This article examines the process of naming the World Wide Web that took place at CERN between 1989 and 1996 to argue that naming was not a secondary act of branding or representation but a constitutive part of technological development. Drawing on archival records, press coverage, and interviews with early web actors, it reconstructs how a nameless internal project evolved through provisional, contested, and unstable designations before "World Wide Web" emerged as a workable compromise. The article shows that naming functioned as an enabling practice: it made the project discussable in meetings, recognizable within CERN's organizational culture, and legible to funding structures and public discourse. At the same time, failed attempts to standardize spellings, abbreviations, and trademarks exposed the limits of institutional control over emerging digital technologies. By foregrounding naming as a material and organizational process, the article reframes how technologies acquire visibility, legitimacy, and stability within the history of computing and communications.
This article challenges the dominant interpretation of early twentieth-century vibrators as inherently sexual objects. Rather than reading vibrators retrospectively through the lens of the modern sex toy industry, it examines hand-cranked and early electric devices from the perspective of design, use, and medical context. Drawing on artifacts, manuals, advertisements, and medical literature from Britain and the United States, the article argues that early vibrators were shaped primarily by therapeutic and cosmetic practices linked to massage medicine, gynecological therapy, and orificial philosophy. Attachments later interpreted as "phallic" or sexually suggestive emerged from clinical assumptions about circulation, nerve stimulation, and rectal or vaginal treatment rather than from explicit erotic design. By foregrounding design logic over retrospective meaning, the article reframes the vibrator as a medical and consumer technology whose sexual associations developed historically rather than existing from the outset. In doing so, it argues for a more historically grounded approach to technologies whose meanings shifted over time.
This article reinterprets telegraphy in colonial Nigeria not as a precursor to modern communications but as a media infrastructure that reshaped how news circulated, authority operated, and publics formed. Histories of African media have largely overlooked the telegraph, leaving the relationship between telecommunications and mass communication underexamined. Drawing on archival and press sources, the article traces how submarine, inland, and wireless telegraph networks became intertwined with newspapers, radio broadcasting, commercial information, and anti-colonial politics. Rather than treating the telegraph as a singular imperial technology, it approaches telegraphy as a technology-in-use whose meanings emerged through everyday practices, institutional conflicts, material breakdowns, and struggles over access and control. By foregrounding African journalists, technicians, readers, and political actors, the study challenges diffusionist histories of communications technology and argues that colonial media infrastructures were coproduced through imperial ambitions and African forms of appropriation, negotiation, and resistance.
This article introduces the concept of mobility-Orientalism to explain how Western models of automobilism shaped both the discourse and infrastructure of global mobility. Extending Edward Said's critique of Orientalism into the history of technology, it argues that road safety policies exported from Europe and North America reproduced assumptions about Western modernity while treating mobility practices in the Global South as backward, inefficient, or unsafe. Using the global history of road safety as a case study, the article shows that safety regimes designed for car-centered societies often failed in contexts characterized by layered traffic, informal mobility systems, and different patterns of risk. In many cases, imported policies intensified rather than reduced inequalities and violence on the road. By foregrounding perspectives from the Global South, the article challenges the presumed universality of Western mobility expertise and argues for a planetary history of automobilism attentive to infrastructural asymmetries, local knowledge, and alternative mobility futures.
This article examines the emergence of hand replantation surgery in socialist China to rethink the relationship between industrialization, medicine, and Cold War technopolitics. Developed in response to rising workplace amputations during the Great Leap Forward, hand replantation became more than a surgical technique confined to the operating room. Drawing on medical journals, propaganda materials, and municipal archives, the article argues that replantation functioned as a "remediating" practice that repaired injured bodies while mediating the social ruptures of accelerated industrialization. Surgeons, workers, transportation systems, and improvised materials formed "chains of rescue" linking bodily trauma to socialist ideals of labor protection and collective mobilization. Hand replantation also crossed geopolitical divides-shifting from the Sino-Soviet split to Third World medical aid and Sino-U.S. scientific exchange. By tracing surgery across bodily, social, and geopolitical scales, the article argues that technopolitics emerged through situated technical practices as much as through state systems and ideology.
