Natural History

"Plant fixity, perceived passivity, and resilient silence have relegated the vegetal world to the cultural background of human civilization. This book argues that the recent emergence of plants in the gallery space constitutes a wake-up-call to reappraise our relationship with plants at a time of deep ecological crisis. 'Why Look at Plants?' challenges readers’ pre-established notions through a diverse gathering of insights, stories, experiences, perspectives, and arguments encompassing multiple disciplines, media, and methodologies".

https://brill.com/view/title/33086

● NZ HERITAGE BOOK AWARD 2019
● Two KA PALAPALA PO'OKELA AWARDS 2019
● STORYLINES NOTABLE BOOK AWARD 2019
● Best of 2019 - Radio New Zealand National: 'absolutely one of the best books I have ever read'
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AUTHOR WEBSITE: https://authors.org.nz/author/andrewcrowe/
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Une forêt ? Un paysage charmant. Un corbeau ? Un sinistre présage. Une rose ? L’être aimé.
Le monde vivant est à la fois omniprésent dans notre culture et décidément absent. Car percevoir le vivant comme un décor, un symbole ou un support de nos émotions sont autant de manières de ne pas le voir. Et si nous apprenions à voir le vivant autrement ? Si nous entrions dans un monde réanimé, repeuplé par les points de vue d’autres êtres que nous ? Ce livre se propose d’équiper notre œil pour saisir le vivant autour de nous comme foisonnant d’histoires immémoriales, de relations invisibles et de significations insoupçonnées. Sur le chemin de cette métamorphose, nous avons pour guides celles et ceux qui ont passé leur vie à apprendre à voir le vivant dans son abondance de signes et de sens : des artistes-peintres et des femmes naturalistes du XIXème siècle anglais et américain. Le livre enquête sur leurs arts de l’attention, différents mais complémentaires, qui ont su tisser ensemble savoirs et sensibilité. À travers cette exploration, c’est une autre disponibilité au monde qui fait surface.
Chaque jour est une occasion inouïe et renouvelée d’apprendre à voir.

With the publication of an extended editorial titled 'Animal Studies and Art: Elephants in the Room' by Giovanni Aloi, Editor in Chief of 'Antennae', the journal embarks on a new and challenging year-long project constituting somewhat of a departure from the theoretical approaches of animal studies for the purpose of conceiving new productivities specific to art. This project is provocatively titled 'Beyond Animal Studies'.
At the end of March 2015 the publication of two installments dedicated to multispecies-Intra-action: new ways of thinking multispecies aesthetics through Karen Barad’s agential realism (co-edited with artist/curator Madeleine Boyd) will mark the beginning of this journey. This first offering will be followed by an issue edited by artists and theorists Suzanne Anker and Sabine Flach focusing on the proceedings of an exciting conference dedicated to bioart titled 'Naturally Hypernatural' that took place in New York (November 2014). The last segment of this publishing project will comprise two issues on art and environment that will be made available in December 2015 and March 2016.
'Animal Studies and Art: Elephants in the Room’ is the developed and expanded version of the keynote address Giovanni Aloi gave at the University of Wurzburg in autumn 2014. Its content stems from a genuine sense of concern with regards to current affairs in animal studies, its involvement with contemporary art, and the challenges scholars and artists face in engaging with multidisciplinarity within this context.

Alpha & Omega: Tales of Transformation.
The twenty-four letters of the Greek alphabet introduce twenty-four stories of transformation and metamorphosis from Greek and Roman history and mythology. Each story is illustrated with one or more object from across the collections of the University of Sydney held in the Nicholson Museum, the Macleay Museum and the University Art Gallery.
In 2018, these same three collections will themselves be transformed into the new Chau Chak Wing Museum.
This final Nicholson Museum exhibition represents the beginning and the end, the alpha and omega of what has been and what will be.

multi-user game engines such as Epic Megagames' UNREAL engine to be extremely useful tools for the design of knowledge spaces. For a collaborative project with 10 Viennese museums 1 we developed a semantic matrix for a cross-disciplinary exhibition showing items from different collections (Sigmund Freud Museum, Jewish Museum, Museum of Natural History...). The content provided by these museums had to be made accessible and comprehensible to users of different ages, educational backgrounds and computer literacy. We developed a system of connotations amongst the objects, which then was translated into a spatial structure of rooms, corridors and places of different sizes, shapes, remotenesses or proximities. The viewer/listener of our knowledge space explores a semantic structure by navigating virtual spaces with the topics being contained in these rooms. The connecting architecture between these rooms resembles staircases, passages, elevators, hidden doors or portals, each of them...

This paper's main contention is that some basically methodological developments in science which are apparently distant and unrelated can be seen as part of a sequential story. Focusing on general inferential and epistemological matters, the paper links occurrences separated by both in time and space, by formal and representational issues rather than social or disciplinary links. It focuses on a few limited aspects of several cognitive practices in medical and biological contexts separated by geography, disciplines and decades, but ...

