Who knew frogs were at the center of 18th century neuroscience? Or that Louis Pasteur’s first vaccine saved the lives of countless sheep?
More animal trivia gems (we promise some of them are more PETA-friendly) in Animals, the Spring 2013 issue of Lapham’s Quarterly.
I immediately thought of Alexis St. Martin and those darn experiments.
(via escranesque)
The Mighty Sea Urchin
Some decades after Darwin, a symbolic event messed in concrete fashion with the rules of generation and with gender assumptions. In 1905, to considerable media fanfare, a biochemist named Jacques Loeb induced “parthenogenesis” — a virgin birth — in a female sea urchin via salt and ox blood in a recipe vaguely reminiscent of Paracelsus. The sea urchin was banally sexually reproducing; there was nothing untoward about her sexuality, and yet her fertility, it seemed, could be effortlessly tweaked in the lab. No sperm required!
Her flexible sexual qua reproductive “nature” was deemed uncannily relevant to larger feminist and “New Woman” issues of the day! Literary types forthwith capitalized on anxieties about gender obsolescence. An H.G. Wells character circa 1909 expressed the opinion that it may well be that “it is only the women matter” — “not every creature needs these males.” Feminist utopias happily hinged on the downgraded status of sperm; the writer Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s Herland (1915) featured an all-women “parthenogenically-reproducing” utopia a la “aphids” (an explicit reference in her text). Others, including a prominent Christian Scientist named Josephine Woodbury, seized on the virtues of immaculate conception.
Excerpt from The Evolving Virgin: Sexual Treaties, Gaga Procreation and the “Facts of Life” [LARB]
Image source: S. G. Goodrich Animal Kingdom Illustrated Vol 2 (New York, NY: Derby & Jackson, 1859)
From notes for a class on the physiological and genetic basis of behavior.
![You don’t always read about a boy that builds a 2.3-million electron-volt atom smasher after his family was forced to move to an internment camp.
From spaceplasma:
Secret Life of Michio Kaku
Every childhood is made up of roadblocks and opportunities. And interviewing our “Secret Life” subjects, we hear a lot about both. But we’d never heard a story quite like the one Michio Kaku told us:
“My parents were born in California. However, during World War II 100,000 Japanese-Americans were incarcerated in large relocation camps. So my parents never had a chance. Their property was confiscated. They lived behind barbed wires and machine guns from 1942 to 1946. And I was born afterwards, when my parents were dirt poor.”
Somehow, after the war, and after their release from the internment camps, Michio’s parents worked to rebuild their lives. They started out with nothing, but put everything they did have into creating a better life for their children. And when Michio began to show that he was more than a little prodigious as a teen scientist, they went along. They went along, even with limited resources and with virtually no idea of what was behind (or could be the consequences) of Michio’s sometimes more-than-a-little-risky boyhood experiments:
“So one day I went up to my mom and I said, ‘Mom, can I have permission to build a 2.3-million electron-volt atom smasher—a betatron—in the garage?’ And my mom stared at me, and she said, ‘Sure. Why not? And don’t forget to take out the garbage.’ So, I went out and took out the garbage. And then I went to Westinghouse. I got 400 pounds of transformer steel, 22 miles of copper wire, and built a 2.3-million electron-volt betatron in the garage. The wire was so heavy, I put the wire on the goal post [of the nearby high school football field] and I gave it to my mother. She ran with this strand of wire to the 50-yard line. My father grabbed it, ran to the goalpost and we wound 22 miles of copper wire on the football field. Well, the magnetic field was so powerful—about 20,000 times the Earth’s magnetic field. If you were to walk by my atom smasher, it would pull the fillings out of your teeth—that’s how powerful the magnet was going to be.”
When Michio actually plugged in his atom smasher, it did, of course, blow out every fuse in his house and likely every fuse for miles around—yet another kid scientist who made the lights go out and the authorities shake their fists (while grudgingly admitting that the kid was pretty smart).
But that wasn’t my big takeaway from Michio’s story.
What grabbed me was that his parents—uneducated about science, returning to the world after years of imprisonment “behind barbed wire and machine guns”—were more than willing to wrap 22 miles of a different kind of wire around the goalposts of a football field… all because they loved their son, had faith in him and his ideas, and wanted him to become the person he was clearly meant to be.
Seems like it all paid off.
