Science

A new DNA study of skeletons from a farmstead on the Delaware frontier has revealed key information about the early transatlantic slave trade.

This 20th century ornithologist earned the respect of her contemporaries for her animal behavior research that went against the grain of traditional science.

In 1873, there weren’t very many options for the public in the United States to see what a real whale looked like.

The Vietnam draft lotteries functioned as a randomized experiment—which has allowed social scientists to study its life-changing effects.

In 1953, as a political battle raged over the US’s nuclear future, the physicist lost a classified document on an overnight train from Philadelphia to DC.

The Comte de Buffon's thirty-six volume Natural History claimed that America was a land of degeneracy. That enraged Thomas Jefferson.

Wild, feral and fossil-fuelled, fire lights up the globe. Is it time to declare that humans have created a Pyrocene?

The world's last climate crisis demonstrates that surviving is possible if bold economic and social change is embraced.

Liesl Schillinger Considers the Impeachment of Donald Trump vs. the Indictment of George III.

Mo Rocca on the struggle to depathologize homosexuality.

The transformation of the environmental movement.

The inventor did not look for problems in need of solutions; he looked for solutions in need of modification.

Apollo 11, the JPEG, the first pop-up ad, and 33 other bits of software that have transformed our world.

Can the social contract be protected from a measles outbreak?

The books examine the history of space exploration, from the race to discover Pluto to the idea of space colonization.

Edwin Forrest’s 1851 divorce trial.

On September 1st, 1858, a mob stormed the New York Marine Hospital in Staten Island, and set fire to the building.

Railroads and photography, developed largely in parallel and brought about drastic changes in how people understood time and space.

The popular way to keep warm outdoors owes a debt to World War II–era clothing science.

Charles Schulz used his culturally monolithic comic strip to advocate for public health. But his approach had some serious shortcomings.

The dark side of the medical industrial complex.

A deluge of new findings are challenging long-held scientific narratives of how humans came to North and South America.

Rural educator Frank Cyr had the vision and pull to force the nation to standardize the color of the ubiquitous vehicle.

If you think dropping a nuclear bomb into the eye of a hurricane is a bad idea, wait'll you see what they had in mind for the polar ice caps.

Many take the separation between science and politics for granted, but this view of science has its own political origins.

They can wreck your eyes, and they can land you 14 years in jail for shining one at a police chopper. But where did they come from?

A review of two new books on the postwar origins of “the Environment.”

In the 1930s, a forgotten federal bureau experimented with ways to make soy and other products more popular in the U.S.

Digital messaging was supposed to make our work lives easier and more efficient, but the math suggests that meetings might be better.

Counterculture-inspired research flourished in the Age of Aquarius.