bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
The Triumph of Industrial Chemistry: The Industrial Response to Sir William Crookes
Authors: Leigh G. J.
Published: November 2020

In 1905, Sir William Crookes published a book entitled The Wheat Problem in which he reiterated what he had said in his British Association address of 1898. The content and tone are familiar: “The fixation of nitrogen is vital to the progress of civilized humanity, and unless we can class it among the certainties to come, the great Caucasian race will cease to be foremost in the world, and will be squeezed out of existence by races to whom wheaten bread is not the staff of life.” A whole gamut of processes for fixing nitrogen was described in a book published in 1914, and in 1919 an eminent U.S. electrochemist, H. J. M. Creighton, published a series of three papers entitled “How the Nitrogen Fixation Problem Has Been Solved.” However, the broader story was only just beginning to unfold. In about 1925, J. W. Mellor, in a justly celebrated sixteen-volume compendium, simply took Creighton at his word and stated quite baldly: “The problem has since [Crookes’ lecture] been solved.” Mellor describes not one but six processes that he believed were of industrial significance. These were: (1) the direct oxidation of dinitrogen by dioxygen to yield, initially, nitrogen oxides, as was undertaken in the Norwegian arc process; (2) the absorption of dinitrogen by metal carbides, subsequently developed as the cyanamide process; (3) the reaction of dinitrogen and dihydrogen by what has become known as the Haber process, or, more justifiably, the Haber–Bosch process; (4) the reaction of dinitrogen with metals, followed by treatment of the resultant nitrides with water; (5) the reaction of dinitrogen with carbon to form cyanides; and (6) the oxidation of dinitrogen during the combustion of coal or natural gas. Of these, only the first three really reached the stage of industrial exploitation, and only the Haber–Bosch process has been applied to any degree of significance since about 1950. The history of these three major developments is traced below. One of the first industrially significant reactions to be developed at the beginning of the twentieth century had already been known for more than 100 years.
The Continuing Mystery of Biological Nitrogen Fixation
Authors: Leigh G. J.
Published: November 2020

Fritz Haber was not blinded by his own achievements. Even in 1921, just when his own work was becoming widely recognised, he could state: “It may be that this solution is not the final one. Nitrogen bacteria teach us that Nature, with her sophisticated forms of the chemistry of living matter, still understands and utilises methods which we do not as yet know how to imitate.” The realisation that this was the case prompted a lot of speculation, but scientific advances in biological fixation still awaited a strategic breakthrough. In addition, chemistry, and especially inorganic chemistry, went into decline. The academic world seemed to believe that the chemistry of simple species such as dinitrogen was completed. There was no single clarion call, comparable to that of Crookes in 1898, for the regeneration of research into nitrogen fixation, but the pressure for it built up in a variety of unexpected ways. Perhaps the seminal influence on the field arose in the 1960s. The stimulus can be seen in the changes that occurred after World War II. In 1945, when much of the world was on its knees, having sustained grave losses of material and people, the impetus was to restart and rebuild. By about 1960, there was the appreciation in some areas that technology could not be applied to the environment indefinitely, nor could standards of living continue to rise without some unpleasant consequences. Western governments were not keen to hear such ideas. The British government, for example, produced a policy document called “Food from our own Resources,” the aim of which was to guide the United Kingdom towards self-sufficiency in food, avoiding the possibility of the country being starved as a result of a siege of the sea lanes by a potential enemy. The difficulties of maintaining food supplies from the Empire in the face of a sea blockade were a principal reason why food had been severely rationed in Britain during World War II. A consequence of this policy was that farmers were encouraged to produce as much food as they could, by whatever methods seemed most appropriate, and the era of intensive agriculture really got into its stride.
Providing Ongoing Support
Authors: Allen Janet , Landaker Christine
Published: November 2020

