Damn Interesting

The tangled history of humanity’s search for the solar system’s uncharted planets.

When the U.S. Army came for their land in 1877, the Nez Perce tribe complied. But tensions boiled over, and Chief Joseph led as they ran for their lives.

In 1970s Bali, a sudden rice crisis prompted an unexpectedly far-reaching scientific discovery

In 1933, British WWI vet Maurice Wilson hatched an unorthodox plan to reach the still-untouched summit of Everest.

A great pitcher’s great temptation.

In 1924 a bankrupt businessman in Portugal launched an audacious international scheme to become one of the wealthiest men in the world.

Robert Rogers, a man obsessed with trespassing, sets his sights on Mount St. Helens in the spring of 1980

The true story of a runaway Nazi, a determined sleuth, and a chase around the world.

In 1958, one heavily modified airplane flew out of Las Vegas with a single objective: Don’t land.

From the depths of poverty, Du Yuesheng rose through Shanghai’s underworld to become one of the most influential, and overlooked, figures in modern China.

In Nazi-occupied Paris, “Dr. Eugène” offered Jews an alternative to deportation, slavery, and death camps. But the escape network was not what it seemed.

A true story of castaways on a lost and hostile scrap of land, all thanks to some meddlesome Frenchmen and terrible luck.

Nikolai Vavilov dedicated his life to improving Soviet agriculture and eradicating famine, but his allegiance to science would ultimately lead to his downfall.

How a booming oil town aimed to become a western metropolis through one of the most ill-conceived boxing matches of all time.

How a female engineer defied all norms to save England in the Second World War.

The true story of the 18th century's greatest femme fatale, and the most unfortunate of her victims.

When an ancient, unexpected imprint is discovered in a stone quarry, scientists endeavor to explain its mysterious origin.

The Spy of Night and Fog by Damn Interesting

French mathematician Évariste Galois lived a full life. When he wasn't trying to overthrow the government, he was reinventing algebra.

One of Poland’s most beloved and honored World War II veterans was not Polish at all: he was a 500-pound brown bear named Wojtek.

The 18th century misadventures of HMS Wager and her reluctant crew

The little known story of an age-old scam

The secret runaway success of Kenneth Gandar-Dower’s racing cheetahs.

The most expensive, bizarre, and obscure work ever created by Dr. Seuss.

Working almost single-handedly, visionary Argentine filmmaker Quirino Cristiani created full-length animated films between 1917 and 1931. He has since been all but forgotten.

In 1981, an international group of doctors identified the devastating disease behind a perplexing outbreak of paralysis in northern Mozambique.

Amanda Theodosia Jones was a 19th-century poet, entrepreneur, and inventor who found inspiration in some unlikely places.

The opening of a canal in 1848 led to the birth of modern financial derivatives, and the early demise of some of the men who traded them

In the 1950s, an anonymous terrorist planted a pipe bomb in a New York City public space. Then another. And another.

Britain’s practice of transporting convicts to American colonies was a fearsome punishment, but not for the chronic criminal James Dalton.

The story of a tragic hotel fire of Rube Goldberg proportions.

As a civilian, the beloved American Civil War general and two-term president failed at every attempt to make money. Except for one.

A 300-year-old hunt for the unsung hero of Salzburg.

He made a name for himself organizing the world’s most important economic conference, only to have it tarnished by an outrageous accusation.

During WWII, 36 American conscientious objectors volunteered as subjects in a brutal science experiment to measure the body's response to starvation.

A remote bay in Alaska is home to an odd and occasionally catastrophic geology. In 1958, a handful of people experienced this firsthand.

The 15th-century scholar who upset the Korean aristocracy by creating a native script for the Korean language, and thus wean it off Chinese characters.

A 1930s effort to reach the Earth's northernmost point via antiquated submarine.

Charles Waterton was a pioneer of conservation. He was also extremely nutty, in ways that suggest he may have over-identified with his animal subjects.

The tumultuous true story of the life of a fast food icon.

The story of the Beale Ciphers; a set of three encrypted notes from the nineteenth century purportedly describing the location of hidden treasure. Only one has been deciphered.

On the ancient Japanese Buddhist practice of self-mummification.

Faxes From The Far Side by Damn Interesting

When women in a poorly administered Oregon town hacked an election in order to repair the town's problems.

A happy-tenth-birthday-to-us retrospective.

