Defining friction and asking what causes it might seem like a trivial question. Friction seems simple enough to understand. Friction is a force between surfaces that pushes against things that are moving or tending to move, and the rougher the surfaces, the greater the friction. Bill Robertson answers this by saying, "Well, not exactly".…

The Congress for Cultural Freedom is remembered as a paramount example of the "cultural cold wars." In this paper, I discuss the ways in which this powerful transnational organization sought to promote "science studies" as a distinct--and politically relevant--area of expertise, and part of the CCF broader agenda to offer a renewed framework for…

Lead poisoning has been a problem since early history and continues into modern times. An appealing characteristic of lead is that many lead salts are sweet. In the absence of cane and beet sugars, early Romans used "sugar of lead" (lead acetate) to sweeten desserts, fruits, and sour wine. People most at risk would have been those who…

As is well known, the positron was discovered in August 1932 by Carl Anderson while studying cloud chamber tracks left by cosmic rays. Far less known is the fact that a few months before Anderson's discovery, in April 1932, Frederic Joliot and Irene Curie had missed an opportunity to discover the positron during a nuclear physics experiment. One…

Educators advocate that science education can help the development of more responsible worldviews when students learn not only scientific concepts, but also about science, or "nature of science". Cosmology can help the formation of worldviews because this topic is embedded in socio-cultural and religious issues. Indeed, during the Cold…

In histories of twentieth-century Darwinism few developments loom larger than the turn-of-the-century rediscovery of Gregor Mendel's genetic research and the later application of Mendelian principles in constructing so-called Neo-Darwinism. Virtually unknown is the equally enthusiastic embrace of Mendel by antievolutionists, who as early as…

Many students enroll in college general chemistry with an interest in a medical career. In those (and alternative) careers, they will need to make critical decisions about data and how that data are acquired. A significant portion of introductory lab experiments are, in principle, but not necessarily in practice, devoted to understanding how…

Background: Although teaching nature of science (NOS) has been continually emphasized in many major reform efforts in science education, researchers claim that students do not possess adequate views of NOS. Insufficient understanding of NOS can be associated with the ineffectiveness of curricular or instructional approaches. Consequently,…

This work is a systematic review of studies that investigate teaching experiences applying History and Philosophy of Science (HPS) in physics classrooms, with the aim of obtaining critical and reliable information on this subject. After a careful process of selection and exclusion of studies compiled from a variety of databases, an in-depth review…

I advance some novel arguments for the use of historical experiments in science education. After distinguishing three different types of historical experiments and their general purposes, I define "complementary experiments", which can recover lost scientific knowledge and extend what has been recovered. Complementary experiments can help science…

The worldwide decline in taxonomists has a broad impact on biology and society. Learning from general historical patterns of science and understanding social changes caused by growing economies, we propose changes in priorities for training taxonomists to reverse these losses. Academically trained professionals, parataxonomists (local assistants…

The leap from science student to scientist involves recognizing that science is a tentative, evolving body of knowledge that is socially constructed and culturally influenced; this is known as The Nature of Science (NOS). The aim of this study was to document NOS growth in first-year premedical students who participated in a science book club as a…

Science education researchers have long advocated the central role of the nature of science (NOS) for our understanding of scientific literacy. NOS is often interpreted narrowly to refer to a host of epistemological issues associated with the process of science and the limitations of scientific knowledge. Despite its importance, practitioners and…

In the early 1930s, the young Antoni Quintana-Mari undertook some research on Antoni de Marti i Franques, one of the most prominent Catalan scientists of the Enlightenment. This scientist worked in Tarragona, where Quintana-Mari lived. Quintana-Mari learnt about Marti i Franques from Josep Estalella, his teacher of physics and chemistry at the…

The historical development of the classical postulates of the second law of Thermodynamics can be traced back to the book by Sadi Carnot, "Reflections on the motive power of fire." While unique in its own right and in some sense revolutionary, the book starts with an analogy between heat engines and waterwheels. Waterwheels were common engines of…