[Abridged] In the late nineteenth century, Mars emerged as one of the most intensively reported astronomical objects in the popular press, driven by favourable oppositions, improved telescopic capabilities and growing speculation regarding planetary habitability. I examine how Mars was interpreted in Australian newspapers between the 1870s and 1899, focusing on the ways in which astronomical knowledge was framed, contextualised and debated within a colonial media environment. Drawing on a large collection of digitised newspaper articles, I analyse how observational authority, instrumental credibility and individual expertise were harnessed in press reporting. The paper situates Australian Mars coverage within a global network of scientific communication dominated by metropolitan centres in Europe and North America, while highlighting the distinctive role played by southern-hemisphere visibility. Australian observatories and observers were frequently positioned as contributors of confirmatory observation rather than interpretive leadership, reinforcing a pattern of locally grounded but internationally oriented scientific engagement. The analysis traces a shift from early emphasis on disciplined observation and measurement to later periods characterised by contested interpretations, particularly surrounding the so-called Martian "canals" and the speculative claims advanced by personalities such as Percival Lowell in the USA. By examining how newspapers mediated between observational astronomy, engineering analogies and popular imagination, this study contributes to a broader understanding of how planetary science entered public discourse beyond metropolitan centres. In doing so, it underscores the active role of colonial newspapers in shaping scientific meaning and situates Australian Mars reporting within the wider history of nineteenth-century astronomical culture.
This article aims to demonstrate the essential role of compassion in the puritan practice of spiritual healing, as it developed in England from the end of the reign of Elizabeth I to the end of the 1630s. While the pastoral care established by puritan divines to address the spiritual crises caused by soteriological anxiety has received some scholarly attention, the question of the emotional resources mobilised by spiritual consolers remains a neglected theme in existing scholarship. Yet, if spiritual comfort is a discursive exchange, the interaction it involves is not solely verbal but also encompasses a significant emotional dimension. In particular, the guides to the practice of spiritual comfort consistently identify compassion as an indispensable quality for the exercise of spiritual comfort: it allows the consoler to find the right balance between gentleness and firmness in their interaction with the afflicted; more generally, it contributes to creating a protective therapeutic environment, based on a relationship of trust and benevolence, within which the afflicted benefits from constant spiritual and emotional support.
History (General) and history of Europe, French literature - Italian literature - Spanish literature - Portuguese literature
У даній статті мова йде про процес легітимації та делегітимації ОБСЄ в українському медійному просторі у 2011-2021 рр. Було зроблено спробу проаналізувати оціночні кон-тексти згадок про ОБСЄ у вказаний період, простежити динаміку зміни довіри до організації на фоні її видимості, а також встановити причинно-наслідкові зв’язки та тенденції. Мета даної статті – дослідити динаміку легітимації та делегітимації ОБСЄ в українському медійному просторі у період війни на Донбасі, а також у довоєнні роки. Для реалізації даної мети було поставлено такі завдання: 1) простежити динаміку політизації ОБСЄ в українському медійному полі; 2) проаналізувати взаємозв’язок між процесами політизації та легітимації ОБСЄ в Україні; 3) визначити тенденції легітимації та делегітимації ОБСЄ в українському медійному просторі. Методика дослідження. Для реалізації поставлених завдань ми опираємося перш за все на методи контент-аналізу, інтент-аналізу, історичного та кількісного аналізу матеріалів ЗМІ. У результаті було досліджено динаміку (де)легітимізації ОБСЄ в українському медійному просторі впродовж 2011-2021 рр. на фоні процесу політизації цієї організації. На основі аналізу даних зроблено висновки, що процес (де)легітимізації ОБСЄ в українському медійному просторі пов’язаний в основному із її залученістю у дипломатичне врегулювання військового конфлікту на Донбасі. Водночас, окрім власне діяльності організації, важливими факторами (де)легітимізації постають і покладені на ОБСЄ сподівання і розчарування, а також зміни у системі міжнародних відносин.
