The Birth of Living Radium

2007 ◽  
Vol 97 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-27 ◽  
Author(s):  
Luis Campos
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Origin Of Life ◽  
Half Life ◽  
Biological Research ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
The Origin Of Life

This article traces the half-life of a series of provocative and productive interconnections between radium, radioactivity, and life in the early twentieth century. Examining the metaphysics of metaphor set in motion by a widespread discourse of "living radium" among physicists and a radium-crazed public alike, I suggest how such conceptions may ultimately have shaped fundamental biological research into the origin of life, the nature of mutation, and even the characterization of the gene.

Lunatic Forms

2020 ◽  
pp. 53-86
Author(s):  
Natalie Pollard
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Commedia Dell'arte ◽  
Narrative Strategies ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
Character Types

Chapter 1 examines derivation and re-animation in Djuna Barnes’s early-twentieth-century lyric novel, Nightwood, focusing on redeployed aesthetic figures: the sleepwalker, the unstoppable narrator, the animate statue. It shows how Barnes’s resurrection of character types is informed by the genre-fusing innovations of the commedia dell’arte. It reads Barnes in dialogue with both Laforgue’s and Verlaine’s development of the Pierrot-figure, and the sad and ominous clowns in grotesque theatre, which inform Chaplin’s Tramp and Beckett’s clowns, as well as Barnes’s characterization of the ‘doctor’. Does Nightwood cast its characters in stone, locking them into old, ritualized narrative strategies? Or are these types themselves on the move; re-animating generations of performances and forms, from Shakespeare’s bawdy, to Rabelais’s carnivalesque, to Aphra Behn’s moon-philosopher, Doctor Balierdo?

scholarly journals Curriculum, knowledge, and the idea of South Africa

2015 ◽  
Vol 7 (2) ◽  
pp. 26-45
Author(s):  
Crain Soudien
Keyword(s):  
South Africa ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Social Space ◽  
Modern World ◽  
Social Difference ◽  
New Approach ◽  
Higher Education System ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
Curriculum Project

South Africa is an important social space in world history and politics for understanding how the modern world comes to deal with the questions of social difference, and the encounter of people with different civilizational histories. In this essay I argue that a particular racial idea inflected this encounter. One of the ways in which this happened was through the dominance of late nineteenthcentury and early twentieth-century positivism. In setting up the argument for this essay, I begin with a characterization of the nature of early South Africa's modernity, the period in which the country's political and intellectual leadership began to outline the kinds of knowledges they valued. I argue that a scientism, not unlike the positivism that emerges in many parts of the world at this time, came to inform discussions of progress and development in the country at the end of the nineteenth century. This was continued into the early twentieth century, and was evident in important interventions in the country such as the establishment of the higher education system and initiatives like the Carnegie Inquiry of 1933. The key effect of this scientism, based as it was on the conceits of objectivity and neutrality, was to institute suspicion of all other forms of knowing, and most critically that of indigenous knowledge. In the second part of the paper, I show that this scientism persists in the post-apartheid curriculum project. Finally, I make an exploratory argument, drawing on the concept of the 'transaction' in John Dewey, for a new approach to knowing.

scholarly journals A teacher, a scientist, a wife: the complex self of Joséphine Schouteden-Wéry (1879-1954)

2018 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
pp. 74-87
Author(s):  
Sarah Erman
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Popular Science ◽  
Public Image ◽  
Biological Research ◽  
Research And Teaching ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
Science Writer ◽  
Professional Teacher ◽  
Cultural Repertoires

In early twentieth-century Belgium, a number of women started careers in teaching and furthered their education at university. This article explores how one of them, Joséphine Schouteden-Wéry – a teacher, a botanist and wife of a successful zoologist – built her public image as a professional “teacher-scientist” by tapping into various pre-existing cultural repertoires for the female popular science writer and for the scientist. I examine how several elements were instrumental in this process, for both the making and the circulation of her public self. Attention is thus directed towards the opportunities provided by the ambiguity of the field as a place of biological research and teaching, the fluidity and uses of the persona of the explorer by scientists and non-scientists alike, and the different impacts of scientific sociability. It is argued that while Schouteden-Wéry strove to construct an independent and consistent public self as a scientist, a teacher and a wife, the different sides of her multifaceted public self occasionally clashed with each other.

