasa” written in Arabic. Following the study, as one of the most common books on the writings of Euclid and Almagest, “Usulu-l-handasa fi Iglidis” is thoroughly studied. At the same time, the author studies the manuscripts written in Persian, “Si Fasl” (30 chapters) and “Astrolabe” (containing the rules for using the astrolabe to calculate the trajectory of motion of celestial bodies in relation to the center of the Earth) and bring clarity to the main chapters of these manuscripts.

On Gaian Systems: An Interview with Bruce Clarke

On Gaian Systems:An Interview with Bruce Clarke Asijit Datta (bio) Asijit Datta interviewed literature and science scholar Bruce Clarke during a webinar on August 27, 2021. Their conversation centered on Clarke's presentation and development of Lynn Margulis's neocybernetic approach to the Gaia concept in Gaian Systems: Lynn Margulis, Neocybernetics, and the End of the Anthropocene, published by the University of Minnesota Press in 2020. Often seen as an outlier in science since its debut in the 1970s by atmospheric chemist James Lovelock and evolutionary theorist Lynn Margulis, Gaia theory has run a long and varied course, gradually bringing the Earth and life sciences into closer integration around new understandings of planetary dynamics. This interview explores the development of Gaia's scientific variants and some key theoretical frames that have been brought to bear on Gaia discourse. Particular attention is paid to Margulis's adaptation of the concept of autopoiesis, which she viewed as providing a clarifying criterion for the autonomous self-production and symbiotic collaboration of living systems, in contrast to the first-order and computational cybernetics of control systems favored by Lovelock. Clarke's own work in this area extends Margulis's autopoietic approach to the Gaian system. Bruce Clarke is Paul Whitfield Horn Distinguished Professor of Literature and Science in the Department of English at Texas Tech University. He was Baruch S. Blumberg/NASA Chair in Astrobiology at the Library of Congress in 2019; Senior Fellow at the Center for Literature and the Natural Sciences, Friedrich Alexander University Erlangen-Nürnberg in 2015; and Senior Fellow at the International Research Institute for Cultural Technologies and Media Philosophy, Bauhaus-University Weimar in 2010–11. His latest books are Writing Gaia: The Scientific Correspondence of James Lovelock and Lynn Margulis, coedited with Sébastien Dutreuil (2022), and Gaian Systems: Lynn Margulis, Neocybernetics, and the End of the Anthropocene (2020); other books include Neocybernetics and Narrative (2014), Posthuman Metamorphosis: Narrative and Systems (2008), and Energy Forms: Allegory and Science in the Era of Classical Thermodynamics (2001). He coedits the book series Meaning Systems, published by Fordham [End Page 431] University Press, and is the editor or coeditor of seven essay collections, most recently Posthuman Biopolitics: The Science Fiction of Joan Slonczewski (2020) and, with Manuela Rossini, The Cambridge Companion to Literature and the Posthuman (2017). asijit datta: Professor Clarke, when you point to Lovelock's "circular logic" [Clarke 2020, 6] concerning Gaia, as that recursive logic is understood in second-order cybernetics, are you looking at Gaia as a system operated by a continuous loop whose essential components are indestructible? Do you think that Gaia has a fixed volume of unalterable properties, while other components keep metamorphosing? bruce clarke: Yes, a continuous loop would conform to my idea here. However, that such a continuous loop and its essential components are indestructible is not the Gaia conception as I understand it. Matter and energy enter the state of living form, and the components of living systems are always re-forming and breaking down again. Their elements are renewable, but their forms are not indestructible, and the system carries out the continuous creation and de-creation of the productions of the system. That would be one way to state Gaia's circular logic. Moreover, Gaia itself is not indestructible, but it makes sense to think that it has maintained itself in operation since it got going some two and a half billion years ago. A time will come when cosmological conditions are no longer sustainable for this planetary system, at which point the continuation of life will cease. As for a fixed volume, this is the issue of material closure [Barlow and Volk 1990]. The planet is thermodynamically open to the flux of solar energy, of course, even while it is essentially closed to the influx of matter from beyond the Earth, just because this amount is negligible in relation to the total mass of the Earth. So basically, the planet does have a fixed volume of geological matter to be brought into the recycling dynamics that sustain the Gaian system. Gaia itself is also evolving as part and parcel of the interlocking of geological and biological evolution. Gaia continuously...

Teodoro Narbuto mokslinė korespondencija kaip veikalo Dzieje narodu litewskiego „akademiškumo“ liudijimas

Teodoro Narbuto mokslinė korespondencija kaip veikalo Dzieje narodu litewskiego „akademiškumo“ liudijimas

Guglielmo Marconi, Augusto Righi and the invention of wireless telegraphy

One of the major accomplishments of the late nineteenth-century applied physics was, as it is well known, the development of wireless telegraphy by Guglielmo Marconi, future Nobel laureate. In this paper, we will explore what scientific debt, if any, Marconi had toward another Italian physicist, internationally well known for his research on electromagnetic waves: Augusto Righi. This question will be pursued through a close analysis of Marconi’s first patent, of Righi’s scientific correspondence and of the specialized and popular press of the time. At the end of this analysis, which includes a brief survey of Marconi and Righi’s activity as senators of the Kingdom of Italy, we will better appreciate what Marconi took from contemporary scientists, what specific contributions he is responsible for and, ultimately, what Marconi and Righi thought of each other.

