Science

The real Whitney story is less grand than the legend, but more interesting and, ultimately, more edifying.

The Congressional Hackathon highlights fading faith in tech fixes and exposes the limits of AI optimism.

As a polio survivor, I am a dinosaur today. My great hope is that our country’s living memory of the disease ends with my generation.

Recent news coverage has called the Privacy Act of 1974 “Watergate-inspired,” but such framing misses the big picture.

A cautionary tale from the Veterans Health Administration’s troubled past.

Thomas Paine nearly died quarantined off in Philadelphia in 1774. Then a Loyalist doctor nursed him back to health.

We’re still dealing with the repercussions of a discredited 1998 study that sowed fear and skepticism about vaccines.

From the Pequot War to the New Deal-era Civilian Conservation Corps, trees tell a living story.

In 1965, Carl Borgmann warned University of Tennessee graduates about CO₂ buildup and climate change, decades before it became a global concern.

In the early days of flight, airships were hailed as the future of war. Then disaster struck the USS Akron.

Offshoots from the “Tree of Life” traveled from Mesopotamia to the Levant to the United States, beguiling everyone with their toothsome confections.

After Hiroshima, scientists became key political voices, some as stewards, others as activists, shaping nuclear policy and moral responsibility.

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

He misrepresented the history of the gym-class test. I know because I served on the council that helped modernize it.

Journalist Rebecca Grant shifts the abortion conversation away from laws and morals to focus on access: getting people the care they seek.

Historians are recovering the overlooked history of North America’s Crotalus horridus, the timber rattlesnake.

For years, the Office of Technology Assessment helped Congress see around corners on science and tech. Its 1995 shutdown left lawmakers flying blind.

A lack of regulatory oversight of supplements allows misleading labels and dangerous products to slip through the cracks and into American homes.

Over the past several decades, concerns about costs and producing short-term results have narrowed the NIH’s impact.

How the “obstetrical dilemma” and the dark history of pelvimetry met in the present.

Colonel Elmer Ellsworth's death marked a turning point in how the nation honored the fallen.

Pits and seeps full of tar and asphalt offer new insights into old ecosystems and cultures.

In the mid-1800s, shady milk purveyors found it was cheaper to keep cows in cities and feed them the byproducts of whiskey manufacturing. The results were dire.

The harrowing experience of being powerless against illness and death.

The men who set off the nuclear age tell the tale in their own words.

On daguerreotypes, William Henry Fox Talbot, and darkroom dangers.

Declassified documents show atomic testing in New Mexico distributed radioactive matter to an extent that the scientists at Los Alamos were ill-prepared for.

The disquieting story of an American health-product giant.

A new book unearths a chapter of the state’s story when anti-intellectual fundamentalism was put to good ends.

The Large Synoptic Survey Telescope was renamed The Vera C. Rubin Observatory. This telescope is breaking new ground, just as Vera Rubin did in her lifetime.