bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Impact of Ketorolac on Reoperation for Hemorrhage After Pediatric Tonsillectomy: A Single‐Center Retrospective Propensity‐Matched Study
Authors: Feldman Rachel M. , O'Reilly‐Shah Vikas , Dahl John P. , Siu Jennifer , Newby Maxwell , Sutherland Tori N. , Parikh Sanjay R. , Jiang Teresa , Franz Amber
Published: November 2023

Objective

To determine if perioperative ketorolac is associated with an increased rate of reoperation for hemorrhage after pediatric tonsillectomy at 30 days and 48 hours.

Study Design

Single‐center retrospective propensity‐matched study.

Setting

Quaternary pediatric hospital and ambulatory surgery center.

Methods

Patients less than 18 years old undergoing tonsillectomy or adenotonsillectomy between January 1, 2015 and October 1, 2020 were included. Hemorrhage rates between exposed (K+) and unexposed (K−) patients were calculated for the total cohort and a 1:1 propensity‐matched cohort. Additional analyses included: multivariable logistic regression, subgroup analysis of ASA 1 and 2 patients, subgroup analysis comparing children with teenagers.

Results

There were 5873 patients (42.1% K+) in the full cohort and 4694 patients in the propensity‐matched cohort. Reoperation for hemorrhage within 30 days occurred in 1.9% of K+ patients and 1.6% of K− patients (P = 0.455) in the full cohort and 1.9% of K+ patients and 1.7% of K− patients (odds ratio [OR] 1.10, 95% confidence interval [CI] 0.72‐1.69, P = 0.662) in the propensity‐matched cohort. Reoperation within 48 hours occurred in 0.65% of K+ patients and 0.53% of K− patients (P = 0.679) in the full cohort and 0.68% of K+ patients and 0.51% of K− patients (OR 1.33, 95% CI 0.63‐2.81, P = 0.451) in the propensity‐matched cohort. There was no association between perioperative ketorolac administration and reoperation for hemorrhage in any of the other analyses.

Conclusion

Ketorolac at end of surgery should be considered as part of the nonopioid analgesic regimen for pediatric tonsillectomy.
Provisional Microgrid Frequency Regulation by Brain Emotional Learning Based Intelligent Controller and Implementation Through FPGA
Authors: Li Zhufeng , Gao Jie , Yang Yuwei
Published: November 2023

With the advancement of technology and human movement towards evolution, intelligent control methods are becoming more important. One of the areas of progress is related to the development of new frameworks for electricity generation and distribution systems, and the microgrid structure with economic capabilities is one of the frameworks. Accordingly, this paper presents a new practical method for controlling the frequency of microgrids and is able to cover the following issues at the same time. 1- It considers the nonlinear model of provisional microgrid which has a hybrid structure (AC and DC) in addition to renewable energy sources. 2- Introduces a method for microgrid frequency control under different operational conditions that performs based on the brain emotional learning. 3- Ensures the operation and applicability of the control method for the provisional microgrid through implementation of FPGA for the first time 4- Confirms the robustness of the proposed method under extreme load changes. So, in the simulation scenarios, the effects of wind turbine and solar energy are considered and under the influence of various changes in load and system uncertainties, the robustness and efficiency of the proposed method are well demonstrated.
Liquid resistivity of pharmaceutical propellants using novel resistivity cell
Authors: Ahmad Hussein , Rasekh Manoochehr , Manivannan Nadarajah , Balachandran Wamadeva
Published: November 2023

Metered-dose inhalers employ propellants to produce pharmaceutical aerosols for treating respiratory conditions like asthma. In the liquid phase, the DC volume resistivity of pharmaceutical propellants, including R134a, R152a, and R227ea, was studied at saturation pressures and room temperature (not vapour phase). These measurements are essential for industries like refrigerants. Aerosols from metered dose inhalers (MDIs) with these propellants become electrically charged, affecting medicament deposition in lung. The resistivity was measured using a novel concentric cylinder-type capacitance cell designed in-house. The resistivity for the propellants (R134a, R152a, and R227ea) was found to be 3.02 × 1010 Ωm, 2.37 × 109 Ωm and 1.31 × 1010 Ωm, respectively. The electrical resistivity data obtained was found to be at least two orders of magnitude higher than the limited data available in the literature. Challenges in the resistivity cell’s development and performance are discussed, with a focus on various propellants and their mixtures with ethanol and moisture concentrations. The resistivity of propellant mixtures containing moisture concentrations ranging from 5 to 500 ppm and ethanol concentrations ranging between 1000 and 125,000 ppm was determined. The resistivity was tested across 10-min and 1-h periods and was performed in accordance with the contemporary IEC 60247 standard.
Remains of decapod crustaceans from the late Cenomanian and early Turonian of the Czech Republic mistakenly assigned to crayfishes (Astacoidea)
Authors: Kočová Veselská Martina , Kawai Tadashi , Audo Denis
Published: November 2023

