The ice on Lake Baikal in Siberia is thick and endless, a deep blue covered with fresh powdery snow. It’s a long journey to reach this middle of nowhere. First a six-hour flight…

Hoss Cartwright, a former editor of the International Journal of Agricultural Innovations and Research, had a good excuse for missing the 5th World Congress on Virology last year:…

xxx.lanl.gov. The address was cryptic, with a tantalizing whiff of government secrets, or worse. The server itself was exactly the opposite. Government, yes—it was hosted by Los…

Sometime between November 11 and 18, 1915, Albert Einstein began a brief calculation. In 14 numbered steps he analyzed the orbit of Mercury to explain a minor anomaly that had defied…

How do scientists decide what research to do? One would like to think that they take a suitably scientific approach to this question by thinking about important problems that need…

Alessandro Baricco paints a lively portrait of the modern-age barbarian in his 2014 book, The Barbarians. He initially frames the issue as a simple struggle between the shallow and…

Have you heard the one about the biologist, the physicist, and the mathematician? They’re all sitting in a cafe watching people come and go from a house across the street. Two people…

Constantine Rafinesque had only been dead a few months when Asa Gray sat down to eulogize him for the American Journal of Science. The year was 1841, and Gray, soon to join both the…

What do you see when you look into a lab? Fluorescent lights and whirring machinery? Gee-whiz equipment and tempting red buttons? Hope Jahren, the geochemist and geobiologist, sees…

In April of 2000, the journal Anesthesia & Analgesia published a letter to its editor from Peter Kranke and two colleagues that was fairly dripping with sarcasm. The trio of academic…