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This week's Science Tuesday starts with a historical article by Howard Markel (Physician and Historian) on the horses used to produce diphtheria antitoxin. Diphtheria antitoxin is extremely important in the history of public health and medicine because it was the first real benefit of germ theory. There's a lot of talk about the "Bacteriological Revolution" that began in the 1860s and 1870s, but diphtheria antitoxin didn't appear until the 1890s. For a "revolution" it sure did take a long time...
Long Ago Against Diphtheria, the Heroes Were Horses
By HOWARD MARKEL, M.D., The New York Times, July 10, 2007
An illustration that originally appeared in the Nov. 17, 1894, issue of the journal Scientific American showed doctors drawing blood from a horse to produce antitoxin for diphtheria.
The Claremont Riding Academy, on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, shut its doors for good a few months ago. As the oldest continuously operated stable in New York City, it reached back to an era when horses were as common as taxis are today, and it prompted thoughts of some of New York’s most heroic horses: the 13 beasts of burden used in 1894 to produce the miracle drug of their day, diphtheria antitoxin.
( Read More )
The next article is on the history of the Harvard Observatory. A classmate of mine does the history of astronomy, which I find infinitely more interesting than it's close relative, the history of physics. Harvard was really a leader in creating an American science, beginning with it's herbarium, started by Asa Gray. Previously, American biologists had to travel to Europe to see catalogs of North American plants. Astronomy is also an essential part of the history of women in science, as the picture below illustrates...
A Trip Back in Time and Space
By GEORGE JOHNSON, The New York Times, July 10, 2007
The “computer” room at the Harvard Observatory in 1891, where women examined glass photographic plates containing images of the sky. One of their most important tasks was looking for stars that changed periodically in brightness.
In the summer of 1889, when this was still an analog world, a young astronomer named Solon I. Bailey carefully packed two crates of glass photographic plates taken at his outpost in the Peruvian Andes for shipment to Harvard College Observatory. Carried down the mountain on muleback and across a suspension bridge to the village of Chosica, the fragile load was put on a train bound for Lima and the long voyage to Boston Harbor.
For nearly 18 months the data stream continued — more than 2,500 plates from what Mr. Bailey had quaintly named Mount Harvard — followed in the coming years by tens of thousands more from a second Peruvian station in Arequipa. Over the decades more streams came from Chile, South Africa and New Zealand, joining the growing piles produced by telescopes in Massachusetts.
The accumulated result weighs heavily on its keepers on Observatory Hill, just up Garden Street from Harvard Square: more than half a million images constituting humanity’s only record of a century’s worth of sky.
“Besides being 25 percent of the world’s total of astronomical photographic plates, this is the only collection that covers both hemispheres,” said Alison Doane, curator of a glass database occupying three floors, two of them subterranean, connected by corkscrew stairs. It weighs 165 tons and contains more than a petabyte of data. The scary thing is that there is no backup.
( Read More )
This next one is for![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
antarcticlust - let's just hope they didn't let "The Thing" out ;p
Observatory: In a Hole in the Ice in Greenland, Proof of a Forested Past
By HENRY FOUNTAIN, The New York Times, July 10, 2007
Fossils can be just the thing for piecing together what a region was like thousands or even millions of years ago. But what to do when the region you want to know about is Greenland, and the fossils that might offer clues are beneath an icecap that is more than a mile thick?
The answer, according to Eske Willerslev, director of the Center for Ancient Genetics at the University of Copenhagen, is to look at the ice itself — specifically that at the bottom, which was deposited when the cap was new. That ice, it turns out, is loaded with dirt and, by consequence, fragments of ancient DNA that have been preserved by the cold.
Dr. Willerslev and his colleagues have analyzed DNA at the bottom of a mile-long ice core and come up with a remarkable finding: within the past million years, southern Greenland was covered in a conifer forest with a diverse collection of insects including moths, flies and beetles. It was much like eastern Canada is now, said Dr. Willerslev, whose findings are reported in Science.
( Read More )
Long Ago Against Diphtheria, the Heroes Were Horses
By HOWARD MARKEL, M.D., The New York Times, July 10, 2007
An illustration that originally appeared in the Nov. 17, 1894, issue of the journal Scientific American showed doctors drawing blood from a horse to produce antitoxin for diphtheria.
The Claremont Riding Academy, on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, shut its doors for good a few months ago. As the oldest continuously operated stable in New York City, it reached back to an era when horses were as common as taxis are today, and it prompted thoughts of some of New York’s most heroic horses: the 13 beasts of burden used in 1894 to produce the miracle drug of their day, diphtheria antitoxin.
( Read More )
The next article is on the history of the Harvard Observatory. A classmate of mine does the history of astronomy, which I find infinitely more interesting than it's close relative, the history of physics. Harvard was really a leader in creating an American science, beginning with it's herbarium, started by Asa Gray. Previously, American biologists had to travel to Europe to see catalogs of North American plants. Astronomy is also an essential part of the history of women in science, as the picture below illustrates...
A Trip Back in Time and Space
By GEORGE JOHNSON, The New York Times, July 10, 2007
The “computer” room at the Harvard Observatory in 1891, where women examined glass photographic plates containing images of the sky. One of their most important tasks was looking for stars that changed periodically in brightness.
In the summer of 1889, when this was still an analog world, a young astronomer named Solon I. Bailey carefully packed two crates of glass photographic plates taken at his outpost in the Peruvian Andes for shipment to Harvard College Observatory. Carried down the mountain on muleback and across a suspension bridge to the village of Chosica, the fragile load was put on a train bound for Lima and the long voyage to Boston Harbor.
For nearly 18 months the data stream continued — more than 2,500 plates from what Mr. Bailey had quaintly named Mount Harvard — followed in the coming years by tens of thousands more from a second Peruvian station in Arequipa. Over the decades more streams came from Chile, South Africa and New Zealand, joining the growing piles produced by telescopes in Massachusetts.
The accumulated result weighs heavily on its keepers on Observatory Hill, just up Garden Street from Harvard Square: more than half a million images constituting humanity’s only record of a century’s worth of sky.
“Besides being 25 percent of the world’s total of astronomical photographic plates, this is the only collection that covers both hemispheres,” said Alison Doane, curator of a glass database occupying three floors, two of them subterranean, connected by corkscrew stairs. It weighs 165 tons and contains more than a petabyte of data. The scary thing is that there is no backup.
( Read More )
This next one is for
antarcticlust - let's just hope they didn't let "The Thing" out ;pObservatory: In a Hole in the Ice in Greenland, Proof of a Forested Past
By HENRY FOUNTAIN, The New York Times, July 10, 2007
Fossils can be just the thing for piecing together what a region was like thousands or even millions of years ago. But what to do when the region you want to know about is Greenland, and the fossils that might offer clues are beneath an icecap that is more than a mile thick?
The answer, according to Eske Willerslev, director of the Center for Ancient Genetics at the University of Copenhagen, is to look at the ice itself — specifically that at the bottom, which was deposited when the cap was new. That ice, it turns out, is loaded with dirt and, by consequence, fragments of ancient DNA that have been preserved by the cold.
Dr. Willerslev and his colleagues have analyzed DNA at the bottom of a mile-long ice core and come up with a remarkable finding: within the past million years, southern Greenland was covered in a conifer forest with a diverse collection of insects including moths, flies and beetles. It was much like eastern Canada is now, said Dr. Willerslev, whose findings are reported in Science.
( Read More )
