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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...

In the middle of the Twentieth Century, if you wanted to know about the bleeding edge of modern chemical spectroscopy, Gladys Anslow...

In its externals the life of Emma Carr (1880-1972) bears many similarities to that of fellow physicist Margaret Maltby (1860-1944). Both...

An American woman hoping to make her way in science in the 19th century carried with her the knowledge that, as soon as she had a child...

Sometimes, simplicity dooms.  In World War I, chlorine gas hailed down upon the British soldiers trudging through their semi-lives in the...

In 1983, one of the great pillars of modern physics was cemented in place when CERN announced the discovery of a group of particles that...

Content Note: By the end of this article, you are not going to like Albert Einstein much.  If this is a problem for you, if part of your...

Every day, we subject our eyes to a nearly ceaseless barrage of screen-mediated experiences - phones, computers, televisions, tablets,...

To fully appreciate Lise Meitner, you have to first forget everything you learned about the atom in high school. Forget that the nucleus...

You want to see tough? Take a look at this picture of Marie Curie near life’s end. It’s not an image you see a lot, but there is no...

It's April of 1732, and the hot ticket in Bologna is not an opera, a play, or a beheading, but rather that most mundane of things: a...

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

Leona Woods (1919-1986) was only 23 years old, fresh from wrapping up her PhD work in spectroscopy in the basement of the University of...

Reading the life of Harriet Brooks is like watching the gradual, inevitable unfolding of a horror movie. There's that same idyllic,...

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...

In a corner of a room, tucked unostentatiously away from the notice of the raving hordes of just barely contained school children using...

How does a neutrino sign its paycheck? Sometimes it’s the absurd questions that break physics from its well-worn grooves and force it to...

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...