bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Carbon–Carbon Bond Construction
Authors: Taber Douglass F.
Published: November 2020

Carlo Siciliano and Angelo Liguori of the Università della Calabria showed (J. Org. Chem. 2012, 77, 10575) that an amino acid 1 could be both protected and activated with Fmoc-Cl, so subsequent exposure to diazomethane delivered the Fmoc-protected diazo ketone 2. Pei-Qiang Huang of Xiamen University activated (Angew. Chem. Int. Ed. 2012, 51, 8314) a secondary amide 3 with triflic anhydride, then added an alkyl Grignard reagent with CeCl3 to give an intermediate that was reduced to the amine 4. John C. Walton of the University of St. Andrews found (J. Am. Chem. Soc. 2012, 134, 13580) that under irradiation, titania could effect the decarboxylation of an acid 5 to give the dimer 6. Jin Kun Cha of Wayne State University demonstrated (Angew. Chem. Int. Ed. 2012, 51, 9517) that a zinc homoenolate derived from 7 could be transmetalated, then coupled with an electrophile to give the alkylated product 8. The Ramberg-Bäcklund reaction is an underdeveloped method for the construction of alkenes. Adrian L. Schwan of the University of Guelph showed (J. Org. Chem. 2012, 77, 10978) that 10 is a particularly effective brominating agent for this transformation. Daniel J. Weix of the University of Rochester coupled (J. Org. Chem. 2012, 77, 9989) the bromide 12 with the allylic carbonate 13 to give 14. The Julia-Kocienski coupling, illustrated by the addition of the anion of 16 to the aldehyde 15, has become a workhorse of organic synthesis. In general, this reaction is E selective. Jirí Pospísil of the University Catholique de Louvain demonstrated (J. Org. Chem. 2012, 77, 6358) that inclusion of a K+-sequestering agent switched the selectivity to Z. Yoichiro Kuninobu, now at the University of Tokyo, and Kazuhiko Takai of Okayama University constructed (Org. Lett. 2012, 14, 6116) the tetrasubstituted alkene 20 with high geometric control by the Re-catalyzed addition of 19 to the alkyne 18. André B. Charette of the Université de Montréal converted (Org. Lett. 2012, 14, 5464) the allylic halide 21 to the alkyne 22 by displacement with iodoform followed by elimination. In an elegant extension of his studies with alkyl tosylhydrazones, Jianbo Wang of Peking University added (J. Am. Chem. Soc. 2012, 134, 5742) an alkyne 24 to 23 to give 25.
Enantioselective Synthesis of Alkylated Centers: The Fukuyama Synthesis of (–)-Histrionicotoxin
Authors: Taber Douglass F.
Published: November 2020

Vinod K. Singh of the Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur optimized (Org. Lett. 2011, 13, 6520) an organocatalyst for the enantioselective addition of thiophenol to an imide 1 to give 2 in high ee. Amir H. Hoveyda of Boston College developed (Angew. Chem. Int. Ed. 2011, 50, 7079) a Cu catalyst for the preparation of 4 by the enantioselective hydroboration of a 1,1-disubstituted alkene 3. Yong-Qiang Tu of Lanzhou University effected (Chem. Sci. 2011, 2, 1839) enantioselective bromination of the prochiral 5 to give the bromoketone 6. Song Ye of the Institute of Chemistry, Beijing established (Chem. Commun. 2011, 47, 8388) the alkylated quaternary center of the dimer 8, by condensing a ketene 7 with CS2. Li Deng of Brandeis University added (Angew. Chem. Int. Ed. 2011, 50, 10565) cyanide in a conjugate sense to an acyl imidazole 9 to give 11. Pier Giorgio Cozzi of the Università di Bologna prepared (Angew. Chem. Int. Ed. 2011, 50, 7842) the thioacetal 14 by condensing 13 with an aldehyde 12, followed by reduction. Takahiro Nishimura and Tamio Hayashi of Kyoto University devised (Chem. Commun. 2011, 47, 10142) a Co catalyst for the enantioselective addition of a silyl alkyne 16 to an enone 15 to give the alkynyl ketone 17. Ping Tian and Guo-Qiang Lin of the Shanghai Institute of Organic Chemistry described (Tetrahedron 2011, 67, 10186) improved catalysts for the enantioselective conjugate addition of dimethyl malonate 19 to the nitroalkene 18, to give 20. Keiji Maruoka, also of Kyoto University, established (Chem. Sci. 2011, 2, 2311) conditions for the enantioselective addition of an aldehyde 21 to the acceptor 22 to give, after reduction, an alcohol 23 that could readily be cyclized to the lactone. Jianrong (Steve) Zhou of Nanyang Technological University prepared (J. Am. Chem. Soc. 2011, 133, 15882) the ester 26 by arylation, under Pd catalysis, of a ketene silyl acetal 24 with the triflate 25. Benjamin List of the Max-Planck-Institut, Mülheim employed (Angew. Chem. Int. Ed. 2011, 50, 9471) a system of three catalysts to effect the enantioselective alkylation of an aldehyde 27 with the allyic alcohol 28 to give 29.
Asymmetric C–C Bond Formation
Authors: Lambert Tristan H.
Published: November 2020

