bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
The Nursery of Life
Authors: van Santen Rutger , Khoe Djan , Vermeer Bram
Published: November 2020

Human beings are much more complex than any technology we could devise today. How many machines are good for 80 or 90 years of service? Our immune system—set up at birth—is able to repel diseases that don’t even exist yet. Most viruses that proliferate 50 years after we were born can be defeated just as easily as maladies that have been dogging humans for generations. Effective health care means that—in most regions of the planet—we are living longer and longer. All the same, human beings are not perfect: We get sick and we wear out over time. In the wealthier regions, we spend a great deal of money trying to get as close as possible to a 100-year span. Our greatest task is to bring a long and healthy life within the reach of as many people as possible. New technology is required to hold down the cost of health care, to nip outbreaks of disease in the bud, and to ease discomfort in our old age. Scientists believe that substantial benefits can be gained by identifying abnormalities earlier. A cancerous growth measuring just a few millimeters is still relatively harmless, and an infection caught in its early stages won’t leave any scars. Although techniques for accurately diagnosing incipient abnormalities can often be very expensive, prompt diagnosis generally means that treatment will be easier, cheaper, and more likely to succeed. Thus, we can end up saving money despite the need for expensive equipment. To adequately fight the outbreak of diseases in the future, our technology must be able to respond more rapidly. This could pose a particular challenge because there is also a trend at present toward superspecialization, which is fragmenting medical knowledge and slowing down responses. Take the science of ophthalmology in which the various specializations focus on extremely specific parts of the eye. This is fine once a precise diagnosis has been made, but it could be a significant problem if the patient consults the wrong doctor at the outset. The way we currently approach diagnosis needs to change.
Personal Medicine
Authors: van Santen Rutger , Khoe Djan , Vermeer Bram
Published: November 2020

No two individuals are alike. Some people are genetically predisposed to develop asthma, whereas others can cheerfully live a hundred meters from a major highway with no adverse effects. Genetic predisposition also plays an important part in the efficacy of drugs and in the progress of diseases like cancer, heart failure, and diabetes. Individual differences make doctors’ work more difficult. They can never be sure precisely how susceptible a person is to a specific disease or how effective a particular medicine will be. We can measure all sorts of things, but what do we have to know before we can accurately predict whether a given person will fall ill? Part of the answer is hidden in our genome: Inherited defects and sensitivity to medication show up in our DNA. The map of the human genome was colored in at record speed at the beginning of this century by two rival research teams, which ended up publishing their results simultaneously in 2001. Their achievement was compared with the first moon landing and the invention of the wheel. One of the competing groups was headed by American Craig Venter, who continues to spread the DNA gospel enthusiastically. Initially, Venter was part of the U.S. government–sponsored Human Genome Project, but he left the group. He founded a private company to create a database of genomic data. Venter characteristically mapped his own DNA, revealing that he bears a heightened risk of alcoholism, coronary artery disease, obesity, Alzheimer’s disease, antisocial behavior, and conduct disorder. Unfazed, he enthusiastically published his complete genome on the Internet. “A lot of people are scared to have their DNA examined,” he says. “They think all their inner secrets will be revealed. Even medical students are wary about supplying their DNA. But the course of our lives isn’t genetically determined, apart from exceptional cases where life expectancy is reduced by a serious hereditary condition.” Most people aren’t aware of the subtle mechanisms of genetics, he adds. “People think like 1980s scientists. Possibilities for analyzing DNA were limited back then.
Reliable Finance
Authors: van Santen Rutger , Khoe Djan , Vermeer Bram
Published: November 2020

As we were drafting our first version of this chapter, the world was abruptly seized by the worst economic crisis since the 1930s. Having just written about the impact that instability, the bonus culture, and the bursting of financial bubbles might have on our collective future, it was disconcerting to see those ideas leap from the page and run amok in the global economy. Rather than tempt fate any further, we put our text on hold and went back to Jean-Philippe Bouchaud, the financial expert with whom we had discussed the potential for precisely this kind of ominous development a few months earlier. Bouchaud knows just how fast money can move. He has set up his computer systems in three separate continents, as close to the major financial centers as possible, because communication between the continents can lag by a few milliseconds—a costly delay he simply can’t afford. “The speed of hot money is close to the speed of light,” he jokes. “It’s relativistic finance.” As a physicist, Bouchaud is well aware of the constraints that the theory of relativity imposes on our actions. But that’s not the only inspiration he has drawn from the laws of nature. Bouchaud’s focus is on the most refined physics, which uses the behavior of individual atoms to explain how collective phenomena such as electrical conductivity and magnetism arise. Nowadays, he’s professor at the prestigious École Polytechnique in Paris, but he has been applying his knowledge of collective phenomena to financial market prices for many years now. Together with Jean-Pierre Aguilar and Marc Potters, Bouchaud is the cofounder of Capital Fund Management, which rapidly grew into France’s largest and most successful hedge fund. What makes the fund so successful is, perhaps, that Bouchaud’s ideas differ fundamentally from the standard approach that economists have developed over the years. A huge amount of research was carried out in the 1950s and 1960s to identify patterns in financial markets. This gave rise to the “quantitative” economic theories that banks and financial institutions now use routinely.
Trabeculectomy and Tube Shunts
Authors: WuDunn Darrell
Published: November 2020

