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Articles

In a letter of 1770, Benjamin Franklin described tofu ("tau-fu") to his friend John Bartram as a sort of cheese made from "Chinese Garavances"—what we would call soybeans.

Ben Franklin May Be Responsible for Bringing Tofu to America

How a letter of 1770 may have ushered the Chinese staple into the New World

How It All Began: A Colleague Reflects On the Remarkable Life of Stephen Hawking

The physicist probed the mysteries of black holes, expanded our understanding of the universe and captured the world’s imagination, says Martin Rees

Calvin and Hobbes, the influential and popular comic strip by Bill Watterson about a boy and his stuffed tiger that ran in thousands of newspapers worldwide during its run from 1985-1995.

This Artist Deconstructed His Love and Fascination for Calvin and Hobbes

Tony Lewis finds a new way of writing poetry, through artistry, and his assemblage of cut-up dialog balloons from Bill Watterson’s much-loved comic strip

Dr. Frankenstein at work in his laboratory

What Frankenstein Can Still Teach Us 200 Years Later

An innovative annotated edition of the novel shows how the Mary Shelley classic has many lessons about the danger of unchecked innovation

What surprises will this year’s tournament have in store?

Can a Computer Model Predict the First Round of This Year’s March Madness?

Two mathematicians at Ohio State University are using machine learning to forecast tournament upsets

Byaku Gunjo

Peek into the Colorful History of the World’s Largest Pigment Collection

An Atlas of Rare & Familiar Colour combs through the rainbow that makes up the Forbes Pigment Collection

The Proliferation of Happiness

A professor of consumer culture tracks the history of positive psychology

Amdavad Ni Gufa

These Unique Buildings in India Just Won the Biggest Award in Architecture

The 90-year-old is the first Indian architect to win the Pritzker Prize

An artist's interpretation of two giant pterosaurs in the Late Cretaceous.

New Research

What Doomed the Pterosaurs?

Killed off in their prime, the leathery fliers may have been living too large for their own good

At the time of capture, the Smithsonian's coelacanth specimen weighed about 160 pounds and measured a little less than five and a half feet long.

How the Smithsonian’s Coelacanth Lost Its Brain and Got It Back Again

This year marks the 80th anniversary of the discovery of a fish believed to have gone the way of the dinosaurs 70 million years ago

Human evolution is ongoing, and what we eat is a crucial part of the puzzle.

How Cheese, Wheat and Alcohol Shaped Human Evolution

Over time, diet causes dramatic changes to our anatomy, immune systems and maybe skin color

Google Japan Now Has Street View From a Dog’s Perspective

It’s like riding an Akita around Japan

Cimarron, Kansas

Daydream About Summer With These Color-Drenched Photos of the Great American Fair

Photographer Pamela Littky set off across the United States to discover why these timeless summer festivals have such staying power

The progress of democracy seems irresistible, because it is the most uniform, the most ancient, and the most permanent tendency which is to be found in history."--Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, 1835. From the series Great Ideas of Western Man, by Jacques Nathan Garamond, 1955

How Do We Restore Trust in Our Democracies?

Museums can be a starting point, says David J. Skorton, the Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution

Is this machine adding an antenna to the fabric?

Embroidering Electronics Into the Next Generation of ‘Smart’ Fabrics

Is an archaic sewing skill a key to connected, sensing, communicating fabrics of the future?

'Cattle Kate' and Postmaster Averill, lynched. Stockmen a Sweetwater, Wyo., July 21, end the career of a lawless pair of depredators - swung from a cottonwood at the rope's end. Undated illustration.

Women Who Shaped History

The Tragedy of Cattle Kate

Newspapers reported that cowgirl Ella Watson was a no-good thief who deserved the vigilante killing that befell her, when in reality she was anything but

A statue of Confederate General Robert E. Lee is lowered to a truck for removal Friday, May 19, 2017, from Lee Circle in New Orleans.

How I Learned About the “Cult of the Lost Cause”

The mayor of New Orleans offers his reading list for anyone looking to better understand the real history of Confederate monuments

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