Topic
The study of how scientific ideas, instruments, and discoveries developed over time, often by revisiting archives, manuscripts, and the people behind them.
Timothy Koeth's team reports in PNAS Nexus that Germany's last test reactor needed far more uranium and heavy water than the Nazi program had. Its reading of surviving uranium cubes and wartime documents challenges Werner Heisenberg's account.
Reality
King's College London and Science History Institute researchers say Franklin calculated DNA helix features from Photo 49 before Photo 51. Their archival study challenges the long-held belief that she did not recognize what Photo 51 showed.
Reality
Rosalind Franklin began Photograph 51 the day she saw Photograph 49, as a sharper exposure for publication, Alistair Sponsel and Brian Sutton report. Her notes on the earlier image record a possible helix, evidence against the long-told story that she misread her own data.
Reality
Caltech historians Jed Buchwald and Mordechai Feingold use newly digitized Newton manuscripts to retell the 20 years before his 1687 Principia. Their evidence for the mathematical route is easier to check than their claim that he was sociable.
Reality
Ignacio Munoz wrote his component-by-component account for a viceroy who doubted him. If the three Latin words naming Galileo as the maker hold, four-lens telescopes move back 13 to 15 years.
Reality
Sahar Diskin, Philip Easo, Ritvik Ramanan Radhakrishnan, Benny Sudakov and Vincent Tassion had the proof nailed down by Christmas, and its appeal is that a single argument reaches a huge variety of graphs.
Reality