Book and media reviews from the journal Science, edited by Valerie Thompson.

Valerie Thompson, Editor

Posts tagged with "Essay"

• Essay

  75 years after Vannevar Bush’s impactful report, debate continues about directing science

  13 July, 2020

  Since its publication in 1945, Vannevar Bush’s Science—The Endless Frontier has elicited considerable examination and criticism. More often than not, contemporary discussions emphasize the report’s shortcomings rather than its successes, using it as a foil for remarking on everything from the complexity of the innovation process to the immense growth of the American science and… Read More

• Essay

  Literature and science converge in a pandemic

  28 April, 2020

  “Tedious were it to recount, how citizen avoided citizen, how among neighbours was scarce found any that shewed fellow-feeling for another, how kinsfolk held aloof, and never met,” wrote Giovanni Boccaccio in the Decameron ca. 1349, having retreated to a villa outside of Florence amid the “great dying” of the bubonic plague (1). More than… Read More

• Essay

  Asimov at 100: From epic space operas to rules for robots, the prolific author’s literary legacy endures

  2 January, 2020

  Gertrude Blugerman once asked of her husband, Isaac Asimov, “What will you say at the end of your life if you have written one hundred books but have missed living?” “Only one hundred?” he replied. Asimov wrote of this incident in Opus 100, his hundredth book, published in 1969. He would write or edit more… Read More

• Essay History of science

  Counterculture-inspired research flourished in the Age of Aquarius

  5 August, 2019

  In the days leading up to Woodstock, posters and advertisements pronounced the music festival—held 50 years ago on 15 to 18 August 1969—as an “Aquarian exposition.” The watery descriptor, derived from astrology, was popularized two years earlier by the hit musical Hair. As the American pop music group The 5th Dimension sang in “Aquarius/Let the… Read More

• Essay Art and Science, Science Education

  Incorporating humanities, arts, crafts, and design into curricula makes better scientists

  2 July, 2018

  If you’ve ever had a medical procedure, chances are you benefited from the arts. The stethoscope was invented by a French flautist/physician named René Laennec who recorded his first observations of heart sounds in musical notation. The suturing techniques used for organ transplants were adapted from lacemaking by another Frenchman, Nobel laureate Alexis Carrel. The… Read More

• Essay Marie Curie, Science lives

  Marie Curie’s legacy looms large 150 years after her birth

  31 October, 2017

  A celebrity crystallizes,” legal scholar Sheryl Hamilton writes, “when we both desire and recognize a relationship between a persona and a person” (1). This territory, the one that opens up between what we think of as biographical and biological “fact” and what we suspect is a result of self-fashioning strategies, is central to the celebrity… Read More

• Essay Art Conservation, Art Restoration, History of science, Science and Society, Scientific Methods

  Scientific methods inform conservation efforts in the quest to preserve cultural heritage

  18 November, 2016

  Fifty years ago on 3 November 1966, after a long stretch of heavy rain, the Levane and La Penna dams in Valdarno, Italy, began to leak, releasing water toward the city of Florence. Fearing that the dams would burst, on 4 November, engineers discharged a massive amount of water that coursed through the city streets at… Read More