Francis Galton pioneered scientific advances in many fields – but also founded the racist pseudoscience of eugenics
Smart people can have really bad ideas – like selectively breeding human beings to improve the species. Put into practice, Galton's concept proved discriminatory, damaging, even deadly.
Jan. 15, 2021 • ~9 min
statistics charles-darwin history-of-science forensic-science meteorology prayer fingerprints eugenics on-the-origin-of-species francis-galton forced-sterilization
Solve suffering by blowing up the universe? The dubious philosophy of human extinction
Driven by a desire to eliminate pain, some people have shockingly advocated taking the rest of nature with us.
Nov. 17, 2020 • ~8 min
extinction philosophy history-of-science interdisciplinarity suffering
John Tyndall: the forgotten co-founder of climate science
The man who explained the greenhouse effect was accidentally killed by his wife.
July 31, 2020 • ~7 min
atmosphere history-of-science climate-science mountaineering greenhouse-effect
The mystery of the missing portrait of Robert Hooke, 17th-century scientist extraordinaire
Online sleuthing and deductive reasoning identifies what appears to be the only existent portrait painted of the celebrated scientist during his lifetime.
July 27, 2020 • ~10 min
history-of-science scientists scientist cells royal-society portraiture mathematicians isaac-newton portrait-painting
Sexism pushed Rosalind Franklin toward the scientific sidelines during her short life, but her work still shines on her 100th birthday
Franklin was born a century ago, and her X-ray crystallography work crucially contributed to determining the structure of DNA.
July 20, 2020 • ~8 min
dna women-in-stem nobel-prize women-in-science history-of-science sexism james-watson x-ray-diffraction dna-structure rosalind-franklin francis-crick x-ray-crystallography
Neowise: an increasingly rare opportunity to spot a comet with the naked eye
Neowise has an orbit of almost 6800 years, meaning that the last generation of people to see it would have lived during the 5th millennium BC.
July 16, 2020 • ~7 min
astronomy history-of-science space-exploration comets
Ignaz Semmelweis, the doctor who discovered the disease-fighting power of hand-washing in 1847
A Hungarian obstetrician was the first to nail down the importance of handwashing to stop the spread of infectious disease.
April 14, 2020 • ~8 min
history-of-medicine maternal-mortality handwashing history-of-science hand-washing disease-control contagion cleanliness handwashing-and-coronavirus
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