This article examines how maintenance workers in Switzerland's Post, Telephone and Telegraph company (PTT) understood and represented their own labor between 1921 and 1959. Drawing on union magazines and previously unpublished sources, it argues that maintenance was not inherently invisible or undervalued but became the object of ongoing struggles over status, expertise, and technological identity. As Switzerland's telephone network expanded, automated, and aged, workers moved from identifying themselves as builders of infrastructure to presenting maintenance as a specialized and indispensable form of technical labor. These shifting representations emerged through debates about outsourcing, training, mechanization, and professional recognition, including disputes over the very name of the job. By tracing how workers alternately reproduced and challenged the "innovation-speak" that marginalized repair labor, the article reframes maintenance as a political and discursive category rather than merely a technical activity. In doing so, it contributes to the historiography of infrastructure, labor, and maintenance in modern communications systems.
This article examines how engineers and surveyors transformed the management of the Po Valley environment between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries. Drawing on archival registers, hydraulic reports, and technical manuals from the State of Milan, it argues that these professionals did not simply apply scientific knowledge to nature. Through practices of measurement, mapping, classification, and repair, they made water, woodlands, and agricultural land into governable resources. Engineers mediated conflicts over irrigation, assessed landed property, standardized environmental records, and linked hydraulic infrastructures to broader economic and political goals. Their work connected mathematics, mechanics, and natural knowledge to the everyday administration of one of Europe's most intensely managed agroecosystems. By foregrounding technical practice rather than scientific theory alone, the article shows how environmental governance emerged through routine acts of observation, calculation, and intervention.
This article uses the global trade in Chinese egg products to rethink the history of refrigeration beyond narratives of technological diffusion and thermal colonialism. Tracing the rise of China's egg-processing industry in the treaty ports, it argues that refrigeration functioned not simply as a colonial technology but as an infrastructure through which states, firms, and consumers negotiated questions of hygiene, trust, and market power. British and American companies introduced refrigerated production systems that Chinese enterprises selectively adapted, while the rapid expansion of low-cost exports provoked protectionist campaigns and sanitary disputes in Europe and the United States. "Chinese eggs" became a political and cultural problem through which anxieties about industrial food, racial difference, and international competition were expressed. As export markets contracted during the interwar crisis of the twentieth century, refrigeration expanded into China's domestic economy through cold storage, logistics, and mass consumer culture. The article shows how refrigeration reshaped both global food politics and everyday urban life in modern China.
This article offers the first comprehensive review of women's contributions and gender-focused research in Technology and Culture (T&C) from its early years through 2025. Using a mixed-methods approach that combines distant reading of digital publication datasets with qualitative mapping of milestones and turning points in the history of T&C, the article examines how the gender composition of authors evolved over time, how this has influenced the journal's content, and what broader role feminist theory has played in shaping new scholarly directions in the history of technology. Findings reveal that while women authors and gender-focused studies have steadily increased in number, engagement with feminist theory followed a less linear trajectory. Early historians advanced feminist approaches that influenced fields such as feminist science and technology studies and feminist digital humanities. Yet the normalization of gender analysis within the history of technology did not produce a similarly consolidated feminist historiographical tradition. The article concludes by outlining possible directions for recovering a more explicit feminist historiographical and methodological conversation within the field and across adjacent interdisciplinary domains.
This article reexamines resistance welding at the Ford Motor Company to challenge both the history of technology's emphasis on engineering expertise and dominant narratives of de-skilling in twentieth-century mass production. While scholarship on industrial mechanization has focused on managerial control and the erosion of craft, this study argues that welders developed forms of embodied, sensory, and machine-mediated expertise essential to automated production. Drawing on company records, technical literature, and visual sources, it reconstructs how welders used sight, touch, and sound to monitor electrodes, interpret sparks, maintain equipment, and adjust welding processes in real time. These practices remained largely invisible within Ford's own narratives of technological progress, which recast welders as unskilled "operators" subordinate to machines and managers. By foregrounding tacit and sensory labor, the article argues that mechanization reorganized rather than eliminated skill in the modern factory.
