History

His dream of feeding the world died in prison. His dream of a seed bank lives on.

In her bedroom during WWII, she discovered how the nervous system is wired.

In her bedroom during WWII, she discovered how the nervous system is wired.

Why men put down other men by attacking their masculinity.

It took an outsider to restore women to the story of human evolution.

His dream of feeding the world died in prison. His dream of a seed bank lives on.

What geoscientists are uncovering in Eastern Europe.

It’s a myth that legendary works in science aren’t read.

Get a whiff of a new sensory experience in history.

The first US museum was devoted to truth and reason. Then the circus came to town.

Images are not always neutral, even within the framework of science.

How the first Americans made their way from Siberia to Patagonia.

In Rush, author Stephen Fried confirms what earlier biographical writings on the doctor had observed: that history misunderstood him, “had not taken him seriously enough as a founder, a writer, a teacher, and a revolutionary in politics, medicine, religion, public health, and philosophy.”.Painting by John Trumbull / Wikicommons I ascribe the Success of our Revolution […]

Where might the US be if it heeded her discovery of global warming’s source?

It’s a fine line between oblivion and immortality.

Now that we’re corralled into our homes and apartments, something seems pre-modern in how our worlds have shrunk. Unlike past quarantines, we’re also connected by digital technology to the rest of the globe, calling to mind poet John Donne’s line from a 1633 poem about making “one little room an everywhere.” Donne came of age […]

A warning from history about simultaneous disasters.

If an earthquake now hits India or Iran, like in 2001 and 2003, respectively, killing over 20,000 people in each country—or if we witness a repeat of 2005’s Hurricane Katrina in the US or 2011’s tsunami in Japan—will the world respond? Would the world wish to respond?Photograph by Microgen / Shutterstock Parts of the world […]

Why we still see the world like the mathematician and poet who first mapped it.

Where might the US be if it heeded her discovery of global warming’s source?

Where might the US be if it heeded her discovery of global warming’s source?

The lessons in Helen Keller's books.

The story of dinosaurs is also the story of capitalism.

Reviving lost stories of women in science.

The Ġgantija temples of Malta are among the earliest free-standing buildings known.Photograph by Bs0u10e01 / Wikicommons The mysteries of an ancient civilization that survived for more than a millennium on the island of Malta—and then collapsed within two generations—have been unravelled by archaeologists who analyzed pollen buried deep within the earth and ancient DNA from […]

Katherine Johnson negotiated the dynamics of both race and space.

Benjamin Rush was a strange, or a strangely gifted, man, and one of the youngest—at 30—to sign the Declaration of Independence.Painting by John Trumbull / Wikicommons I ascribe the Success of our Revolution to a Galaxy,” Benjamin Rush wrote to John Adams, in 1812. He wasn’t invoking the astrological. It was commonplace then to associate […]

Our ancient Roman would simply wipe him- or herself, rinse the tersorium in whatever was available (running water and/or a bucket of vinegar or salt water), and leave it for the next person to use.Photograph by Kapustin Igor / Shutterstock We’ve all been caught unawares by our digestive tract at one time or another. It […]

The tech that most people depend on must appeal to our fears and vanities and must require continuous and rapid overturn. If it were truly necessary, the market would demand durability.Wikicommons Surrounded by advanced achievements in medicine, space exploration, and robotics, people can be forgiven for thinking our time boasts the best technology. So I […]

Man’s best friend was also man’s first buried pet.Photograph by Pavlina Trauskeova / Shutterstock As a kid, when my pet turtle died we had a funeral—of course—and buried him in the backyard. When the family dog passed, his remains were cremated and placed in an urn on the mantle. In today’s society, mortuary rites for […]

What it was like being among the first women in the US missile program.

Human skin books are the rare artifacts that prove that the practice of making leather goods from human skin is more than just a ghoulish legend.Photograph by voodoo willy In 1868, on a hot, midsummer day, 28-year-old Mary Lynch was admitted to the Philadelphia Almshouse and Hospital, the city hospital for the poor, better known […]

Nine letters by Freeman Dyson portray his relationship with the Nobel Laureate.

The unusual union of a renowned artist and the discoverer of the Polio vaccine.

This planetarium was hailed as a successor to Russian theater and the Orthodox Church.

