Imagine for a moment you are on a long overseas flight – say, for example, Flight SQ22 between Singapore and New York, the longest regularly-scheduled nonstop route in the world. Around halfway through this gruelling 18 hour, 40 minute marathon, having run out of in-flight movies to watch and grown bored of the latest Dan Brown literary abomination you purchased […]

You can find it almost everywhere: in every gift shop, on every online merchandise store, on every souvenir stand – and on every object imaginable, from posters and postcards to coffee mugs, water bottles, t-shirts, and phone cases: the brick-red background, the stylized white crown, and in big, bold letters, those five iconic words: Keep Calm and Carry On. …or, […]

If I ask you to picture the words “digital,” “electronics,” or “cyberspace,” odds are the images that just popped into your head are tinted a bright fluorescent green, like Neo seeing the Matrix for the first time. Indeed, our collective image of digital technology is drenched in shades of green, from the strings of code that make up software to […]

On the afternoon of March 18, 1925, residents of southeastern Missouri watched with dread as a line of pitch-black storm clouds gathered on the horizon. As torrential rain and hail began to fall, a cluster of 12 sinister funnel clouds snaked their way down to the ground and began moving northeast, into neighbouring states of Illinois and Indiana. One of […]

Gold. Since the dawn of civilization, we humans have been obsessed with this most divine of metals. Empires have risen and fallen over it, oceans crossed and continents conquered in search of it, the entire field of chemistry invented to try and make more of it, and – until relatively recently – the entire global economy built around it. And […]