Andrew G. Myers at Harvard reported (Angew. Chem. Int. Ed. 2012, 51, 4568) the alkylation of the pseudophenamine amide 1 selectively setting the quaternary stereogenic center of 2. This is an effective replacement for his previously reported pseudoephedrine, now a controlled substance. Amine catalysis has enabled numerous methods for the asymmetric α-functionalization of aldehydes, although α-alkylation remains a significant challenge. David W.C. MacMillan at Princeton developed (J. Am. Chem. Soc. 2012, 134, 9090) an α-vinylation of aldehydes 3 with vinyliodoniums 5, which relied on the “synergistic combination” of the amine catalyst 4 and copper(I) bromide. The stability of the β,γ-unsaturated aldehyde products under the reaction conditions is notable. A procedure for the asymmetric β-vinylation of α,β-unsaturated aldehydes such as 7 was developed (Eur. J. Org. Chem. 2012, 2774) by Claudio Palomo at the Universidad del Pais Vasco in Spain. Amine 8 catalyzed the enantioselective Michael addition of β-nitroethyl sulfone 9 to 7 followed by acetalization and elimination of HNO2 and SO2Ph furnished products such as 10 in high enantiomeric excess. In a conceptually related reaction, a surrogate for acetate as a nucleophile was reported (Chem. Commun. 2012, 48, 148) by Wei Wang at the University of New Mexico and Jian Li of the East China University of Science and Technology. In this case, amine 13-catalyzed Michael addition of pyridyl sulfone 11 to unsaturated aldehyde 12, followed by acetalization and reductive removal of the sulfone, gave rise to the ester product 14 with very high ee. Asymmetric hydroformylation offers a powerful approach for the synthesis of carbon stereocenters, but controlling the regioselectivity of the reaction remains a challenge with many substrate classes. Christopher J. Cobley of Chirotech Technology Ltd. (UK) and Matthew L. Clarke at the University of St. Andrews showed (Angew. Chem. Int. Ed. 2012, 51, 2477) that the mixed phosphine-phosphite ligand “bobphos” 16 (bobphos = best of both phosphorus ligands) provided significant selectivities for the branched hydroformylation products, up to 10:1 b:l in the case of 15. Another major challenge for hydroformylation is to control the regioselectivity of internal olefin substrates.
Substituted Benzenes: The Gu Synthesis of Rhazinal
Authors: Taber Douglass F.
Published: November 2020

Sisir K. Mandal of Asian Paints R&T Centre, Mumbai used (Tetrahedron Lett. 2013, 54, 530) a Ru catalyst to couple 2 with an electron-rich arene 1 to give 3. Jun-ichi Yoshida of Kyoto University (J. Am. Chem. Soc. 2013, 135, 5000) and John F. Hartwig of the University of California, Berkeley (J. Am. Chem. Soc. 2013, 135, 8480) also reported direct amination protocols. Tommaso Marcelli of the Politecnico di Milano and Michael J. Ingleson of the University of Manchester effected (J. Am. Chem. Soc. 2013, 135, 474) the electrophilic borylation of the aniline 4 to give 5. The regioselectivity of Ir-catalyzed borylation (J. Am. Chem. Soc. 2013, 135, 7572; Org. Lett. 2013, 15, 140) is complementary to the electrophilic process. Professor Hartwig carried (Angew. Chem. Int. Ed. 2013, 52, 933) the borylated product from 6 onto Ni-mediated coupling to give the alkylated product 7. Weiping Su of the Fujian Institute of Research on the Structure of Matter devised (Org. Lett. 2013, 15, 1718) an intriguing Pd-mediated oxidative coupling of nitroethane 9 with 8 to give 10. The coupling is apparently not proceeding via nitroethylene. Peiming Gu of Ningxia University developed (Org. Lett. 2013, 15, 1124) an azide-based cleavage that converted the aldehyde 11 into the formamide 13. Zhong-Quan Liu of Lanzhou University showed (Tetrahedron Lett. 2013, 54, 3079) that an aromatic carboxylic acid 14 could be oxidatively decarboxylated to the chloride 15. Gérard Cahiez of the Université Paris 13 found (Adv. Synth. Catal. 2013, 355, 790) mild Cu-catalyzed conditions for the reductive decarboxylation of aromatic carboxylic acids, and Debabrata Maiti of the Indian Institute of Technology, Mumbai found (Chem. Commun. 2013, 49, 252) Pd-mediated conditions for the dehydroxymethylation of benzyl alcohols (neither illustrated). Pravin R. Likhar of the Indian Institute of Chemical Technology prepared (Adv. Synth. Catal. 2013, 355, 751) a Cu catalyst that effected Castro-Stephens coupling of 16 with 17 at room temperature. Arturo Orellana of York University (Chem. Commun. 2013, 49, 5420) and Patrick J. Walsh of the University of Pennsylvania (Org. Lett. 2013, 15, 2298) showed that a cyclopropanol 20 can couple with an aryl halide 19 to give 21.
Heteroaromatic Construction: The Sperry Synthesis of (+)-Terreusinone
Authors: Taber Douglass F.
Published: November 2020

