Until the 1960s, women couldn’t compete in Olympic events any longer than a sprint – and commentators declared that a marathon would kill them, or leave them unable to have children.

Among the many steps along the road to high-performance AI, one of the most important was taken in 2007 by Fei-Fei Li, then an assistant professor in Princeton’s computer science department. Using ...

Comrade Lysenko has seized control of Soviet agriculture with his radical ideas about genetics. He disdains traditional scientists who learn everything from books and nothing from the land, and ...

In 1860, police officer Robert O’Hara Burke plans an expedition to map the ghastly blank in the centre of Australia. Joining him is scientist William Wills, and a ragtag team of hires. Burke ...

In the 1970s, some basic ideas in supposedly useless number theory were deployed by Ron Rivest, Adi Shamir and Leonard Adleman. They developed the RSA algorithm, which enables public key cryptography, ...

On 26 April, I plan to be on the start line of the London Marathon. I’m in my fifties, I’ve only been running for a few years ...

Panic has erupted in the cockpit of AirFrance Flight 447. The pilots are convinced they’ve lost control of the plane. It’s lurching violently. Then, it begins plummeting from the sky at breakneck ...

Was the fairy tale of Hansel and Gretel – the story of a woodcutter’s children abandoned in the woods and left at the mercy of a witch – in fact, early true crime? A hit book – The Truth About Hansel ...

“Thanks to Tim Harford’s characteristic wit and magnetic storytelling, you may not realize you’re getting an advanced course in how to understand the kinds of statistics we’re all faced with every day ...

Victorian nurse Florence Nightingale (played by her distant cousin Helena Bonham Carter) is a hero of modern medicine – but her greatest contribution to combating disease and death resulted from the ...