Frozen in the Glassy, Bluestreaked Air

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alix Beeston
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Central Character ◽  
Male Gaze ◽  
Female Characters ◽  
Modern City ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
Female Bodies

This chapter interprets the serialized narration and characterization of John Dos Passos’s Manhattan Transfer (1925) in line with the figuring of female bodies through the photographic apparatus of advertisement and celebrity that was ancillary to popular Broadway entertainments in the early twentieth century. Unpacking the image of Ellen Thatcher, Dos Passos’s central character, as a photograph at the end of the multilinear novel, it accounts for Dos Passos’s critique of the patriarchal, white-centric specular economy of the modern city. The photographic freezing of the wealthy, white Ellen registers her imprisonment to the male gaze and her resistance to those who are ethnically and socially other to her. Yet by the additive construction of its female characters, Manhattan Transfer undercuts Ellen’s sense of her essentialized difference from the novel’s other women.

scholarly journals Characterization of foxing stains in early twentieth century photographic and paper materials

2016 ◽  
Vol 33 (7) ◽  
pp. 987-996 ◽  
Author(s):  
Aurora Modica ◽  
Maurizio Bruno ◽  
Marco Di Bella ◽  
Maria Francesca Alberghina ◽  
Maria Brai ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Early Twentieth Century

scholarly journals ATP emerged to induce protein folding, inhibit aggregation and increase stability

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jian Kang ◽  
Liangzhong Lim ◽  
Jianxing Song
Keyword(s):  
Protein Folding ◽  
Small Molecules ◽  
Origin Of Life ◽  
Protein Homeostasis ◽  
Nmr Characterization ◽  
General Capacity ◽  
The Origin Of Life ◽  
First Time ◽  
Control Protein

AbstractBy NMR characterization of effects of ATP and related molecules on the folding and dynamics of the ALS-causing C71G-PFN1 and nascent hSOD1, we reveal for the first time that ATP has a general capacity in inducing protein folding with the highest efficiency known so far. This capacity was further identified to result from triphosphate, a key intermediate in prebiotic chemistry, which, however, can severely trigger protein aggregation. Remarkably, by joining adenosine and triphosphate together, ATP integrates three abilities to simultaneously induce protein folding, inhibit aggregation and increase thermodynamic stability. Our study implies that the emergence of ATP might represent an irreplaceable step essential for the Origin of Life, and decrypts a principle for engineering small molecules with three functions to treat aggregation-associated ageing and diseases.One sentence summaryBy joining adenosine and triphosphate, ATP integrates three abilities to control protein homeostasis for the Origin of Life.

scholarly journals Questions and Answers Related to the Prebiotic Production of Oligonucleotide Sequences from 3′,5′ Cyclic Nucleotide Precursors

Life ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 11 (8) ◽  
pp. 800
Author(s):  
Judit E. Šponer ◽  
Jiří Šponer ◽  
Aleš Kovařík ◽  
Ondrej Šedo ◽  
Zbyněk Zdráhal ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Origin Of Life ◽  
Cyclic Nucleotides ◽  
Cyclic Nucleotide ◽  
Prebiotic Chemistry ◽  
Current Review ◽  
Questions And Answers ◽  
Template Free ◽  
The Origin Of Life ◽  
Geological Context

Template-free nonenzymatic polymerization of 3′,5′ cyclic nucleotides is an emerging topic of the origin of life research. In the last ten years, a number of papers have been published addressing various aspects of this process. These works evoked a vivid discussion among scientists working in the field of prebiotic chemistry. The aim of the current review is to answer the most frequently raised questions related to the detection and characterization of oligomeric products as well as to the geological context of this chemistry.

scholarly journals Spectroscopic Characterization of Key Aromatic and Heterocyclic Molecules: A Route toward the Origin of Life

2017 ◽  
Vol 154 (3) ◽  
pp. 82 ◽  
Author(s):  
Cristina Puzzarini ◽  
Alberto Baiardi ◽  
Julien Bloino ◽  
Vincenzo Barone ◽  
Thomas E. Murphy ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Origin Of Life ◽  
Spectroscopic Characterization ◽  
Heterocyclic Molecules ◽  
The Origin Of Life

scholarly journals The origin of life

1988 ◽  
Vol 7 (1) ◽  
pp. 33-37
Author(s):  
W. Van Hoven
Keyword(s):  
Amino Acids ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Origin Of Life ◽  
Organic Compounds ◽  
Big Bang ◽  
Natural Process ◽  
Primitive Earth ◽  
The Origin Of Life ◽  
Life On Earth ◽  
The Big Bang

For many centuries scientists have been debating the question of how life on earth originated. With the increase in knowledge and technology in the twentieth century, realistic explanations are around with regard to the nature of life and its origin. One thought is that life has always existed, while a thought which is discussed deals with life originating as a slow and natural process following the big bang. Long after the big bang primitive earth formed, followed by the formation of prebiotic organic compounds. As these compounds became more concentrated they reacted spontaneously into elementary precursors of life such as amino acids and proteins.

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