#histsci — Public Fediverse posts
Live and recent posts from across the Fediverse tagged #histsci, aggregated by home.social.
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He weighed his food, his sleep, his feces, and, by his own accounting, his sex life. For thirty years he sat in a chair that took his dinner away. Santorio Santorio, founder of quantitative physiology, discovered that we are all quietly evaporating.
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257 years ago today, #AlexanderVonHumboldt was born. The Invention of Nature is a delightful biography that paints a lively portrait of this ever-restless polymath, showing he was a force of nature.
https://inquisitivebiologist.com/2025/02/11/book-review-the-invention-of-nature-the-adventures-of-alexander-von-humboldt-the-lost-hero-of-science/#Books #BookReview #Bookstodon #Biography #HistoryOfScience #ScienceHistory #HistSci #Scicomm @andrea_wulf
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He weighed strings with birdshot, photographed the sag, and flipped the picture to find his church. He carried hazelnuts and one key when the tram hit him. Taxis refused the rags. Antoni Gaudí, the dandy who ended up trusting what falls.
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#histsci folks, if you're not following @[email protected] yet on all the things, now's the time!
RE: https://bsky.app/profile/did:plc:batsswaxvws26rr3gf7wvm7k/post/3mvfhpbeils2l -
An excerpt on AI & robots from the “Machines” chapter of HUMANS: A MONSTROUS HISTORY, 1st published by @[email protected], now out from @[email protected] in a South Asian edition, is out in Newslaundry!
🧪💙📚 🗃 #ancient #medieval #earlymodern #histsci #histmed #18thCentury #politics #HAMH
If the only value lies in what... -
I wrote this blog when QUEER ORIGINS was published in the UK. I'm reposting it now that the book is out in Canada and the US.
Read about the natural wonder of sexual polymorphism — and why Richard Dawkins' view of Darwin needs amending. 🌈📚🦋
Darwin's Queer Inheritance: https://yalebooks.co.uk/blog/darwin-queer-inheritance/
#book #books #bookstodon #reading #readingcommunity #writing #author #science #nature #animals #darwin #Darwin #evolution #history #histsci #sts #histsex #queerhistory #queer #lgbt #lgbtq #lgbtqia
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He ate his meat raw, slept bolt upright by candlelight, and casually mentioned that 18,000 boys were sacrificed to an ox-headed god each year. Oxford gave George Psalmanazar rooms and asked him to teach the language. He was from Marseille.
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In 1901, she strapped herself into a padded oak barrel with an anvil at her feet and went over Horseshoe Falls. She was sixty-three. A charm-school teacher. Broke. And she had already sent the cat. Meet Annie Edson Taylor, Queen of the Mist.
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He shot them with fine shot to spare the feathers, ran wires through the bodies, posed the wings mid-lunge, then often ate the model. Snowy owl, not indelicate. Bald eagle, like veal. John James Audubon, taxidermist of the sublime.
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Happy birthday to writer, statesman and polymath Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832). Made for the #printersolstice Fauvism prompt: This print is a hand-printed, limited edition, reduction block print portrait. While best known for his contributions to German literature, he pursued natural sciences, studying morphology, doing work which presaged evolution, 🧵1/
https://minouette.etsy.com/listing/1162543096
#linocut #printmaking #sciart #histsci #Goethe #NaturalScience #reductionPrint #printmaker #mastoArt
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HUMANS: A MONSTROUS HISTORY is out in Korean, from Hyeonamsa! Please considering sharing this with Korean folks in your circles.
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💙📚 🧪🗃 #ancient #medieval #earlymodern #18thC #histsci #histmed #politics
www.hyeonamsa.com/book/book_de... -
Happy birthday to British-born, American #astrophysicist Margaret Burbidge (1919-2020) who was one of the people instrumental in building our understanding of stellar nucleosynthesis, how nuclei are produced in stars & you and I are all stardust! She was the 1st author of a monumental scientific paper Synthesis of the Elements in Stars, which became known as B2FH from the initials of its authors: 🧵1/4
https://minouette.etsy.com/listing/1855643660
#linocut #printmaking #sciart #histsci #womenInSTEM #mastoArt -
Happy birthday to #geologist & oceanographic #cartographer Marie Tharp (1920-2006), whose pioneering, thorough & complete ocean floor maps with Bruce Heezen, made using realms of echo sounder data, revealed the Mid-Atlantic Ridge.
