history
-
‘Dark Waters’ tells the origin story of a public health nightmare. We’re still living it.
The new Mark Ruffalo movie tells the story of how we found out about "forever chemicals."
-
How America got into this climate predicament, through the lens of art history
The traveling exhibit 'Nature's Nation' explores our evolving relationship with nature (it's complicated).
-
How the U.S. got addicted to plastics
The 1939 World’s Fair was a testament to cork’s primacy in consumer packaging. But a little-known substance called plastic was waiting in the wings.
-
Costa Rica modernized without wrecking the environment. Here’s how.
Not every route to prosperity involves trashing the planet.
-
Dried-up pee from small fuzzy creatures has a lot to offer climate scientists
Hyrax communities also tend to settle in at particular spots. So these pee records can go back millennia -- scientists found one spot where hyraxes have been peeing for 55,000 years.
-
The world’s earliest dinosaur was tiny enough that your dog could take it on
Because Nyasasaurus parringtoni is so old, researchers had to convince themselves that he was really a dinosaur—but they're pretty convinced.
-
Check out this 100-year-old electric car
Electric cars are a modern new technology, so modern and unproven that many [Republicans] would say they couldn’t possibly be plausible. Except for how they’ve actually been around since the turn of the 20th century. This photo of an electric car charging (above, click to embiggen) is from 1909, and by that point the technology […]
-
Did climate change cause the Salem witch trials?
A little ice age around the time of the 1692 Salem witch trials led to crop failures and shortages of fish, which put everyone in a mood to find a scapegoat, says a newly resurfaced 2004 Harvard thesis by economist Emily Oster.
-
Study: Woolly mammoths are extinct and it’s YOUR FAULT
There’s been some dispute in scientific circles about whether the woolly mammoths died out because of natural variations in climate, or because of the malign influence of roving bands of humans. Turns out it’s a little from column A, a little from column B — meaning that if we actually do manage to clone a […]