This essay argues that visual analysis can fundamentally reshape histories of communications technology in Africa. Using photographs from archival and digital collections, it examines how maintenance and repair sustained Nigeria's telegraph network and how images make visible forms of labor, expertise, and technical practice that textual archives often obscure. Rather than treating photographs as illustrations of infrastructure, the essay reads them as historical evidence that reveals the material and social conditions under which telegraph systems operated. Scenes of workshops, linemen, storms, and repair crews expose unstable infrastructures maintained through African technical labor, improvisation, and embodied knowledge. At the same time, the images illuminate the uneven visibility of colonial expertise, since African workers frequently appeared collectively rather than as named individuals. By foregrounding maintenance and repair, the essay contributes to emerging histories of infrastructure, materiality, and technology-in-use while demonstrating the value of visual sources for reconstructing African histories of technology.
In the mid-nineteenth century, kerosene refined from petroleum revolutionized artificial illumination by making lighting widely affordable. Yet it posed serious risks of lamp explosion, claiming lives and destroying property. This article intervenes in histories of energy and technology that privilege large-scale infrastructures and imperial rivalry by shifting attention to small-scale instruments. It argues that flashpoint testers-devices designed to measure everyday risk-forged a transimperial collaboration between the United States and Britain. Diverse flashpoint testers gave rise to different risk cultures. While the United States developed a vernacular culture in which ordinary users managed safety themselves, Britain cultivated an administrative one, with trained inspectors enforcing standardized regulations. As the latter approach proved more reliable, kerosene importers entrusted Britain with the role of governing kerosene's risk in global markets, while the United States took on the role of a manufacturer, conforming to the British standard. By showing how the flashpoint tester made risk measurable, negotiable, and governable, this article argues that such practices enabled the rapid expansion of the petroleum economy through transimperial collaboration, while also reshaping how historians understand the making of energy systems.
This study developed a synbiotic rice yogurt cake with a medium glycemic index by combining resistant starch-enhanced rice with Lactobacillus acidophilus. The effects of substrate concentration (20-40%), pullulanase enzyme activity (20-40 U/g), and hydrolysis time (4-8 hr) on resistant starch content were investigated. At a substrate concentration of 30%, an enzyme activity of 30 U/g, and a hydrolysis time of 6 hr, the optimal resistant starch content was 14.54 ± 0.96%. After being treated to enhance its resistant starch content, IR504 rice was mixed with milk and processed to produce rice milk. The rice milk was fermented for 12 hr at 37°C with a 3% inoculum ratio, yielding the highest L. acidophilus count of 5.62 × 107 CFU/g. After freeze-drying, the synbiotic rice yogurt cake contained 3.8 × 107 CFU/g L. acidophilus and 3.55 g/100 g resistant starch. Nutritional analysis showed 82.4 g carbohydrates, 6.78 g lipids, 8.90 g proteins, and 1.05% moisture per 100 g. This product achieved a lower estimated glycemic index of 69.32 ± 0.534 compared with non-resistant starch (77.74 ± 0.369). Microbiological tests confirmed safety standards were met, with undetectable Enterobacteriaceae (<10 CFU/g), Listeria monocytogenes (undetectable/25 g), and undetectable total mold. The predicted shelf life of the synbiotic rice yogurt cake was approximately 198 days under typical storage conditions at 30°C and L. acidophilus count of 4.8 × 106 CFU/g. Therefore, the synbiotic rice yogurt cake can be used as a product supporting glycemic control while simultaneously providing a substrate for beneficial gut bacteria.
