At Sotheby’s, a feast of rare science books includes volumes from Copernicus, Galileo and Newton that together revolutionized human understanding of the cosmos.

A team of historians, scientists and engineers has developed a portable X-ray scanner to study 4,000-year-old letters encased in clay envelopes.

In the foothills of the Ecuadorean Amazon, a 101-year-old farmer and a young scientist turned an amateur collection into a scientific survey of one of the most diverse snake habitats on Earth.