Robert Luke Naylor

The University of Manchester · Centre for the History of Science, Technology and Medicine (CHSTM)

Argument During the first half of the 1970s, climate research gained a new significance and began to be perceived within political and academic circles as being worthy of public support. Conventional explanations for this increased status include a series of climate anomalies that generated awareness and heightened concern over the potentially deva...

This article contributes towards scholarship on teaching environmental history by analysing a series (Chernobyl, 2019) and film (Dark Waters, 2019). It argues that the immediacy of such media offer an ideal entry point into environmental history and history of science for students first studying those subjects. As well, it provides a model for how...

The boundaries and intersections between physics and philosophy remain contested, both within academia and among wider publics. To understand these contentions and to work toward resolving them, it is important to ask how we arrived at a place where a considerable proportion of the physics community rejects philosophy and those who practice it. Is...

The social contributors to the formation of expertise are often a taboo subject when practitioner communities interact with outsiders, making the exploration of these inputs a difficult endeavour. When exploring scientific communities, one resource that many STS and HSTM scholars can draw from is their personal experience as students of science – e...

The famine in the Western Sahel that made international headlines in the early 1970s was one of the first major post-colonial disasters, and set the tone for Western engagement in the region throughout the following decades. It was also one of the earliest events that was decisively linked with narratives of global climatic change, helping to prope...

Reid Allen Bryson (1920–2008) was a forceful orator who consistently fought against institutional pressures to get his messages out to the public. In the 1960s, Bryson was a leader in the wider academic turn toward politically charged interdisciplinarianism. To the dismay of many of his colleagues, he publicly made climatological prognoses in the 1...

The infection pattern of a mountain pine beetle (MPB) epidemic in the Black Hills National Forest (BHNF) was extracted from National Agriculture Imagery Program (NAIP) aerial photography data via the application of pixel colour analysis and texture functions. From initial analysis, local percolation clusters were identified. Epidemic simulations we...