Akio Saito and Yuji Hanzawa of Showa Pharmaceutical University found (Tetrahedron Lett. 2011, 52, 4658) that an alkynyl keto ester 1 could be oxidatively cyclized to the furan 2. Eric M. Ferreira of Colorado State University showed (Org. Lett. 2011, 13, 5924) that depending on the conditions, a Pt catalyst could cyclize 3 to either 4 or 5. Shunsuke Chiba of Nanyang Technological University used (J. Am. Chem. Soc. 2011, 133, 13942) Cu catalysis for the oxidation of 6 to the pyrrole 7. Vladimir Gevorgyan of the University of Illinois at Chicago devised (Org. Lett. 2011, 13, 3746) a convergent assembly of the pyrrole 10 from the alkyne 8 and the alkyne 9. Dale L. Boger of Scripps La Jolla extended (J. Am. Chem. Soc. 2011, 133, 12285) the scope of the Diels-Alder addition of the triazine 11 to an alkyne 12 to give the pyridine 13. Tomislav Rovis, also of Colorado State University, used (Chem. Commun. 2011, 47, 11846) a Rh catalyst to add an alkyne 15 to the oxime 14 to give the pyridine 16. Sensuke Ogoshi of Osaka University, under Ni catalysis, added (J. Am. Chem. Soc. 2011, 133, 18018) a nitrile 18 to the diene 17 to give the pyridine 19. Alexander Deiters of North Carolina State University showed (Org. Lett. 2011, 13, 4352) that the complex tethered diyne 20 combined with 21 with high regiocontrol to give 22. Yong-Min Liang of Lanzhou University prepared (J. Org. Chem. 2011, 76, 8329) the indole 24 by cyclizing the alkyne 23. Xiuxiang Qi and Kang Zhao of Tianjin University found (J. Org. Chem. 2011, 76, 8690) that the enamine 25 could be oxidatively cyclized to the indole 26. Kazuhiro Yoshida and Akira Yanagisawa of Chiba University established (Org. Lett. 2011, 13, 4762) that ring-closing metathesis converted the keto ester 27 to the indole 28. Alessandro Palmieri and Roberto Ballini of the Università di Camerino observed (Adv. Synth. Catal. 2011, 353, 1425) that the pyrrole 30 spontaneously added to the nitro acrylate 29 to give an adduct that cyclized to 31 on exposure to acid.
The Ma Synthesis of Gracilamine
Authors: Taber Douglass F.
Published: November 2020

The Am aryllidaceae alkaloid gracilamine 3 was isolated in 2005 from the Turkish plant Galanthus gracilis. The supply of the natural product was not sufficient to assess the biological activity. Dawei Ma of the Shanghai Institute of Organic Chemistry envisioned (Angew. Chem. Int. Ed. 2012, 51, 10141) that the pentacyclic skeleton of 3 could be assembled by intramolecular dipolar cycloaddition, converting 1 to 2. The successful completion of the synthesis also enabled the full establishment of the relative configuration of 3. The immediate precursor to the ylide 1 was the aldehyde 9. The preparation of 9 began with the reductive amination of piperonal 4 with tyramine 5. The crude product was formylated to give the amide 6. Oxidative cyclization converted 6 to 7, which was reduced to a 1:1 mixture of diastereomers, only one of which (illustrated) could be carried onto the natural product. The undesired diastereomer was oxidized and recycled. Further reduction gave the amine, which was protected to give 8. With 8 in hand, the stage was set for regioselective von Braun degradation. Exposure to Troc-Cl gave a benzylic chloride that was hydrolyzed with AgNO3 to the benzylic alcohol. Dess-Martin oxidation completed the preparation of the aldehyde 9. Condensation of 9 with leucine ethyl ester 10 gave an imine, which on heating cyclized to racemic 2 with 5:1 diastereocontrol. Other diastereomers were possible, but the constraints of the fused 5/5 system ensured that the alternative transition states were significantly higher in energy. On exposure of the amino alcohol from deprotection of 2 to modified Pfitzner-Moffatt conditions, the amine was again protected and the alcohol was oxidized to the ketone to give 11. On deprotection, the amine added in a conjugate sense to give a ketone that was reduced to gracilamine 3 The diene 9 is prochiral, so there is the possibility that chiral catalysis could set the absolute configuration of 2 and so of 3. Attempts by the authors to catalyze the intramolecular dipolar cycloaddition were, however, so far not successful.
Pyrite and the Origins of Life
Authors: Rickard David
Published: November 2020

If you have been reading this book since the beginning, you will not be surprised by now to find that you have come across a chapter documenting the involvement of pyrite in the origin of life. This is because you will have read in this book how pyrite has been at the root of many fundamental discoveries about the nature of our world. So you do not suffer more than eyebrow-raising surprise and maybe a gentle throat-clearing in learning that pyrite is contributing to our current understanding of the origins of life. By contrast, if you have dived in at Chapter 9 you probably look at the title of this chapter with disbelief. After all, what could be the connection between a common glitzy mineral and the origin of life? The more diligent reader will have already learned that pyrite formation is intimately associated with biology because most of it is produced by bacteria that extract their oxygen from sulfate and produce hydrogen sulfide. This relationship is so overweening today that pyrite formation controls many fundamental aspects of the Earth’s environment. So what happens if we extend this line of inquiry back to the beginnings of geologic time? We have already seen that the characteristics of ancient pyrite are one of the main sources of information about the nature of the early Earth. The consequence of this is that we know quite a bit about the relationship between pyrite and early life on Earth. In this chapter, we further explore this and review the laboratory work that implicates pyrite itself in the original syntheses of the self-replicating biomolecules that assembled to produce Earth’s first life forms. The thesis that life developed from nonbiological chemistry is a very old idea stretching back through Anaximander in 6th-century BCE Greece to the Vedic writings of ancient India around 1500 BCE and is often called abiogenesis.
The Hydroxyl Radical and Its Role in Ozone Formation
Authors: Calvert Jack G. , Orlando John J. , Stockwell William R. , Wallington Timothy J.
Published: November 2020

