The AmericanScience team is back from winter break! To start out the New Year, we’re putting down our ice skates and hot ciders (okay, our piles of grading and overdue chapters) and introducing a new feature to the blog. Besides our regular posts and reviews—and science links, which we’re Tweeting daily—we’ve decided to re-read The Classics in the discipline. Returning to some classic HOS texts and discussing them as a team, we hope, will be a way to both rethink old ideas and, on a more practical note, to read some texts that we haven’t looked at since generals.

To start out the series, we’re beginning with one of the most famous, and most famously impenetrable, essays in the field: Donna Haraway’s “Teddy Bear Patriarchy: Taxidermy in the Garden of Eden, New York City, 1908-1938.” First published in Social Text in the winter of 1984-85, the piece became a key chapter in Haraway’s later 1989 masterpiece, Primate Visions: Gender, Race, and Nature in the World of Modern Science. “Teddy Bear Patriarchy,” and Haraway’s work in general, has become some of the most influential writing in the history of science, in postmodern readings of biology, and in critical gender and race theory. Over the course of a few weeks this fall, the AmericanScience team took some time with the essay, and came together to discuss our experiences with it, where it fits into current scholarship, and whether it really is impenetrable. We invite you to join the conversation in the comments section or on Twitter. On a purely aesthetic note, we’d like to point you to our current header—a timely, we think, image of none other than Carl Akeley working on his taxidermy at the AMNH in the 1930s.

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As a new transplant to Philadelphia, I’ve been reveling in the city’s myriad science museums and historical institutions—from the Franklin Institute to the Please Touch Museum (which I’ve written about for the blog), from the Chemical Heritage Foundation (newly merged with the Life Sciences Foundation!) to the Mütter Museum. Philadelphia, in short, is a historian of science’s dream city. A few weeks ago, though, I took an artistic turn to the Philadelphia Museum of Art’s stunning new special exhibition “Audubon to Warhol: The Art of American Still Life.” More than one hundred works of still life cover the exhibition’s dark grey walls, ranging from natural history illustrations of the eighteenth century to pop art installations of the 1960s. Lured into the exhibit by promises of Audubon’s enormous birds and taxidermied specimens, I was absolutely entranced by the range and variety of the works, which came together to paint a persuasive picture of the inextricable links between art and science in America.

John James Audubon, “Carolina Parakeet,” c. 1828

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Today we’re featuring a guest post from Sarah Pickman, a PhD student in the History Dept. at Yale. Sarah works on the history of exploration, field collecting, and natural history museums, and anthropology in nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Her past work has focused on the material culture of expeditions, from field provisions to Polar gear. Sarah comes to Yale from New York, where she earned an M.A. in Decorative Arts, Design History and Material Culture at Bard College.

Any casual observer can see that there’s a certain vogue for retro technology in the air. So dust off your home canning system, pull out your vinyl records, and break out your…sextant?

Double-bridge sextant, c. 1798. Collection of National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, UK, NAV1107

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• We’re sad to report the passing of the eminent Early Modernist historian, Lisa Jardine.
• A new approach to federal heart research funding: raise the peaks and archive the valleys.
• New digital humanities project allowing you to “explore the early modern social network”–Six Degrees of Francis Bacon.
• Why we have no f***ing idea how to computationally simulate a human brain.
• The galaxy that got too big: why bigger isn’t always better.
• On galaxies and stars, a beautiful article on the most mysterious star in our galaxy.
• Better living through venom?
• Paul Kedrosky’s sociology of engineering explanation of one of our favorite subjects, the VW emissions scandal.
• And finally, we had a wonderful time at the 2015 Joint Atlantic Seminar for the History of Medicine, and Evan wrote a round-up of his time at this year’s SHOT in the land of Breaking Bad.

• Mice (aka Major Tom) as harbingers of human expansion.
• Mars had LAKES!
• On metaphysics and science–why science can’t tell us whether science can tell us everything.
• Announcing Tropy, a Mellon-funded digital tool designed to help researchers organize, share, edit, and search the images they take in the archives.
• New climate change finding: rising sea temperatures (along with climatological events) have been bleaching our coral reefs.
• The money you spent on your calc textbook went to build an incredible house.
• Why did Europe’s weather model get Hurricane Joaquin right, while America’s model got it so wrong?
• A legend passes.
• Scientists test ape memory using some hilarious techniques.
• Did America’s tea trade with China create our first millionaires?
• Just in case you don’t want to win a Nobel Prize.
• “An object lesson in what happens when STEM majors don’t take enough courses in the humanities.”
• “Pharm-bitrage“: buy cheap drug brands without generic competitors, jack up prices, and profit while generics await approval.
• The folly of big science awards.
• And finally, did you catch our new posts on what Reddit can tell us about the future of science and on blood, bones, and a new T. rex for the Smithsonian’s Fossil Hall?

http://paleobiology.si.edu/

On October 1^st, NPR featured a story on the construction of the “nation’s T. rex,” a nearly complete Tyrannosaurus skeleton set to be the crown jewel of the Smithsonian’s Natural History Museum’s new Fossil Hall, opening in 2019. The dinosaur, somewhat disappointingly nicknamed the “Wankel T.” (after the Montana rancher who discovered in in 1988), will, indeed, stand out among other dinosaur skeletons for some visible—and not-so-visible—reasons. Maybe most obviously, the Wankel T. is being displayed in a “natural” state of carnivory: rather than standing straight up, small arms waving prostrate in the air, the Wankel will be shown bent down, tearing into the flesh of a dead triceratops. Preparators hope that this life-like scene of consumption, though perhaps a bit disturbing to triceratops lovers, will capture the imagination of young visitors while encouraging a sort of “nature in action” form of display. Even more significant to paleontologists, though, is the fact that the Wankel is constructed with mostly real bones.

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