Cyrus Mody

congrats btw to Glen Morgan & Chris Carter not only for this entirely justified celebration/bashing of Philadelphia but also for mildly dissing Theosophy in two episodes in a row. two of my niche interests intersecting at last!

Google Ngram for "sociology of scientific knowledge" - rapid increase 1965ish to ~1997, only gradual fall-off ever since.

attn: @sallywyatt.bsky.social - SSK not dead yet (though it's best years are probably behind it)

De l’art difficile de reproduire des expériences scientifiques Des chercheurs ont tenté de répliquer une expérimentation menée par une équipe chinoise. Mais ils ne sont même pas parvenus à franchir la première étape et ont décelé des anomalies dans l’article de l...

📰 David Larousserie reports for Le Monde on the NanoBubbles replication project

Read in 🇫🇷 www.lemonde.fr/sciences/art...

@raphavisses.bsky.social @erc.europa.eu @univ-spn.bsky.social

Mulder & Scully facing the camera, Mulder saying "It wouldn't be Philadelphia without a certain degree..."

same; Mulder continues "of confrontation, right?"

one for @icpetrie.bsky.social & @inquiline.myatproto.social (& any other brotherly lovers on here)

How to establish whether a disputed claim is true or false? Publication of the results of our first replication and call for others to replicate our work How to establish whether a disputed claim is true or false? This is one of the questions at the centre of the ERC Synergy project NanoBubbles, which studies the barriers to the correction of science. We focus on a controversy in bionanoscience: there are hundreds of scientific articles that report the specific detection of molecules or ions inside cells with nanoparticle probes, yet, when they enter cells, nanoparticles are largely sequestered in specific compartments where they cannot reach the target that they are supposed to detect.

How to establish whether a disputed claim is true or false? Publication of the results of our first replication and call for others to replicate our work

How to establish whether a disputed claim is true or false? This is one of the questions at the centre of the ERC Synergy project NanoBubbles,…

Deadline has been extended to 23 March!
Send us your 🫧 and 🤖 abstracts.

often it's not clear even after you read the book itself

ngram for "chemical engineering" rising from nil ~1900 gradually to a peak in the late '50s then tumbling in the '60s and slowly petering out ever since

"the American century"

ngram for biotechnology, starting from nil around 1970, skyrocketing in the 1980s, and then very slowly declining to stabilize at half-peak around 2015

now tell me about neoliberalism 🤑

Google ngram for "materials science" starting from nil in 1950 and peaking in 1990 before falling to a bit over half of its peak in the 2000s

grampa, tell me about the Cold War

ofc, the Google corpus isn't really fit for this purpose, so my @nanobubbles.bsky.social colleague Yagmur Ozturk is working on a similar approach but w/ corpora tunable to specific scientific fields. so we should have more refined ngrams to share soon!

ngrams for piconewton and "single molecule biophysics" (the latter times 10) overlaid, both peaking a little before 2010 then falling off

the two terms do track, more or less. I would expect some artifactual drop-off in very recent times (it takes a while for books to get into the corpus), but the peaks are nearly 20 years ago so maybe there's more to it.

do you think the decline in the ngram after 2010 is real or an artifact of the Google corpus? i.e., have people really moved away from doing that kind of molecular pulling or is the activity still there but maybe the terminology has shifted?

ngram for micronewton & piconewton: former has a small bump in the early '70s then a higher one peaking ~2000, immediately followed by a similar peak for nanonewton peaking ~2010

same, but now also with ngram for piconewton - about double the height of the peak of the other two, again peaking ~2010

these two are also weird, right? should piconewtons really be so much more popular then micro- and nanonewtons?

mmm, pi-co-newtonssss.

google ngram for microseconds: rising gradually to 1960, then steadily declining ever since

ngram for nanosecond: sharp rise in the late 1960s and holding steady ever since

ngram for picosecond: relatively sharp rise and fall, peaking in the late '80s

ngram for femtosecond: sharpish rise (with a hump) peaking ~2005, then a fall back to the hump and plateauing at about 1/2 peak

anyone care to explain these? apparently microseconds are old hat, pico- and femtoseconds are a (pun intended) flash in the pan, but nanoseconds are forever, baby

Joint AMC-MUSTS Colloquium | 4 March

Reflections from inside the TAIM Lab (ICAI ROBUST): #interdisciplinary collaboration, industry partnerships, #SDGs, and what “trustworthy #AI” means in practice.

