Information is power. For more than five hundred years the success or failure of nations has been determined by a country's ability to acquire knowledge and technical skill and transform them into strength and prosperity. Leading historian Jeremy Bla...

In 1492 Columbus set out across the Atlantic; in 1776 American colonists declared their independence. Between these two events old authorities collapsed – Luther's Reformation divided churches, and various discoveries revealed the ignorance of the an...

"The Courtiers' Anatomists" is about dead bodies and live animals in Louis XIV's Paris – and the surprising links between them. Examining the practice of seventeenth-century anatomy, Anita Guerrini reveals how anatomy and natural history were connect...

William Hyde Wollaston made an astonishing number of discoveries in an astonishingly varied number of fields: platinum metallurgy, the existence of ultraviolet radiation, the chemical elements palladium and rhodium, the amino acid cystine, and the ph...

A contemporary of Descartes and Newton, Athanasius Kircher, S. J. (1601/2-80), was one of Europe's most inventive and versatile scholars in the baroque era. He published more than thirty works in fields as diverse as astronomy, magnetism, cryptology,...

Founded around 1700 by a group of German Lutherans known as Pietists, the Halle Orphanage became the institutional headquarters of a universal seminar that still stands largely intact today. It was the base of an educational, charitable, and scientif...

The advent of recombinant DNA technology in the 1970s was a key moment in the history of both biotechnology and the commercialization of academic research. Doogab Yi's "The Recombinant University" draws us deeply into the academic community in the Sa...

When we think of sites of animal research that symbolize modernity, the first places that come to mind are grand research institutes in cities and near universities that house the latest in equipment and technologies, not the surroundings of the bird...

In science and technology, the images used to depict ideas, data, and reactions can be as striking and explosive as the concepts and processes they embody – both works of art and generative forces in their own right. Drawing on a close dialogue betwe...

The last twenty-five years have witnessed some provocative transmutations in our understanding of early modern chemistry. The alchemist, once marginalized as a quack, now joins the apothecary, miner, humanist, and natural historian as a practitioner...