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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...

In 1923, when Estelle Massey graduated from the City Hospital No. 2 School of Nursing with the highest examination score in the entire...

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...

Polio, unique among humanity’s eradicated diseases, carries with it a visual familiarity that has insistently lingered far beyond its...

Of all the realms of mathematics, there are few where more people feel more at home than in the safe harbours of algebra. From the age of...

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

If you have been reading this series over the years, you’re used to a particular narrative sequence: (1) Brilliant woman researcher...

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...

When Grace Chisholm, at age 28, married the mathematician William Henry Young, she had every prospect of a brilliant career before her....

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

Back in the age when historians favored hard and fast lines between different Eras of world history, 1543 stood as the gold standard...

The first astronaut class to include women candidates, announced in 1978 and self-dubbed the TFNG, or Thirty-Five New Guys, brought six...

When it comes finally time to settle Mars, the most terrifying sound might not be *RRRIP* or ‘I'‘m sorry, Dave, I don'‘t WANT to turn the...

An arrow hits a target as a fifteen year old girl on a horse goes galloping victoriously by. It is not an entirely unusual sight in late...

In between landing on the moon in July of 1969 and launching the first space shuttle into orbit in April of 1981, NASA learned a few...