When adults talk about reading history, most of us think of a range of history- related texts: historical fiction, periodicals, biographies, diaries, documents, reports, and documentaries. Yet, when I talk with students about reading history, they immediately talk about reading history textbooks. This leads me to believe that our task as teachers is twofold: expanding the range of reading that students define as reading history and increasing students’ ability to comprehend that range of texts—including their textbooks. Much of the comprehension support we provide during reading is focused on helping students negotiate a range of texts. For many students, obstacles to comprehension occur when they are presented with a diverse range of text types. Several aspects are involved in supporting students’ comprehension in reading history, because comprehension is always a complex issue. Nagy highlights the complexity of comprehension with this statement in Teaching Vocabulary to Improve Reading Comprehension: “Reading comprehension depends on a wealth of encyclopedic knowledge and not merely on definitional knowledge of the words in the text” (1988, 7). While lists of vocabulary words are often introduced to students prior to assigning reading, it is clear that comprehending reading assignments is about more than defining words. In order for students to comprehend the diverse types of texts they encounter in reading history, they must know how to use and when to employ a wide range of independent reading strategies. Those challenges to comprehension include, but are not limited to, the following text-related reading issues:… • Diverse levels of readability are represented in a single text. • Texts present multiple concepts in a short amount of space (concept density). • Knowledge on how to use text supports to support reading is lacking. • Ability to break the language code (specialized vocabulary) is required. • Comprehension is predicated on significant background knowledge. • Sophisticated study/memory techniques have to be employed to organize and retain information. • Monitoring techniques have to be employed so important concepts aren’t missed. • Knowledge of what supplemental resources (atlas, map, almanac) can provide is necessary. • Knowledge of how to read supplemental resources is required. • Texts may not hold or capture reader’s interest so readers must be selfmotivated. • Multiple texts must be held in memory for comparison, contrast, and discovery of patterns.
How to Protect Yourself from Hoaxes, Frauds, and Identity Theft
Authors: Pournelle Jerry
Published: November 2020

There are two basic categories of Internet lies: frauds, where the object is to get your money, and hoaxes, where the primary object is just to pull your chain, but there can be far-reaching consequences as well. Hoaxes give the perpetrators ego gratification as they watch their creation spread throughout the Internet. Frauds may give the perpetrators your life savings, and give you months—maybe years—of hassle as you try to repair your credit record and retrieve your very identity. Hoaxes—Hoaxes are spread by e-mail and come in an endless variety of guises. There are, for example, fake virus warnings, chain letters promising riches if you follow their instructions (or threatening dire consequences if you don’t); urban myths about women in peril, dogs in microwaves, and hypodermic needles on theater seats; letters that tug at your heart strings or appeal to your greedy side; Internet petitions (often based on false information); and letters claiming that Bill Gates wants to give you money. Yeah, right. Even the most “innocent” hoaxes are harmful. At the very least, they take up your time, and they try to get you to forward them to other people as well. If you forward a letter to just 40 people, and each of them does the same, and so on, then after just four steps, more than two and a half million copies will have been sent out. That’s a lot of wasted time and wasted bandwidth. These letters can also contain dangerous misinformation and bad advice. One example is a common letter advising women not to stop when pulled over by the highway patrol, but instead to dial #77 on their cell phones to talk to the police—a wrong number in 48 of the 50 states! Perhaps the most common example is the virus hoax—typically a letter forwarded by someone you know warning you that if you find a certain file on your computer it means you are infected with a virus.
Introduction
Authors: Dryfoos Joy G.
Published: November 2020

We have invited some practitioners who “do the work” to tell us what they do. Six program areas are covered here: parent involvement, after-school and summer programs, early childhood programs, primary health services, mental health services, and community development. These are the basic components of the community school model developed by The Children’s Aid Society (CAS); most other models include some or all of these activities as well. We have asked our experts from CAS to provide the rationale for what they do in their components, describe a working example, discuss implementation issues and sources of financing for the component, and tell us about the challenges they faced and the lessons they have learned from their experiences. Many of these components require space within the school—a designated area for parents to congregate, rooms for a primary health care clinic, private offices for mental health counseling, and classrooms and gyms for before- and after-school activities. Not every school can meet these space requirements, or at least many schools do not think that they have room for one more activity. I have observed, though, that more space becomes available in direct relationship to how essential the services become. One principal, reluctant to place a school-based clinic in his building, offered one very small room in a dark corner. Yet five years later, a full suite of rooms had been designated the “Health Place” with two examining rooms, a dental office, a meeting room, three private offices, and an attractive waiting room. The principal described the facility as “my clinic” when a newscaster came to do a story on the program. Unquestionably, full-service community schools require delicate negotiations over many issues, especially space. The CAS schools make full use of classrooms for after-school activities and need access to the gymnasium, auditorium, band room, restrooms, cafeteria, and playground. The principal and the community school director must work out the arrangements for the use of facilities and for cleaning and maintaining them. As you will see from these descriptions of the core components, this work is labor intensive. In every aspect of community school work, individual attention to students and their families is paramount.
Interventions for Cancer Late Effects and Survivorship
Authors: Butler Robert W. , Copeland Donna R.
Published: November 2020