Two species of fossil crustaceans from the Czech Republic are assigned to AstacusFabricius, 1775, a European crayfish: A. laevissimusFritsch & Kafka, 1887 and A. cenomanensisFritsch & Kafka, 1887. Both come from marine sediments, making doubtful their assignment to crayfishes. Specimens assigned to Astacus laevissimus correspond in fact to propodi of etyoid brachyurans. The type material of A. cenomanensis is heterogeneous, comprising fragmentary ctenochelid (Thalassinidea) propodi and isolated cheliped fingers of etyoid crabs. None of the two species belong to crayfishes. Since the studied cheliped material is too fragmentary and poorly preserved to be attributed confidently on species or genus level, A. laevissimus and A. cenomanensis are considered nomina dubia.
Traumatic Stress and Supervision in Child Welfare
Authors: Pryce Josephine G , Shackelford Kimberly K , Pryce David H
Published: November 2023

A young new child welfare supervisor entered a recent training session at 8:30 a.m. almost in tears, trembling, and totally distraught. She told the other child welfare supervisors that she did not know what to do and needed their help. The agenda for the training was postponed, and attention was focused on the recent events in the young supervisor’s life. When the trainer asked what had happened, the supervisor said in exasperation, “Well, in order for you to understand, I have to go back—before last night.” After a deep breath that showed everyone that she wasn’t sure she could even speak without breaking down, she related the recent events. “Mary, who you know is a very young worker, on the job for less than a year, went out on a crystal methamphetamine case a few days ago. The police were with her. The front door was open and a baby was crying, but no one would respond, so they went inside. The report was that the parents were using crystal meth—not cooking it. Mary said they could not smell the meth and thought it was okay to proceed into the house. You know they [administrators and narcotics agents] have told us that. The parents were passed out and a seven-year-old girl was caring for the infant. The parents were awakened and a physical fight ensued, with the officer having to physically restrain the father. Mary called me and then contacted the judge for a verbal order to remove the children.
Child Welfare Work and Traumatic Stress: An Occupational Hazard
Authors: Pryce Josephine G , Shackelford Kimberly K , Pryce David H
Published: November 2023

This chapter addresses the nature of child welfare work and identifies second- ary traumatic stress as an occupational hazard. It further proposes remedies in worker compensation law for when occupational stress injuries do occur in the child welfare workforce.
Physical Health Conditions
Authors: Walsh Joseph
Published: November 2023

The previous chapters in this book have been concerned with psychoeducation for a range of mental, emotional, and behavioral problems. This chapter is unique in that it is concerned with how such programs can be of assistance to persons with serious physical conditions and their families. Persons who experience chronic and debilitating health conditions are subject to emotional and family stress and are often in need of information to cope with these conditions more effectively. Psychoeducational programs have been shown to help ameliorate the negative effects of health conditions among participants. These programs often emphasize increased knowledge, empowerment, and support in the context of the illness or disability. Programs offer participants opportunities for obtaining health-related resources, learning from peers, minimizing isolation through mutual connection, and problem-solving skills development. They frequently involve cognitive strategies to build participants’ sense of self–efficacy.
About the Author
Authors: Walsh Joseph
Published: November 2023

Joseph Walsh is professor of social work and affiliate professor of psychology at Virginia Commonwealth University. He has been a direct service practitioner in the field of mental health for many years, first in a psychiatric hospital and later in community mental health center settings. He has provided services to general outpatient populations, but has mostly specialized in services to persons with serious mental illness and their families. Since 1993, Joe has been teaching courses in generalist practice, clinical practice, human behavior, research, and social theory. He continues to provide direct services to clients at the university’s Center for Psychological Services. He has published widely in social work and related journals on topics related to clinical practice and is the author of several other books, two published by Lyceum, including Short-term Existential Intervention in Clinical Practice (2007), with Jim Lantz, and Endings in Clinical Practice: Ensuring Closure Across Service Settings (2nd edition, 2007).
Tamar and Judah: Genesis 38
Authors: Gunn David M , Fewell Danna Nolan
Published: November 2023

Our book moves, we have said, between readings of texts and discussions of method. This first extended reading illustrates broadly from one particular story, in Genesis 38, the kinds of questions we shall be asking and the kinds of observations we shall be making about Hebrew narrative in general.
Introduction
Authors: Kane R L
Published: November 2023

The last decade has seen incredible changes in the rate of mortality in older age groups. The numbers of elderly persons are increasing rapidly in both the developed and developing worlds. Within the latter, although the proportion of older persons is still generally quite modest, the overall number is remarkable. We have recently reached the point where the numbers of older persons in the developing countries exceed those in the developed world. While this shift reflects a triumph for health and medical care, some view it m, mixed blessing, and express great concern about the rising cost of health care associated with an aging society. Some have called for drastic measures, including age-based rationing as way of controlling the rapidly rising cost of care. For those just beginning to encounter the growing numbers of elderly. the experience of geriatricians in parts of Europe and the United State can be especially relevant.
How are the elderly different?
Authors: Evans Grimley J
Published: November 2023