Although the HO radical is present in the sunlight-irradiated troposphere at very low concentrations, only about 106 molecules cm−3, it is the most important trace component in our atmosphere. It is a highly reactive transient species and is responsible for initiating the oxidation of the majority of organic compounds in the troposphere. It initiates the chain reactions that produce ozone. All the saturated, H-atom containing molecules react with HO through abstraction of an H atom. In the case of the simplest alkane, methane, reaction (1) leads to the formation of a water molecule and an alkyl (CH3) radical: . . . HO + CH4 → H2O + CH3 (1) . . . The CH3 radical released into the oxygen-rich atmosphere quickly adds O2 to give the methyl peroxy radical in reaction (2), which in NO-containing atmospheres can react to form NO2, and an alkoxy radical, CH3O, in reaction (3). In turn, this radical reacts with O2 to give an HO2 radical and a molecule of formaldehyde in (4). An HO radical can be regenerated as the HO2 molecule oxidizes NO to NO2 in (5), and the chain of events, reactions (1) through (5), leads to ozone generation through the photolysis of the NO2 molecule in reactions (6) and (7): . . . CH3 + O2 → CH3O2 (2) . . . . . . CH3O2 + NO → CH3O + NO2 (3) . . . . . . CH3O + O2 → HO2 + CH2O (4) . . . HO2 + NO → HO + NO2 (5) . . . . . . NO2 + hν → O + NO (6) . . . . . . O + O2 (+ M) → O3 (+ M) (7) . . . Methane is the least reactive of the alkanes with HO. Urban atmospheres contain a complex mixture of the more reactive larger alkanes (RH). The number of different possible geometric isomers and stereoisomers of the alkanes that can be formed by association of C and H atoms is astounding (Calvert et al., 2008). For example, there are more than a thousand structurally different molecules of molecular formula C12H26, more than a million C20H22, more than a billion of formula C25H52, and more than a trillion possible different isomers of molecular formula C31H64.
Mechanisms of Reactions of the RO Radicals
Authors: Calvert Jack G. , Orlando John J. , Stockwell William R. , Wallington Timothy J.
Published: November 2020

The atmospheric chemistry of alkoxy radicals determines the first-generation oxidation products of organic compounds in the atmosphere. There are three competing fates for alkoxy radicals: reaction with molecular oxygen (O2), isomerization, and decomposition (Atkinson and Arey, 2003b; Devolder, 2003; Orlando et al., 2003b; Calvert et al., 2008). Reaction with O2 preserves the carbon chain of the parent alkane and results in the production of a carbonyl compound and HO2. Unimolecular decomposition usually results in the formation of an alkyl radical and a carbonyl compound with a shortening of the carbon chain. Unimolecular isomerization usually leads to multifunctional oxidation products (e.g., 1,4-hydroxycarbonyls and 1,4-hydroxynitrates) and a preservation of the carbon chain. These potentially competing pathways are illustrated in Figure VI-A-1 for the 2-pentoxy radical: Absolute rate coefficients for these processes have been obtained for only a few of the smaller alkoxy radicals. For example, rate coefficients have been firmly established only over a range of temperatures for reaction of a subset of the C1–C6 alkoxy radicals with O2; dissociation rate coefficients have only been directly measured for ethoxy, 2-propoxy, 2-butoxy, and tert-butoxy radicals (Balla et al., 1985; Blitz et al., 1999; Caralp et al., 1999; Devolder et al., 1999; Fittschen et al., 1999, 2000; Falgayrac et al., 2004); and no direct measurement of isomerization rates have been reported to date. A large portion of the database describing the atmospheric behavior of alkoxy radicals has been built up primarily from two sources: (1) environmental chamber experiments, where end-product distributions observed under atmospheric conditions have been used to infer relative rates of competing alkoxy radical reactions (e.g., Carter et al., 1976; Cox et al., 1981; Niki et al., 1981a; Eberhard et al., 1995; Aschmann et al., 1997; Orlando et al., 2000a; Cassanelli et al., 2006); and (2) from theoretical methodologies that lend themselves well to the study of unimolecular processes (e.g., Somnitz and Zellner, 2000a, 2000b, 2000c; Mereau et al., 2000a, 2000b; Fittschen et al., 2000; Lin and Ho, 2002; Mereau et al., 2003; Davis and Francisco, 2011). An overview of these three classes of competing alkoxy radical reactions (reaction with O2, unimolecular decomposition, and isomerization) is given in this section.
The Marsh Builders
Authors: Levy Sharon
Published: November 2020

