The Squire Who Taught Darwin Everything

He rode a caiman like a horse. He climbed St. Peter's Basilica to leave a glove on top, then climbed back up to fetch it when the Pope demanded its removal. He dangled his bare foot from a hammock so vampire bats could feed on his toes.

https://oddlet.com/p/zrl

#HistSci #history #SciComm

Yesterday, we started fully disassembling the 16th century clock 🕰️. After three hours, we were at about 45 components, and we're nowhere near done yet 🤯
Christ on a cracker... just when you thought you could not have more respect for #EarlyModern craftspeople #HistSci #HistSTM 🗃️ 🏛️ #MaterialCulture

Galileo forbade one of his students from publishing a letter the student wrote.

He outlines this in his 1604 "Difesa contro alle calunnie et imposture di Baldessar Capra" [trans De Angelis, Galileo and the 1604 Supernova pp. 61-69]

...

🧪🏛️🔬🔭 #HistSci

#SkyStorians, art historians and historians of science: Is anyone familiar with or specialized in decorative engravings on #EarlyModern scientific instruments, especially clocks? We have questions with respect to the dating! #HistSci #HistTech #ArtHistory #HistSTM #MaterialCulture 🗃️ 🏛️

Flyer image for our symposium’s second workshop, titled, "Madness as a Way of Seeing - An Experimental Study of Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s The Yellow Wallpaper” and happening on April 18th from 10-11:30a PT 1-2:30p ET 6-7:30 GMT. The description reads, "fACILITATED BY CARA-JULIE KATHER, PHD (Leuphana University Lüneburg), Independent Scholar, THIS WORKSHOP ASKS “What is seen, heard, AND experienced in modes routinely understood as mad? What do we find out when we engage with madness as a way of perceiving?” In this workshop we experiment on this matter together by engaging with reading and writing collectively. The short story - The Yellow Wallpaper by Charlotte Perkins Gilman – will guide and inspire us as it is a story of a “woman gone mad” dating back to the patriarchal diagnosis of ‘hysteria’ common in the Victorian era. We will read parts of this story and let it wash us into our own writing on mad seeing."

Full Day 2 Symposium Schedule flyer. You can view this on our eventbrite registration site and our conference website, linked in previous posts.

✍🏾💛 Day 2 Workshop Announcement! This one’s for all you medical/health and experimental humanities folks. 💛✍🏾

"Madness as a Way of Seeing: An Experimental Study of Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s The Yellow Wallpaper"

🍏🧠 🛟 🩺 🧪😷 🌈🎓 ‍🌈 🏳️‍⚧️ 🩺📊 🖋️📚
#FeministSky
#LGBTQIA+
#PhilSci
#HistSci
#LiteratureSky

Esp in #histstm #histsci #envhist

The Woman Who Rewrote French Opera With a Sword at Her Hip

She burned down a convent, defeated three duels at a single party, and earned two royal pardons before anyone thought to check the law. A composer eventually built an entirely new vocal category around her voice.

https://oddlet.com/p/7se

#HistSci #history #SciComm

Maria Sibylla Merian:17th Century Artist, Entomologist, Explorer and Proto-Ecologist! Biological classification took a while to figure itself out. For centuries, it was a mish-mash of Aristotelian sentiments and cabinets of Unnatural Curiosities whose only organizing principle was a R...

Maria Merian was born 379 ago today. An entomologist who founded the ecological approach to taxonomy, she traveled by herself to Surinam in 1599 to document the insect life there, then published her findings with her own lush illustrations.

tinyurl.com/2pknyx6n

#WomenInSTEM #HistSci #BugSky 🐛🌱

16th century Iron gall ink on paper, top corner of legal proceedings with a brown stain that follows the edges of the written words

16th century Iron gall ink on paper, top corner of legal proceedings with a brown stain that follows the edges of the written words

structural formula of iron gall ink

Look at how pretty this manuscript damage is. Any cross disciplinary scholars want to explain why iron gall ink would repel (water? who knows) in this way? A chemistry friend of a friend provided the structural formula. #earlymodern #skystorians #histsci

Portrait of Henry Stuart c. 1610

Henry Frederick Stuart (1594–1612) eldest son of James VI of Scotland, I of England & Anne of Denmark, heir apparent to the thrones of Scotland & England engaged several of the leading mathematical practitioners of the age at his court as tutors #histsci
thonyc.wordpress.com/2026/04/02/t...

