History

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 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 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.

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.

A flipping nut on Salyut 7, a tumbling Explorer 1 and a tossed tennis racket all obey the same rule: of the three ways to spin a solid object, the middle one is unstable.

From Schönbrunn in 1770 to a Philadelphia fire in 1854, Kempelen’s chess-playing Turk looked like a thinking machine. It was a human master in a clever cabinet — and the ancestor of every AI demo that hides its operators.

Sprinkle sand on a metal plate, bow the edge, and watch geometry appear. How Ernst Chladni made sound visible — and started a fight over elastic math and rocks from space.

A Lincolnshire carpenter spent 40 years proving a clock could find a ship’s position at sea, and fought Britain’s scientific establishment for the prize.

A broken granodiorite stele from 196 BC, found near Rashid in 1799, gave scholars the same decree in three scripts — and the key to reading ancient Egyptian again.

A third atomic bomb core never used on Japan killed two Los Alamos physicists in criticality accidents, then was melted down.

On February 2, 1851, a handful of Paris scientists received one of the strangest invitations in the history of science.

A glass teardrop that survives a hammer but explodes when you snap its tail puzzled the Royal Society for centuries. Here’s how frozen-in stress works, and where it hides in your car and phone.

A rolling bicycle with nobody on it can steer itself upright. For a century the credit went to gyroscopes and trail. Then a 2011 bike with neither proved the real story was stranger.

Solar Orbiter 2022, Norikura 1992, SDO 2012, SOHO’s whip, and the 1946 Grand Daddy — the best solar prominence images ever captured.

For decades, rocks on Death Valley’s Racetrack Playa left trails no one saw form. Then GPS-tagged stones and a lucky winter pond caught paper-thin ice pushing them along.

A tippe top turns itself upside down, a spun hard-boiled egg stands on end, and a rattleback refuses to spin the wrong way. Friction explains all three.