Science

The 20th-century movement to fix slouching questions the moral and political dimensions of addressing bad backs over wider public health concerns.

How fifty years of barcode magic came to be.

Cicely Saunders realized that preparing for a good death is the first step in providing one.

Hervey Cleckley wanted to treat the most overlooked psychiatric patients. Instead his work was used to demonize them.

“Spectropia” demystified the techniques used by mediums who claimed they could speak to the dead, revealing the “absurd follies of Spiritualism.”

Apple experts divide time into “before Honeycrisp” and “after Honeycrisp,” and apples have never tasted so good.

Today’s contentious immigration debate is the construct of one man’s effort to halt overpopulation.

Journalists helped to pioneer what would eventually result in our mobile world.

Forest fires of 1910 sparked a media-driven fire exclusion policy, which has arguably worsened today's "fire problem."

Once lauded as a wonder of the age, cocaine soon became the object of profound anxieties. What happened?

Longevity enthusiasts are microdosing a 19th-century cure-all. Are they onto something?

“Postpartum depression” encompasses various debilitating changes in mood that can occur after giving birth. How did that language come to be?

The same legal and cultural struggles will await the next critical infrastructural technology, and the next.

Seaweed and its connection to faith and abolitionism.

In two new books, the rise of recycling is a story of illusory promises, often entwined with disturbing political agendas.

The controversial career of John E. Mack, the Pulitzer Prize–winning Harvard psychiatrist who wrote best-selling books on UFO abduction.

Eleanor Roosevelt’s tacit support for a program that jailed sex workers suggests the limits of the elite-led reform efforts she championed.

A community health center in Los Angeles that sought to get patients back into the community.

Before AC, office workers relied on building design to adapt to high temperatures. The promise of boosted productivity created a different kind of workplace.

A researcher challenged the idea that women did not – and should not – experience sexual desire.

On the native prairies of North America, green is the problem.

How research helps us understand the past to create a better future.

First discovered in 1938, Teflon has been used for everything from helping to create the first atomic bomb to keeping your eggs from sticking to the pan.

Scientists and lawmakers in the 70s knew more than we think they did about climate change and the impacts of fossil fuel regulations.

It wasn’t just scientists who were worried, but Congress, the White House, and even Sports Illustrated, newly unearthed documents show.

Coding was a preserve of elites, until BASIC hit the streets.

The magical in-betweenness—and surprising epidemiological history—of the porch.

On the impact of systematic oppression on indigenous cuisine in the United States.

The Year 2000 computer problem has become a punchline in recent years, but the CrowdStrike outage shows the joke's on us.

A new book takes on a diagnosis invented to cover up police killings: that men of color are “combusting as a result of their aggressiveness.”