To build America’s first comprehensive sewer system, 1850s Chicago raised its streets several feet and then jacked up its buildings to match, hotels, shops and half a city block, often with people still inside.
In 1858 a cable under the Atlantic carried messages for three weeks, set New York’s City Hall on fire in celebration, and then went dead. This is how it failed, and how the Great Eastern finally wired two continents together in 1866.
In 1868 astronomers saw a yellow line in the Sun that matched nothing on Earth. The story of helium runs from a forgotten observer in India to a Kansas gas well, a teacup of liquid at Leiden and the helium shortage of 2026.
Time for a dive. These two reef scenes look like twins, but someone has been rearranging things under the sea.
How two feuding 19th-century scientists, Edward Drinker Cope and Othniel Charles Marsh, bribed, spied and raced to fill America with dinosaurs.
A space heater is the cheapest way to fix one cold room: the home office over the garage, a drafty
A late moon of Jupiter, a toothed wheel, a mirror spinning 528 times a second and a mile of pipe: the 300-year race to measure the speed of light.
A sickly French road engineer cut away the glass a lens doesn’t need and made lighthouses shine to the horizon. His idea still lights stages, cars and VR headsets.
The deadliest disaster in U.S. history wiped out Galveston in one night in 1900. Then the city built a seawall and jacked itself up as much as 17 feet.
Three shapes, three row totals. What does the left column add up to?
This week on Aglena: the Great Moon Hoax, a Soviet bug with no battery, H-bombs on Greenland’s sea ice, a record El Niño, and more.
Six digital picture frames compared for 2026, from a $60 Frameo to Aura’s 15-inch Walden: the Aura Carver, Aspen and Walden, Skylight Frame 2, and 10.1- and 15.6-inch Frameo frames.
In 1835 the New York Sun reported that John Herschel had seen bat-winged people on the Moon. The story behind the Great Moon Hoax, and the optics that rule it out.
A B-52 on a secret radar-watching mission caught fire over Greenland in 1968 and crashed with four H-bombs. What followed: a cleanup in the polar night, a hunt for a lost bomb core and a scandal in Denmark.
A record-strength El Niño is building in the Pacific. What NOAA’s forecasts say it could bring to the U.S. this winter, from Southern storms to a mild North.
A nuclear-powered Army town carved into the Greenland ice, a secret missile plan, and a few jars of forgotten mud that rewrote the history of the ice sheet.
A plate tossed in a Cornell cafeteria, a Nobel Prize, a famous mistake, and the same equation that makes the whole Earth wobble.
A level hanging mobile, two marked weights, two mystery shapes. What does the triangle weigh?
Six stand mixers compared for 2026, from a compact mini to bread-kneading power: the KitchenAid Artisan and Classic, Cuisinart SM-50, Aucma 6.5-quart, Kitchen in the Box 3.2-quart, and Bosch Universal Plus.
A carved Great Seal hung in the U.S. ambassador’s Moscow residence for seven years with a passive bug inside. How Leon Theremin’s “Thing” worked, how it was found, and how it led to RFID.
A spinning wheel, gravity and the turning Earth: how the gyrocompass finds true north, and how a patent fight made Einstein its co-inventor.
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