History (General) and history of Europe, Political science
Science is about facts and truth. Yet sometimes the truth and facts are not obvious. For example, in the field of MRI (Magnetic Resonance Imaging), there has been a long-lasting debate about who were the major contributors in its development. Particularly, there was a strong dispute between the followers of two scientists, R. Damadian and P. Lauterbur. In this review, we carefully trace the major developments in applying NMR for cancer detection starting almost 50 years ago. The research records show that the truth was beyond the claims of either research camps. The development of NMR for cancer detection involved multiple research groups, who made critical contributions at different junctures.
El presente artículo plantea un recorrido sobre cómo se ha abordado e investigado el auge y consolidación de vox, la formación de extrema derecha que desde 2018 ha penetrado en las instituciones del Estado jugando un papel destacado en la agenda política de los distintos niveles de gobierno. En este sentido, se ponen de relieve las publicaciones más importantes tanto de académicos como de personajes públicos que se han aproximado a este fenómeno, con dispares niveles de rigurosidad, contribuyendo al conocimiento colectivo sobre las causas y la naturaleza del éxito relámpago de la formación de Santiago Abascal.
Recent generative AI platforms are able to create texts or impressive images from simple text prompts. This makes them powerful tools for summarizing knowledge about architectural history or deriving new creative work in early design tasks like ideation, sketching and modelling. But, how good is the understanding of the generative AI models of the history of architecture? Has it learned to properly distinguish styles, or is it hallucinating information? In this chapter, we investigate this question for generative AI platforms for text and image generation for different architectural styles, to understand the capabilities and boundaries of knowledge of those tools. We also analyze how they are already being used by analyzing a data set of 101 million Midjourney queries to see if and how practitioners are already querying for specific architectural concepts.
What were the aspirations of women who began a rapping career in 1990s France? Were they looking to make it in a male-dominated world? To leave behind a dominated social position and enjoy an artist’s life? To assert the public existence of postcolonial minorities? Based primarily on life narratives, this article analyses the social mobility of female French rappers in the 1990s. It shows the importance of considering both subjective and objective career experiences, as well as the manifold power relations informing trajectories within a social space whose hierarchies are multidimensional. An often unseen dimension in the analysis of artistic careers, the transformations of social hierarchies from childhood to adulthood, and by extension age relations, are crucial here. At odds with the commonplace assumption that women get into male-dominated rap artist careers to subvert the gender order, this study shows that for a majority of these women, rap works as a generational matrix of politicization in which the experience of territorial and ethno-racial discriminations is key. As they grow older, however, this politicization contributes to denaturalizing new social hierarchies, starting with gender hierarchies. The impact of power relations is notable in both subjective and objective career experiences. Subjectively, the taste for rap and the transition to its practice are part of a politicization of inequalities which is perceived as a “generational” experience, which can be transferred from one type of inequality to the next over the course of a career or retrospectively played down as “teenage revolt”. Objectively, age relations redefine gender relations by exacerbating the double bind to which female rappers are confronted throughout their careers, during which the main turning points occur from childhood to adulthood. Still, for most of these women, the practice of rap contributes to an upward social mobility, particularly in comparison to their parents, most of whom are working-class and/or members of racialized minorities, and who have often performed subordinate jobs with demanding working hours.
The history of the Institute of Physics at the University of Florence is traced from the beginning of the 20th century, with the arrival of Antonio Garbasso as Director (1913), to the 1960s. Thanks to Garbasso's expertise, not only did the Institute gain new premises on Arcetri hill, where the Astronomical Observatory was already located, but it also formed a brilliant group of young physicists made up of Enrico Fermi, Franco Rasetti, Enrico Persico, Bruno Rossi, Gilberto Bernardini, Daria Bocciarelli, Lorenzo Emo Capodilista, Giuseppe Occhialini and Giulio Racah, who were engaged in the emerging fields of Quantum Mechanics and Cosmic Rays. This Arcetri School disintegrated in the late 1930s for the transfer of its protagonists to chairs in other universities, for the environment created by the fascist regime and, to some extent, for the racial laws. After the war, the legacy was taken up by some students of this school who formed research groups in the field of nuclear physics and elementary particle physics. As far as theoretical physics was concerned, after the Fermi and Persico periods these studies enjoyed a new expansion towards the end of the 1950s, with the arrival of Giacomo Morpurgo and above all, that of Raoul Gatto, who created the first real Italian school of Theoretical Physics at Arcetri.