As night fell over the East German town of Pössneck on the evening of 14 September 1979, most of the town's citizens were busy getting ready for bed. But not Günter Wetzel. The mason was in his attic, hunched over an old motor-driven sewing machine, desperately working to complete his secret project. Wetzel and his friend H. Peter Strelzyk and their families had been working on their plan for more than a year and a half, and by now the authorities were looking for them. They were nearly out of time. Wetzel had feigned illness in order to procure five weeks off from work, and during that time he and his friend had collected the materials and laboured over the construction together. This would be their last chance. Earlier in the day, a strong wind had arisen from the north. These were exactly the conditions that the two families had been waiting for. Around 10:00pm, Wetzel put the finishing touches on the massive patchwork project, then rounded up Strelzyk and prepared to leave. Two hours later the families were en route to a predetermined clearing on a hill by way of automobile and moped. The other components of their project—a steel platform, a homemade gas burner, and a powerful fan—were already packed and ready to go. It was time to attempt the escape.

"I don’t think it belongs here." Such was the assessment of Bob Vinson, the graveyard shift supervisor at Harvey's Wagon Wheel Casino in Lake Tahoe, Nevada. The "here" Vinson referred to was a nook just outside the telephone equipment room in the employees-only portion of the second floor of the hotel. The "it" was a curious piece of equipment of unknown origin loitering conspicuously in the cramped side room. It was a metallic gray box about the size of a desk, with a smaller box attached on top near the rear right corner. The front face of the smaller box was an incomprehensible control panel occupied by 28 metal toggle switches in five neat rows, each labeled with a numbered sticker. All of these switches were situated in the down position except for #23, which was toggled up—an oddly ominous asymmetry. It was approximately 6:30am on Tuesday, 26 August 1980, and although Bob Vinson had been on shift all night long, he hadn't heard any large equipment delivery commotion from his nearby office, and he was sure this thing hadn't been there an hour earlier. Whoever had left the machine had taken the time to place each corner on blocks of wood, and these blocks pressed deep dimples into the red-orange carpet, suggesting that the equipment had significant mass. In spite of its resemblance to some kind of manufactured electromechanical office machine, it had no power cord, and no obvious power switch, just the 28 enigmatic toggles. To add alarm to intrigue, Vinson had found that some of the keyholes for the doors leading into the area had been hastily jammed using what appeared to be toothpicks and glue. An envelope with "Harvey's Management" typewritten on one side lay on the carpet alongside the object. Vinson was reasonably suspicious that the envelope did not contain anything as harmless as an invoice. "Stay here," Vinson instructed the custodian who had been examining the mystery object with him. "Don’t touch it. Don’t let anyone fool with it. I’ll be right back." Vinson soon returned with companions, having summoned members of Harvey's Wagon Wheel Casino security, who had subsequently summoned sheriff 's deputies and the fire department. After prodding the envelope with a broomstick to ensure it wasn't booby-trapped, those to whom it was concerned gingerly extracted three pages of typed text from the envelope. The letter claimed that this device was a bomb.

(This is a podcastification of an older article to observe the 30th anniversary of the events discussed herein). In April 1985, it is rumored that a collection of executives gathered at their corporate headquarters for an emergency meeting. On the table before them sat six small canisters which had been smuggled from their chief competitor's manufacturing plant. Inside the metal cylinders lurked a secret compound which represented the next strike in a long-running war: an altered version of their rival's incredibly successful *Merchandise 7X*. The substance was scheduled to be released upon the public within mere days, and these men had assembled to assess the threat. They were aware that billions of dollars were at stake, but the true power of the revised chemistry was beyond their reckoning. Ultimately, the contents of these canisters would plunge the United States into a surreal turmoil the likes of which had never before been seen. The 72 ounces of fluid were portioned into sampling containers and passed around the room with earnest resolve. Each man inspected his sample by ingesting it orally, then smacking his tongue to allow the solution full access to his taste buds. The men's impressions were mixed, yet the Pepsi officials were forced to acknowledge that this "New Coke" represented a serious threat. Today, the New Coke debacle of 1985 is usually looked upon as a blunder of monumental proportions; however the ill-fated reformulation ultimately became one of the most fortuitous and informative failures in human history.

