history

Before it fueled Woodstock and the Summer of Love, LSD was brought to America to make spying easier.

The brain of an ancient bird offers clues to the survival of its modern-day relatives.

Scientists discover surviving viruses in 15,000-year-old glacier ice on the Tibetan Plateau in China.

In ancient Greece, the Olympics were never solely about the athletes themselves.

For the ancients, hospitality was an inviolable law enforced by gods and priests and anyone else with the power to make you pay dearly for mistreating a stranger.

The few seconds of nuclear explosion opening shots in Godzilla alone required more than 6.5 times the entire budget of the monster movie they ended up in.

Opponents of 19th-century American imperialism were not above body-shaming the personification of the U.S. government.

Long before Alexandria became the center of Egyptian trade, there was Thônis-Heracleion. But then it sank.

From “mutilated males” to “wandering wombs,” dodgy science affects how we view the female body still today.

Smallpox was nothing new in 1721.

For decades, researchers have proposed that climate change and human-caused environmental destruction led to demographic collapse on Easter Island. That’s probably false, according to new research.

The ancient Greeks were obsessed with geometry, which may have formed the basis of their philosophical cosmology.

A Nazi institute produced a Bible without the Old Testament that portrayed Jesus as an Aryan hero fighting Jewish people.

The skeleton of the world’s oldest known shark attack victim exhibits telltale wounds.

Can a war be won from the air? A group of renegade pilots in the 1930s thought so.

In 1933, the skull of a 50-year-old male of the Homo longi species was found in China, puzzling researchers.

When the mutual relatives of two royal families died, the countries were likelier to go to war.

These distant cousins of starfish live on sea floors around the globe.

A new study reveals what caused most life on Earth to die out during the end-Permian extinction, also known as the Great Dying.

The Bomber Mafia nearly changed the world—and you’ve likely never heard of them.

Geologists discover a rhythm to major geologic events.

Researchers discovered a galactic wind from a supermassive black hole that sheds light on the evolution of galaxies.

The Black Death wasn’t the only plague in the 1300s.

A school lesson leads to more precise measurements of the extinct megalodon shark, one of the largest fish ever.

Pythagoras may have believed that the entire cosmos was constructed out of right triangles.

Hippocrates overturned conventional wisdom and invented modern medicine.

Today, it’s common knowledge, but it took scientists centuries to figure out.

ExtendNY stretches the Big Apple’s gridiron all across the globe – with some bizarre effects

How our fantasy world of the past has become everyday reality.

A thought experiment from 1867 leads scientists to design a groundbreaking information engine.