Science

For more than a century, school nurses have improved public health in schools and beyond.

When the creator of MDMA first experimented with the drug, he felt a mellow sensation that he compared to "a low-calorie martini."

On May 1, 1924, the first iodized salt appeared on shelves, quickly solving an iodine deficiency crisis that plagued the northern U.S. “goiter belt.”

A collection of records from the Nixon Presidential Library and other sources on the internal debates Nixon advisors were having about climate change and environment.

On museum ethics and animal welfare in 19th century America.

Elisabeth Kübler-Ross’s “On Death and Dying” sparked a revolution in end-of-life care. But soon she began to deny mortality altogether.

Despite assumptions about its demise, it is still enmeshed in the foundations of how some professions think about the world.

Considering how relationships of cooperation and perhaps even solidarity might be forged between human beings and animals.

How psychedelics went from counterculture to grind culture.

Historians are working to shine a light on Alice Ball’s legacy and contributions to an early treatment of a dangerous and stigmatizing disease.

The history of the Nutrition Facts label exposes the power — and limitations — of such transparency.

Clare Beams on the dark legacy of a purported pregnancy miracle drug.

The nuisance of a new season.

Rat bones collected from centuries-old shipwrecks tell a story of ecological competition and swift victory.

The Chesapeake 1000, which can lift 1,000 tons, arrived in Baltimore on Friday. Decades ago, it helped build a ship for a CIA mission to recover Soviet secrets.

Injecting the world’s deadliest toxin into one’s eye was always going to be a hard sell.

Meet the Washington artist who pioneered the field of medical illustration — and helped repair the lives of soldiers returning from WWI.

Wang Huning and Alexis de Tocqueville’s dark vision of the future.

America's environmental movement has always been moralistic, which has made it bad at weighing tradeoffs. This accounts for its successes and also its failures.

The self has never been more securely an object of classification than it is today.

Our age-based laws have never made sense. With modern science, they make even less sense.

How a 1960s interspecies communication experiment went haywire.

The disparate and intriguing connections found in environmental history, one tree ring at a time.

Despite knowing that plastic recycling wouldn't work, new documents show how petrochemical companies promoted it anyway.

For some, it is a luscious dessert, a delightful treasure hiding in the woods. For others, it is, to say the least, an acquired taste. It is an enigma.

Tracking the history of a curious scientific term.

A document in her papers in the Library of Congress sheds new light on postwar research on psychedelics.

Why headlines blaming extreme weather on climate change don’t hold up, the peril of catastrophism, and the case that we’re actually safer than ever before.

Arsenic cycles through racism and empire in the Americas.

No, aliens haven’t visited the Earth. Why are so many smart people insisting otherwise?