NASA Enlists Andy Warhol, Annie Leibovitz, Norman Rockwell & 350 Other Artists to Visually Document America’s Space Program

in Art, Astronomy, History, Science, Technology | August 19th, 2026

It’s hard to imagine that the space-crazed general public needed any help getting worked up about astronauts and NASA in the early ’60s.

Perhaps the wild popularity of space-related imagery was in part what motivated NASA administrator James Webb to create the NASA Art Program in 1962.

Although the program’s handpicked artists weren’t edited or censored in any way, they were briefed on how NASA hoped to be represented, and which emotions their creations were meant to capture—the excitement and uncertainty of exploring these frontiers.

NASA was also careful to collect everything the artists produced while participating in the program, from sketches to finished work.

In turn, the artists received unprecedented access to launch sites, key personnel, and major events such as Project Mercury and the Apollo 11 Mission.

Hundreds of artists, including Andy Warhol, Norman Rockwell, and Laurie Anderson, have brought their unique sensibilities to the project. (Find NASA-inspired art by Warhol and Rockwell above.)

(And hey, no shame if you mistakenly assumed Warhol’s 1987 Moonwalk 1 was created as a promo for MTV…)

Jamie Wyeth’s 1964 watercolor Gemini Launch Pad includes a humble bicycle, the means by which technicians traveled back and forth between the launch pad and the reinforced-concrete blockhouse where they worked.

Photographer Annie Leibovitz offers two views of NASA’s first female pilot and commander, Eileen Collins—with and without helmet.

Postage stamp designer, Paul Calle, one of the inaugural group of participating artists, produced a stamp commemorating the Gemini 4 space capsule in celebration of NASA’s 9th anniversary. When the Apollo 11 astronauts suited up prior to blastoff on July 16, 1969, Calle was the only artist present. His quickly rendered felt-tip marker sketches lend a backstage element to the heroic iconography surrounding astronauts Armstrong, Aldrin and Collins. One of the items they carried with them on their journey was the engraved printing plate of Calle’s 1967 commemorative stamp. They hand-canceled a proof aboard the flight, on the assumption that post offices might be hard to come by on the moon.

In 2016, NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory enlisted a team of nine artists, designers, and illustrators to collaborate on 14 posters, a visual throwback to the ones the WPA created between 1938 and 1941 to spark public interest in the National Parks. You can see the results at the Exoplanet Travel Bureau.

More recently, in 2024, NASA and the artist team Geraluz and WERC relaunched the program with space-themed murals in Manhattan.

View an album of 25 historic works from NASA’s Art Program here.

Note: An earlier version of this post appeared on our site in 2019.

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Ayun Halliday is an author, illustrator, and theater maker in NYC.

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How Ada Lovelace, Daughter of Lord Byron, Wrote the First Computer Program in 1842–a Century Before the First Computer

in Computer Science, History, Science, Technology | August 5th, 2026

I’ve never quite understood why the phrase “revisionist history” became purely pejorative. Of course, it has its Orwellian dark side, but all knowledge has to be revised periodically, as we acquire new information and, ideally, discard old prejudices and narrow frames of reference. A failure to do so seems fundamentally regressive, not only in political terms, but also in terms of how we value accurate, interesting, and engaged scholarship. Such research has brought us fascinating stories about previously marginalized people who made significant contributions to scientific discovery, such as NASA’s “human computers,” portrayed in the book Hidden Figures, then dramatized in the film of the same name.

Likewise, the many women who worked at Bletchley Park during World War II—helping to decipher encryptions like the Nazi Enigma Code (out of nearly 10,000 codebreakers, about 75% were women)—have been getting their historical due, thanks to “revisionist” researchers. And, as we noted in a prior post, we might not know much, if anything, about film star Hedy Lamarr’s significant contributions to wireless, GPS, and Bluetooth technology were it not for the work of historians like Richard Rhodes. These few examples, among many, show us a fuller, more accurate, and more interesting view of the history of science and technology, and they inspire women and girls who want to enter the field, yet have grown up with few role models to encourage them.

We can add to the pantheon of great women in science the name Ada Byron, Countess of Lovelace, the daughter of Romantic poet Lord Byron. Lovelace has been renowned, as Hank Green tells us in the video at the top of the post, for writing the first computer program, “despite living a century before the invention of the modern computer.” This picture of Lovelace has been a controversial one. “Historians disagree,” writes prodigious mathematician Stephen Wolfram. “To some she is a great hero in the history of computing; to others an overestimated minor figure.”