Swamps and marshes once covered vast stretches of the North American landscape. The destruction of these habitats, long seen as wastelands that harbored deadly disease, accelerated in the twentieth century. Today, the majority of the original wetlands in the US have vanished, transformed into farm fields or buried under city streets. In The Marsh Builders, Sharon Levy delves into the intertwined histories of wetlands loss and water pollution. The book's springboard is the tale of a years-long citizen uprising in Humboldt County, California, which led to the creation of one of the first U.S. wetlands designed to treat city sewage. The book explores the global roots of this local story: the cholera epidemics that plagued nineteenth-century Europe; the researchers who invented modern sewage treatment after bumbling across the insight that microbes break down pollutants in water; the discovery that wetlands act as efficient filters for the pollutants unleashed by modern humanity. More than forty years after the passage of the Clean Water Act launched a nation-wide effort to rescue lakes, rivers and estuaries fouled with human and industrial waste, the need for revived wetlands is more urgent than ever. Waters from Lake Erie and Chesapeake Bay to China's Lake Taihu are tainted with an overload of nutrients carried in runoff from farms and cities, creating underwater dead zones and triggering algal blooms that release toxins into drinking water sources used by millions of people. As the planet warms, scientists are beginning to design wetlands that can shield coastal cities from rising seas. Revived wetlands hold great promise for healing the world's waters.
The Microbe Solution
Authors: Levy Sharon
Published: November 2020

In the hot, dry summer of 1858, the Thames was a stew of sewage that festered in the sun, giving off an unbearable stench. “We believe this to be the uncleanest, foulest river in the known world,” wrote a London pundit in July. “There you shall see in the brief space of half an hour and two or three miles, a hundred sewers disgorging solid filth, a hundred broad acres of unnatural, slimy chymical compost . . . The water—the liquid rather—is inky black.” Dockworkers suffered nausea, headache, sore throats, temporary blindness—some of them fainted from breathing in the river’s aroma. In the newly rebuilt Houses of Parliament, on the riverbank, legislators choked on what the press labeled “the Great Stink.” The Thames had been badly polluted for decades, but the heat and low water that summer brought the situation to a crisis. Benjamin Disraeli, leader of the House, held a handkerchief over his nose as he fled from the Chamber, complaining that the Thames had become a “Stygian Pool.” In July 1858, he introduced a law that authorized the construction of a costly new sewer system, designed by engineer Joseph Bazalgette, that would carry London’s waste downstream of the city. Britain’s rivers were overwhelmed with sewage, its cities bursting at the seams. Between 1801 and 1841 London’s population had grown from 958,000 to 1,948,000. Numbers of people living in smaller cities like Leeds, Bradford, and Huddersfield doubled or tripled in the same span of time. While the same pattern held in other European and American cities, geography made the problem more intense in Britain, where the rivers were too small to carry off the wastes of the towns that sprouted on their banks. In 1885, engineer James Gordon estimated that dumping the raw sewage of the major towns along the Rhine would give that river a concentration of only one part sewage per 2,345 parts water. The lower Lea, a tributary of the Thames whose upstream flows had been diverted to provide drinking water for London, was by contrast composed of two- thirds sewage.
Caring for Autism
Authors: Ellis Michael
Published: November 2020

When a professional states, "Your child has Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD)", it is enough to make your whole world fall apart. What does it mean to be on the autism spectrum? How will this affect your child's life, your life, the life of your family, and others you interact with? What sorts of medications, therapies, and alternative methods are used to help manage the disorder? What are the financial and legal ramifications? How will this affect schooling, your spiritual growth, and everyday life? These are just a few of the questions that will rapidly cross your mind. Caring for Autism: Practical Advice from a Parent and Physician delves into all these questions and more. As the father of a daughter with ASD and as a trained psychiatrist who specializes in ASD, Dr. Michael A. Ellis provides a holistic view of what comes after diagnosis. In user-friendly tones, he answers the most commonly asked questions about what it's actually like to live with ASD, what medications and therapies are available, and the global impact it has on the child's environment. With the help of his wife, Lori Layton Ellis, to provide a mother's perspective, Dr. Ellis shares personal stories of their 10-year journey in order to provide insight and support for anyone - patient, parent, caregiver - traversing the difficulties of autism.
Climate Change and the Health of Nations
Authors: McMichael Anthony
Published: November 2020

When we think of "climate change," we think of man-made global warming, caused by greenhouse gas emissions. But natural climate change has occurred throughout human history, and populations have had to adapt to the climate's vicissitudes. Anthony J. McMichael, a renowned epidemiologist and a pioneer in the field of how human health relates to climate change, is the ideal person to tell this story. Climate Change and the Health of Nations shows how the natural environment has vast direct and indirect repercussions for human health and welfare. McMichael takes us on a tour of human history through the lens of major transformations in climate. From the very beginning of our species some five million years ago, human biology has evolved in response to cooling temperatures, new food sources, and changing geography. As societies began to form, they too adapted in relation to their environments, most notably with the development of agriculture eleven thousand years ago. Agricultural civilization was a Faustian bargain, however: the prosperity and comfort that an agrarian society provides relies on the assumption that the environment will largely remain stable. Indeed, for agriculture to succeed, environmental conditions must be just right, which McMichael refers to as the "Goldilocks phenomenon." Global warming is disrupting this balance, just as other climate-related upheavals have tested human societies throughout history. As McMichael shows, the break-up of the Roman Empire, the bubonic Plague of Justinian, and the mysterious collapse of Mayan civilization all have roots in climate change. Why devote so much analysis to the past, when the daunting future of climate change is already here? Because the story of mankindâs previous survival in the face of an unpredictable and unstable climate, and of the terrible toll that climate change can take, could not be more important as we face the realities of a warming planet. This sweeping magnum opus is not only a rigorous, innovative, and fascinating exploration of how the climate affects the human condition, but also an urgent call to recognize our species' utter reliance on the earth as it is.
What We Know
Authors: Lupia Arthur
Published: November 2020

