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Nukewars
Nuclear strategy, proliferation risks, deterrence policy, missile programs, arms control, and the geopolitical tensions shaping the nuclear age.
Nukewars
Why did the US Air Force designate a 106,000-acre live-fire training reservation in the southeastern Coastal Plain as a national stronghold for the red-cockaded woodpecker, and why does controlled artillery use appear to help the bird recover?
Inside the 106,000-acre Avon Park Air Force Range, live-fire training ignites the same low-intensity ground fires that longleaf pine savannah evolved with — and the red-cockaded woodpecker, downlisted from endangered to threatened in 2024, has become one of the strangest beneficiaries of controlled artillery use.
Nobody talks about why the most competent person in the family often ends up the loneliest, and it isn't jealousy or distance, it's that competence quietly disqualifies you from being checked on
In 1971, Apollo 14 astronaut Alan Shepard pulled a Wilson six-iron head he had smuggled aboard, clipped it to a lunar sample scoop handle, and hit two golf balls one-handed in a pressurised suit that would not let him bend at the waist
Tardigrades pulled from Antarctic moss can survive a decade without water, temperatures near absolute zero, and a 10-day exposure to the open vacuum of space in 2007, curling into a dehydrated husk they call a tun until conditions improve
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
Friedrich Miescher spent the winter of 1869 rinsing pus off surgical bandages collected from a Tübingen clinic to isolate what he called nuclein, a phosphorus-rich substance from white blood cell nuclei that the world would take another 75 years to recognise as DNA
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?
