Clouds of noxious gas, stink bombs and purple smokescreens may sound like schoolboy pranks, but the animal world is just as capable of executing arresting chemical warfare, says Deborah Nicholls-Lee

Edward Jenner developed the world’s first vaccine in 1796, when he inoculated a young boy against smallpox with pus collected from a cowpox sore on a milkmaid in Berkeley, Gloucestershire. In the 19th

‘Green sickness’, also known as the ‘disease of virgins’ – a diagnosis applied mainly to teenage girls from the 16th to the 19th centuries – is one of the most puzzling conditions in the history of me

A HUNDRED YEARS ago on 26 January 1926, in an attic room in London’s Soho (more famous for ladies of the night than technological breakthroughs), a Scottish engineer gave the first public display of p

In the early 1940s, the Royal Mint replaced the familiar image of a portcullis on the threepenny coin with a thrift plant. This was part of the government’s campaign reminding the public of the need f

FIRELESS LOCOMOTIVES – PART 2