Source: PBS.org
Credit: Tom Miller](http://24.media.tumblr.com/620ff014759cc4ae3715f00aa73075c3/tumblr_mgtgpnN0if1rnq3cto1_r4_500.jpg)
You don’t always read about a boy that builds a 2.3-million electron-volt atom smasher after his family was forced to move to an internment camp.
Secret Life of Michio Kaku
Every childhood is made up of roadblocks and opportunities. And interviewing our “Secret Life” subjects, we hear a lot about both. But we’d never heard a story quite like the one Michio Kaku told us:
“My parents were born in California. However, during World War II 100,000 Japanese-Americans were incarcerated in large relocation camps. So my parents never had a chance. Their property was confiscated. They lived behind barbed wires and machine guns from 1942 to 1946. And I was born afterwards, when my parents were dirt poor.”
Somehow, after the war, and after their release from the internment camps, Michio’s parents worked to rebuild their lives. They started out with nothing, but put everything they did have into creating a better life for their children. And when Michio began to show that he was more than a little prodigious as a teen scientist, they went along. They went along, even with limited resources and with virtually no idea of what was behind (or could be the consequences) of Michio’s sometimes more-than-a-little-risky boyhood experiments:
“So one day I went up to my mom and I said, ‘Mom, can I have permission to build a 2.3-million electron-volt atom smasher—a betatron—in the garage?’ And my mom stared at me, and she said, ‘Sure. Why not? And don’t forget to take out the garbage.’ So, I went out and took out the garbage. And then I went to Westinghouse. I got 400 pounds of transformer steel, 22 miles of copper wire, and built a 2.3-million electron-volt betatron in the garage. The wire was so heavy, I put the wire on the goal post [of the nearby high school football field] and I gave it to my mother. She ran with this strand of wire to the 50-yard line. My father grabbed it, ran to the goalpost and we wound 22 miles of copper wire on the football field. Well, the magnetic field was so powerful—about 20,000 times the Earth’s magnetic field. If you were to walk by my atom smasher, it would pull the fillings out of your teeth—that’s how powerful the magnet was going to be.”
When Michio actually plugged in his atom smasher, it did, of course, blow out every fuse in his house and likely every fuse for miles around—yet another kid scientist who made the lights go out and the authorities shake their fists (while grudgingly admitting that the kid was pretty smart).
But that wasn’t my big takeaway from Michio’s story.
What grabbed me was that his parents—uneducated about science, returning to the world after years of imprisonment “behind barbed wire and machine guns”—were more than willing to wrap 22 miles of a different kind of wire around the goalposts of a football field… all because they loved their son, had faith in him and his ideas, and wanted him to become the person he was clearly meant to be.
Seems like it all paid off.
Source: PBS.org
Credit: Tom Miller
The History Channel has made family dinner conversations even more intolerable with their bullshit.
History is political and origins are histories. Consequently, it should be neither surprising nor scandalous that, when science and history converge, they are invariably vested with assumptions, interpretations, and manipulations that give them political weight… .
Could extraterrestrials have built the Great Pyramids at Giza? Sure, they could have; but the chances that they actually did are about the same as their having built the Eiffel Tower. After all, the ancient Egyptians not only seemed to think that they did it themselves, but also left us their learning curve - in the form of earlier tombs, such as the Step Pyramid and the Bent Pyramid. But more relevant is the assumption under which the question is founded - that there is some kind of problem with the idea that the ancient Egyptians are the ones who actually did built the pyramids. In fact, it is the same problem that underlay the questions, “Who built the mounds?” and “Who built Great Zimbabwe? - namely, that there is some reason to doubt the indigenous peoples actually could have done it themselves. In other words, the question is framed in such a way as to presume that the indigenous peoples were constitutionally incapable of doing it themselves, and therefore someone else either must have done it for them or helped them out crucially. Otherwise, why even bother asking the question?
What runs through all of these rhetorical questions is the presumption of some deficiency in the nature of people themselves… . After all, it is more likely that the intellectual deficiency lies in the head of the questioner rather than in the heads of the indigenous people - it’ s not that that were stupid and couldn’t have done it; it’s that they were cleverer than you and did it.
Why I am Not a Scientist: Anthropology and Modern Knowledge (p 200) by Jonathan Marks
My translation of what most of these television shows claim: The Maya couldn’t have possibly created these massive cities with temples themselves, it had to be aliens because I am an idiot who can barely wipe my own ass and I’m being paid money to say it.
(via moorewr)
