al-mofhariz

Don't know much about the shuttle program's history? MIT's OpenCourseWare provides the perfect place to start: a guest lecture from 2005 by leading space science historian John Logsdon . The lecture works on two levels now. It's an excellent primer on shuttle history, first and foremost. I learned quite a bit---in truth, I had given very little thought to the origins of the shuttle up until recently. The complex institutional negotiations involving NASA, Nixon's OMB, and the various aerospace firms tell a particularly interesting story about the origins of big national science programs. The lecture also serves as a piece of history in its own right. Logsdon salts the conversation with references to the plan for space exploration then just recently announced by President George W. Bush---a plan that would hold NASA funding steady while making it a priority to get Americans back on the moon (and very eventually on Mars). As you've no doubt heard, the Obama admi...

When the future meets the past, get ready for a whole new you . . . For a few hundred dollars and a tube of your own spit, you can now obtain a read-out of millions of secret histories embedded in your DNA . Thanks to a growing volume of data on the genetics of human populations, the budding field of “deep ancestry” promises to take your family tree to a whole new level. Could a quick peek at your personal genome reveal that you’re a descendant of Marie Antoinette? Genghis Khan? Charles Darwin? Turn the clock back even further, and you might be able to learn what path your ancient ancestors took as Homo sapiens migrated out of Africa. Molecular biologist and biotechnology expert Lee Silver reveals the surprising tales hidden in his own genome. (For example, did his maternal ancestor really get hot and heavy with a man from another species? Shwing! ) And he explores the ethics and anxieties society faces as science makes increasingly dramatic advances in personal genomics. A prof...

This marks the first in what I hope will be a series of historical comments on NASA's transition away from the Space Shuttle. Robert R. MacGregor , a Princeton grad student writing a dissertation on rocket design in the US and Soviet Union, kicks us off. Upon my request, Bob offered a host of powerful historical frameworks to help us think about scuttling the shuttle. Part of what Bob suggested was that we consider this transition alongside the earlier decision to replace the Apollo program with the space shuttle program in the first place. I was struck by one of his side points about the disjoint between the powerful narratives we all know of technological progress and what actually happened to manned space flight: A big part of why Apollo hoax conspiracy theories are so successful is precisely because the space race narrative doesn't fit in with the narrative of technological progress.  Why would we go to the moon and then just stop? It doesn't make sense---if technology...

The HSS newsletter notes that the University of Chicago Press has joined other presses in JSTOR's Current Scholarship Program , which promises to allow access to both yesterday's and today's scholarship all through one portal. I can certainly see the advantage to not having to search through a variety of databases for journal articles from past and present. That could save me a great deal of time and effort. But I had hoped to find that this program would also include some talk of keeping costs down as well. I imagine many who read this blog hear frequently---as I do---from librarians about the cost of maintaining digital subscriptions. What will putting more under JSTOR's umbrella mean in terms of price? Thoughts?

In the tradition of the great mathematical problem challenges of the last four centuries, Americanscience is kicking off a series of challenges aimed at teachers and interpreters of HOS in the USA. We'll post a primary source text of some interest or complexity and ask you to use the comments to pitch an inventive and insightful approach to that text. How would you fold it into a US history course? Or into an HOS course? What might we expect students to get out of it? What texts could we pair with it? What potential challenges does the text pose? (Short = good.) I'm kicking off this series with one of my favorite discoveries of the last few years: "Little Boy Boo," an installment from Looney Tunes in 1954 .  Granted, this is no brachistochrone ( original figures here ), but I think it will be entertaining and enlightening.

Today's headline: Shuttle Atlantis Lifts Off for Final Planned Mission Compare that to this video showing highlights from NASA's space program in 1965. It is hard to believe that the US has gone through a few manned space systems in such a short time. I like this comparison for three reasons. It gets to the heart of one of the question we care about most here at Americanscience: how can we best understand science as it took shape within the boundaries of the United States/North America/the Americas? That's a question that we've explored at some depth: here , here , here , and here . No matter the framing for your answer, I'm pretty sure NASA has to enter the picture. We here at Americanscience want to help you think about today's news with a historical perspective. That's a tall order. But juxtaposition is a way to start. Any space science historians out there? Shoot me a note in the comments. We'd love to share your insights at this crucial moment in N...

This is the first of a series of posts this week drawn from wonderful resources available to us thanks to the Prelinger Library's vast collection of stock footage, made available for free at Archive.org . A friend turned me on to this short film a year ago or so and I now show excerpts of it to great effect in my American cultural history class. Everyone loves the white-coated scientists turning complex molecules into toothbrushes. They love the big finish even more: Martians discover the secret to building a society of plenty and to overcoming tyranny: oil---of course---mixed with "competition: more for all." But that doesn't do it justice. You just have to watch it yourself.

...all that was missing were the Bridges of Königsberg . A few days ago I was strolling around our quiet neighborhood with my infant son. We approached a T in the road. From the left came our local postal delivery guy. From the right rumbled a street zamboni. Can you blame me for feeling as if I had found myself inside some sort of graph theory nightmare? Turning to the section on Eulerian chains in my undergrad discrete math textbook--- Applied Combinatorics ---by Fred S. Roberts, I found this sentence: "A large area for applications of combinatorial techniques is the area of urban services."(467) Roberts goes on to list a slew of published studies taking on problems ranging from optimizing snow removal routes to assigning municipal workers' shifts. Here we have an interesting example of non-military state science sponsorship (even if its just a matter of the state providing the problem). There must be some good historical work out there on this, right? Off the top of my...

Dr. Iain Couzin syncs up and goes wild at the Secret Science Club . . . A predator approaches a school of fish, and—seemingly in one motion—the fish dart to safety. A flock of pigeons wheel over Brooklyn rooftops, their movements orchestrated as if by a conductor’s baton. What’s at the root of these mysterious behaviors? Biologist and mathematician Iain Couzin of Princeton’s Collective Animal Behavior Lab discusses swarming locusts, marching army ants, and even crowds of bugged-out Homo sapiens . He asks: --How did collective animal behavior evolve and what are the fundamental principles underlying this behavior? --What enables groups of animals to move in unison? --How does individual behavior influence group dynamics? --Can crowds of species (even humans) undergo dramatic “personality” changes? Dr. Couzin is Assistant Professor in the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology and Adjunct Faculty in the Program of Applied and Computational Mathematics at Princeton University. He...