History of Science

Books and recommendations from Scientific American

For 500 years, explorers and marine archeologists have exploited the latest technologies to reach new depths, often at great risk to themselves

Amir Aczel explored jungles and ancient temples to trace the history of the number zero

My fermentation obsession has reached new heights – on Christmas day I bottled my first mead, and it was delicious. My wife also gave me a book on mead making, and I’m getting ready to start a wild-ferment mead.

When I visited the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution on Cape Cod in early 2013 for an open house for prospective students, in many senses I was feeling under the weather.

Haruko Obakata caused a sensation earlier this year with papers, now discredited and retracted, that claimed a simple method for creating pluripotent stem cells

It's time to wind things down for Christmas, so what better way to do it than to write a short article about robins. And here I mean the `original' or `proper' robin - the European robin Erithacus rubecula - a Eurasian passerine that also occurs in northern Africa and is (conventionally) regarded as the only [...]

The Christmas holiday approacheth, and for those of a Maker bent, here’s how to Build A Sled For Slinging Snowballs — Winter Warfare Will Never Be the Same.  If you’re more the craft-y sort, now you can deck the halls with Nobel physicists with this physics twist on the craft of cutting paper snowflakes.

Penicillin and its relatives have been in wide use since the 1940s, but researchers have only now discovered another way that it thwarts bacteria. Karen Hopkin reports

 

Reported in Scientific American, This Week in World War I: December 19, 1914 Scientific American in 1914 sometimes used large, single-theme images for the issue cover.

It was 111 years ago today that the world's first piloted, powered, controllable, heavier-than-air machine built and flown by Orville and Wilbur Wright took to the air.

One of the most commonly used metaphors for describing the solution for growing and diversifying America's scientific talent pool is the "STEM pipeline." Major policy reports have called on the U.S.