A century after Robert Goddard’s first-ever launch of a liquid-fueled rocket, two NASA experts weigh in on what his legacy still holds for spaceflight’s future We trace the final chapter of Katharine ...

Early scientific theories—such as those explaining basic phenomena like gravity, burning, and the movement of molecules in water—centered on presumed inherent properties rather than external factors, ...

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 ...

We’re celebrating 180 years of Scientific American. Explore our legacy of discovery and look ahead to the future. Since at least the 17th century, science has struggled with words. Francis Bacon, ...

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 ...

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 ...

We all know the scene -- James Watson and Francis Crick, discoverers of the DNA double helix, walk into a pub in Cambridge and declare, "We have discovered the secret of life!" The rest is Nobel Prize ...

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 ...

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 ...

A NEW token of the growing interest in the history of science. is provided by the appearance of the first number of “a quarterly review of the history of science since the Renaissance”, under the ...