Science

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?

Some years wield such power that you must comply with them.

This metamorphic record is a teaching tool, a flirtation device, a college radio favorite, a nostalgic object, and more. BOOP!

Well before the hippies arrived, LSD and other hallucinogens were poised to enter the American mainstream.

My mother was a beloved doctor. She is also a reminder, to me, of every Black doctor who is not here with us but should be.

The exhibition “Mermaids and Monsters” explores hoaxes of yore.

The 1886 blizzard imperiled settlers and left fields of dead cattle in its wake.

Researchers studying the 160-year-old fur of a dog named Mutton found that the breed existed for at least 5,000 years before European colonizers eradicated it.

The archival trove chronicles the extreme measures administrators took to ensure Black sharecroppers did not receive treatment for the venereal disease.

In March 1911, the segregated Crownsville asylum opened outside Baltimore, Maryland, admitting only Black patients.

Hesitancy and opposition to vaccines has existed in the past, and such awareness provides needed context to the COVID-19 pandemic and vaccine within American history.

Pneumatic tubes offered a leap forward in business and communications, in the office and across the city.

Robert A. Millikan was once a beloved figure in American science. In 2021, his name was removed from buildings and awards. What happened?

Before the Endangered Species Act, the federal government had actually encouraged the killing of certain species.

Maybe what we need is not just a new form of poultry farming but a complete revolution in how we relate to meat.

Two gifted sisters in Philadelphia helped to transform early American science.

New analysis confirms precolonial lineage of this extinct breed, once kept for their wool.

Wednesday night will bring a brilliant meteor shower, but the far bigger Leonid shower 190 years ago had people believing Judgment Day was at hand.

The US military’s greatest enemy worked in an institution saturated with military funding. How did it shape his thought?

Reexamining biases and injustices that the New England Journal of Medicine has historically helped to perpetuate.

Sturmann Yanghis, a 17-year-old South African, was put on stage in America as a “wild savage.” Harvard claimed his remains when he died. Then they disappeared.