Bruno Teles

Bruno Teles

Energy & Electric Mobility

Bruno Teles is an energy and industry journalist who has published more than 7,000 articles across the oil, gas, technology, mining, and construction sectors. He writes daily about the companies, projects, and breakthroughs shaping how the world makes and moves energy. At Watts & Wild he leads coverage of power and the grid, batteries and storage, solar and wind, nuclear, and electric mobility seen through the battery and the range.

LinkedIn X Facebook Instagram

Recent articles

A turboprop cargo aircraft powered by a hydrogen engine flying against a clear blue sky

Energy

China just flew the world's first megawatt-class hydrogen engine, on a cargo drone

By Bruno Teles · July 4, 2026

The portal of the Zojila tunnel cut into a snowy Himalayan mountainside with a road leading in

Industry & Mega-Builds

Engineers just broke through the Zojila tunnel, taming one of the world's deadliest mountain passes

By Bruno Teles · July 4, 2026

A modern clean fuel plant with tanks and pipes that turns carbon dioxide and water into jet fuel under a blue sky

Energy

America just opened its first commercial plant that makes jet fuel out of carbon dioxide and water

By Bruno Teles · July 4, 2026

A microscope view of muscle stem cells and muscle fibres glowing in fluorescent blue and green

Science & Tech

Scientists made aged muscle stem cells young again, and found the reason we slow down may protect us

By Bruno Teles · July 4, 2026

A radiologist examining brain MRI scans on a screen showing the small deep lesions of a lacunar stroke

Science & Tech

For decades doctors blamed plaque for a lacunar stroke, and a 2026 study says the real cause is different

By Bruno Teles · July 4, 2026

The ornate marble tombs of the Medici Chapels in Florence, dimly lit, where the grand duke's remains were studied

Curiosities

For 400 years everyone said the Medici duke was poisoned, then DNA from his bones named the real killer

By Bruno Teles · July 4, 2026

A driverless Tesla robotaxi Model Y with an empty front seat moving through a busy Austin street at dusk

Electric

Tesla's robotaxi now drives across every street in Austin, and hardly anyone is inside

By Bruno Teles · July 4, 2026

Rows of white wind turbines of the SunZia wind farm across a wide New Mexico desert

Industry & Mega-Builds

America's largest clean energy project just switched on, eighteen years after it was first dreamed up

By Bruno Teles · July 4, 2026

A small superconductor disc levitating above a magnet in a cloud of cold vapour

Energy

A 33-year superconductor record just fell, edging us closer to electricity that flows without loss

By Bruno Teles · July 4, 2026

The golden chandelier-like cooling apparatus of a quantum computer hanging in a lab

Science & Tech

After decades of hype, quantum computing is finally closing in on beating ordinary computers at something real

By Bruno Teles · July 4, 2026

A crew burying a thick power cable in a trench along a waterway

Energy

A 336-mile power cable buried under a lake and a river now lights up a fifth of New York City

By Bruno Teles · July 4, 2026

A vast modern semiconductor chip factory complex spread across the desert near Phoenix

Industry & Mega-Builds

The factory making the tiny brains behind the AI boom is now rising in the Arizona desert

By Bruno Teles · July 4, 2026

A sleek modern electric high-speed train racing across a desert landscape beside a highway

Electric

The country that built the transcontinental railroad is finally laying its first true high-speed line

By Bruno Teles · July 4, 2026

The tapering Jeddah Tower under construction rising far above a hazy desert city

Industry & Mega-Builds

After years frozen half-built, the world's first kilometre-high tower is climbing again in Saudi Arabia

By Bruno Teles · July 4, 2026

A compact clean small modular reactor power plant with modern industrial buildings under a blue sky

Energy

After years of hype, small nuclear reactors are finally being poured in concrete rather than slideshows

By Bruno Teles · July 4, 2026

The huge circular cutterhead of a tunnel boring machine underground studded with cutting discs

