This artist concept depicts "multiple-transiting planet systems," which are stars with more than one planet.

To Find a New World, Watch How a Planet Dances with Its Star

Finding a tiny planet around bright stars dozens or hundreds of light-years from Earth is extremely difficult.
From a pamphlet about the discovery of a witch, 1643

Sex and the Single Witch

On witch-hunting and the pursuit of sexual knowledge in early-modern England.
John Cho

Why #StarringJohnCho Is Not Enough for Asian American Cinema

Filling more movie roles with Asian American actors may be the wrong goal if such visibility promotes stereotypes or buys into Hollywood's fantasies of power.
Poverty Point, Louisiana

The Riches of Poverty Point

Earthworks built around 3,700 years ago in Louisiana centered an exchange system that stretched up the Mississippi and into the Ohio and Tennessee Valleys.
The continent of Antarctica, circa 2006

Inventing Antarctica

We're only just getting to know "the Ice."
Coster-girl by H.G Hine and E. Whimpers, 1851

The Radical Street Sellers of London

Many considered street vendors dangerous, not just for their general skirting of the law but because they comprised an outspoken political force.
This composite image contains X-ray data from Chandra (green and blue) that show heated material in the center of a shell generated by a supernova explosion. Optical data from Hubble show the glowing pink rim, which is ambient gas being shocked by the blast wave from the supernova, as well as the surrounding star field. The Type Ia supernova that resulted in the creation of this remnant would have been visible from Earth some 400 years ago.

How Stars Die

Nothing in this Universe is eternal—not even the stars.
Tom Cruise runs in a scene from the film 'Minority Report', 2002

The History of Precrime

UCLA’s Violence Center was squelched by political revolt, not so much for its ambition to stockpile behavioral data as Americans' fear of psychosurgery.
Bath Room Interior by the J.L. Mott Iron Works, 1888

Dawn of the Bathroom

The bathroom didn’t become a thing until the nineteenth century, and most working-class US homes added plumbed-in amenities in piecemeal fashion over time.
1922 Women's World Games athletes

How a Paris Meet Changed Women’s Track and Field

In the early twentieth century, women were discouraged from competing in track and field. The First International Track Meet for Women helped change that.