It was July 16, 1970, and Mario Escamilla was furious. The 33-year-old native of Santa Barbara, California, had just learned that a coworker, Donald “Porky” Leavitt, had broken into his trailer and stolen his most prized possession: a 15-gallon jug of homemade raisin wine. Determined to put an end to such theft, Escamilla grabbed a… Read More »
On January 23, 2020, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, a non-profit research and education organization based in Chicago, moved the hands on its Doomsday Clock forward to 100 seconds to midnight – the closest in its 74-year history. According the Bulletin, this change reflects the growing threat posed by climate change, nuclear proliferation, and… Read More »
Space: the final frontier – or, if science fiction is to be believed – the final battlefield. In the land of sci-fi, no self-respecting Starfleet officer on an away mission or scruffy-looking nerf-herding smuggler would dare leave their spacecraft without a trusty phaser or blaster at their side. Even in universes where directed-energy weapons have… Read More »
Space travel is a pricey business. Even today, the average cost of launching a satellite or other payload into orbit hovers around $10,000 per kilogram. Much of this cost stems from the great complexity of space launch vehicles, which require a great deal of time, money, skilled personnel, and other resources to design, test, and… Read More »
While many a historic leader can be credited with sometimes even millions of deaths via their orders, with perhaps the poster children of this in modern times being the likes of Hitler and Stalin, these individuals themselves only killed in a somewhat abstract way- not by their own hand directly. Which brings us to the… Read More »
The Great War of 1914-1918 is often remembered as one of the first truly modern, fully-industrialized conflicts, with many now-ubiquitous military technologies such as the aeroplane, the submarine, the tank, and poison gas making their combat debut on its battlefields. But the Great War was also a time of transition, with many older technologies and… Read More »
Sable Island lies 300 kilometres off the coast of Nova Scotia, Canada, near the edge of the eastern continental shelf. A windswept, crescent-shaped sandbar 43 kilometres long and barely one kilometre wide, it has long been known as the graveyard of the Atlantic, with over 350 ships having foundered on its shores since 1583. The… Read More »
If I were to ask you which 20th Century recording artist had the most top-ten hits in their lifetime, you might be tempted to guess Elvis Presley, or maybe a member of the Beatles. But no: that honour belongs to Glenn Miller, the trombonist and band leader whose recordings of such classics as “In the… Read More »
On July 20, 1969, American astronaut Neil Armstrong stepped onto the surface of the moon and uttered the immortal words “That’s one small step for [a] man, one giant leap for mankind,” bringing to a close the decade-long Space Race between the US and USSR. While the Americans beating the Soviets to the moon might… Read More »
During the Second World War, more than 260,000 Allied personnel were captured by the Western Axis powers and held in prisoner-of-war camps in Germany, Italy, and their occupied territories. Their bold and often ingenious escape attempts have become the stuff of legend, including the famous “Great Escape” from the Stalag Luft III camp in March… Read More »
If you are the sort of person who spends a lot of time staring at old buildings, you may have noticed a strange symbol cropping up again and again: a bundle of rods bound together with criss-crossing straps, often topped by an axe head. This motif shows up just about everywhere, from theatres, universities, courthouses,… Read More »