Industry & Mega-Builds

A machine longer than a city block just started chewing a tunnel deep beneath Sydney Harbour

By Bruno Teles · July 4, 2026

A white self-driving robotaxi with roof sensors driving on a city street with no driver

Electric

The driverless car quietly went mainstream, and almost no one noticed the moment it happened

By Bruno Teles · July 4, 2026

A row of humanoid robots on a modern factory assembly line being built

Science & Tech

2026 is the year humanoid robots stopped being demos and started rolling off a real assembly line, one an hour

By Bruno Teles · July 4, 2026

A large industrial direct air capture plant with rows of big fans pulling carbon dioxide from the air

Energy

America is switching on its first big machines built to vacuum carbon straight out of the sky

By Bruno Teles · July 4, 2026

Artist's impression of a pale fluffy cotton-candy super-puff gas giant planet glowing near its star

Curiosities

Astronomers just found two planets so light they would float in a bathtub big enough to hold them

By Bruno Teles · July 4, 2026

Rows of huge white offshore wind turbines standing in the Atlantic Ocean under a bright sky

Industry & Mega-Builds

America's largest offshore wind farm is rising 27 miles off Virginia Beach, one giant turbine at a time

By Bruno Teles · July 4, 2026

The glowing interior of a magnetic mirror fusion device with hot plasma held inside a metal chamber

Energy

A Wisconsin startup pulled electricity straight out of a fusion plasma, and it was just enough to light a few bulbs

By Bruno Teles · July 4, 2026

Rows of large grid-scale battery storage containers in a field under a blue sky, the kind of site sodium-ion batteries are designed for

Energy

America's biggest carmaker is quietly betting that the batteries of the future will be made from something as cheap as table salt

By Bruno Teles · July 4, 2026

The Willard suitcases, rows of old leather and cardboard cases and steamer trunks stacked and gathering dust in a dim asylum attic

Curiosities

Four hundred suitcases sat forgotten in an asylum attic, each packed by a person who walked in expecting to leave and never did

By Bruno Teles · July 3, 2026

Elisha Otis demonstrating his safety elevator, standing on an open platform high above a crowd in a grand 1854 exhibition hall as an assistant prepares to cut the rope

Industry & Mega-Builds

A man stood on a high platform, had an axe cut the only rope holding him up, and did not fall, and that stunt made the modern city possible

By Bruno Teles · July 3, 2026

The Fermi 1 nuclear power plant on the flat shore of Lake Erie near Detroit in the 1960s, a boxy reactor building by the water

Energy

A reactor built to be the future of atomic power partly melted down near a major city in 1966, brought down by the very part meant to keep it safe

By Bruno Teles · July 3, 2026

Rows of small amber 1930s medicine bottles on a dim pharmacy shelf, evoking the poisoned Elixir Sulfanilamide of 1937

Science & Tech

A medicine that tasted of raspberries was mixed with a poison and sold legally, and the hundred deaths that followed forced America to make drugs prove they are safe

By Bruno Teles · July 3, 2026

The great stone portal entrance of the Hoosac Tunnel set into a wooded Massachusetts mountainside in the 1870s, railroad tracks leading in

Industry & Mega-Builds

A tunnel that took a quarter of a century and 200 lives to drive through a mountain was a triumph of engineering and a slaughterhouse at once

By Bruno Teles · July 3, 2026

A tray of ominous vintage mid-20th-century steel surgical instruments in a stark clinical setting, evoking the era of the lobotomy

Science & Tech

A brain operation that blunted people for life was called a miracle, won its inventor a Nobel Prize, and was carried across America with an ice pick

By Bruno Teles · July 3, 2026

Aerial view of the vast concentric C-shaped earthen ridges and mounds of Poverty Point in the green Louisiana landscape

Curiosities

People who grew no crops built one of the biggest earthworks in ancient North America, and it broke a rule that scholars were sure of

