The first compound microscopes date to 1590, but it was the Dutch Antony Van Leeuwenhoek in the mid-seventeenth century who first used them to make discoveries.

A generation before Rosa Parks, a young Alaska Native woman was arrested for sitting in the "whites only" section of a Nome, Alaska movie theater.

In the late 1890s, Bertha Corbett set up her own illustration studio in Minneapolis. Her simple drawing of children in sunbonnets became her ticket to success.

According to one scholar, we're inundated with ways to pursue pleasure, which we conflate with happiness, to our own detriment.

Composition with pigeons. One flock's dynamic movement created a spatial music that was constantly crescendoing and dissipating in a long haunting chord.

Underneath the home and personal makeovers, is "Queer Eye" political?

More than one self-experiment has resulted in a Nobel Prize. Against all odds, and sometimes in spite of the damage they cause, these crazy gambits pay off.

In 2004, two researchers analyzed the New York Times obit section between 1977 and 2002 in an attempt to understand how the obituary section portrayed American librarians.

Astronomers who noticed a slight blip in space's background radiation got an insight not just into the early stars but into the age and nature of the early universe.

Decades after Charles Knowlton died, his book would be credited with the reversal of population growth in England and the popularization of contraception in the United States.