Wolfram spent some time with “many original documents” to untangle the mystery. “I feel like I’ve finally gotten to know Ada Lovelace,” he writes, “and gotten a grasp on her story. In some ways it’s an ennobling and inspiring story; in some ways it’s frustrating and tragic.” Educated in math and music by her mother, Anne Isabella Milbanke, Lovelace became acquainted with mathematics professor Charles Babbage, the inventor of a calculating machine called the Difference Engine, “a 2‑foot-high hand-cranked contraption with 2000 brass parts.” Babbage encouraged her to pursue her interests in mathematics, and she did so throughout her life.

Widely acknowledged as one of the forefathers of computing, Babbage eventually corresponded with Lovelace on the creation of another machine, the Analytical Engine, which “supported a whole list of possible kinds of operations, that could in effect be done in arbitrarily programmed sequence.” When, in 1842, Italian mathematician Louis Menabrea published a paper in French on the Analytical Engine, “Babbage enlisted Ada as translator,” notes the San Diego Supercomputer Center’s Women in Science project. “During a nine-month period in 1842–43, she worked feverishly on the article and a set of Notes she appended to it. These are the source of her enduring fame.” (You can read her translation and notes here.)

In the course of his research, Wolfram pored over Babbage and Lovelace’s correspondence about the translation, which reads “a lot like emails about a project might today, apart from being in Victorian English.” Although she built on Babbage and Menabrea’s work, “She was clearly in charge” of successfully extrapolating the possibilities of the Analytical Engine, but she felt “she was first and foremost explaining Babbage’s work, so wanted to check things with him.” Her additions to the work were very well-received—Michael Faraday called her “the rising star of Science”—and when her notes were published, Babbage wrote, “you should have written an original paper.”

Unfortunately, as a woman, “she couldn’t get access to the Royal Society’s library in London,” and her ambitions were derailed by a severe health crisis. Lovelace died of cancer at the age of 36, and for some time, her work sank into semi-obscurity. Though some historians have seen her as simply an expositor of Babbage’s work, Wolfram concludes that it was Ada who had the idea of “what the Analytical Engine should be capable of.” Her notes suggested possibilities Babbage had never dreamed of. As the Women in Science project puts it, “She rightly saw [the Analytical Engine] as what we would call a general-purpose computer. It was suited for ‘developping [sic] and tabulating any function whatever… the engine [is] the material expression of any indefinite function of any degree of generality and complexity.’ Her Notes anticipate future developments, including computer-generated music.”

In an episode of the BBC’s In Our Time, above, you can hear former-host Melvyn Bragg discuss Lovelace’s importance with historians and scholars Patricia Fara, Doron Swade, and John Fuegi. And be sure to read Wolfram’s biographical and historical account of Lovelace here.

Note: An earlier version of this post appeared on our site in 2017.

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Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC.

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How Did Everything Begin?: Animations on the Origins of the Universe Narrated by X‑Files Star Gillian Anderson

in Philosophy, Religion, Science | July 23rd, 2026

We previously brought you the BBC series of short animated videos, A History of Ideas. Produced in collaboration with the UK’s Open University and narrated by Harry Shearer, these fun introductions to such philosophers as Simone de Beauvoir and Edmund Burke, and such weighty philosophical topics as free will and the problem of evil, make challenging, abstract concepts accessible to non-philosophers. Now the series is back with a new chapter, How Did Everything Begin?, a survey of several theories of the origins of the universe, from Thomas Aquinas’ philosophical speculations, to Hindu cosmology; and from theologian William Paley’s design argument (below), to the theory of the Big Bang (above).

The two videos here present an interesting counterpoint between the origin theories of astrophysics and theology. Though current-day intelligent design proponents deny it, there is still much of William Paley’s argument, at least in style, in their explanations of creation. First propounded in his 1802 work Natural Theology, the theologian’s famous watchmaker analogy—which he extended to the design of the eye, and everything else—gave Charles Darwin much to puzzle over, though David Hume had supposedly refuted Paley’s arguments 50 years earlier. The Big Bang theory—a term created by its foremost critic Fred Hoyle—offers an entirely naturalistic account of the universe’s origins, one that presupposes no inherent purpose or design.

