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.
Seven carry-on suitcases compared, from the $129.99 Samsonite Freeform to the $729 Briggs & Riley Baseline Essential, with expert test results, specs and Amazon prices.
In June 1859 an American settler on San Juan Island shot a pig that kept raiding his potatoes. Within weeks, US troops and British warships faced off over a vague line in a treaty. How the Pig War nearly began, and why nobody fired.
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 St. Louis in 1904, the Olympic marathon was won by a man kept going with strychnine, egg whites and brandy, after the first finisher was caught having ridden in a car. The race official’s own report tells the story.
Fresh apples, bundles of carrots, the last sunflowers of the season and jars of local honey: this market stall has
Jake Schneider has ALS and Neuralink’s seventh brain implant. He now steers a power wheelchair with his thoughts.
Hello, and welcome to this week’s roundup. This week on Aglena: a horse that seemed to do math, a 5,300-year-old
A portable projector turns any blank wall, bedroom ceiling or backyard sheet into a 100-inch screen, and it packs away
On December 7, 1941, a damaged Japanese fighter came down on Niihau, an island that had not heard about Pearl Harbor. Six days later two men were dead, and the island’s Hawaiians had ended it themselves.
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.
An arrow is spinning on a row of compass tiles. It starts pointing North, and it always turns clockwise from
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.
A great hair dryer is one of those gifts people use every single day and rarely buy for themselves. The
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.
For nearly 50 years the US military used the Hawaiian island of Kahoʻolawe as a target. In 1976, nine people landed on its beach and started the fight to win it back.
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