A Tale of Seven Elements

2013 ◽  
Author(s):  
Eric Scerri
Keyword(s):  
World War I ◽  
Periodic Table ◽  
Chemical Nature ◽  
World War ◽  
Lise Meitner ◽  
Chemical Research ◽  
Missed Opportunities ◽  
Boiling Points ◽  
Elegant Method ◽  
English Physicist

In 1913, English physicist Henry Moseley established an elegant method for "counting" the elements based on atomic number, ranging them from hydrogen (#1) to uranium (#92). It soon became clear, however, that seven elements were mysteriously missing from the lineup--seven elements unknown to science. In his well researched and engaging narrative, Eric Scerri presents the intriguing stories of these seven elements--protactinium, hafnium, rhenium, technetium, francium, astatine and promethium. The book follows the historical order of discovery, roughly spanning the two world wars, beginning with the isolation of protactinium in 1917 and ending with that of promethium in 1945. For each element, Scerri traces the research that preceded the discovery, the pivotal experiments, the personalities of the chemists involved, the chemical nature of the new element, and its applications in science and technology. We learn for instance that alloys of hafnium--whose name derives from the Latin name for Copenhagen (hafnia)--have some of the highest boiling points on record and are used for the nozzles in rocket thrusters such as the Apollo Lunar Modules. Scerri also tells the personal tales of researchers overcoming great obstacles. We see how Lise Meitner and Otto Hahn--the pair who later proposed the theory of atomic fission--were struggling to isolate element 91 when World War I intervened, Hahn was drafted into the German army's poison gas unit, and Meitner was forced to press on alone against daunting odds. The book concludes by examining how and where the twenty-five new elements have taken their places in the periodic table in the last half century. A Tale of Seven Elements paints a fascinating picture of chemical research--the wrong turns, missed opportunities, bitterly disputed claims, serendipitous findings, accusations of dishonesty--all leading finally to the thrill of discovery.

Sulphur Mustard Induced Toxicity, Mechanism of Action and Current Medical Management

2016 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 07 ◽  
Author(s):  
Satish C. Pant ◽  
Vinay Lomash
Keyword(s):  
World War I ◽  
Chemical Nature ◽  
Short Review ◽  
Current Medical ◽  
World War ◽  
Sulphur Mustard ◽  
Chemical Weapons Convention ◽  
Mechanism Of Toxicity ◽  
Serious Injury ◽  
Medical Countermeasures

<p>Sulphur mustard (SM), chemically, bis (2-chloroethyl) sulphide is a bifunctional alkylating agent that causes cutaneous blisters in human or animals. It was first used in the World War I. Since then, there have been 11 conflicts where SM allegedely had caused mass distruction. Additionally, discarded weapons and stockpiles periodically come to surface during agricultural or fishing activities leading to serious injury. Concerns for threat to modern societies by the serious effects of SM, agreements to ban its production and the use has been made as per 1993 chemical weapons convention (CWC) and agent destruction programs. This short review attempts to discuss the histroy, chemical nature, mechanism of toxicity, toxicokinetics, animal models used for SM induced skin and systemic lesions, pathogenesis of SM induced lesions including medical countermeasures for SM toxicity. <br /><br /></p>

Through the prism of Spain. Socio-economic causes of different outcomes of Russian and Spanish civil wars

2017 ◽  
pp. 142-155
Author(s):  
I. Rozinskiy ◽  
N. Rozinskaya
Keyword(s):  
Civil War ◽  
World War I ◽  
Civil Wars ◽  
Spanish Civil War ◽  
Statistical Data ◽  
Well Being ◽  
Russian Civil War ◽  
World War ◽  
Common Features ◽  
Economic Well Being

The article examines the socio-economic causes of the outcome of the Spanish Civil War (1936-1936), which, as opposed to the Russian Civil War, resulted in the victory of the “Whites”. Choice of Spain as the object of comparison with Russia is justified not only by similarity of civil wars occurred in the two countries in the XX century, but also by a large number of common features in their history. Based on statistical data on the changes in economic well-being of different strata of Spanish population during several decades before the civil war, the authors formulate the hypothesis according to which the increase of real incomes of Spaniards engaged in agriculture is “responsible” for their conservative political sympathies. As a result, contrary to the situation in Russia, where the peasantry did not support the Whites, in Spain the peasants’ position predetermined the outcome of the confrontation resulting in the victory of the Spanish analogue of the Whites. According to the authors, the possibility of stable increase of Spanish peasants’ incomes was caused by the nation’s non-involvement in World War I and also by more limited, compared to Russia and some other countries, spending on creation of heavy (primarily military-related) industry in Spain.