As with the previous videos, these are scripted by the host of the Philosophy Bites podcast, Nigel Warburton. This time around the videos are narrated by Gillian Anderson, whose voice you may not immediately recognize. Rather than sounding like Dana Scully, her famous X‑Files character, Anderson speaks in a British accent, which she slips into easily, having lived in the UK for much of her childhood and now again as an adult. (You may have seen Anderson in many of the English period dramas she has appeared in, or in British crime drama The Fall or Michael Winterbottom’s uproarious adaptation of Tristram Shandy.)

These fascinating speculative theories—whether scientific or mythological—are sure to appeal to fans of the X‑Files, who can perhaps begin to believe again, or remain skeptical, thanks to Chris Carter’s R‑rated director’s cut of X‑Files: I Want to Believe, coming out this fall.

Watch the remaining videos in the series below:

Thomas Aquinas and the First Mover Argument

Hindu Creation Stories

Note: An earlier version of this post appeared on our site in 2015.

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Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC.

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Albert Einstein Imposes on His First Wife a Cruel List of Marital Demands

in Letters, Physics, Science | July 9th, 2026

Albert Einstein passionately wooed his first wife Mileva Maric, against his family’s wishes, and the two had a turbulent but intellectually rich relationship that they recorded for posterity in their letters. Einstein and Maric’s love letters have inspired the short film above, My Little Witch (in Serbian, I believe, with English subtitles) and several critical re-evaluations of Einstein’s life and Maric’s influence on his early thought. Some historians have even suggested that Maric—who was also trained in physics—made contributions to Einstein’s early work, a claim hotly disputed and, it seems, poorly substantiated.

The letters—written between 1897 and 1903 and only discovered in 1987—reveal a wealth of previously unknown detail about Maric and the marriage. While the controversy over Maric’s influence on Einstein’s theories raged among academics and viewers of PBS’s controversial documentary, Einstein’s Wife, a scandalous personal item in the letters got much better press. As Einstein and Maric’s relationship deteriorated, and they attempted to scotch tape it together for the sake of their children, the avuncular pacifist wrote a chilling list of “conditions,” in outline form, that his wife must accept upon his return. Lists of Note transcribes them from Walter Isaacson’s biography Einstein: His Life and Universe:

CONDITIONS

A. You will make sure:

1. that my clothes and laundry are kept in good order;
2. that I will receive my three meals regularly in my room;
3. that my bedroom and study are kept neat, and especially that my desk is left for my use only.

B. You will renounce all personal relations with me insofar as they are not completely necessary for social reasons. Specifically, You will forego:

1. my sitting at home with you;
2. my going out or travelling with you.

C. You will obey the following points in your relations with me:

1. you will not expect any intimacy from me, nor will you reproach me in any way;
2. you will stop talking to me if I request it;
3. you will leave my bedroom or study immediately without protest if I request it.

D. You will undertake not to belittle me in front of our children, either through words or behavior.

While it may be unfair to judge anyone’s total character by its most glaring defects, there’s no way to read this without shuddering. Although Einstein tried to preserve the marriage, once they separated for good, he did not lament Mileva’s loss for long. Manjit Kumar tells us in Quantum: Einstein Bohr, and the Great Debate about the Nature of Reality that although “Mileva agreed to his demands and Einstein returned”

[I]t could not last. At the end of July, after just three months in Berlin, Mileva and the boys went back to Zurich. As he stood on the platform waving goodbye, Einstein wept, if not for Mileva and the memories of what had been, then for his two departing sons. But within a matter of weeks he was happily enjoying living alone “in my large apartment in undiminished tranquility.”

Einstein prized his solitude greatly. Another remark shows his difficulty with personal relationships. While he eventually fell in love with his cousin Elsa and finally divorced Maric to marry her in 1919, that marriage too was troubled. Elsa died in 1936 soon after the couple moved to the U.S. Not long after her death, Einstein would write, “I have gotten used extremely well to life here. I live like a bear in my den… This bearishness has been further enhanced by the death of my woman comrade, who was better with other people than I am.”

Einstein’s personal failings might pass by without much comment if he had not, like his hero Gandhi, been elevated to the status of a “secular saint.” Yet, it is also the personal inconsistencies, the weaknesses and petty, even incredibly callous moments, that make so many famous figures’ lives compelling, if also confusing. As Einstein scholar John Stachel says, “Too much of an idol was made of Einstein. He’s not an idol—he’s a human, and that’s much more interesting.”

