Videos highlight the work of the Cambridge University Herbarium
The Cambridge University Herbarium is presenting three new videos, produced with the support of the Cambridge Philosophical Society. The short videos, released as part of the 2024 Cambridge Festival, aim to showcase the collections and activities of the Herbarium to a general audience. Featuring the beautiful and unique collections housed in the Herbarium and the Cory and Herbarium Libraries, each video was designed to answer a question: “What is a Herbarium?”, “How are herbarium specimens made?”, and “How do plants get their scientific names?”.
The Cambridge University Herbarium (CGE) is part of the Department of Plant Sciences. Founded in the 1760s through the bequest of a few thousand specimens by John Martyn, second Professor of Botany, the University Herbarium was significantly used and expended by John Stevens Henslow, fourth Professor of Botany and co-founder of the Cambridge Philosophical Society, then by successive Professors and Curators. Containing an estimated 1.1 million dried specimens of plants and fungi collected worldwide over the course of three centuries, and with considerable collections from the British Isles and the Cambridgeshire area, CGE represents an invaluable archive of plant diversity through space and time. It was extensively used by taxonomists to write the Flora Europaea and the Flora of Great Britain and Ireland, and continues to facilitate research and education in the fields of Natural Sciences and Humanities. In recognition of the outstanding scientific and historical value of its collections, CGE was awarded designated status by the Arts Council in 2022. In recent years, to improve the accessibility of the data held in its collections, CGE has started digitising its specimens and is currently exploring new approaches, combining citizen science and artificial intelligence, to transcribe the information attached to them. More information on these projects will soon be available on the Herbarium website: herbarium.plantsci.cam.ac.ukThe videos are available on the Herbarium YouTube channel: youtube.com/@CUHerb.
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Kipling’s “Iron‒Cold Iron‒is master of them all” captures the familiar importance of metals as structural materials. Yet common metals are not necessarily hard; they can become so when deformed. This phenomenon, strain hardening, was first explained by G. I. Taylor in 1934. Ninety years on from this pioneering work on dislocation theory, we explore the deformation of metals when dislocations do not exist, that is when the metals are non-crystalline. These amorphous metals have record-breaking combinations of properties. They behave very differently from the metals that Taylor studied, but we do find phenomena for which his work (in a dramatically different context) is directly relevant.
During the Covid-19 pandemic, U.K. policy-makers claimed to be "following the science". Many commentators objected that the government did not live up to this aim. Others worried that policy-makers ought not blindly "follow" science, because this involves an abdication of responsibility. In this talk, I consider a third, even more fundamental concern: that there is no such thing as "the" science. Drawing on the case of adolescent vaccination against Covid-19, I argue that the best that any scientific advisory group can do is to offer a partial perspective on reality. In turn, this has important implications for how we think about science and politics.
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