Science

The ivory-billed woodpecker hasn't been seen for decades. The government is ready to declare it extinct—but at what cost?

Fifty years later, the legacy of the National Cancer Act illustrates the need for a broad approach.

Did Ancestral Puebloans watch the skies from Mesa Verde's Sun Temple? Solving its mysteries requires overcoming archaeology’s troubled past.

Counting both uninfected and infected people helps us better understand a pandemic.

The maternal health intervention from a century ago that worked.

In moving away from fossil fuels, some in aviation are thinking of bringing back helium-assisted flight.

Understanding the battle over immunization—from the pre-Victorian era onward—between public health and the people may help in treating anti-vax sentiment.

Museums construct knowledge by constructing objects—literally.

Ryan White’s story both reinforced and challenged assumptions about the disease.

The challenges of 536 CE, including cold temperatures and volcanic fallout, prompted a flourishing of Ancestral Pueblo society.

A blinking cursor follows us everywhere in the digital world, but who invented it and why?

Tens of thousands of sick and injured soldiers became addicted.

As the country grew, each census required greater effort than the last. That problem led to the invention of the punched card – and the birth of an industry.

How a bloody gun duel between two doctors in Transylvania sparked a frenzy of outrage—and helped create the American Medical Association.

The history of WD-40, a chemical substance with an unusual origin story and a rust-fighting ability that has become a standby of workbenches the world over.

In 1741, the Royal Academy of Sciences held a contest searching for the origin of “blackness.” The results show how Enlightenment thinkers justified slavery.

Scientific research and historical accounts can help us identify and dissect the threat of ‘coercive persuasion.’

How a feisty, suicidal Nobel laureate infuriated both Hitler and Stalin, and stalled cancer research for fifty years along the way.

The statesman was embarrassed by the mishap—no doubt a murder most fowl.

On the origins, use, and abuse of mugshots.

A friend of Henry David Thoreau, Ellen Sewall Osgood's pursuit of her scientific passion illuminates the limits and possibilities placed on the era's women.

Today’s “medical freedom” warriors are drawing on a centuries-old American tradition.

Biased ideas about a link between body size and health have led many people to dismiss unexpected scientific findings.

Morton and his skull measurements have long been part of the scholarship on American racism, but what happens when we draw Audubon into the racial drama?

The plant explorers of the USDA succeeded in bringing the world’s fruits to American supermarkets. But at what human, ecological, and gustatory cost?

Benjamin Franklin's writing about losing his son to smallpox is a must-read for parents weighing COVID-19 vaccines today.

And that’s exactly why there is no need to overreact.

How Rosalind Franklin, the crystallographer whose data were crucial to solving the structure of DNA, was written out of the story of scientific discovery.

A new book challenges the notion that independent inventors were shunted aside in the 20th century by anonymous scientists in corporate research laboratories.

The “peaceful revolution” of rural electrification.