Note: An earlier version of this post appeared on our site in 2013.

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Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC.

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When Albert Einstein & Charlie Chaplin Met and Became Fast Famous Friends (1930)

in Film, History, Science | July 6th, 2026

Photo via Wikimedia Commons

“You do not really understand something unless you can explain it to your grandmother,” goes a well-known quote attributed variously to Albert Einstein, Richard Feynman, and Ernest Rutherford. No matter who said it, “the sentiment… rings true,” writes Michelle Lavery, “for researchers in all disciplines from particle physics to ecopsychology.” As Feynman discovered during his many years of teaching, it could be “the motto of all professional communicators,” The Guardian’s Russell Grossman writes, “and especially those who earn a living communicating the tricky business of science.”

Einstein became one of the world’s great science communicators by choice, not necessity, and found ways to explain his complex theories to children and the elderly alike. But perhaps, if he’d had his way, he would rather have avoided words altogether, and preferred acrobatic feats of silent daring to get his message across. We might at least conclude so from his reverence for the work of Charlie Chaplin. Chaplin was the only person Einstein wanted to meet in California during his second, 1930–31 visit to the U.S., when he was “at the height of his fame,” notes Claire Cock-Starkey at Mental Floss, “with newspapers tracking his every move and academics clamoring for explanations of his theories.”

The admiration, of course, was mutual. Their first meetings happened outside the press’s scrutiny, at Universal Studios, “where the pair took a tour and had lunch together. They hit it off straight away, sharing quick wits and curious minds.” In his autobiography, Chaplin writes that Einstein’s wife Elsa finagled an invitation to dinner at Chaplin’s house. And he “was only too happy to oblige,” Cock-Starkey writes, arranging an “intimate dinner, at which Elsa regaled him with the story of when Einstein came up with his world-changing theory, sometime around 1915.”

The two continued to correspond, and the big public unveiling of their friendship came when Chaplin invited Einstein to the premiere of City Lights in 1931 (see photo up top) where the mega-celebrities from very different worlds were greeted by reporters, photographers, and adoring crowds. There are several recorded versions of their conversation. In one account, Einstein expressed bemusement at the cheering, and Chaplin remarked, “the people applaud me because everyone understands me, and they applaud you because no one understands you.”

Chaplin himself wrote in his 1933–34 travelogue, A Comedian Sees the World, that one of Einstein’s sons uttered the line, weeks afterward: “You are popular [because] you are understood by the masses. On the other hand, the professor’s popularity with the masses is because he is not understood.” Yet another version, circulating on the Nobel Prize’s Instagram and collecting tens of thousands of likes, has the exchange take place in a dialogue.

Einstein: “What I most admire about your art, is your universality. You don’t say a word, yet the world understands you!”

Chaplin: “True. But your glory is even greater! The whole world admires you, even though they don’t understand a word of what you say.”

Whatever they really said to each other, it’s clear Einstein saw something in Charlie Chaplin worth emulating. Chaplin left his mark on Existentialist philosophy, lending the name of his film Modern Times to Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir’s influential journal, Les Temps Modernes. He left a legacy on Beat poetry, lending the name City Lights to Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s infamous San Francisco bookstore and publisher. And it seems he also maybe had some small effect on physics, or on the most famous of physicists, who might have harbored a secret ambition to be a silent film comedian—or to communicate, at least, with the universal effectiveness of one as skilled as Charlie Chaplin, favorite of geniuses and grandmothers (and genius grandmothers) everywhere.

Note: An earlier version of this post appeared on our site in 2020.

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Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC.

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Leonardo da Vinci’s Notebooks, Separated for 400 Years, Have Been Reunited and Put Online

in Art, History, Science | June 24th, 2026

Leonardo da Vinci was a painter, draughtsman, engineer, scientist, theorist, sculptor, and architect, to provide only his most widely agreed-upon list of occupations. It is he, more than any other single figure, who comes to mind when we think of the ideal of the “Renaissance man.” Though considered rather less practical today than it was in fifteenth-century Italy, the relentless questing for both scientific knowledge and artistic perfection implied by that title has never entirely ceased to appeal. For aspiring modern Renaissance men, one of the most enduring sources of inspiration remains Leonardo’s own notebooks, full of backwards-written explorations of ideas both realized and unrealized that move unpredictably from one intellectual domain to another.

