To enjoy a story behind the story podcast of this article, just press the play button below. Constantine Rafinesque had only been dead a few months when Asa Gray sat down to eulogize…

As a geologist and professor I speak and write rather cavalierly about eras and eons. One of the courses I routinely teach is “History of Earth and Life,” a survey of the 4.5-billion-year…

Errol Morris feels that Thomas Kuhn saved him from a career he was not suited for—by having him thrown out of Princeton. In 1972, Kuhn was a professor of philosophy and the history…

Silicon Valley has a term for startups that reach the $1 billion valuation mark: unicorns. The term is instructive. It suggests not only that hugely successful startups are rare, but…

“You may speculate from the day that days were created, but you may not speculate on what was before that.”—Talmud, Tractate Hagigah 11b, 450 A.D. To go back to the beginning,…

In December 2014, the publisher Scientific Research issued a retraction notice for a paper that had appeared in its journal Health with the anodyne title “Basic Principles Underlying…

Bumping into Millie Dresselhaus in the halls of MIT, where she was an Institute Professor, would invariably earn you a warm smile. It was hard to imagine a more modest or down-to-earth…

The ice on Lake Baikal in Siberia is thick and endless, a deep blue covered with fresh powdery snow. It’s a long journey to reach this middle of nowhere. First a six-hour flight…

Hoss Cartwright, a former editor of the International Journal of Agricultural Innovations and Research, had a good excuse for missing the 5th World Congress on Virology last year:…

xxx.lanl.gov. The address was cryptic, with a tantalizing whiff of government secrets, or worse. The server itself was exactly the opposite. Government, yes—it was hosted by Los…