Science

A miracle cure for addiction may not be around the corner.

As record temperatures bake portions of the United States this summer, a Chicago heat wave in 1995 offers a grim preview of the toll from climate change.

Native to Paraguay, Ka’a he’e followed a circuitous path through Indigenous medicine, Japanese food science, and American marketing to reach the US sweeteners market.

Many servicemen became addicted to opioids prescribed during the war. Society viewed their dependency as a lack of manliness.

Size-based health and beauty ideals emanated from eugenic pseudoscientific postulates, and BMI continues to advance white supremacist embodiment norms. 

Hookworm eradication efforts, along with the development of institutionalized public health, often neglected the health of the Black community.

Milk banks, a successor concept to wet nursing, are a little discussed part of the contemporary landscape of infant care.

Research shows structural racism in 1900s U.S. society harmed Black health in ways still being felt today.

Long before “transgender” entered the lexicon, Christine Jorgensen became the year’s biggest story.

As a Harvard student, Kaczynski was part of an experiment backed by the Central Intelligence Agency that one author argued shaped his worldviews.

The wildfire haze reminded some of the 1966 "killer smog" that wrapped New York in a toxic cloud. A woman recalled how her dad built a machine to save her mom.

"Ice: From Mixed Drinks to Skating Rinks – A Cool History of a Hot Commodity" reveals the history of frozen water and its impact on American life and culture.

A group of 1970s campus librarians foresaw our world of distributed knowledge and research, and designed search tools for it.

An in-depth look at horse breeding.

The Reagan administration thought Surgeon General C. Everett Koop would put his faith above public health. Instead, Koop sent all Americans a mailer on AIDS.

The complicated, ever-changing, millennia-long relationship between insects and humans.

In 1910, a failed House bill sought to increase the availability of low-cost meat by importing hippopotamuses that would be killed to make "lake cow bacon."

Botanists Elzada Clover and Lois Jotter braved rapids and steep cliffs to catalog numerous plant species.

Sigmund Freud once applied his Oedipal theory to the leader of the free world.

Forget changing only the names that honor the horrors of the past. Some biologists now argue no species should ever be named after a single individual.

Debating the meaning of gender is hardly new, but the clinical origin of the word may come as a surprise.

Coca-Cola has made ambitious climate and sustainability pledges, but marketing its products worldwide will always be a top priority.

In 1928, two Americans invented a large metal breathing device that would become synonymous with polio treatment.

Apples no one has ever tasted are still out in the wild. Dave Benscoter, a retired FBI agent, has spent a decade searching for these 100-year-old heirlooms.

A new history of the Apple II charts how computers became unavoidable fixtures of our daily lives.

While these pills are making headlines in the US, where a Texas judge tried to ban them, the story of their invention is often overlooked.

Already prone to boiler explosions that regularly killed scores of passengers, steamboats were pushed to their limits in races that valued speed over safety.

Pennyroyal is a species of mint with purple flowers. It smells like spearmint. And it has been used as an abortifacient for over two thousand years.

More than 30 years ago, the "French paradox" got America bleary-eyed.

Efforts to pinpoint early cases have been complicated, and in some cases compromised, by distractions and diversions.