Under ordinary circumstances, the final evening of a cruise aboard the luxury turbo-electric ocean liner SS Morro Castle was a splendid event. Hundreds of lady and gentlemen passengers would gather in the Grand Ballroom in their finest evening attire for the customary Farewell Dinner, where veteran sailor Captain Willmott would captivate his guests with salty tales from his years at sea over endless glasses of champagne. Reality, bills, hangovers, and economic depression were all far away, on the other end of tomorrow morning's gangplank in New York. But on the night of Friday, the 7th of September 1934, circumstances aboard ship were not ordinary. Passengers were indeed draped in their finery in the ballroom, yet the captain's chair at the captain's table was conspicuously vacant. He had somewhat suddenly felt unwell. And atop the typical worries lurking outside were two near-hurricane-force storms, one approaching from the north and another from the south. The agitated sea and gusty winds were beginning to cause some sway in the decks, putting already-eaten entrées in danger of unscheduled egress. The surly weather was bound to be a considerable distraction. Nevertheless, the Morro Castle was a large and modern cruise ship quite capable of handling inclement weather. Chief Warms was in command of the bridge for the night shift, and he knew well enough to keep her slicing through the sea near top speed to minimize passenger discomfort. The ship made 20 knots against a gale-force headwind, so shuffleboard was out of the question, but in the Grand Ballroom, festooned with colorful flags and balloons, drinks were drunk and rugs were cut. The waitstaff served a steady supply of Cuban lobster broiled in butter, ham in champagne sauce, roast turkey, and candied sweet potatoes. The ship’s orchestra served a steady supply of dance tunes. Just before 8:00pm, the orchestra abruptly stopped playing mid-song. The previously foxtrotting passengers turned to see what was the matter, and there at the bandstand they saw cruise director Bob Smith beckoning for everyone's attention. He announced that he had some sad news to share. Their captain, Robert Willmott, had died suddenly in his quarters. The official farewell party and dance contest were therefore canceled, but the orchestra and barkeeps would remain on station late into the evening for passengers who wished to linger. Smith instructed the passengers to have a pleasant evening, and departed. The ship's doctor had determined the captain's cause of death as "heart attack brought on by acute indigestion." He had been just 52 years old. William Warms and the other officers were shocked and saddened by the turn of events, but there was also an unmistakable undertow of apprehension on the bridge. In recent weeks Captain Willmott had confided in some of his fellow officers that he had reason to believe that a "red" was aboard the ship plotting revenge against the Morro Castle and her captain. Although Willmott had never seemed particularly prone to paranoia, his remarks had been dismissed as such. The wild sabotage speculations were more difficult to ignore under the new circumstances, but scrutiny would have to wait. Chief Warms--now Acting Captain Warms--was understandably anxious. It was he who had discovered the captain's body face-down and motionless in his bathtub, and he was having trouble keeping the image out of his mind. Now he was obliged to assume command during some of the worst sailing weather he had ever seen, and he had already been awake for over twenty-four hours. Even if sleep had been possible under such conditions, there was no time for it. It was going to be a long night.

Low-pressure weather systems are a familiar feature of the winter climate in the northern Atlantic. While they often drive wind, rain, and other unpleasantness against Europe’s rocky western margin, this is typically on a “mostly harmless” basis. Early in the evening of 31 January 1953, the weather in northern Europe was damp, chilly, and blustery. These unremarkable seasonal conditions disguised the fact that a storm of extreme severity was massing nearby, and that an ill-fated assortment of meteorological, geophysical, and human factors would soon coalesce into an almost unprecedented watery catastrophe. The storm scudded past the northern tip of Scotland and took an unusual southerly detour, shifting towards a low-lying soft European overbelly of prime agricultural, industrial, and residential land. The various people, communities, and countries in its path differed in their readiness and in their responses to the looming crisis, yet the next 24 hours were about to teach them all some enduring lessons. In a world that remains awash with extreme weather events—and with increasing numbers of people living in vulnerable coastal areas—the story of this particular storm system’s collision with humanity remains much-studied by emergency planners, and much-remembered in the three countries it so fatally struck.

In 1744, a young geographer living in Spanish-colonial Peru with his wife and children decided the time had come to move the family back to his native France. Jean Godin des Odonais had come to Peru in 1735 as a part of a small scientific expedition and had ended up staying much longer than expected. He’d married a young woman from a local aristocratic family and now the couple had two children and a third on the way. But news from France eventually brought word of Godin’s father’s death, meaning that there was an inheritance to sort out. It was time to return. Making travel arrangements from such a distance, however, was going to be a challenge. Perhaps, Godin reasoned, he and his family could travel to the colony of French Guiana at the other end of the Amazon River, then find places on a ship back to France. In order to establish whether this was plausible, Godin decided to travel ahead to French Guiana and make inquiries. From its headwaters in Peru, the Amazon goes downhill. From this point, virtually everything for Jean and Isabel Godin did the same. Left behind, Isabel spent years waiting for word from her husband. Eventually, due to an improbable series of mishaps and misery, Isabel ended up stranded alone in the middle of the Amazonian rainforest, hopelessly lost and so far into starvation that her chances of survival were vanishingly small.

