Nukewars
July 2026
Every article published in July 2026. 25 articles · Back to full archive
Nukewars
In 1952, Alfred Hershey and Martha Chase put radioactive virus-infected bacteria through a kitchen blender, and the tubes helped settle that DNA, not protein, carried genetic information
Nukewars
How does a single family of dam-building rodents, reintroduced to a drought-cracked valley, raise the water table by close to a metre and store more carbon in the resulting wetland than an equivalent area of forest?
Nukewars
The GPS satellites orbiting 20,200 kilometres overhead must correct their atomic clocks by 38 microseconds per day, because Einstein's relativity predicts time itself runs faster up there where Earth's gravity is weaker
Nukewars
In 1961, a Soviet test over Novaya Zemlya detonated a 50-megaton hydrogen bomb called Tsar Bomba whose mushroom cloud reached 64 kilometres into the sky and whose flash was visible from roughly 1,000 kilometres away, still the largest explosion humans have ever produced
Nukewars
A tiny jellyfish called Turritopsis dohrnii can revert its adult cells back to a juvenile polyp when injured or starving, effectively restarting its life cycle and making it one of the only known animals with no fixed lifespan
Nukewars
Why did a wealthy delta nation deliberately breach its own dykes and pay farmers to let the rivers flood their fields, after four centuries of building the walls ever higher?
Nukewars
The USS Nautilus became the first submarine to cross beneath the North Pole in August 1958, travelling 2,945 kilometres under the Arctic ice cap on a single reactor core without surfacing
Nukewars
How did a temple complex in southern Anatolia get built roughly 6,000 years before Stonehenge by people who had neither metal tools nor the wheel?
Nukewars
How did a single quaking aspen colony in the mountain west spread across roughly 106 acres, weigh about 6,000 tonnes and share one root system, making it possibly the heaviest living organism on Earth?
Nukewars
What happened when a physician in 1854 mapped 578 cholera deaths onto a London street grid and traced the entire outbreak to a single wooden pump handle?
Nukewars
In 1859, a solar storm now called the Carrington Event induced currents so strong in telegraph lines that operators disconnected their batteries and kept sending messages powered by the aurora alone, with sparks jumping from the keys to their fingers
Nukewars
How did a desert nation with almost no freshwater rivers grow its agricultural output more than tenfold while cutting the water used to produce each crop, mostly by rethinking a black plastic tube?
Nukewars
The Soviet Venera 13 probe survived 127 minutes on the surface of Venus in 1982, transmitting colour photographs of orange rock through an atmosphere hot enough to melt lead before the pressure crushed its electronics into silence
Uncategorized
Researchers studying retirement found the hardest month isn't the first — it's somewhere around the fourth, when the novelty has burned off and the structure that used to answer the question of who you are has stopped answering anything at all
Psychology