Trabeculectomy surgery is the most common operative procedure for managing glaucoma. Although the techniques have evolved over the decades, the basic procedure remains the same since filtering surgery was first performed a century ago: a scleral fistula enables aqueous fluid to drain into the subconjunctival space and create a bleb. Despite the long history of trabeculectomy surgery, the mechanisms of how aqueous fluid ultimately exits the eye after trabeculectomy are still not well characterized. Aqueous tube shunts are becoming more popular among glaucoma surgeons as an alternative to trabeculectomy in eyes with previously failed blebs or in eyes at high risk for bleb failure. Although the mechanism of aqueous outflow following tube shunt implantation may be similar to the mechanism after trabeculectomy, key differences exist that may be important for future developments in glaucoma surgery. Multiple potential routes of aqueous drainage exist for both trabeculectomy and tube shunt implants. Thus, aqueous drainage can be thought of as a complex system of pathways arranged in series and in parallel. In general, fluid flowing through any system will be directed according to the resistance along each potential pathway. After glaucoma surgery, the arrangement and resistance through these pathways will depend on the wound healing response (see Chapter 3), and thus the mechanism of aqueous drainage will alter as the wound healing response evolves. However, it is likely that one or 2 main routes of drainage will dominate as the tissue reaction stabilizes. When Cairns first described the trabeculectomy procedure, he argued that aqueous humor would flow out through the cut ends of Schlemm’s canal without subconjunctival drainage. However, as the procedure is currently performed, a filtering bleb is almost always created, and a block of trabecular meshwork is not consistently excised. Thus, modern trabeculectomy is a filtering procedure in which aqueous passes through the sclera into the subconjunctival space overlying the scleral flap. The existence of a filtering bleb does not eliminate the possibility of aqueous outflow through Schlemm’s canal into the aqueous veins. Indeed, tracer studies suggest that some aqueous enters the aqueous veins.
Scleral Flap Dehiscence
Authors: Maltzman Jeff , Orengo-Nania Silvia D.
Published: November 2020

Following its introduction by Cairns in 1968, trabeculectomy quickly became the procedure of choice for the management of elevated intraocular pressure (IOP) inadequately controlled by medications, and it remains the gold standard today. This procedure’s popularity stemmed from dissatisfaction with the existing practices of the time, which typically involved full-thickness sclerectomy. Although quite effective at IOP reduction, an unguarded sclerectomy invited severe and often prolonged hypotony, with the associated risks of a flat anterior chamber, maculopathy, and suprachoroidal hemorrhage, to name but a few. Placement of the sclerectomy beneath a partial thickness scleral flap added much needed control to filtering surgery. Indeed, proper construction and suturing of the scleral flap are vital to preventing scleral flap dehiscence and promoting further surgical success, as the scleral “valve” provides the majority of the resistance to initial aqueous outflow, limiting the risk of early hypotony. There is no consensus on the size or shape of scleral flap required to produce effective IOP control. Surgeon preference is generally what was taught during training, with square, rectangular, trapezoidal, and triangular flaps all commonly employed. Although scleral flap shape is probably unimportant, the flap should be at least one-half to two-thirds scleral thickness to avoid tearing or avulsing the tissue and to prevent “cheese wiring” by sutures. Most surgeons prefer to hinge the flap as far forward as possible to ensure that the sclerectomy is created anterior to the scleral spur, avoiding the ciliary body. Extending the sides of the flap too far beyond the limbus, however, may result in excessive filtration and early hypotony. Recently, some have advocated leaving the sides of the flap short, not extending fully to the limbus, in order to force aqueous posteriorly and create a more diffuse bleb. In this case a wider flap may assist with proper anterior placement of the sclerectomy. In many cases, complications involving the scleral flap can be avoided by attention to risk factors preoperatively and careful handling of tissue intraoperatively. The most important risk factor for scleral complications is previous ocular surgery performed at the intended trabeculectomy site, particularly extracapsular cataract extraction.
Elevated IOP with a Flat Anterior Chamber
Authors: Godfrey David G.
Published: November 2020