In the Andes of Central Chile, flowering commences 1–2 months earlier on equatorial-(north-) facing than on polar-(south-) facing slopes, and pollinator assemblages also differ between these habitats. In order to understand the potential influence of these differences on gene flow, we monitored flowering periods and insect visitation rates to flowers of 60 individuals of Anarthrophyllum cumingii (Papilionaceae) on two equatorial-and two polar-facing slopes in the Andes of central Chile (33 35 0 S;70 32 0 W). Flowering began about 30 days earlier on equatorial-facing slopes. Flowering periods of individuals on slopes with the same aspect had a mean overlap of 0.52, while those on opposite slopes had a mean overlap of 0.15. On equatorial-facing slopes Yramea lathionoides (Lepidoptera) accounted for 60% of the visits to flowers of A. cumingii, while on polar-facing slopes Centris cineraria (Hymenoptera) was responsible for more than 80% of flower visits. Average similarities of visitor assemblages among individual plants on slopes with the same aspect was 0.83, while the mean similarity between individuals on opposite slopes was only 0.23. Within slopes fluorescent dyes were dispersed up to 40 m from the donor plants, but there was no movements of dyes between individuals growing on opposite slopes, even when they were separated by less than 10 m. Synchronous blooming and a common pollen vector are necessary conditions for pollen exchange between individuals. The overall probability of pollen exchange estimated by multiplying the inter-individual overlap for both factors, was nearly 0.5 for individuals growing on slopes with the same aspect, and less than 0.04 for individuals growing on opposite slopes. Consequently, at equivalent distances, the probability of pollen exchange between individuals growing on slopes of opposite aspect is more than 10-times lower than between those growing on the same slopes. Seed dispersal cannot compensate for restricted gene flow through pollination, because seeds of A. cumingii were dispersed less than 2 m away from a parent plant. Presumably, restricted gene flow could enhance genetic divergence between populations on slopes of contrasting aspects. This factor could be important in contributing to the high diversity and endemism in the Chilean Andes.

| www.bmgn-lchr.nl | e-issn 2211-2898 | print issn 0165-0505 Robert-Jan Wille, Mannen van de microscoop. De laboratoriumbiologie op veldtocht in Nederland en Indië, 1840-1910 (Nijmegen: Vantilt, 2019, 365 pp., isbn 9789460043796). Hoe ontstaat een wetenschappelijke discipline? Om antwoord te geven op die vraag kan men enerzijds bestuderen hoe methoden, theorieën, instrumenten of onderzoeksvragen zijn samengevoegd. Anderzijds kan men zich buigen over de politieke, culturele of sociale factoren die de oprichting van onderzoeksinstellingen,-banen en-financiering in de hand hebben gewerkt.

The aim of this study was to describe the natural history and management of surgically unresectable intra-abdominal desmoid tumors in two patients with Gardner's syndrome from two unrelated families, where each had failed on conventional therapy. Two patients with Gardner's syndrome were placed on a chemotherapy regimen which included doxorubicin (90 mg/m2) and dacarbazine (900 mg/m2) in divided doses over four days of continuous infusion. Their progress on chemotherapy was assessed by abdominal computerized tomography and laparoscopy. The computerized abdominal tomography scans proved difficult to interpret because of adhesions and matted small bowel resulting from the patients original colectomies. These findings made it difficult to differentiate postoperative changes from residual desmoid tumor. Second-look laparotomy in such patients was contraindicated as this may predispose to further desmoid production. Laparoscopy disclosed a complete response to this chemotherapy. Nevertheless, we had an iatrogenic small bowel perforation in one of these patients. Each patient showed a complete response to chemotherapy. Surgical resection remains the first-line treatment of intraabdominal desmoid tumors. However, doxorubicin/dacarbazine chemotherapy on a clinical trial basis may be indicated in patients whose intra-abdominal desmoid is unresectable, or who have failed to respond to treatment with hormones (tamoxifen, Toremifene), steroids (prednisone), and nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory agents (Clinoril; Merck & Co., Inc., West Point, PA).

This paper looks at the conditions of the emergence of "race" as a new scientific category during the eighteenth century, arguing that two modes of discourse and visualization played a significant role: that on society, civility, and civilization -- as found principally in the travel literature -- and that on nature, as found in natural history writings, especially in botanical classifications. The European colonizing enterprise had resulted in an extensive flow of new objects at every level. Visual representations of these new objects circulated in the European cultural world and were transferred and transformed within travelogue and natural history writings. The nature, boundaries, and potentialities of humankind were discussed in this exchange within the conceptual grid of classifications and their visual representations. Over the course of the century the discourse on society, civility, and civilization collapsed into the discourse on nature. Humans became classified a...

The article reviews research and presents our results on the natural history of 2 forms of anxiety disorder, panic disorder and generalized anxiety disorder. Data from our epidemiological cohort study give evidence of premorbid anxiousness and overadaptation already in childhood. Distressing conditions in the family are more prevalent among subjects with anxiety disorders or major depression than among controls. Anxiety disorders frequently begin between age 20–30 and can be triggered by life events. The course is often characterized by a certain chronicity that manifests itself in residual symptoms and mild impairment in social roles even after many years and is frequently complicated with depression. The best predictors are severity and duration of symptoms, as well as comorbidity with depression. Future studies of the natural history should take into account these factors in multivariate approaches.