Science

Lighting, trash burning, powerlines, playing with matches – how do they rank as causes of wildfire?

Medicine’s dark history helps explain why black mothers are dying at alarming rates.

100 years ago, factory workers fought to hold companies accountable for their radium poisoning.

Vendors hawked the swill as “Pure Country Milk.”

When industrial fertilizer replaced dung heaps, its spoils helped fund the spread of plastics.

Considering astronomy's history from the shadow of the Arecibo Observatory reveals the discipline's intimate ties to imperialism.

The bland appeal of the Broad Breasted White.

A new report says the sugar industry pulled the plug on evidence linking sugar consumption to heart disease.

A visit with three of the last polio survivors in the U.S. who still depend on iron lungs.

How audience measurement became central to the creative and commercial development of television.

A profile of Hannah Mayer Stone, one of the key figures in the struggle to make contraception safe, effective, and widely available.

A reflection on the role of parasites in early American history.

What can past droughts tell us about tomorrow?

Unraveling the connections between public health and civil rights in 1960s New Orleans.

In his 2-million-word journal, the transcendentalist balanced poetic wonder and scientific rigor as he explored the natural world.

Three reasons why you shouldn’t consult the nineteenth-century WebMD archives.

“We are starved!” cried the sixty skeletal members of the English colony of Jamestown as provisions arrived in 1610.

The toll of history’s worst epidemic surpasses all the military deaths in World War I and World War II combined. And it may have begun in the United States.

This year's Nobel Prize in physics is a blast from the past of Cold War-era research investment. Is that era gone for good?

Americans, warned President Teddy Roosevelt's newly appointed opium commissioner in 1908, 'have become the greatest drugs fiends in the world.'

Preserved birds and digital photos help pinpoint levels of black carbon in the air and the changes that led to its decline.

When America’s first aerial cameraman met an infamous spirit photographer, the chemistry was explosive.

His administration has made the moon a destination, not just a pit stop, on the way to Mars.

The organic compounds that enabled industrialization are having unintended consequences for the planet’s life.

The 1957 launch of Sputnik wasn’t necessarily the start of the US-Soviet space race that Americans think of today.

How the U.S. military handled a shortage of prosthetic eyes for injured soldiers.

An epic natural disaster restored the forest of an earlier America.

A primary source set and teaching guide created by educators.

Our circumstances have changed a lot since early colonial times. Unfortunately, our thinking about climate hasn’t changed enough.

Can the history of hurricanes prove the existence of climate change?