The global triumph of Mendelian genetics in the twentieth century was not a foregone conclusion, thanks to the existence of graft hybrids. These chimeral plants and animals are created by grafting tissue from one organism to another with the goal of passing the newly hybridized genetic material on to their offspring. But prevailing genetic theory insisted that heredity was confined to the sex cells and there was no inheritance of characteristics acquired during an organism’s lifetime. Under sustained attacks from geneticists, scientific belief in the existence of graft hybrids slowly began to decline. Yet ordinary horticulturalists and breeders continued to believe in the power of grafting. Matthew Holmes tells the story of these organisms—which include multicolored chickens and black nightshades that grew tomatoes—and their enduring influence on twentieth-century biology. Their creators sought a goal as ambitious as the wildest dreams of genetic engineering today: to smash the barriers between species and freely exchange genes between plants and animals. The Graft Hybrid presents a greater understanding of the controversial history of graft hybrids, offering a crucial intervention in the history of genetics and the future of biological science.

When the Apollo 11 astronauts returned from humanity’s first voyage to the moon in 1969, NASA officials advocated for more ambitious missions. But with the civil rights movement, environmental concerns, the Vietnam War, and other social crises taking up much of the public’s attention, they lacked the support to make those ambitions a reality. Instead, the space agency had to think more modestly and pragmatically, crafting a program that could leverage the excitement of Apollo while promising relevance for average Americans. The resulting initiative, the space shuttle, would become the centerpiece of NASA human space flight activity for forty years, opening opportunities for the public to engage with and participate in space projects in new ways. The People’s Spaceship traces how and why NASA painstakingly connected the vehicle to so many segments of society. Underscoring the successes and challenges endured in the process, Amy Paige Kaminski shares the story of how the space shuttle became an American technological icon.

Public health, housing, poverty, and immigration dominated social and political discourse in early twentieth-century New York, much as they do today. The Lower East Side provided an urban environment where infectious disease and other public health concerns flourished. One city block in particular, known in muckraking circles as “The Lung Block,” housed four thousand first- and second-generation Americans in dilapidated tenements where deadly tuberculosis spread uninhibited. The Lung Block looks at a 1903 reform crusade to demolish this working-class tenement neighborhood and replace it with a park. Progressive reformers aimed to confront the area’s moral and environmental dangers, but their conceptualization of the problem and methods for addressing it placed them into direct conflict with the hand-to-mouth priorities of the residents. The campaign and its eventual failure illuminate the formidable social barriers distancing urban reformers and the marginalized populations they intend to help.

The idea that a new technology could challenge human intelligence is as old as the warning from Socrates and Plato that written language eroded memory. With the emergence of generative artificial intelligence programs, we find ourselves once again debating how a new technology might influence human thought and behavior. Researchers, software developers, and “visionary” tech writers even imagine an AI that will equal or surpass human intelligence, adding to a sense of technological determinism where humanity is inexorably shaped by powerful new machines. But among the hundreds of essays, books, and movies that approach the question of AI, few have asked how exactly scientists and philosophers have codified human thought and behavior. Rather than focusing on technical contributions in machine building, The Descent of Artificial Intelligence explores a more diverse cast of thinkers who helped to imagine the very kind of human being that might be challenged by a machine. Kevin Padraic Donnelly argues that what we often think of as the “goal” of AI has in fact been shaped by forgotten and discredited theories about people and human nature as much as it has been by scientific discoveries, mathematical advances, and novel technologies. By looking at the development of artificial intelligence through the lens of social thought, Donnelly deflates the image of artificial intelligence as a technological monolith and reminds readers that we can control the narratives about ourselves.

The specialization thesis—the idea that nineteenth-century science fragmented into separate forms of knowledge that led to the creation of modern disciplines—has played an integral role in the way historians have described the changing disciplinary map of nineteenth-century British science. This volume critically reevaluates this dominant narrative in the historiography. While new disciplines did emerge during the nineteenth century, the intellectual landscape was far muddier, and in many cases new forms of specialist knowledge continued to cross boundaries while integrating ideas from other areas of study. Through a history of Victorian interdisciplinarity, this volume offers a more complicated and innovative analysis of discipline formation. Harnessing the techniques of cultural and intellectual history, studies of visual culture, Victorian studies, and literary studies, contributors break out of subject-based silos, exposing the tension between the rhetorical push for specialization and the actual practice of knowledge sharing across disciplines during the nineteenth century.

