Science

BMI is a simple calculation, but how it is translated into a diagnosis is complex and flawed.

Why a powerful House Republican wants to ban a common insurance practice.

A new interactive digital project recovers biographies of women in science, and recreates the social networks that were essential to sustaining their work.

Loss of control over knowledge of the female body cemented women’s status as second-class citizens.

How one doctor’s letter and a string of dodgy studies spurred a public health panic.

The U.S. Army's contributions to meteorology.

Fertilizers filled with the nutrient boosted our ability to feed the planet. Today, they’re creating vast and growing dead zones in our lakes and seas.

Decades before paleontology’s formal establishment, Black and Native Americans discovered—and correctly identified—millennia-old fossils.

Throughout its history, the technology sector has been dependent on the federal budget.

What is an industry-made disaster, and what is caused by natural factors like weather?

Some see the reaction to Sen. Fetterman’s announcement as a sign of progress, but that’s less true than you might think.

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.