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The Social Life of Nanotechnology
This book addresses the interconnections and tensions between technological development, the social benefits and risks of new technology, and the changing political economy of a global world system as they apply to the emerging field of nanotechnologies. The basic premise, developed throughout the volume, is that nanotechnologies have an undertheorized and often invisible social life that begins with their constructed origins and propels them around the globe, across multiple localities, institutions and collaborations, through diverse industries, research labs, and government agencies and into the public sphere. The volume situates nano innovation and development as a modernist science and technology project in a tense and unstable relationship with a fractured, postmodern social world. The book is unique in incorporating and integrating studies of innovation systems along with a focus on the risks and consequences of a globally significant set of emerging technologies. It does this by examining the social and political conditions of their creation, production, emergence, and reception.
The Story of N
In The Story of N, Hugh S. Gorman analyzes the notion of sustainability from a fresh perspective—the integration of human activities with the biogeochemical cycling of nitrogen—and provides a supportive alternative to studying sustainability through the lens of climate change and the cycling of carbon. It is the first book to examine the social processes by which industrial societies learned to bypass a fundamental ecological limit and, later, began addressing the resulting concerns by establishing limits of their own The book is organized into three parts. Part I, “The Knowledge of Nature,” explores the emergence of the nitrogen cycle before humans arrived on the scene and the chang...
The Visioneers
The story of the visionary scientists who invented the future In 1969, Princeton physicist Gerard O'Neill began looking outward to space colonies as the new frontier for humanity's expansion. A decade later, Eric Drexler, an MIT-trained engineer, turned his attention to the molecular world as the place where society's future needs could be met using self-replicating nanoscale machines. These modern utopians predicted that their technologies could transform society as humans mastered the ability to create new worlds, undertook atomic-scale engineering, and, if truly successful, overcame their own biological limits. The Visioneers tells the story of how these scientists and the communities the...
The Man Who Saw Tomorrow
The first full-length biography of a brilliant, self-taught inventor whose innovations in information and energy technology continue to shape our world. The Economist called Stanford R. Ovshinsky (1922–2012) “the Edison of our age,” but this apt comparison doesn't capture the full range of his achievements. As an independent, self-educated inventor, Ovshinsky not only created many important devices but also made fundamental discoveries in materials science. This book offers the first full-length biography of a visionary whose energy and information innovations continue to fuel our post-industrial economy. In The Man Who Saw Tomorrow, Lillian Hoddeson and Peter Garrett tell the story of...
Shaky Foundations
Numerous popular and scholarly accounts have exposed the deep impact of patrons on the production of scientific knowledge and its applications. Shaky Foundations provides the first extensive examination of a new patronage system for the social sciences that emerged in the early Cold War years and took more definite shape during the 1950s and early 1960s, a period of enormous expansion in American social science. By focusing on the military, the Ford Foundation, and the National Science Foundation, Mark Solovey shows how this patronage system presented social scientists and other interested parties, including natural scientists and politicians, with new opportunities to work out the scientifi...
The Malthusian Moment
Although Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring (1962) is often cited as the founding text of the U.S. environmental movement, in The Malthusian Moment Thomas Robertson locates the origins of modern American environmentalism in twentieth-century adaptations of Thomas Malthus’s concerns about population growth. For many environmentalists, managing population growth became the key to unlocking the most intractable problems facing Americans after World War II—everything from war and the spread of communism overseas to poverty, race riots, and suburban sprawl at home. Weaving together the international and the domestic in creative new ways, The Malthusian Moment charts the explosion of Malthusian t...
Hormones, Heredity, and Race
Early in the twentieth century, arguments about “nature” and “nurture” pitted a rigid genetic determinism against the idea that genes were flexible and open to environmental change. This book tells the story of three Viennese biologists—Paul Kammerer, Julius Tandler, and Eugen Steinach—who sought to show how the environment could shape heredity through the impact of hormones. It also explores the dynamic of failure through both scientific and social lenses. During World War I, the three men were well respected scientists; by 1934, one was dead by his own hand, another was in exile, and the third was subject to ridicule. Paul Kammerer had spent years gathering zoological evidence ...
Electrical Conquest
This book, drawing on fresh scholarship, investigates electrification in new places and across different time periods. While much of our understanding of electrification as a historical process is based on the seminal work done by Thomas P. Hughes in Networks of Power (1983), the scholars in this volume expand and revise Hughes’ systems approach to suggest that electrification is a heterogeneous and contingent process. Moreover, the contributors suggest that the conquest of the world by electricity remains incomplete despite more than a century elapsing. Above all, though, this book provides context for thinking about what lies ahead as humans continue their conquest of the earth through electricity. As we become increasingly dependent on electricity to power our lights, heat and cool our homes, turn the wheels of industry, and keep our information systems humming, so we are ever more vulnerable when the grid runs into trouble. Chapter "Surveying the Landscape: The Oil Industry and Alternative Energy in the 1970s" is available open access under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License via link.springer.com.
The Identity of John the Evangelist
This book examines the various Johannine narratives found in writings in the period from Papias (early second century) to Eusebius (early fourth century). Dean Furlong argues that the first major revision of the Johannine narrative was the identification of John the Evangelist with John the Apostle, the son of Zebedee, at the beginning of the third century. This in turn initiated a process of reinterpretation, as the previously-separate narratives of the two figures were variously spun into new configurations during the third and fourth centuries. This process culminated with Eusebius’s synthesis of the Johannine traditions, which came to form the basis of what is considered the “traditional” Johannine story. Furlong concludes that in the earliest narrative, found in Papias, John the Evangelist was identified, not with the Apostle, but with another disciple of Jesus known as John the Elder.
The Turning Points of Environmental History
From the time when humans first learned to harness fire, cultivate crops, and domesticate livestock, they have altered their environment as a means of survival. In the modern era, however, natural resources have been devoured and defiled in the wake of a consumerism that goes beyond mere subsistence. In this volume, an international group of environmental historians documents the significant ways in which humans have impacted their surroundings throughout history. John McNeill introduces the collection with an overarching account of the history of human environmental impact. Other contributors explore the use and abuse of the earth's land in the development of agriculture, commercial forestr...
