On a cold, dry Tuesday in December, 1940, Rita Levi-Montalcini rode a train from the station near her home in Turin, Italy, for 80 miles to Milan to buy a microscope. Milan had not…

In the annals of transportation history persists a tale of how automobiles in the early 20th century helped cities conquer their waste problems. It’s a tidy story, so to speak, about…

James Watson once said his road to the 1962 Nobel Prize began in Naples, Italy. At a conference in 1951, he met Maurice Wilkins, the biophysicist with whom he and Francis Crick shared…

The dinosaur is a chimera. Some parts of this complex assemblage are the result of biological evolution. But others are products of human ingenuity, constructed by artists, scientists,…

John Jay Hopkins’s visit to Japan in 1955, as an informal emissary of “Atoms for Peace,” must have seemed surreal to everyone involved. Hopkins was the head of an old American…

When I first posted on social media about my new book, Father Figure: How to Be a Feminist Dad, some of my friends were confused. One commented, “I don’t understand; do you hate…

Elaine Morgan had sass. In Descent of Woman, published in 1972, she asked her readers to take science into their own hands. “Try a bit of fieldwork,” she suggested. “Go out of…

In 1913, 26-year-old Russian biologist Nikolai Vavilov went to the John Innes Horticultural Institute to study at the feet of legendary geneticist William Bateson. While there, Vavilov…

When people entertain transporting to the past, 19th-century Berlin, say, they don’t often imagine a dramatic shift in smellscape. The inhabitants talk differently. Their fashion…

It’s easy to name science and math geniuses. I can just flip open my old book from the 1960s, which lists “100 Great Scientists”; it contains all the names you’d find on most…