Category archives: History

Changing the Eurocentric narrative about the history of science

Changing the Eurocentric narrative about the history of science

HistoryPhilosophy of science

By Invited Researcher

Author: Karen K. Christensen-Dalsgaard, Assistant Professor, Department of Biological Sciences, MacEwan University In the 11th century in Cairo, the foundations for modern science were laid through the detention of an innocent man. The mathematician Abu Ali al-Hasan Ibn al-Haytham had been tasked with regulating the flow of the Nile, but when he saw the river […]

150 years ago, the Metre Convention determined how we measure the world

150 years ago, the Metre Convention determined how we measure the world

History

By Invited Researcher

Author: Jonathan Simone, Adjunct Professor of Biological Sciences, Brock University On May 20, 1875, delegates from a group of 17 countries gathered in Paris to sign what may be the most overlooked yet globally influential treaty in history: the Metre Convention. At a time when different countries (and even different cities defined weights and lengths […]

Extracting the stone of madness: the art of brain surgery in the Renaissance

Extracting the stone of madness: the art of brain surgery in the Renaissance

HistoryMedicine

By Invited Researcher

madness Authors: Chiara Bressan, student of the European Master’s in Clinical Linguistics & Adrià Rofes, assistant professor of neurolinguistics at the University of Groningen Imagine yourself tied to a chair. You cannot move, you are fully conscious, and a strange individual behind you is about to carve into your skull. No, you are not an […]

A founder event left its genetic mark in Ashkenazi Jews

A founder event left its genetic mark in Ashkenazi Jews

AnthropologyArchaeologyEthicsGeneticsHistory

By Invited Researcher

About two-thirds of Jews today – or about 10 million people – are Ashkenazi, referring to a recent origin from Eastern and Central Europe. They reside mostly in the United States and Israel. Ashkenazi Jews carry a particularly high burden of disease-causing genetic mutations, such as those in the BRCA1 gene associated with an increased […]

The dawn of what?

The dawn of what?

AnthropologyHistory

By Jesús Zamora Bonilla

For the intellectual history of our century, one of the most important books published in 2021 will probably be David Graeber’s and David Wengrow’s The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity , a monumental description of the evolution of the first human societies and of our understanding thereof. The book is conceived as […]

How snake oil got a bad name

How snake oil got a bad name

History

By Invited Researcher

During the pandemic, the pejorative term “snake-oil salesman” has been bandied about a lot. It’s been used, perhaps with a tinge of 1980s nostalgia, to describe convicted fraudster and serial opportunist Jim Bakker, whose colloidal Silver Solution required only some deft rebranding to become a specific curative for COVID-19. For this, the televangelist found himself […]