It is now generally accepted that the diagnosis of many pediatric cancers and their treatments result in significant and long-lasting neurocognitive, psychological, and psychosocial impairments and difficulties. The current status of research in this field has been addressed by other chapters in this text. We would, however, like to emphasize at the onset of our chapter that we firmly believe pediatric cancer is truly a family affair. The effects of the diagnosis of a life-threatening illness and its often-chronic treatment not only result in significant impact on the child’s or adolescent’s neuropsychological and psychological state, but also cause psychological ramifications for the parents, siblings, and extended family members. In healthy, well-functioning families, this major life obstacle can serve as an impetus to rally family members in support of the child. When this happens, interventions for late effects are beginning to be identified as effective and of potential benefit. This field, however, is clearly in its infancy. If the family is chaotic and struggling with relationship issues, the prognosis is less positive. Our clinical observations of these relationships are supported both by preliminary data from studies conducted by our research group and others, and by published manuscripts in the field of pediatric traumatic brain injury (Yeates et al., 1997, 2001). In one of the only studies investigating the impact of familial variables on psychosocial and neuropsychological outcome in pediatric brain tumor patients, the results are extremely consistent with the traumatic brain injury population (Carlson-Green, Morris, & Krawjecki, 1995). Reduced maternal dependence on external coping resources, higher parental socioeconomic status, dual-parent families, and familial cohesion were all identified as improving long-term outcome in this population, as documented by intellectual and behavioral integrity. The late effects of pediatric cancer and its treatment are physical, cognitive, psychological, and social. When multiple effects are present, they can be expected to result in a synergistic impact not only on the child, but also on other family members. The important point is that late effects should not be viewed in isolation or summated but should be appreciated for their interrelatedness.
Into the Lake—Deep
Authors: Thomson Peter
Published: November 2020

Dress warmly, hold your breath, and take a dive . . . You pierce the surface of Baikal at a soft angle and slip like the low rays of the high-latitude sun into a prism of liquid glass. The water molecules release their bonds with each other to embrace you. Sunlight follows you, wiggles, and scatters; the photons themselves become liquid. Sound becomes a liquid, too, thick and syrupy. Gravity loses its bearings and presses at you from all around. Normal reference points fall away— up and down, left and right—your sense of where you are comes only from subtle changes in light, temperature, and pressure. This will take some getting used to. But not to worry, here in the world’s oldest lake, still in its youth at twenty-five million years, you’ve got nothing but time. And if you put on your special magnifying goggles, you’ll see that you’ve got plenty of company, as well. You’re surrounded by a haze of tiny creatures, each no longer than a millimeter and a half. They’re Epischura baicalensis, those elfin shrimp that float through the lake, sucking massive Baikal through their little digestive tracts, feeding on algae and bacteria, pulling out impurities, and helping to keep the lake clean and clear. Epischura baicalensis are members of a group of organisms known as zooplankton—tiny animals and larva that drift and swim through the water, buffeted about by waves and currents. The miniscule creatures that make up zooplankton live everywhere, in just about every body of water on earth, and like Epischura baicalensis, many of them are little shrimp, or copepods. But Epischura baicalensis live nowhere else, and apparently can’t live anywhere else. It’s said that they can’t live even in a glass of Baikal water removed from the lake. Perhaps they die of homesickness. The water surrounding you as you float in Baikal is about as close as you can get in nature to pure H2O. It’s what aquatic scientists call “oligotrophic”— there’s very little in the way of nutrients and minerals running off into it from the surrounding landscape, and so a very limited supply of some of the basic building blocks of life.
Bad Roads Are Good for Baikal
Authors: Thomson Peter
Published: November 2020

The Barguzin River flows out of the Barguzin Mountains, through the town of Barguzin and then the coastal community of Ust-Barguzin before it finally loses itself in a broad cove of Baikal known as Barguzin Bay. The only way across the river for miles upstream from the lake is a ramshackle little wooden ferry with a tiny, corrugated steel shed with a wood stove in it and room on its deck for about half a dozen cars. The ferry slips noiselessly away from the end of the road on the south bank, and looking west toward the lake, two ghostly, rusting timber loading cranes loom on the horizon while the river spills over into a grassy marsh on its north bank. Turning back to the east, there’s a small motorboat laboring to get upstream—laboring because it’s attached to a tow rope, which is attached to the ferry. The ferry, it turns out, is just a hapless little barge, at the mercy of the river without the guidance of the motorboat pilot on the other end of the towline. Our crossing takes less than five minutes, and connected to it by nothing but that single strand, the pilot directs the barge into place perfectly on the far side. But the deckhand fails to secure it, the ferry swings wide in the current, spins ninety degrees, and slams butt-end into the dock. The pilot scowls as he turns the motorboat around and uses its blunt bow, covered in a tractor tire, to push the barge back into place, where the deckhand finally lashes it to the dock. The Barguzin is Baikal’s third largest tributary, after the Selenga to the south of here and the Upper Angara to the north. It carries about six percent of the water flowing into the lake, along with migratory fish like omul and sturgeon, born in the shallow gravel beds upriver before wandering downstream to spend most of their lives in the lake. And even though it flows through only two towns between its headwaters and the lake, the Barguzin carries a significant pollution load into Baikal, as well, especially organic chemicals from timber operations.
Angels and Ghosts in Irkutsk
Authors: Thomson Peter
Published: November 2020