To offer prospective learners information that yields high net benefits, it is important to understand what they already know. How do educators learn about others’ knowledge? Surveys are a common source of information. In part II of this book, I focus on these surveys and how many different kinds of educators use them. My goal throughout part II is to improve educators’ measures and understanding of what people do and do not know about politics. Better measurement and more accurate inferences from data can help educators more effectively diagnose whether individuals have the knowledge they need to achieve desired competences. Where faulty diagnoses can lead educators to offer information that prospective learners neither want nor need, improved diagnoses can help educators identify information that can help others make more competent decisions. The way that we will achieve the improvements just described is by examining survey-based research and political commentary on a concept that many people call “political knowledge.” The best-known academic book on political knowledge defines it as “the range of factual information about politics that is stored in long-term memory.” The survey questions that are most relevant for this purpose are recall questions. Recall questions are designed to measure whether or not a person has selected declarative memories. “Who is the Vice President of the United States?” is an example of a commonly asked recall question. Interpretations of responses to recall questions are the evidentiary basis for thousands of books and articles on political knowledge and ignorance. If these data accurately measure what people know, and if analysts accurately interpret the data, then educators can use the interpretations to compare what an audience knows to necessary and sufficient conditions for competence at a given task. Part II’s main tension is that not all data and interpretations are accurate. Some survey data are inaccurate, as happens when a survey organization records a survey participant’s response incorrectly. Similarly, some interpretations of survey data are inaccurate, as happens when an analyst uses a survey to make a claim about ignorance that is inconsistent with the survey’s actual content.
Seven Chemical Clues to First Life
Authors: McFarland Ben
Published: November 2020

I was struck by two colorful examples of the hidden chemical structure of the world while I was supposed to be on vacation on Whidbey Island in Washington State, at a place called Camp Casey. Camp Casey is one of three forts the US Army built at the mouth of the Puget Sound. Each sat on an island and looked toward the others, forming a “Triangle of Fire” across the water route toward Seattle. Now, a century after obsolescence, you can visit the eastern apex of the Triangle, which stands as Fort Casey State Park. Children play in the industrial labyrinth of dark rooms, concrete steps, and watch towers, as parents worry about the lack of railings and abrupt drops. (It helped me learn as a parent to “let go a little.”) The beach breeze and wide- open grounds are perfect for flying kites, a campground sits on the beach, and a ferry across the Sound leaves every hour from next door. It’s a nice place. My fondness for the area comes because I’ve spent a lot of time there. My university owns the old parade grounds and barracks just north of the fort. Faculty can stay in the old officers’ quarters a short walk away. Last time I was there, I was trying not to work but couldn’t help myself from doing a little geology. I saw two strikingly different rocks made of chemicals that may have bridged the gap between the two worlds of the flowing and the fixed—that is, the quick and the dead. The first rock grows out of the concrete fort. It is a white, rippled rock that appears to drip from the walls and flow from the ceilings as teardrop stalactites. It is shaped by water. This water flows through the concrete, dissolving calcium and moving it to the surface. When the calcium in the water meets carbon dioxide in the air, calcium carbonate forms and freezes in a slick white mass. This is the same chemistry that formed the dolomite mountains and absorbed the CO2 blanket, except here it is seeded by an abandoned concrete maze.
The Shack Enterprise
Authors: Leopold Estella B.
Published: November 2020

In each person’s life a particular place may stand out—a place where one spent a lot of time, a place one grew to love and recall for so many happy memories. Such a place for me was the Shack, on the floodplain of the Wisconsin River. In summertime, standing by the river, it was incredibly quiet, except for the occasional call of a kingfisher. It often seemed that high overhead one could hear a kind of humming. Look up and there were barn swallows turning in the air catching insects. Look down and the surface of the river was always quietly in motion, and rippling against a snag in the shallows. We were a hunting and fishing family. Although camping on weekends early on became a family tradition in Wisconsin, Dad got it into his head to buy a piece of land of our own on which we could camp, hunt, fish, swim, and study nature and even do some bow hunting. He also had a real itch to practice a new idea, ecological restoration, on his own land. At the dedication ceremony of the University of Wisconsin Arboretum on June 17, 1934, Dad told the audience: “The time has come for science to busy itself with the earth itself. The first step is to reconstruct a sample of what we had to start with. That, in a nut shell, is the Arboretum.” He was looking for a place of our own to do just that as well—“a place to show what the land was, what it is, and what it ought to be.” It was in January of 1934; Dad asked an archery friend of his in Prairie du Sac, Ed Ochsner, to help him locate and lease some land near the Wisconsin River. They visited an eighty-acre piece in the south-central part of the state northeast of Baraboo. Dad apparently thought it would fit his purposes. By paying the taxes we could buy the land for just eight dollars an acre.
summer
Authors: Leopold Estella B.
Published: November 2020