It was the middle of a cool September night in Munich, Germany. The year was 1939. In an otherwise unoccupied auditorium, a man knelt on hands and knees chiseling a square hole into a large stone pillar. The lights were out, but a small flashlight dimmed with a handkerchief provided a pallid puddle of light. The man's chisel was also wrapped in cloth to quiet his hammer strikes. Whenever there was some unexpected sound, he froze. Whenever a truck rumbled past the building, he seized the opportunity to chisel more vigorously. It was exceedingly tedious and slow work. The fellow was a 36-year-old German handyman named "Georg Elser". But "handyman" isn't exactly the right word. In his three and a half decades he had cultivated many skills, including clock making, cabinet building, master carpentry, and stone quarrying. And the task at hand required all of his diverse expertise.

In April of 1938, representatives from the USSR approached the Finnish government and expressed a concern that Nazi Germany could attempt to invade Russia, and such an attack might come through parts of Finland. The Finns replied that they were officially neutral, but any Nazi incursion on Finland’s borders would be resisted. This did not mollify the Soviets. Hitler’s manifesto, Mein Kampf, was published thirteen years previous with specific note that the Nazis would need to invade the Soviet Union. The Red Army was determined to “advance to meet the enemy” and refused to accept promises from the smaller country. As negotiations continued, the Soviets tried to coax Finland into leasing or ceding some area to serve as a buffer to Leningrad. In November 1939, however, all negotiations ceased, and on 30 November 1939 the Soviet Red Army invaded Finland. In the municipality of Rautjärvi near the Soviet/Finnish border, 34-year-old Simo Häyhä was a farmer and hunter leading a flagrantly unexciting life. Upon news of the hostilities, he gathered up food, plain white camouflage, and his iron-sighted SAKO M/28-30--a variant of the Soviet Mosin-Nagant rifle--and went to defend his country. Before the four-month war ended, humble Häyhä would gain infamy among the Russian invaders, and come to be known as the “White Death”.

Staple though it is today, the lowly potato had a hard time reaching its preeminent status in Western cuisine. Perhaps its lengthy purgatory has something to do with the tale that when Sir Walter Raleigh gave some potatoes to Queen Elizabeth, her cooks tossed aside the roots and served up the boiled greens instead, causing a court-wide case of indigestion. Whether that's the case or not—and there's no evidence that Raleigh ever so much as set eyes on a potato—for decades Europeans would have nothing to do with the tuber. At best, it was found useful to feed the cattle. At worst, it was considered a leprosy-inducing invention of the devil. This belief was particularly pernicious in the fair fields of France, a country at the time holding a quarter of Europe's inhabitants despite its periodic decimation by epidemic and famine. By the beginning of the 17th century France's population reached had twenty million and continued to rise. Clearly, a cheap, plentiful, and resilient crop was just what the nutritionist ordered, yet even in the face of the brutal demographic crises that popped up every ten to fifteen years over the next two centuries, each time lopping two or three million inhabitants off the non-existent voting rolls, the potato remained unpondered, unprized, and unplanted. Clearly, the potato needed a champion. What it got was a pharmacist.

Near the heart of Scotland lies a large morass known as Dullatur Bog. Water seeps from these moistened acres and coalesces into the headwaters of a river which meanders through the countryside for nearly 22 miles, until its terminus in Glasgow. In the late 19th century this river adorned the landscape just outside of the laboratory of Sir William Thompson, renowned scientist and president of the Royal Society. The river must have made an impression on Thompson--when Queen Victoria granted him the title of Baron in 1892, he opted to adopt the river’s name as his own. Sir William Thompson was thenceforth known as Lord Kelvin. Kelvin's contributions to science were vast, but he is perhaps best known today for the temperature scale that bears his name. It is so named in honor of his discovery of the coldest possible temperature in our universe. Thompson had played a major role in developing the Laws of Thermodynamics, and in 1848 he used them to extrapolate that the coldest temperature any matter can become, regardless of the substance, is -273.15°C (-459.67°F). We now know this boundary as zero Kelvin. Once this absolute zero temperature was decisively identified, prominent Victorian scientists commenced multiple independent efforts to build machines to explore this physical frontier. Their equipment was primitive, and the trappings were treacherous, but they pressed on nonetheless, dangers be damned. There was science to be done.

