How a janitor wowed Darwin by solving the ice age mystery
22 August 2018
Self-educated ice sage James Croll cracked the conundrum of why Earth periodically freezes over. He was feted in his time, so why did the world forget him?
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Premium
Inside the secret military programme that uses dolphins as weapons
27 June 2018
In the 1950s, the US navy thought dolphins would be good templates for torpedo design. But they ended up using them for a very different purpose
Why the Sicilian Mafia owes its existence to scurvy
20 June 2018
Take one ravaging disease and add two parts British imperialism and Italian nationalism – it's a toxic cocktail with criminal effects still felt today
How a frog’s eye robbed us of a genius’s AI masterwork
30 May 2018
Walter Pitts would have become one of the most famous names in computer science - if it hadn’t been for the frogs
High times: The Victorian doctor who promoted medical marijuana
2 May 2018
Thanks to one man's researches, cannabis was drug of choice for ailments from migraine to epilepsy – until an unexpected twist led to its downfall
Maverick or monster? The controversial pioneer of brain zapping
27 March 2018
In the 1950s, psychiatrist Robert Heath planted electrodes in people's brains to treat mental illness, creating a legacy that divides opinion to this day
The doctor who exposed the UK's terrible experiments on patients
7 February 2018
In the 1960s, British medics took sometimes fatal liberties with unsuspecting patients in the name of science. Maurice Pappworth wasn't having any of it
The Amazonian arrow poison that made modern anaesthesia
17 January 2018
Adventurer Richard Gill sought relief from symptoms of multiple sclerosis in an Ecuadorian tribal weapon – with wider results that live on in medicine today
Missives impossible: How gravity fell victim to fake news
19 December 2017
Patriotic fervour gripped Paris with proof that Isaac Newton had stolen his theory of gravity from a Frenchman – but the details looked distinctly fishy
The Soviet genius who tried to beat capitalism at its own game
6 December 2017
The USSR once believed it could catch up with or even overtake the US. If it had listened to one of its brightest mathematical stars, that might have been true
