History

A quorum of quarks; asbestos surprises

We trace the final chapter of Katharine Burr Blodgett’s career, her retirement from GE and her disappearance from public memory

At the height of her career, chemist and physicist Katharine Burr Blodgett faced challenges that not even her closest colleagues suspected

Russia’s war has left many of Ukraine’s world-class observatories in ruins—but the besieged nation’s astronomers already have plans to rebuild and recover

When Katharine Burr Blodgett discovered nonreflecting glass, the General Electric Company’s public relations machine made her a star

Thousands of markings on objects made around 40,000 years ago may have been more than just doodles, a new analysis suggests

Researchers have rediscovered a 77-year-old recording of a haunting song that now has been determined to have come from a humpback whale

A Greenland mystery; booming dunes

A Roman stone board game has been unplayable since its discovery more than a century ago, but AI might have just worked out the rules

Scientists have spent decades searching for the final resting place of Luna 9, the first spacecraft to soft-land on the moon. Now they’re on the cusp of finding it

Synchrotron radiation has revealed a star map made by the ancient astronomer Hipparchus that was thought to be lost to time

Treponema pallidum, a microorganism that can cause a deadly sexually transmitted disease in humans, may have a far more ancient lineage than scientists once thought