One of the basic issues in planning for the consequences of demographic aging is whether the elderly should be regarded as a specific ‘target’ group or whether their needs should be catered for within the context of planning for the population as a whole. Both strategies have their proponents whose experience has been drawn exclusively from a limited number of economically developed countries. The theme of this essay will be to review the nature of human aging and its implications for the design and deployment of health services in aging populations. A general model of aging can establish the principles which health services for aging populations need to embody and can identify some of the impediments likely to be encountered. At an operational level, however, the widely different social and cultural contexts of economically developed and developing countries probably preclude there being a single appropriate response to what should be recognized as a range of unique situations.
Introduction
Authors: Grimley Evans J
Published: November 2023

Aging as manifested in the loss of adaptability of an individual with time is the result of the accumulation and interaction of many impairments, both functional and anatomical. Some of these impairments have been traditionally designated as ‘diseases’ and have therefore been long under the scrutiny of the medical sciences. Others. dismissed as ‘normal aging’ or whose functional importance was underestimated, have only recently received scientific attention.
Osteoporosis
Authors: Evans Grimley J
Published: November 2023

Osteoporosis, conceptualized as a condition characterized by a low amount of histologically normal bone tissue per volume of anatomical bone, is a multifactorial disorder. This implies that it may be the final common pathway of a wide variety of aetiological and pathogenic causal chains. The relative importance of these different pathways may well vary between populations and between groups within a population, and such heterogeneity may underlie some of the contradictory results of epidemiological and interventive studies in osteoporosis. For example, dietary calcium intake is less likely to emerge as an important risk factor for osteoporosis in a population with a uniformly high dietary intake than in one with a lower and more variable intake. In a population with uniformly low levels of physical activity the importance of activity as a determinant will be underestimated and oestrogen deficiency may seem to account for more of the variance between the osteoporotic and the normal than in a population with wider variation in physical activity levels.
Iatrogenic disorders
Authors: Caird F I
Published: November 2023

There is no doubt that adverse reactions to prescribed drugs are the most important single disorder in the elderly which is directly due to the activities of doctors; these arc discussed elsewhere (p. 211). However, there are also many other important disorders which doctors and those caring for the elderly may cause by mechanisms over which the doctors have at least some control. These may therefore legitimately be said to be iatrogenic.
The efficacy of continence treatment
Authors: Ouslander J G
Published: November 2023

Urinary incontinence, defined as the involuntary loss of urine, is a prevalent, disruptive, and costly health problem among elderly people. As many as one-third of community-dwelling elderly people admit to some degree of incontinence. Prevalence rates and the frequency of incontinence episodes are greater among elderly patients in long-term care institutions.
Home care and day care for the elderly
Authors: Havens Batty
Published: November 2023

Home care is usually viewed as the in-home or community-based option for providing long-term care to elderly persons. While the majority of this chapter will address precisely this option, two points should be noted: home care may also be provided to persons of all ages, not just the elderly, and some persons require home care only as a short-term (usually defined as less than 60 days) care solution.
Assessing the impact of introducing new technologies and interventions for the elderly
Authors: Becker Henk A
Published: November 2023

In most developed and developing countries the ‘greying of society’ has become recognized by now as one of the major problems for years to come. Demographical data have been extrapolated and the costs for the cure and care of the elderly have been estimated. Some countries will experience this rise in costs relatively early and heavily, while others still have some time to get accustomed to this development. or will undergo the ‘greying’ to a relatively light degree only. Table 32.1 summarizes the prospects for a number of countries.
The role of aging in establishing social priorities: an economic perspective
Authors: Wright Ken
Published: November 2023

Economics is all about allocating scarce resources to competing ends, to maximizing the outcome of the use of any set of resources. However, there are usually two competing objectives in this process: one concerned with efficiency, which is the maximization of outcome or the minimization of costs, the other with equity, which is concerned with how the outcomes and costs are distributed amongst different sectors of society. Although the efficiency calculus is mainly technical, involving the measurement of costs and outcomes, it also contains a number of elements requiring judgement and valuation. Equity considerations are judgemental; they involve assessing the fairness of the burden of costs and the benefits of outcomes that accrue to specific groups in the population. Decisions on social priorities from an economic viewpoint require the consideration of the achievement of both objectives.
Q Fever
Authors: Marrie Thomas J
Published: November 2023

Q fever is a wide spread illness affecting wild and domestic animals and man. The etiological agent, Coxiella burnetii, has both a wild life and domestic animal cycle. In mammals infection localizes to the endometrium and the mammary glands. The organism is reactivated during pregnancy reaching high concentrations in the placenta. At the time of parturition the organism is aerosolized. Inhalation of Coxiella burnetii by susceptible animal results in Q fever. In man Q fever may be acute (self limited febrile illness, pneumonia, hepatitis) or chronic (mostly endocarditis). Abortion and stillbirth are manifestations of Q fever in domestic animals and in animal models of disease (such as Q fever in pregnancy in a mouse model). A vaccine is available for abattoir workers and veterinarians and others in high risk occupations for acquiring Q fever.
Rat-Bite Fevers
Authors: Salmon R L , McEvoy M B
Published: November 2023

