Jane Addams From American Saint to Traitor
Imagine becoming the most admired woman in America, winning a Nobel Peace Prize, and then being booed off the stage at Carnegie Hall, expelled from the Daughters of the American Revolution, and brande...
10 Jun 19min
Invisible parking spots at Lagrange points
The James Webb Space Telescope sits 1.5 million kilometers from Earth, but it isn't orbiting Earth, and it isn't quite orbiting the Sun either. It circles an empty patch of space, a gravitational park...
10 Jun 18min
Igor Sikorsky and the 30 year wait
In 1911, a young pilot's experimental airplane lost power and barely survived a crash landing. The culprit wasn't a broken fuel line or a snapped wing. It was a single mosquito, sucked into the carbur...
10 Jun 18min
How Zulu Spears Defeated British Rifles
Picture the most fearsome military machine of the 19th century: the British Empire at the peak of its industrial power, with breech-loading rifles, field artillery, and rocket batteries. Now picture i...
10 Jun 23min
How your shadow becomes a Brocken spectre
On a misty mountain ridge at dawn, you raise your arm to shield your eyes and a hundred-foot faceless giant in the fog raises its arm too, its head crowned by perfect concentric rainbow rings. For cen...
10 Jun 18min
How your brain physically rewires itself
The brain inside your head right now is not the same one you woke up with. For most of the 20th century, neuroscientists held a bleak dogma: once you reach adulthood, the brain is finished, hardwired,...
10 Jun 23min
How Water Built and Broke Angkor
Deep in the Cambodian jungle stands a stone city of impossible proportions: lotus-bud towers built for kings worshipped as living gods, surrounded by the remnants of a mathematically precise water gri...
10 Jun 22min
How the world hijacked Pink Panther
What connects an elite international jewel thief network, a tough Irish boxer, a desert-camouflaged military Land Rover, and a 1963 Hollywood comedy? Two words: Pink Panther. This is the biography of ...
10 Jun 19min
