Science

Tom Scully is as responsible as anyone for the way health care in America works today.

Psychiatrist Bessel van der Kolk’s once controversial theory of trauma became the dominant way we make sense of our lives.

Why we need to be critical of medical museums as spaces for disability histories.

For centuries the study of optics and the use of invisibility in science fiction have developed side by side, each inspiring the other.

It took a shift in food culture for consumers to embrace the "noodle plant."

Computer scientist Joseph Weizenbaum was there at the dawn of artificial intelligence– but he was also adamant that we must never confuse computers with humans.

Our ways of thinking about thinking are a product of postwar business culture.

The so-called "father of the bomb" helped bring us prematurely into the age of existential risk.

We must recognize the continued suffering and sacrifice of the Navajo that built the atomic era.

Federal agencies awarded millions of dollars to scientific studies on Native American human remains, undermining the goals of tribes fighting for repatriation.

It turns out there was an "unlikely" chance the first atomic bomb could have ignited the atmosphere — which didn’t stop the Manhattan Project.

The “Barbenheimer” double feature captures the dawn of our imperiled era.

A-bomb architect “was no Einstein,” historian says, but he did Nobel-level work on black holes.

A miracle cure for addiction may not be around the corner.

As record temperatures bake portions of the United States this summer, a Chicago heat wave in 1995 offers a grim preview of the toll from climate change.

Native to Paraguay, Ka’a he’e followed a circuitous path through Indigenous medicine, Japanese food science, and American marketing to reach the US sweeteners market.

Many servicemen became addicted to opioids prescribed during the war. Society viewed their dependency as a lack of manliness.

Size-based health and beauty ideals emanated from eugenic pseudoscientific postulates, and BMI continues to advance white supremacist embodiment norms. 

In 1973, a young biologist hatched a plan to bring a charismatic seabird back to Maine. Over five decades, it would revolutionize seabird restoration.

Hookworm eradication efforts, along with the development of institutionalized public health, often neglected the health of the Black community.

Milk banks, a successor concept to wet nursing, are a little discussed part of the contemporary landscape of infant care.

Research shows structural racism in 1900s U.S. society harmed Black health in ways still being felt today.

Long before “transgender” entered the lexicon, Christine Jorgensen became the year’s biggest story.

As a Harvard student, Kaczynski was part of an experiment backed by the Central Intelligence Agency that one author argued shaped his worldviews.

The wildfire haze reminded some of the 1966 "killer smog" that wrapped New York in a toxic cloud. A woman recalled how her dad built a machine to save her mom.

"Ice: From Mixed Drinks to Skating Rinks – A Cool History of a Hot Commodity" reveals the history of frozen water and its impact on American life and culture.

A group of 1970s campus librarians foresaw our world of distributed knowledge and research, and designed search tools for it.

An in-depth look at horse breeding.

The Reagan administration thought Surgeon General C. Everett Koop would put his faith above public health. Instead, Koop sent all Americans a mailer on AIDS.

The complicated, ever-changing, millennia-long relationship between insects and humans.