Super-Resolution Microscopes Showcase the Inner Lives of Cells
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.
Convincing Peasants to Fly in the Soviet Union
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.
Before Deep Blue: the Automaton Chess Player
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.
Putting a Cork in It: In Construction, That Is
The bark of the evergreen oak Quercus suber has been used for millennia as a construction material. Could it be our answer to sustainable buildings?
Tyler S. Sprague on the Intersection of Structure and Design
An interview with Tyler S. Sprague, a historian of the built environment whose work depends on multidisciplinarity and a deep knowledge of structure and materials.
How Was the Wheel Invented?
Computer simulations reveal the unlikely birth of a world-changing technology nearly 6,000 years ago.
Phantoscopes, Radiovision, and the Dawn of TV
After creating a projector called the Phantoscope in 1895, C. Francis Jenkins successfully tackled the problem of transmitting motion pictures through radio.
One Thousand Years of Domelessness
For more than 900 years, between the fifth century and the Renaissance, Romans didn’t cap their buildings with domes. Why?
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.
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.