Long-term trends in the longevity of scientific elites: evidence from the British and the Russian academies of science.

National science academies represent intellectual elites and vanguard groups in the achievement of longevity. We estimated life expectancy (LE) at age 50 of members of the British Royal Society (RS) for the years 1670-2007 and of members of the Russian Academy of Sciences (RAS) for the years 1750-2006. The longevity of academicians was higher than that of their corresponding national populations, with the gap widening from the 1950s. Since the 1980s, LE in the RS has been higher than the maximum LE among all high-income countries. In each period, LE in the RS was greater than in the RAS, although since the 1950s it has risen in parallel in the two academies. This steep increase shared by academicians in Britain and Russia suggests that general populations have the potential for a substantial increase in survival to high ages

Qualification sous irradiation du crayon CEA: de la conception des composants a l'irradiation d'assemblages en reacteur de puissance

Available from CEN Saclay, Service de Documentation, 91191 Gif-sur-Yvette Cedex (France) / INIST-CNRS - Institut de l'Information Scientifique et TechniqueSIGLEFRFranc

Family behaviours and religious practice in France

Based in our data, in France, 80 % of people aged 18–79 report being Catholic (currently or by birth), 5 % Muslim, 2 % Protestant, 2 % a different religion and 11 % say they have no religion. But this distribution varies considerably by age: the youngest cohorts less often report a religious affiliation, and when they do, they attend religious services less regularly than their elders. Regular attenders, now a small minority, remain more strongly attached to marriage and less often experience several successive unions. They also have more children: among women ever in union born in 1960, regular attenders have 0.6 children more than the others. Women practising a religion other than Catholicism, notably Muslim women, do not account for all of this difference, since regularly practising Catholics have 0.5 more children than the others

Childhood mortality and quality of care among abandoned children in nineteenth-century Italy

A great deal of scholarly attention has been devoted in recent years to the large-scale abandonment of newborn babies in the European past, with special emphasis given to the staggering rates of infant mortality among the foundlings. For the most part, scholars have agreed with the foundling home officials of the past in assigning much of the blame for this excess mortality to the women who took in the foundlings as wetnurses and subsequently as foster mothers. This article takes issue with this view, based on an examination of the children abandoned at the foundling home of Bologna, Italy in the nineteenth century. Four cohorts of foundlings are examined - those abandoned in 1809-30, 1829-30, 1849-50, and 1869-70 (N=3615) - as we trace the changing pattern of infant and early childhood mortality. Longitudinal methods are used in examining the life course of these foundlings and the determinants of their mortality