For thousands of the tsars’ political enemies in imperial Russia, the bad news was that they were being stripped of their wealth, their civil rights, and their aristocratic privileges and exiled to Siberia, perhaps never to return home. The good news was that they were being sent to Irkutsk. In the continent-sized freezer and prison camp that was Siberia, Irkutsk was a place where formerly dignified and refined Russians not only might survive but might even be able to live with something approaching the dignity and refinement of their lives back in St. Petersburg or Moscow. “The best of all Siberian towns is Irkutsk,” Chekhov wrote on his way east to report on the prison camps of Sakhalin Island in the Pacific in 1890. The city is more than 5,000 kilometers from Moscow, 250 kilometers from Mongolia, and twice as close to Beijing’s Forbidden City as to the Kremlin, and even after the first road was cut from Moscow in the 1860s, it took a month of miserable travel to get here under the best conditions. It’s also a place where it was said that you could hear a symphony or an opera as good as any in St. Petersburg, or attend the theater in a hall that would grace the most elegant streets of the Russian capital. Where, today, you can walk down tree-lined sidewalks fronting elegant commercial blocks with well-stocked shops and cafes serving the best coffee west of San Francisco. Where green and gold spires descend to ornate white Orthodox churches and poplar-shaded log houses with gracefully carved eaves and window frames extend for what seem like miles in every direction. Irkutsk was founded in the mid-seventeenth century as a Cossack ostrog, a fort at the confluence of the Irkut and Angara rivers, and by the mid-eighteenth century it had become the administrative center of Eastern Siberia as the Russian Empire pushed its frontier ever eastward. It had also become the economic hub of the region, “the warehouse of Russia,” as the contemporary writer Mark Sergeyev puts it, where, he says, quoting a Russian proverb, “everything was on sale except pigeon’s milk.”
Blind Love Is a Dangerous Thing
Authors: Thomson Peter
Published: November 2020

The sky is a blinding white and blue, and the little minibus from Listvianka to Irkutsk flits over the folds of the Angara Valley like a bumblebee, slightly ungainly and, to an observer, perhaps not quite in control of its trajectory, but confident in its own path and in the completion of its journey. We’ve seen our last of Baikal. One last run alongside daughter Angara and James and I will get our final glimpse of the lake’s cobalt water, bearing northwest for the turbines and factories of the Angarsk industrial corridor and then, slightly tarnished, on to her rendezvous with her beloved Yenisei and finally the Arctic ocean, 2,500 river kilometers downstream. One last pass through Irkutsk, and we’ll be back on the beast-machine bound for Moscow and beyond, and a world more familiar if still not known. We’ve seen our last of Baikal, but I’m pretty sure that I, anyway, am not leaving it behind, that it will never quite stop flowing through me. Blood has the same salinity as the ocean, someone once told me—we never really left the sea, we just carry it around inside us. Alas, this little detail of life turns out to be just too exquisite to be true, but it sure works as metaphor—we all carry around a biological memory of where and what we come from, from the water that makes up roughly sixty percent of our bodies to the ninety-eight or so percent of our genes that we share with chimpanzees. And so it is with Baikal—the lake inseparable from the people who love it in so many complex and ambiguous ways—I’ll carry a piece of it around in every part of me, like a new strand of DNA that has spliced itself in with mine and changed ever so slightly who I am and how I live in the world. For our last couple of nights back in Irkutsk, James and I stay in a downtown hotel, for about three times the cost of the American House, where, Olga tells us, we can finally get our visas properly registered.
Access: 1954–1983
Authors: Graham Patricia Albjerg
Published: November 2020

“I’ll Never go to School with a Nigger!” Dickie, an eighth grader in my social studies class, shouted vehemently as we began to discuss the Brown v. Board of Education case prohibiting segregation in public schools that the Supreme Court had decided a year before, in 1954. Dickie was right; he never did, dropping out of school two years later, before his Virginia public high school began desegregation. I was flabbergasted and appalled by Dickie’s assertion, only gradually coming to realize that my new profession, teaching, was heading on a rocky road to improvement. In September 1955, as a new, navy bride, I began teaching in still segregated Deep Creek High School serving the predominantly low-income white community of the Dismal Swamp in southeastern Virginia. Prepared as I had been by the mushy adjustment curriculum of my Indiana public schools (lots of attention to my deficient social skills, not much to strengthening my intellect), I had zipped through college. I added the teacher training sequence after I became engaged in order to have a saleable skill when I married on graduation day. My five education courses, most of which I thought academically and professionally worthless, required that I memorize the Seven Cardinal Principles, still the reigning dogma, and I did, believing they represented the fuzzy thinking I associated with public education. I lived in a totally white world, never having had a black friend, fellow student, or teacher. Under Virginia law at that time Deep Creek High School was also a totally white high school world, though surrounded by a black community. The drop-out rate was high: 140 students in eighth grade but only 40 high school seniors. When Dickie made his assertion about segregation, I was astounded both by the language and by the sentiment. We did not use such a term in my household, and, innocent that I was, I thought the Supreme Court had decided the year before in Brown v. Board of Education that public schools could not be legally segregated by race.
Racism’s Economic Foundation
Authors: Bell Derrick
Published: November 2020