Streptobacillus moniliformis was first isolated in 1925 from the blood of a laboratory worker and became recognized as one of the two causes of rat-bite fever (the other is Spirillum minis). At the same time, an epidemic form of the disease, Haverhill fever, was recognized during an outbreak in the United States (Parker and Hudson 1926) which was ascribed to milk. Accounts of cases have been rare in the world literature but in 1983 the largest outbreak ever described occurred among pupils at a boarding school in England following the probable contamination by rat urine of a private water supply from a spring (McEvoy et al. 1987).
Streptococcosis
Authors: Mayon-White R T
Published: November 2023

Two species of streptococci are of zoonotic interest: Streptococcus suis and S. zooepidemicus. Pigs are the primary hosts of S. suis, and human disease is concentrated in people who have contact with pigs or pork. The main human disease from S. suis is meningitis. Streptococcus zooepidemicus causes pharyngitis in humans, complicated rarely by glomerulonephritis. In these cases, the source is unpasteurized milk. Cattle and horses are natural hosts, but other species may also have pyogenic infections. All the pyogenic (beta- haemolytic) streptococci of clinical significance have animal connections, sometimes by disease and often by sharing group antigens. Penicillin is the mainstay of treatment and the prevention of human disease is by milk pasteurization and hygiene in the meat industry.
Tick-Borne Encephalitides
Authors: Nuttall Patricia A , Labuda Milan
Published: November 2023

Tick-bome encephalitides are caused by several different viruses belonging to the tick-borne encephalitis (TBE) subgroup, a distinct antigenic complex of the virus family, Flaviviridae. Encephalitic members of the complex are represented by the several subtypes of tick-borne encephalitis virus (including Russian spring-summer encephalitis virus), louping ill virus, and Powassan virus. They cause encephalitis affecting humans in Eurasia and North America. The TBE subgroup has been one of the most intensely studied groups of tick-borne pathogens.
American Trypanosomosis
Authors: Nlarsden Philip Davis
Published: November 2023

Trypanosoma cruzi infection is an ancient zoonosis of the New World. It is usually transmitted by faecal soiling of the mammalian integument during the act of feeding of blood-sucking triatomine bugs. Such transmission occurs from New York State to the Argentine pampas including all countries within this wide range. Chagas disease is the term applied to syndromes caused by human infection.
Babesiosis And Malaria
Authors: Cox F E G
Published: November 2023

Babesiosis and malaria are very rare zoonoses. Although some 350 million people are infected with one of four species of Plasmodium, all these infections are acquired from other humans through the agency of infected mosquitoes and the number of recorded infections from animals to humans is very small. Similarly Babesia species infect millions of cattle and unknown numbers of sheep, dogs, and horses, and transmission is usually from one member of the species to another member of the same species through the bite of a tick, and human infections are very rare. The parasites that cause malaria and babesiosis are protozoa classified in the same phylum, Sporozoa, but in different classes (Table 47.1).
Cysticercosis and taeniosis: Taenia saginata, Taenia soliumq and Asian Taenia
Authors: Lloyd Sheelagh
Published: November 2023

This chapter reviews current knowledge of the taxonomy, epidemiology, diagnosis, therapeutic regimens, and potential control strategies for human Taenia spp. The recently identified Asian Taenia is compared with Taenia saginata and Taenia solium, both named in the eighteenth century. Sanitary and agricultural practices that lead to the infection of animal intermediate hosts are described; as are the socio-economic and cultural/dietary practices that lead to infection of humans as definitive hosts for adult tapeworms and as intermediate hosts for the metacestodes of T. solium. The relative merits and disadvantages of various diagnostic techniques are discussed. The development of coproantigen ELISA for adult tapeworms in man is a major advance but still is not species specific. Diagnosis of metacestode infections in animals still remains inefficient, with modern immunological techniques not yet showing any major advance over current meat inspection practices. While major advances have been made in diagnosis of neurocysticercosis in man, the merits and disadvantages of CT scan, MRI and antigen/antibody detection methods still mean that no single test should be used for diagnosis and/or prognosis. The advent of albendazole and praziquantel have greatly improved therapy of adult tapeworms and metacestodes in man, but surgery remains an important therapeutic regimen for ventricular, subarachnoid, and ocular cysts. The merits of each therapeutic regimen are discussed in relation to the viability, site, and intensity of infection with metacestodes. Finally, the value of different potential measures for control of the taeniid cestodes of man is discussed in relation to parasite biology and the social, cultural, economic, and agricultural practices that must be considered before implementation of control.
Zoonotic Hookworm Infections (Ancylostomosis)
Authors: Prociv Paul
Published: November 2023

