Science

How Emily Dickinson, scientists, and other writers theorized plant intelligence in the nineteenth century.

Medical schools in the antebellum U.S. were critical in the formation of a medical community that shared ideas about racial science.

The Great Epizootic, an equine flu in 1872-1873, infected most U.S. horses. Streetcars and mail delivery stopped across the country while fires raged.

Stephen Casper, a medical historian, argues that the danger of C.T.E. used to be widely acknowledged. How did we unlearn what we once knew?

We’ve been fighting over gas stoves for decades.

A relic of '80s scofflaw gun culture is still lethal.

As two warring bone hunters sought to destroy each other, they laid the foundations for our knowledge of dinosaurs.

A 1940s Red Cross rule, which racially segregated blood, propped up notions of racial difference and Black inferiority.

The history—and danger—of a modern safety obsession.

Catastrophic accidents at power plants have heightened fears about the safety of nuclear energy, but it's getting renewed attention as a way to fight global warming.

The march toward revolution in America coincided with a smallpox epidemic. True freedom now meant freedom from disease as well.

The prospect of removing people from communities to be put in institutions has been a project of social control.

Manhattan Project physicist was infamously stripped of his security clearance in 1954.

Archaeology and genetics can’t yet agree on when humans first arrived in the Americas. That’s good science, and here’s why.

The first flu children encounter shapes their immune systems. This had a surprising effect on Black and white mortality rates in 1918.

How the U.S. became a global laggard in chemical regulation.

In the 19th century, food science promised to improve the health, robustness, and productivity of humankind.

High-stakes testing has struggled with overt and implicit biases. Should it still have a place in modern education?

Leila Philip's book is thrilling, both on scientific and historical levels.

A catalog of cleanup efforts at the 50-plus sites where uranium was processed for nuclear weapons, where polluted water and sickness were often left behind.

A real (but mostly forgotten) patent conjures a world that could have been.

Predicting a hurricane in nineteenth-century South Carolina.

Game theory, computers, the atom bomb—these are just a few of things von Neumann played a role in developing, changing the 20th century for better and worse.

Even its inventors didn’t fully understand the point-contact transistor.

The fact that most doctors like me don't know how to perform abortions is one of the greatest scandals of contemporary medicine in the US.

Solving baseball’s enduring puzzles, to those who could even see them, was its own reward. They changed everything but were never given their due.

The Police Beat Algorithm’s outputs were not so much predictive of future crime as they were self-fulfilling prophesies.

"Female physicians" did a lot more than provide abortions, but abortion soon encompassed how others perceived their work.

From beginning to end, experts saw through Buckminster Fuller’s ideas and theories. Why did so many people come under his spell?

Using the historical record to model long-term wind patterns in remote parts of the world where few instrumental data sets prior to 1957 exist.