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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...

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

Our interactions with our closest relatives in the animal kingdom, the chimpanzees, have rarely been entirely honorable. We dress them up...

When it comes to bones, immortality is far from a sure thing. We generally think that the road from bone to fossil is a straight-forward...

In September of 1960, the American pharmaceutical company Richardson-Merrell submitted their application to the FDA for the approval 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...

Color is among the most familiar of our sensations, and at the same time also one of the most foreign. Whereas any child can tell you...

“There was a tunnel, and at the end a beautiful light, and I heard the voices of my family calling to me.” For centuries this, the...

Humans have been building structures out of ceramic brick for five thousand years, and for four thousand nine hundred of those years the...

Separate But Equal. Of all America's variously Orwellian brandings, few have wrought as much human suffering as those three words. It is...