Natural History and More

Following on from yesterdays post at the MC priceless evening at the Natural History Museum here is one of our behind the scenes treats. Ok it is a little scary but not as scary as it would be in the wild. Do you know what it is? I'd never met one before. A wolverine. Those jaws are capable of chomping through your thigh bone. Yikes keep out of its way. His fur is very desirable for around the hood of your hat. Why? Because it wont go icy. A combination of its fur type and density means you can just brush the ice off. Pretty important at minus 40. Our behind the scenes tour with the professionals in each field was magic. Dinosaurs, meteorites, plants, animals and gems of information not on any brochure. I even got to hold in my hand a meteorite from Mars. Beat that!

Robotville

If you want to know where robot technology is at present go to the Science Museum for the Robotville Festival (on until 4 December). Geeks with their robots are there to answer all the questions you can throw at them. Some I found a little scary, one or two had "technical issues" and others just wowed. I decided to show you Kasper. Kasper is a robot who is successfully being used to assist children with autism. The official website for Kasper is down this morning but you should be able to find information from the University of Hertfordshire. Also a youtube here with Kasper at work.

Elvis spotted in the Houses of Parliament

How would you like to enter a world to which only the rare few are invited? Where views are vigorously challenged and equivocations pounced upon by the powerful? Perhaps you would rather be a 'fly on the wall', able to eavesdrop without being discovered. In that case this suggestion could be for you. The Medicine and Society Collection contains reports which faithfully record the conversations of highly regarded experts. These experts are encouraged to express their opinions but also subjected to searching questions. These exchanges can be found in the Houses of Parliament Select Committee reports.



Lurking behind such profoundly undramatic titles as 'Further Education (FE) Fourth Report of Session 2005-6' and sandwiched between the formal minutes and written evidence, is the section called oral evidence. It is here that some engaging dialogue between Members of Parliament and their guests occur:



Mr Marsden: I will not pursue your analogy and ask you to name 10 famous people in FE, but what I will do- Sir Andrew Foster: Stephen Fry is one! Darren Campbell is a second. Chairman: Paul MacCartney, Jamie Oliver Mr Marsden: Okay I stand corrected..



or even:



Dr Chilton: Let me share with you an analogy which we did not use... FE is like Belgium Chairman: Why, because nobody knows anything about it?



But it is not all light-hearted banter and attempts at humour. Important and significant considerations affecting government strategy are brought to light in these processes. These inform decision-making and have an impact on how health and education services develop.



The Medicine and Society Collection contains information about how scientists start and progress in their careers, including the institutions and funding bodies that support them. This is why reports that deal with issues of higher and further education can be found here. This is just one of some 500 select committee reports dating back to 1990, covering topics like diabetes and driving, climate change and the safety of MRI scanners (featuring a memorandum from the Wellcome Trust). Whoever titled this last MRI report (possibly an Elvis Costello fan) couldn't resist a pun despite the weighty subject matter. It is named 'Watching the directives'. Who would have thought politics could be so wry?



Images: 1. Justus von Liebig and eight others seated in a committee, c 1870 2. The Information Committee listens to the Hansard Society during the first evidence session of the People and Parliament inquiry. Committee photograph courtesy of UK Parliament .

Watt - Inventor

James Watt was seen by contemporaries as the founder of the Industrial Revolution. His improved engine meant that steam could be used everywhere, not just in coal mines, boosting output in breweries, potteries and textile mills.

When Watt died in 1819, his workshop at his home near Birmingham, was locked and its contents left undisturbed as an 'industrial shrine'. Then in 1924, the complete workshop including contents, was transported to the Science Museum. Now for the first time is on public display.

During his retirement Watt turned to sculpture, turning out a huge number of busts, many of himself. He will no doubt be delighted that his head will be portrayed on the new £50 note.

