"Always Ready"—This Currier and Ives painting illustrates the clothing of the early American fire fighter. The mid-19th century gear consisted almost entirely of wool, which was used both to ...

How close were the Nazis to developing an atomic bomb? The truth is that National Socialist Germany could not possibly have built a weapon like the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima or Nagasaki.

In 1942, Sigmund Rascher and others conducted high-altitude experiments on prisoners at Dachau. Eager to find out how best to save German pilots forced to eject at high altitude, they placed ...

The term "samurai" comes from the Japanese word saburau, meaning "to serve," and was first used in A.D. 702 to describe mid-to-low-ranking court administrators and, later, armed imperial guards.

With their strange silhouettes and awe-inspiring capabilities, today's UAVs, like this Predator, seem to have flown in from the future. But the Predator and the dozen other operational UAVs in the ...

NOVA is the most popular primetime science series on American television, demystifying the scientific and technological concepts that shape and define our lives, our planet, and our universe.