A flat anterior chamber following filtering surgery has many etiologies. Included in the differential diagnosis are overfiltration, wound leak, choroidal effusions/hemorrhage, and pupillary block; however, the key is the central anterior chamber depth. If the intraocular pressure (IOP) is normal to high, the anterior chamber shallow centrally, and choroidal effusions/hemorrhage ruled out, then the likely diagnosis is aqueous misdirection syndrome. Aqueous misdirection syndrome (AMS), previously referred to as malignant glaucoma, was first described by von Graefe in 1869 as an unusual complication of eye surgery, in the presence of a patent peripheral iridectomy, with elevated IOP and a fl at anterior chamber. This condition has been referred to as ciliary block glaucoma because the ciliary processes may be in apposition to the anterior vitreous or lens, with the lens moving into the ciliary sulcus. Diversion of aqueous posteriorly into the vitreous cavity, thus increasing the volume of the vitreous, is considered the main mechanism in the development of AMS. This diversion pushes the lens forward, leaving the central as well as the peripheral anterior chamber shallow or even flat (Figure 11.1). Once a diagnosis is made, treatment is effective at resolving the problem. Filtering surgery, either alone or in combination with another surgery, has been shown to be the inciting event for AMS in 10 of 24 cases (42%) reported in a series from Harbour. Tsai et al reported 12 of 19 cases (63%) with AMS followed filtering surgery. One case of AMS among 105 (1%) trabeculectomy procedures was reported by Gedde et al in the Tube Versus Trabeculectomy (TVT) Study. Two instances of AMS out of 465 (0.4%) trabeculectomy procedures were reported in the Collaborative Initial Glaucoma Treatment Study (CIGTS). The rates from these studies of open-angle glaucoma patients may not apply to other populations in which angle closure glaucoma (a known risk factor for AMS) is more prevalent. Typically, AMS develops within the first few weeks of filtering surgery.
Complications Specific To Ex-Press™ Shunts
Authors: Sarkisian , Steven R. Jr.
Published: November 2020

The EX-PRESS™ Glaucoma Filtration Device (Alcon Laboratories, Inc., Fort Worth, Texas) has been commercially available in the United States since 2002 and was originally developed by Optonol, Inc. (Kansas City, Kansas) for implantation directly under the conjunctiva for an indication of control of intraocular pressure (IOP). It is a nonvalved, stainless steel device almost 3 mm long with an external diameter of approximately 400 microns and a 50 or 200 micron lumen, depending on the model. It has an external disc at one end and a spur-like extension on the other to prevent extrusion. The EX-PRESS™ shunt is one option for controlling IOP available to today’s glaucoma surgeon. The challenges and complications involved with EX-PRESS™ shunts are addressed below, as well as how to manage and prevent such scenarios. The original unguarded technique of implantation under the conjunctiva resulted in numerous complications, including hypotony, extrusion, and, most commonly, erosion of the implant. Typically, there was a period of hypotony followed by failure and erosion of the implant. Endophthalmitis has also been associated with an exposed implant. To avoid complications associated with subconjunctival implantation, Dahan and Carmichael proposed implanting the device under a scleral flap. This technique has greatly reduced erosions, and EX-PRESS™ shunts have been reported to have a lower rate of hypotony than trabeculectomy (15.8% with EX-PRESS™ shunt versus 22.5% in trabeculectomy). Since 2003, the manufacturer has recommended all users only implant the device under a scleral flap. Like all filtration surgery, failure is most commonly from episcleral and subconjunctival fibrosis. As with traditional filtration surgery, intraoperative adjunctive antimetabolites, such as mitomycin-C, may be used to limit the degree of postoperative scarring. However, should failure due to fibrosis occur, there are several options. The first is to add topical medications or perform laser trabeculoplasty. The second is to perform bleb revision or needling with an antifibrotic agent. Finally, as in a failed trabeculectomy, the surgeon may abandon the EX-PRESS™ shunt and perform a second unrelated procedure.
Tube Shunt Related Complications of the Retina and Vitreous
Authors: Kellaway Judianne , Davis Garvin H.
Published: November 2020

