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Being a bug is a chancy thing. From the moment your egg is laid, you are the target of a vast array of predators hungry for your gushy, nutritive innards. Chances are, you will never make it out of your egg, as hosts of other insects either eat you directly or scoop you out to make room for their own babies to grow in the resources prepared by your mother. Out of a hundred eggs laid, it is a good day if a few dozen occupants make their way out, hopelessly, ludicrously exposed

The American West in the mid 19th century made profound demands on all those fated to experience it. The cost for even momentary lapses of vigilance was often death, and the people raised under the intense pressures and expectations of this time and place were a hard lot - self-sufficient almost to a fault, capable of feats of endurance and application that beggar belief today. Competence and self-reliance on that scale, however, usually comes at a steep cost. Having done so

At 10:17 in the morning on June 17, 1929, a 7.8 magnitude earthquake shook New Zealand’s Murchison region, causing landslides that claimed seventeen lives, and sending seismic P-waves throughout the Earth’s interior, to be picked up by seismology stations scattered across the globe, including to a handful of outposts that, according to everything everybody knew about the inner structure of the Earth, should not have been able to detect the quake. For some, these results were

In 1947, the partition of India carved out a theoretically Muslim-majority territory out of the Indian state, sparking a bloody era of desperate migration as members of religious minorities in the new Indian and Pakistani nations left ancestral homes and sought safety within the boundaries of their co-religionists. That same year, a Muslim woman from northern India whose parents had recently passed away boarded a boat, seeking medical training in England, entirely unsure as t

When Dr. Mary Babcock first arrived in Montana in 1891 to take up her unprecedented position as company doctor to the gold miners there,...

The sub-atomic world as we learn about it in high school is a seemingly settled and staid affair - you have protons and neutrons in the...

To stand before a redwood is to remove yourself from the context of space and time as experienced by human beings. Crane your neck up as...

The good wrought by Elisabeth Kübler-Ross (1926-2004) is beyond dispute. The insight she offered on how to psychologically prepare for...

ATP is the stuff of life.  Without it, cell communication shuts down, muscles freeze, and anything requiring ready energy (which is to...

In the mid 2000s, a small patch of ground in the middle of a country torn apart by the marauding violence of warring clans and religions...

In 1870, botany in the state of Maine was an underdeveloped and precarious thing. In the 1670s, John Josselyn had published a brace of...

One of the greatest revolutions of the Twentieth Century in the relief of the intense pains of childbirth came under the most unassuming...

In 1991, a paper appeared in the Archives of General Psychology that held out the promise, at long last, of an effective treatment for...

In the aftermath of the attack on Pearl Harbor, the Japanese armed forces fanned out across the Pacific, taking in quick succession...

In telling the story of M. Carey Thomas, there is no getting around the fundamental fact that she was, resoundingly, a terrible person....

Two scientists. Two crystallographers. Both successful, but one died young after her most significant discovery was snatched from her,...

America in the 1920s. The Jazz Age - flappers and motorcars, talkies and speak-easies - it is difficult to reflect on this time without...

Monterey Bay in the 1930s stood at the nadir of its ecological fortunes, having sustained every imaginable indignity that mankind’s...

In the late 18th century, when a crop failed, farmers and agricultural enthusiasts traded theories about what was to be done in the pages...