Essay review: Why we fight about science.

The concept of 'science' occupies a distinctive place within our rhetorical inheritance. Tangential to science's actual practices and institutions, this rhetoric holds that science comprises an arsenal of techniques, or a pervasive mentality, that have broadly shaped and even defined modern society. Such notions have been the subject of more or less constant discussion for two or three centuries, with early critics of scientific thought targeting its links to the religious and political radicalism of the Enlightenment and the troubles of industrialization.

The Farm Hall Transcripts: The Smoking Gun That Wasn't.

Over 75 years after their creation, the Farm Hall transcripts remain a tantalizing source from the dawn of the atomic age in 1945. Declassified in 1992, the transcripts document ten prominent German nuclear physicists, including Werner Heisenberg, Carl Friedrich von Weizsäcker, and Otto Hahn, contemplating the Nazi defeat, their complicity in the German war machine, and - after the atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima - whether they truly intended to build a nuclear weapon for Adolf Hitler. As a written record of conversations, one might expect the transcripts to be the proverbial smoking gun that determines, once and for all, whether German physicists intended to build a nuclear weapon for the Nazi regime.

Computational Methods for Charge Density Waves in 2D Materials.

Two-dimensional (2D) materials that exhibit charge density waves (CDWs)-spontaneous reorganization of their electrons into a periodic modulation-have generated many research endeavors in the hopes of employing their exotic properties for various quantum-based technologies. Early investigations surrounding CDWs were mostly focused on bulk materials. However, applications for quantum devices require few-layer materials to fully utilize the emergent phenomena.

A Qualitative Comparative Analysis of the Drivers of HIV Status Knowledge in Orphans and Vulnerable Children in Mozambique.

In Mozambique, more than a million children are living with HIV or are otherwise vulnerable due to HIV. In response to this crisis, the US President's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief funds programs that serve orphans and vulnerable children affected by HIV and their families. These programs retain case workers, known as activistas, who provide and refer beneficiaries to services to increase beneficiaries' knowledge of their HIV status and to improve retention in care among those living with HIV.

A perspective from the history of scientific journals.

In their articles for this special issue on digital humanities, Jeremy Burman (2018) and Ivan Flis and Nees Jan van Eck (Flis & van Eck, 2018) examine how psychology journals can be used as sources for large-scale data sets that might illuminate the development of psychology as a research discipline. In my commentary, I seek to situate these two articles in a broader history of scientific publishing and offer further thoughts on the possibilities and pitfalls of data-based methods for the history of scientific publishing. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2018 APA, all rights reserved).

Resurrecting Maunder's ghost: John 'Jack' Eddy, the Maunder Minimum, and the rise of a dilettante astrophysicist.

During the 1970s, widespread scientific interest in the risks of climate change prompted John A. Eddy (1931-2009), an astrophysicist with the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, CO, to investigate whether sunspots could be used to predict future climate changes. Methodologically, Eddy's investigations were uniquely historical in nature.

The organization and description of science archives in America.

The creation of science archives, the historical study of modern science, and major changes in archival practice roughly coincided in the 1950s and 1960s. This has allowed science archives to respond to contemporary issues in the history of science. It has also allowed them to develop as an integral part of the revolution in archival practice since that time, adopting international archival standards that make science archives more accessible to researchers.

Rise of interdisciplinary research on climate.

Until the middle of the 20th century, the discipline of climatology was a stagnant field preoccupied with regional statistics. It had little to do with meteorology, which itself was predominantly a craft that paid scant attention to physical theory. The Second World War and Cold War promoted a rapid growth of meteorology, which some practitioners increasingly combined with physical science in hopes of understanding global climate dynamics.

Government science in postwar America: Henry A. Wallace, Edward U. Condon, and the transformation of the National Bureau of Standards, 1945-1951.

In the fall of 1945, Secretary of Commerce Henry Wallace handpicked Edward Condon, a respected theoretical physicist, to become director of the National Bureau of Standards. Already regarded by many academic and industrial scientists as a second-rate research institution, the Bureau had deteriorated further during the Great Depression. An ardent New Dealer who favored government action to prevent anticompetitive behavior in the marketplace, Wallace claimed that giant corporations leveraged their extensive patent holdings and research capabilities to manipulate markets and restrict competition at the expense of smaller firms without similar resources.