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Famous Scientists

Publisher Set to Release Exact Replicas of the World’s Most Mysterious Manuscript

There will be 898 copies made of the coded Voynich Manuscript, which has stumped scholars for over a century

Screwworm Fly larva

Cool Finds

Researchers Studying “Teen Sex” and Flesh-Eating Maggots Win 2016 Golden Goose Awards

Both quirky and important, these studies went against the grain

Maria Goeppert Mayer, co-winner of the 1963 Nobel Prize in Physics for her work on nuclear shell structures. She is just one of hundreds of women added to Wikipedia by the Wikiproject Women Scientists

Cool Finds

How a College Student Led the WikiProject Women Scientists

Emily Temple-Wood’s Women Scientist project is writing female researchers back into the conversation

A relative unknown, Werner Forssmann won the 1956 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for inventing the cardiac catheter. Some of his equally qualified peers have not been as fortunate.

How Not to Win a Nobel Prize

A search through the Nobel archives shows how the history of the famous prize is filled with near misses and flukes

Distant view of man standing with Macy’s Day Parade balloons

The Puppeteer Who Brought Balloons to the Thanksgiving Day Parade

A Thursday morning tradition came with strings attached

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The Inventive Mind of Walter Hunt, Yankee Mechanical Genius

The compulsively creative Hunt might be the greatest inventor you’ve never heard of

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The Many, Many Designs of the Sewing Machine

Rioting tailors, destitute inventors and the court system all got involved in one of the 19th century’s biggest innovations

The telegraph key used to send the famous message “What Hath God Wroght” over the prototype telegraph line between Baltimore and Washington D.C. in 1844

How the Telegraph Went From Semaphore to Communication Game Changer

Samuel Morse was an artist by trade, but to the world he’s best known for connecting the dots —and dashes— that forever changed the way we communicate

Blackboard Jungle

Crossing the Line Between Art and Science

New York artist Steve Miller melds the computer models and scientific notes of a Nobel-winning biochemist into a series of paintings now on display in D.C.

About the only use modern humans have for their urine is in health screenings. But preindustrial workers built entire industries based on the scientific properties of pee.

From Gunpowder to Teeth Whitener: The Science Behind Historic Uses of Urine

Preindustrial workers built huge industries based on the liquid’s cleaning power and corrosiveness—and the staler the pee, the better

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Men and Women Think on Family Matters Equally, But Women Get More Stressed

A study suggests that stereotypical gender roles transform thoughts of home into burdens for women, while men react differently

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Nobel Prize Winners Are Put to the Task of Drawing Their Discoveries

Volker Steger photographs Nobel laureates posing with sketches of their breakthrough findings

Bubo the robotic owl from the 1981 film Clash of the Titans

A Brief History of Robot Birds

The early Greeks and Renaissance artists had birds on their brains

Benjamin Franklin’s phonetic alphabet

Benjamin Franklin’s Phonetic Alphabet

One of the founding father’s more quixotic quests was to create a new alphabet. No Q included

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What’s in Century-Old ‘Snake Oil’ Medicines? Mercury and Lead

A chemical analysis of early 1900s medicines, billed as cure-alls, revealed vitamins and calcium along with toxic compounds

Psychologist B.F. Skinner taught these pigeons to play ping-pong in 1950.

B.F. Skinner: The Man Who Taught Pigeons to Play Ping-Pong and Rats to Pull Levers

One of behavioral psychology’s most famous scientists was also one of the quirkiest

Goodall’s travels have often brought her face to face with exotic plants. In Cambodia, she was “awestruck” by the giant roots of an ancient strangler fig she found embracing the Ta Prohm temple at Angkor Wat.

Jane Goodall Reveals Her Lifelong Fascination With…Plants?

After studying chimpanzees for decades, the celebrated scientist turns her penetrating gaze on another life-form

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Interview: Jane Goodall on the Future of Plants and Chimps

The renowned chimp expert discusses her new book, her efforts to protect the rainforest and why she misses living with chimps

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World War I: 100 Years Later

Unmanned Drones Have Been Around Since World War I

They have recently been the subject of a lot of scrutiny, but the American military first began developing similar aerial vehicles during World War I

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Origami: A Blend of Sculpture and Mathematics

Artist and MIT professor Erik Demaine makes flat geometric diagrams spring into elegant, three-dimensional origami sculptures

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