Isaac Newton investigating light

Science and technology

Benjamin Franklin: life of the week.

Benjamin Franklin and the kite experiment

Benjamin Franklin’s greatest inventions – and famous kite experiment

The Magus: enlightened magician or Renaissance charlatan?.

Video podcastDid our ancestors think the world was flat?.

Video podcastDinosaurs: a Victorian obsession.

Dinosaurs: a Victorian obsession.

A family watching television in their home, circa 1955.

QuizHow well do you know the history behind everyday inventions?.

History Behind the Headlines: ageing politicians & new names for the London Overground.

Astronaut Buzz Aldrin on the moon's surface

The history of the first moon landing: the road to Apollo 11

Video podcastTim Peake on the human history of space.

Tim Peake on the human history of space.

Archimedes heat ray sets fire to Roman ship

Archimedes’ greatest inventions and discoveries

Video podcastAstronomy history: everything you wanted to know.

AI: An ancient nightmare?.

What was Albert Einstein's involvement in the creation of the atomic bomb?.

OppenheimerIs Nolan perpetuating a historical myth?.

Still from Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977), directed by Steven Spielberg (Photo by Allstar Picture Library Limited/Alamy Stock Photo)

“Nasa has finally been dragged back into the UFO debate”: David Clarke on the history of flying saucers.

A photograph of Albert Einstein looking into the camera

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

Soviet cosmonaut Alexei Leonov, seen in 1975, would have been the leading candidate to be the first person to step on the Moon had the Soviets landed before the US (Photo by Space Frontiers/Getty Images)

What if...The Soviets had landed on the Moon first and won the Space Race?.

Historian Simon Schama, 2015 (Photo by David Levenson/Getty Images)

Simon Schama“Humans are a marvel of ingenuity, yet we seem to exist in this great pond of primitive terror and paranoia”.

The city of Hiroshima, Japan, a few days after the first atom bomb is dropped in August 1945. This clearly demonstrated the apocalyptic potential of the new weapon (Photo by Keystone-France/Gamma-Keystone via Getty Images)

Second World War

The Manhattan Project: your guide to the building of the first atomic bomb

Illustration by Hugh Cowling

Artificial intelligence: a modern advance or an ancient nightmare?.

Jai Singh II (third from left) built astronomical observatories across northern India in the 18th century, incorporating knowledge he’d sourced everywhere from China to Portugal (Photo by Dinodia Photos/Alamy Stock Photo)

Why the scientific revolution was far from just a European phenomenon.

Mathematician and Bletchley Park codebreaker Alan Turing played a key role in deciphering the Enigma code (Photo by Science History Images / Alamy Stock Photo)

What if...The Enigma code had not been cracked by Alan Turing and Bletchley Park?.

The Royal Observatory, commissioned by Charles II in 1675, on a hill in Greenwich Park, London (Photo by: Pictures From History/Universal Images Group via Getty Images)

Art, culture and science in the Restoration period.

The man who almost discovered the double helix.

Science & religion: a story of war or harmony?.

Video podcastPeter Frankopan on humanity’s long relationship with nature.

A composite image showing an astronaut on the moon against a purple sky.

ConspiracyDid NASA fake the Moon landing?

Circulation of the blood, 1628. English physician William Harvey (1578-1657) was the first to correctly describe the mechanism whereby blood is circulated in the body. Diagram showing the existence of valves in veins. From Exercitatio anatomica de motu cordis et sanguinis in animalibus, by William Harvey. (Photo by The Print Collector/Getty Images)

A medical renaissance?.