Mountaineers, Rock Climbers, and Science Educators Around the 1920s, rock climbing separated from mountaineering to become a separate sport. At that time European climbers developed new equipment and techniques, enabling them to ascend mountain faces and to climb rocks, which were considered unassailable up to that time. American climbers went further by expanding and improving on the equipment. They even developed a system of quantification where points were given for the degree of difficulty of an ascent. This system focused primarily on the pitch of the mountain, and it even calculated up to de- mals to give a high degree of quantification. Rock climbing became a technical system. Csikszentmihaly (1976) observed that the sole interest of rock climbers at that time was to climb the rock. Rock climbers were known to reach the top and not even glance around at the scenery. The focus was on reaching the top of the rock. In contrast, mountaineers saw the whole mountain as a single “unit of perc- tion. ” “The ascent (to them) is a gestalt including the aesthetic, historical, personal and physical sensations” (Csikszentmihaly, 1976, p. 486). This is an example of two contrasting approaches to the same kind of landscape and of two different groups of people. Interestingly, in the US, Europe, and Japan a large segment of the early rock climbers were young mathematicians and theoretical physicists, while the mountaineers were a more varied lot.

Once a reluctant science teacher, Becky Schnekser now takes her elementary-aged scientists on virtual field trips to the Amazon, spelunking explorations right in the classroom, and all-weather research trips to the school's rainwater collection ponds. Refusing to accept the worn-out excuses about why science has become an afterthought in elementary education, in Expedition Science, Schnekser demonstrates how you can immerse young learners in authentic, exciting science and thus empower them to engage, discover, and lead. With real-life examples that put you right in the middle of the action, and specific details of hands-on classroom science and the pedagogy behind it, Expedition Science will serve as your go-to guide as you work to disrupt tired ways of teaching science and instead turn your students into enthusiastic explorers of the world all around them. "Part fearless cave-exploring field researcher and part P. T. Barnum, Becky Schnekser is every bit the science teacher that Ms. Frizzle aspired to be: colorful, vibrant, and larger-than-life. Brimming with ideas and busting with heart and humor on each page, Expedition Science is packed with all kinds of strategies to help teachers rekindle their passion and learn how to create classrooms that bring life, joy, and relevance back to all-too-stodgy science classrooms. In a word? It's magic."-John Meehan, author of EDrenaline Rush "Expedition Science is the science book I've been waiting for my entire career. Becky makes science fun, she makes it important, her ideas make it engaging, and maybe most of all, Becky makes it doable for any teacher."-Adam Welcome, author of Teachers Deserve It "Now more than ever, it's important to foster a love of learning science in students from a young age, and Expedition Science is a catalyst for that. The examples Becky presents, the connections she makes, and the resources she provides are practical and easy to implement for educators at all levels." -Becky Thal, fifth-grade math/science teacher and educational consultant

In The Value of Science in Space Exploration, James S.J. Schwartz provides a thoughtful and rigorous defense of the view that space exploration activities should focus primarily on science, and that the knowledge and understanding we will gain from expanded space science activities will benefit humanity more over the next century than any attempts to settle Mars or mine asteroids.

Examines the massive impact of colonial exploration on British scientific and literary activity between the 1760s and 1830s.

During the long twentieth century, explorers went in unprecedented numbers to the hottest, coldest, and highest points on the globe. Taking us from the Himalaya to Antarctica and beyond, Higher and Colder presents the first history of extreme physiology, the study of the human body at its physical limits. Each chapter explores a seminal question in the history of science, while also showing how the apparently exotic locations and experiments contributed to broader political and social shifts in twentieth-century scientific thinking. Unlike most books on modern biomedicine, Higher and Colder focuses on fieldwork, expeditions, and exploration, and in doing so provides a welcome alternative to laboratory-dominated accounts of the history of modern life sciences. Though centered on male-dominated practices—science and exploration—it recovers the stories of women’s contributions that were sometimes accidentally, and sometimes deliberately, erased. Engaging and provocative, this book is a history of the scientists and physiologists who face challenges that are physically demanding, frequently dangerous, and sometimes fatal, in the interest of advancing modern science and pushing the boundaries of human ability.

By the middle of the nineteenth century, as scientists explored the frontiers of polar regions and the atmosphere, the ocean remained silent and inaccessible. The history of how this changed—of how the depths became a scientific passion and a cultural obsession, an engineering challenge and a political attraction—is the story that unfolds in Fathoming the Ocean. In a history at once scientific and cultural, Helen Rozwadowski shows us how the Western imagination awoke to the ocean's possibilities—in maritime novels, in the popular hobby of marine biology, in the youthful sport of yachting, and in the laying of a trans-Atlantic telegraph cable. The ocean emerged as important new territory, and scientific interests intersected with those of merchant-industrialists and politicians. Rozwadowski documents the popular crazes that coincided with these interests—from children's sailor suits to the home aquarium and the surge in ocean travel. She describes how, beginning in the 1860s, oceanography moved from yachts onto the decks of oceangoing vessels, and landlubber naturalists found themselves navigating the routines of a working ship's physical and social structures. Fathoming the Ocean offers a rare and engaging look into our fascination with the deep sea and into the origins of oceanography—origins still visible in a science that focuses the efforts of physicists, chemists, geologists, biologists, and engineers on the common enterprise of understanding a vast, three-dimensional, alien space.

Present trends indicate that in the years to come transnational science, whether basic or applied and involving persons, equipment or funding, will grow considerably. The main purpose of this volume is to try to understand the reasons for this denationalization of science, its historical contexts and its social forms. The Introduction to the volume sets out the socio-political, intellectual, and economic contexts for the nationalization and denationalization of the sciences, processes that have extended over four centuries. The articles examine the specific conditions that have given rise to the growth of transnational science in the 20th century. Among these are: the need for cognitive and technical standardization of scientific knowledge-products, pressure toward cost-sharing of large installations such as CERN, the voluntary and involuntary migration of scientists, and the global market for R&D products that has emerged at the end of the century. The volume raises many new questions for research by historians and sociologists of science and poses problems that are of concern both to scientists and science policy-makers.