On the 150th anniversary of the publication of Charles Darwin's groundbreaking work on natural selection, author David Williams tells of a personal encounter with a first edition of the book. 

One August night fifty years ago, campers visiting Montana's Hebgen Lake suddenly found themselves in the middle of a dark nightmare: The most powerful earthquake ever to strike the state was rupturing the side of a nearby mountain. The resulting landslide killed 28 people and left deep scars in the survivors.

In June 1938, China made a desperate attempt to prevent the invading Japanese army from moving further inland. In the largest act of environmental warfare in history, General Chiang Kai-sheck unchained the Huang He (Yellow River) from its levees — with deadly results.

An astronomy experiment in 1919 set out to test Einstein's general theory of relativity, published four years earlier.

Near the ghost town of Prypiat, Ukraine, the ruins of Chernobyl's reactor number four remain buried under 200 meters of concrete — the remnants of the worst nuclear disaster in history.

Edward Drinker Cope and his archrival, Othniel Charles Marsh, waged one of the most famous feuds in paleontology in the late 19th century, risking scientific integrity and financial well-being in a race to discover the most new fossils.

Two hundred years after Charles Darwin was born, studies are showing that there is much more to evolution than just random variation followed by selection of the fittest. DNA isn't the only inheritable molecular info: Genomic settings that can turn a gene on or off — sometimes triggered by stress or diet — may also be passed down from generation to generation.

One frigid night in 1961, on a remote patch of desert about 65 kilometers east of Idaho Falls, a nuclear reactor exploded. Three men were killed in the nation’s only fatal nuclear accident.

In 1984, nearly half a million people in Bhopal, India, were exposed to a toxic gas that had leaked from a nearby Union Carbide pesticide plant. Thousands died. And as the effects of the poison linger in the groundwater, court cases against the company are still dragging on.

On a foggy day in 1871, just as the Gold Rush was winding down, two grimy prospectors walked into the Bank of California, claiming to have found a trove of diamonds, rubies and sapphires. Their claim set off a new mining frenzy — but USGS surveyors suspected something wasn't quite right.