Science

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.

Why is the essential promise of technology and the alleviation of drudgery not enough?

The Large Synoptic Survey Telescope was renamed The Vera C. Rubin Observatory. This telescope is breaking new ground, just as Vera Rubin did in her lifetime.

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?

In the 1970s, the National Science Foundation tried to shake up the Cold War research model.

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.

“Trouble men” searched for water damage in early analog telephones.

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. 

In the 19th century, tens of thousands of babies died every year of gastroenteritis.

“When you invent the plane, you also invent the plane crash.”

The demystification of pregnancy.

The health secretary’s clearest plans for psychiatric treatment are a retreat to the past.