El Castillo pyramid illuminated at night under a starry sky in Chichen Itza, Mexico, one of the largest Maya cities.
Matteo Colombo/DigitalVision via Getty Images
The skies and the gods were inseparable in Maya culture. Astronomers kept careful track of events like eclipses in order to perform the renewal ceremonies to continue the world’s cycles of rebirth.
Anti-trans legislation adjudicates the bodily autonomy of those who do not conform to gender norms.
Carolyn Kaster/AP Photo
Claims about the discovery of a coveted room-temperature superconductor peppered the news in 2023. We pulled three stories from our archives on what superconductivity is and why scientists study it.
Galileo, holding two balls, about to perform his legendary experiment.
Hulton Archive/Stringer via Getty Images
A centuries-old experiment shows the differences between classical and modern physics. Physicists use thought experiments like this to think about how objects move both on Earth and in the stars.
George De Hevesy working in his lab at Stockholm University in 1944.
Keystone Features/Hulton Archive via Getty Images
Some Nobel Prize-winning ideas originate in strange places, but still go on to revolutionize the scientific field. George de Hevesy’s research on radioactive tracers is one such example.
Photograph of the first Solvay Conference in 1911 at the Hotel Metropole. Heike Kamerlingh Onnes is standing third from the right.
Benjamin Couprie/Wikimedia Commons
Superconductivity may sound like science fiction, but the first experiments to achieve it were conducted over a century ago. Heike Kamerlingh Onnes, credited with the discovery, won a Nobel Prize in 1913.
The course of nanotechnology, like the carbon nanotubes in this laboratory, has been guided by many stakeholders.
VCG/VCG via Getty Images
Two decades ago, the nanotechnology revolution avoided stumbling by bringing a wide range of people to the table to chart its development. The window is closing fast on AI following suit.
The Herschel Museum in Bath, England, has a new display of a handwritten draft of Caroline Herschel’s memoirs.
Internet Archive Book Images via Wikimedia Commons
Kris Pardo, USC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences
Astronomer Caroline Herschel’s work discovering and cataloging astronomical objects in the 18th century is still used in the field today, but she didn’t always get her due credit.
Talia Dan-Cohen, Arts & Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis and Carl Craver, Arts & Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis
Astrology and astronomy were once practiced side by side by scientists like Galileo and Kepler. And they’re more similar than you might think.
Ada King, Countess of Lovelace, was more than just another mathematician.
Watercolor portrait of Ada King, Countess of Lovelace by Alfred Edward Chalon via Wikimedia
Lovelace was a prodigious math talent who learned from the giants of her time, but her linguistic and creative abilities were also important in her invention of computer programming.
Rocca Calascio is a mountaintop fortress in the province of L'Aquila in Italy. It bears witness to the long relationship between humanity and mountains, and how natural landscapes are also culture ones.
UNESCO
Often thought of as eternal, mountains are vulnerable to climate change and tourism. To protect them, they should be recognised for their cultural values, not just their natural characteristics.
‘Permacrisis’: the Ever Given stuck in the Suez Canal, instantly bringing 12% of global trade to a stop.
Xinhua | Alamy
Two simple rules can help us identify future-proof science.
Three soldiers (far right) carry karnyxes, long horns with frightening boar-headed mouths that produce eerie calls during battle.
Prisma/Universal Images Group via Getty Images
The son of a formerly enslaved mother, Charles Henry Turner was the first to discover that bees and other insects have the ability to modify their behavior based on experience.
While resurrecting dinosaurs may not be on the docket just yet, gene drives have the power to alter entire species.
Hiroshi Watanabe/DigitalVision via Getty Images
As genetic engineering and DNA manipulation tools like CRISPR continue to advance, the distinction between what science ‘could’ and ‘should’ do becomes murkier.