That last quality seems to have displeased the sculptor Pompeo Leoni, who eventually came into possession of Leonardo’s notebooks after they were inherited by his last student Francesco Melzi. Leoni “dismounted and cut the folios, separating the materials into two albums according
to his own judgement,” notes the Italian Embassy in London, “the larger portion for technical and scientific topics,” and the smaller for “Leonardo’s artistic and figurative workings.”

In the early seventeenth century, Leoni’s son-in-law sold the former album, now known as the Codex Atlanticus, to a count who in turn donated it to the Veneranda Biblioteca Ambrosiana; the latter ended up in England’s Royal Collection by 1670 or so. Only now have they been reunited, thanks to a project called Leonardotheka.

The culmination of a decade’s work involving the Veneranda Biblioteca Ambrosiana as well as the Biblioteca Leonardiana and the Royal Collection Trust, Leonardotheka digitally reunites those albums after four centuries apart. Such a task also entailed the reconstruction of 50 long-sundered individual pages and their replacement into their original context. The notebooks combined “decades of anatomical studies, flying machines, landscapes, and grocery-list-adjacent musings, all tangled together the way Leonardo’s mind may have worked,” writes Anastasia Scott at Discover. Yet he’d “likely never intended to separate art from science in the first place. A single page might hold a machine, a horse, and a poem, and Leoni severed connections the artist had made on purpose.” With those connections restored, we here in the twenty-twenties — a time plagued by its own doubts about the relationship between what we now call “humanities” and “STEM” — can see once again how a real Renaissance mind worked. Enter the Leonardotheka here.

via Kottke

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Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. He’s the author of the newsletter Books on Cities as well as the books 한국 요약 금지 (No Summarizing Korea) and Korean Newtro. Follow him on the social network formerly known as Twitter at @colinmarshall.

by Colin Marshall | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 1 ) |

Before Bill Nye, There Was Julius Sumner Miller: Watch Complete Episodes of His Classic Science Show, Why Is It So?, Free Online (1962–73)

in Physics, Science, Television | June 19th, 2026

“We are approaching a darkness in the land. Boys and girls are emerging from every level of school with certificates and degrees, but they can’t read, write or calculate. We don’t have academic honesty or intellectual rigor.” That quote may sound like a familiar lament today, but it’s actually drawn from an interview conducted about half a century ago with the physicist and television host Julius Sumner Miller. If that name sounds familiar to you, there’s a fair chance you’re an Australian who grew up between the sixties and the eighties — and it’s hardly impossible that, thanks to his program Why Is It So?, you went on to pursue a career in science or engineering.

Generations of young viewers down under and elsewhere learned from Why Is It So? that physics and its principles could be fun. Even if you weren’t among them at the time, you can now watch full episodes of the show uploaded to YouTube by ABC, the Australian Broadcasting Corporation.

As you may notice after just a few seconds of listening to him, Miller himself was American. The Massachusetts-born son of immigrants from Latvia and Lithuania, he studied physics at Boston University and thereafter taught and performed research at various institutions (befriending Albert Einstein along the way) before taking a long-term position at El Camino College in Torrance, California in 1952.

Miller’s popularity at El Camino, the school’s proximity to Hollywood, and television’s rapid expansion into a mass medium led to his launching Why Is It So? on KNXT in Los Angeles in 1959. By the mid-sixties, he was also explaining scientific phenomena on Disney’s Mickey Mouse Club, Great Moments in Science, and Science and Its Magic, as well as on Steve Allen’s late-night talk show. He made his debut on Australian television when the University of Sydney brought him out as a visiting lecturer. The appearance went wrong when he couldn’t perform his standard trick of driving a drinking straw through a potato, but what it nevertheless got him — apart from an office filled with the domestic straws he’d jokingly criticized on-air — was a new home for Why Is It So? on ABC.