Men at Work #33

Adam Hart-Davis photographer, writer, broadcaster, a man passionate about his subjects. One of those subjects is James Watt. Yesterday Adam shared his passion at the opening of the "James Watt and Our World" exhibition at the Science Museum.
Watt through his invention of the condenser (amongst many things), was a huge driving force in the industrial revolution which changed our world forever.
Tomorrow I will show you more about James Watt and this exciting exhibition.

Wellcome Library Workshops

This week’s free Wellcome Library workshops are:

Finding full text journals online
A guide to finding full text articles from online journals in the Wellcome Library and beyond.
Tuesday 2nd November, 2-3pm

Science in the news: keeping track of stories in the media
For anyone interested in following science in the media, this workshop will introduce you to online science news sources, and internet tools for keeping up to date.
Thursday 4th November, 5-6.15pm

Our programme of free workshops offers short practical sessions to help you discover and make use of the wealth of information available at the Wellcome Library. Book a place from the library website.

Author: Lalita Kaplish

Edwin Morgan (1920-2010)

The death was announced yesterday of the Scottish poet Edwin Morgan. A major poetical voice, Morgan's obituaries do their best to capture the range and styles of his vast array of poems.

Evident from Morgan's work is his fascination by science: his poems commenting with wonder upon such topics as space travel, zoology, biology and evolution. A naturally clear-sighted illustration of his belief in the close relationship of science with poetry, is to be found in his essay 'Poetry and Virtual Realities' published in Contemporary Poetry and Contemporary Science (2007) (a copy of which is held in our Medicine and Society collections).

In this essay, Morgan comments how his work looked at "how scientific facts and discoveries could be opened out fictionally within a broader context of human experience". Such a statement stands for much of his poetry, but perhaps the clearest examples are in his collection Virtual and Other Realities (2007). This work includes a poem on Matthew Clydesdale, the executed murderer allegedly brought (briefly) back to life by Dr Andrew Ure at the University of Glasgow in 1818 and 'A Voyage' a sequence of poems on the meeting of a sperm and an egg and which are told from their perspectives.

It is perhaps not surprising that when diagnosed with cancer Morgan turned his gaze inward: writing dialogues between a normal cell and a cancerous cell. Even here, life could be looked upon with wonder and humour.

Image: from The Guardian

Wellcome Library Workshops

This week’s free Wellcome Library workshops are:

Pubmed and Pubmed Central: an introduction
Take a closer look at PubMed, one of the leading databases for locating research articles in the fields of health, medicine and dentistry. It contains over 15 million references back to the 1950s and is freely available to anyone with access to the internet. It is linked to PubMed Central, a free archive of life sciences journals.
Tuesday 27th April, 2-3pm

Science in the news: keeping track of stories in the media
For anyone interested in science in the news and media, this workshop will introduce you to science news sources in the library and on the internet, and to tools such as RSS feeds, for keeping track of the news.
Thursday 29th April, 2-3.15pm

Our programme of free workshops offer short practical sessions to help you discover and make use of the wealth of information available at the Wellcome Library. Book a place from the library website.

Author: Lalita Kaplish

'Theories and Methods: Literature, Science and Medicine'

The Wellcome Library is a participant in an Arts & Humanities Research Council (AHRC) doctoral training programme 'Theories and Methods: Literature, Science and Medicine', which is running from 2009-2011.

The second event in this programme will take place from 25-27th March at the Wellcome Library, King's College, London, and the Royal College of Surgeons.

There will be 20 places for this event awarded to doctoral students, with also bursaries for accommodation and travel. Applications for this event must be submitted by Monday 1st February.

More details on the Literature, Science and Medicine programme are available from their website, including more detailed information on the Wellcome, Kings College and Royal College of Surgeons event.

Also of interest is LitSciMed’s flourishing social space, which includes details on the first event of the programme, held at St Deniol’s Library in January, along with discussion topics accompanying the training programme, plus blog postings, films of lectures, audio recordings and other learning resources for students working on topics that combine literature, science and medicine.

