Science

Three reasons why you shouldn’t consult the nineteenth-century WebMD archives.

“We are starved!” cried the sixty skeletal members of the English colony of Jamestown as provisions arrived in 1610.

The toll of history’s worst epidemic surpasses all the military deaths in World War I and World War II combined. And it may have begun in the United States.

This year's Nobel Prize in physics is a blast from the past of Cold War-era research investment. Is that era gone for good?

Americans, warned President Teddy Roosevelt's newly appointed opium commissioner in 1908, 'have become the greatest drugs fiends in the world.'

Preserved birds and digital photos help pinpoint levels of black carbon in the air and the changes that led to its decline.

When America’s first aerial cameraman met an infamous spirit photographer, the chemistry was explosive.

His administration has made the moon a destination, not just a pit stop, on the way to Mars.

The organic compounds that enabled industrialization are having unintended consequences for the planet’s life.

The 1957 launch of Sputnik wasn’t necessarily the start of the US-Soviet space race that Americans think of today.

How the U.S. military handled a shortage of prosthetic eyes for injured soldiers.

An epic natural disaster restored the forest of an earlier America.

A primary source set and teaching guide created by educators.

Our circumstances have changed a lot since early colonial times. Unfortunately, our thinking about climate hasn’t changed enough.

Can the history of hurricanes prove the existence of climate change?

A history of every Atlantic storm tracked by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration since 1987.

For decades, only female names were used.

Life expectancy doubled in the past 150 years. Here’s why.

Based on a century's worth of NOAA data.

It turns out that deforestation and suburbanization – not evolution – are to blame for the tick-borne epidemic.

Rural Americans once led the fight to link extreme weather like Hurricane Harvey and human activity. What changed?

Blame messy history for the gender imbalance bedeviling Silicon Valley.

The darkness of the eclipse lit up American minds more than a century ago.

With the rise of spit-in-a-cup genetic testing, white nationalists are turning to science to "prove" their racial identity.

Cooling the air was once seen as sinful. Maybe the idea wasn’t entirely wrong.

Reconsidering the journalistic ethics of a New York Times reporter who chronicled the Manhattan Project from the inside.

Eclipse madness is real.

How Americans got so weird about science.

Pre-Columbian bodies are once again being used as evidence for extraterrestrial life.

How does one talk about cancer, something so unpleasant that is almost always linked with death, and where do metaphors come in?