The records of the Old Bailey, London’s central criminal court, tell the tale of one John Randal, who was tried on Sept. 9, 1674. He was charged “with two Indictments, one for…

Among other pursuits, Simon DeDeo studies big things—those that are too big to experiment on. These include cosmology, the subject of his doctoral dissertation, and human societies.…

By the time Cornelis Drebbel built an oven with a simple thermostat, one of the first manmade feedback mechanisms in history, in the 1620s, he was regarded in Europe as a magisterial,…

The lights in the sky above us—the sun, the moon, and the panoply of countless stars—have surely been a source of wonder since long before recorded history. Ingenious efforts to…

When the HMS Beagle dropped anchor on San Cristobal, the easternmost island in the Galapagos archipelago, in September 1835, the ship’s naturalist Charles Darwin eagerly went ashore…

Celebrated author Jared Diamond asks deceptively simple questions: “What do traditional societies do better than us?” “Why are some nations more resilient than others?” The…

Collecting grotesque and marvelous objects was a favorite pastime among genteel Europeans from the early modern period to the Enlightenment. Their curated “wunderkammern,” or “cabinets…

Finding regularity in nature is the bread and butter of science. We know that reptiles lay eggs, while mammals bear live young; the Earth revolves around the sun every 365.25 days;…