Linocut portrait of Maria Sibylla Merian in gradient of green to brown with pomegranate branch, caterpillar and butterflies

Happy birthday #entomologist & scientific illustrator Maria Sibylla Merian (1647-1717)! 🧪👩🏼‍🔬🐡🦋 #histsci Her stepdad Jacob Marrel & students trained her as an artist. She began painting insects & plants by 13. She wrote, “I spent my time investigating insects. [...] I realized that other caterpillars 🧵

Teaching Animal Mobilities Animals in history moved through landscapes, cultures, and systems of power. Our adaptable teaching modules bring the dynamic lives of animals into classroom conversations. Primary visual sources enco...

New #OpenAccess educational resource: "Teaching Animal Mobilities: (How to) Move Animals into Your Classroom" 🐛🪼 🐘
Modules include historical sources, discussion questions, assignment ideas, and readings to explore key themes in animal mobility.

🔗 animalmobilities.org

#HistSci #AnimalMobilities

Refraction, refrangibility, diffraction or inflexion Over at Skull in the Stars gg has written another one of his excellent articles on 19th century optics. This time the object of his scrutiny is the Talbot effect a consequence of diffraction that w…

Diffraction was first investigated and described by the Jesuit astronomer, mathematician and physicist Francesco Maria Grimaldi, who was born 2 April 1618 #histsci

thonyc.wordpress.com/2010/03/14/r...

100th speaker! 🥳

Come join the S&T in Asia online seminar series @ Harvard for this talk by Michitake Aso on Agent Orange and dioxin knowledge in postwar Vietnam.

🗓 Tue (4/14)
🕥 10:30 am ET
📍 Over Zoom

Register: seow.scholars.harvard.edu/STinAsia%E2%...

#histstm #envhist #histmed #histsci

Exclusive Viewing: The Great Instauration - Edinburgh Science For the 2026 Edinburgh Science Festival artist Gayle Chong Kwan has created a new art installation, The Great Instauration, hosted in the Grand Gallery of the National Museum of Scotland.

NMS @ntlmuseumsscot.bsky.social is hosting a new art installation for the Edinburgh Science Festival, called The Great Instauration (a familiar title for #histsci). I'll be taking part in a discussion with the artist, Gayle Chong Kwan on Saturday evening www.edinburghscience.co.uk/event/exclus...

Making invalidity fair: schizophrenia, medical uncertainty and the certification of war disability pensions in post-war Britain | BJHS Themes | Cambridge Core Making invalidity fair: schizophrenia, medical uncertainty and the certification of war disability pensions in post-war Britain

I used archival case files to reconstruct histories of psychotic veterans denied disability pensions in post-WWII Britain; I argue that the idea of stress-induced schizophrenia, popularized later by anti-psychiatry, emerged in tribunals as part of a liberal critique of technocracy. #histmed #histsci

First @jhokjournal.bsky.social
article of 2026 by Anne Eriksen!

#histknow #histsci #envhist

Sophie Germain – A Life Between Numbers and Freedom 1880 illustration of a young Sophie Germain (circa 1790)                                                                    We know that wom...

Sophie Germain, born on 1st April 1776 in Paris, made important contributions to the field of #Mathematics, in particular to number theory and the applied mathematics of acoustics and elasticity.

My post➡️ www.lanostra-matematica.org/2025/04/soph...

