‘Good, fresh air and an expert medical service’: old age pensioners in Leiden’s St. Hiëronymusdal retirement home, sixteenth century

The cost of retirement has a strong impact on social processes, both today and in the past. This study concerns the cost of retirement to St. Hiëronymusdal, a retirement home that was established outside the town of Leiden in the first half of the sixteenth century. Here individuals could purchase lifelong accommodation and care. If they had enough money to spend, they could opt for relatively luxurious contracts providing them with a private room; if they were short of means, they could opt for a basic contract providing them with a bed in a hall. We demonstrate that this allowed people from lower and middling groups to prepare for old age. Inexpensive retirement also gave individuals the option to spend their old age living independently from relatives, in a retirement home. These elderly people could do this on their own account by paying for care rather than depending on charity – which usually involved a loss of social prestige. We suggest that inexpensive retirement allowed family ties to become looser and thus facilitated such developments as migration and urbanization, and the rise of the European marriage pattern. Rising prices and declining interest rates caused retirement to become more expensive in later centuries though, posing challenges for the early modern elderly

American Precious Metals and Their Consequences for Early Modern Europe

An early version of this chapter can be found in: http://www.ehes.org/EHES_174.pdfOver the early modern period and beyond, massive amounts of silver and gold were found and mined in the Americas. This chapter reviews the consequences for the European economies. Some second-order receiver countries such as England benefited in both the short and long run. First-order receivers such as Spain and Portugal also benefited in the short run, but their continued exposure to the arrival of massive quantities of precious metals eventually led to loss of competitiveness and an institutional resource curse.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

Microbially-Enhanced Vanadium Mining and Bioremediation Under Micro- and Mars Gravity on the International Space Station

As humans explore and settle in space, they will need to mine elements to support industries such as manufacturing and construction. In preparation for the establishment of permanent human settlements across the Solar System, we conducted the ESA BioRock experiment on board the International Space Station to investigate whether biological mining could be accomplished under extraterrestrial gravity conditions. We tested the hypothesis that the gravity (g) level influenced the efficacy with which biomining could be achieved from basalt, an abundant material on the Moon and Mars, by quantifying bioleaching by three different microorganisms under microgravity, simulated Mars and Earth gravitational conditions. One element of interest in mining is vanadium (V), which is added to steel to fabricate high strength, corrosion-resistant structural materials for buildings, transportation, tools and other applications. The results showed that Sphingomonas desiccabilis and Bacillus subtilis enhanced the leaching of vanadium under the three gravity conditions compared to sterile controls by 184.92 to 283.22%, respectively. Gravity did not have a significant effect on mean leaching, thus showing the potential for biomining on Solar System objects with diverse gravitational conditions. Our results demonstrate the potential to use microorganisms to conduct elemental mining and other bioindustrial processes in space locations with non-1 × g gravity. These same principles apply to extraterrestrial bioremediation and elemental recycling beyond Earth

A risk society? Environmental hazards, risk and resilience in the later Middle Ages in Europe

Modern society is said to have restructured in reaction to contemporary hazards with the aim of improving its management of risk. This implies that pre-industrial societies were somehow fundamentally different. In this paper, we challenge that hypothesis by examining the ways in which risks associated with environmental hazards were managed and mitigated during the Middle Ages (defined here as the period from 1000 to 1550 AD). Beginning with a review of the many case studies of rapid onset disasters across Europe, we draw upon both historical and archaeological evidence and architectural assessments of structural damage for what is a pre-instrumental period. Building upon this, the second part of the paper explores individual outlooks on risk, emphasising the diversity of popular belief and the central importance of Christianity in framing attitudes. Despite their religious perspectives, we find that medieval communities were not helpless in the face of serious environmental hazards. We argue instead that the response of society to these threats was frequently complex, considered and, at times, surprisingly modern