Alarming events were in store for Sicily at the beginning of the summer of 1831. On 28 June, small earthquakes rocked the western end of the island, and these continued occurring day after day. On 4 July, the unpleasant scent of sulfur spread through the town of Sciacca. On the 13th, the people of St. Domenico spotted smoke from far offshore. Normally, volcanic activity would be the obvious culprit, but these black plumes were out on the water. Maybe, the residents suggested to one another, a boat was on fire. The crew of a passing ship had other ideas: the captain noted that the water under the smoke was bubbling vigorously. He was convinced that what they were dealing with was a sea monster. But a second ship brought reports of masses of dead fish in the water, entirely undevoured. This disturbance was, in fact, a volcano erupting from just under the surface of the Mediterranean Sea. By the 17th of July, a new island some 25 feet high had appeared off the coast of Sicily. And that was only the beginning. The volcano went on spewing lava over the course of the next week until the island was four times its original height and seven kilometers around, with two peaks and even two small lakes. The new island lay between Europe and Africa right where the Mediterranean narrowed, putting it in the middle of an ongoing flurry of nautical trade and military maneuvers. Several countries observed simultaneously that the infant rock would likely prove extremely valuable to whichever country owned it, and at least three of them raced to claim it. As it turned out, none of them would succeed.

The men from London arrived just in time to see Mary Toft give birth to her fifteenth rabbit. It was the winter of 1726, and Nathaniel St. André and Samuel Molyneux arrived in the market town of Godalming in Surrey to meet Mary Toft, a short, stout peasant of "stupid and sullen temper" (per St. André's later, embittered description). They found the country-woman waiting at the house of local man-midwife John Howard. She was lingering on the edge of a bed, stripped down to her corset. Howard assured the Londoners that they had come just in time. Soon Mary Toft's body began to twist and contort. Her throes could be so powerful that her clothes would fly off her body, and the woman would have to be held down in her chair. Sometimes the labors lasted up to a day and a half. Toft's belly would "leap," a phenomenon Howard thought was caused by baby rabbits jumping around inside Toft's uterus. One was observed to hop like this for eighteen hours. But that winter day, the labor was not prolonged, and soon Toft had delivered her child--the skinned torso of a small rabbit. The men from London started dissecting it right there on the floor. St. André--surgeon anatomist to the King of England himself--took a section of lung and put it in a basin of water. It floated, showing that the lungs had air in them, which suggested that the creature had breathed before it died. The rabbit's anus was found to have feces in it, which meant that the small animal must have eaten something. There was no blood. St. André then turned his attention to the mother, who had been waiting patiently by the fire. He found that one breast produced a thin, watery milk. After palpating Mary's stomach, St. André found a hard lump in the woman's right side. From this he concluded that the rabbits had been bred in Toft's fallopian tubes, after which they had hopped down to her uterus, where they developed. With no prospect of another birth any time soon, the men retired. In the evening Mary Toft fell into convulsions again--this time so violent she had to be held in her chair. "After three or four very strong Pains that lasted several minutes, I delivered her of the skin of the rabbet, rolled and squeezed up like a Ball," St André wrote later. The rabbit's head came soon after, complete except for one ear. Satisfied, St. André and his companion Molyneux returned to London with some of Mary's purported offspring, preserved by Howard in jars of alcohol. By the end of the year, all of England--even King George I himself--would know about the woman who had given birth to rabbits.

Sometime in the 1940s an improbable encounter occurred at a mental institution in Maryland. Two women, each of whom was institutionalized for believing she was the Virgin Mary, chanced upon one another and engaged in conversation. They had been chatting for several minutes when the older woman introduced herself as "Mary, Mother of God." "Why you can't be, my dear," the other patient replied, unable to conceive of such a notion. "You must be crazy. I am the Mother of God." "I'm afraid it's you who are mixed up," the first asserted, "I am Mary." A hospital staff member eavesdropped as the two Virgin Marys debated their identities. After a while the women paused to quietly regard one another. Finally, the older patient seemed to arrive at a realization. "If you're Mary," she said, "I must be Anne, your mother." That seemed to settle it, and the reconciled patients embraced. In the following weeks the woman who had conceded her delusion was reported to be much more receptive to treatment, and she was soon considered well enough to be discharged from the hospital. This clinical anecdote was retold in a 1955 issue of Harper's Magazine, and a highly-regarded social psychologist named Dr. Milton Rokeach read it with great interest. What might happen, he wondered, if a psychologist were to deliberately pair up patients who held directly conflicting identity delusions? Perhaps such psychological leverage could be used to pry at the cracks of an irrational psyche to let in the light of reason. Dr. Rokeach sought and secured a research grant to test his hypothesis, and he began canvassing sanitariums for delusional doppelgängers. Soon he found several suitable subjects: three patients, all in state care, each of whom believed himself to be Jesus Christ. And he saw that it was good.

