The steam locomotive chugged its way toward Cambridge, Massachusetts, on Aug. 15, 1859. On board was an impatient young ...

Many scholars have studied the effects of colonial management on terrestrial resources, but what about the effect of ...

In 2003, Kary Mullis took The Scientist readers behind the scenes of the night in 1983 when he came up with the idea for PCR. He included a photo of his lab notebook that depicts his very first ...

A slender thread of memory connects a Texas Hill Country man to a discovery that transformed modern technology. In 1916, Fred Schmidt’s grandfather, Jan Czochralski (1885-1953), a largely self-taught ...

In an amazing twist of fate, the aggressive cervical cancer tumor that killed Henrietta Lacks, a 31-year old African American mother, became an essential tool that helped the biomedical field flourish ...

At a low-key talk for a local professional society in 1964, computer scientist and chemist Gordon Moore laid out a prediction that would define the world of technology for more than 50 years. In the ...

Science is collaborative, painstaking and iterative, with progress slow and some unsung scientific heroes lost to time. But every once in a while, a key event, discovery or conceptual breakthrough has ...

There are some scientists whose contributions to the stores of human knowledge are so well-known that they have become household names. I don’t think it’s going too far out on a limb to say that ...