Endeavour
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Biography Historical Article
Private science and the Imperial imagination: John Herschel's Cape voyage.
In 1833 Sir John Herschel sailed to the British Cape Colony in southern Africa. It was a private voyage, the purpose of which was to undertake an astronomical survey of the southern heavens. But his private voyage was interpreted by both the British Government and the British public as a voyage of Imperial scientific exploration. Despite Herschel's explicitly private scientific intentions, he nonetheless became popularly incorporated into the ranks of imperial scientific explorers.
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Humphry Davy (1778-1829) was one of the first professional scientists, earning his living and rising spectacularly from an impoverished upbringing in Cornwall to be President of the Royal Society and a baronet. He owed his rise to patronage as well as to his range of abilities: as a lecturer, as a chemical theorist and as a very early applied scientist. ⋯ Admired rather than loved, he became unpopular and was seen as haughty. In his last two years, spent wandering lonely and sickly in Italy and the Alps, he sought to make sense of his life, writing dialogues as his bequest to the new generation.
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Headache is one of the most common types of pain, but its causes remain poorly understood. The long-standing idea that some headaches, particularly migraine, might be caused by cerebral or cranial vasodilation has failed to find support in recent studies. Alternative hypotheses have focused on other processes that might be capable of activating or sensitizing sensory nerve fibres that innervate the blood vessels of the intracranial meninges.