Science

Three new genetics studies present a fascinating, complex picture of how the first people in America spread across two continents.

Though their wishes were often overshadowed, soldier-patients had voices.

A team of sound artists reconstructs what the end of the First World War might have sounded like.

The concertina wire Trump loves at the border has a long, troubling legacy in the West.

In late-nineteenth-century America, the miscarried fetus became a scientific specimen.

Telegraph operators were the first to know news of the Civil War.

“Megafires” are now a staple of life in the Pacific Northwest, but how we talk about them illustrates the tension at the heart of the western myth itself.

A new study on Civil War prisoners suggests that our parents’—and even grandparents’—experiences might affect our DNA.

The presidential text that hits your phone Wednesday will be the first, but it's part of a decades-long lineage of government alerts.

What we can learn about trade policy from a misbegotten 19th century effort to quantify the chemical properties of wool.

Virginia Woolf and Charlotte Perkins Gilman were both patients of this infamous rest cure.

For well over a hundred years, paleontology has done double duty as mass entertainment.

What constitutes death is based on more factors than those that are medical.

Anxieties about the effects of screens on human health are hardly new, but the way the public addresses the problems has changed.

The world's greatest clockmaker sent a clock to the new world – and everything went haywire.

Current debates about breastfeeding highlight the political nature of changing cultural norms about motherhood.

How do some companies regain public trust after something goes seriously wrong, while others fail?

One diagnosis fits all! If you're a woman.

The explorer John Wesley Powell tried to prevent the overdevelopment of the West.

A favorite anecdote about the origins of the vibrator is probably a myth.

Bighorn sheep and moose learn to migrate from one another. When they die, that generational know-how is not easily replaced.

A previously unnamed scientist finally gets her due.

Medical science has always had a lax relationship to consent – especially with the marginalized.

What happens when the Patent Office doesn't recognize the inventor as a person at all?

The historic pigments in the Forbes Collection include the esoteric, the expensive, and the toxic.

In 1991, eight people sealed themselves inside a giant glass biosphere to practice space living. By the time they emerged, they had “suffocated, starved and went mad.”

To prevent botulism in tinned goods, scientists and canners worked with the government to protect the public.

City dwellers of the 19th century were dogged by a foul terror: miasma.

Physicist and writer Leo Szilard was vital to the creation of the atomic bomb. He also did everything he could to prevent its use.

World War I exposed the world to the horror of gas attacks. But why do we draw the line there when other methods of killing prove so much more effective?