Two BSHS online alternatives to conventional conferences.

In 2020, the BSHS hosted two major online events, the first of their kind in our collective experience. The first, a Twitter conference, was planned and accomplished before COVID-19 had quite been established as a serious global issue. The conference was planned, rather, as an innovation in travel-free conferencing, something that has been on the BSHS agenda since the IPCC report of 2018, calling for net-zero-carbon activity in all areas by 2050.

Innovation in a crisis: rethinking conferences and scholarship in a pandemic and climate emergency.

It is a cliché of self-help advice that there are no problems, only opportunities. The rationale and actions of the BSHS in creating its Global Digital History of Science Festival may be a rare genuine confirmation of this mantra. The global COVID-19 pandemic of 2020 meant that the society's usual annual conference - like everyone else's - had to be cancelled.

Plastic body, permanent body: Czech representations of corporeality in the early twentieth century.

In the early twentieth century, the body was seen as both an ontogenetic and a phylogenetic entity. In the former case, its individual development, it was manifestly changeable, developing from embryo to maturity and thence to a state of decay. But in the latter case, concerning its development as a species, the question was an open one.

Brave new worlds: trophallaxis and the origin of society in the early twentieth century.

Trophallaxis, the process of feeding by mutual regurgitation amongst insects, was named by the North American entomologist William Morton Wheeler in 1918. I argue that entomologists, both before and after 1918, saw mutual feeding as an integral part of the behavioral whole of the nest, and moreover related its explanatory power to theories about human society. In particular, feeding behavior was seen as the key to the riddle of the origin of sociality.