Science

Rat bones collected from centuries-old shipwrecks tell a story of ecological competition and swift victory.

Climate activists are no fans of electric utilities. But the alternatives that they often prefer will not deliver infrastructural change at the scale we need.

The Chesapeake 1000, which can lift 1,000 tons, arrived in Baltimore on Friday. Decades ago, it helped build a ship for a CIA mission to recover Soviet secrets.

Injecting the world’s deadliest toxin into one’s eye was always going to be a hard sell.

Meet the Washington artist who pioneered the field of medical illustration — and helped repair the lives of soldiers returning from WWI.

Wang Huning and Alexis de Tocqueville’s dark vision of the future.

America's environmental movement has always been moralistic, which has made it bad at weighing tradeoffs. This accounts for its successes and also its failures.

The self has never been more securely an object of classification than it is today.

Our age-based laws have never made sense. With modern science, they make even less sense.

How a 1960s interspecies communication experiment went haywire.

The disparate and intriguing connections found in environmental history, one tree ring at a time.

Despite knowing that plastic recycling wouldn't work, new documents show how petrochemical companies promoted it anyway.

For some, it is a luscious dessert, a delightful treasure hiding in the woods. For others, it is, to say the least, an acquired taste. It is an enigma.

Tracking the history of a curious scientific term.

A document in her papers in the Library of Congress sheds new light on postwar research on psychedelics.

Why headlines blaming extreme weather on climate change don’t hold up, the peril of catastrophism, and the case that we’re actually safer than ever before.

Arsenic cycles through racism and empire in the Americas.

No, aliens haven’t visited the Earth. Why are so many smart people insisting otherwise?

Some years wield such power that you must comply with them.

This metamorphic record is a teaching tool, a flirtation device, a college radio favorite, a nostalgic object, and more. BOOP!

Well before the hippies arrived, LSD and other hallucinogens were poised to enter the American mainstream.

My mother was a beloved doctor. She is also a reminder, to me, of every Black doctor who is not here with us but should be.

The exhibition “Mermaids and Monsters” explores hoaxes of yore.

The 1886 blizzard imperiled settlers and left fields of dead cattle in its wake.

Researchers studying the 160-year-old fur of a dog named Mutton found that the breed existed for at least 5,000 years before European colonizers eradicated it.

The archival trove chronicles the extreme measures administrators took to ensure Black sharecroppers did not receive treatment for the venereal disease.

In March 1911, the segregated Crownsville asylum opened outside Baltimore, Maryland, admitting only Black patients.

Hesitancy and opposition to vaccines has existed in the past, and such awareness provides needed context to the COVID-19 pandemic and vaccine within American history.

Pneumatic tubes offered a leap forward in business and communications, in the office and across the city.

Robert A. Millikan was once a beloved figure in American science. In 2021, his name was removed from buildings and awards. What happened?