🧪 ⚛️ #histsci #WomenInStem #histmaths #mathsky 1/4

The Man Who Laughed at Everything

He figured out that all matter is made of tiny indivisible particles moving through empty space. No lab, no instruments — just thinking. His neighbors thought he was insane and called a doctor. The doctor sided with him.

https://oddlet.com/p/9mw

#HistSci #history #SciComm

01-Apr-1832: Darwin falls for an old tradition April Fools’ Day aboard HMS Beagle, 1832.

01-Apr: (This is not a trick!) On this day in 1832, Charles Darwin fell for a pretty pathetic April Fools’ Day trick courtesy of his HMS Beagle shipmates…
#HistSci

Linocut of Sophie Germain (a young woman in with a collar with bow, under a dark dress, with a ribbon tied around her neck, long hair with centre part, half tied up with a ribbon in her hair). She is printed in dark blue with her own words about Fermat's Last Theorem in her own script carved into her hair and dress). Behind her in lavender is a grid of Chladni figures.

Happy birthday to French mathematician, physicist and philosopher Marie-Sophie Germain (1776 – 1831), known as Sophie. 🧪🧵👩🏼‍🔬🧮 #histsci She taught herself mathematics using books in her father’s library and by corresponding with leading mathematicians of her day, including Lagrange, Legendre and Gauss,

Black-and-white photo of a woman seated in an early spacecraft simulator. She wears a padded flight helmet with a microphone and a vest-like harness. She also holds two control sticks, one in each hand while sitting inside a boxy metal cockpit frame. A complex arrangement of exposed mechanical parts, wiring, and tubing extends in front of her, supported by a skeletal metal structure. Another person is faintly visible in the dark background at lower right. NASA GRC-1960-C-53088

Geraldyn “Jerrie” Cobb (1931-2019)
top 2% of ALL candidates on Mercury program screening tests
7k flying hours
1st woman to fly #ParisAirShow
ferried military aircraft in WWII
3 world #aviation records
#NASA told her men only

#WomeninSTEM #astronaut #histsci #spaceflight #WomensHistoryMonth 🍎#pilot

Here’s NASA’s big SLS rocket with the Orion capsule on top, ready at Kennedy Space Center. You see the orange middle part between the white boosters against a perfect blue sky. Taken March 30, 2026. Credit: NASA/Bill Ingalls

🧵1/9
Everything is ready for #ArtemisII test flight — we're nearing the starting line.🔭 🧪 ⚛️

The countdown is underway at the Kennedy Space Center. It started ticking down yesterday at 4:44 p.m. EDT to a targeted launch time of 6:24 p.m. on April 1.

➡️ www.nasa.gov/blogs/missio...

#histsci #Moon

Start listening now: www.ghil.ac.uk/publi...

#environmentalhistory #historyofscience #histsci #naturalhistory #skystorians
5/5

3/3
...his lifetime because news about the condemnation of Galileo reached him.

He was one of the first to oppose scholastic Aristotelianism, by methodically doubting knowledge based on authority.

His most famous quote is: “I think, therefore I am.”

🧪 #histsci #histmaths

2/3
In "La Géométrie" (from which we today have Cartesian Geometry), Descartes utilized the discoveries he made with Pierre de Fermat.

He decided not to publish his first major treatise on physics- "Le Monde, ou Traité de la Lumière"- during...⤵️

🧪 #histsci #histmaths

Portrait of René Descartes (1596-1650): he wears a dark suit with a large white collar, has hair that touches his shoulders and an austere expression. Public Domain Source: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Frans_Hals_-_Portret_van_Ren%C3%A9_Descartes.jpg

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31 March 1596: René Descartes, considered one of the main founders of modern #mathematics and #philosophy, was born.

"I would give away everything I know for half of what I ignore"
(R. Descartes)

A biography➡️ mathshistory.st-andrews.ac.uk/Biographies/...