Under normal circumstances, one would expect a wandering throng of students to demonstrate animated displeasure upon encountering a human corpse in the woods; particularly a corpse as fragrant and festering as that which was found on an August afternoon in Knoxville, Tennessee. From a short distance the male figure almost appeared to be napping among the hummingbirds and squirrels, draped as he was over the pebbled ground. But something about his peculiar pose evoked a sense of grim finality-- the body language of the deceased. The students knelt alongside the slumped form, seemingly untroubled by the acrid, syrupy tang of human decay which hung in the air. They remarked on the amount of decomposition that had become evident since their last visit, such as the sloughed skin and distended midsection. The insects which feasted upon the decommissioned man were of specific interest, prompting a number of photographs and note-jottings. After surveying the scene to their satisfaction, the students strolled across the glade to examine a considerably more decayed corpse in the trunk of an abandoned car. Their lack of alarm wasn't altogether surprising, for they were part of the organization responsible for dumping these corpses-- along with dozens more-- throughout the otherwise serene forest. They were forensic anthropology students from the University of Tennessee.

The story of Camp Century: A "nuclear city" under the Greenland ice sheet that was not entirely what it seemed.

While most of the major powers of western Europe spent the 17th, 18th, and 19th centuries racing around the world carving out empires for themselves, Japan felt threatened by the influx of foreigners and ended up spending this period as one of the most reclusive nations on the planet. In the 1630s, a series of proclamations closed the country’s borders, marking the beginning of the period now known as sakoku (‘locking the country’) or sometimes kaikin (‘sea-restriction’). Non-Japanese-citizens were not permitted on Japanese soil; potential violators were warned that they would be subject to capital punishment. Only a small amount of trade with China, Korea, and the Netherlands was permitted, and the Dutch were restricted to Dejima, an artificial island in the harbour at Nagasaki. Nor were Japanese citizens allowed to leave Japan. Even the construction of long-range ships was illegal. These measures remained in place well into the 19th century. But occasionally a group of Japanese citizens left Japan by mistake. Smaller ships were still permitted under sakoku since they played an indispensable role in the transportation of goods and people, and once in a while unpredictable forces of nature would drag one of these vessels away from the coast of Japan. In the autumn of 1832, for instance, a cargo-ship known as the Hojunmaru was transporting rice and porcelain to Edo (now Tokyo) when it ran into a storm and was blown off-course. The 15-metre-long ship was left far from shore without a rudder or a mast, meaning that there was no way to steer it. All that the crew could do was let their vessel drift on the ocean until they happened upon either another ship or a useful bit of land. For one of them in particular – 14-year-old Yamamoto Otokichi – this would prove to be only the beginning of a decades-long accidental circumnavigation of the globe.

The story of Roy Sullivan. A different kind of Damn Interesting episode.

On the 11th of July 1897, the world breathlessly awaited word from the small Norwegian island of Danskøya in the Arctic Sea. Three gallant Swedish scientists stationed there were about to embark on an enterprise of history-making proportions, and newspapers around the globe had allotted considerable ink to the anticipated adventure. The undertaking was led by renowned engineer Salomon August Andrée, and he was accompanied by his research companions Nils Strindberg and Knut Fraenkel. In the shadow of a 67-foot-wide spherical hydrogen balloon--one of the largest to have been built at that time--toasts were drunk, telegrams to the Swedish king were dictated, hands were shook, and notes to loved ones were pressed into palms. "Strindberg and Fraenkel!" Andrée cried, "Are you ready to get into the car?" They were, and they dutifully ducked into the four-and-a-half-foot tall, six-foot-wide carriage suspended from the balloon. The whole flying apparatus had been christened the "Örnen," the Swedish word for "Eagle." "Cut away everywhere!" Andrée commanded after clambering into the Eagle himself, and the ground crew slashed at the lines binding the balloon to the Earth. Hurrahs were offered as the immense, primitive airship pulled away from the wood-plank hangar and bobbed ponderously into the atmosphere. Their mission was to be the first humans to reach the North Pole, taking aerial photographs and scientific measurements along the way for future explorers. If all went according to plan they would then touch down in Siberia or Alaska after a few weeks' flight, laden with information about the top of the world. Onlookers watched for about an hour as the voluminous sphere shrank into the distance and disappeared into northerly mists. Andrée, Strindberg, and Fraenkel would not arrive on the other side of the planet as planned. But their journey was far from over.