Niels C. M. Martens, Miguel Ángel Carretero Sahuquillo, Erhard Scholz
et al.
Editorial of a special issue on dark matter & modified gravity, distributed across the journals Studies in History and Philosophy of Modern Physics and Studies in History and Philosophy of Science. Published version of the open access editorial (in SHPS) available here: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.shpsa.2021.08.015. The six papers are collected here: https://www.sciencedirect.com/journal/studies-in-history-and-philosophy-of-science-part-b-studies-in-history-and-philosophy-of-modern-physics/special-issue/10CR71RJLWM.
With Cyrano, Voltaire, and Verne, France provided important milestones in the history of early science fiction. However, even if the genre was not very common a few centuries ago, there were numerous additional contributions by French-speaking writers. In this paper, we review two cases of interplanetary novels written in the second half of the eighteenth century and sharing a rare particularity: their authors were female. Voyages de Milord Ceton was imagined by Marie-Anne de Roumier-Robert whereas Cornelie Wouters de Wasse conceived Le Char Volant. While their personal lives were very different, and their writing style too, both authors share in these novels a common philosophy in which equality -- between ranks but also between genders -- takes an important place. Their works thus clearly fit into the context of the Enlightenment.
The article explores the different modalities of the notion of bond in Rousseau’s philosophy (social, civil, political) according to the main axes of his thinking. We begin with the criticism of the sociability of Enlightenment developed in the Discourse on the Origins and Basis of Inequality among Men in order to compare it with the political remedy that emerges in the Social Contract, as well as the analysis that is conducted in the Émile around “the abstract man” cultivating his capacity for attachment. Thus the genealogy of the links can emerge from the relationships of need. Alongside the condemnation of mutual dependence, mapping the notions of link, bond, relationship, node and spring offers full meaning to the positive definition of Man as a “relative being”.
History (General) and history of Europe, Philosophy (General)
In June 1888, Oliver Heaviside received by mail an officially unpublished pamphlet, which was written and printed by the American author Willard J. Gibbs around 1881-1884. This original document is preserved in the Dibner Library of the History of Science and Technology at the Smithsonian Institute in Washington DC. Heaviside studied Gibbs's work very carefully and wrote some annotations in the margins of the booklet. He was a strong defender of Gibbs's work on vector analysis against quaternionists, even if he criticized Gibbs's notation system. The aim of our paper is to analyse Heaviside's annotations and to investigate the role played by the American physicist in the development of Heaviside's work.
This paper provides a critical reflection on the operational logic, ideological inconsistencies, and material fallout of the tea plantation economy of northeastern India, a large-scale commercial enterprise that induced transformative changes to the region's biosocial landscape for a century and more. Unlike existing works on the subject, however, this study focuses on agro-economic ideology – namely the relationship between the crop and its built environment – to highlight the impact of tea on labor, disease ecology, and modernist parables of "progress" in British East India.
The aim of this paper is to shed light on an under-researched area of study: that of the relations that the leading members of the «Caffé» – Paolo Frisi, Cesare Beccaria and the Verri – established with the Royal Society’s Anglo-Italian circles in 1765-1767. These were generally men of science, even though it is also possible to detect the signs of their interest in the socio-legal topics underlying the iconic Dei delitti e delle pene. Building upon a complex epistolary network, as well as a series of unpublished materials, we shall try to show that Father Frisi was at the heart of the creation of a transnational cultural bridge between Milan and London, and that despite their stronger ties with Paris and its philosophes, Beccaria and the Verris benefited from these exceptional contacts. The picture that we shall draw will clarify the role of learned academies in eighteenth-century Europe, on the interdisciplinary nature of intellectual exchanges, particularly on the international milieu where the «book of crimes» was translated into English.