Urinary indoxyl sulfate (IS), a gut microbiota-derived uremic toxin, is associated with the adult gut microbiota and is elevated in children with autism spectrum disorder. However, its age-related trajectory and association with microbiota in healthy children remain uncharacterized. Therefore, we aimed to elucidate age-related changes in urinary IS in healthy children and to investigate the potential utility of urinary IS as a surrogate marker for their gut microbiota. We measured urinary IS/creatinine (Cr) ratios and analyzed the fecal gut microbiota composition (16S rRNA gene sequencing) in 102 healthy Japanese children aged 5 months to 12 years. Associations were assessed using Spearman's correlation. An empirical age-adjustment model (inverse proportional) was developed to derive an age-adjusted IS/Cr ratio (actual/predicted), thereby removing the strong age dependence before re-evaluating correlations with gut microbiota. The unadjusted IS/Cr ratio showed a strong negative correlation with age (rs=-0.47, p<0.001) and declined markedly during early childhood, stabilizing at approximately 5 years. Weak correlations with microbiota metrics were observed before adjustment; however, the age-adjusted IS/Cr ratio showed no correlation with age (rs=-0.03, p=0.768). Notably, age adjustment revealed significant positive correlations between the IS/Cr ratio and the phylum Bacteroidota (rs=0.26, p=0.008) and strengthened the correlation with the genus Bacteroides (rs=0.31, p=0.002), associations that were not apparent before adjustment. Correcting for this age-dependent variation is crucial, after which the IS/Cr ratio can serve as a potential non-invasive surrogate marker reflecting the abundance of Bacteroidota, particularly the genus Bacteroides, in the pediatric gut microbiota.
There is growing optimism regarding the potential therapeutic and preventive benefits of regulating intestinal microbiota for various diseases. Diet is one of the most straightforward and safest methods for modulating the intestinal microbiota; however, considerable individual differences have been observed in the microbiota response to dietary interventions. These individual differences pose substantial challenges in application, which are primarily attributed to variations in the commensal flora and bacterial competition for nutrients. Our previous research indicated that the microscopic localization of bacteria provides valuable insights into the mechanisms by which specific intestinal bacterial species acquire nutrients within a competitive gut environment. Furthermore, our analysis revealed that the combination of bifidobacterial species and the nutrient source found in the localization analysis determined individual differences in microbiota response. These findings suggest that bacterial colonization facilitates the efficient, preferential, and presumably exclusive utilization of solid nutrient sources in the human gut. Moreover, the impact of a single nutrient source on the gut and human body may vary depending on the presence or absence of the primary species colonizing that source. In this review, we examined the micrometer-scale localization of intestinal bacteria and individual variability in microbiota responses to diet, drawing upon the results of our previous studies.
Humanized mouse models are widely used to investigate host-microbiota interactions, yet the extent to which host background contributes to engraftment fidelity remains incompletely defined. In this study, we transplanted fecal microbiota from healthy human donors into NCG and SGM3 mice and characterized engraftment using 16S rRNA sequencing. Both models exhibited reduced diversity relative to donors, but their colonization trajectories diverged. NCG recipients appeared closer to donors in β-diversity space, a pattern largely associated with the expansion of a limited set of opportunistic Proteobacteria such as Escherichia-Shigella and Citrobacter. In contrast, SGM3 mice displayed modestly higher α-diversity and retained a broader set of donor-associated genera, with selective enrichment of Bacillus, yet exhibited greater predicted functional divergence, with reductions in pathways related to ABC transport and carbohydrate metabolism. Several strictly anaerobic commensals, including Faecalibacterium, failed to colonize in either genotype. Collectively, these findings suggest that host genotype is associated with selective colonization of human fecal microbiota and support the utility of integrating compositional and functional criteria when selecting experimental models for translational microbiome research.
Tongxie Yaofang (TXYF) is a classic formula for liver stagnation and spleen deficiency diarrhea, but its mechanisms involving the gut microbiota remain unclear. This study aimed to elucidate the mechanisms TXYF by integrating network pharmacology, molecular docking, and 16S rRNA gene sequencing. We employed network pharmacology and molecular docking to identify bioactive compounds, targets, and their associations with gut microbiota metabolites. Sequencing of the 16S rRNA gene revealed changes in the gut microbiota in a diarrheal mouse model after TXYF intervention. Thirty-nine active compounds (525 targets) were identified. Intersection analysis yielded 44 shared targets among TXYF, diarrhea, and gut microbiota metabolites. Molecular docking demonstrated favorable binding of the selected active compounds and representative gut microbiota-derived metabolites with the core targets GSK3B, TP53, and MAPK3. Sequencing of the 16S rRNA gene also showed that TXYF significantly modulated gut microbiota structure, notably altering abundances of Corynebacterium stationis, Proteus vulgaris, and Proteus mirabilis. TXYF treats diarrhea by modulating gut microbiota composition and maintaining microbial homeostasis via a multi-component, multi-target mechanism, supporting its potential as a microbiota-targeted therapy.
