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To the uninitiated, there seems a dizzying amount of carnage wrapped up in advancing biological knowledge. Every scrap of information...

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...

One of the great things about writing this column is the fact that, from time to time, I get to talk with remarkable people about other...

As a rule, our favorite flavors of scientist are the theoretical and experimental – we tend to like them either sitting in a chair...

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...

Think back to your last zoo trip. More likely than not, most of the larger animals were contained in open air facilities, with features...

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

If you’ve been reading my Women in Science column here and there over the last decade, you’ll have been subjected to my intermittent...

When Eleanor Emmons left home to matriculate at Reed College in 1934, she had life pretty well figured out. Her family’s Theosophy gave...

Margaret Floy Washburn (1871-1939) was the first American woman to receive a PhD in psychology (though not, as we learned from our time...

In a small but soon-to-be-revered town in Southern Italy, 2,500 years ago, a group of men and women gathered, united by the proposition...

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

There is hardly a name in science more encrusted with bad faith generalizations and well-meaning but ahistorical hagiography than that of...

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...