Art
Before coming across an unusually calligraphic painting of a mountain, Williams College Museum of Art Curator Kevin Murphy considered the turn-of-the-century artist Abbott Handerson Thayer "a one slide guy," a man known for portraits of placid angels, who in an art history class might get one mentio
Art
Consider a wanderer 10,000 years in the future discovering a strange construction of granite thorns in the New Mexico desert, their points weathered by centuries, their shadows stretching at sinister angles.
Books
At the end of Vladimir Nabokov's poem "Pale Fire," he describes how "White butterflies turn lavender as they / Pass through its shade where gently seems to sway / The phantom of my little daughter's swing."
Art
WASHINGTON, DC — Science fiction rose to prominence in the 19th and early 20th centuries, when authors like H. G. Wells, Jules Verne, and Mary Shelley imagined the extraordinary possibilities of advances in technology and exploration.
Art
In the 1880s, William Nicholson Jennings set out to prove the diversity and unpredictability of lightning's path, capturing the electric light with his plate camera.
Books
Natural history storerooms are a bit like drowned Noah's Arks, with specimens from every realm of the animal world posthumously preserved.
Art
If it hadn't been for Carl Strüwe, a German graphic designer and self-taught photographer, the world may have never come to appreciate the unlikely beauty of a cockroach's stomach.
Books
In the 16th century, Pierre Belon published one of the earliest scientific depictions of a dolphin: a woodcut with finely hatched skin and pointed teeth.
Art
Richard Evans Schultes took peyote with the Kiowa in Oklahoma in the 1930s, was the first scientist invited to a hallucinogenic yagé ceremony in the Amazon's Sibundoy Valley in the 1940s, and inadvertently helped launch the psychedelic era of the 1960s.
![Damien Hirst's Pickled Animals May Have Leaked Carcinogenic Fumes [UPDATED]](https://storage.ghost.io/c/51/f8/51f871d8-b6be-4a73-b958-0ca4fff0110a/content/images/size/w600/hyperallergic-newspack-s3-amazonaws-com/uploads/2016/04/hirst-fumes-home.jpg)
In Brief
Damien's Hirst's formaldehyde-filled installations don't just ooze money and pretension — some may also leak potentially dangerous gas.
News
The Carnegie Institution for Science announced this week that one researcher's dive into a collection of glass photographic plates turned up an unexpected image from 1917 that indicates the presence of an exoplanetary system.
Performance
"Maybe there’s a physicist sitting right beside you, who can explain this better than we do, but we're in the business of art, so we’ll make a metaphor," sings Hai-Ting Chinn in Science Fair: An Opera With Experiments.