From curious models of fossils to an artificial throat able to recreate the sounds of vowels, an exhibition at the Royal Society 100 years ago had no shortage of unusual displays.
Now visitors to this year’s Summer Science Exhibition can revisit this cutting-edge science of 1923 and compare it with that of today’s pioneering research.
Opening yesterday, the display will showcase a host of objects relating to exhibits presented at the 1923 Royal Society conversazione.
Photo courtesy of Wikimedia Commons
Among the historical items are photographs of cotton balls and water mites taken using a microscope, and an article identifying the skull of Panoplosaurus — an armored dinosaur thought to have lived about 76 million years ago.
Some of the advances showcased in 1923 remain remarkable, including a high-speed camera that could take 5,000 frames per second. The device, for which schematics from its US patent will be on show in the new display, was demonstrated by Walter Heape and his assistant, Horace Bere Grylls. “[Heape] developed this for embryology to look at the development of embryos, but the main application is for ballistics and just looking at fast missiles and guns exploding,” said Louisiane Ferlier, curator of the exhibition.
The display will also include a microscope from the John Innes Center that was used in the 1920s — a nod to an exhibit in the 1923 exhibition by the mycologist Dorothy Cayley — and microscope slides of tissues taken from goats that were used in experiments to investigate the impact of decompression on the body during deep-sea diving.
The 1923 exhibition also contained Edward Jenner’s certificate of election to the Royal Society, to mark the centenary of his death. While best known for his work on the world’s first successful vaccine, which protected against smallpox, he was also a noted zoologist.
“He’s elected [to the fellowship of the Royal Society] for something completely different than vaccination. He is elected for his natural history work on birds, migrating birds and cuckoos in particular,” said Ferlier, who said the display would include the original paper that got him elected.
Not every advance has stood the test of time. One exhibit in 1923, which was two meters tall, was presented by Arthur Smith Woodward — the palaeontologist who proposed that the remains that became known as the Piltdown Man were from a 500,000-year-old human ancestor (they were later found to be fake).
The huge, spiral object he put forward — images of which are in the new display — was described as being a model of the fossil of the world’s largest snail — the original having been found in pieces in Sussex. It wasn’t long, however, before the theory bit the dust.“It’s not actually the fossil of a snail,” said Ferlier. “The first theory that is brought forward just a couple of years after 1923 is that it’s a coprolite — so dinosaur faeces basically.”
More recently, researchers have proposed it could be a fossilized burrow-hole, while the latest work, said Ferlier, suggests it could be a naturally occurring geological structure.
But the prehistoric, it seems, has an enduring appeal.
Among those showcasing contemporary research in this year’s exhibition is the palaeontologist Danielle Schreve of Royal Holloway, who will be displaying material from an excavation of a previously unexplored cave site in Somerset.
“It is a fantastic archive of information that tells us about how in particular animals responded to very abrupt and rapid climate change,” she said. “At the moment we are digging in a spotted hyena den from about 45,000 years ago, and as well as bits of hyena, we’re finding the things that they bring in as prey. So things like baby woolly rhinos.”
Other contemporary research on show includes robotic tools to help surgeons carry out operations on minute structures within the body, and virtual reality games to help young people with cochlear implants in both ears determine the direction of a sound source.
But amid the blend of old and new research Keith Moore, librarian at the Royal Society, noted some exhibits from a century ago had remained in the archives.
“In 1923 one of the exhibits was beetles showing transplanted heads, which quite frankly, wouldn’t go down well with modern sensibilities,” he said.
The Summer Science Exhibition will run until 9 July at the Carlton House Terrace in London. For more information, visit: royalsociety.org.
Towering high above Taiwan’s capital city at 508 meters, Taipei 101 dominates the skyline. The earthquake-proof skyscraper of steel and glass has captured the imagination of professional rock climber Alex Honnold for more than a decade. Tomorrow morning, he will climb it in his signature free solo style — without ropes or protective equipment. And Netflix will broadcast it — live. The event’s announcement has drawn both excitement and trepidation, as well as some concerns over the ethical implications of attempting such a high-risk endeavor on live broadcast. Many have questioned Honnold’s desire to continues his free-solo climbs now that he’s a
Lines between cop and criminal get murky in Joe Carnahan’s The Rip, a crime thriller set across one foggy Miami night, starring Matt Damon and Ben Affleck. Damon and Affleck, of course, are so closely associated with Boston — most recently they produced the 2024 heist movie The Instigators there — that a detour to South Florida puts them, a little awkwardly, in an entirely different movie landscape. This is Miami Vice territory or Elmore Leonard Land, not Southie or The Town. In The Rip, they play Miami narcotics officers who come upon a cartel stash house that Lt. Dane Dumars (Damon)
Francis William White, an Englishman who late in the 1860s served as Commissioner of the Imperial Customs Service in Tainan, published the tale of a jaunt he took one winter in 1868: A visit to the interior of south Formosa (1870). White’s journey took him into the mountains, where he mused on the difficult terrain and the ease with which his little group could be ambushed in the crags and dense vegetation. At one point he stays at the house of a local near a stream on the border of indigenous territory: “Their matchlocks, which were kept in excellent order,
Today Taiwanese accept as legitimate government control of many aspects of land use. That legitimacy hides in plain sight the way the system of authoritarian land grabs that favored big firms in the developmentalist era has given way to a government land grab system that favors big developers in the modern democratic era. Articles 142 and 143 of the Republic of China (ROC) Constitution form the basis of that control. They incorporate the thinking of Sun Yat-sen (孫逸仙) in considering the problems of land in China. Article 143 states: “All land within the territory of the Republic of China shall
RSS