In the definitive host, they attach to and feed on the intestinal mucosa. Some species cause blood loss. Eggs passed in host faeces embryonate in the soil. The third- stage larva infects the next host, either by skin contact or following ingestion. The relative importance to the life cycle of these two routes, or of paratenic hosts, is unknown. Larvae of some species also become hypo- biotic in the definitive host, being reactivated by endogenous or host stimuli. This underlies transmammary transmission in at least one species.
Toxocarosis
Authors: Lloyd S
Published: November 2023

This chapter discusses the role of Toxocara canis in the syndromes of visceral, ocular, and covert toxocarosis (VT, OT, CT). While the transmission dynamics of T. canis to humans have never been fully elucidated, the potential roles of pet dogs, stray dogs, and foxes, and the influence of their population densities and the age demography of the populations, are compared in relation to contamination of the environment with eggs. Routes of infection for children by geophagia, poor hygiene, fly-borne, and meat-borne ingestion of eggs or larvae are described. The development of prolonged in vitro culture and analysis of the excretions/secretions (ES) and surface of T. canis larvae have gone a long way to explaining the importance of these ES antigens and their rapid production and shedding in the prolonged course of infection and pathogenesis of disease. ES antigens also have greatly improved the sensitivity and specificity of serodiagnosis. Nevertheless, we still have insufficient understanding as to differences in the aetiology of the larvae or differences in immune responses among individuals to account for development of VT versus CT or OT in different individuals. Our understanding that most of the pathology in toxocarosis is due to the immunopathological response of the host to T. canis ES has emphasized the need for vigorous antiinflammatory therapy in treatment; unfortunately, less information is available as to the true efficacy of the anthelmintics currently available. The complexity of the T. canis life cycle in dogs is described and therapeutic regimens to prevent excretion of eggs by pet dogs are given. This, plus adequate control or exclusion of stray or wild canids from a property7 should prevent most cases of VT. Control of the other sources of infection, free-ranging stray dogs and foxes, will be difficult, and more data are needed to clarity the importance of these and of fly-borne and meat-borne transfer of infection to humans to target these for control.
Globalizing Rights?
Authors: George Susan
Published: November 2023

In this essay I shall try to explain why neoliberal globalization is incompatible with the globalization of human rights. This incompatibility is neither an aberration nor a temporary inconvenience which will improve with time but a built-in feature of the system.

Let me start by defining terms. What do I mean by globalization? Some people see it entirely in terms of technology. Globalization may have been given a decisive push by the information revolution, but computers and the internet didn’t cause it. Similarly, purely economic definitions of globalization are inadequate even though it’s quite true that cheap capital, information, and transport have been vital to its success.
Food Rights, Free Trade, and Fascism
Authors: Shiva Vandana
Published: November 2023

Free trade has hijacked our most powerful aspiration—the will to be free. It has substituted corporate for personal freedom, and passed off increased freedom for corporations as the expansion of democracy and human rights.

The West has been considered one of the sources of the notion of human rights, but brutality was integral to the Western project of colonialism and imperialism. The North has dominated the South by systematically denying full human status to the Southern peoples. This was first done through the West’s ‘civilizing mission’—the white man’s burden; now it is done through globalization and free trade. Globalization is today rewriting the human rights agenda by redefining what being human means.
Early Writings
Authors: Wolff Jonathan
Published: November 2023

The dominant theme of Marx’s Early Writings is that the capitalist society of his day is not properly fit for human consumption. It crushes the human spirit, denying the vast majority of people any chance to develop their real potential. No existing theorist, Marx thinks, has diagnosed the human malaise correctly, and thus no one had been in any position to outline a genuine cure, although this had not stopped them trying. Marx is confident that he can do better.
Otto Stern’s sulphurous cigars
Authors: Gratzer Walter
Published: November 2023

Otto Stern (1888-1969) used to describe himself as an experimental theoretician. Isidore Rabi, the great American physicist [21], took Stern, with whom he had worked as a young man, for his model of all a scientist should be. He was genial, unpretentious, and generous, and had pre-eminently, Rabi wrote, ‘good taste’ in his physics: he infallibly sought out problems of the first importance, revelled in ingenuity, and his experimental approach was marked by style and wit. Stern was drawn initially to theoretical physics and he served for some years as assistant to Albert Einstein, to whom he was related. Stern told his assistant, Otto Frisch [20], that he and Einstein would visit the local brothels together, for these were quiet, relaxing places in which to discuss physics. One of Stern’s theoretical studies, which solved a longstanding problem in statistical mechanics, was published during the First World War under the dateline ‘Lomsha, Russian Poland’; this was a dingy provincial town to which Stern was posted to tend a weather station, and where he occupied his spare time with these arduous calculations.
‘Every integer his personal friend’: Hardy visits Ramanujan
Authors: Gratzer Walter
Published: November 2023