It Is One Thing To Point Out the ways in which racism manifests itselfin this country: the involuntary sacrifices of black rights that often-further settlement of differences among policymakers; the convergence of interests that almost always underlie progressive racial policies; the fortuity of circumstances that are seldom influenced either by the injustices blacks are suffering or by their petitions and protests. These approaches, these hidden covenants, offer perspectives on both historical and contemporary racial developments. They may not, though, answer the basic question. What are the motivations, the invisible forces, that move both individuals and groups to function so predictably across time and a wide-variety of conditions as to ensure a perpetually subordinate role for all but a fortunate few of those Americans who are not white? It is as though black people are trapped in a giant, unseen gyroscope. Even their most powerful exertions fail either to divert the gyroscopic prison from its preplanned equilibrium, or to alter its orientation toward dominance for whites over blacks. The symbols change and the society sometimes even accepts standards such as “equal opportunity” that civil rights advocate shave urged on it, but somehow in practice such standards serve to strengthen not weaken the subordinate status of African Americans. And to our horror, that status is stabilized rather than alleviated by the movement up through the class ranks of the precious few blacks, including myself, who too quickly are cited as proof-both that racism is dead and that the indolence of blacks rather than the injustice of whites explains the socioeconomic gaps separating the races. For many years, I have been disturbing friends and critics by expressing the view based on history and personal experience that racism is permanent in this country. My statement may seem more provocative than instructive. Here I want to elaborate on it by asserting that it is racism that underlies the paradox of a nation built on the combination of free-market economy and popular democracy. For support, I owe much to the work of Yale Law professor Amy Chua, who reminds us that political theorists and economists such as Adam Smith, James Madison, and Thomas Babington Macaulay warned that this combination simply could not work. Markets would produce enormous concentrations of wealth in the hands of a few who exploited the many.
Science Books
Authors: Zimmer Carl
Published: November 2020

Every piece of science writing has a trajectory, a life history. You decide you want to write something, you find a subject to write about, you find someone to publish it, you research it, you write it, and then—if all goes well—it eventually turns up in print. These milestones mark the life history of every piece of science writing, whether it's a magazine feature, a newswire story, a post on a Web log, or a book. But these genres are a bit like animals. Every species has its own life history. All animals are born, grow, and reach maturity, but each species takes its own route from one milestone to the next. You can't equate the life of a mayfly with the life of a tortoise. Here, then, is the life history of a science book. I hope that in describing it, I convince you that the science book is not simply a very long article, but an altogether separate beast. Book ideas come about in many different ways. The idea for my first book, At the Water's Edge, occurred to me one day in 1996 as I was sitting at my desk at Discover. I had just written an article about how our fish-like ancestors crawled on land 360 million years ago. I was flipping through the published article, sometimes glancing up at my stack of notes and papers. The stack was a foot thick. (I'm very slow about clearing off my desk.) I probably managed to get half an inch of that information into the story. All the rest of those wonderful stories within the story—about the evolutionary principles these animals illustrate, about the 150 years of scientific debate over this central mystery of our heritage—would never see the light of day. I thought about the other articles I had written on other great evolutionary transformations, and all the details I had left out of them because of space constraints. I decided to write a book. I suspect this is a common route to many first science books. Others are born when authors are approached to write a companion book to a television series, or to serve as a co-author with a scientist.
Science Audiences on the Web
Authors: Powledge Tabitha M.
Published: November 2020