Tube shunt complications of the retina and vitreous can threaten vision. It is important to understand how to recognize, prevent, and manage these complications. While many retrospective studies regarding retinal complications of tube shunts are in the literature, there are now 2 major prospective studies that can be looked to for the incidence of retinal complications. In the Tube Versus Trabeculectomy (TVT) Study, at 3 years of follow-up, 4 eyes out of 107 total eyes (4%) with tube shunts had required pars plana vitrectomies due to a retinal complication (e.g., vitreous occlusion of the tube, retinal detachment, choroidal detachment). Drainage of a choroidal effusion was performed in 2 patients. Early postoperative retinal complications (onset at 1 month or less after tube shunt implantation) included choroidal effusion (15 eyes; 14%), suprachoroidal hemorrhage (2 eyes; 2%), and vitreous hemorrhage (1 eye; 1%). Late postoperative retinal complications (onset more than 1 month after tube shunt implantation) included choroidal effusion (2 eyes; 2%) and retinal detachment (1 eye; 1%). In the Ahmed Baerveldt Comparison (ABC) Study, at one year of follow-up, one eye of 276 total eyes (0.4%) required a pars plana vitrectomy to clear a postoperative hemorrhage and one eye (0.4%) required reoperation for drainage of a suprachoroidal hemorrhage. Early postoperative retinal complications (3 months of less after implantation of the tube shunt) reported included choroidal effusion (34 eyes; 12%), suprachoroidal hemorrhage (2 eyes; 1%), endophthalmitis (1 eye; 0.4%), and vitreous hemorrhage (5 eyes; 2%). Late retinal postoperative complications (more than 3 months after tube shunt implantation) included choroidal effusion (3 eyes; 1%), endophthalmitis (2 eyes; 1%), vitreous hemorrhage (3 eyes; 1%), and retinal detachment (2 eyes; 1%). Both of these studies indicate a similar incidence of retinal complications after tube shunt implantation. Tube shunt surgery is performed in cases of uncontrolled glaucoma where medications are inadequate. A pars plana tube is most often indicated for anatomic reasons, such as a small eye, or an eye that already has coexisting corneal disease.
Th e Economy
Authors: Baldwin Peter
Published: November 2020

Let Us Begin Where Everything Starts, with the economy and the labor market. This is perhaps where contrasts are thought to be sharpest. America—so the proponents of radical differences across the Atlantic argue—worships at the altar of what West German chancellor Helmut Schmidt once called Raubtierkapitalismus, predatory capitalism, where the market sweeps everything before it and the state exerts no restraint. The result is what another German chancellor, Gerhard Schröder, called amerikanische Verhältnisse, “American conditions,” plucked straight out of a play by Bertolt Brecht: America’s labor market is untrammeled and cruel, jobs are insecure and badly paid. Americans live to work, while Europeans work to live. That is the story. But is it true? America’s core ideological belief is oft en thought to be the predominance of the market and the absence of state regulation. “Everything should and must be pro-market, pro-business, and pro-shareholder,” as Will Hutton, a British columnist, puts it, “a policy platform lubricated by colossal infusions of corporate cash into America’s money-dominated political system. . . . ” Hutton stands in a long line of European critics who have seen nothing but the dominance of the market in America. There is some truth to the American penchant for free markets. But the notion that the Atlantic divides capitalism scarlet in tooth and claw from a more domesticated version in Europe has been overstated. When asked for their preferences, Americans tend to assign the state less of a role than many—though not all—Europeans. Proportionately fewer Americans think that the government should redistribute income to ameliorate inequalities, or that the government should seek to provide jobs for all, or reduce working hours. On the other hand, proportionately more Americans (by a whisker) than Germans and almost exactly as many as the Swedes think that government should control wages, and more want the government to control prices than Germans. Proportionately more Americans believe that the government should act to create new jobs than the Swedes, and about as many as the Germans, Finns, and Swiss. The percentage of Americans that thinks the state should intervene to provide decent housing is low.
Th e Rest of the Welfare State
Authors: Baldwin Peter
Published: November 2020

If We Turn to Other forms of Social Policy, how does the United States care for its old, its poor, its unemployed, and its disabled? Here, most outcomes place the United States in the lower half of the spectrum, but within European norms and standards. The primary weakness of American social policy is its reluctance to deal resolutely with poverty. If we measure outcomes before redistribution, the United States starts with an economy that produces less poverty than most European nations. According to one calculation, only Finland and the Netherlands have lower “natural” poverty rates. But after taxes, social benefits, and other mechanisms of redistribution have worked their magic, the American poverty rate (as measured relatively, i.e., as a fraction of median income) is higher than anywhere in Western Europe. We will come back in more detail to the question of poverty and inequality. In what one might call the middle-class entitlement aspects of the welfare state, however, America is less of an anomaly. As is widely known, the American state is more modest in size and scope than its European peers. Yet as an employer of civil servants, it ranks in the middle of the European scale (figure 50). France and Finland employ proportionately more civil servants, but at least five other countries, including Germany, hire fewer. Correspondingly, the percentage of America’s GDP spent on government employee salaries is higher than in six of the nations we are examining. The size of the American state, as measured by government expenditure as a percentage of GDP, also fits into the European span. Ireland and Switzerland spend less (figure 51). For most social policies and benefits— which together make up what is usually called the welfare state—the picture is analogous: the United States ranks low, but within the bottom half of the European spectrum. All figures given here and elsewhere (unless otherwise indicated) are phrased in internationally comparable terms. Sometimes this means benefits rates are measured as a percentage of median income, allowing a sense of what proportion of a standard of living is maintained. Sometimes they are calculated in Purchasing Power Parity (PPP) terms, which means that differences between the cost of living in poorer and richer nations have been factored in.
Religion and Science
Authors: Baldwin Peter
Published: November 2020

