Loading...
184 illustrations
In 1995, astronomer Robert Williams made one of the boldest decisions in the history of science. As director of the Space Telescope Science Institute, he...
In 1882, Louisa Stead took her husband and young daughter Lily to the beach for a picnic. What began as a quiet afternoon shattered in...
In 1997, ecologist Suzanne Simard published a groundbreaking discovery in the journal *Nature*. She found that trees in a forest are not competing loners but...
In 1995, physicist Eric Cornell and his colleague Carl Wieman achieved something remarkable at the University of Colorado. They cooled rubidium atoms to nearly absolute...
When we think of great hymns, we often picture dramatic backstories — shipwrecks, deathbed conversions, narrow escapes. But one of the most beloved hymns in...
Every autumn, monarch butterflies undertake one of the most remarkable navigational feats in all of nature. From milkweed fields as far north as Canada, they...
Every autumn, monarch butterflies launch a 3,000-mile migration from Canada to a remote mountain range in Michoacán, Mexico — a forest of Oyamel fir trees...
Every autumn, billions of birds launch themselves into skies that hold no visible path. The European robin, barely larger than a child's fist, leaves its...
Fanny Crosby was six weeks old when a country doctor's mistake destroyed her eyesight forever. She never saw a sunrise, never read a page of...
In the autumn of 1741, George Frideric Handel was a broken man. His health had failed him — a stroke years earlier had briefly paralyzed...
At the 1996 Atlanta Olympics, the U.S. women's gymnastics team stood on the edge of history. After a stumbling first vault, Kerri Strug limped back...
A loggerhead sea turtle hatches on a dark beach, scrambles to the surf, and disappears into the Atlantic. She will spend the next twenty to...
Fanny Crosby was six weeks old when a man posing as a doctor placed a hot poultice on her infected eyes. The treatment destroyed her...
At the 1996 Atlanta Olympics, American gymnast Kerri Strug sprinted down the vault runway with everything on the line. On her first attempt, she had...
Every time you buy something online, your browser performs a small miracle of trust. Before your credit card number travels across the internet, your computer...
When scientists first opened a chrysalis mid-transformation, they expected to find a half-formed butterfly — perhaps a caterpillar with small wings budding from its back....