The Past

Dreams of resurrecting lost species didn’t start in Hollywood or Silicon Valley.

Long before the search for biosignatures, scientists imagined a cosmos teeming with intelligent life.

If an asteroid hadn’t killed off the dinosaurs, humans would almost certainly have never walked the Earth.

From religious iconography to modern mysticism, the human aura has been a subject of fascination across centuries and cultures.

In “Enough Is Enuf,” Gabe Henry traces the history of simplified spelling movements and the lessons they teach us about language.

Americans have gone through three historic junctures like what we’re witnessing today — and they happen on an uncanny 80-year cycle.

In his book, “Birds, Sex and Beauty,” Matt Ridley explores why learning isn’t always nature versus nurture.

Fears of celestial collisions — and calculations of their likelihood — go back to the very origins of modern science itself.

While death-bed utterances are more famous, baby’s first words have influenced us too.

New research challenges old assumptions about the evolution of the human brain.

An extraordinary haberdasher obsessed with buttons, lace collars, and death pioneered modern statistical analysis during the Age of Reason.

One alchemist’s search for a whiz-bang method to produce gold unlocked the central science instead.

The Malling-Hansen writing ball, with its potential and limitations, redefined Nietzsche’s philosophical and creative expression.

Carl Sagan was far from the first to declare we are the children of ancient stars.

Grab a sword, a small plate, and a young child. We’ve got a demon to summon.

From tribal hunts to Stonehenge and into the modern day, the peer instinct helps humans coordinate their efforts and learning.

The controversial theory about magic mushrooms and human evolution gets a much-needed update.

Dinosaurs and other beasts were once thought to be the “undisputed masters” of Venus.

The annual rite of passage has always been more about the ambivalence of adults than the amusement of children.

Famed activist Bayard Rustin constantly faced the dilemma of coordinating collective pursuits among diverse groups of people.

How “Catastrophe and Social Change” (1920) became the first systematic analysis of human behavior in a disaster.

Slowing growth and limiting development isn’t living in harmony with nature—it is surrendering in a battle.

In popular culture, the eruption is usually depicted as an apocalyptic event.

From surviving on wild plants and game to controlling our world with technology, humanity’s journey of progress is a story of expanding human agency.

An analysis of Indonesian cave paintings is reframing the history of human art, though whether the paintings really were created by human hands remains an open question.

Alan Turing and Christopher Strachey created a ground-breaking computer program that allowed them to express affection vicariously when so doing publicly, as gay men, was criminal.

9 minutes of cruel history may cure the anti-progress delusion.

The true story of the shot that “reverberated through England” when science collided head-on with religion.

While the concept stretches back centuries, it has garnered significant attention in recent decades.

Concerns about privacy and pressures regarding the physical appearance of women and their homes contributed to the failure of AT&T’s 1960s Picturephone.