Even On Religion, there is reason to question the usual stereotypes of an absolute polarity between the United States and Europe. Let us leave aside the extent to which secularizing Europe is the outlier in a religious world, not the United States. There are religious contrasts, to be sure, between America and Europe, but they are neither as stark nor undifferentiated as is oft en thought. It is frequently said that Americans are more religious than Europeans. These things are hard to quantify, but there is certainly data pointing in that direction. In 1999, a smaller percentage of Americans (1.4%) described themselves as atheists than did Europeans—by a small margin, with the Irish and the Austrians almost indistinguishably close to the Americans (figure 174). But then again, no European country except France (with 14.2%) has more than 8% avowed atheists. The Americans are closer (less than one standard deviation below) to the European mean than are the French, who are more than three standard deviations above it. A smaller percentage of Americans consider themselves religious than the Portuguese and Italians. Proportionately fewer Americans say they believe in God and always have than the Irish and Portuguese, and only a few more than the Italians. A higher percentage of Americans firmly believes in God than northern Europeans, but the numbers are broadly comparable with the Catholic countries (figure 175). If the qualifier “firm” is removed, the American figures become much the same as the Mediterranean nations and, of course, Ireland (figure 176). Again, the United States is closer to the European mean (1.6 standard deviations above) than is the nonbelieving extreme, Sweden, at 1.9 standard deviations below it. Percentage-wise, more Americans (16.4%) attend church more than once a week than in any European nation (Ireland: 13.3%). But fewer Americans, by far, attend church on a weekly basis than the Irish, and the Portuguese and Italians attend at the same rate. The American figure for weekly church attendance is only about as far above the European mean (1.2 standard deviations) as the Danish result (1.07 standard deviations) is below it (figure 177). Over a quarter of Americans report never attending church, the same as the Finns, compared to only 12% of Italians.
Crystallization
Authors: Harrison Roger G. , Todd Paul W. , Rudge Scott R. , Petrides Demetri P.
Published: November 2020

Crystallization is the process of producing crystals from a homogeneous phase. For biochemicals, the homogeneous phase from which crystals are obtained is always a solution. Crystallization is similar to precipitation in that solid particles are obtained from a solution. However, precipitates have poorly defined morphology, while in crystals the constituent molecules are arranged in three-dimensional arrays called space lattices. In comparison to crystallization, precipitation occurs at much higher levels of supersaturation and rates of nucleation but lower solubilities. These and other differences between crystallization and precipitation are highlighted in Table 9.1. Because of these differences and because the theory of crystallization that has been developed is different from that for precipitation, crystallization is considered separately from precipitation. Crystallization is capable of producing bioproducts at very high purity (say, 99.9%) and is considered to be both a polishing step and a purification step. Polishing refers to a process needed to put the bioproduct in its final form for use. For some bioproducts, such as antibiotics, this final form must be crystalline, and sometimes it is even necessary that a specific crystal form be obtained. In some instances, the purification that can be achieved by crystallization is so significant that other more expensive purification steps such as chromatography can be avoided. There are actually two very different applications of crystallization in biotechnology and bioproduct engineering: crystallization for polishing and purification, and crystallization for crystallography. In the latter case, the goal is a small number of crystals with good size (0.2–0.9 mm) and internal quality. Although it has become common to crystallize proteins for characterization of their three-dimensional structure by x-ray diffraction, this is performed only at small scale in the laboratory, and the knowledge about how to crystallize proteins at large scale in a production process is less developed. However, many antibiotics and other small biomolecules are routinely crystallized in production scale processes. This chapter is oriented toward the use of crystallization in processes that can be scaled up.
Helium
Authors: Fisher David
Published: November 2020

Today we learn at such a young age about the periodic properties of the elements and their atomic structure that it seems as if we grew up with the knowledge, and that everyone must always have known such basic, simple stuff. But till nearly the end of the nineteenth century no one even suspected that such things as the noble gases, with their filled electronic orbits, might exist. Helium was the first one we at Brookhaven looked for in our mass spectrometer, and the first one discovered. This was in 1868, but the discovery was ignored and the discoverer ridiculed. He didn’t care; he had other things on his mind. His name was Pierre Jules César Janssen, and he was a French astronomer who sailed to India that year in order to take advantage of a predicted solar eclipse. With the overwhelming brightness of the sun’s disk blocked by the moon, he hoped to observe the outer layers using the newly discovered technique of absorption spectroscopy. Nobody at the time understood why, but it had been observed that when a bright light shone through a gas, the chemical elements in the gas absorbed the light at specific wavelengths. The resulting dark lines in the emission spectrum of the light were like fingerprints, for it had been found in chemical laboratories that when an element was heated it emitted light at the same wavelengths it would absorb when light from an outside source was shined on it. So the way the technique worked, Janssen reasoned, was that he could measure the wavelengths of the solar absorbed lines and compare them with lines emitted in chemical laboratories where different elements were routinely studied, thus identifying the gases present in the sun. On August 18 of that year the moon moved properly into position, and Janssen’s spectroscope captured the dark absorption lines of the gases surrounding the sun. It was an exciting moment, as for the first time the old riddle could be answered: “Twinkle twinkle, little star, how I wonder what you are.” The answer now was clear: the sun, a typical star, was made overwhelmingly of hydrogen. But to Janssen’s surprise there was one additional and annoying line, with a wavelength of 587.49 nanometers.
Dating the Spreading Seafloor
Authors: Fisher David
Published: November 2020

