The American atomic bomb was born in secrecy. From the moment scientists first conceived of its possibility to the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and beyond, there were efforts to control the spread of nuclear information and the newly discovered...

Today, a scientific explanation is not meant to ascribe agency to natural phenomena: we would not say a rock falls because it seeks the center of the earth. Even for living things, in the natural sciences and often in the social sciences, the same is...

Galileo never set foot on the Iberian Peninsula, yet, as Enrique Garcia Santo-Tomas unfolds in "The Refracted Muse", the news of his work with telescopes brought him to surprising prominence – not just among Spaniards working in the developing scienc...

In 1968, the director of USAID coined the term "green revolution" to celebrate the new technological solutions that promised to ease hunger around the world – and forestall the spread of more "red", or socialist, revolutions. Yet in China, where mode...

From Blaise Pascal in the 1600s to Charles Babbage in the first half of the nineteenth century, inventors struggled to create the first calculating machines. All failed – but that does not mean we cannot learn from the trail of ideas, correspondence,...

Before the hydrogen bomb indelibly associated radioactivity with death, many chemists, physicians, botanists, and geneticists believed that radium might hold the secret to life. Physicists and chemists early on described the wondrous new element in l...

"Race and Photography" studies the changing function of photography from the 1870s to the 1940s within the field of the "science of race", what many today consider the paradigm of pseudo-science. Amos Morris-Reich looks at the ways photography enable...

The advent of recombinant DNA technology in the 1970s was a key moment in the history of both biotechnology and the commercialization of academic research. Doogab Yi's "The Recombinant University" draws us deeply into the academic community in the Sa...

In the years immediately following Napoleon's defeat, French thinkers in all fields set their minds to the problem of how to recover from the long upheavals that had been set into motion by the French Revolution. Many challenged the Enlightenment's e...

The Victorian period in Britain was an "age of reform". It is therefore not surprising that two of the era's most eminent intellects described themselves as reformers. Both William Whewell and John Stuart Mill believed that by reforming philosophy –...