According to a familiar story, science was born as a pastime of seventeenth-century European gentlemen, who built air pumps, traded telescopes, and measured everything from the size of the earth to ...

The history of science and technology links many disciplines and cultures: scientific, technological, humanistic and social. Smith’s program in the history of science and technology is designed to ...

Sir Ronald Ross had just returned from an expedition to Sierra Leone. The British doctor had been leading efforts to tackle the malaria that so often killed English colonists in the country, and in ...

WE cordially recommend this book to the general reader as well as to educable teachers and students of science. It is admirably written, the work of a scholar and thinker who knows the value of ...

IN his recent book on “Clothes”, Mr. Eric Gill says that “in our hearts we know science for what it is—the greatest frivolity of history.... If it was not that science enables a lot of people to get ...

Astronomers once believed the Sun revolved around the Earth. In the 19th century, scientists thought the shape of a person’s skull could reveal their mental strengths or weaknesses. And in the 20th ...

When I was a kid, I’d sometimes spend the day with my dad in his lab, at the National Institutes of Health. For a few hours I’d read, while eating vending-machine crackers and drinking Diet Coke. I’d ...