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Academic Insights for the Thinking World
By Margot Minardi
The new Martin Luther King, Jr. National Memorial in Washington, DC, attracted criticism from an unlikely corner recently when poet Maya Angelou complained that one of the inscriptions made the civil rights leader seem like an “arrogant twit.” In a sermon on “The Drum Major Instinct,” delivered two months before
September is National Ovarian Cancer Awareness Month. Will the White House be lighted in teal just as it’s been lighted in pink to commemorate National Breast Cancer Awareness Month? Will grocery stores line shelves with teal ribbon products? Will schools give out teal t-shirts or pins? Probably not. Pink has been the color of choice when it comes to cause support…
This Day in World History – Each evening that weather permitted, Maria (pronounced Mah-RYE-uh) Mitchell mounted the stairs to the roof of her family’s Nantucket home to sweep the sky with a telescope looking for a comet. Mitchell—who had been taught mathematics and astronomy by her father—began the practice in 1836. Eleven years later, on October 1, 1847, her long labors finally paid off. When she saw the comet, she quickly summoned her father, who agreed with her conclusion.
Some of you may know that today is National Coffee Day. I’ve, personally, been trying to ignore the free/discounted offers around New York City since I’m trying to cut back, and decided to distract myself by putting together this quick video post about coffee and caffeine.
Now, I would be reimiss if I did not first mention the fantastic book Buzz: The Science and Lore of Alcohol and Caffeine by Stephen Braun. This is a
Situated at the intersection of Europe, Asia, and Africa, the Mediterranean Sea has been for millenia the place where religions, economies, and political systems met, clashed, influenced and absorbed one another. Ranging from prehistory to the 21st century, The Great Sea is above all the history of human interaction across a region that has brought together many of the great civilizations of antiquity as well as the rival empires of medieval and modern times.
By Louis René Beres
Apart from their obvious differences, all of the candidates, both Democrat (President Obama) and Republican, have one overriding chant in common. For each aspirant, every pitch is prefaced by sanctimonious appeals to “the people.” Whether openly, or with a quiet nod to a presumably more subtle strategy, “I want to be the people’s president” is always their conspicuously shared mantra.
This is not hard to understand. To suggest otherwise
By Nigel Crisp
I suspect that most people if asked would describe the aim of the NHS as being about curing illness, helping people be healthy and providing good health services when needed. All of these are of course crucial and what the NHS does daily. I believe, however, that we need to go deeper and wider than this and suggest that the NHS shares in a wider aim to help people to have as much independence as possible so that they can live a life they have reason to value.
By Anatoly Liberman
Ingle is usually derived from Celtic. The Scots form is the same as the English one, while Irish Gaelic has aingeal. The Celtic word is a borrowing of Latin ignis “fire” (cf. Engl. ignite, ignition). Therefore, some etymologists derive Engl. ingle directly from the Latin diminutive igniculus; ingle nook gives this derivation some support. Be that as it may, no path leads from ingle to inkling.
This Day in World History – Few people in history can justly claim the impact of Kongfuzi (often called Confucius), whose teachings have influenced hundreds of millions of people across Asia. Like so many important figures in the world of ideas, the historical Kongfuzi is an elusive figure. While precise date of the sage’s birth is unknown, the Chinese have long celebrated September 28, and to this day, members of the Kong family still live in the family compound in Qufu, China.
By Dorothy Crawford
Chance is a fine thing, especially when it leads to a major new discovery. Remarkably, this often seems to be the case with scientific discoveries, at least in my field – tumour virology. We now know that around 20% of cancers are caused by microbes but without chance this figure might be substantially lower. The first human tumour virus was discovered in 1964 by Anthony Epstein and Yvonne Barr at the Middlesex Hospital in London with the virus being named Epstein-Barr virus (EBV) after its discoverers.
By Elizabeth Beck
Neither Sarah nor I have met Troy Anthony Davis. I first met his family in about 2003, which was about 18 years into his death sentence when Sarah and I were working on In the Shadow of Death: Restorative Justice and Death Row Families. At the time, his sister
By Elvin Lim
The two front-runners in the Republican nomination contest, Rick Perry and Mitt Romney, narrowed the distance between them in the last debate in Florida sponsored by Fox and Google. This is a debate that showcased both their Achilles’ heels. Perry’s problem is not the “ponzi scheme” comment about Social Security. Most conservatives agree with him, and the consistent conservative would actually agree with him that Social Security is a matter that should be sent back to the states to handle. Perry’s problem is his
This Day in World History – On September 27, 1822, Jean François Champollion announced a long-awaited discovery: he could decipher the Rosetta Stone. The stone, a document written in 196 BCE during the reign of Ptolemy V, had been discovered in Rashid (Rosetta in French), Egypt in 1799 by French troops involved in a military campaign against the British. Deciphering hieroglyphics had frustrated scholars for centuries. Arab scholars, beginning in the ninth century, CE, made unsuccessful attempts, as did Europeans in the fifteenth.
There are few moments in American history in which the course of events tipped so suddenly and so dramatically as at the Battle of Midway. At dawn of June 4, 1942, a rampaging Japanese navy ruled the Pacific. By sunset, their vaunted carrier force (the Kido Butai) had been sunk and their grip on the Pacific had been loosened forever.
This is the latest post in our regular OUPblog column SciWhys. Every month OUP editor and author Jonathan Crowe will be answering your science questions. Got a burning question about science that you’d like answered? Just email it to us, and Jonathan will answer what he can. Today: what happens when our immune system doesn’t work as it should?
By Adam Rosen
A little over three weeks ago, Hurricane Irene passed through New York City. Although residents greeted warnings from authorities with wildly varying degrees of seriousness, their response was nearly uniform: hunker down. Even for those types relishing the chance to buck official admonishment, there wasn’t much point. Concerts were canceled, beaches were closed, and untold numbers of brunches went unserved. I wasn’t, in truth, all that bothered by the state of affairs.