Sister Mary should not, by any reasonable interpretation of late-20th-century Alzheimer's neuropathology, have been able to teach seventh and eighth grades for…
Edward Tronick — now in his eighties, Distinguished Professor at the University of Massachusetts Boston, director of its Child Development Unit, and one of the…
Nobody knows who invented the letter A. Nobody knows who invented the letter B, or C, or almost any other letter of the writing systems used by the world's major languages.
The economic case for South Korea's hopelessness was, in 1953, structurally compelling.
There was a moment, during the second round of a different fight in May 1981 in Las Vegas, when an old German man in his seventies sat in a hotel suite paying…
If two women in 19th-century Louisville had written essentially anything else — a nursery rhyme, a folk hymn, a marching band number, a parlour song — their…
The original wallpaper concept was, by every available account from the period, a perfectly reasonable mid-century product idea.
The 1886 American pharmaceutical landscape into which Coca-Cola was introduced bore essentially no resemblance to the regulated drug-approval system that has…
The Eiffel Tower's existence, in its original 1880s context, was a deeply contested proposition.
Almost every tourist who flies into Los Angeles, drives up Beachwood Canyon, points a phone at the white letters on the hillside, and posts the resulting…
Every other country that has ever built a high-speed rail system has, sooner or later, killed people with it.
On 26 September 1991, eight people entered Biosphere 2, a sealed glass and steel structure in Oracle, Arizona, built to test whether a human-made ecosystem could keep people alive for two years.
The boundary between what computers can do and what only humans can do has moved many times across the past 80 years, but it has rarely moved in a way that anyone could see happening in real time.
A new synthesis from early childhood neuroscience argues that shared laughter does specific, measurable work in the infant brain — though the full picture is more incremental than the headlines suggest.
Hartshorne and Germine's 2015 Psychological Science paper suggests that cognitive abilities peak on different timetables, from speed in youth to vocabulary much later.
The space race that produced Vostok 1 had begun in earnest approximately three and a half years earlier, on 4 October 1957, when the Soviet Union launched the…
