On the evening of August 21, 1986, Ephraim Che, a farmer from the highlands of northwest Cameroon, heard a great rumbling in the distance like rolling thunder. Emerging from his hut, he peered down the mountain to the moonlit waters of Lake Nyos, a small but deep body of water nestled in the crater of… Read More »
While often overlooked, unless you drive an electric car, there is likely a seemingly humble metal can attached to your exhaust pipe that is an absolutely incredible piece of chemical engineering, a product of a herculean but now largely-forgotten feat of politics and industrial research and development that some scholars have compared to the Apollo… Read More »
Bulletproof vests are one of Hollywood’s favourite action movie plot devices. Easily concealable and seemingly impervious to all weapons, they provide writers with a handy eleventh-hour means of saving their characters from certain death. But how can such a relatively thin and flimsy piece of fabric stop a speeding bullet, and are real-life bulletproof vests… Read More »
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… Read More »
For anyone sitting in gridlocked traffic on the way to a soul crushing job surrounded by other humans nattering on all day about their TPS reports as you truly internalize the pointlessness of everything because we’re all going to die and everything we ever said or did will be forgotten someday, you may at some… Read More »
So you and your significant other have been dating for a while, and you’ve finally decided to pop the question. Well the first thing you’re going to need is a ring, right? Preferably diamond, and costing the equivalent of three months’ salary? After all it’s traditional, isn’t it? Never mind that this so-called ‘tradition’ is… Read More »
If you are like many parents watching your children’s booster seats slide around while they hop into the vehicle and otherwise wonder what precisely is the way you’re supposed to incorporate the seatbelt around the bits so it’s properly positioned on the kids (we’ll get into how to always do this one correctly later in… Read More »
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… Read More »
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… Read More »
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… Read More »
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… Read More »