In a world full of wild insect defenses, bombardier beetles stand out for the violent chemical reaction they employ to deter enemies.

When it came time to describe what they saw under microscopes, Victorians couldn’t help but perceive a real-life fairyland.

Would today's online, social media-based friendships look familiar to the letter-writing friends of earlier centuries, when epistolary friendships were also common?

Referendums have a way of turning everyone into a self-proclaimed political expert. But does giving a population the chance to directly weigh in on a specific issue lead to a more informed voting public?

The U.S. is the only country in the world that sentences people to die in prison for offenses committed while under the age of 18.

Tea is bound up in the nation's history of colonial expansion. British tea drinkers preferred Chinese tea at first, and had to be convinced on patriotic grounds to drink tea from India.

What constitutes adulthood has never been self-evident or value-neutral. Queer lives follow their own temporal logic.

Is Facebook bad for your mental health? Researchers have been studying the profound impact social bonds can have on health since the 1970s.

Supermarkets represented a major innovation in food distribution—a gendered innovation that encouraged women to find sexual pleasure in subordination.

Debates about the moral value of biodiversity are longstanding in the world of environmental ethics, and the issue is far from settled.