After studying #geology & math, Maurice ‘Doc’ Ewing at Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory at Columbia hired her to draft 1000s of echo sounder profiles. 🧵1/5 -
Some later authors find Mendel’s data too good to be true and suspect some amount of confirmation bias or simplification of data and even call the conflict between the alleged “cooking” of the data and his moral character the “Mendelian Paradox.” Other authors dispute the evidence of any “cooking” of the data at all.
#sciart #linocut #printmaking #histsci #biology #botany #genetics #printmaker #washi 🧵3/
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Big update to ‘Form & Number: A History of Mathematical Beauty’: the PDFs are now *tagged* (plus various minor improvements).
A #TaggedPDF contains hidden extra semantic information to assist screen-reading software etc., including alt text for diagrams+images (in the case of ‘F&N’, 552 pieces of alt text were required, some quite lengthy).
The new version is available (#OpenAccess as always) at: https://archive.org/details/cain_formandnumber_ebook_large
Feedback from users of screen readers would be very welcome!
Creating this version has been possible because of the ongoing LaTeX tagging project [https://latex3.github.io/tagging-project/] (thank you to the LaTeX team and other contributors!). I have been adapting my own #LuaLaTeX styles [https://codeberg.org/ajcain/minos] to use the new interfaces.
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#accessibility #a11y #MathArt #HistMath #HistSci #MathematicalBeauty #aesthetics #typography #TeXLaTeX
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Happy birthday to #astrophysicist Jocelyn Bell Burnell! In 1967, as a grad student she discovered the 1st radio pulsar, a highly magnetized, rotating neutron star that emits a beam of EM radiation. This radiation can only be observed when the star is pointed towards us; so, like the light from a lighthouse, it appears to pulse at a precise frequency. She had been working with her supervisor Antony Hewish & others to construct a radio telescope to study quasars. 🧵 #linocut #printmaking #histsci
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Hey, still need to submit fall book orders? (I KNOW)
Teaching #envhist #envhum #envstudies #histsci #histtech #histstm #sts #discardstudies ?
🤩Please consider #TransformingNight 🌌💡🌃 -- out 3 Aug, just in time for the new academic year!
uwapress.uw.edu/book/9780295...
Transforming Night -
Hunting for a #FathersDay gift? How about a book that blends history, science, & pop culture? HUMANS: A MONSTROUS HISTORY is a history of the category of the human, told through ideas about monsters and monster-making. 💙📚 🧪🗃 #ancient #medieval #earlymodern #18thC #histsci #histmed #politics 1/
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#JobKlaxon: 3-year postdoc position at Manchester Metropolitan University
Application deadline: 29th June 2026
Manchester Metropolitan University is seeking to recruit a postdoctoral Research Associate in History (full-time, 3 years) to join the team for Dr Francesca Mackenney's Leverhulme-funded project, ‘‘The Making of Natural History, 1797 - Present'
#envhist #histsci #naturalhistory #envhum
https://www.jobs.ac.uk/job/DRU994/research-associate-the-making-of-natural-history-1797-present
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A short #BookReview of ‘Form & Number: A History of Mathematical Beauty’ in ‘Mathematics Magazine’ has been pointed out to me: https://doi.org/10.1080/0025570X.2025.2587000 (not open-access)
I am quite pleased by the reviewer's evaluation :-) ‘a very careful and absolutely thorough survey of the “rich heritage of scholarship” about both beauty in mathematics and the study of that topic’.
There was a more detailed review by Viktor Blåsjö in ‘TUGboat’ last year: https://doi.org/10.47397/tb/46-2/tb143reviews-cain (open-access)
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Today is #EarthDay. 🌍 But what about Earth at #night? 🌌🌃 And how did scientists come to understand #night as environment, albeit in distinct ways? #envhist #envhum #histsci #histtech #sts @[email protected] uwapress.uw.edu/book/9780295...
Transforming Night -
Maxwell's equations seem to be universally and consistently held up as exemplars of mathematical beauty in physical law. Expressed in modern notation as differential equations, they are as shown in the first attached image.
Even someone unaware of the physical interpretation of the symbols can see clear symmetries in the equations.
Henri Poincaré (1854–1912) thought James Clerk Maxwell (1831–79) was able to reformulate electromagnetic theory in part due to seeing how the equations would become more symmetrical:
‘It was because Maxwell was profoundly steeped in the sense of mathematical symmetry; would he have been so, if others before him had not studied this symmetry for its own beauty?’