Role of serotonin transporter-linked polymorphic region in suicide: Beyond association, meta-analysis, and future prospects

Serotonin transporter-linked polymorphic regions (5-HTTLPR) have been investigated intensively in suicide with inconsistent findings. However, a recent meta-analysis has observed an association of S allele with violent attempted suicide. The S allele causes a lower expression of 5-HTTLPR and is correlated with higher amygdala response to unpleasant stimuli. However, studies show that effect 5-HTTLPR genotype on mRNA expression is additive and linear. It suggests that apart from genotype, the expression of 5-HTTLPR is also controlled by epigenetic factors. Therefore, the purpose of this narrative review is to re-evaluate the findings of retrospective studies 5-HTTLPR in suicide with their limitations and highlight a new approach to understand the role of 5-HTTLPR in suicide. Reviews, meta-analysis, research articles, brief reports, and scientific correspondence were searched through PubMed, library web portal of Sikkim University, Bio-Med, and Science Direct using the terms such as “serotonin or serotonin system and suicide,” “5-HTTLPR and suicide,” “5-HTTLPR and attempted suicide,” “5-HTTLPR and completed suicide,” “5-HTTLPR meta-analysis and suicide,” and “5-HTTLPR and epigenetics.” The articles written in English were initially screened by title and later selected by abstract for possible inclusion. After the literature review, it was observed that previous studies were limited by variability of sample size, heterogeneous populations, varied social stressors, and variations in the assay and statistical methods. Hence, the cumulative study of environmental factors, 5-HTTLPR gene polymorphism, and epigenetic factors is hereby proposed in the well-defined ethnic population to understand the role of 5-HTTLPR in suicide.

Handed Flowers Pick High Quality Mates from Pollinators

Darwin devoted an entire book to stigma and anther polymorphisms, which exemplified the importance of pollen movement efficiency as a selective agent on floral form. However, five years after its publication, his interest was piqued by a description of floral handedness or enantiostyly. Todd described how left handed Solanum rostratum flowers have stigmas deflected to the left and anthers deflected to the right, while the opposite is true for right-handed flowers. In his final scientific correspondence, Darwin wrote to Todd for seeds so that he could … have the pleasure of seeing the flowers and experimenting on them. Darwin died days later on 19 April 1882. More than a century would elapse before the first experiments demonstrated that handedness leads to high rates of outcrossing [5, 6]. By attaching quantum dots to pollen grains, we tracked pollen movement, revealing the mechanisms behind high outcrossing rates in a plant with partial handedness (a majority of anthers deflected to one side). Handedness leads to outcrossing, because left- and right-handed morphs place most of their pollen on different sides of the pollinators. However, we also found that partial handedness results in pollen quality mosaics on each side of pollinators, comprising hotspots and coldspots of outcrossed pollen. Outcrossed pollen receipt was much higher than expected because stigmatic positions are fine-tuned to match the outcross pollen hotspots. Exploitation of these pollen quality mosaics suggests that like animals, female choice in plants can occur before or during the act of mating.

Научные практики и языки описания в России XVIII века (на примере любительских занятий В.Н. Татищева)

The theoretical basis for the approach used in this article is T. Kuhn’s version of social constructivism, according to which the subject of science is formed due to the languages of science. For the first time in Russian history of science, С. Bazerman’s approach was applied here, allowing us to reveal a set of scientific practices and languages of description that were used in the 18th century: a standardized description of facts in the common language of the scientific community; publication of the results in scientific journals, dictionaries and encyclopaedias; participation in scientific expeditions and educational trips; scientific correspondence. The authors of this article claim that the scientific practices and languages of description used by the Russian scientific communities in the 18th century were similar to those adopted by the scientific communities in Europe. The purpose of this paper is to demonstrate that the use of these languages and practices allowed the amateur scientist (V.N. Tatishchev) to obtain significant scientific results. To do this, we identify the scientific practices and languages of description approved by the scientific community in 18th-century Russia and compare them to Tatishchev’s nonprofessional scientific and historical work. We conclude that turning to the accepted scientific practices, such as scientific expeditions, hypothetico-deductive method, and stepwise organization of research, allowed Tatishchev to arrive at important conclusions in palaeontology and geography. However, in spite of his work with historical sources (chronicles) and attempts to standardize the language of describing historical facts (his Lexicon), Tatishchev’s historical research lacks indisputable results, which fact we attribute to his insufficient knowledge of Latin – the language used by the scientific community of the 18th century to describe facts – and to his use of the methodology rejected by historians.