Science

Fazlur Khan and the idea that would turn architecture on its head.

For as long as scientists have studied tornadoes, researchers have dreamed of controlling them.

The grueling, relentless simulations astronauts that prepared the astronauts for quick decision-making in space.

Confused 17th-century Europeans argued that human groups were separately created, a precursor to racist thought today.

A case study from the smallpox epidemic among North Carolina Moravians.

How did the sensuality, sexuality, and homosociality of exercise create intimate possibilities for Black women in postwar America?

"The Conqueror" was filmed downwind of a nuclear test site. A new documentary tells the story of the fatal film set, and the community affected.

An epic account of a vital economic artery and our many efforts to control it.

Without the local San Francisco activists who risked their lives for it, today’s legal cannabis market might never have come to be.

Fanny Angelina Hesse introduced agar to the life sciences in 1881. A trove of unpublished family papers sheds new light on her many accomplishments.

While the phrase "between a woman and her doctor" has been used to protect abortion access, it also reflects physicians' outsized power.

Her brother’s disease leads a writer to challenge how we conceive of human abnormality in the emerging era of gene editing.

When it comes to cicadas, the silence of the historical record can be deafening.

U.S. Surgeon General Dr. Vivek Murthy published an op-ed in The New York Times calling for a ‘Warning Label on Social Media Platforms.'

On the porous, ever-shifting boundaries between science and speculation.

From the tomato to the hamburger bun, the invention has transformed not just what we eat but taste itself.

A story of math and political stasis.

The medical profession saw nothing wrong with offering a cocaine-laced cola to white, middle-class consumers. Selling it to Black Americans was another matter.

For the entire 20th century, it had felt like telepathy was just around the corner. Why is that especially true now?

Insulin transforms a sick body. It also has the potential to reconstitute our political economic realities.

Undoing the politics of fear will require us to reckon with the legacies of nativism that divert our attention from the greatest threats to our health.

The anti-vaccine movement has gained ground because the public health community has denied the truth about measles.

Putting the burden on the government to demonstrate significant risk of harm before regulating has allowed willful ignorance to undermine public health.

When Thomas Kuhn coined the term, he wasn’t referring simply to “out of the box” thinking.

The company found its own toxic compounds in human blood—and kept selling them.

Cardboard boxes hold a world of meaning that spans from Amazon to the Container Corporation of America.

The carcinogenic effects of asbestos have been known for decades. We should have banned it long ago.

Beware of theories about human nature based on the study of our earliest ancestors.

Professional nurses who moved north during the Great Migration worked in New York City’s most contagious sanatorium — and changed the course of public health.

In Beth Linker’s new book, she applies a disability studies lens to the history of posture.