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 ...

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 ...

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, ...

Thomas Midgley’s inventions caused his own death, hastened the deaths of millions of people around the world, and very nearly extinguished all life on land. Midgley and his employers didn’t set out to ...

“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 ...

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 ...

Just before Christmas 1953, the bosses of America’s leading tobacco companies met John Hill, the founder and chief executive of one of America’s leading public relations firms, Hill & Knowlton.

William the Conqueror undertook a remarkably modern project. In 1086, he began compiling and storing a detailed record of his realm: where everyone lived, what they did and where they came from. 900 ...