ABC has so far made available seven full broadcasts originally aired between the early sixties and the early seventies. Despite their black-and-white production and lack of visual effects, they hold up well today in both educational and entertainment value. However engaging his personality as what we would now call a science communicator, it seems that “Miller could be a terror in the classroom,” according to his Los Angeles Times obituary from 1987, “intolerant of misspelled words or misplaced punctuation” and insistent that “most faculty were not rigid enough and that students were not learning enough.” He’d hardly be pleased with what’s happened to intellectual standards in the nearly four decades since his death, but he’d surely appreciate that his teaching continues to reach “everybody ages four to 94,” as he liked to describe his audience. Age, nationality, and even credentials didn’t matter; what counted was genuine curiosity and the willingness to pursue it, whether in the classroom or the living room.

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Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. He’s the author of the newsletter Books on Cities as well as the books 한국 요약 금지 (No Summarizing Korea) and Korean Newtro. Follow him on the social network formerly known as Twitter at @colinmarshall.

by Colin Marshall | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 1 ) |

How a Volcanic Eruption Helped Unleash the Black Death in Europe in 1347

in History, Science | May 8th, 2026

The flap of a butterfly’s wings on one side of the world can cause a hurricane on the other, or so they say. If we take it a bit too literally, that old observation may make us wonder what a hurricane can cause. Or if not a hurricane, how about another kind of large-scale natural disaster? If new findings by researchers from the University of Cambridge and the Leibniz Institute for the History and Culture of Eastern Europe are to be believed, a volcano’s eruption helped lead to the outbreak and spread of the Black Death across Europe in the fourteenth century. In the video above, British history and environmental science specialist Paul Whitewick explains the evidence on a visit to one of the abandoned medieval villages stricken by that plague.

As Cambridge’s Sarah Collins writes, “the evidence suggests that a volcanic eruption — or cluster of eruptions — around 1345 caused annual temperatures to drop for consecutive years due to the haze from volcanic ash and gases, which in turn caused crops to fail across the Mediterranean region.” Desperate Italian city-states thus fell back on trading with grain producers around the Black Sea. “This climate-driven change in long-distance trade routes helped avoid famine, but in addition to life-saving food, the ships were carrying the deadly bacterium that ultimately caused the Black Death, enabling the first and deadliest wave of the second plague pandemic to gain a foothold in Europe.”

An important clue came in the form of “information contained in tree rings from the Spanish Pyrenees, where consecutive ‘Blue Rings’ point to unusually cold and wet summers in 1345, 1346 and 1347 across much of southern Europe.” Records of lunar eclipses and layers of sulfur locked into ice cores dating to about the same time further heighten the probability of volcanic activity. Key to tying these disparate pieces of evidence together are changes in trade routes: on a map, Whitewick traces “movement increasing along these corridors, grain imports to the maritime republics of Venice and Genoa from north of the Black Sea and beyond, in 1347.” According to written records, the Black Death came to Britain the following year, arriving in “a country already shaped by failed harvests, weakened communities, and rising movement of people and goods.”

Some communities weathered the plague and, in the fullness of time, even bounced back; others, like the village amid whose remains Whitewick stands, practically vanished altogether. “This was a global problem that became very much a local one,” he says, underscoring its revelation of the risk factors present even in the early stages of what we now call globalization. “A volcanic eruption thousands of miles away altered climate patterns, and that climate reshaped harvest and trade, and trade carried disease. And here, in the quiet English fields, the consequences have settled into the ground:” not quite as poetic an image as the butterfly and the hurricane, granted, but hardly less relevant to our own world for it.

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Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. He’s the author of the newsletter Books on Cities as well as the books 한국 요약 금지 (No Summarizing Korea) and Korean Newtro. Follow him on the social network formerly known as Twitter at @colinmarshall.

by Colin Marshall | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

NASA Enlists Andy Warhol, Annie Leibovitz, Norman Rockwell & 350 Other Artists to Visually Document America’s Space Program

How Ada Lovelace, Daughter of Lord Byron, Wrote the First Computer Program in 1842–a Century Before the First Computer

How Did Everything Begin?: Animations on the Origins of the Universe Narrated by X‑Files Star Gillian Anderson

Albert Einstein Imposes on His First Wife a Cruel List of Marital Demands

When Albert Einstein & Charlie Chaplin Met and Became Fast Famous Friends (1930)

Leonardo da Vinci’s Notebooks, Separated for 400 Years, Have Been Reunited and Put Online

Before Bill Nye, There Was Julius Sumner Miller: Watch Complete Episodes of His Classic Science Show, Why Is It So?, Free Online (1962–73)

How a Volcanic Eruption Helped Unleash the Black Death in Europe in 1347

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