Space travel is a pricey business. Even today, the average cost of launching a satellite or other payload into orbit hovers around $10,000 per kilogram. Much of this cost stems from the great complexity of space launch vehicles, which require a great deal of time, money, skilled personnel, and other resources to design, test, and launch. Further complicating matters, different […]

The Great War of 1914-1918 is often remembered as one of the first truly modern, fully-industrialized conflicts, with many now-ubiquitous military technologies such as the aeroplane, the submarine, the tank, and poison gas making their combat debut on its battlefields. But the Great War was also a time of transition, with many older technologies and tactics like cavalry serving alongside […]

Sable Island lies 300 kilometres off the coast of Nova Scotia, Canada, near the edge of the eastern continental shelf. A windswept, crescent-shaped sandbar 43 kilometres long and barely one kilometre wide, it has long been known as the graveyard of the Atlantic, with over 350 ships having foundered on its shores since 1583. The treacherous waters around the island […]

On July 20, 1969, American astronaut Neil Armstrong stepped onto the surface of the moon and uttered the immortal words “That’s one small step for [a] man, one giant leap for mankind,” bringing to a close the decade-long Space Race between the US and USSR. While the Americans beating the Soviets to the moon might seem inevitable in hindsight, this […]

During the Second World War, more than 260,000 Allied personnel were captured by the Western Axis powers and held in prisoner-of-war camps in Germany, Italy, and their occupied territories. Their bold and often ingenious escape attempts have become the stuff of legend, including the famous “Great Escape” from the Stalag Luft III camp in March 1944 and countless outlandish breakouts […]

If you are the sort of person who spends a lot of time staring at old buildings, you may have noticed a strange symbol cropping up again and again: a bundle of rods bound together with criss-crossing straps, often topped by an axe head. This motif shows up just about everywhere, from theatres, universities, courthouses, and government buildings to the […]

The first James Bond novel, Casino Royale, appeared on bookstore shelves on April 13, 1953. Its author, Ian Fleming, had served in British Naval Intelligence during WWII, and based much of his famous super-spy’s world on his own personal experiences. For example, Bond himself was inspired by Fleming’s own personality and tastes as well as numerous wartime intelligence operatives including […]

It can be found in the toolbox of every craftsman and mechanic, and in the pocket of every hiker, camper, and adventurer. It has appeared in countless books, movies, and television shows; travelled across scorching deserts, frozen tundra, and steaming jungles; plunged to the bottom of the ocean; and even rocketed into outer space. It is the Swiss Army Knife, […]

Put a frog in a pot of boiling water and it will immediately jump out. But put that same frog in a pot of cold water and raise the temperature gradually enough, and it will be boiled alive. This evocative story has long served as a useful metaphor for complacency in the face of gradual change, being used in discussions […]

On the morning of March 23, 1976, the peace of Tokyo’s Satagawa neighbourhood was shattered as a small aircraft came screaming out of the sky and slammed into the side of a large two-story house. The plane burst into a giant fireball on impact, setting the house ablaze and injuring two of its occupants, though miraculously no-one but the pilot […]

2700 years ago or so, the Assyrian king Ashurbanipal was initiating a program to gather copies of all books in his empire to his library. ‘Bookworm’ would be an apt description for him, had books not been made out of clay making them slightly undesirable to worms… Anyway, back to good old Ashurbanipal, he liked to boast about having the […]