Fifty years ago a Hawaiian voyaging canoe sailed about 2,500 miles to Tahiti with no compass, charts or radio, steered by a Micronesian master navigator reading stars, swells and birds. How Mau Piailug did it, what it proved about the first Polynesian voyagers, and the revival it started.

Japan built thousands of hydrogen balloons from paper and potato-root paste and set them loose on the jet stream toward America. How the Fu-Go balloon bombs worked, how the US kept them secret, and the picnic near Bly, Oregon, that ended in the only mainland deaths from enemy action in World War II.

A Bell Labs engineer hunting static on transatlantic phone calls built a rotating antenna on Model T wheels and found a faint hiss that kept time with the stars. How Karl Jansky traced it to the center of the Milky Way and started radio astronomy.

On November 14, 1963, a fishing crew off Iceland watched a volcano rise out of the sea. The island it built, Surtsey, was closed to all but scientists before the eruption ended, and it has been showing how life colonizes new land ever since.

In May 1962 a fire at a borough dump crept into the old coal mines under Centralia, Pennsylvania. It defeated every attempt to stop it, emptied the town, and is still burning.

Dug up by looters in 1999 and seized in a Swiss hotel bar in 2002, the Nebra sky disc may be the oldest known picture of the night sky.

In July 1897 three Swedes lifted off from Svalbard in a leaking hydrogen balloon, bound for the North Pole. Their fate stayed a mystery for 33 years.

In 1940 four teenagers slid into a hole above Montignac and found Ice Age paintings. Within 23 years the crowds had nearly ruined them, and Lascaux was shut.

In September 1991 two hikers spotted a body in the melting ice of the Ötztal Alps. He turned out to be 5,300 years old, and he had been murdered.