The idea of a missing link between humanity and our animal ancestors predates evolution and popular science and actually has religious roots in the deist concept of the Great Chain of Being. Yet, the metaphor has lodged itself in the contemporary ima...

The second-century physician and philosopher Galen is not known for brevity. Although his writings on medicine are famously verbose and numerous, for centuries they constituted much of the standard syllabi for medical students. About fourteen hundred...

"The Atlas of the Ethno-Political History of the Caucasus" is a magnificent collection of fifty-six original maps with commentaries that detail the ethnic, religious, and linguistic makeup of the Caucasus – the region located between the Black and Ca...

One of the largest islands in the world, Madagascar is home to an astonishing array of endemic vertebrate biodiversity. While recent decades have seen numerous publications on the subject – ranging from technical papers to species descriptions and fi...

In this insightful and provocative book Alon Tal provides a detailed account of Israeli forests, tracing their history from the Bible to the present, and outlines the effort to transform drylands and degraded soils into prosperous parks, rangelands a...

Galileo wrote that "nature cannot produce a horse as large as twenty ordinary horses or a giant ten times taller than an ordinary man unless by miracle or by greatly altering the proportions of his limbs and especially of his bones" – a statement tha...

Tiny ruby-throated hummingbirds weighing less than a nickel fly from the upper Midwest to Costa Rica every fall, crossing the six-hundred-mile Gulf of Mexico without a single stop. One of the many creatures that commute on the Mississippi Flyway as p...

Ask anyone who has owned a pet and they'll assure you that, yes, animals have personalities. And science is beginning to agree. Researchers have demonstrated that both domesticated and nondomesticated animals – from invertebrates to monkeys and apes...

Although many of the practical and intellectual traditions that make up modern science date back centuries, the category of "science" itself is a relative novelty. In the early eighteenth century, the modern German word that would later mean "science...

In the second half of the nineteenth century, American cities began to go dark. Hulking new buildings overspread blocks, pollution obscured the skies, and glass and smog screened out the health-giving rays of the sun. Doctors fed anxities about these...