Stone’s silent sister in the archaeological record.

Anybody you can name from ancient history is in your family tree.

Byzantine military inventors perfected Greek Fire, a combustible liquid like napalm that could be hurled at enemy ships (or lobbed against land armies as hand grenades).Madrid Skylitzes (12th century) / Wikicommons Byzantine civilization, the eastern Roman empire whose capital was at Constantinople, is mostly known today for its spirituality and eccentricities, including the spectacular church […]

  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; electrons glom onto protons like bears onto honey. But what if some oddity seems to defy the laws of nature, like the platypus, […]

The cat as the witch’s familiar in the 17th century, woodcut.Mary Evans Picture Library From the 12th century onward there were two distinct attitudes to cats. For many people the cat population operated as important rodent-controllers, and every so often a cat would go beyond being a mere working animal and become a welcome pet […]

Speculation on multiple universes goes back farther than you might think.

British soldiers in a World War I trench.Photograph by Ernest Brooks / Australian War Memorial / Wikicommons Just over 100 years ago, on the 28th of June, 1914, the Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria-Hungary was assassinated in Sarajevo. That set into motion a chain of events that, within several weeks, culminated in the European great […]

When we make moral judgments, says Fiery Cushman, the lead researcher at Harvard’s Moral Psychology Lab, the “more primitive, so to speak ‘you caused it, you should suffer’ response never goes away.”“The Barque of Dante,” by Eugène Delacroix (1822) One day in July 1884, four shipwrecked men aboard a lifeboat headed northwest off the Cape […]

The very act of existential unburdening proves to be life prolonging.Photograph by UpperCut Images / Getty What would go through your mind if I told you that you had cancer? Perhaps you’d wonder how you got it, or how you were going to get rid of it. Maybe you’d worry about whether you could keep […]

A neuroscientist turned designer has created a unique celebration of women’s history month.

Turns out, we've been debating the notion of infinite worlds for millennia.

Fingers Crossed: Pascal reasoned that life is a sort of “game,” and that our faith in God, or lack-there-of, is our wager as to the ultimate nature of reality.Photograph by Albert / Flickr On the evening of November 23rd, 1654, the brilliant polymath Blaise Pascal was thrown from his horse-drawn carriage, the creatures having been […]

Something is rotten in Denmark, but not to worry, it’s just the remains of astronomer Tycho Brahe. Despite being dead for over 400 years, this Renaissance astronomer continues to captivate scientists, historians, and the public. Part of his fame is due to his scientific credentials. Brahe is the father of modern observational astronomy, known for […]

Have you ever been at sea in a dense fog, when it seemed as if a tangible white darkness shut you in, and the great ship, tense and anxious, groped her way toward the shore with plummet and sounding-line, and you waited with beating heart for something to happen? If there’s a better description of […]

Have you ever been at sea in a dense fog, when it seemed as if a tangible white darkness shut you in, and the great ship, tense and anxious, groped her way toward the shore with plummet and sounding-line, and you waited with beating heart for something to happen? If there’s a better description of […]

Presbyterian reverend Thomas Bayes had no reason to suspect he’d make any lasting contribution to humankind. Born in England at the beginning of the 18th century, Bayes was a quiet and questioning man. He published only two works in his lifetime. In 1731, he wrote a defense of God’s—and the British monarchy’s—“divine benevolence,” and in […]

An alternative history of the great ideas of science.

In the debate between religion and science, wonder is what the doctor ordered.

Katherine Johnson negotiated the dynamics of both race and space.

The rise of fascism shaped Schrödinger’s cat fable.

If they’re honest and humble enough, people who study societies that existed in the Americas before the arrival of Europeans will admit that they don’t really understand those societies. They’ll know the facts about pre-Hispanic cultures and chronologies, yet how people in those societies thought, their values and psychologies, remain maddeningly out of reach. It’s like reading poetry […]

Dr. Hans Reiter achieved the one thing most likely to keep a physician’s name in textbooks forever: He got an illness named after him. While working as a medic in the German army in World War I, he once treated a case of simultaneous inflammation in the joints, eyes, and urethra. This became known as […]

Sports don’t survive their cultures of origin if they resist modern measurement.

