Science

Offshoots from the “Tree of Life” traveled from Mesopotamia to the Levant to the United States, beguiling everyone with their toothsome confections.

After Hiroshima, scientists became key political voices, some as stewards, others as activists, shaping nuclear policy and moral responsibility.

Eighty years after the bomb, scientists still grapple with nuclear legacy. Some seek atonement, others insist it’s no longer their burden.

He misrepresented the history of the gym-class test. I know because I served on the council that helped modernize it.

Historians are recovering the overlooked history of North America’s Crotalus horridus, the timber rattlesnake.

For years, the Office of Technology Assessment helped Congress see around corners on science and tech. Its 1995 shutdown left lawmakers flying blind.

A lack of regulatory oversight of supplements allows misleading labels and dangerous products to slip through the cracks and into American homes.

Over the past several decades, concerns about costs and producing short-term results have narrowed the NIH’s impact.

How the “obstetrical dilemma” and the dark history of pelvimetry met in the present.

Colonel Elmer Ellsworth's death marked a turning point in how the nation honored the fallen.

Pits and seeps full of tar and asphalt offer new insights into old ecosystems and cultures.

In the mid-1800s, shady milk purveyors found it was cheaper to keep cows in cities and feed them the byproducts of whiskey manufacturing. The results were dire.

The harrowing experience of being powerless against illness and death.

The men who set off the nuclear age tell the tale in their own words.

On daguerreotypes, William Henry Fox Talbot, and darkroom dangers.

Declassified documents show atomic testing in New Mexico distributed radioactive matter to an extent that the scientists at Los Alamos were ill-prepared for.

The disquieting story of an American health-product giant.

A new book unearths a chapter of the state’s story when anti-intellectual fundamentalism was put to good ends.

A dark mystery shocked America in the early 1990s, from prime-time shows to Congress. It’s largely been forgotten. It shouldn’t be.

Why does the diagnosis of Gage social ‘disinhibition’ lean so heavily on flimsy documentation about Gage, while overlooking the case of Eadweard Muybridge?

The establishment of a federal agency devoted to space, physics, and more belied a cross-party consensus that such disciplines were vital to national interest.

A new book challenges the discursive ignorance about the condition.

For as long as the United States has had nuclear weapons, officials have struggled with how to transport the destructive technology.

In the 1960s and 1970s, Freedom House Ambulance Service set the standard for emergency medical care, laying the groundwork for the services available today.

It used to be progressives who distrusted the experts. What happened?

During the McCarthy era’s darkest days, public lands came under attack. History now repeats itself – and this may be the last chance to defend what’s ours.

Medicaid has always been fiercely contested political terrain, and past cuts have had disastrous human costs.

"We should go back into history and ask: Why did we need the federal Pure Food and Drug Act in 1906?"

How and why ideas like germ theory are pursued, accepted or ignored, and how human habits of the mind can make it difficult to ask the right questions.

The history of the three-drug combo used in death-penalty executions.