Winner, 2022 Edward Kremers AwardCompound Remedies examines the equipment, books, and remedies of colonial Mexico City’s Herrera pharmacy—natural substances with known healing powers that formed part of the basis for modern-day healing traditions and home remedies in Mexico. Paula S. De Vos traces the evolution of the Galenic pharmaceutical tradition from its foundations in ancient Greece to the physician-philosophers of medieval Islamic empires and the Latin West and eventually through the Spanish Empire to Mexico, offering a global history of the transmission of these materials, knowledges, and techniques. Her detailed inventory of the Herrera pharmacy reveals the many layers of this tradition and how it developed over centuries, providing new perspectives and insight into the development of Western science and medicine: its varied origins, its engagement with and inclusion of multiple knowledge traditions, the ways in which these traditions moved and circulated in relation to imperialism, and its long-term continuities and dramatic transformations. De Vos ultimately reveals the great significance of pharmacy, and of artisanal pursuits more generally, as a cornerstone of ancient, medieval, and early modern epistemologies and philosophies of nature.

Since their invention, computers have kept revolutionizing the world at a staggeringpace. And yet, through recent conquests in AI and computer graphics, the profound effects of this revolution threaten to upend much of the previous world order. Sitting squarely at the crossroads of computer science, history, socioeconomics, ethics, and philosophy, and written by an insider who contributed foundational work to many of the latest and most pervasive technologies, this book offers a much-needed reframing of the past, present, and future of computing.

From the Moon to Rhinos is the story of Michele Sofisti, a Geologist who became a valued and itinerant manager – in Ferrari, Omega, Swatch, Gucci – and then actively “returned” to Nature, engaging in the conservation of animal species, forests, and oceans. It is a collection of life experiences, meetings, and emotions laid bare. It is an ongoing journey that aims to sensitize people to believe that a change towards a better interaction between humans and the natural world, which feeds and sustains us, is possible and must be undertaken instantly. This journey symbolically began with the Apollo missions on the Moon – which, for the first time, showed us the uniqueness of our wonderful planet from a new perspective – and ends with Rhinos that are slaughtered for their horn and have unfortunately become a symbol of human ignorance and greed, proving and confirming how the stupidity of a few people in interacting with Nature can be extremely destructive for everyone. The story’s intent – narrated amidst tennis and skiing, Ferraris and wonderful watches – is to convey a final message and spur the reader to act urgently and positively towards our planet, yet not to save it, as planet Earth can go on without us, but to preserve ourselves and our future generations.

We live in the Golden Age of space exploration. Humanity’s achievements include the continued operation of the International Space Station, rapid advancements in reusable rockets, and soon, a return to the Moon. Within our lifetime, we might have human outposts on the lunar surface and flags flying on the plains of Mars. These strides are not just about reaching new frontiers. They have profound implications for life on Earth. The data from climate satellites overhead, innovative materials and recycling systems designed for space habitats, and emerging spacebased energy solutions are essential to addressing Earth’s conservation challenges. Space enables the understanding of Earth as much as Earth enables the exploration of space. This bright tomorrow is not assured, however. Space junk, international conflicts and fiscal calamities loom as threats to all that might be accomplished. For the human adventure to continue beyond the Earth’s atmosphere, the time is now to reconsider the nature of sustainability.

When we are born, we are basically sterile. By the time we die, we are more microbe than human. Microscopic organisms are essential to the development of human life. Until Antonie van Leeuwenhoek observed his own microbes under a self-made microscope in the seventeenth century, we were not even aware that they existed. Clinician-scientist Fergus Shanahan and graphic design artist Laura Gowers shed light on the microbial world. How can we nurture microbes in the face of the climate emergency? Why do Irish Travellers have a unique microbiome? A remarkable, ground-breaking graphic book.

A Nurse’s Life tells the remarkable story of one woman’s devotion to a life of care in the medical profession. Beginning her career as a midwife, Geralyn later became an authority in palliative care, but throughout her goal has always been about understanding what it means to truly care for another person. That is precisely what she does in this book: portray the essence of nursing. After years in the hospital wards Geralyn decided it was time for a change and volunteered to work for Concern Worldwide in a two-year post among the most needy in Bangladesh. Here she learned first-hand about the link between poverty and health care. Upon her return to Ireland she returned to academia and enrolled in an MsC programme at Trinity College Dublin. Eventually she became Assistant Professor in the School of Nursing at Trinity. Interspersed between her highly entertaining personal stories as a nurse, Geralyn expounds on many of the key issues in the nursing profession today: the changing nature of nursing and environment of care; challenges in providing person-centred care in the hospital setting, the essential qualities needed to be a good nurse; the problematic doctor/nurse/administration relationship; the future of nursing and possible ways to address the current challenges; and much more. More recently, Geralyn experienced nursing from the other side when she was diagnosed with a brain tumour that while benign meant surgery, radiotherapy and several new chronic conditions as a result. This has given her a deeper, first-hand understanding of nursing and the extraordinary reality of loving care.