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Can an archive make a monster of a historian? But of course! I wrote about this for @[email protected], and the essay is now both free to read online and available as an audio read by me! The audio version: 💙📚 🗃 #medieval #earlymodern #histsci #histmed #18thC #HAMH #maps #cartography 1/2
Can the Archive Make a Monster... -
Call open: Visiting Fellowships for early career researchers, Natural History Humanities [N2H] Research Programme, University of Cambridge
https://www.ccc.cam.ac.uk/ini.../natural-history-humanities/
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CORRECTION: My lecture in London is on the evening of Thursday 5th March! Sorry, folks. 'Twas my first day doing any work after the break. 😭 💙📚 🧪 🗃 #medieval #earlymodern #histsci #histmed #18thC #HAMH
RE: https://bsky.app/profile/did:plc:rzug5jxal4snlewudks3efsf/post/3mbtjloooq22p -
London book talk on HUMANS: A MONSTROUS HISTORY! I'll be speaking on Thursday 5th May, 6pm, at @[email protected] More info and registration below. A free exhibition, "Wonder" is now on and ends the next day. 1/2 💙📚 🧪 🗃 #medieval #earlymodern #histsci #histmed #18thC #HAMH
HUMANS: A Monstrous History -
Happy #PubDay for the Complex/Traditional Chinese translation of HUMANS: A MONSTROUS HISTORY from Gusa Publishing House, Taiwan! Available: World excluding Mainland China. More translations coming! 💙📚 🧪 🗃 #medieval #earlymodern #histsci #histmed #18thC #HAMH #worldhistory #politics 1/
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Would love to see non-astronomers there, too, w insights from relevant disciplines #sts #histsci #envhist #envhum #envjustice ... And "everyone" includes more than human world
RE: https://bsky.app/profile/did:plc:eay5bbvyxip5w543ndsjrard/post/3mbqb6m47f22j -
My book talk on HUMANS: A MONSTROUS HISTORY is now available on the Linda Hall Library's YouTube channel. Come take a tour through monsters and monster-making, from earth to outer space! 💙📚 🧪 🗃 #ancient #medieval #earlymodern #histsci #histmed #18thC #HAMH #politics www.youtube.com/watch?v=81KT...
Humans: A Monstrous History -
A neat piece on the broader connections of Aldo Leopold’s “song of the river” https://www.themarginalian.org/2025/12/03/aldo-leopold-river-science/ #soundstudies #envhum #histsci
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Today! Free book talk on HUMANS: A MONSTROUS HISTORY, hosted by the Linda Hall Library: 7-8pm CST (8-9pm EST) Register to get the Zoom link. 💙📚 🧪 🗃 #ancient #medieval #renaissance #earlymodern #histsci #histmed #18thC #HAMH #politics
RE: https://bsky.app/profile/did:plc:rzug5jxal4snlewudks3efsf/post/3m5jwdryd4s2a -
Day 4 of #artAdventCalendar is my portrait of British-born, American #astrophysicist Margaret Burbidge (1919-2020) who was one of the people instrumental in building our understanding of stellar nucleosynthesis, how nuclei are produced in stars & you and I are all stardust! She was the 1st author of a monumental scientific paper Synthesis of the Elements in Stars, which became known as B2FH from the initials of its authors: 🧵
#mastoArt #linocut #printmaking #sciart #histsci #womenInSTEM
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Thrilled that HUMANS: A MONSTROUS HISTORY is one of @[email protected]'s best books of 2025 in @[email protected]! 💙📚 🧪 🗃 #medieval #earlymodern #histsci #histmed #18thC #HAMH #politics 1/
RE: https://bsky.app/profile/did:plc:a4shi6ynzwugeipylngfiwqw/post/3m6ym7j7his2w -
Free book talk on HUMANS: A MONSTROUS HISTORY, hosted by the Linda Hall Library: Thurs Dec 4th, 7-8pm CST (8-9pm EST) Register at link below. 1/ 💙📚 🧪 🗃 #ancient #medieval #earlymodern #histsci #histmed #18thC #HAMH events.lindahall.org/humansamonst...
