Science and technology

Launch of the Apollo 16 mission, 1972. ((Photo by SSPL/Getty Images)

The Space Race: The Cold War rivalry that put humans on the Moon

A portrait of 17th-century scholar John Wilkins

Ye final frontier: the 17th-century space race

(Illustration by Kate Hazell for BBC World Histories Magazine)

Back down to Earth: the legacy of the 1969 moon landing

Peter Mayhew, Harrison Ford, Alec Guinness and Mark Hamill, on-set of the film Star Wars

Star Wars: why did the film make history?

Da Vinci's sketch 'The Vitruvian Man'. Da Vinci's talents ranged from anatomy to military engineering, and many of his innovations were not explored further for several centuries. (Photo by: Photo12/UIG via Getty Images)

Leonardo da Vinci’s genius: 7 of his visions for the future

A portrait of physicist Albert Einstein, c1946. (Photo by Fred Stein Archive/Archive Photos/Getty Images)

Albert Einstein: facts about his life, death, education and work

Charles Darwin

Darwin vs God: did the ‘Origin of Species’ cause a clash between church and science?

Alan M Turing and colleagues working on the Ferranti Mark I Computer, 1951.

Second World War

Alan Turing: The man, the enigma

Staff hard at work at Bletchley Park. The people who worked here did so under conditions of utmost secrecy, and with little idea of how their work slotted into the grand scheme of things. (Photo by SSPL/Getty Images)

Second World War

Alan Turing was not the only star of Bletchley Park

c60 AD, Queen Boudica of the Iceni holding a spear. (Photo by Hulton Archive/Getty Images)

8 things you may not know about British history

Alfred Nobel. (Bettmann/Getty Images)

Great misconceptions: There is a Nobel Prize for economics

Ada Lovelace “had a unique and farsighted insight into the potential of computers,” says James Essinger. (Photo by Getty Images)

Ada Lovelace: a visionary of computing

A group of skaters on a frozen-over backwater of the River Thames at Abingdon, 1895. (Photo by English Heritage/Heritage Images/Getty Images)

Harbingers of doom: a brief history of climate change warnings

c1935: Beatrice Shilling sits astride her Norton motorcycle. (Photo by Fox Photos/Getty Images)

5 “bloody brilliant” 20th-century women