‘Grey Dawn’ in the British Pacific: Race, Security and Colonial Sovereignty on the Eve of World War I

2016 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
pp. 32-54 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jesse Tumblin
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
World War I ◽  
Military Force ◽  
Royal Navy ◽  
World War ◽  
Building Projects ◽  
Cooperative Security ◽  
Strategic Defense ◽  
Racial Discourses ◽  
The Way

This article examines the way a group of colonies on the far reaches of British power – Australia, New Zealand, Canada, and India, dealt with the imperatives of their own security in the early twentieth century. Each of these evolved into Dominion status and then to sovereign statehood (India lastly and most thoroughly) over the first half of the twentieth century, and their sovereignties evolved amidst a number of related and often countervailing problems of self-defence and cooperative security strategy within the British Empire. The article examines how security – the abstracted political goods of military force – worked alongside race in the greater Pacific to build colonial sovereignties before the First World War. Its first section examines the internal-domestic dimension of sovereignty and its need to secure territory through the issue of imperial naval subsidies. A number of colonies paid subsidies to Britain to support the Royal Navy and thus to contribute in financial terms to their strategic defense. These subsidies provoked increasing opposition after the turn of the twentieth century, and the article exlpores why colonial actors of various types thought financial subsidies threatened their sovereignties in important ways. The second section of the article examines the external-diplomatic dimension of sovereignty by looking at the way colonial actors responded to the Anglo-Japanese Alliance. I argue that colonial actors deployed security as a logic that allowed them to pursue their own bids for sovereignty and autonomy, leverage racial discourses that shaped state-building projects, and ultimately to attempt to nudge the focus of the British Empire's grand strategy away from Europe and into Asia.

The Anarchist Press in Egypt before World War I

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anthony Gorman
Keyword(s):  
Social Justice ◽  
Public Education ◽  
World War I ◽  
State Power ◽  
Local Context ◽  
Colonial Rule ◽  
World War

This chapter traces the development of the radical secular press in Egypt from its first brief emergence in the 1870s until the outbreak of World War I. First active in the 1860s, the anarchist movement gradually expanded its membership and influence over subsequent decades to articulate a general social emancipation and syndicalism for all workers in the country. In the decade and a half before 1914, its press collectively propagated a critique of state power and capitalism, called for social justice and the organisation of labour, and promoted the values of science and public education in both a local context and as part of an international movement. In seeking to promote a programme at odds with both nationalism and colonial rule, it incurred the hostility of the authorities in addition to facing the practical problems of managing and financing an oppositional newspaper.

Press Propaganda and Subaltern Agents of Pan-Islamic Networks in the Muslim Mediterranean World prior to World War I

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Odile Moreau
Keyword(s):  
Middle East ◽  
World War I ◽  
North Africa ◽  
World War ◽  
Subaltern Studies ◽  
Resistance Movements ◽  
The Press ◽  
Mediterranean World ◽  
History Of

This chapter explores movement and circulation across the Mediterranean and seeks to contribute to a history of proto-nationalism in the Maghrib and the Middle East at a particular moment prior to World War I. The discussion is particularly concerned with the interface of two Mediterranean spaces: the Middle East (Egypt, Ottoman Empire) and North Africa (Morocco), where the latter is viewed as a case study where resistance movements sought external allies as a way of compensating for their internal weakness. Applying methods developed by Subaltern Studies, and linking macro-historical approaches, namely of a translocal movement in the Muslim Mediterranean, it explores how the Egypt-based society, al-Ittihad al-Maghribi, through its agent, Aref Taher, used the press as an instrument for political propaganda, promoting its Pan-Islamic programme and its goal of uniting North Africa.

From Flibbertigibbet to Ernest Jones and Ernst Simmel: Nightmares under Analysis

2020 ◽  
Vol 22 (2) ◽  
pp. 159-174
Author(s):  
Martin von Koppenfels
Keyword(s):  
World War I ◽  
Cultural Theory ◽  
World War ◽  
Conceptual Problem ◽  
Affective Dimension ◽  
Dream Theory ◽  
Ernest Jones

Freud's The Interpretation of Dreams denies itself any reference to the immemorial folklore and demonology of nightmares. This telling omission can be linked to the marginal role assigned to the affective dimension of dreams in Freud's book. It can also be linked to Freud's life-long struggle to determine the place of anxiety dreams in the framework of his dream theory. This conceptual problem became even more urgent when, in the wake of World War I, the anxiety dreams of traumatized soldiers appeared on the psychoanalytic agenda. Among Freud's closest collaborators, Ernest Jones was the first to turn his attention to the mythology of nightmares. Interestingly enough, Jones's study treats the nightmare complex exclusively as a problem of cultural theory instead of dream theory. In this essay I explore the theoretical implications of this half-forgotten chapter of psychoanalytic dream theory focusing on Freud, Jones and Ernst Simmel.

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