Summer was a time for transplanting prairie wildflowers. We knew that we wanted to restore prairie on the cornfield in front of the Shack. How did we know where we could get these prairie species? Of course there were no commercial sources at all. We had heard that prairie species were especially prolific along railroad tracks, because in those days the railroad frequently burned them to control brush. So we would stop there during different parts of the summer and find the prairie species in bloom (so we could identify them), or along an old road cut where we felt we could dig up chunks of sod with the species, put them in a tub in the car, and transport these to the Shack, to spud them in to the old corn field (our future prairie). This included prairie grasses, legumes, asters, and a whole variety of perennial species. And of course these can reproduce. This means that in those days (and to some extent now) there were “idle spots” along each side of the railroad tracks, as Dad observed, where the cow, plow, and mower are absent and a profusion of wild prairie herbs persist and bloom vigorously. Some species had huge deep roots, like the beautiful compass plant. Dad collected their seeds and built a little plot on the hill to plant these along with a mix of seeds of prairie grasses. This was an experiment. As mentioned, he did not water them, but they came up and did beautifully. So we knew how to promote such species on our prairie. (See chapter 7.) Over the years our prairie became more diverse, and more beautiful. According to the Land Institute of Salinas, Kansas, these native perennial prairie herb species typically grow very deep roots. Some extend downward ten to eighteen feet below the land surface! So it is no wonder the prairie vegetation is so stable and tenacious during drought; they have unusual adaptations to reach moisture and minerals at depth.
The Internet Revolution in the Sciences and Humanities
Authors: Gross Alan G. , Harmon Joseph E.
Published: November 2020

The Internet Revolution in the Sciences and Humanities takes a new look at C.P. Snow's distinction between the two cultures, a distinction that provides the driving force for a book that contends that the Internet revolution has sown the seeds for transformative changes in both the sciences and the humanities. It is because of this common situation that the humanities can learn from the sciences, as well as the sciences from the humanities, in matters central to both: generating, evaluating, and communicating knowledge on the Internet. In a succession of chapters, the authors deal with the state of the art in web-based journal articles and books, web sites, peer review, and post-publication review. In the final chapter, they address the obstacles the academy and scientific organizations face in taking full advantage of the Internet: outmoded tenure and promotion procedures, the cost of open access, and restrictive patent and copyright law. They also argue that overcoming these obstacles does not require revolutionary institutional change. In their view, change must be incremental, making use of the powers and prerogatives scientific and academic organizations already have.
Nobel Ideals and Noble Errors
Authors: Allchin Douglas
Published: November 2020

Christiaan Eijkman shared a 1929 Nobel Prize “for his discovery of the antineuritic vitamin.” His extensive studies on chickens and prison inmates on the island of Java in the 1890s helped establish a white rice diet as a cause of beriberi, and the rice coating as a remedy. Eijkman reported that he had traced a bacterial disease, its toxin, and its antitoxin. Beriberi, however, is a nutrient deficiency. Eijkman was wrong. Ironically, Eijkman even rejected the current explanation when it was first introduced in 1910. Although he earned a Nobel Prize for his important contribution on the role of diet, Eijkman’s original conclusion about the bacterium was just plain mistaken. Eijkman’s error may seem amusing, puzzling, or even downright disturbing—an exception to conventional expectations. Isn’t the scientific method, properly applied, supposed to protect science from error? And who can better exemplify science than Nobel Prize winners? If not, how can we trust science? And who else is to serve as role models for students and aspiring scientists? Eijkman’s case, however, is not unusual. Nobel Prize–winning scientists have frequently erred. Here I profile a handful of such cases (Figure 11.1). Among them is one striking pair, Peter Mitchell and Paul Boyer, who advocated alternative theories of energetics in the cell. Each used his perspective to understand and correct an error of the other! Ultimately, all these cases offer an occasion to reconsider another sacred bovine—that science is (or should be) free of error, and that the measure of a good scientist is how closely he or she meets that ideal. Consider first Linus Pauling, the master protein chemist. Applying his intimate knowledge of bond angles, he deciphered the alpha-helix structure of proteins in 1950, which earned him a Nobel Prize in 1954. He also reasoned fruitfully about sickle cell hemoglobin, leading to molecular understanding of its altered protein structure. Yet Pauling also believed that megadoses of vitamin C could cure the common cold. Evidence continues to indicate otherwise, although Pauling’s legacy still seems to shape popular beliefs.
Celebrating Darwin’s Errors
Authors: Allchin Douglas
Published: November 2020

Charles Darwin was truly amazing. In 1859 he introduced a robust understanding of descent with modification by means of natural selection. His concepts would help unify taxonomy, biogeography, comparative anatomy, heredity, functional analysis of form, embryology, paleontology, population dynamics, and ecology, and even human moral behavior. Darwin showed how to explain organic “design” as well as the limitations of contingent history, adaptive structures as well as vestigial ones. Every lesson in biology, properly framed, expresses and celebrates Darwin’s achievement. How, then, might one mark so august an occasion as his two hundredth birthday (also the sesquicentennial year of his premier work, the Origin of Species)? Many will no doubt parade Darwin’s many triumphs. But allow me to take exception to the common view (another sacred bovine?) that science is best reflected only by its successful theories. If science is fundamentally about discovery, then its “failures” or errors along the way may be just as important as the ultimately reliable insights. I wish to celebrate science as a process. Here, then, I acknowledge Darwin’s mistakes and show how understanding them gives us a deeper understanding both of Darwin and of science more generally. My tribute is to forgo the mythologized legend and appreciate so remarkable a scientist as Darwin in familiarly human terms. First, one may note that Darwin’s errors generate interest largely because of his many achievements. His credentials are unimpeachable. If he made mistakes, it was not for want of scientific ability. One cannot rudely dismiss his errors as due to ineptitude. Indeed, Darwin’s contributions are wider and their theoretical coherence deeper than popularly known. He produced four volumes on the taxonomy of barnacles, demonstrating his skills in detailed observation and analysis of evolutionary classification. In his first work after the Origin, he showed the importance of orchid form in promoting outcrossing through pollination, thereby contributing to an understanding of the role of sex and genetic recombination in evolution. Later, he explained heterostyly—the occurrence of flowers with styles of different lengths—as illustrating the same general principle (see essay 16).
The Tragic Hero of Childbed Fever
Authors: Allchin Douglas
Published: November 2020

