The name of our journal comes from Shen Kuo, an official and scholar of the Song dynasty. His knowledge was expansive and eclectic, spanning subjects from astronomy to literature to zoology. In later life, Shen retired to a large estate in Jiangsu that he named “Dream Brook,” where he wrote his masterpiece, Brush Talks from Dream Brook. He was said to have remarked, “Because I had only my writing brush and ink slab to converse with, I call it Brush Talks.”