Before winning his Nobel prize, Stanley Prusiner was ridiculed for suggesting that something he called a prion caused spongiform brain diseases
Michael Faraday built an electric motor in 1821 and a rudimentary generator a decade later – but half a century passed before electric power took off
A car with just two wheels looked too terrifying to catch on, but the secret of its amazing balancing act is at the heart of today's guidance systems
George Cayley knew how to make a plane a century before the Wright brothers took off.
What links modern cosmology to 18th-century musings on billiards?
Michael Faraday built an electric motor in 1821 and a rudimentary generator a decade later – but half a century passed before electric power took off
George Cayley knew how to make a plane a century before the Wright brothers took off.
A fluke that lives in the bodies of marine snails has a caste system like that of social insects – the first such animal known to do so
We now know that gene activity can change significantly without changes to DNA – but did a shamed scientist who killed himself in 1926 get there first?
When a 17th-century Dutch draper told London's finest minds he had seen "animalcules" through his home-made microscope, they took some convincing
