Well-researched stories from BBC, Nature, and other great publications that bridge the gap between news and scholarship.

The 1960 East German film The Silent Star provided a significant cautionary tale for the Cold War era.

The wild ancestors of coffee and other vital crops are at risk, leaving much of the world's food supply vulnerable to catastrophe.

How a company that started off selling cuticle remover convinced American woman to paint their nails.

FDR's "czar of research," an electrical engineer named Vannevar Bush, was working on an atomic bomb months before Pearl Harbor.

Historians are giving credence to W.E.B. DuBois's assertion that enslaved workers coordinated a general strike, which helped end the Civil War.

Offshore oil and gas exploration in the Atlantic Ocean will involve seismic blasts, which may be harmful to whales and marine mammals.

The remains of two of the very last of the Beothuk are finally being repatriated to Canada. Why has it taken almost 200 years?

At the turn of the twentieth century, American Christian evangelicals, led by Pastor Walter Rauschenbusch, were at the forefront of socialism.

Why is lo-fi hip-hop so conducive to concentration?