A Stone Age individual’s left leg healed after being amputated just above the foot, allowing them to survive for six to nine years after the procedure was performed, researchers say.

The newly authorized intradermal vaccination only requires one-fifth of the usual vaccine dose. This will help stretch out the limited vaccine supply, experts say, but only if healthcare personnel receive sufficient training.

Elaborate annotations hidden in a copy of Sir James Edward Smith’s The English Flora hinted at the life of a mysterious woman botanist.

Beyond The Scientist’s coverage of COVID-19’s molecular underpinnings were many other stories highlighting the advances made in scientists’ understanding of the biology of cells.

Intrigued by an optical illusion he experienced while traveling in Scotland, Robert Addams wrote what is now considered one of the definitive observational accounts of so-called motion aftereffects.

Every medical intervention—even one with a centuries-long history—brings dangers, some of which become clear only later.

Centuries of folklore backed by scientists in the early 1900s have perpetuated the idea that menstruating women can exert dangerous forces.

Soranus of Ephesus’s manual shaped the way midwifery was practiced for more than a millennium.

A contaminated ham put bacteriologist Émile Pierre-Marie van Ermengem on the path to discovering the microbe that produces botulinum toxin.

Ruth Ella Moore had a trailblazing career, overcoming barriers of racism and sexism as she pursued her interest in microbiology.

A controversial idea from the mid-20th century is attracting renewed attention from researchers developing theories for how cognition arises with or without a brain.

Trofim Lysenko’s attacks on geneticists had long-term effects on Russian science and scientists, despite a lack of evidence to support his beliefs about biological inheritance.

Historical and modern experiments have hinted that unicelluar organisms can learn from their experiences, but the idea still has its critics.

One hundred years after its invention, BCG has stood the test of time as a vaccine against tuberculosis.

A famous account of multiple personality disorder in the early 20th century foreshadowed a century of controversial diagnoses and debate among psychiatrists.

The “mother of plant virology and serology,” Helen Purdy Beale, developed techniques to understand the nature of viruses that went unappreciated for decades.

As a deadly smallpox outbreak ravaged Boston, one of the city’s leaders advocated for a preventive measure he’d learned about from Onesimus, an enslaved man.

Watch Nobel Laureate Rita Levi-Montalcini tell the story of how she continued her transformative cell biology research as World War II raged.

Neuroscientist Rita Levi-Montalcini began her Nobel Prize–winning work in a makeshift laboratory in Italy during the Second World War.