All traces of evolutionary theories had been removed from the Spanish public sphere during the late stages of the Civil War and early Francoism. Darwin's books were cleared from the shelves of libraries and bookshops and evolutionism was replaced by creationism in primary and higher education manuals. In the public sphere, there was a mixture of concepts concerning evolution that were borrowed from different evolutionary theories, some of them outdated. Talking about evolution in the press meant talking in a nineteenthcentury manner about the ape origin of man, materialism and threat to the Catholic faith. In other words, evolution was something unpleasant and dangerous. In this context, certain Spanish palaeontologists went to considerable lengths to try and avoid all of this bad popular imaginary (linking it to Darwinism), and to rehabilitate evolutionism from a finalistic-theistic point of view, which fitted in well with the ideology of the Franco regime. This effort, which succeeded in bringing evolutionism back into the public sphere following a period of «evo-lutionary silence», was relegated to second place when a new period of regime openness came about. The more scientific jargon of genetics and Modern Synthesis, which was less conducive to origins and theological discussion, fitted in better with the aims of the new regime, thus changing public scientific authority from bones to genes. This paper highlights the ongoing process of the appropriation of evolutionary theory through the case study of the presence and treatment during Francoism of the theory of evolution in the Catalan newspaper La Vanguardia Española.

On April 8, 1966, 4,808 barrels—208.2 L each—were buried at Savannah River nuclear cemetery in Aiken, South Carolina. They contained about 1,100 tons of radioactive contaminated soil and vegetation from Palomares, a village on the South Coast of Spain. Earlier that year, about 9 kg of plutonium had been scattered over Palomares due to a U.S. Air Force accident involving four nuclear bombs. In this paper I reconstruct the diplomatic negotiations between the US and Spain to establish the clean‐up criteria for Palomares by focusing on the contaminated earth. This work provides an interpretation of the construction of radiological thresholds (for burial and health protection) through nuclear diplomacy and highlights the importance of public visibility in this process. The Palomares earth was considered nuclear or not nuclear depending on different factors, not only its radioactivity readings. In this paper I disentangle these factors and show to what extent materiality, diplomacy, and public visibility are intertwined in the construction of nuclearity.

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Darwin was wrong' was a headline that made news around the world in March 1956. Johannes Hürzeler, a Swiss palaeontologist, had just made public his theory that Oreopithecus bambolii, a fossil thus far classified as an extinct Old World monkey, was in fact a 12-million-year old hominid. That was 10 million years (!) older than the oldest hominids accepted at the time. Two years later he unearthed a complete skeleton of Oreopithecus in Italy. The echo of this discovery in the media was enormous yet the newspaper coverage in different western countries followed distinctive patterns. This paper will show these differences and point out possible explanations that go far beyond scientific disagreement. It will be argued that the press is a privileged source for comparing simultaneous reactions to the same scientific fact around the globe and for helping us discover national and supranational patterns of scientific discourse while linking them to their contexts. This paper also highlights the role of the news pieces as 'supports of knowledge.' Just like bones or scientific articles, news items circulate prompting in turn the circulation of other 'supports of knowledge' such as fossil remains or scientists.