Featured series 
Tag: science history
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Nation & World
The evolution of Darwin
In a fitting celebration of a man whose ideas revolutionized science, Harvard marked Charles Darwin’s 200th birthday in style.
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Nation & World
Tilting at ice ages
Here’s a story to cool you off on a hot summer day. One of the major mysteries of ice ages may have been solved by a Harvard climatologist.
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Nation & World
Human skull is 7 million years old
When a 7-million-year-old skull was first found, Daniel Lieberman, a professor of anthropology at Harvard, called it “one of the greatest discoveries of the past 100 years.” After studying new…
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Nation & World
Solving the mystery of a centuries-old plague
Edward O. Wilson identified two different ant species in investigating the mystery of centuries-old plagues, a tropical fire ant in the early 1500s and an introduced African ant in the…
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Nation & World
Lifeless suns dominated early universe
The very first generation of stars were not at all like our Sun. They were white-hot, massive stars that were very short-lived. Burning for only a few million years, they…
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Nation & World
Did life originally spring from clay?
While the research is a far cry from proving that humans sprang from clay, as some creation myths assert, it does provide a possible mechanism for explaining how life initially…
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Nation & World
“Winking star” started winking only recently
In 2002, astronomers at Wesleyan University announced that they had discovered a “winking” star that undergoes a regular, long-lasting (approximately 20 day) eclipse every 48 days. They theorized that those…
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Nation & World
Earth’s birth date turned back
Radioactive elements in rocks decay in a predictable way, like the ticking of a well-made clock that can run for millions of years. The decay marks a change in character…
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Nation & World
Spotlight on the Dark Ages
“Medievalists are just beginning to be aware of the implications of the revolutions now occurring in the life sciences for the knowledge of the past,” says Michael McCormick, the Francis…
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Nation & World
Medical texts and other fictions
In the 19th century, hysteria was considered one of the most common disorders afflicting women. Doctors advised parents to keep their daughters from riding horseback, eating vanilla, or reading novels,…
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Nation & World
Charles Rosenberg looks at changing perceptions of illness
In Charles Rosenberg’s eyes, epidemics tell us a great deal about American society. Rosenberg, considered by many to be the nation’s pre-eminent medical historian, was recently named Professor of the…
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Nation & World
El Nino found to be 124,000 years old
Records preserved in corals from Indonesia reveal that El Niño was causing severe weather even before the last ice age began, when the climate apparently was like it was for…