According to a familiar story, science was born as a pastime of seventeenth-century European gentlemen, who built air pumps, traded telescopes, and measured everything from the size of the earth to ...

From teaching curious museumgoers to adding creativity to the scientific process, art is an essential component of the science done at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History. Raven ...

H istorians! Put down your tools! Your labors are at an end. The scientists have finally solved history, turning it from a jumble of haphazard facts (“just one damn thing after another”), into ...

From “experimental archaeology” to the mysterious appeal of exploration, the wide-ranging subjects detailed in these titles captivated Smithsonian magazine’s science contributors this year Joe Spring, ...

IN his recent book on “Clothes”, Mr. Eric Gill says that “in our hearts we know science for what it is—the greatest frivolity of history.... If it was not that science enables a lot of people to get ...