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Biological classification took a while to figure itself out. For centuries, it was a mish-mash of Aristotelian sentiments and cabinets...

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...

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...

By 1910, the woman whose brilliance had forced the doors of Harvard University open to women (if only in an unofficial capacity) and who...

Sign Language is a grammarless series of bluntly defined iconic hand gestures. Until William Stokoe (1919-2000) published his...

"Well Dale, we, the universe, hate to break it to you, but your desk is on fire, your copy of Thor 337 was lost in the mail, you've been...

You’re a monkey, and somebody in a white lab coat has shown you a location where a delicious, ever-so-nummy, bit of banana has been...

Seventy miles west of Denver, in a small town nestled 8,574 feet above sea level there rests the town of Fraser. Today an enclave of...

It is the early 1870s and we are heading into the mining town of Gornyi Zerentui, located in the mountainous Transbaikal region on the...

Imagine it is the twelfth century, and you have woken up experiencing some trouble breathing. Fortunately, you have the financial...

In a tent in Iraq, an Englishwoman attempts to sleep as mice crawl over her body and cockroaches look on from the walls. She is...

Four short decades ago, the prevailing wisdom among forestry officials was the “Free To Grow” model by which, when a forest was clear cut...

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,...

When you headed out into the field as a 19th century ornithologist, you had one of two things in mind as to what constituted your...

In 1970, everybody knew, or believed they did, how the flow of genetic information in a cell works. The Central Dogma of genetics...

Told one way, the story of Jeanne Baret is an essentially inspiring tale: a woman born a peasant, raised with the expectation of seeing...

There is a special poetry in rocks available to a select few and utterly incomprehensible to absolutely everybody else. While...

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...

Caste. Race. Gender. These were the three categories that, in early twentieth century Madras, combined to determine the boundaries of...