History of Ecological Sciences, Part 56: Ethology until 1973

A History of Until

Until is a notoriously difficult temporal operator as it is both existential and universal at the same time: AUB holds at the current time instant w iff either B holds at w or there exists a time instant w in the future at which B holds and such that A holds in all the time instants between the current one and w. This “ambivalent” nature poses a significant challenge when attempting to give ded...

History of ethology comes of age

The public profile of animal behavior research is out of all proportion to the number of biologists who engage in this kind of work, or the share of funding which they receive. The television genre of the ‘wildlife program’ was substantially shaped by the early contributions of Niko Tinbergen and his students, such as Desmond Morris at Granada Television. High-profile public controversies about...

A History of the Ecological Sciences , Part 10 : Botany during the Italian Renaissance and Beginnings of the Scientific Revolution

Part I History and ecological basis of species distribution modeling

Recent decades have seen an explosion of interest in species distribution modeling. This has resulted from a confluence of the growing need for information on the geographical distribution of biodiversity and new and improved techniques and data suitable for addressing this information need – remote sensing, global positioning system technology, geographic information systems, and statistical l...

[History of robotics: from archytas of tarentum until Da Vinci robot. (Part II)].

Robotic surgery is a reality. In order to to understand how new robots work is interesting to know the history of ancient (see part i) and modern robotics. The desire to design automatic machines imitating humans continued for more than 4000 years. Archytas of Tarentum (at around 400 a.C.), Heron of Alexandria, Hsieh-Fec, Al-Jazari, Bacon, Turriano, Leonardo da Vinci, Vaucanson o von Kempelen w...