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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...

How does radioactive decay know when to stop? When Uranium-238 breaks up, it goes through twenty-two intermediate isotopes before...

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

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...

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...

‘Momentum is always conserved, except when it isn’t.’ In secondary school physics, we learn all manner of conservation laws, one at a...

Our concept of living in a universe with a knowable and predictable future has taken two stunning blows in the last century, first from...

Whereas few European scientists escaped the politico-intellectual gnash of the 1930s unscathed, arguably none faced quite the looming...

When you first walk into secondary school your first year and plop yourself nervously into a desk in the back of your geometry class...

Before NASA, there was NACA, an oddball collection of aeronautics nerds using black box data and wind tunnel analysis to figure out as...

Beholding a bar of metal, it seems an object almost primal in its simplicity. Solid, reliable, the stuff of which cities are made. Peek...

Water is that great, terrible thing. Its chemical properties make it a magnificent solvent and coolant, which is wonderful if you’re...

For scientists engaged in speculative research, the invisible adversary is nothing less than science’s own history of conspicuous...