In otherwise hard times, at least one market for science writing appears to be expanding: writing for scientists, particularly online. It's also a market that can offer unusual professional satisfaction. When you write for scientists, you can ignore many of science and medical journalism's topical fads. On the Web, you can pursue subjects that interest you, delve into more of their technical details, and write about them with surprising flexibility and freedom. Like everything else in the dot-corn world, online-only publications for scientists have come and gone. I, for one, am still mourning the disappearance of BioMedNet, which Elsevier dropped at the end of 2003. For several years BMN was an important market. It published at least a couple of news stories every weekday and also covered several basic research conferences annually. But there's good news, too: A few online news operations allied with print publications are still going strong. These outlets, such as TheScientist.com (www.the-scientist.com) and NewScientist.com (www.newscientist.com), publish unique content that does not appear in their print versions. Top weekly journals also publish daily news online—among them Nature (www.nature.com/news) and Science (sciencenow.sciencemag.org). So does the top-tier publication Scientific American (www.sciam.com), which appeals both to those with an armchair interest in science and to scientists themselves. The stories in these online publications—typically short, in the range of 400 to 600 words—are written by both staffers and freelances. One of the best things about writing for scientists on the Web is that it's not like typical Web writing at all. It resembles traditional print writing—but, amazingly, often with fewer constraints. And it is garnished only lightly with electronic doodads. Publications for scientists are not mad for multimedia, so your words don't have to take second (or third) place to video documentaries, interactive quizzes, Flash animation, or chat. Hyperlinks, yes, but only rarely will there be slideshows or snazzy static graphics. Nor is this a deeply collaborative process. Usually it's just you and your editor, who often leaves you to produce your piece in your own way. This is different from Web writing in general, when you might be part of a Web content team whose other members regard you as the least valuable player.
The Environment
Authors: Revki Andrew C.
Published: November 2020

Hindsight is usually expressed in bravado-tinged phrases. “You have it so easy now” is one. But when scanning the recent history of environmental news, the impression is just the opposite. A few decades ago, anyone with a notepad or camera could have looked almost anywhere and chronicled a vivid trail of despoliation and disregard. Only a few journalists and authors, to their credit, were able to recognize a looming disaster hiding in plain sight. But at least it was in plain sight. The challenges in covering environmental problems today are far greater, for a host of reasons. Some relate to the subtlety or complexity of most remaining pollution and ecological issues now that glaring problems have been attacked. Think of non-point-source pollution, such as runoff from countless farm fields or urban lawns, and then think of the ultimate point of the Exxon Valdez, spilling its heavy load of crude oil into the seas off the Alaskan coast. A little reflection is useful. Most journalists of my generation were raised in an age of imminent calamity. Cold War “duck and cover” exercises regularly sent us to the school basement. The prospect of silent springs hung in the wind. We grew up in a landscape where environmental problems were easy to identify and describe. Depending on where you stood along the Hudson River's banks, the shores were variously coated with adhesive, dyes, paint, or other materials indicating which riverfront factory was nearest. And, of course, the entire river was a repository for human waste, making most sections unswimmable. Smokestacks were unfiltered. Gasoline was leaded. Then things began to change. New words crept into the popular lexicon—smog, acid rain, toxic waste. At the same time, citizens gained a sense of empowerment as popular protest shortened a war. A new target was pollution. Earth Day was something newspapers wrote about with vigor, not an anachronistic, even quaint, notion. Republican administrations and bipartisan Congresses created a suite of laws aimed at restoring air and water quality and protecting wildlife. And, remarkably, those laws began to work. Right through the 19805 the prime environmental issues of the day—and thus the news—continued to revolve around iconic incidents, mainly catastrophic in nature.
A Delayed Healing: Understanding the Fragmented Resilience of Gernika
Authors: Kirschbaum Julie B. , Sideroff Desirée
Published: November 2020

For the 1937 Paris World’s Fair, Pablo Picasso unveiled a vivid portrayal of human suffering entitled Guernica. Inspired by the brutal civilian attack on a small Basque town in northern Spain, the painting became an artistic indictment of fascism, exposing the horrors of the Spanish Civil War to the world. Gernika suffered this major urban trauma on April 26, 1937, when Hitler’s Condor Legion demolished the town at the request of General Francisco Franco, leader of the National Forces and subsequent dictator of Spain. While the town of Gernika lacked the global prominence and political freedom to convey its own account of the bombing, the Picasso painting, in conjunction with the international press, exposed the brutality of the attack. In the ensuing decades, the painting traveled the globe promoting a message of martyrdom and suffering. This international attention occurred in sharp contrast to Gernika’s concealed recovery, which received little publicity under the censorship of Franco’s fascist regime. Franco deliberately targeted Gernika because of its cultural significance to the Basque people, for whom the town symbolized democracy and autonomy. In attacking this town, which held no military or strategic significance, Franco aimed to destroy the symbolic center of Basque self-rule and crush his enemy’s morale. This deadly assault affected the lives of all of Gernika’s citizens, killing many, scattering survivors, and almost completely destroying the town’s physical structure. Following the bombing, the town experienced a precarious recovery. The man who ordered Gernika to be destroyed guided its reconstruction and dictated the rules of the Spanish public realm from 1939 to 1975. Franco simultaneously directed a rapid physical restoration and a strict program of Basque cultural subjugation. The politics of recovery meant that decades passed before town members could publicly mourn or openly place blame. Under these circumstances, recovery in Gernika exhibited distinct physical, emotional, and cultural dimensions. Physical resilience denotes the ability of a city to rebuild its physical structure. It considers how the city was rebuilt, who was in charge of the rebuilding process, and the politics involved in physical reconstruction. Emotional resilience refers to the ability of individuals, families, and communities to cope and heal from trauma.
Looking to the Rocks: Molecular Clues to the Origin of Life
Authors: Gaines Susan M. , Eglinton Geoffrey , Rullkötter Jürgen
Published: November 2020