The naked mole rat, Heterocephalus glaber, is fleshy, furless, buck-toothed and brazenly ugly. Yet what these small East African rodents lack in terms of good looks, they make up with an impressive array of biological quirks. These misnamed mammals are neither moles nor rats, and in terms of their social behaviour are actually closer to bees, wasps, ants, and termites than to other backboned animals. They live in underground cooperative colonies of up to 300 individuals with a dominant breeding “queen” and celibate soldier and worker castes. Biologists have identified only one other vertebrate--the closely related Damaraland mole rat--that uses this rigid reproductive and social structure. Until the late 1970s scientists believed that this trait, known as eusociality, was confined to insects. Naked mole rats deploy several impressive feats of physiology, including an apparent imperviousness to pain, a casual disregard for low-oxygen environments, and resistance to cancer. Indeed, these unsightly creatures both baffle and buttress Darwin's Theory of Evolution in multiple remarkable and apparently self-contradictory ways.

There is a small town in Pennsylvania called Ashland where Route 61's northbound traffic is temporarily branched onto a short detour. Exactly what the detour is circumventing is not immediately clear to travelers, however few passers-by pay it any mind... a detour is nothing unusual. But anyone who ignores the detour and ventures along the original route 61 highway will soon encounter an abrupt and unexplained road closure. Beyond it lies a town filled with overgrown streets, smoldering earth, and ominous warning signs. It is the remains of the borough of Centralia. Centralia, Pennsylvania was never a particularly large community, but it was once a lively and industrial place. At its peak the coal mining town was home to 2,761 souls, but today the population of its cemeteries far outnumbers that of its living residents. The series of events which led to the community's demise-- slowly diminishing its numbers to less than a dozen-- began about forty-four years ago.

The meeting had not gone well, the man gloomily reflected as he was driven out of East Berlin. His head was still heavy after a few too many snifters of cognac. The American's ambitious scheme to build a life and career in Moscow had sputtered to an unforeseen halt not unlike a Trabant's two-stroke engine; the only concession the Russians had made was to invite him back for another meeting in two weeks' time. The three KGB representatives he had talked to didn't seem very enthusiastic about his offer to defect from the US Army. The date was 22 February 1953. It was George Washington's Birthday, a holiday for all American troops stationed in Berlin. The drunken man being shuttled out of East Berlin in a Soviet car was Robert Lee Johnson, a 31-year-old sergeant in the United States Army. Most competent intelligence services would have considered the Army clerk useless, dismissing him as an embittered bureaucrat with a grossly inflated sense of self-worth. Nine years later he would, through a combination of luck and circumstance, become one of the most destructive spies the KGB had ever implanted into the US military.

It was the summer of 1936 when Ernest Lawrence, the inventor of the atom-smashing cyclotron, received a visit from Emilio Segrè, a scientific colleague from Italy. Segrè explained that he had come all the way to America to ask a very small favor: He wondered whether Lawrence would part with a few strips of thin metal from an old cyclotron unit. Dr Lawrence was happy to oblige; as far as he was concerned the stuff Segrè sought was mere radioactive trash. He sealed some scraps of the foil in an envelope and mailed it to Segrè's lab in Sicily. Unbeknownst to Lawrence, Segrè was on a surreptitious scientific errand. At that time the majority of chemical elements had been isolated and added to the periodic table, yet there was an unsightly hole where an element with 43 protons ought to be. Elements with 42 and 44 protons--42molybdenum and 44ruthenium respectively--had been isolated decades earlier, but element 43 was yet to be seen. Considerable accolades awaited whichever scientist could isolate the elusive element, so chemists worldwide were scanning through tons of ores with their spectroscopes, watching for the anticipated pattern. Upon receiving Dr Lawrence's radioactive mail back in Italy, Segrè and his colleague Carlo Perrier subjected the strips of molybdenum foil to a carefully choreographed succession of bunsen burners, salts, chemicals, and acids. The resulting precipitate confirmed their hypothesis: element 42 was the answer. The radiation in Lawrence's cyclotron had converted a few 42molybdenum atoms into element 43, and one ten-billionth of a gram of the stuff now sat in the bottom of their beaker. They dubbed their plundered discovery “technetium” for the Greek word technetos, meaning "artificial." It was considered to be the first element made by man rather than nature, and its “short” half-life--anywhere from a few nanoseconds to a few million years depending on the isotope--was the reason there’s negligible naturally-occurring technetium left on modern Earth. In the years since this discovery scientists have employed increasingly sophisticated apparatuses to bang particles together to create and isolate increasingly heavy never-before-seen elements, an effort which continues even today. Most of the obese nuclei beyond 92uranium are too unstable to stay assembled for more than a moment, to the extent that it makes one wonder why researchers expend such time, effort, and expense to fabricate these fickle fragments of matter. But according to our current understanding of quantum mechanics, if we can pack enough protons and neutrons into these husky nuclei we may encounter something astonishing.

