Blog Posts by Subject: Biology

Charles Darwin died 130 years ago today, leaving an intellectual legacy which has profoundly influenced the general course of Western thought. He is best known for his work On the Origin of Species (1859) and The Descent of Man (1871), both of which introduced radical new ideas for the time concerning the origins of humans and all life. Darwin's last work, however, devoted itself entirely to a more down-to-earth species: the lowly earthworm.

Background Info on the Museum & Library: Luckily for me, I was able to visit the library of the American Museum of Natural History (AMNH) with a staff group. I did not realize that their library is open to the public, and I was not aware of the amount of empirical research that goes on in the museum. The museum is focused on the natural sciences, the earth and animals. There are about 200 scientists that work for the museum, and the library is a METRO member. The library is a special library and academic library. There is a graduate school attached to the museum in which students study comparative biology. The museum publishes three journals.

The LIVE from the NYPL program featuring Richard Holmes in conversation with Paul Holdengräber was off to a rocky start last night; the technology controlling the microphones kept malfunctioning. Mr. Holmes joked that it probably had "something to do with homeland security." This prompted a few chuckles from the crowd. When the microphone started acting up again twenty minutes later, Richard commented, "this gives new meaning to [part of] the subtitle of the book; ‘the Beauty and Terror of Science.'" At this point, he had the audience roaring with laughter. On hand to talk about his new book, The Age of Wonder, two things could be gleaned from an 

Although I don’t keep bees, I’ve lately found myself being drawn into their curious world—looking into New York City’s beekeepers; investigating honeybees in history, literature, design, and in the kitchen; even incorporating the beehive into my own handmade efforts. And I recently discovered bees in biography too, in the story of Lorenzo Lorraine Langstroth, a nineteenth century giant in the world of honeybees, who worked to devise a workable modern frame hive.  

With new technologies that can make images of molecules, biology has been returning to its origins as a visual science, according to Moselio Schaechter, writing on his blog Small Things Considered. Biologists can now “see” how an enzyme works or how macromolecules interact with molecules large and small, and the revolution is leading to a specialist field called Structural Biology. The visual origins of biology are abundantly illustrated in the holdings of The New York Public Library, including original and facsimile editions of Robert Hooke’s beautifully illustrated Micrographia. This flea is reminiscent of Hooke's famous illustration, but actually