By Bruno Teles · July 3, 2026

The long Keokuk Dam and powerhouse stretching across the wide Mississippi River in 1913, water spilling over its gates

Energy

A dam built to light a distant city in 1913 was an engineering marvel, and it quietly erased a wild stretch of the Mississippi forever

By Bruno Teles · July 3, 2026

The Aerocar, a small 1950s roadable aircraft with a car body, propeller tail and detachable wings, parked on an airfield

Science & Tech

A man built a car that unfolded its wings and flew, got the government to approve it, and still could not sell the dream of a flying car

By Bruno Teles · July 3, 2026

The 1933 Dymaxion car, a long silver teardrop-shaped aluminium vehicle on three wheels, parked on a street with onlookers

Science & Tech

A teardrop car on three wheels looked like the future in 1933, until one deadly crash and a cover-up turned it into a headline nobody would fund

By Bruno Teles · July 3, 2026

An Atlas-Agena rocket carrying Mariner 1 lifting off from Cape Canaveral in 1962 on a pillar of flame against a clear sky

Science & Tech

A single missing mark in a line of code helped destroy America's first mission to another planet, five minutes after it left the pad

By Bruno Teles · July 3, 2026

The White City of the 1893 World's Fair, grand white neoclassical palaces around a long reflecting basin with a golden statue, crowds strolling

Industry & Mega-Builds

America fell in love with a gleaming white city of the future in 1893, and almost none of it was real or meant to last

By Bruno Teles · July 3, 2026

The Shippingport atomic power station on the bank of the Ohio River in Pennsylvania in the late 1950s, a domed reactor building beside the water

Energy

America's first atomic power station was really a submarine engine on land, and its greatest achievement was learning how to make it disappear again

By Bruno Teles · July 3, 2026

The Wright brothers' fragile 1903 Flyer lifting off the sand at Kitty Hawk, one brother at the controls and the other running alongside

Science & Tech

The Wright brothers invented the airplane and then spent a decade in court trying to own it, and many believe the fight handed the future of flight to Europe

By Bruno Teles · July 3, 2026

A wide aerial view of gray coal ash slurry flooding a Tennessee valley and river after the 2008 Kingston dike failure, burying land and homes

Energy

America's biggest coal ash flood buried a Tennessee valley in 2008, and then quietly went after the very men who were hired to clean it up

By Bruno Teles · July 3, 2026

The Eads Bridge with its long steel arches spanning the wide Mississippi River at St Louis, stone piers rising from the water

Industry & Mega-Builds

A self-taught engineer who had never built a bridge spanned the mighty Mississippi with an untried metal, silenced the doubters with an elephant, and the result still carries traffic today

By Bruno Teles · July 3, 2026

Horsetail Fall glowing bright orange like molten lava as the setting February sun lights it against the dark cliff of El Capitan in Yosemite

Energy & the Wild

For ninety years Yosemite created a glowing waterfall of fire every night by shoving burning embers off a cliff, and after it was banned, nature offered a real one in its place

By Bruno Teles · July 3, 2026

The Mackinac Bridge, a long white suspension bridge with two tall towers, spanning the blue Straits of Mackinac in Michigan under a bright sky

Industry & Mega-Builds

Fifteen years after the wind tore a suspension bridge to shreds, engineers built an even bigger one across one of America's stormiest straits, and made its five-mile deck bend on purpose

By Bruno Teles · July 3, 2026

The broken but well-preserved wreck of the Lady Be Good B-24 bomber resting on the empty sand of the Libyan Sahara under a clear sky

Science & Tech

An American bomber flew off into the North African night in 1943 and simply disappeared, and fifteen years later it turned up nearly intact deep in the empty Sahara

By Bruno Teles · July 3, 2026

A DeLorean DMC-12 sports car with its brushed stainless-steel body and both gullwing doors raised open in a studio

Electric

A star engineer built a gleaming stainless-steel sports car with wings for doors, watched his company die in a drug scandal, and then a Hollywood film turned his flop into an icon

