News
When hikers in the Alps stumbled upon the mummy known as Ötzi the Iceman along the Austrian–Italian border in 1991, the body was so well preserved that they feared they'd discovered the corpse of a fellow mountaineer.
Art
With their standard formats and widespread availability, high school yearbooks represent a historical data set of 20th-century style. They also capture how our tendency to smile in photographs has intensified over time.
Art
Field books capture essential information for ecological history but are often difficult to track down in scientific collections.
Interview
The new stone is a fusion, through fire, of molten plastic and natural materials.
Art
The same year that Albrecht Dürer created his famous rhinoceros woodcut, the German artist also collaborated on the first star charts printed in Europe.
News
Now, thanks to NASA, you can stare at the sun for as long as you like.
Art
Among the 18 million specimens in the oldest natural history museum in the United States are contributions from missionaries and ministers who practiced science alongside their faith.
Books
Titian Peale could have been the first major American lepidopterist, but instead his five decades of vibrant butterfly illustrations and research languished, unpublished until 130 years after his death.
Art
In the 18th-century, French artist Jacques Gautier-D’Agoty painted numerous dissected corpses with muted colors and quiet dignity that made them appear alive, despite the flayed skin and exposed muscles.
Art
Astronomers have long considered the harmony of the universe as a sort of music, from Pythagoras and the Musica Universalis, to Kepler and the "music of the spheres."
Art
The watermelons of our summers are not the watermelons of yesteryear, as demonstrated by a 17th-century painting by Italian artist Giovanni Stanchi.
Books
After 25 years of collecting contemporary art, George Loudon's eye was caught by a display of 19th-century glass flowers at Harvard University.