History of Science coverage from Scientific American, featuring news and articles about advances in the field.

From starting out as a night-drive idea to becoming a global diagnostic gold standard, PCR has irreversibly transformed life sciences in its 40 years of existence. By 1991, scientists had begun ...

PATRICIA FARA‘s epic history of science ranges from the astronomers of ancient Babylon to today’s geneticists and particle physicists. But it is no ordinary account of how scientific knowledge has ...

In her groundbreaking trilogy, “Women Scientists in America,” she told the stories of numerous accomplished but largely invisible women. By Penelope Green Margaret W. Rossiter, a historian whose ...

I WAS saddened to hear of the death last month of Harriet, the giant tortoise that Charles Darwin reputedly collected from the Galapagos Islands in 1835. She died in the Australia Zoo in Beerwah, ...