By the mid-1700s, many Plains nations survived on North America’s largest land mammals: bison. They ate its meat, made the hides into winter coats and blankets, and used the bones and horns for tools. But in the following decades,...

Sixty-six million years ago, near what’s now the Yucatán Peninsula, a juvenile sauropod feasted on horsetail plants on a riverbank. Earth was a tropical planet. Behemoth and tiny dinosaurs alike soared its skies and roamed its lands...

Oiwa’s only hope for ending her marriage to the cruel and dishonorable samurai, Iemon, was her father. But after he tried to end the union, Iemon murdered him in cold blood. With plans to marry another, Iemon conspired to poison his wife...

It’s a cold morning in 15th century France and you’re off to the barber for a shave and haircut. You hear the familiar sound of singing inside and eye a bowl of blood in the window. You grab a cup of ale and examine the array of teeth...

Stories of werewolves have existed for thousands of years and continue to live on today. They're especially prominent in European literature and folklore, and often found in cultures where the wolf is the largest natural predator. Over...

For over 200 years, potatoes thrived in Ireland; roughly half the country’s residents lived almost entirely on potatoes. But when harvesting began in 1845, farmers found their potatoes blackened and shriveled. While this failed harvest...

It's daybreak in the city of Chan Chan, and former soldier Maxo has been up all night fretting. Last night, a friend stopped by and instructed him to go to the plaza at noon to receive an important message. But with the recent defeat of...

Environmental activist Gopal D. Patel thinks the climate movement could learn a lot from one of the longest-standing social initiatives in human history: religion. Exploring three areas where frameworks from faith traditions could...

Keegan-Michael Key is a modern master of sketch comedy, starring in hits shows “Mad TV,” “Key and Peele” and “Schmigadoon!” Now, he and his wife, film and TV producer Elle Key, have taken a long look into the history of the art form....

The bubonic plague killed so many people in Europe, the Middle East, and North Africa that that natural selection event is still rippling through our genomes today. But the same genes that helped your ancestors survive the Black Death...

Sure, potions of invisibility and immortality may be a little hard to come by in the real world, but there's some legit science behind less fantastic ones. Historical sleep and love potions are grounded in science, even if some of the...

Thomas Edison often gets credit for the invention of the light bulb, but a good argument can be made that they were around centuries earlier in the form of barometric light. <br/>

Recently, a group of scientists have declared that the start of the Anthropocene, the time of outsize human influence on Earth, to be Crawford Lake in Canada. But how can a time be a place? We'll explain, and maybe grab some maple...

The body can get a whole lot colder - but not a whole lot hotter - before we die. Why is that?<br/>

Most of Earth’s land is currently in the northern hemisphere because we happen to exist in a time where uneven heating in the mantle has pushed many continental plates northward.<br/>

The earth is always moving, and our view of the night sky is slowly but surely changing.

Our solar system is a tiny bubble of habitability suspended in a vast universe that mostly wants to kill us. In fact, a good fraction of our own galaxy turns out to be utterly uninhabitable, even for sun—like stellar systems. Is this why...

The ability to make and use fire has fundamentally changed the arc of our evolution. The bodies we have today were, in many ways, shaped by that time when we first tamed fire.

While we’ve been farming for around 10,000 to 12,000 years, the ancestors of ants have been doing it for around 60 million years. So when, and how, and why did ants start … farming?

Because of their strange combination of bear-like and dog-like traits, they’re sometimes confusingly called the beardogs. And even though you’ve never met one of these animals, the beardogs are key to understanding the history of an...

We can track our history of eating just about anything back through the fossil record and see the impact it’s had on our evolution. Throughout time, part of the secret to our success as a species has been our early - and sometimes fatal...

In some places, the rocks below the Great Unconformity are about 1.2 billion years older than those above it. This missing chapter in Earth’s history might be linked to a fracturing supercontinent, out-of-control glaciers, and maybe the...

One million Americans live with Parkinson’s disease, a progressive condition that causes problems with body movement. New research has identified a genetic variant that increases the risk of Parkinson’s in people of African descent, and...

The school year is coming to a close and with it, the first year of Advanced Placement African American studies, an interdisciplinary class by the College Board that has attracted praise from professors and also fierce opposition from...