The Rocket That Could Have Beaten Apollo The Soviet N-1 rocket had more raw thrust than the Saturn V. The machine that lost the Space Race was physically more powerful than the one that won it. Its first stage generated roughly 45,400 kilonewtons of force, making it the most powerful single rocket stage ever flown … Read more
The Rocket Plane That Wanted to Skip Across the Atmosphere In 1941, Austrian aerospace engineer Eugen Sänger handed the German Air Ministry a 900-page document outlining a plan to strike New York City from a launchpad in Europe, continue across the Atlantic and the United States, and land on a Japanese-held island in the Pacific, … Read more
The Wonder Nobody Can Find Six of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World left something behind. The Great Pyramid still stands. The Lighthouse of Alexandria left physical traces before its final collapse. The Mausoleum at Halicarnassus left ruins behind. But the Hanging Gardens of Babylon? Nothing. Not a foundation stone, not a clay tablet, … Read more
The Gap Between Public and Scholar A 2015 poll of roughly 4,000 people in Britain found that around 40% of respondents didn’t believe Jesus ever existed. That figure puts most of the public at odds with professional historians, who maintain a near-universal consensus that a Jewish preacher named Jesus of Nazareth was a real historical … Read more
Your Jaw Probably Can’t Do What the Movies Say It Can You’ve seen it in films: a character, caught in some desperate bind, grits their teeth and bites through their own finger to slip free of a restraint. Sheer willpower gets the job done. The scene cuts away, the character escapes, and nobody in the … Read more
The Night London Brought a Coffin to the Theater Picture a man in a dress, stomping on a theater bench, while the person beside him beats a frying pan. A pigeon wheels past the chandeliers. Somewhere in the gallery, a coffin is propped against the rail. On the stage below, actors are attempting Macbeth. Nobody … Read more
Built on What Canada Didn’t Have Most engineering breakthroughs come from having more: more money, more resources, more industrial muscle. The CANDU reactor came from having less. Canada in the late 1940s lacked two things every other nuclear program took for granted, and the engineers at Atomic Energy of Canada Limited (AECL) arrived at something … Read more
The Last-Second Exit Picture this: a 5.62-meter wooden boat screaming across open water at 33 knots, aimed directly at the hull of a warship. The pilot locks the rudder, holds the course for one more second, then uses a primitive ejection mechanism to throw himself into the sea. The boat carries on without him. This … Read more
The Lifesaver’s Other Project Frederick Banting’s name appears in the 1923 Nobel Prize records, awarded alongside John Macleod for co-discovering insulin. Banting was 32 at the time, the youngest person ever to win the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. He divided his share of the prize money with his research partner Charles Best. The … Read more
The Impossible Crime Scene Imagine walking into a room and finding a person’s torso reduced to gray ash while their feet, still in their socks, sit a few inches away and are completely untouched. The furniture around them is intact. The curtains haven’t caught. A fire hot enough to destroy bone requires sustained, intense heat, … Read more