Lactococcus cremoris subsp. cremoris FC (L. cremoris FC) improves bowel movement; however, its associations with the intestinal microbiota remain unclear. To address this gap, this post hoc analysis of a four-week, placebo-controlled, parallel-group trial evaluates the associations between L. cremoris FC intake and gut microbiota profiles. We analyzed fecal samples from 83 healthy Japanese adults with mild constipation who received either placebo capsules containing corn starch (n=20) or L. cremoris FC capsules (50, 75, or 100 mg; n=21 each). Using 16S rRNA gene amplicon sequencing, we evaluated diversity and relative abundance and explored association patterns through Sparse InversE Covariance estimation for Ecological Association and Statistical Inference network analysis. Although no dose dependence was observed, alpha diversity decreased significantly in the L. cremoris FC 100 mg group, whereas beta diversity shifted significantly in the 50 mg group. Short-chain fatty acid producing genera, including Blautia, Anaerobutyricum, Anaerostipes, and Agathobaculum, showed higher relative abundances after intervention in both L. cremoris FC intake groups. Moreover, the relative abundance of Blautia was positively correlated with stool characteristics across post-intervention samples. Exploratory network analysis indicated altered statistical associations among bacterial taxa. Blautia and Roseburia showed higher centrality in the L. cremoris FC 100 mg group, whereas Bacteroides and Ruminococcus were more central in the placebo group. These findings suggest that L. cremoris FC intake was associated with coordinated alterations in microbial diversity, genus-level relative abundance, and association patterns, providing ecological insights into microbiota changes accompanying bowel improvement, though underlying mechanisms remain unclear.
Lactiplantibacillus plantarum and Lactiplantibacillus pentosus are the commonly found dominant species in post-fermented Japanese tea. The dominant species of lactic acid bacteria (LAB) depends on the production area, regardless of the production method. However, the selection mechanism of these bacteria remains unknown. Therefore, we investigated the mechanism by which these LAB species are selected. We investigated the effects of pH and catechins on the growth of L. plantarum and L. pentosus isolated from two types of post-fermented Japanese teas. When the pH of the medium was adjusted with hydrochloric acid, the strains derived from Ishizuchi-kurocha grew at pH 4 to 10, whereas the strains derived from Awa-bancha grew at pH 3 to 10. In contrast, when the pH was adjusted using lactic acid, no growth was observed at pH 4. The pH of the fermented fluid of Ishizuchi-kurocha was approximately 4, suggesting that the growth of the LAB in Ishizuchi-kurocha was inhibited by the accumulation of lactic acid. Furthermore, when a mixture of green tea-derived catechins containing epicatechin, epigallocatechin, epicatechin gallate, and epigallocatechin gallate was added to the culture medium at a concentration of 1.0 mg/mL, Staphylococcus aureus growth was inhibited. However, the effect on L. plantarum or L. pentosus growth was negligible. Furthermore, when the catechins in the medium were analyzed using high-performance liquid chromatography after 24 hr incubation with LAB, the peak intensities of catechins, particularly catechin gallate, were decreased, and an unknown peak was observed. These results suggest that L. plantarum and L. pentosus metabolize catechins during tea leaf fermentation. During the fermentation of Ishizuchi-kurocha and Awa-bancha, at least, the catechins in them and decrease in pH due to mainly lactic acid accumulation are factors involved in LAB selection.
Histories of data and computing have rarely treated extractive industries as foundational, yet this article argues that the U.S. oil industry was a critical site in the rise of predictive, numerical ways of knowing. Tracing the transformation of subsurface knowledge from embodied, sensory labor to increasingly abstracted, numerical, and computational forms between the late nineteenth and mid-twentieth centuries, the article centers oilfield services and geophysical work. Drawing on labor history, the history of science and technology, and the history of data visualization, it shows how seismic techniques reorganized workplace hierarchies, displaced experiential expertise, and expanded white-collar analytical labor. In doing so, the article reframes oil as an institutional foundation for numerical authority and early computational practice.