🧪 #histsci #histmaths

« Place aux femmes ! Les premières femmes médecins » – Journée d’étude le 3 avril Dans le cadre de la nouvelle exposition « Place aux femmes ! Les premières femmes médecins » à découvrir prochainement, la BU Grands Moulins organise le 3 avril 2026 une journée d’étude consacrée à l’histoire de ces pionnières, ayant conquis un métier longtemps fermé aux femmes, et dont les parcours sont restés largement invisibilisés. _Publié le 4 mars 2026_ **« Place aux femmes ! Les premières femmes médecins »** Vendredi 3 avril 2026 © Carte postale humoristique appartenant à une série autour des étudiantes en médecine], Collection G. I. D., Nantes, Sd. Numerabilis – BIU Santé Médecine – Université Paris Cité À l’occasion de l’exposition « Place aux femmes ! Les premières femmes médecins » à découvrir prochainement à la BU Grands Moulins, faisons le point sur cette thématique. **En effet, depuis une trentaine d’années, médecins, sociologues, historiennes et historiens ont œuvré pour sortir ces pionnières de l’oubli et mieux les faire connaître.** Qui étaient-elles ? Quels ont été leurs combats ? Pourquoi les premières femmes médecins ont-elles durablement servi de modèle aux femmes désireuses de s’émanciper ? Les intervenantes et intervenants de cette journée d’étude permettront de faire découvrir les multiples parcours et héritages de ces femmes médecins, **en croisant les approches disciplinaires et les perspectives.** Inscription ##### Programme de la journée #### **Matin (9h30 à 12h)** * 9h30 : Accueil * 9h50 à 10h : Mot de bienvenue _**> Session 1 – Études et vie professionnelle**_ * 10h à 10h40 : La femme médecin : sa raison d’être au point de vue du droit de la morale et de l’humanité (Augustine Girault, 1868) : état des lieux d’un débat à la veille de l’accès des femmes au doctorat en médecine – **Nathalie Sage-Pranchère** , Laboratoire SPHERE, CNRS * 10h40 à 11h20 : Être femme et médecin au quotidien : des premières au tournant de la Première Guerre mondiale – **Amélie Puche** , post-doctorante, Institut des humanités en médecine (CHUV-UNIL) * 11h20 à 12h : Médecin et malvoyante : Melania Lipińska (1865-1933), un parcours de résilience, international et atypique – **Aude Fauvel** , professeure associée, Institut des humanités en médecine (CHUV-UNIL) _12h à 13h30 – Pause déjeuner_ #### **Après-midi (13h30 à 18h)** _**> Session 2 – Le genre « doctoresse » questionné**_ * 13h30 à 14h10 – La “nature féminine” comme argument : débats autour de la femme médecin – **Natalie Pigeard-Micault** , Musée Curie-CNRS * 14h10 à 14h50 – De savantes étrangères, fascinantes et inquiétantes : genre et « slavité » dans la réception des étudiantes et docteures en médecine de l’Empire russe à Paris (1868-1914) – **Juliette Louvegny** , Université de Namur, Aspirante F.R.S.-FNRS * 14h50 à 15h30 – Quand les hommes riaient des docteurs en jupons – **Agnès Sandras** , Université Paris Cité, Direction Générale Déléguée aux Bibliothèques et Musées (DGDBM), Pôle Patrimoine, culture et rayonnement scientifiques (PCRS) _15h30 à 16h – Pause_ _**> Session 3 – Portraits de femmes médecins**_ * 16h à 16h40 – Caroline Schultze, médecin aux PTT jusqu’à l’épuisement – **Mikhaël Moreau** , doctorant, IHM (CHUV-UNIL) * 16h40 à 17h20 – Marthe Francillon-Lobre (1873-1956), première interne française : entre parcours prestigieux et héritage discret – **Alix Vogel** , doctorante, IP (UNIL) * 17h20 à 18h – Madeleine Pelletier et Constance Pascal. Les deux premières internes des