Science

At the time of the Apollo 11 landing, some Americans had reservations about reaching for the stars when troubles swelled on Earth.

It's worth considering how the two images of the beaver – one focused upon its hind parts and the other upon its industry – are but two acts in a single history.

Reading Silent Spring today, in the hazy reddish glow of climate catastrophe, is both an exhilarating and a melancholy pleasure.

Lead contamination in New Orleans and beyond.

Research finds that white people in regions that were heavily dependent on slavery are more likely to harbor unconscious racism.

The roots of anti-gay attitudes lay in white supremacy.

A review of three recent books that delve into the history and science of vaccines and immunity, and the anxieties that accompany them.

The code has undergone minor changes since its creation, but its use persists to this day.

Two women programmers played a pivotal role in the birth of chaos theory. Their previously untold story illustrates the changing status of computation in science.

Challenges to the legitimacy of the profession have forced it to examine itself. What, exactly, constitutes a mental disorder?

Science doesn’t make you magically objective, and it’s not separate from the rest of human experience.

ARPANET and the development of the internet, 50 years later.

We don't think much about where our waste goes, but the history of what we do with poop is also the history of how we grow food.

If the sci-fi space cities of Bezos’s Blue Origin look familiar, it’s because they’re derived from the work of his college professor.

A Pompous Doctor, a Racist Bureaucracy, and More. From the book "Black Death at the Golden Gate".

25 years later, The Bell Curve’s analysis of race and intelligence refuses to die.

The extraordinary woman known as the ‘Angel of the Battlefield’ eventually founded the Red Cross.

A century ago, the Flexner Report led to the closure of 75% of U.S. medical schools. It still explains a lot about today’s unequal access to healthcare.

Junk Science, paternalism, and a misplaced faith in 'expertise.'

To better understand the controversy over New York’s measles outbreak, you have to go back to the late 19th century.

The man who wrote one of environmentalism’s most-cited essays was a racist, eugenicist, nativist and Islamaphobe.

Three recent books explore different aspects of opiate addiction in America.

Key plant and animal specimens arrived in Europe on slavers’ ships

The idea that liberal democracies shielded science from politics was always flawed.

For centuries, literalist interpretations of the Book of Genesis have fueled scientific racism and white supremacy.

Apollo’s successful computing software was optimized to deal with unknown problems.

Our ethics and desires can shape digital networks at least as forcefully as those networks influence us.

A review of "She Has Her Mother’s Laugh: The Powers, Perversions, and Potential of Heredity."

However the Little Ice Age came to be, we now know that climatic cooling had profound consequences for contemporary societies.

Civic-minded Midwesterners realized that network access would someday be a necessity, and worked to make it available to everyone, no strings attached.