When Geoff started analyzing leaf waxes, he hadn’t consciously been looking for compounds in living organisms that are likely to survive in sediments, attacking his Derbyshire question from its other end, as is now a standard ploy in biomarker studies. But when he returned from the Canaries in 1961, it began to dawn on him that this was, in fact, what he had done. It also became apparent that he was not alone in his curiosity about the fate of organic compounds in things like rocks and tars. In fact, he had some very good company. Two prominent Nobel chemists gave talks in Glasgow that year, both posing fundamental questions about the stuff of life. And both, Geoff found, shared his maverick interest in the organic chemistry of rocks and oils. Sir Robert Robinson sought to resolve the apparent paradox of petroleum, which appeared to have formed from the buried detritus of plants and algae that had been subjected to high pressures and temperatures, and yet also contained organic compounds that were quite different from any known in plants and algae. And Melvin Calvin, who had discovered how CO2 is converted to organic molecules in photosynthesis, talked about the origin of life. Experiments done in the past decade had given new meaning to such questions, by showing that simple organic chemicals could form spontaneously under conditions similar to those that were likely to have prevailed on the early, prebiotic earth. The mystery of life’s origin suddenly seemed approachable, and discussions had shifted from the purely theoretical and philosophical toward the empirical, and from the paleontological to the chemical. On the contemporary earth, life has something of a monopoly on making organic compounds. But if amino acids and sugars, the basic building blocks of living things, were produced by other than living things on the early earth, before the advent of life, then one could imagine the world before photosynthesis, before bacterial chemosynthesis. One could imagine some form of chemical evolution that predated Darwin’s biological evolution and launched the simplest, most primitive of bacteria. And one could look to the oldest rocks for evidence.
Weird Molecules, Inconceivable Microbes, and Unlikely Environmental Proxies: Marine Ecology Revised
Authors: Gaines Susan M. , Eglinton Geoffrey , Rullkötter Jürgen
Published: November 2020

Anaerobic methanotrophs are not the only ecologically important archaea to surprise microbiologists in the last decade. And their isoprenoid ethers are not the only useful lipids—and certainly not the strangest—to have joined the lexicon of microbial biomarkers. Though much of that lexicon is still too generic to be of much use in understanding geologic history, some of these structures have allowed geochemists to transcend biological complexity and garner clues to past climates and environments. In the 1990s, when Stefan Schouten first started finding ring-containing biphytanyl ethers in his sediment samples, he was still working on his doctorate at NIOZ. Like everyone else at the time, he assumed that they derived from the lipids of methanogenic archaea and that it was only a matter of time before ring-containing biphytanyl tetraethers would be identified among the lipids of some newly isolated culture of methanogens, as Guy Ourisson had predicted. Schouten was studying oxygen- and sulfur-bound biomarkers, which meant he treated his sediment extracts chemically to cleave the ether and sulfur bonds, and the treatments often turned up biphytanes. But then, he says, he and another student started finding the ring-containing compounds in some really unlikely places, such as the oxic surface layer of marine sediments where neither methanogens nor extreme thermophilic and halophilic archaea were likely to make a home. The only thing they could think of at the time was that the tetraethers had come from methanogens that lived in the oxygen minimum zone, the layer of water beneath the photic zone where heterotrophic bacteria are active, sometimes to the point of using up all of the oxygen. When Schouten presented these ideas at the 1995 organic geochemistry meeting, Stuart Wakeham immediately piped up with the suggestion that they look for the lipids in the water column—and offered the perfect samples for the enterprise. He had collected particulate matter at different depths in the Black Sea and Cariaco Basin, just the sort of anoxic environments where one might expect to find methanogens in the water column. . . .
Towards a Predictive Computational Complexity Theory for Periodically Specified Problems: A Survey
Authors: Hunt III Harry B. , Marathe Madhav V.
Published: November 2020

