History of Science coverage from Scientific American, featuring news and articles about advances in the field.

From medicine to physics and astronomy, these scholars saved lives and improved our understanding across all aspects of the ...

From starting out as a night-drive idea to becoming a global diagnostic gold standard, PCR has irreversibly transformed life sciences in its 40 years of existence. By 1991, scientists had begun ...

There's something uniquely frustrating about the world of scientific discovery. We celebrate the names we know, the heroes etched into textbooks and museum walls. Yet countless brilliant minds remain ...

The Hubble Space Telescope as seen from the Space Shuttle Discovery in December 1999. Credit: NASA In the summer of 1995, Robert Williams, then director of the Space Telescope Science Institute, which ...

A slender thread of memory connects a Texas Hill Country man to a discovery that transformed modern technology. In 1916, Fred Schmidt’s grandfather, Jan Czochralski (1885-1953), a largely self-taught ...

There are some scientists whose contributions to the stores of human knowledge are so well-known that they have become household names. I don’t think it’s going too far out on a limb to say that ...