pplpod

When was the last time you actually saw the Milky Way? For most people on Earth, that memory is tied to a remote vacation, not a regular night at home. The orange dome of urban light pollution has era...

6 Touko 55min

The text on your screen, the operating system running your phone, and the security protocols protecting your bank tab share architectural DNA. Most of it was laid down by a man who started by trying t...

6 Touko 22min

In 1955 the British foreign secretary stood up in the House of Commons and publicly cleared a man named Kim Philby of being a Soviet spy. Philby followed up with a charming press conference in his mot...

6 Touko 23min

Right now, behind your screen, millions of invisible computers are screaming at each other, and the only thing keeping the entire internet from collapsing into chaos is a set of mathematical rules inv...

6 Touko 21min

The clean version of vaccine history is a spotless lab and a Eureka moment. The real version is a barnyard full of cowpox pus, dairymaids with clear complexions, and the parasitic life cycle of the cu...

6 Touko 20min

Polar explorer, Royal Navy combat veteran, successful entrepreneur, radical political activist, and author of a global bestseller that helped end the British slave trade. If you pitched that resume to...

6 Touko 20min

The smashed guitar is the visual shorthand of punk rebellion, and for many people it is permanently synonymous with Nirvana. The strange truth is that the move started as a way to cut bad shows short....

6 Touko 33min

He spoke so sparingly that his Cambridge colleagues invented a unit of measurement for silence and named it after him: one Dirac, defined as one word per hour. With that same precision, he predicted t...

6 Touko 21min