science history

Both Pfizer and GSK have shared preliminary data suggesting that their experimental vaccines can protect older adults and newborn infants from the virus.

Putting on a mask to protect oneself and others against disease is nothing new, nor is resistance to mask-wearing, but mask designs have changed considerably from their first iterations.

This new book tells the fascinating story of plastic surgery’s unlikely origin on WWI battlefields.

Nan Songer, a spider expert living in California, played an integral part in the Allies’ success in World War II by supplying silk for bombsights.

A series of rodent experiments showed that even with abundant food and water, personal space is essential to prevent societal collapse.

Edward Ricketts built his laboratory just onshore from the swirling tidepools of Monterey Bay, California, an ideal backdrop against which he developed a new system for studying the ecology of any given habitat.

Before its association with a pining for the toys or TV shows of yesteryear, nostalgia was deemed a dangerous psychiatric disorder.

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

Researchers continue to debate whether US President Abraham Lincoln was coming down with smallpox as he delivered his famous Gettysburg Address, and if he had been immunized.

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.

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

Race has been used to segment humanity and, by extension, establish and enforce a hierarchy in science. Individual and institutional commitments to racial justice in the sciences must involve political activity.

The incubator exhibitions of the late 19th and early 20th centuries publicized the care of premature babies.

French revolutionary Jean-Paul Marat took on many roles over the course of his life, including physician and scientist.

Most didn’t believe French doctor Charles Louis Alphonse Laveran when he said he’d spotted the causative agent of the disease—and that it was an animal.

By ditching traditional agar-based media, two biochemists captured iconic images of Myxococcus in 1982.

Moses Harvey’s photograph brought the mysterious creature out of legend and into science.

Louis Pasteur’s trepidation at injecting a child with the first rabies vaccine might have reflected his private knowledge of its lack of prior animal testing.

She will also be an executive producer on the HBO Films project, which is based on a 2010 book about the life of Henrietta Lacks.