Science

Once lauded as a wonder of the age, cocaine soon became the object of profound anxieties. What happened?

Longevity enthusiasts are microdosing a 19th-century cure-all. Are they onto something?

“Postpartum depression” encompasses various debilitating changes in mood that can occur after giving birth. How did that language come to be?

In two new books, the rise of recycling is a story of illusory promises, often entwined with disturbing political agendas.

The controversial career of John E. Mack, the Pulitzer Prize–winning Harvard psychiatrist who wrote best-selling books on UFO abduction.

Eleanor Roosevelt’s tacit support for a program that jailed sex workers suggests the limits of the elite-led reform efforts she championed.

A community health center in Los Angeles that sought to get patients back into the community.

Before AC, office workers relied on building design to adapt to high temperatures. The promise of boosted productivity created a different kind of workplace.

A researcher challenged the idea that women did not – and should not – experience sexual desire.

On the native prairies of North America, green is the problem.

How research helps us understand the past to create a better future.

First discovered in 1938, Teflon has been used for everything from helping to create the first atomic bomb to keeping your eggs from sticking to the pan.

Scientists and lawmakers in the 70s knew more than we think they did about climate change and the impacts of fossil fuel regulations.

It wasn’t just scientists who were worried, but Congress, the White House, and even Sports Illustrated, newly unearthed documents show.

Coding was a preserve of elites, until BASIC hit the streets.

The magical in-betweenness—and surprising epidemiological history—of the porch.

On the impact of systematic oppression on indigenous cuisine in the United States.

The Year 2000 computer problem has become a punchline in recent years, but the CrowdStrike outage shows the joke's on us.

A new book takes on a diagnosis invented to cover up police killings: that men of color are “combusting as a result of their aggressiveness.”

Fazlur Khan and the idea that would turn architecture on its head.

For as long as scientists have studied tornadoes, researchers have dreamed of controlling them.

The grueling, relentless simulations astronauts that prepared the astronauts for quick decision-making in space.

Confused 17th-century Europeans argued that human groups were separately created, a precursor to racist thought today.

A case study from the smallpox epidemic among North Carolina Moravians.

How did the sensuality, sexuality, and homosociality of exercise create intimate possibilities for Black women in postwar America?

"The Conqueror" was filmed downwind of a nuclear test site. A new documentary tells the story of the fatal film set, and the community affected.

An epic account of a vital economic artery and our many efforts to control it.

Without the local San Francisco activists who risked their lives for it, today’s legal cannabis market might never have come to be.

Fanny Angelina Hesse introduced agar to the life sciences in 1881. A trove of unpublished family papers sheds new light on her many accomplishments.

While the phrase "between a woman and her doctor" has been used to protect abortion access, it also reflects physicians' outsized power.