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.
Prepare to be stunned by a technology that nature perfected.
maradek/iStock via Getty Images
Bill Sullivan, Indiana University School of Medicine
Albert Alexander was the first known person treated with penicillin. While his ultimately fatal case is well known in medical histories, the cause of his illness has been misattributed for decades.
Tu Youyou shared the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 2015.
Claudio Bresciani/AFP via Getty Images
Brian Finlayson, The University of Melbourne and Ray Sumner, California State University, Dominguez Hills
A total eclipse that travelled the full width of Australia in 1922 offered astronomers the chance to confirm Einstein’s theory of general relativity - and for the community to enjoy a rare spectacle.
After six decades during which it tracked lunar missions, spotted distant pulsars and quasars, and even expanded our concept of the size of the Universe, the Parkes telescope is still going strong.
Children and parents lined up for polio vaccines outside a Syracuse, New York school in 1961.
AP Photo
Public health experts know that schools are likely sites for the spread of disease, and laws tying school attendance to vaccination go back to the 1800s.
Women who got their start in the male-dominated profession 40 years ago have advice for today’s newcomers in STEM.
Contributor/Denver Post via Getty Images
On Oct. 1, 1971, Godfrey Hounsfield’s invention took its first pictures of a human brain, using X-rays and an ingenious algorithm to identify a woman’s tumor from outside of her skull.