I sometimes worry that many who would enjoy a scientific career are put off by a narrow and outdated conception of what’s involved. The word “scientist” still conjures up an…

Here are three versions of the same story:1. In the fall of 1996, Sally Clark, an English solicitor in Manchester, gave birth to an apparently healthy baby boy who died suddenly when…

I can’t see them. Therefore they’re not real.” From which century was this quote drawn? Not a medieval one. The utterance emerged on Sunday from Fox & Friends presenter Pete…

I first learned about Douglas Prasher three years ago, when an algorithm we’d just developed made an unpredictable prediction: He should have been a recipient of the 2008 Nobel Prize.…

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…