The sublime Indian mathematician Srinivasa Aayengar Ramanujan (1887-1920) was ‘discovered’ by G. H. Hardy, Professor of Mathematics at Cambridge. Hardy was passionate about his subject and expounded his credo in his book, A Mathematician’s Apology (1940). Bertrand Russell recorded a remark of Hardy’s to the effect that ‘if he could find a proof that I [Russell] was going to die in five minutes he would of course be sorry to lose me, but this sorrow would be quite outweighed by pleasure in the proof. ‘I entirely sympathized with him’, Russell continued, ‘and was not at all offended.’
Rabi meets his match
Authors: Gratzer Walter
Published: November 2023

Isidore Rabi [21], when Chairman of the Physics Department at Columbia University and a mandarin of the American physics establishment, gave the following account of his first encounter with a youthful prodigy. It was 1935 and Rabi was pondering a controversial paper, just published by Einstein, Podolsky, and Rosen, which sought to undermine, with a paradox, the foundations of quantum theory.
The Bucklands explode a miracle
Authors: Gratzer Walter
Published: November 2023

William Buckland (1884-56) was the first incumbent of the Chair of Zoology at Oxford, who passed his trait of extreme eccentricity to his son, Francis, a zoologist—author of Curiosities of Natural History and for some years Inspector of Salmon Fisheries. The Bucklands made it a custom to eat, in a spirit of scientific inquiry, any animal that crossed their path. Francis arranged with the London Zoo to receive a cut from anything that died there. Visitors to the Buckland menage, as well as suffering the overtures of the pet donkey and other creatures not generally found in the drawing room, were apt to be offered such delicacies as mice en croute or sliced head of porpoise. William maintained that roast mole had been the most unpleasant thing he had eaten until he tried the stewed bluebottles. When he was shown by his friend, the Archbishop of York, a snuffbox containing the embalmed heart of Louis XVI, which the prelate had bought in Paris at the time of the Revolution, William Buckland announced that he had never eaten the heart of a king and before he could be prevented had seized and swallowed it.
The vanishing blackboard
Authors: Gratzer Walter
Published: November 2023

Andre Marie Ampere (1775-1836), the remarkable French man of science, whose name is commemorated in the unit of electrical current, broke open the field of electromagnetism (or, as he called it, electrodynamics). He was an infant prodigy and was said in early childhood to have memorized all 20 volumes of the Encyclopédie edited by Diderot and d’ Alembert. Long before Esperanto was thought of, he invented a universal language with a complete new vocabulary and syntax.

Ampere was capable of the intense concentration, common to many geniuses, that often reveals itself in an eccentric absence of mind. When thinking about physical or mathematical problems, he would draw a chalk stub from his pocket and use any convenient surface as a blackboard. It is related that, while walking in Paris, a thought came to him and he searched eagerly for a surface on which to work out its consequences. What he found was the back of a hansom cab and in a while he had covered it in equations. As his cogitations reached a denouement, he was startled to see his blackboard recede, gather speed, and, before he could react, vanish into the distance, bearing away the solution to his problem.
Unlocking the chains
Authors: Gratzer Walter
Published: November 2023

The concept of a chain reaction—a process that gathers pace by multiplying the reactive entities as it progresses—entered chemistry in 1913 and physics some 20 years later. It is a characteristic of such reactions that they start slowly, sometimes after a marked lag, and accelerate explosively. The most familiar example is nuclear fission: when a neutron strikes a uranium (235U) atom and is captured the nucleus breaks in two and releases two or three neutrons. These in turn act on surrounding uranium atoms and the process of fission accelerates sharply. In chemistry autocatalytic reactions with similar characteristics had been observed in the nineteenth century and had exercised such luminaries as Robert Bunsen, the great German chemist.
Fortune favours the ham fist
Authors: Gratzer Walter
Published: November 2023

Fortune, Louis Pasteur tells us, favours the prepared mind. The American physicist, who observed that when his children dropped their toast on the carpet it invariably contravened the malign principle of nature by falling buttered-side up, did not dismiss it as a statistical anomaly. He investigated further and found an explanation, consistent with the laws of physics: his children buttered their toast on both sides. The history of science is replete with examples of accidental discovery, the result of fine judgement, when an anomalous and seemingly useless experimental result was examined more closely rather than discarded.

In the organic chemistry laboratory, breaking a thermometer was always considered a major infraction. Yet when Otto Beckmann (1853-1923), an assistant at the end of the nineteenth century in the laboratory of one of the mandarins of German chemistry, Wilhelm Ostwald, broke a precious thermometer, specially made by the departmental glassblower with a stem so long and uniform that the temperature could be read to one-hundredth of a degree, he turned it to good account: he fell to wondering how one might construct a less-vulnerable instrument with similar precision, and so avoid such disasters and escape the wrath of the professor. The result was the Beckmann thermometer, familiar to all chemists (at least until the age of electronic thermometers), which has a short stem with a mercury reservoir at the top so that the amount of mercury in the bulb can be adjusted to select a chosen narrow temperature range.
The marble and the mop
Authors: Gratzer Walter
Published: November 2023

