Science & Medicine Week

Yuri Gagarin before the first space flight, 12 April 1961. (Credit: RIA Novosti)

In pictures: Soviet cosmonauts and the birth of the space age

Appia Antica (The Appian Way), Rome, Lazio, Italy, Europe. (Getty)

Invention or adaptation: what did the Romans really do for us?

Grace Humiston was nicknamed 'Mrs Sherlock Holmes' by the American press. (Image courtesy of Brad Ricca)

First World War

America’s ‘Mrs Holmes’: how one woman took on the cases the NYPD couldn’t solve

Heck cows, the result of Nazi breeding experiments. Seven Heck cows had to be put down in January 2015 after they tried, on multiple occasions, to attack Devon farmer Derek Gow. (Photo by Jim Wileman/Alamy Stock Photo)

Nazi super-cows and defamed Gods: 7 strange and forgotten moments in history

A chocolate house in Georgian times. Coffee and chocolate houses were popular, and served as clubs and meeting places for business (© TopFoto)

Hangover cure, medicinal wonder-drink and Valentine’s Day gift: the history of our obsession with chocolate

Coca cola bottles from the 1990s

From Velcro to Viagra: 10 products that were invented by accident

A reconstruction of a Theban painting from the Ancient Egyptian Dynasty XIX depicting a childbirth scene. The mother is seen being helped by her handmaidens and a midwife. Photo by DeAgostini/Getty Images)

7 surprising facts about the history of medicine

London & North Western Railway locomotive, 1848. (Photo by SSPL/Getty Images)

8 ways railway travel changed everything for Britain

A portrait of Florence Nightingale

Florence Nightingale: nursing by numbers

Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin. (Photo by Getty Images)

Yuri Gagarin: 8 things you (probably) didn’t know about the first man in space

Isambard Kingdom Brunel

Brunel: a hard taskmaster

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In pictures: a history of the Royal Institution Christmas Lectures

The operation

John Hunter and the horrors of 18th-century surgery

Sarcophagus with relief depicting the Calydonian boar hunt, Campanian amphitheatre, Italy, 1st-2nd century AD. (Photo by DeAgostini/Getty Images)

General prehistory

From dragons to unicorns: finding fantastic beasts in ancient history

A phantasmagoria by Belgian entertainer Etienne-Gaspard Robert, whose stage name was Etienne Robertson, 1797. (Photo by Kean Collection/Archive Photos/Getty Images)

Phantasmagoria: creating the ‘ghosts’ of the Enlightenment