discovery

The Black Death killed a third of Europe. The 1918 flu killed more people than World War I. Epidemics have redirected history more than any army.

Mathematics is the only field where we prove things are true forever. The story of how humans discovered that power spans 2,300 years and several revolutions in thought.

The atom went from a philosophical guess to a nuclear reality in about 150 years. Each model that replaced the last was stranger than anyone expected.

Before 1846, surgery meant unbearable agony and a near-certain chance of fatal infection. Here's how medicine solved both problems within a generation.

DNA was discovered in 1869, but nobody knew what it did. Working out its role and structure took 84 more years, and the story is more collaborative, and more complicated, than the famous version.

In 144 years, European thinkers traded inherited doctrine for measurement, experiment, and proof, and built the method science still runs on.

Medicine has gone from bloodletting and prayer to gene editing in just a few centuries. Here's how we got there.

How Ramón y Cajal's microscopy revealed neurons as individual cells composing the nervous system

Since 1999, Chandra has mapped X-rays from black holes, neutron stars, and galaxy clusters, transforming understanding of the universe's most violent phenomena.

July 2022: JWST's first images revealed galaxies 13.6 billion light-years distant, formed just 100 million years after the Big Bang, reshaping cosmology.

TESS discovered 5,600+ exoplanets using transit photometry, revolutionizing our census of worlds and identifying prime targets for atmospheric study.

In 1831, Michael Faraday discovered that changing magnetic fields induce electric currents. This fundamental discovery enabled electric motors, generators, and transformed civilization.