Project A119: The Secret Cold War Plan to Nuke the Moon
In the panic following the 1957 Sputnik launch, the United States seriously studied detonating a nuclear weapon on the Moon as a show of force. Code-named Project A119 under the bland cover title "A S...
30 Jun 21min
Blue Peacock: Britain's Chicken-Powered Nuclear Landmine
In the 1950s, British military strategists, terrified of a Soviet armored advance across the North German Plain, designed a 10-kiloton nuclear landmine called Blue Peacock. The plan was to bury these ...
30 Jun 21min
Rose Island: The Engineer Who Built His Own Nation
In 1968, Italian engineer Giorgio Rosa completed a 400-square-meter platform in international waters off the coast of Emilia-Romagna, declared it the independent Republic of Rose Island, and named him...
30 Jun 19min
The Metric Mix-Up That Destroyed the Mars Climate Orbiter
In 1999, NASA's Mars Climate Orbiter completed a flawless 669-million-kilometer journey only to be destroyed in its final moments by one of the most infamous errors in engineering history: a unit conv...
30 Jun 21min
Cargo Cults: The Real Story Behind the Straw Airplanes
In the years following World War II, indigenous Melanesian communities built airplanes from straw and bamboo, carved wooden headsets, and waited on hand-cleared runways for planes that would never lan...
30 Jun 22min
The Pangolin: How Perfect Armor Became a Fatal Flaw
The pangolin is so perfectly adapted that its design has barely changed in 75 million years, armored in keratin scales so tough a lion walks away with shattered teeth. Yet that same defense mechanism ...
30 Jun 23min
Poles of Inaccessibility: Finding the Middle of Nowhere
Despite satellite mapping and GPS, a few spots on Earth are defined entirely by how hard they are to reach, and pinning them down is a mathematical nightmare. This episode explores the poles of inacce...
30 Jun 20min
Elixir Sulfanilamide: The Poison That Built the FDA
In 1937, a cheerful raspberry-flavored medicine killed 107 people across the United States, simply because no one was legally required to check if it was toxic before selling it. This episode dives in...
30 Jun 24min
