Grace Hopper at the UNIVAC keyboard, c. 1960.

Talking with Machines: Computer Programming as Language

The proliferation of different types of computing machines in the 1950s enabled—or perhaps forced—the creation of programming languages.
Fruit of the pong-pong tree (Cerbera odollam)

Cerbera odollam: “The Suicide Tree” That Harms and Heals

Even before The White Lotus, people feared the poisonous pong-pong tree, Cerbera odollam. But there's another way to look at the plant and its effects.
Italian physicist Alessandro Volta (1745-1827), demonstrating his pile (battery) to Napoleon in Paris, 1801.

Electric Fish and the First Battery

Allesandro Volta invented the voltaic pile, the earliest electric battery, in part because of his investigations into the torpedo, an electric ray fish.
West County Recycles, Richmond, CA

Did “Big Oil” Sell Us on a Recycling Scam?

Our focus on recycling to save the planet may be missing the mark.
Elisha Gray

Gray’s Music: Over the Telegraph

Inventor of the telephone Elisha Gray also pioneered the world’s first purpose-built electric musical instrument.
Red-lined Sea Cucumber Thelenota rubralineata in the shallow water near Moyo Island, Sumbawa, Indonesia.

Weird and Wondrous Sea Cucumbers

These spiny or slimy ocean creatures display an astonishing diversity of appearances, behaviors and lifestyles. Many are increasingly threatened.
Operation Morning Light team members, dressed in specially designed arctic clothing, begin the painstaking process of searching the area with hand-held radiation detectors.

The Trouble with Reentry

Reentry of space junk in the 1970s forced First Nations communities into a reckoning with Cold War geopolitics and a burgeoning envirotechnical disaster.
People working with digital database, organizing files in folders on laptop.

Expanding the Possibilities for Preservability

A new tool from NYU Libraries helps authors, publishers, and preservation specialists assess the preservability of evolving digital scholarship.
A dog riding the Moscow metro

Dogs of the Moscow Metro

The public attitude toward the adventurous dogs who have mastered the Moscow metro system has roots in an egalitarian Soviet culture.
Portrait of Carl Linnaeus, 1855

Was Carl Linnaeus Bad at Drawing?

Linnaeus has often been thought of as a poor artist, but visualization was a core element of his analytical tool set.