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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...

The human body is a truly wonderful place to live, if you can fit in it. It's warm and protected and, because humans are such clever at...

How is it that, starting from a single fertilized egg, employing only mechanical processes, you can form a kangaroo, a housefly, or a...

In 1932, Irving Langmuir won the Nobel Prize for his life of work investigating the physics of how surfaces interact with their...

As Isabella Bird, in her seventieth year and in the middle of her last great adventure, sat across from the Sultan at Marrakesh, telling...

It is August 25, 1940, and the Panamanian ship Bonita, sailing alone in war-torn waters with its cargo of clay bound for the United...

‘Well, some go this way, some go that way. But as for me, myself, personally, I prefer the short-cut.’ – The Cheshire Cat Every morning...

I wish to say farewell to all those who thought of me as a friend, to all those who were kind to me, assuring them all that the deep...

In the year 1933, the Long Beach Earthquake bore down on Southern California with the fury of revelation. At 6.4, it was not the largest...

In the late eighteenth century, it would have been not at all unusual to run into a woman on the streets of New York wearing upon her...

We are all mutants, our genes loaded with the steadily acquired variations of three billion years that gradually changed a collection of...

One of the most consistently frustrating things about humanity is our blithe willingness to allow all manner of industrially organized...

Who (besides, obviously, bacteria) doesn't love penicillin? It's on everybody's shortlist of the most important things we've discovered...

In 1964, two publications announced the beginning of two roads out of the centuries-long quagmire represented by the Nature Versus...

Remember back when I said that botanists were the most under-respected members of the scientific community? Well, that's true until you...

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...

The year is 1990 and a man is sitting across from a monkey. Between them is an object that will, in mere moments, become the Raisin Heard...

In the mid 19th century, American biological science was tentatively feeling its way forward along a half dozen different and...

"I don't know what to write to you, so I shall tell you a story about four little rabbits whose names were Flopsy, Mopsy, Cottontail and...

Humans have a profound genius for generating terrible ideas. Slavery. Theocratic government. But there is one particular idea we hung...