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Happy Halloween! Here's a thread of some of my monstery essays, and a link to register for my next book talk, hosted by the Linda Hall Library: Thurs Dec 4th, 7-8pm CST (8-9pm EST) 1/ 💙📚 🧪 🗃 #ancient #medieval #earlymodern #histsci #histmed #18thC #HAMH events.lindahall.org/humansamonst...
events.lindahall.org/humansamonstro... -
Delighted that HUMANS: A MONSTROUS HISTORY was featured in @neilmackay.bsky.social's Long Read column in @heraldscotland.bsky.social! It was a pleasure to chat with Neil. 1/2 #monsters #politics #sociology #psychology #folklore 💙📚 🗃 #medieval #earlymodern #histsci #histmed #18thC #HAMH
RE: https://bsky.app/profile/did:plc:wgkjw2elffmg6jenkougz2mv/post/3m43lb5cbgs27 -
For #spacetober_challenge prompt telescope: #astrophysicist Jocelyn Bell Burnell as a grad student in ‘67 discovered the 1st radio pulsar, a highly magnetized, rotating neutron star that emits a beam of EM radiation. This radiation can only be observed when the star is pointed towards us; so, like the light from a lighthouse, it appears to pulse at a precise frequency. She had been working with her supervisor Hewish & others to construct a radio telescope 🧵1/
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For the #Spacetober_challenge prompt historic person, day 17, I’m sharing my portrait of British-born, American #astrophysicist Margaret Burbidge (1919-2020) who was one of the people instrumental in building our understanding of stellar nucleosynthesis, how nuclei are produced in stars & that you and I are all stardust! She was the 1st author of a monumental scientific paper Synthesis of the Elements in Stars, 🧵
#mastoArt #linocut #printmaking #sciart #histsci #womenInSTEM
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A #monsters #pitchme for a December special issue of @contingent-mag.bsky.social! I wonder whether someone who has read or is planning to read HUMANS: A MONSTROUS HISTORY might wish to pitch them a review.... 💙📚 🗃 #medieval #earlymodern #histsci #histmed #18thC
RE: https://bsky.app/profile/did:plc:zr7q3ldpaadceq4u76arqujo/post/3m26jgbe2p22c -
For day 22 of #sciArtSeptember prompt fellowship, I am sharing my portrait of #astrophysicist Jocelyn Bell Burnell, who took her $3 million Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics for her discovery of #pulsars & leadership in science and donated money to the Institute of Physics for PhD scholarships for underrepresented people including women, ethnic minorities & refugee students in physics! #linocut #printmaking #histsci
As a grad student in ‘67 she discovered the 1st radio pulsar, a 🧵
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Happy birthday to British-born, American #astrophysicist Margaret Burbidge (1919-2020) who was one of the people instrumental in building our understanding of stellar nucleosynthesis, how nuclei are produced in stars & you and I are all stardust! She was the 1st author of a monumental scientific paper Synthesis of the Elements in Stars, which became known as B2FH from the initials of its authors: Margaret Burbidge, Geoffrey Burbidge (her 🧵
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Happy birthday to #geologist & oceanographic #cartographer Marie Tharp (1920-2006), whose pioneering, thorough & complete ocean floor maps with Bruce Heezen, made using realms of echo sounder data, revealed the Mid-Atlantic Ridge.
After studying #geology & math, Maurice ‘Doc’ Ewing at Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory at Columbia hired her to draft 1000s of echo sounder profiles. Women were still not allowed to participate in 🧵#sciart #printmaking #womenInSTEM #histsci #linocut #mastoArt
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Happy birthday to #astrophysicist Jocelyn Bell Burnell! In 1967, as a grad student she discovered the 1st radio pulsar, a highly magnetized, rotating neutron star that emits a beam of EM radiation. This radiation can only be observed when the star is pointed towards us; so, like the light from a lighthouse, it appears to pulse at a precise frequency. She had been working with her supervisor Antony Hewish & others to construct a radio telescope to study quasars. 🧵#linocut #printmaking #histsci
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"J'ai retiré ce radium de la pechblende
Et j'ai brûlé mes doigts à ce feu défendu
Ô paradis cent fois retrouvé reperdu
Tes yeux sont mon Pérou ma Golconde mes Indes"
Louis Aragon, Les Yeux d'Elsa, 1942
https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Les_Yeux_d%27Elsa
#artsci #histsci #curie -
Save the date! I am thrilled to announce our first Neuburger Lecture in 2025, at the Josephinum @meduniwien.ac.at on June 2nd in Vienna. Andreas Heinz (Charité Berlin) will give a talk on "The Colonised Brain" [in German]. www.josephinum.ac.at/.../max-neub... #histmed #histpsy #histsci #vienna
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Save the date! I am thrilled to announce our first Neuburger Lecture in 2025, at the Josephinum @meduniwien.ac.at on June 2nd in Vienna. Andreas Heinz (Charité Berlin) will give a talk on "The Colonised Brain" [in German]. www.josephinum.ac.at/.../max-neub... #histmed #histpsy #histsci #vienna