In 1934, physicists around the world were in a state of high excitement over the transmutation of elements. It was already known that the nuclei of some heavy atoms could capture a flying neutron and thereby form a new and heavier isotope [20]. The energy given up by the neutron on colliding with the nucleus was emitted as a gamma ray—the signature of the process. Enrico Fermi (1901-54), the great Italian physicist, had set in train a programme to examine systematically the behaviour of a range of elements under neutron bombard ment. Elation at what had seemed an early success with a light element (sodium) was tempered by a baffling feature of the result: the gammaray emission occurred with a time delay far beyond what theory allowed. A better proof of neutron capture was required. Two of Fermi’s bright young associates, Emilio Segrè and Edoardo Amaldi, thought they had settled the matter when they found that the next element they studied, aluminium, not only captured a neutron but in doing so gave rise to a radioactive isotope with a lifetime (measured by gamma-ray emission) of nearly three minutes. Fermi, delighted, reported the results at a meeting in London.
A laboratory libation
Authors: Gratzer Walter
Published: November 2023

A. R. Todd, later Sir Alexander, and still later Lord Todd of Trumpington, was often known in Cambridge, where he held the Chair of Organic Chemistry, as Lord Todd Almighty. He was famous for many tours de force of structure determination, most notably that of the nucleotides—the building blocks that are connected together to form the long chains of DNA (and of RNA) [88]. Todd was an earthy Scotsman (born in 1907 in Glasgow) and known as something of an authoritarian. A jingle by one of his colleagues ran:

Do you not think it is odd

That a commonplace fellow like Todd

Should spell, if you please,

His name with two d’s,

When one is sufficient for God?
Hooke’s tease
Authors: Gratzer Walter
Published: November 2023

Scientists have been known to complain of a want of candour in their confrères, in pursuit of patents or merely priority. Matters were far worse in earlier days. The natural philosophers of the Enlightenment frequently sought to safeguard their claims to a discovery, while minimizing the risk of public error, by depositing their dated observations in an archive or by concealing them in a cipher. Isaac Newton’s contemporary, Robert Hooke (1635-1703), was a formidable polymath, a friend of (among others) Christopher Wren, and it was he who designed the monument in Pudding Lane in the City of London to mark the spot at which the Great Fire started in 1666.

Hooke was habitually jealous in guarding what would now be called his intellectual property and mistrustful of his contemporaries. His name is enshrined in Hooke’s Law of Elasticity, which states that extension of an elastk material is directly proportional to the applied stretching force. Hooke’s interest in elasticity stemmed in part from his invention of the balance-spring watch. In 1665, Hooke formulated an encrypted description of this invention in the form: ‘the True theory of Elasticity or Springiness, and a particular Explication there of in several Subjects in which it is to be found: And the way of computing the velocities of bodies moved by them. ceiii11osssttuu.’ This last was an anagram, as Hooke disclosed two years later, when he was sure of his results and satisfied that they could be applied to his balance-spring:
The divine spark conies by night
Authors: Gratzer Walter
Published: November 2023

Many scientists have experienced the transcendental flash of revelation while relaxing or between sleep and wakefulness. One captivating case was that of the Austrian physiologist Otto Loewi (1873-1961), Professor of Pharmacology at the University of Graz and chiefly remembered for his discovery of chemical transmission of the nerve impulse. In 1936, this brought him the Nobel Prize, which he shared with his English friend, Henry Dale [36]. A central question in neurobiology at the time was whether nerve impulses are imparted to the muscles that they control by way of a chemical mediator, for Dale had already shown that a substance found in the body, acetylcholine, could stimulate the action of a nerve; it could, for instance, slow down the beating of a heart, exactly like stimulation of the vagus nerve, which controls the heart muscle.

Loewi had fallen asleep one night over a novel, when he woke with a start, conscious that a dazzling revelation had erupted in his mind. He reached for a pencil and jotted down its essence. But when he awoke next morning he could neither recapture his great idea, nor, to his chagrin, interpret his note. All that day he sat in his laboratory, vainly hoping that the sight of all the familiar apparatus would jolt his memory, and trying without success to understand what he had scribbled. Loewi went to bed that night a disappointed man but during the small hours he woke, the idea once more effulgent in his mind. This time he was more careful in putting it on paper.
Old soldiers never die
Authors: Gratzer Walter
Published: November 2023

It was Ernest Rutherford [ 16] who declared that scientists (by which he meant physicists) never grow old, for, unlike the less fortunate majority of the population who have no laboratories to play in, they retain throughout their lives the child-like pleasure of exploration. Here is a vignette of Rutherford’s patron, J. J. Thomson, famous for many discoveries, most notably that of the electron. On his death at the age of 84 in 1940 his obituarist, the German theoretician Max Born (1882—1970), later Professor of Physics in Edinburgh, recalled

It was Prof. J. J. Thomson’s name which took me to Cambridge in 1906 ...
Fortunate furtive encounter
Authors: Gratzer Walter
Published: November 2023

Max Born [73], one of the founders of quantum theory, was ejected from his professorial chair at G6ttingen after the t\azi government promulgated its racial laws in 1933, and eventually found shelter in Edinburgh. It was a chance encounter with Rutherford [16] that opened this avenue of escape for him:

