Nobel Prize

The iconic songwriter has transcended time and place for 60 years. What should that mean for the rest of us?

This year's Nobel Prize in physics is a blast from the past of Cold War-era research investment. Is that era gone for good?

Eighty years after the bomb, scientists still grapple with nuclear legacy. Some seek atonement, others insist it’s no longer their burden.

Former President Jimmy Carter, who died Sunday at age 100, gave visibility to devastating health problems that are often invisible.

You can argue over whether Jimmy Carter was America’s greatest president, but he was undoubtedly one of the greatest Americans to ever become president.

Despite assumptions about its demise, it is still enmeshed in the foundations of how some professions think about the world.

Isaiah Bowman was one of the worst college presidents in American history.

He was the only person ever to be national security adviser and secretary of state at the same time. He was also the target of relentless critics.

A-bomb architect “was no Einstein,” historian says, but he did Nobel-level work on black holes.

How a celebrated corporate lawyer named Elihu Root became the driving force behind some of the worst U.S. atrocities ever perpetrated abroad.

A new interactive digital project recovers biographies of women in science, and recreates the social networks that were essential to sustaining their work.

Even its inventors didn’t fully understand the point-contact transistor.

In Yoknapatawpha County, the past never speaks with a single voice.

How a feisty, suicidal Nobel laureate infuriated both Hitler and Stalin, and stalled cancer research for fifty years along the way.

How Rosalind Franklin, the crystallographer whose data were crucial to solving the structure of DNA, was written out of the story of scientific discovery.

Hundreds of scientists had worked on mRNA vaccines for decades before the coronavirus pandemic brought a breakthrough.

How medical humanitarianism helped facilitate exploitation of Africa.

The results of Foote's simple experiments were confirmed through hundreds of tests by scientists in the US and Europe. It happened more than a century ago.

“A Promised Land” tells of a country that needed a savior.

Since World War I we’ve been solving problems with dangerous chemicals that introduce new problems.

Faulkner’s chroniclers have to reconcile the novelist’s often repellent political positions with the extraordinary meditations on race, violence, and cruelty in his fiction.

Cameron Laux looks at how The Age of Innocence – published 100 years ago – marked a pivotal moment in US history.

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

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's best work was done in isolation, a long way from Soviet Russia.

Tesla created inventions that continue to alter our daily lives, but he died nearly penniless.