In 1943 Britain seriously planned a 2-million-ton aircraft carrier made of pykrete, frozen water mixed with wood pulp. Here’s how Project Habakkuk got from a bathtub to a Canadian lake, and why it never sailed.
The black box isn’t black. How a jazz fan’s wire recorder became aviation’s memory, why recorders are orange, and why some are never found.
Diamonds and circles on three score cards. Two totals are given — can you find the missing number on card C?
Six over-ear noise-cancelling headphones compared, from the Sony WH-1000XM6 and Bose QuietComfort Ultra (2nd Gen) to AirPods Max 2, Sennheiser Momentum 4, Beats Studio Pro, and the $40 Soundcore Q20i.
In 1946 the Navy set off two atomic bombs among 90 empty warships at Bikini Atoll. The underwater Baker shot coated the fleet in radioactive mist that no amount of scrubbing could remove.
On February 10, 2009, a working Iridium satellite and a derelict Russian Cosmos bird collided at 11.7 km/s over Siberia—the first accidental intact-satellite smashup—and seeded thousands of debris fragments still tracked today.
Bite a Wint-O-Green Life Saver in the dark and it flashes blue. Meet triboluminescence: light from crushing crystals, from Ute quartz rattles to sticky tape that emits X-rays in a vacuum.
On December 6, 1917, the munitions ship Mont-Blanc exploded in Halifax Harbour after colliding with the Imo — killing nearly 2,000, blinding hundreds with shattered glass, and forging a lasting bond with Boston.
Lake Kivu holds enough dissolved gas to threaten two million people. Here is how it compares with Lake Nyos, what the 2021 Nyiragongo eruption revealed, and how Rwanda turned the lake’s methane into electricity.
Stars, hexagons and diamonds on three balance scales. How many diamonds balance scale C?
We compared six greener cleaners and castile soaps, from a $10 concentrate that makes 16 gallons to a gadget that turns salt and vinegar into a registered disinfectant.
Young women painted luminous watch dials with radium, tipped their brushes on their lips, and glowed on the walk home. Their fight exposed a deadly industrial lie and helped invent modern radiation safety limits.
In the 1960s, a Yale neuroscientist stepped into a Spanish bullring and stopped a charging bull with a radio signal to its brain. The story of José Delgado and his stimoceiver, and what it foreshadowed.
In 1999, NASA’s Mars Climate Orbiter flew too close to Mars and was lost because one piece of software used pounds and another expected newtons. Here is how a unit mix-up doomed a spacecraft, and nearly downed a jetliner.
Three balance scales, three shapes, and one empty pan. How many circles balance scale C?
NASA’s final call for commercial space stations is out, with bids due Dec. 8, 2026. What NASA is buying, and how Axiom, Vast, Starlab, Orbital Reef and others compare.
Messenger RNA was discovered in 1961 and spent decades as a molecule nobody wanted. Here is how fat bubbles, a stubborn biochemist, a photocopier meeting and a clue from transfer RNA turned it into the fastest vaccine ever made.
Six indoor CO2 and air quality monitors compared: the accurate Aranet4, a radon-sensing Airthings, a HomeKit Qingping with PM2.5, a smart Govee, a $43 Temtop, and a no-app Inkbird.
In 1972 a French lab found uranium from a Gabon mine was short on uranium-235. The reason: about two billion years ago, the ore had run its own nuclear chain reactions, pulsing on and off like a geyser for hundreds of thousands of years. Here is how nature built a reactor, and what it still teaches scientists.
In 1958 a Swedish engineer got the first fully implanted pacemaker. It failed in three hours, and he went on to use 26 of them. Here is how the pacemaker went from a homemade epoxy disc to a capsule inside the heart.
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