In 1912 a German Meteorologist, Alfred Wegener, took the drastic step of moving into another science altogether by publishing the shocking geologic theory that our continents have been sailing across the surface of the earth like leaves on a lake blown by—what? The geologists laughed at the suggestion of an impossible wind and scorned the man who had insolently crossed the boundaries of the sciences. But truth be told, it wasn’t unheard of in those early years to do just that. Rutherford, a physicist, had won the Nobel Prize in chemistry, and Marie Curie had already won twice, once in physics and once in chemistry. Wegener himself had done his PhD work in astronomy before switching over to meteorology, and at the same time was a renowned arctic explorer. The separation between the sciences are useful and real—a biology student has enough to learn without spending years on tensor analysis or relativity— but at their boundaries they blur. Today nearly everyone pays lip service to what we call interdisciplinary research, but in practice they fight hard against it. I did my PhD course work in the chemistry department of the University of Florida and my research in the physics group at Oak Ridge, then had a postdoc appointment in the chemistry department at Brookhaven before going to physics at Cornell and ending up in geology at Miami, but I had to fight along the way. A chemistry professor at Florida tried to insist that I take his colloid course instead of relativity (which was taught at the same time). I won that fight but lost at Cornell when I tried to have my students take chemistry courses instead of the required engineering and physics courses. The fact that Wegener wasn’t a geologist gave them an easy way out: it’s easier to laugh at new ideas than to confront them, and easier still to laugh at new ideas from those whom you can consider amateurs.
The Coldest Place on Earth
Authors: Fisher David
Published: November 2020

Suddenly, at 7.30 P.M. on July 10, 1908, the coldest place on earth—the coldest place in the entire history of the earth—was inside a small glass tube in a messy laboratory in Groningen, the Netherlands, where the temperature was a cool 269 degrees below freezing. That’s centigrade; it would be minus 452° Fahrenheit. Inside the tube were 60 cc of liquid helium, produced for the first time in history by a Dutch physicist today virtually and unfairly unknown to the general public, Heike Kamerlingh Onnes—unfairly unknown, for unlike the results discussed in the last two chapters on MORB geochemistry, this feat of engineering physics has had profound practical consequences. The utilization of fire was the first giant leap for mankind, but its opposite, the search for cold, has been an ongoing human activity through recorded history. (Actually, there is no such thing as cold; there are only lesser amounts of heat. Absolute zero, minus 273° centigrade, is unattainable, as “explained” by a complex quantum theory argument, and there are no minus numbers on the Absolute, or Kelvin, scale.) But in practical terms, no one cared, the important thing was to get ice for food preservation through the hot summers, and until nearly a hundred years ago the only way to do that was to bring it down from the high northern latitudes or, in the in-between latitudes, to store the winter’s ice underground. By the last quarter of the nineteenth century, some progress began to be made in utilizing that marvelous insight into nature, the Second Law of Thermodynamics, to bring some sort of mechanical cooling into people’s lives. The law can be stated in various ways, but for this purpose the simplest is that heat flows from hot to cold. What could be simpler? And yet it has profound consequences. When you want a cold drink, you put in ice cubes and the heat flows from the warm scotch to the cold ice cubes, cooling down the scotch. But as the ice melts, it dilutes the scotch, which is a problem.
Life and Death on Mars and Earth
Authors: Fisher David
Published: November 2020

