Debate: Seeds as Deep Time Technologies.

This essay theorizes crop seeds as deep time technologies, surveying a range of materialist approaches to the study of agriculture, from historical materialism to agroecology and actor-network theory. Recent studies of plant domestication suggest that the long history of human-plant relations and agrarian knowledge defy the reduction of seeds to products of nature or objects of property. Approaching seeds as technologies allows us to understand the actors and processes of improvement that demarcate biological material according to commercial and scientific logics. Framing seeds as a collaborative technological project with a 19,000-year history unseats industrial time as the dominant frame in the history of technology. It recasts political economy not simply as a construction of human social relations of production but also as it imagines the material used to produce life itself.

Prison Papermaking: Colonial Ideals of Industrial Experimentation in India.

This article questions the economic rationale of colonial experimentation and prison labor, arguing that for many administrators a prison-based experiment's success mattered less than its existence. It examines the position of convict labor and penal discipline within colonial industrial experiments in colonial India, where convicts performed experiments for what one administrator described as "the most penal" form of labor, papermaking. The belief that Indian fibers could open a new export market for global papermaking meant that prisons became prominent sites of experimentation with new pulps. Regional prisons gained state monopolies for handmade paper, often decimating local independent producers. Yet prison and industrial officers counterintuitively positioned the frequent failures of papermaking experiments as a continuing potential source for industrial improvement. They argued that the failures demonstrated the need to improve discipline and supervision. Prison experiments slotted convicts into repetitive, mechanized roles that served European investigations into the utility of Indian products.

How Prepaid Billing in Italy Helped Shape the Global Diffusion of Mobile Phones.

Why was Italy the first country to introduce prepaid mobile phone billing services in 1996? What was the key to its success that led seventy-five telecommunications operators to introduce prepaid billing by 1998 and accelerated the mass adoption of mobile phones around the world? This article examines why prepaid was successful in light of national policies and sociocultural shifts. Along with SMS, handhelds, GSM, and the digitization of mobile communications, prepaid billing played a role in the rapid and immense spread of the mobile phone worldwide. As an innovative means of paying for mobile phone usage, prepaid represented a departure from operators' previous mobile phone payment methods. The article argues that by overlooking the contribution of this form of payment, telephone historians, the media, and business scholars have ignored this important driver of the success of mobile phones.

Feminism and Capitalism under the Nuclear Cloud & Barbie.

The Warner Brothers/Mattel movie Barbie is meant to be about feminism and capitalism in complicated, comical, and nuanced ways. It mostly succeeds in its dual purpose of comedy and inspiration. The doll's origin in 1959 places her and her consort, Ken, squarely in the context of the Cold War, although neither the movie nor the doll's long and successful marketing history acknowledges anything outside the sunny world of Barbie Land. The nuclear shadow does affect the movie's reception, however, in the form of international protests over the dashed lines scrawled on a supposed "World Map" in one scene. For nations in and around the South China Sea, the dashed lines evoke the specter of war in a nuclear age over claims to territorial sovereignty. Yet director Greta Gerwig's film is a runaway success, the first film solo directed by a woman to gross more than a billion dollars and counting.

History of chronic gastritis: How our perceptions have changed.

Currently, the diagnostic strategy for chronic gastritis (CG) is aimed not just at fixing the presence of gastric mucosal inflammation, but also at gastric cancer (GC) risk stratification in a particular patient. Modern classification approach with the definition of the stage of gastritis determines the need, activities and frequency of dynamic monitoring of a patient. However, this attitude to the patient suffering from CG was far from always. The present publication is a literature review describing the key milestones in the history of CG research, from the description of the first observations of inflammation of the gastric mucosa, assessment of gastritis as a predominantly functional disease, to the advent of endoscopy of the upper digestive tract and diagnostic gastric biopsy, assessment of the role of Helicobacter pylori infection in progression of inflammatory changes to atrophy, intestinal metaplasia, dysplasia and GC.

Theranostics - a sure cure for cancer after 100 years?

Cancer has remained a formidable challenge in medicine and has claimed an enormous number of lives worldwide. Theranostics, combining diagnostic methods with personalized therapeutic approaches, shows huge potential to advance the battle against cancer. This review aims to provide an overview of theranostics in oncology: exploring its history, current advances, challenges, and prospects. We present the fundamental evolution of theranostics from radiotherapeutics, cellular therapeutics, and nanotherapeutics, showcasing critical milestones in the last decade. From the early concept of targeted drug delivery to the emergence of personalized medicine, theranostics has benefited from advances in imaging technologies, molecular biology, and nanomedicine. Furthermore, we emphasize pertinent illustrations showcasing that revolutionary strategies in cancer management enhance diagnostic accuracy and provide targeted therapies customized for individual patients, thereby facilitating the implementation of personalized medicine. Finally, we describe future perspectives on current challenges, emerging topics, and advances in the field.

Innovation and Discovery: A 30-Year Journey in Advancing Cancer Care.

Since the inaugural issue of Current Oncology was published 30 years ago, we have witnessed significant advancements in cancer research and care [...].

"Inherently Limited by Our Imaginations": Health Anxieties, Politics, and the History of the Climate Crisis.

As global warming became a cause of concern in the 1980s, researchers and climate activists initially paid little attention to the possible health effects of a warmer world. This changed quickly between 1985 and 1989, when scientists working on contracts with the US Department of Energy and the Environmental Protection Agency extrapolated from existing knowledge about the impact of weather on health to speculate about how global warming would impact health. However, they downplayed the impact of their contributions by highlighting the uncertainty in their models and the adaptability of human societies. Since that time, physicians and other health scientists have maintained a steady drumbeat of warnings about the health effects of global warming. They have published widely in the medical literature and participated actively in international scientific collaborations. Their research has significantly increased the breadth and depth of climate-health science and shown that measurable impacts of global warming have already begun. But as the many climate crises of 2023 show, action against global warming remains inadequate. Is it still reasonable to hope that health advocacy will incite communities and politicians to act? The history of climate and health advocacy reveals many obstacles that must be overcome.