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Nukewars
Nuclear strategy, proliferation risks, deterrence policy, missile programs, arms control, and the geopolitical tensions shaping the nuclear age.
Nukewars
The SR-71 Blackbird cruised at Mach 3.2 above 25,000 metres, and its titanium skin ran so hot in flight that the fuselage grew about 10 centimetres longer, which is why the fuel tanks were designed to leak on the ground and only seal once the plane heated up in the air
The SR-71 Blackbird's titanium airframe grew several inches longer at Mach 3.2 as skin temperatures passed 300°C, which is why Lockheed engineers designed the fuel tanks to leak on the ground and seal only in flight.
Why does roughly 27 million tonnes of desert dust cross an ocean each year to fertilise a rainforest on the other side of the planet?
How did a Southeast Asian city-state with no large natural rivers or usable groundwater engineer enough recycled water to meet roughly 40 percent of its total demand?
How did a windswept North Atlantic island once almost entirely stripped of its birch forests by Viking settlers push tree cover from less than 1 percent back toward 2 percent, tree by stubborn tree?
In 1665, Robert Hooke pressed a sliver of cork under one of the first compound microscopes in London and saw thousands of tiny empty chambers that reminded him of monks' rooms, which is why every living thing on Earth is now measured in units he called cells
Why does concrete poured into harbour walls two thousand years ago keep growing reinforcing minerals in seawater, while modern reinforced piers can suffer corrosion damage within decades?
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
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?
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
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
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
