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Camelids are vital to the cultures and economies of the Andes. The animals have also been at the heart of ecological and social catastrophe: Europeans overhunted wild vicuña and guanaco and imposed husbandry and breeding practices that decimated llama and alpaca flocks that had been successfully tended by Indigenous peoples for generations. Yet the colonial encounter with these animals was not limited to the New World. Llamas beyond the Andes tells the five-hundred-year history of animals removed from their native habitats and transported overseas. Initially Europeans prized camelids for the bezoar stones found in their guts: boluses of ingested matter that were thought to have curative powers. Then the animals themselves were shipped abroad as exotica. As Europeans and US Americans came to recognize the economic value of camelids, new questions emerged: What would these novel sources of protein and fiber mean for the sheep industry? And how best to cultivate herds? Andeans had the expertise, but knowledge sharing was rarely easy. Marcia Stephenson explores the myriad scientific, commercial, and cultural interests that have attended camelids globally, making these animals a critical meeting point for diverse groups from the North and South.

Awards shape careers, make research visible, and create role models. They provide evidence of prestige and credit and play a key role in evaluating individual scientists. Nevertheless, the understanding of prize cultures in science has remained surprisingly superficial. This book explores the prize cultures of the most famous scientific award worldwide: the Nobel Prize. It contributes to modern approaches in history and sociology of science that focus on the social context of scientific practices and gives new insights into the role of status and impact in academia.

Published with ISME, ITTO and project partners FAO, UNESCO-MAB, UNEP-WCMC and UNU-INWEH This atlas provides the first truly global assessment of the state of the world's mangroves. Written by a leading expert on mangroves with support from the top international researchers and conservation organizations, this full colour atlas contains 60 full-page maps, hundreds of photographs and illustrations and a comprehensive country-by-country assessment of mangroves. Mangroves are considered both ecologically and from a human perspective. Initial chapters provide a global view, with information on distribution, biogeography, productivity and wider ecology, as well as on human uses, economic values, threats, and approaches for mangrove management. These themes are revisited throughout the regional chapters, where the maps provide a spatial context or starting point for further exploration. The book also presents a wealth of statistics on biodiversity, habitat area, loss and economic value which provide a unique record of mangroves against which future threats and changes can be evaluated. Case-studies, written by regional experts provide insights into regional mangrove issues, including primary and potential productivity, biodiversity, and information on present and traditional uses and values and sustainable management.

A nuanced reframing of the dual importance of reading and observation for early modern naturalists.Historians traditionally argue that the sciences were born in early modern Europe during the so-called Scientific Revolution. At the heart of this narrative lies a supposed shift from the knowledge of books to the knowledge of things. The attitude of the new-style intellectual broke with the text-based practices of erudition and instead cultivated an emerging empiricism of observation and experiment. Rather than blindly trusting the authority of ancient sources such as Pliny and Aristotle, practitioners of this experimental philosophy insisted upon experiential proof. In A Centaur in London, Fabian Kraemer calls a key tenet of this master narrative into question—that the rise of empiricism entailed a decrease in the importance of reading practices. Kraemer shows instead that the early practices of textual erudition and observational empiricism were by no means so remote from one another as the traditional narrative would suggest. He argues that reading books and reading the book of nature had a great deal in common—indeed, that reading texts was its own kind of observation. Especially in the case of rare and unusual phenomena like monsters, naturalists were dependent on the written reports of others who had experienced the good luck to be at the right place at the right time. The connections between compiling examples from texts and from observation were especially close in such cases. A Centaur in London combines the history of scholarly reading with the history of scientific observation to argue for the sustained importance of both throughout the Renaissance and provides a nuanced, textured portrait of early modern naturalists at work.

These stories take readers where they cannot go, be it out into space, back in time, deep under the ocean, down to microscopic scales, or out onto the geologic overview. Squid turn themselves inside-out when disturbed by predators hunting through the darkness with sonar. Beneficial microbes spend their summer living in nectar and being transferred between blooms by the bees, then spend the winter living within those bees. Ecological stories are seen through the eyes of squirrels, birds, fish, ants, butterflies, and beetles. Between the Rocks and the Stars dives deep into the relationships that shape the natural world. The book presents a collection of vignettes from the wild, each of which describes the natural advantage of a particular organism. These true-to-life accounts are then posed in particular circumstances that illustrate the principles-commensalism, speciation-that shape the place of these organisms in their living environment. Some stories cover topics in geology and cosmology, describing the physical world context in which natural history progresses across the eons. Underlying themes in the book include the network of connections that link all these organisms together and the adaptations they make to the physical world in which they must find themselves a home.

Data on Nobel Laureates show that the age–creativity relationship varies substantially more over time than across fields. The age dynamics within fields closely mirror field-specific shifts in (i) training patterns and (ii) the prevalence of theoretical contributions. These dynamics are especially pronounced in physics and coincide with the emergence of quantum mechanics. Taken together, these findings show fundamental shifts in the life cycle of research productivity, inform theories of the age–creativity relationship, and provide observable predictors for the age at which great achievements are made.

With chapters written by a diverse array of specialists, this book exemplifies the dynamic nature of Legionella and illustrates many new methods such as genomics that have revolutionised this area of science. Written by internationally-recognised scientists under the expert guidance of the editors this volume covers the epidemiology and ecology of Legionella, diagnosis and treatment of legionellosis and presents reviews of current and emerging concepts and new advances in Legionella research. This detailed and topical book is an important reference volume for anyone involved in the study of legionellosis or other infectious diseases and is a recommended acquisition for all science and medical libraries.

Animal breeding has been complicated by persisting factors across species, cultures, geography, and time. In Made to Order , Margaret E. Derry explains these factors and other breeding concerns in relation to both animals and society in North America and Europe over the past three centuries. Made to Order addresses how breeding methodology evolved, what characterized the aims of breeding, and the way structures were put in place to regulate the occupation. Illustrated by case studies on important farm animals and companion species, the book presents a synthetic overview of livestock breeding as a whole. It gives considerable emphasis to genetics and animal breeding in the post-1960 period, the relationship between environmental and improvement breeding, and regulation of breeding as seen through pedigrees. In doing so, Made to Order shows how studying the ancient human practice of animal breeding can illuminate the ways in which human thinking, theorizing, and evolving characterize our interactions with all-natural processes.

This study investigates whether engaging college students (n = 42) in a knowledge building environment would help them work as a community to construct their collective knowledge of history of science and, accordingly, develop a more informed scientific view. The study adopted mixed-method analyses and data mainly came from surveys and student online discourse recorded in a database. Findings indicate that students' knowledge building activities were conducive to the development of their online collaboration as a learning process and the effective collective knowledge work concerning natural science history as a learning outcome. Moreover, students were able to attain a more constructivist-oriented epistemic view that sees scientific theories as invented, tentative, and improvable objects. Finally, based on course reflection, students also regarded their collective learning experiences in this course as meaningful and productive.

A rich and exuberant group biography of the early geologists, the people who were first to excavate from the layers of the world its buried history.The birth of geology was fostered initially by gentlemen whose wealth supported their interests, but in the nineteenth century, it was advanced by clergymen, academics, and women whose findings.