Medicine has long framed race relations in the Caribbean-that basin where African and European cultures have met from the beginning of the Colonial Period to the twentieth century. Whether Sir Hans Sloane, founder of the British Museum and President of the Royal Society of London, who as a physician wrote about African medical beliefs and…[Read more]

En 1974 la administración del Partido Popular bajo el gobernador Rafael Hernández Colon adquirió exitosamente la Puerto Rico Telephone Company (PRTC), cuyo dueño previo había sido el conglomerado International Telephone and Telegraph (ITT.). El estudio busca entender las causas y consecuencias de lo que se consideró ser un cambio monumental en la…[Read more]

Gonzalo Fernós Maldonado (1887-1966) fue uno de los arquitectos más destacados en Puerto Rico durante las primeras dïcadas del siglo XX, cuyos logros y habilidades lamentablemente han quedado en el olvido colectivo. Este libro, escrito por su nieto, trata de resucitar la historia de su vida en un momento histórico muy diferente al con…[Read more]

The Pan-American Scientific Congresses ushered a new scientific era in Latin America. Bringing together scientists, engineers, and medical researchers from both South and North America, they facilitated the exchange of ideas between the two regions at the beginning of the twentieth century. Nobel Prize thinkers such as Albert Michelson and others,…[Read more]

Science and democracy are two of the most cherished values of Western Civilization, so much so that they are often associated with each other. With science, it is held, comes democracy. But, will democracy necessarily blossom with the seed of science? Inversely, does the collapse of the Arecibo Observatory on December 1, 2020 represent a predictor…[Read more]

When the same $9 billion allocated to a nation’s annual budget (Puerto Rico 2015) is spent on a single scientific instrument (Hubble telescope) or to administer a single scientific facility for a year (CERN), we might presume that science is today a monolithic enterprise, akin to what the pyramids of Ancient Egypt had been in their day. Yet when…[Read more]

Los Congresos Científicos Pan-Americanos abrieron una nueva época de intercambio científico no solamente dentro de los pa?ses de América Latina sino entre estos y los Estados Unidos. Figuras importantes como Albert. A. Michelson, ganador del Premio Nobel en 1907, regularmente atendieron estas conferencias, así ayudando a difundir los últimos avanc…[Read more]

Biology and Ethics provides a historian’s perspective of the attempts to ground an ethics within a biological framework. Aside from its analysis of schools as social Darwinism, eugenics, and sociobiology, it attempts to evaluate their veracity using cases as Japan’s Unit 731, the Guatemala Syphilis study, and others. In spite of the much disputed…[Read more]

By taking water as a viewpoint, this dissertation reveals that the urban communities of seventeenth-century Holland were highly subsidiary in nature. Individual townspeople, men and women alike, knew how to fend for themselves, incidentally having recourse to other inhabitants, businessmen, corporations or magistrates. Together, they constituted a…[Read more]

Two art exhibitions, “Training Humans” and “Making Faces,” and the accompanying essay “Excavating AI: The politics of images in machine learning training sets” by Kate Crawford and Trevor Paglen, are making substantial impact on discourse taking place in the social and mass media networks, and some scholarly circles. Critical scrutiny reveals,…[Read more]

The contribution of women to the development of societies and medicine around the world cannot be overstated. Their contribution to medicine is great; this is seen, in particular, in their role among other physicians, obstetricians, nurses, herbalists, and assistant physicians. Despite the significant contribution of women to medicine and health…[Read more]

Literary journalism offers an important way for explaining the complexity of the scientific world to a lay audience. An analysis of two of Richard Preston’s pieces published by The New Yorker, “The Mountains of Pi” and “Capturing the Unicorn” and how they give emphasize science-in-the-making.

Karen Barad’s Meeting the Universe Halfway relies on mutually incompatible grounding gestures, one of which describes the relationality of an always already material-discursive reality, while the other seeks to ground this relation one-sidedly in matter. These two materialisms derive from the gesture she borrows from the New Materialist (and o…[Read more]

NASA’s Viking probes were launched in 1975. Six years earlier an International Planetary Patrol Network of telescopes was set up to observe Martian surface conditions. Sites were chosen to provide continuous observing, and were located in Hawaii, eastern Australia, India, South Africa, Chile, and central USA. Negotiations for a facility to be s…[Read more]

The government of Ghana from the 1990s has tried a lot of policies to finance healthcare in Ghana. Different policies were introduced by different governments until 2003 when President John Agyekum Kuffour introduced the National Health Insurance Scheme (NHIS). The study was carried out to find out the impact of NHIS on maternal healthcare at the…[Read more]

In this presentation, I investigate claims that publishers add little value to scholarly communication by asking about those parts of publishing overlooked when the focus is exclusively on content. Evaluating a study by Martin Klein, Peter Broadwell, Sharon Farb, and Todd Grappone, I not only point to problems with its assumptions about value,…[Read more]

Literature on traditional medicine in Africa is diverse and broad but most are country based, regional based or time based. There is the need for a systematic review that focuses on the nature of traditional medicine and its healers, the impact of the changing society on traditional medicine, and an analysis of same based on scholarly literature.…[Read more]

The literature on the history of electricity production have studied the evolution of electricity in both developed and developing countries and its impact on their economies. Some have laid foundations upon which other works are carried out. A close examination of historiography and multidisciplinary research on electricity production in Ghana…[Read more]

A set of about 70 fresco samples made with pigments and binders typical of the Renaissance period in Rome has been characterized by LIBS, LIF and colorimetric measurements in order to build an as much as possible complete database. Aiming at providing the restorers and art historians with a useful tool for the study of ancient frescoes, the…[Read more]