The situation in the Vienna hospital in the mid-1840s was certainly grim. The hospital offered medical care to indigent mothers, but in one maternity ward women faced a ghastly one-in-ten chance of dying from childbed fever (today’s puerperal sepsis, a bacterial infection). Could nothing be done? Enter Ignaz Semmelweis (Figure 24.1), who, so popular stories typically tell us, “notices that [the attending medical] students move between the dissection room and the delivery room without washing their hands.” The students offering care are themselves infecting the patients with putrid matter from cadavers! Semmelweis institutes handwashing, and the mortality rate soon drops by an impressive 90%. However, “despite the dramatic reduction in the mortality rate in Semmelweis’ ward, his colleagues and the greater medical community greeted his findings with hostility or dismissal.” Semmelweis’s hypothesis “was largely ignored, rejected or ridiculed. He was dismissed from the hospital and harassed by the medical community in Vienna, which eventually forced him to move to Budapest.” Further injustice seemed to follow. “Despite various publications of results where handwashing reduced mortality to below 1%, Semmelweis’s observations conflicted with the established scientific and medical opinions of the time and his ideas were rejected by the medical community. Some doctors were offended at the suggestion that they should wash their hands and Semmelweis could offer no acceptable scientific explanation for his findings.” “The years of controversy and repeated rejection of his work by the medical community caused him to suffer a mental breakdown. Semmelweis died in 1865 in an Austrian mental institution. Some believe that his own death was ironically caused by puerperal sepsis,” the very disease he had tried to prevent. “Semmelweis saved the lives of countless women and their newborn children. He showed how a statistical approach to the problems of medicine could demolish popular but mystical theories of disease. His work prepared the way for Pasteur’s elucidation of germ theory. He turned obstetrics into a respectable science. And he revealed how professional eminence and authority could breed crass stupidity and bitter jealousy.”
Personal Presence and the Safe Class
Authors: Fox Raymond
Published: November 2020

Martin Buber decried the preponderance of I-it relationships, believing that they threatened human well-being. Thingification was the culprit. As we move further a field from everyday person-to-person experience, the special connection involving attentiveness, shared rapport, and synchronized verbal and nonverbal communication—in other words, relationship needs to be pursued and reclaimed. At the same time, drawing upon the work of D. W. Winnicott, creating and maintaining an environment for learning, by serving as a container for the anxiety associated with seeking new and unfamiliar knowledge, is a teacher’s vital role. There is a profound and pervasive relational dimension to teaching, especially teaching in the professions. The relationship is a unique and special one with identifiable similarities to the practitioner-client relationship. Both are based on the dynamics of human development and change. The mantle of professional authority derives partly from the intellectual, but more substantially through the immediacy, openness, and intimacy between you and students. The central passageway for you to help students learn the ground rules for practice—how to establish and sustain a relationship, to attend to another person, to pace interventions, to converse, to tune into others and, most important, how to manage their own feelings while engaged with others—lies in your intense connection with students. The optimum pattern in practice as well as in teaching is having a balanced brain, one with strengths in both empathy and in substantive know-how. This balance is achieved through relationship. Students bring with them habits and beliefs that previously worked for them but are not professionally functional. The foundation of competence does not arise from amassing new theories and factual knowledge but, rather, from absorbing and synthesizing them into a new, improved, and integrated whole established through your firsthand contact. To develop students’ level of professional expertise, you need to interact in a manner consistent with what theory and research you preach. The relationship is the medium, a potent emotional channel, through which depth learning occurs and professional identity is formulated. Your relationship with students serves as an exemplar for the student-client relationship outside the classroom.
Transmitted Wounds
Authors: Pinchevski Amit
Published: November 2020

In Transmitted Wounds, Amit Pinchevski explores the ways media technology and logic shape the social life of trauma both clinically and culturally. Bringing media theory to bear on trauma theory, Pinchevski reveals the technical operations that inform the conception and experience of traumatic impact and memory. He offers a bold thesis about the deep association of media and trauma: media bear witness to the human failure to bear witness, making the traumatic technologically transmissible and reproducible. Taking up a number of case studies--the radio broadcasts of the Eichmann trial; the videotaping of Holocaust testimonies; recent psychiatric debates about trauma through media following the 9/11 attacks; current controversy surrounding drone operators' post-trauma; and digital platforms of algorithmic-holographic witnessing and virtual reality exposure therapy for PTSD--Pinchevski demonstrates how the technological mediation of trauma feeds into the traumatic condition itself. The result is a novel understanding of media as constituting the material conditions for trauma to appear as something that cannot be fully approached and yet somehow must be. While drawing on contemporary materialist media theory, especially the work of Friedrich Kittler and his followers, Pinchevski goes beyond the anti-humanistic tendency characterizing the materialist approach, discovering media as bearing out the human vulnerability epitomized in trauma, and finding therein a basis for moral concern in the face of violence and atrocity. Transmitted Wounds unfolds the ethical and political stakes involved in the technological transmission of mental wounds across clinical, literary, and cultural contexts.