The preceding chapters in this volume have documented the substantial recent progress towards understanding the complexity of randomly specified combinatorial problems. This improved understanding has been obtained by combining concepts and ideas from theoretical computer science and discrete mathematics with those developed in statistical mechanics. Techniques such as the cavity method and the replica method, primarily developed by the statistical mechanics community to understand physical phenomena, have yielded important insights into the intrinsic difficulty of solving combinatorial problems when instances are chosen randomly. These insights have ultimately led to the development of efficient algorithms for some of the problems. A potential weakness of these results is their reliance on random instances. Although the typical probability distributions used on the set of instances make the mathematical results tractable, such instances do not, in general, capture the realistic instances that arise in practice. This is because practical applications of graph theory and combinatorial optimization in CAD systems, mechanical engineering, VLSI design, transportation networks, and software engineering involve processing large but regular objects constructed in a systematic manner from smaller and more manageable components. Consequently, the resulting graphs or logical formulas have a regular structure, and are defined systematically in terms of smaller graphs or formulas. It is not unusual for computer scientists and physicists interested in worst-case complexity to study problem instances with regular structure, such as lattice-like or tree-like instances. Motivated by this, we discuss periodic specifications as a method for specifying regular instances. Extensions of the basic formalism that give rise to locally random but globally structured instances are also discussed. These instances provide one method of producing random instances that might capture the structured aspect of practical instances. The specifications also yield methods for constructing hard instances of satisfiability and various graph theoretic problems, important for testing the computational efficiency of algorithms that solve such problems. Periodic specifications are a mechanism for succinctly specifying combinatorial objects with highly regular repetitive substructure. In the past, researchers have also used the term dynamic to refer to such objects specified using periodic specifications (see, for example, Orlin [419], Cohen and Megiddo [103], Kosaraju and Sullivan [347], and Hoppe and Tardos [260]).
How to evaluate the catastrophic risks and the possible responses to them
Authors: Posner Richard A.
Published: November 2020

To deal in a systematic way with the catastrophic risks identified in chapter 1 requires first assessing them and then devising and implementing sensible responses. Assessment involves first of all collecting the technical data necessary to gauge, so far as that may be possible, the probability of particular risks, the purely physical consequences if the risks materialize (questions of value are for later), and the feasibility of various measures for reducing either the risks or the magnitude of the consequences by various amounts. The next step in the assessment stage is to embed the data in a cost-benefit analysis of the alternative responses to the risk. I am not proposing that cost-benefit analysis, at least as it is understood by economists, should be the decision procedure for responding to the catastrophic risks. But it is an indispensable step in rational decision making in this as in other areas of government regulation. Effective responses to most catastrophic risks are likely to be extremely costly, and it would be mad to adopt such responses without an effort to estimate the costs and benefits. No government is going to deploy a system of surveillance and attack for preventing asteroid collisions without a sense of what the system is likely to cost and what the expected benefits (roughly, the costs of asteroid collisions that the system would prevent multiplied by the probabilities of such collisions) are likely to be relative to the costs and benefits both of alternative systems and of doing nothing. The “precautionary principle” (“better safe than sorry”) popular in Europe and among Greens generally is not a satisfactory alternative to cost-benefit analysis, if only because of its sponginess—if it is an alternative at all. In its more tempered versions, the principle is indistinguishable from cost-benefit analysis with risk aversion assumed. Risk aversion, as we know, entails that extra weight be given the downside of uncertain prospects. In effect it magnifies certain costs, but it does not thereby overthrow cost-benefit analysis, as some advocates of the precautionary principle may believe.
19th-Century Temblors: A Science Is Born
Authors: Hough Susan Elizabeth , Bilham Roger G.
Published: November 2020

When the 1811–1812 New Madrid earthquakes rocked the North American midcontinent, the state of seismology as a modern field of inquiry matched that of the United States as a country: a few steps beyond a collection of struggling colonies but still very much a work in progress. Inevitably the New Madrid earthquakes caught the attention of some of the best and most scientifically trained individuals who experienced the remarkable sequence. Jared Brooks, Daniel Drake, Samuel Mitchell—all endeavored to document their observations, and other data, in a thorough and scientific manner, and all had some awareness of theories of the day. Yet in retrospect, contemporary investigation of the sequence remained limited and fragmented. The response would be very different when the Charleston, South Carolina, earthquake rocked the central United States toward the end of the 19th century. Although still too early to be recorded on seismometers, the Charleston earthquake was investigated in a manner that the present-day earth scientist would consider modern. Within the United States, the New Madrid sequence and the Charleston earthquake form a pair of 19th-century bookends. On the shelf in between these milestone events was the emergence of seismology as a modern science—developments that, for the most part, took place outside of the United States. The field would not mature fully during the span of this single century, of course. Elastic rebound theory, the fundamental tenet that has lent its name to this book, would not appear as a fully realized theory until shortly after the 1906 San Francisco earthquake. Plate tectonics, which at long last explained the engine behind the earthquake machine, would arrive on the scene later still. But it was during the 19th century that scientists first began to build the very foundations of the field. As earlier chapters have discussed, intelligent speculations about earthquakes date back at least as far as Aristotle’s time; intelligent, thorough observations of earthquakes date back to the mid-18th century, in particular the efforts sparked by the Year of the Earthquakes in England (1750) and the Lisbon earthquake five years later.