A simple telegram plunged America into the Great War. The Zimmermann telegram, intercepted by American intelligence in April 1917, revealed Germany’s efforts to encourage Mexico to invade the United States. For a towheaded kid from Arizona named Frank Luke, Jr., and other citizens of the states along the Mexican border, the threat of invasion was real and personal. Anti-German sentiment swept the nation that spring. Sauerkraut became “Victory Cabbage”, the precursor to Freedom Fries, and suspicion fell on families of German descent such as the Lukes, whose name had been Luecke just a generation before. The immigrants’ son Frank Luke, Jr. had a lot to prove when he joined the Army a few months later. By the time Luke completed flight training, received his commission, and joined the 27th Aero Squadron in France in July 1918, the surge of American forces onto the Western Front promised a swift end to the war – and the life expectancy of a pursuit pilot at the front was just three weeks. If Frank Luke was going to prove anything, he needed to work fast. In just a few months, he would demonstrate how well he could work under pressure, becoming one of the most decorated flyers of the First World War.

It’s a testament to the strength and versatility of the human brain that anyone with at least half of one tends to assume that their senses give them direct access to objective reality. The truth is less straightforward and much more likely to induce existential crises: the senses do not actually provide the brain with a multifaceted description of the outside world. All that the brain has to work with are imperfect incoming electrical impulses announcing that things are happening. It is then the job of neurons to rapidly interpret these signals as well as they can, and suggest how to react. This neurological system has done a pretty good job of modelling the world such that the ancestors of modern human beings avoided getting eaten by sabre-toothed tigers before procreating, but the human brain remains relatively easy to fool. Optical illusions, dreams, hallucinations, altered states of consciousness, and the placebo effect are just a handful of familiar cases where what the brain perceives does not correspond to whatever is actually occurring. The formation of a coherent model of the world often relies on imagined components. As it turns out, this pseudo-reality in one’s imagination can be so convincing that it can have unexpected effects on the physical body.

On 12 November 1971, in the presidential palace in the Republic of Chile, President Salvador Allende and a British theorist named Stafford Beer engaged in a highly improbable conversation. Beer was a world-renowned cybernetician and Allende was the newly elected leader of the impoverished republic. Beer, a towering middle-aged man with a long beard, sat face to face with the horn-rimmed, mustachioed, grandfatherly president and spoke at great length in the solemn palace. A translator whispered the substance of Beer’s extraordinary proposition into Allende’s ear. The brilliant Brit was essentially suggesting that Chile’s entire economy–transportation, banking, manufacturing, mining, and more–could all be wired to feed realtime data into a central computer mainframe where specialized cybernetic software could help the country to manage resources, to detect problems before they arise, and to experiment with economic policies on a sophisticated simulator before applying them to reality. With such a pioneering system, Beer suggested, the impoverished Chile could become an exceedingly wealthy nation. In the early 1970s the scale of Beer’s proposed network was unprecedented. One of the largest computer networks of the day was a mere fifteen machines in the US, the military progenitor to the Internet known as ARPANET. Beer was suggesting a network with hundreds or thousands of endpoints. Moreover, the computational complexity of his concept eclipsed even that of the Apollo moon missions, which were still ongoing at that time. After a few hours of conversation President Allende responded to the audacious proposition: Chile must indeed become the world’s first cybernetic government, for the good of the people. Work was to start straight away. Stafford Beer practically ran across the street to share the news with his awaiting technical team, and much celebratory drinking occurred that evening. But the ambitious cybernetic network would never become fully operational if the CIA had anything to say about it.