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Taking tuber sciences and their histories as a case study, this essay hinges on materiality, both as a condition shaping thing–human relations and as a vector for producing knowledge and ge...

The starting point of this essay is a short film of an optical effect, published in 1998 by the Institute for Scientific Film (Institut fur den Wissenschaftlichen Film [IWF]) as part of a s...

This essay investigates time-lapse cinematography as a hybrid, intermedial practice. To interrogate practices of authorship, publication, copying, storage, and especially distribution, it recovers the history of The Embryonic Development of Drosophila mela-nogaster, a film made by Eric Lucey at the University of Edinburgh in 1956. An unusually rich archive makes it possible to recover uses and reuses of time-lapse footage in research, teaching, and other forms of communication.

This essay reconstructs the origins of the film Bird-Song Contest with Chaffinches in the Western Harz Mountains (1991), a contribution to the eight-part series “Lower Saxonian Folklore Fil...

This essay traces the simultaneous development of two distinct efforts to unify the brain sciences in the twentieth century—one originating at the Montreal Neurological Institute (MNI) and ...

In his treatise On the Rainbow (De iride), composed nearly four hundred years before the first known telescope, the English polymath Robert Grosseteste identified three striking optical effects: distant objects can be rendered close by; close-by large objects can be rendered small; and distant small objects can be rendered large. In the context of the history of optics, the first effect is especially striking. Grosseteste did not give details of the mechanisms underlying these effects but did mention the passage of rays through refraction in “diaphanous” or transparent bodies. While making no final claim that Grosseteste himself necessarily knew of or used lenses, this essay examines the coherence between the three optical effects described in Grosseteste’s treatise and two candidate proposals for the deployment of a single convex lens. A convex lens, deployed in different ways, is shown to produce all three of Grosseteste’s optical effects, in a manner strikingly aligned with the language that he uses to distinguish changes in the location and size of objects. The implications of this coherence for interpretations of On the Rainbow are discussed throughout the essay.

The Leyden jar surprised natural philosophers when it was invented in 1746 because it showed the paradoxical behavior of glass. But similar experiments had been done before, such as those b...

Project Chariot, one of the first planned nuclear excavation experiments of the Atomic Energy Commission’s Plowshare program, touched off a controversy over its safety that drew in two prom...