Science

Why the rich historical names given to birds should not be scrubbed for the sake of political correctness.

In a biography of Dostoyevskian proportions, Sidney Gottlieb emerges as a tortured soul, penned in by personal compunction and a twisted sense of patriotism.

Fixating on Black vaccine skepticism obscures a rich history of Black medical and scientific innovation.

One solution to climate change may come from our pre-automotive past.

At least 12 Black chemists and physicists worked as primary researchers on the team that developed the technology behind the atomic bomb.

As a diagnosis, it’s too vague to be helpful—but its rise tells us a lot about the way we work.

For care in pregnancy and childbirth, Black parents are turning to a traditional practice.

A prominent intellectual and naturalist, the Maryland native wrote extensively on natural phenomena and anti-slavery causes.

Recorded accidentally by the Navy during the Cold War, "Songs of the Humpback Whale" became a hit album that changed perceptions about the natural world.

For decades, flying saucers were a punch line. Then the U.S. government got over the taboo.

When professor Norman E. Himes published The Medical History of Contraception in 1936, he had made a tactical move, to legalize birth control.

Audrey Clare Farley on the scientists who weaponized biology.

When germ theory displaced the idea of "miasmas" we lost important knowledge about tackling airborne disease.

A new book tackles the deep and persistent American intellectual tradition we might call Science-hesitant.

Elizabeth Catte’s new book traces a shameful history and its legacy today.

Sixty-six years ago, people celebrated the polio vaccine by embracing in the streets. Our vaccine story is both more extraordinary and more complicated.

After the Soviet Union sent the first human safely into orbit, the U.S. government doubled down on its effort to win the race to the moon.

America’s first opioid crisis came after its bloodiest war, but the lessons of the original debacle have been lost in history.

Over 30 years, dramatic consolidation has meant higher prices, fewer treatment options and less incentive to innovate.

History shows that the benefits of such a system can extend far beyond the venues into which such a passport would grant admission .

It’s easier to blame individuals for the opioid crisis than to attempt to diagnose and cure the ills of a society.

Vaccination is of critical importance right now. History shows us that our problems are nothing new.

Nearly two centuries later, many tribes remain suspicious of the drive to get them vaccinated against the coronavirus.

Racism documented in files from the “Central Lunatic Asylum for the Colored Insane.”

Disease reshapes our lives in surprising ways.

It's the health inequities of today, not the infamous "Tuskegee Study," that explain many Black people's distrust of the American health system.

At the first hint the virus was receding, people pushed to get life back to normal. Unfortunately another surge of the disease followed.

The two prevailing historical visions of Louis Agassiz — one gentle and reverential, the other rigid and bigoted — may simply be two sides of the same coin.

Whose body was harvested to create a spectacular anatomical specimen, and did that person know they would be on display more than a century later?

The coronavirus pandemic has highlighted racial disparities with roots in the past.