Nose Cone from B.F. Skinner's Pigeon-Guided Missile, on display in "Science in American Life." Photo courtesy American History Museum It’s 1943, and America desperately needs a way to reliably bomb ...

In 1943, the U.S. military had a problem. It didn’t suffer from a lack of bombs and missiles, but there was no reliable way to accurately guide them for a precision strike. A psychologist, though, had ...

B.F. Skinner is a psychologist best known for the Skinner Box, a kind of sensory-deprivation device which limits the creature inside it to only one form of stimulus at a time. Using one such box, he ...

As World War II raged in the 1940s, a showdown between missile guidance systems unfolded in Building 20, home of the recently established MIT Radiation Laboratory. The “Rad Lab” team was secretly ...

The image of the crackpot inventor, disheveled, disorganized, and surrounded by the remains of his failures, is an enduring Hollywood trope. While a simple look around one’s shop will probably reveal ...

Pigeons are now learning other trades besides decorating statues and outdoor monuments, the Harvard Psychological Laboratories announced recently. Psychology professor B. F. Skinner is using the birds ...

Long before there were grab and go lunches and weekly pub trivia nights, slot machines and pianos filled the basement of Memorial Hall. The lucky gamblers and musicians were not students or faculty, ...