In 1927 he had joined an international congress in Como. During one lecture which he did not find interesting and while they were showing some slides he had made good use of the darkness to sneak out of the auditorium. Checking the outside corridor just to make sure no one had seen him he saw another figure carefully slide out of another door also checking there was nobody around. It was Rutherford, who laughed and said to Born, ‘you couldn’t stand it either, let’s have a trip on the lake’. In this way they spent the rest of the day and this was the beginning of their friendship which led Rutherford to invite Born to Cambridge in 1933. Later Born moved from Cambridge up to Edinburgh. This story is a simple example of how chance decided the fate of many in these troubled times.
Eddington’s disobedient conscience
Authors: Gratzer Walter
Published: November 2023

At the outset, Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity was by no means universally accepted by physicists and astronomers. Its opponents were mainly those who could not bring themselves to discard the ether, the medium through which light waves were supposedly propagated; others could not swallow the tenet that time itself was relative, or that the velocity of light could not be exceeded. One of Einstein’s most fervent proselytisers in this turbulent debate was the foremost British astronomer of his time, Sir Arthur Eddington (1882-1944).

Eddington was painfully shy but far from modest. His illustrious pupil Subramanyam Chandrasekhar recalled overhearing a conversation between Eddington and another astronomer, Ludwig Silberstein: Silberstein believed that he himself had a firm grasp of Einstein’s theory and complimented Eddington for being one of the three people in the world to understand it. When Eddington hesitated Silberstein asked why he was flaunting his false modesty. ‘Not at all,’ came the reply, ‘I am trying to think who the third one might be.’ Eddington was, moreover, a Quaker and a pacifist and had a strong personal sympathy for Einstein, whose condemnation of German militarism at the start of the First World War had exposed him to widespread opprobrium. It is against this background that Eddington’s determination to prove Einstein right must be seen.
The living fossil
Authors: Gratzer Walter
Published: November 2023

In 1938, three days before Christmas, the young curator of the small East London Museum on the eastern seaboard of South Africa was assembling a display of fossils. Her name was Marjorie Courtenay-Latimer. That morning her work was interrupted by a telephone call from the harbour, where a trawler, laden with a catch that included sharks and other fish, had just docked. The trawlermen had supplied Miss Courtenay-Latimer with fish of many species for the museum’s collection. She now had a backlog of specimens from earlier catches still to be mounted and she wanted to get her fossil display finished before the Christmas holiday. She was not therefore anxious to accumulate more fish. ‘But 1 thought of how good everyone at Irvin and Johnson had been to me, and it being so near Christmas, I thought the least I could do would be to go down to the docks to wish them the compliments of the season.’
Friends and enemies
Authors: Gratzer Walter
Published: November 2023

A. V. (Archibald Vivian) Hill (1886-1977) was a physiologist who won a Nobel Prize in 1922 for his work on the energetics of muscle. He was also, in the words of his protege (and later Nobel Laureate), Sir Bernard Katz, ‘the most naturally upright man 1 have ever known’. Hill strove all his life to right political wrongs—to curb the excesses of chauvinism that disfigured relations between intellectuals in the opposing countries during and after the First World War, and to give succour to scholars displaced from Nazi Germany before the Second. A story from his collection of essays and memoirs recalls some of the absurdities that sprang from the nationalistic passions engendered by the Great War.

It was known since the early years of the twentieth century that the metabolic end-product of muscle activity is lactic acid, which accumulates in large amount with fatigue. What was not then fully understood was how the muscle recovers, and what, in particular, happens to all the lactic acid. Was it eliminated by oxidation or was it recycled through metabolic reactions into the carbohydrate from which it had been formed?
Hybrid vigour
Authors: Gratzer Walter
Published: November 2023

Science has generated its own vocabulary, loosely rooted in the classical languages. But neologisms today are less scrupulously coined than in the era when the ancient languages were universally taught. Jacques Barzun, the American scholar, has recalled the lament of a university president, deploring the introduction of the Bachelor of Science degree: it would not, he said, ensure that the students knew science, but it would certainly ensure that they knew no Latin. Mixed derivations, in those more learned days, were anathema. An Oxford historian was supposed to have remarked when television arrived that no good would ever come of an invention the name of which was half in Latin and half in Greek.

In old age, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832), who wrote and theorized widely about science (and is now remembered for his elaborate, but incorrect, theory of colour vision), was reported to have had the following illuminating exchange with his disciple, Johann Peter Eckermann: the latter related to his master one day that he had been present at the demonstration of a remarkable new invention. It was a steam carriage, or automobile, which could propel itself without horses. Goethe pondered long over this remarkable apparition, and presently summoned Eckermann again. It was surely, he pronounced, Eckermann’s little joke, for if such a contrivance had indeed been invented it could not have been given so grotesque a name: it would have been called an autokineticon, or otherwise perhaps an ipsornobile.