With Daniella Pauly Jensen, @posteurope.bsky.social, @anniric.bsky.social & @sallywyatt.bsky.social

u notice something similar w/ the media. PhD candidates like @michielbron.bsky.social & even MA students I've supervised have published national op-eds & been interviewed by major outlets. even I - generally no limelight-seeker - have found it easy to connect in ways I never could w/ big US papers.

I mean, Rianne is/was my boss - it's not like we hang out. But still, the contrast w/ the current US cabinet - not people I would know, certainly not people I would want to know - is striking!

Rob Jetten's team: Who is who in the new Dutch cabinet - DutchNews.nl The new look Dutch government was sworn in on Monday, featuring 15 men and 13 women, with seven D66 ministers, six from the VVD and five from the CDA. After the swearing in ceremony, the 18 full minis...

people sometimes ask what differences b/t EU & US life/academia I've noticed but the most salient haven't been big country v. continent but rather big v. little country. e.g., one morning you wake up & someone you're on a first-name basis w/ is a cabinet minister!

www.dutchnews.nl/2026/02/rob-...

are they really the color of freshly spilt arterial blood? because if not, then you're fine.

"Historians of science interested in the 1980s [...] can profitably learn from one another by comparing how scientists of different stripes moved through the greedy waters they swam in."

Joseph Martin's review of Greedy Science: link.springer.com/article/10.1...

finally, I - as regular readers of this microblog could have guessed - will argue that early STS in the US (& in certain places in the UK & NL) was awash in oil money, much of it funneled through individual, family & corporate oil philanthropies.

& Paola will compare the cases of two women life scientists in the US & Canada who contested their discipline's norms & practices, partly in conversation w/ early STS, one as a somewhat established insider & one as a more unsettled outsider...

From Politics to Academics: Political Activism and the Emergence of Science and Technology Studies in South Korea Science and technology studies (STS) is now a mature field in many countries, and it is important to understand its historical and political roots in a wide variety of national contexts. The presen...

at any rate, hope to see you there! Friedrich will discuss notions of "application" & "creativity" in GDR science studies; @mnoel75.bsky.social will elaborate on her study 👇 (w/ Mathieu Quet) of the transition from pro-democracy activism to STS in the ROK...

www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....

we didn't manage to include contributions on STS in Latin America or Africa this time around - but that means we're hoping that this session will evolve into a longer-term conversation about STS's many histories...

nor is our panel comprehensive, especially geographically. Friedrich will talk ab/ science studies in the socialist bloc (esp. the GDR), @mnoel75.bsky.social the origins of STS in South Korea, and Paola & I will look at the North American context (I also have a Maastricht local history angle)...

Science as Culture From Radical Science to STS Guest Editors: Peter J. Taylor and Karin Patzke. Volume 30, Issue 1 of Science as Culture

picks up threads from @danishanley.bsky.social's dissertation & work such as Karin Patzke & the late Peter J. Taylor's 2021 special issue of Science as Culture...

www.tandfonline.com/toc/csac20/3...

w/ HSS taking place in the home of the strong program & several leading STS programs at or beyond the half-century mark, this meeting offers a great opportunity to talk ab/ the history of STS. not that we're the first to do so - I'm particularly inspired by Elena Aronova's work and this session...

vy happy that our @historyscience.bsky.social session "Contested Science (and Technology Studies): Histories of STS and Its Forerunners, Interlocutors, Competitors, Targets, and Patrons" has been accepted. "our" here is @mnoel75.bsky.social, Paola Altomonte, Friedrich Cain & me...

really happy to see this in print & looking forward to delving further into the Marstrand-Strongs & their circle.

tagging @patrickmccray.bsky.social (for the New Alchemists) @danishanley.bsky.social (for the Lindisfarne Association) & @nichecanada.bsky.social (for Strong).