Norman Levitt: science warrior

Norman Levitt, Professor of Mathematics at Rutgers University died on 24th October 2009. He was probably best known for championing the role of science in society. With fellow scientist Paul Gross, he wrote Higher Superstition, in which he challenged the post-modern activities of humanities and social science academics who practised literary criticism of scientific texts and deconstructed scientific theories with little understanding of the science in question.

The book was cited as a major influence by Alan Sokal, physics professor at New York University, who perpetrated the notorious Sokal Hoax. In 1996, Sokal submitted a paper to the cultural studies journal Social Text, as an experiment to see if it would be published. The paper, entitled "Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity", was published in the Spring/Summer 1996 issue of Social Text, which at that time had no peer review process. The paper argued that quantum gravity was a social and linguistic construct. On the day of publication Sokal announced the paper to be a hoax, "structured around the silliest quotations [he] could find about mathematics and physics". Sokal revisited the affair in his own book, Beyond the Hoax.

Higher Superstition and the Sokal Hoax precipitated the so called Science Wars, a series of intellectual debates in the 1990s about the nature of science. Some of those practicing science and technology studies and cultural studies questioned the objectivity of science, employing a variety of post-modern critiques on scientific knowledge and methods. While, some in the scientific community argued that there was such a thing as objective scientific knowledge and criticized the lack of scientific understanding in these critiques.

You can discover more about both sides of the science wars debates in many books to be found at classmarks HJ (the nature of science) and HK (science in society) in the Science and Society Collection in the Wellcome Library.

Levitt went on to write Prometheus Bedeviled: science and the contradictions of contemporary culture, in which he discussed the role of science in politics and policy, a topic that continues to be relevant today.

Image above: Rowena Dugdale, Science Good or Bad?

Author: Lalita Kaplish

Online Journals and Science in the News Workshops

Our new Autumn programme of Wellcome Library workshops launch this week, with introductory sessions on the following topics:

Online Journals
This session offers a guide to finding full-text online journals in the Wellcome Library and beyond. It covers both contemporary and historically-related themes and includes both the Library´s subscribed journals and other freely available resources.

The workshop lasts for approximately one hour and will be running on the following dates:

Tuesday 13th October, 2.00pm-3.00pm
Tuesday 10th November, 2.00pm-3.00pm

Places are limited and pre-booking is essential. You can reserve a place by booking online.


Science in the News
For anyone interested in keeping up with news about science and medicine. The workshop will introduce you to news resources available at the Wellcome Library or free on the internet, as well as online tools for keeping up to date, such as RSS feeds and discussion forums. We will also look at how to analyse the news and check the facts behind stories in the media.

Participants will be encouraged to share their own knowledge and experiences of researching science news topics.

The workshop lasts for approximately one hour and will be running on the following dates:

Thursday 15th October, 2.00pm-3.00pm
Thursday 19th November, 2.00pm-3.00pm

Places are limited and pre-booking is essential. You can reserve a place by booking online.


Authors: Lalita Kaplish, Simon Warburton

Upcoming Library workshops

The winter/spring programme of Wellcome Library workshops begins on January 20th 2009. The workshops offer introductions to resources and research methods, and are aimed at the general public.

The programme includes thematic workshops such as science in the news, the history of medicine on the internet, training on specific resources such as the Wellcome Images database and PubMed Central, and introductions to the Wellcome Archives and genealogical research resources at the library.

All workshops are free and available to everyone who joins the library (library membership is also free and open to all). To book a place on any of the workshops, please use the new online booking facility link on the library web site.

Author: Lalita Kaplish

Science in the News Workshop

For anyone interested in science in the media, the Science in the News Workshop will introduce you to online science news sources, internet tools for keeping up to date, and suggestions on how to check the facts behind the story.

There are still a few places left on the free workshop next week on Thursday 20th November from 2-3pm at the Wellcome Library, 183 Euston Road, NW1 2BE. Nearest transport is Euston station, or 5 minutes walk from Russell Square.

Places are limited and pre-booking is essential. You can secure a place by booking online. For advice or assistance on making a booking, telephone 020 7611 8722 or email library@wellcome.ac.uk.

Author: Lalita Kaplish