On a damp, foggy January morning in 1793, Louis XVI, besieged monarch of France, stood before a guillotine. To some 20,000 of his angry subjects, Louis declared: “I die innocent of all the pretended crimes laid to my charge. I forgive all those who have had any hand in my misfortunes, and I pray that […]

In 1868, on a hot, midsummer day, 28-year-old Mary Lynch was admitted to the Philadelphia Almshouse and Hospital, the city hospital for the poor, better known as “Old Blockley.” Lynch had tuberculosis, which was soon to be compounded by the parasitic infection trichinosis. She didn’t recover, dying in Ward 27 the following year, weighing just […]

The creation of stainless steel took equal parts metallurgy and perseverance.

Women are woven deeply into the history of science, stretching back to ancient Egypt, over 4,000 years ago. But because their contributions often go unacknowledged, they fade into obscurity—and the threads of their influence today aren’t as apparent as they ought to be.  As a Wikipedia editor, I have tried to make women’s contributions more […]

Eduard Egarter-Vigl (L) and Albert Zink (R) taking a sample from the Iceman in November 2010.EURAC/Marion Lafogler In 1991, two German tourists walking an Alpine ridge, between Austria and Italy, stumbled across something shocking: a yellowed but well preserved human body, partially frozen embedded in a glacier. Initially, they believed it to be the remains […]

Our cultural history is crumbling. Not because of bad education—though one might make that argument—but because of chemistry. Between the late 60s and the late 80s, much of our culture—from the Nixon trials on television to unreleased music from famous artists like the Beatles—was recorded on magnetic tape, and this tape is starting to disintegrate. […]

How place names encode ecological change.

Fifty years ago, who knew we’d learn to clone genes and find water on Mars?

Mangroves are sturdy trees. Recognizable by their extensive root systems, these trees can thrive in muddy soil, sand, peat, even coral. They tolerate water much saltier than most other plants and survive flooding during severe storms. It is perhaps their sturdiness that led mangroves to be one of the most significant targets in the Vietnam […]

This bitter dispute set the stage for the modern weather forecast.

This bitter dispute set the stage for the modern weather forecast.

A complexity theorist explores how science and culture co-evolve.

A degraded frame from an old celluloid (aka nitrate) film, the same material used by Naum Gabo in some of his sculptures   In the 1930s, Russian-born sculptor Naum Gabo started experimenting with a thin, plastic material called celluloid. Previously used as film for photography or to make cheap jewelry, celluloid in Gabo’s hands became […]

In the early 1950s, the U.S. Air Force Supply Depot in Ohio was looking for a faster way to store and fetch information from its sizable inventory. They had 50,000 items in their records and wanted instant access to each one of them. The dominant storage technologies of the time—punch cards, magnetic tape and magnetic […]

The president and the physicist teach us a lesson about moral genius.

For these scientists, success and fame did not come in equal measure.

10 great minds that should have been in your science textbooks.

Why it’s time to retire the concept of genius.

Why it’s time to retire the concept of genius.

His weather forecasts changed the world. Could his predictions of war?

A Renaissance alchemist pioneers feedback control.

His curious discovery, 200 years ago, foresaw our expanding universe.

Life, death, and Sputnik.

Life, death, and Sputnik.

Humans have long had a desire to capture the now—to freeze the current moment to look back on after it has left us. We painted, wrote things down, developed photography and storage systems, and built vast libraries of books and images. In 1939, during the New York World’s Fair, Westinghouse introduced the first-ever “time capsule” […]

It’s 2014: Sixty-one years since the discovery of the double-helix structure of DNA. Four hundred seventy one years since Copernicus published the heliocentric model of the universe. And one year since the Higgs Boson was discovered. In 100 years, how will we look back on today’s science? We’re building a scientific time capsule—a collection of […]

How the science of sound explained an ancient Peruvian oracle.

How the unlikely and unexplainable, strange and terrifying, spawned the age of science.

How the unlikely and unexplainable, strange and terrifying, spawned the age of science.

On July 4, 1776, representatives of thirteen colonies on the eastern shores of North America signed a Declaration of Independence from England. Winning independence was still a bloody war ahead, an unlikely outcome. Declaring independence was rashness, potentially carrying a death sentence for treason. Not, perhaps, what you would expect of well-educated men, many of […]