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

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

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...

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...

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

“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...

There are scales and metrics you use to evaluate the lives of most neuropsychologists, and then there are those you have to invent in...

It is 1942, and Allied bombs are raking the city of Turin, wreaking a thudding vengeance for Il Duce’s cynical alliance with Nazi Germany....

In 1955, if you were a man who suffered from premature ejaculation, or a woman who had never known an orgasm, your choices were few and...

For women in science, posterity has three fates in store. Some, like Marie Curie or Rosalyn Yalow, are recognised in their time and...

A young mother of the early twentieth century who could not or did not want to breast feed was a creature entirely at the hands of...

It is sometime in the 1930s, and you are walking into a ward full of crouching children with blue-tinted lips. Something is wrong with...

There is an unsung immensity in the craft of Measuring Things Better. Within our sparkling cleverness for developing better and better...

In 1955, the World Health Organization had what, on the surface, seemed a splendid idea: Let’s Get Rid of Malaria. Just four years...

It might be difficult to believe if you were born within the last three decades, but there was once a time when America was led by a...