The mask, like the veil, is seen by the anxious West as concealing a racialized female subject in need of liberation from a backward culture.

A half century ago ago, Benoit Mandelbrot coined the word "fractal" and pioneered a new type of geometry.

Nutmeg originated in the Maluku islands of what’s now Indonesia, but Barbados became known as the Nutmeg Island. Why did the tree wander?

Advanced light microscopy techniques have come into their own—and are giving scientists a new understanding of human biology and what goes wrong in disease.

Offshoots from the “Tree of Life” traveled from Mesopotamia to the Levant to the United States, beguiling everyone with their toothsome confections.

With air-minded films, poems, and demonstrations, Soviet leaders sought to lift peasants out of their “backward” lives and into the world of the modern proletariat.

Cranes, sandpipers, ducks, geese and many other waterbirds have lost essential rest stops along their seasonal migration routes. Bird-friendly agriculture can assist in filling the gaps.

Historians are recovering the overlooked history of North America’s Crotalus horridus, the timber rattlesnake.

New evidence suggests the universe might not behave as expected, raising questions about the costs of being wrong.

You may have heard of IBM’s chess-playing computer, but Johann Nepomuk Maelzel’s Automaton Chess Player beat Deep Blue to the (mechanical) punch. Check mate.