It’s certainly not intuitively obvious that the noble gases, which don’t do anything, which don’t react either chemically or biologically, should be intimately related with questions of life and death, but so they are. The conventional wisdom is that they are physiologically inert: you breathe them in, you breathe them out; they don’t react with your body at all. This is not quite true. In 1938, two scientists at the Navy Experimental Diving Unit, Albert R. Behnke and Oscar D. Yarbrough, were working on the “remarkable stupefaction and neuromuscular impairment experienced by deep sea divers at depths below 100 feet” due to nitrogen narcosis. They discovered that substituting helium for atmospheric nitrogen in the air supply minimized the problem. The helium didn’t actually interact physiologically, but it improved the flow of oxygen through the aerobic pathways, according to Graham’s Law, which relates air flow to the inverse square root of the gas’s density (i.e., atomic mass). It seemed natural to investigate the role of argon, and the following year they found that, as expected, argon (being more dense than air) interfered with air flow rather than improving it. But further experiments showed, to their surprise, that argon was even more narcotic than nitrogen, an effect they ascribed to its increased solubility in both water and fat; that is, the effect on the central nervous system seemed to depend not so much on the identity of the gas but on its total dissolved concentration in the body and blood stream. Interesting, but soon there was a war on, and it wasn’t until 1946 that several workers at the University of California, Berkeley, took the obvious next step: the solubility of the noble gases increases with atomic number, so xenon should be most narcotic. And they found this to be so; indeed, xenon was so narcotic it worked as a general anesthetic on mice. Well, that was interesting.
Adaptation to Climate Change: Who Pays Whom?
Authors: Baer Paul
Published: November 2020

The problem of adaptation to climate change is complex and multifaceted. At its core, however, are two simple questions: what actions should be taken to prevent or reduce harm that will be caused by anthropogenic climate change, and who should pay for those actions that have costs? In this chapter I focus on the latter question, concerning liability for the funding of adaptation. I argue that obligations for funding adaptation are based on ethical principles governing just relationships between individuals in a “life-support commons,” which are essentially the same as the norms of justice governing other forms of harm. Simply, it is wrong to harm others by abusing a commons, and if one does, one owes compensation. In this view, ethics and justice address the rights and responsibilities of individuals; obligations between countries are derivative, based on the aggregate characteristics of their populations, and pragmatic, given the existing state system. Furthermore, liability can be disaggregated in other ways; as I argue, it is equally important that the distribution of liability can be differentiated between classes within nations. A simple quantitative exercise applying these principles of justice to the adaptation problem suggests net liability from the North to the South but also net liability for adaptation from wealthy classes in the South. The United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) devotes a small but significant amount of attention to adaptation to climate change. Only in the last few years, however, with the creation of the Least Developed Countries (LDC) Fund and the Special Climate Change Fund (SCCF) under the UNFCCC, the creation of an Adaptation Fund under the Kyoto Protocol, as well as the support for the development of National Adaptation Plans of Action (NAPAs), have delegates and advocates begun to focus seriously on the problems of adaptation and adaptation funding. Given the disproportionate share of current and past emissions from the industrialized countries of the North and the evidence that the developing countries of the South are more vulnerable to climate damages, almost any plausible interpretation of “common but differentiated responsibilities” implies that the North should shoulder the major part of the costs of adaptation.
Population Geography
Authors: Gober Patricia , Tyner James A.
Published: November 2020

Geographic issues loom large as the American population begins the new millennium. Regional fertility differentials are growing, social networks focus new immigrants on a small number of port-of-entry metropolitan areas and states, highly channelized migration streams redistribute population in response to economic and social restructuring, and a highly variegated landscape of aging has emerged. Perhaps at no other time in its history has the field of population geography been confronted with a more intellectually important and socially relevant research agenda. Building upon its strong tradition in spatial demography and incorporating an increasingly diverse set of quantitative and qualitative methodologies, population geography today seeks a more complete understanding of human movement, regional demographic variability, and the social context within which these population processes occur. In addition, population geographers increasingly tackle issues of policy significance. After a brief review of the history of population geography and an empirical analysis of its presence in geography’s major journals, we summarize six lines of contemporary research including studies of: (1) internal migration and residential mobility; (2) international migration, transnationalism, and the nexus of internal and international migration systems; (3) immigrant assimilation, acculturation, and the emergence of ethnic enclaves; (4) regional demographic variability; (5) the social context for population processes; and (6) public policy research. We conclude by identifying major challenges facing the field today and fruitful new directions for research including the need for greater emphasis on environmental issues, integration with geography’s new technologies, and more social relevance. Although geographers long had integrated population characteristics into their broader regional studies, population geography emerged as a distinct field of study only in the early 1950s. It, like urban geography, surfaced from a discipline that was strongly rooted in the study of rural cultural landscapes and regional inventories. Its birth was marked by the 1953 AAG presidential address of Glenn Trewartha, a noted climatologist and population geographer. Trewartha lamented the neglect of population in the discipline of geography, which was at that time organized into the subdivisions of physical and cultural geography. He argued for a new threefold structure organized around population, the physical earth, and the cultural landscape.
Medical Geography
Authors: Gesler Wil
Published: November 2020

