Ah hurtling through the air in a device made of several million parts in a portion of the Earth where the temperature generally sits at -40 degrees Celsius or Fahrenheit and there isn’t enough oxygen or atmospheric pressure to keep you alive. All the while a rather complex combination of a controlled explosion and rapidly spinning parts is both providing […]

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 […]

Winning a big ticket lottery very often isn’t all that it cracked up to be and despite a windfall of cash, a surprising number of winners have gone on record as saying winning the lottery was the worst thing that ever happened to them. And some could never end up saying it because of the surprising amount of murder that […]

As humans continue to rapidly accelerate to replacing ourselves with robot overlords or otherwise see if we can’t make Wall-E into a prophetic mocumentary, one group of homosapiens refuses to go quietly into the night. And, while it may come as a surprise to you, this group is seemingly set to inherit the Earth, given their population is exploding, whilst […]

If you happen to be one of those individuals who continues to have a pulse and intake and exhale air, you no doubt occasionally have to deal with the fact that basically every service, organization, or company out there you may use or be a part of will inevitably require you to have some form of account, and then some […]

Ah YouTube, a place where any beautifully bearded British bald man with a microphone and nerdy, socially awkward American, who despite being 42 from the sounds of it is still waiting on puberty to hit, can go to team up across oceans and make the world’s greatest edutainment channel according to the words that just came out of my mouth. […]

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 […]

English novelist Marie Corelli, author of the popular 1886 novel A Romance of Two Worlds, once wrote: “Let me be mad, mad with the madness of absinthe, the wildest, most luxurious madness in the world.” In the late 19th and Early 20th centuries, few vices exemplified the spirit of La Belle Epoque and the ideals of the bohemian revolution like […]

Every day millions of Americans carefully wash, sort, and set out their recycling for collection. But while many might feel proud to be doing their bit to help save the environment, such efforts are minuscule next to the gargantuan recycling effort that accompanied the Second World War. The term “total war” refers to a state in which every facet of […]

Scapa Flow lies barely seven degrees below the Arctic Circle, in the cold, windswept Orkney Islands at the northern tip of Scotland. Measuring 10 kilometres wide by 8 kilometres long with an average depth of 30 metres, this natural anchorage is bounded to the north by the mainland, to the east by the islands of Burray and South Ronaldsay, and […]

The idea of the robot – an autonomous, even sentient machine – has been around for millennia. In Ancient Greek mythology, the blacksmith god Hephaestus, whose legs were injured as a child, crafted a pair of mechanical women to help him walk. From the Middle Ages onwards, various master craftsmen constructed increasingly sophisticated clockwork automatons that dazzled and bewildered audiences […]