Mitigation of Airborne Contaminant Spread through Simple Interventions in an Occupied Single-Family Home.

Historically, reducing aerosol-based transmission of respired viruses in indoor environments has been of importance for controlling influenza viruses and common-cold rhinoviruses. The present public health emergency associated with SARS-CoV-2 makes this topic critically important. Yet to be tested is the potential effectiveness of simple interventions that create an isolation zone (IZ) for a suspected/confirmed sick or sensitive person requiring quarantine. The intent in existing homes is to find a practical means to mitigate exposure to airborne contaminants. In creating an IZ in an occupied single-family home in the study, four simple strategies were tested. The test configurations were: (1) IZ windows closed with IZ bathroom exhaust ventilation fan off, (2) IZ windows closed with IZ exhaust fan on, (3) IZ window open with IZ exhaust fan off, and (4) IZ window open with IZ exhaust fan on. Incense-generated fine particulate matter (PM2.5) was used as a marker for virus transmission. The measured transfer of PM2.5 from the IZ into the main zone (MZ) of the house enabled us to determine the relative effectiveness of four containment strategies. Collectively, the data from pressure differential (across zones) and PM2.5 measurements suggested that the best containment strategy was achieved through continuously operating the bathroom exhaust fan while keeping the windows closed in the IZ (configuration 2). Interventions using open windows were found to be less reliable, due to variability in wind speed and direction, resulting in an unpredictable and sometimes detrimental pressure differential in the IZ with reference to MZ. Our findings strongly suggest a simple IZ exhaust ventilation strategy has the potential for mitigating the risk from the airborne spread of contaminants, such as SARS-CoV-2.

Instrument provision and geographical science: the work of the Royal Geographical Society, 1830-ca 1930.

This paper examines the Royal Geographical Society's provision and management of scientific instruments to explorers and expeditions in the century following its foundation in 1830. Assessment of the Society's directives concerning appropriate scientific instruments for the conduct of geography reveals the emergence (slow and uneven) of policies concerning the assignment of instruments. From examination of Council minutes and related manuscript sources, the paper documents the numbers of instruments acquired by the Society, by whom used, for what scientific purpose and in which parts of the world. The paper examines the number and chronology of expeditions supported by the Society's instruments, examines the expenditure upon instruments' repair, and discusses the publications that followed their use in exploration. Correspondence between instrument users and the Society reveals that, on occasion, the use of instruments was adventitious. While geographical knowledge depended upon the use of scientific instruments to measure and to depict the world, geography was not a formally institutionalized survey science as was the case with the Geological Survey or the nation-defining mapping of Ordnance Survey.

Science and sociability: women as audience at the British Association for the Advancement of Science, 1831-1901.

This essay recovers the experiences of women at the meetings of the British Association for the Advancement of Science (BAAS) from its founding in 1831 to the end of the Victorian era. It aims to add to research on women in science by reconsidering the traditional role of women as consumers rather than producers of knowledge and to that on science popularization by focusing on audience experience rather than on the aims and strategies of popularizers. The essay argues that, in various ways, the ubiquitous and visible female audience came to define the BAAS audience and "the public" for science more generally. The women who swelled the BAAS audiences were accepted as a social element within the meetings even as they were regarded critically as scientific participants. Portrayed as passive and nonscientific, women allowed the male scientific elites to distance themselves from their audiences. Arguing from diary and other evidence, we present examples that complicate existing notions of audiences for science as necessarily active.

Historical geographies of provincial science: themes in the setting and reception of the British Association for the Advancement of Science in Britain and Ireland, 1831-c.1939.

The British Association for the Advancement of Science sought to promote the understanding of science in various ways, principally by having annual meetings in different towns and cities throughout Britain and Ireland (and, from 1884, in Canada, South Africa and Australia). This paper considers how far the location of its meetings in different urban settings influenced the nature and reception of the association's activities in promoting science, from its foundation in 1831 to the later 1930s. Several themes concerning the production and reception of science--promoting, practising, writing and receiving--are examined in different urban contexts. We consider the ways in which towns were promoted as venues for and centres of science. We consider the role of local field sites, leading local practitioners and provincial institutions for science in attracting the association to different urban locations. The paper pays attention to excursions and to the evolution and content of the BAAS meeting handbook as a 'geographical' guide to the significance of the regional setting and to appropriate scientific venues. The paper considers the reception of BAAS meetings and explores how far the association's intentions for the promotion of science varied by location and by section within the BAAS. In examining these themes--the geographical setting of the association's meetings, the reception of association science in local civic and intellectual context and the importance of place to an understanding of what the BAAS did and how it was received--the paper extends existing knowledge of the association and contributes to recent work within the history of science which has emphasized the 'local' nature of science's making and reception and the mobility of scientific knowledge.