Medical geographers employ geographical concepts and techniques to study issues related to disease and health. In its early stages of development as a distinct geographic subdiscipline, from the 1950s and into the 1980s, medical geography focused on disease ecology and health-care delivery as topics and spatial analysis as technique. These three areas have maintained their importance and research productivity within them has increased over the last decade. At the same time, since the 1980s, medical geography has evolved into new areas of concern. Both those who continue to call themselves medical geographers and those who do not identify closely with the subdiscipline have moved toward a geography of health that is less concerned with disease and the medical world and more with well-being and social models of health and health care (Rosenberg 1998). Health geography is characterized by an emphasis on place and place meaning, grounding in socio-cultural theory, and a critical perspective on health issues (Kearns and Moon 2000). The evolution of medical geography led to lively debates in the mid-1990s (Kearns 1993; Mayer and Meade 1994; Litva and Eyles 1995; Philo 1996) that have been put into historical perspective by Del Casino and Dorn (1998). By the end of the 1990s, the dichotomy between old and new medical geographers constructed during the debate was giving way to complementarity and synthesis. As examples, disease ecology was opened out to include political economic concerns (Mayer 1996) and multi-level modeling combined aspects of spatial analysis with a focus on place (Duncan et al. 1996; Verheij 1999). The structure of this chapter results from a decision made by the Medical Geography Specialty Group (MGSG) to base its contribution to this volume on papers presented at two special sessions on “Retrospect and Prospect” during the 1998 Association of American Geographers meetings in Boston. The six presenters were Michael Greenberg on disease ecology, Ellen Cromley on health services, Gerard Rushton on spatial analysis, Susan Elliott on women’s health, Jennifer Wolch on mental health, and Joseph Scarpaci on the developing world.
Human Rights
Authors: Honey Rex
Published: November 2020

Scholarship addressing the geography of human rights— the geographical analysis of the ways cultures conceive of justice and understand just behavior—improves both our understanding of human rights and our understanding of geography. A full understanding of struggles over human rights requires a geographical perspective, a consideration of the contexts in which the struggles occur. Conceptualizations of human rights and the abuse of human rights do not just happen. They are the products of human action in particular cultural and environmental settings. They are place-based and socially constructed, products of processes not only tied to place but also altering the significance of place. Human rights scholarship that omits geographical background and geographical consequences misses the target because it fails to capture both the cultural struggles over what a just society is and the milieu of interrelated sites of injustice. If geographical research addressing oppression does not explicitly address human rights, then virtually by definition such work does so implicitly. At its core, human rights scholarship addresses oppression. Hence, such geographical scholarship as the work of Knopp (1997) addressing gay rights and of Monk (1998) addressing women’s rights fits into the scope of the geography of human rights in America. To fulfill its potential as a scholarly discipline examining the human condition, geography needs to focus on human rights. The spotlight of geographic education’s five themes—place, location, region, nature–society relations, movement—should be focused on what truly matters in people’s lives, including human rights. Likewise, the study of human rights, with its vexing examination of rights and wrong, needs the nuanced sensitivity of geography, with its study of cultural and environmental contexts. To wit, geography needs human rights and human rights needs geography. Geographical research that has been done or is in progress explains why. Indeed, the roster of former presidents of the Association of American Geographers contains many individuals whose professional and personal lives were committed to the furtherance of human rights. Among them are such luminaries as Richard Hartshorne, Harold Rose, Gilbert White, Julian Wolpert, and Richard Morrill, each of whom struggled for the advance of human rights in his personal life as well as his scholarly work.
On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem (1936)
Authors: Turing Alan
Published: November 2020

The ‘‘computable’’ numbers may be described briefly as the real numbers whose expressions as a decimal are calculable by finite means. Although the subject of this paper is ostensibly the computable numbers, it is almost equally easy to define and investigate computable functions of an integral variable or a real or computable variable, computable predicates, and so forth. The fundamental problems involved are, however, the same in each case, and I have chosen the computable numbers for explicit treatment as involving the least cumbrous technique. I hope shortly to give an account of the relations of the computable numbers, functions, and so forth to one another. This will include a development of the theory of functions of a real variable expressed in terms of computable numbers. According to my definition, a number is computable if its decimal can be written down by a machine. In §§ 9, 10 I give some arguments with the intention of showing that the computable numbers include all numbers which could naturally be regarded as computable. In particular, I show that certain large classes of numbers are computable. They include, for instance, the real parts of all algebraic numbers, the real parts of the zeros of the Bessel functions, the numbers π, e, etc. The computable numbers do not, however, include all definable numbers, and an example is given of a definable number which is not computable. Although the class of computable numbers is so great, and in many ways similar to the class of real numbers, it is nevertheless enumerable. In § 8 I examine certain arguments which would seem to prove the contrary. By the correct application of one of these arguments, conclusions are reached which are superficially similar to those of Gödel. These results have valuable applications. In particular, it is shown (§ 11) that the Hilbertian Entscheidungsproblem can have no solution. In a recent paper Alonzo Church has introduced an idea of ‘‘effective calculability’’, which is equivalent to my ‘‘computability’’, but is very differently defined. Church also reaches similar conclusions about the Entscheidungsproblem.