Virologist Jonas Salk led the team that developed the breakthrough vaccine for polio. He was also a social critic.

As a style of Afro-Cuban music and dance, mambo was considered "primitive." And not just by white North Americans.

And have we been misinterpreting Leviticus?

During World War I, anti-vice crusaders marked women who liked the nightlife as shady. You can tell by the way men started talking about them.

Funk music, floating cities, poetic prose, and a return to the classics.

Why do we celebrate on the 1st of January? Do financial incentives help you stick to resolutions? And other burning questions.

Crocodiles in Egypt, latrines in Rome, two timely syllabi, plus interviews with an epidemiologist and a theoretical physicist, were readers' favorites this year.

The science of COVID-19 vaccines, the 1957 flu vaccine that controlled that outbreak, eradicating polio in India with oral vaccines, and more.

Well-researched stories about the upside of public shaming, the octopus's sense of taste, and more from publications that bridge the gap between news and scholarship.

On the persistence of a folk belief.