From majestic Amazonian macaws and highland Andean hawks to tiny colorful tanagers and tall flamingos, birds and their feathers played an important role in the Inka empire. Claudia Brosseder uncovers the many meanings that Inkas attached to the diverse fowl of the Amazon, the eastern Andean foothills, and the highlands. She shows how birds and feathers shaped Inka politics, launched wars, and initiated peace. Feathers provided protection against unpredictable enemies, made possible communication with deities, and brought an imagined Inka past into a political present. Richly textured contexts of feathered objects recovered from Late Horizon archaeological records and from sixteenth- and seventeenth-century accounts written by Spanish interlocutors enable new insights into Inka visions of interspecies relationships, an Inka ontology, and Inka views of the place of the human in their ecology. Inka Bird Idiom invites reconsideration of the deep intellectual ties that connected the Amazon and the mountain forests with the Andean highlands and the Pacific coast.PRAISE"In this amply illustrated and beautifully written book, Brosseder scours archaeological and ethnohistorical records to reveal the meanings of birds and their feathers to the Inkas. While fine Andean featherwork has long been admired as craft, Brosseder’s study sheds new light on why birds were so integral to the visual cultures of Andean peoples across both time and space." ~Carolyn Dean, University of California at Santa Cruz

The eleventh volume of The Correspondence of John Tyndall covers the period from January 1869 to the end of February 1871 and contains 427 letters with more than 130 individual correspondents, as well as letters to several newspapers. These years find Tyndall an internationally established scientist with broad influence and feeling increasingly confident in that role. They were highly productive research years, and Tyndall had a wide scope of interests, publishing in scientific journals, popular magazines, and newspapers on a variety of topics, including diamagnetism, germ theory, comets, and atmospheric phenomena. The results of this research were presented in numerous papers and lectures in various venues and complemented by his regular public lecture series and annual Christmas lectures at the Royal Institution.

In October 1948, a seemingly average fog descended on the tiny mill town of Donora, Pennsylvania. With a population of fewer than fifteen thousand, the town’s main industry was steel and zinc mills—mills that continually emitted pollutants into the air. The six-day smog event left twenty-one people dead and thousands sick. Even after the fog lifted, hundreds more died or were left with lingering health problems. Donora Death Fog details how six fateful days in Donora led to the nation’s first clean air act in 1955, and how such catastrophes can lead to successful policy change. Andy McPhee tells the very human story behind this ecological disaster: how wealthy industrialists built the mills to supply an ever-growing America; how the town’s residents—millworkers and their families—wilfully ignored the danger of the mills’ emissions; and how the gradual closing of the mills over the years following the tragedy took its toll on the town.

The Many Voices of Modern Physics follows a revolution that began in 1905 when Albert Einstein published papers on special relativity and quantum theory. Unlike Newtonian physics, this new physics often departs wildly from common sense, a radical divorce that presents a unique communicative challenge to physicists when writing for other physicists or for the general public, and to journalists and popular science writers as well. In their two long careers, Joseph Harmon and the late Alan Gross have explored how scientists communicate with each other and with the general public. Here, they focus not on the history of modern physics but on its communication. In their survey of physics communications and related persuasive practices, they move from peak to peak of scientific achievement, recalling how physicists use the communicative tools available - in particular, thought experiments, analogies, visuals, and equations - to convince others that what they say is not only true but significant, that it must be incorporated into the body of scientific and general knowledge. Each chapter includes a chorus of voices, from the many celebrated physicists who devoted considerable time and ingenuity to communicating their discoveries, to the science journalists who made those discoveries accessible to the public, and even to philosophers, sociologists, historians, an opera composer, and a patent lawyer. With their final collaboration, Harmon and Gross offer a tribute to the communicative practices of the physicists who convinced their peers and the general public that the universe is a far more bizarre and interesting place than their nineteenth-century predecessors imagined.

Environmental challenges are defining the twenty-first century. To fully understand ongoing debates about our current crises - climate change, loss of biological diversity, pollution, extinction, resource woes - means revisiting their origins, in all their complexity. With this ambitious, highly original contribution to the environmental history of global modernity, Frank Uekötter considers the many ways humans have had an impact on their physical environment throughout history. Ours is not a one-way trajectory to sudden collapse, he argues, but rather death by a thousand cuts. The many paths we’ve forged to arrive in our current predicament, from agriculture to industry to infrastructure, must be considered collectively if we are to stay afloat in what Uekötter describes as a vortex: a powerful metaphor for the flow of history, capturing the momentum and the many crosscurrents that swept people and environments along. His book invites us to look at environmental challenges from multiple perspectives, including all the twists and turns that have helped to create the mess we find ourselves in. Uekötter has written a world history for an age where things are falling apart: where we know what lies ahead and are equipped with the right tools - technological and otherwise - and plenty of experience to deal with environmental challenges, but somehow fail to get our affairs in order.