asiles de la Seine – **Pierrette Caire Dieu** , psychiatre _Chaque intervention comprend un temps d’échange avec le public._ ##### Comité scientifique * **Amélie Puche** , post-doctorante, Institut des humanités en médecine (CHUV-UNIL) ; * **Agnès Sandras** , commissaire générale de l’exposition (Université Paris Cité). ##### Organisation * **Agnès Sandras** , commissaire générale de l’exposition – Université Paris Cité, DGDBM, Pôle PCRS ; * **Jeanne Nicolas** , chargée d’exposition – Université Paris Cité, DGDBM, Pôle PCRS. ### Informations pratiques > **« Place aux femmes ! Les premières femmes médecins »** – Journée d’étude > Vendredi 3 avril 2026 – 9h30 à 18h > Halle aux Farines, 10 | Salle 064E – 16 rue Françoise Dolto, 75013 Paris > _Rendez-vous devant la sculpture « Monochrome for Paris » sur le parvis du campus des Grands Moulins_ > **Gratuit sur inscription** ### Pour aller plus loin En parallèle de cet événement est organisée par la BU Jeanne-Chauvin**:** * **l’exposition « Places aux femmes : Les premières femmes avocats »**, à découvrir prochainement, dressant le portrait de femmes ayant lutté pour accéder au métier d’avocat, et ouvrant la voie malgré les obstacles juridiques et sociaux de l’époque. * **la table ronde de l’exposition, gratuite sur inscription** , où les intervenantes de l’événement reviendront sur l’éducation des femmes, levier central de leur émancipation, le parcours de Jeanne Chauvin et son accession à la profession, ainsi que la manière dont les femmes ont contribué à faire évoluer le droit. ## À lire aussi #### « L’accès des femmes au métier d’avocat » – Table ronde le 7 avril Evénements et culture À l’occasion de la nouvelle exposition « Place aux femmes ! Les premières femmes avocats » à découvrir prochainement, la BU Jeanne-Chauvin organise le 7 avril 2026 une table ronde consacrée à la question de l’accès des femmes à la profession d’avocat.... #### Nouveau service : demander la reproduction d’un article imprimé bibliothèques, Services en ligne Les bibliothèques de l’Université Paris Cité vous proposent désormais un service de reproduction d'articles : vous pouvez maintenant demander une copie d'article de revue imprimée, conservée dans les BU de l'université ! Publié le 31 mars 2026 © Lorem... #### Exposition « La folie selon les psys. Jusqu’au début des années 1960 » du 16 mars au 17 juillet à la BU Henri-Piéron Evénements et culture À l’occasion de la nouvelle édition de la Semaine du Cerveau, la BU Henri-Piéron propose une exposition consacrée à la notion de folie, à travers les regards psychiatrique, psychologique et psychanalytique. Présentée du 16 mars au 17 juillet 2026, elle... #### La BU Jeanne-Chauvin élargit exceptionnellement ses horaires les samedis Bibliothèques Sociétés et Humanités La BU Jeanne-Chauvin adapte ses horaires à vos besoins. Afin de vous accompagner au mieux dans la préparation de vos examens, la bibliothèque ouvrira en horaires élargis tous les samedis du 21 mars au 25 avril 2026 ! Publié le 3 mars 2026 À...

« Place aux femmes ! Les premières femmes médecins » –
Journée d’étude ce vendredi 3 avril
BU Grands moulins, 75013.
u-paris.fr/bibliotheques/journee-et... #histsci #histmed #womeninstem

Day 2 full schedule just dropped! This is free[dot]com, and you’ll get access to session recordings for a month afterward if you can’t attend in person.

Spread the word, invite your friends, and register today!

#AcademicSky
#PhDSky
🍏🧠 🛟 🩺 🧪😷 🌈🎓 ‍🌈 🏳️‍⚧️ 🩺📊
#MedSky
#Reprosky
#PhilSci
#HistSci