Smithsonian

We may feel isolated now, in our homes, or apart in parks, or behind plexiglass shields in stores. But we are ...

For tens of millions of years, even as other dinosaur species grew to huge sizes, 40-foot carnivores weren't around. How, ...

To mark the 10th anniversary of the Smithsonian’s “David H. Koch Hall of Human Origins,” here are some of the ...

It was a truism among 19th-century physicians that, in the words of German epidemiologist August Hirsch, “[t]he history of typhus ...

Amidst a slew of shortages and logistical hurdles, American researchers are now slowly rolling out two crucial and very different ...

Scientists don’t yet have definitive answers about SARS-CoV-2 immunity. For now, people who have had the disease appear unlikely to ...

The search for signs of Earth’s earliest forms of life isn’t quite like looking for dinosaur bones protruding out from ...

Two million years ago, three different early humans—Australopithecus, Paranthropus, and the earliest-known Homo erectus—appear to have lived at the same time in ...

Many infectious diseases wax and wane with the changing months. Some, like flu, spike when the weather turns cold, while others, ...

When German pathologist Robert Koch discovered the bacterium behind tuberculosis in 1882, he included a short guide for linking microorganisms ...

[H]owever small the probability of seeing a signal from E.T. is, those chances are soon going to be a lot ...

It was a parade like none Philadelphia had ever seen.... When the Fourth Liberty Loan Drive parade stepped off on September ...

Clearly, a lot can happen in a decade—but innovation has to start somewhere. Based on what’s breaking through now, here ...

On an April afternoon in 1897, thousands of women packed the Boston Theatre to see the nation’s most beguiling female entrepreneur, ...

Charles Darwin’s ideas about evolution shook up Britain’s Victorian establishment upon the release of On the Origin of Species, the 1859 ...

As of 2020, there are now targeted therapy drugs for 30 kinds of cancer. As part of this whirlwind of innovation, ...

In ancient times, the region of Judea was known for its plump, delicious dates, which delighted the palates of classical ...

With the deadly 2017-2018 flu season still fresh in public health officials’ minds, this year’s outbreak is shaping up to be ...

They’re perfect strangers: biological entities that, up until this point, had no business being together. And yet, [microbiologist Michael] Levin ...

If we compress the history of the universe into a single year, Earth and our solar system formed around Labor ...

For more than half a century, the prevailing story of how the first humans came to the Americas went like ...

Pound for pound, the blue whale’s reign is indisputable. At around 100 feet long and 100 tons in size, these ...

Mini-brains are just the size of a pea but capable of reproducing key brain functions. They are currently a hot research topic because scientists think they ...

Some scientists have theorized that it only became physically possible to speak a wide range of essential vowel sounds when ...

Omarion was born with a rare genetic disorder called X-linked severe combined immunodeficiency (SCID), better known as the “bubble boy ...

Creating a durable, natural-looking skin substitute to cover burn injuries or other wounds has been a bioengineer’s holy grail for decades ...

In a memorable scene from the 1931 horror classic Frankenstein, Dr. Frankenstein stands over his sentient monster, a beast he created from ...

Shell shock ultimately sent 15 percent of British soldiers home. Their symptoms included uncontrollable weeping, amnesia, tics, paralysis, nightmares, insomnia, heart ...