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How is it that, starting from a single fertilized egg, employing only mechanical processes, you can form a kangaroo, a housefly, or a...

In 1932, Irving Langmuir won the Nobel Prize for his life of work investigating the physics of how surfaces interact with their...

Who (besides, obviously, bacteria) doesn't love penicillin? It's on everybody's shortlist of the most important things we've discovered...

Remember back when I said that botanists were the most under-respected members of the scientific community? Well, that's true until you...

When Rosalind Franklin (1920-1958) succumbed to cancer at the age of thirty-seven, she left behind monumental contributions to three...

In 1989, Angela Merkel was a quantum chemist with a respectable reputation for applying statistical mathematics to chemical analysis. In...

If you were to ask an ancient Greek how it is determined that a baby is born a boy or a girl, they would have had some interesting and...

The lady researcher Is always fumbling about, searching and probing around her, For problems to fathom; She studies and parlays and...

For a science teacher, perhaps the most dreaded question is "What Is Energy?" Sure, we have a standard answer - "The ability to do work"...

In the opening days of the Nazi attack on France, a Jewish engineer took his family aside and instructed them on how to commit suicide by...

How does radioactive decay know when to stop? When Uranium-238 breaks up, it goes through twenty-two intermediate isotopes before...

There was a time, during the Golden Age of Railroads, when the name of the small Welsh town of Dowlais was stamped on iron rails that ran...

Radioactivity is a great thing. Terrible, as they say, but great. The medical applications of radioactively tagged molecules, as Rosalyn...

Every morning we wake up to a feast of assumptions. We assume that the place our sewage gets dumped is not the same place our drinking...

The Red Planet has not always been kind to those who have given their lives to its study. Before the rise of rover-based observation,...

It is hard to imagine a time and place outside of Charles Dickens’s Revolutionary France that more embodies the spirit of the Best of...

In the late 1750s and early 1760s, the Seven Years’ War, an intercontinental struggle that would largely determine the power structure of...

On July 16, 1945, the United States detonated the world’s first atomic bomb in the deserts of Alamogordo, New Mexico. At the time, it...