Suchergebnisse

Zusammenfassung aller Artikel der Jahrgänge 1999 bis 2006, die in der Zeitschrift "Spektrum der Wissenschaft" zum Thema Naturgewalten erschienen sind: Darin geht es um Hurrikane und Tornados, Blitze, Meteoriteneinschläge, Supervulkane, Erdbeben und Tsunamis. (Kap)

"Spektrum Spezial" zum Topthema Klimawandel, das Artikel internationaler Wissenschaftler und Wissenschaftsjournalisten über die aktuellen Befunde, Entstehung des Treibhauseffektes, Klimapolitik, Maßnahmen zur Eindämmung des anthropogenen Klimawandels, Alternativen zu fossilen Energieträgern sowie über Energieeffizienz versammelt. Grafisch ansprechend gestaltetes Heft, das sich an den anspruchsvollen interessierten Laien wendet. Auch für Schülerreferate eine ergiebige Quelle, die trotz Zeitschriftenformat bereits in den Bestand kleinerer öffentlicher Bibliotheken - gerade wenn diese einschlägige Periodika wie GEO oder Spektrum der Wissenschaft nicht bereitstellen können - aufgenommen werden sollte, zumal der Preis vergleichsweise günstig ist (vgl. auch "Die Erde im Treibhaus", BA 5/05). (1 S)

This review essay of two edited volumes sketches how STS scholars have analyzed scientific representation and visualization in recent work. Several key foci have emerged, among them attending closely to materiality, engaging the digital through embodied action, turning to ontology, as well as benefitting from artistic practice and critique. In diverse ways these choices are informed by a discontentment with the Cartesian split of mind and body as well as the picture theory of language. Yet, naturalism endures as a template, an expectation, and sometimes a specter with and against which much representational work in science is done. What STS scholars have learnt about representation in laboratory and expert settings still awaits being employed more comprehensively for making sense of practices beyond the lab, especially in contested political, social and ecological environments. In setting out to do so, they ought to reflect on the kinds of logic that their practices of representing representation enact.

Focusing ethnographically on astronomers engaged in "look back studies" of cosmic evolution, this essay considers how they make telescopic observations at an optical observatory in the context of their epistemic work at other sites. Foucault's notion of a heterotopia captures key aspects of how the observatory is set apart from astronomers' work with digital data elsewhere. However, visual practices of interpreting telescopic exposures in the observatory's control room do reach across this divide and inform later epistemic work, such as when scientists use these exposures retrospectively as windows into the functioning of telescopes and detectors. Visiting astronomers remark that witnessing the emergence of exposures in the control room asserts to them the reality of the cosmic objects they study. I interpret this as being grounded in their understanding of semiosis.

Today human ecology has split into many different sub-disciplines such as historical ecology, political ecology or the New Ecological Anthropology. The latter in particular has criticised the predominance of the Western view on different ecosystems, arguing that culture-specific world views and human-environment interactions have been largely neglected. However, these different perspectives only tackle specific facets of a local and global hyper-complex reality. In bringing together a variety of views and theoretical approaches , these especially commissioned essays prove that an interdisciplinary collaboration and understanding of the extreme complexity of the human-environment interface(s) is possible