By Bruno Teles · July 3, 2026

The Genesis probe return capsule cracked open and partly buried in the cracked mud of the Utah desert after crashing without a parachute

Science & Tech

In 2004 a NASA capsule carrying pieces of the Sun slammed into the Utah desert at nearly 200 miles an hour because its sensors had been installed upside down, and scientists saved the mission anyway

By Bruno Teles · July 3, 2026

The Marfa lights, small mysterious glowing orbs hovering on the dark horizon of the flat west Texas desert under a starry sky

Curiosities

For more than a century strange glowing orbs have danced on the horizon of the west Texas desert near Marfa, and most of them turn out to be something wonderfully ordinary

By Bruno Teles · July 3, 2026

The Teton Dam breaching in 1976, a torrent of brown water bursting through a huge gap in the earthen dam into the canyon below

Industry & Mega-Builds

In 1976 America's newest federal dam collapsed the very first time it was filled, sending a wall of water through Idaho farm towns and helping to end the age of the great dams

By Bruno Teles · July 3, 2026

The 1970s Skylab space station with its gold sun shield and windmill-like solar panels orbiting above the blue curve of the Earth against black space

Science & Tech

In 1979 America's first space station fell out of orbit and rained flaming debris across the Australian outback, and the whole world spent weeks nervously asking where it would hit

By Bruno Teles · July 3, 2026

A dry reddish riverbed of the Puerco River winding through arid New Mexico high desert scrub and mesas near Church Rock under a wide sky

Energy

In 1979 a broken dam sent 94 million gallons of radioactive waste into a river on Navajo land, the biggest such spill in US history, and the country barely noticed

By Bruno Teles · July 3, 2026

The Trinity test fireball, a brilliant orange-white dome of light rising over the dark New Mexico desert horizon before dawn in 1945

Science & Tech

In 1945 a team of physicists gathered in the New Mexico desert before dawn, set off the first atomic bomb, and watched a false sunrise that changed the world forever

By Bruno Teles · July 3, 2026

An early 1900s view of Milton Hershey's large brick chocolate factory with tall smokestacks and a tidy planned town around it in rural Pennsylvania

Industry & Mega-Builds

The chocolate king Milton Hershey had no children, so he quietly signed his entire fortune over to a school for orphans and told almost no one for years

By Bruno Teles · July 3, 2026

A row of identical austere 11-storey modernist concrete Pruitt-Igoe apartment towers under a grey sky in 1950s St Louis

Industry & Mega-Builds

In 1956 St Louis opened a gleaming 33-tower housing project hailed as the future of the American city, and 16 years later it was blowing the same buildings to rubble on live television

By Bruno Teles · July 3, 2026

A 1969 California beach coated in thick black crude from the Santa Barbara oil spill, with an offshore oil platform on the hazy horizon

Energy

In 1969 a blown-out oil well fouled the California coast with three million gallons of crude, and the disaster helped give birth to Earth Day and the modern environmental movement

By Bruno Teles · July 3, 2026

London Bridge, a long pale granite arch bridge, spanning a blue channel in the Arizona desert with rocky hills and palm trees under a bright sky

Curiosities

In 1968 an American bought London Bridge for $2.46 million, took it apart stone by stone, shipped it across an ocean, and rebuilt it in the middle of the Arizona desert

By Bruno Teles · July 3, 2026

The word CROATOAN carved into a weathered wooden palisade post at the deserted site of the Roanoke Colony

Science & Tech

In 1590 an English governor sailed back to his New World colony with supplies and found all 115 men, women and children gone, leaving only a single word carved into a wooden post

By Bruno Teles · July 2, 2026

Workers in the 1860s turning rows of jackscrews beneath a large brick building during the raising of Chicago

Industry & Mega-Builds

In the 1850s Chicago was sinking into its own mud, so the city jacked its buildings and streets several feet into the air, lifting entire brick blocks while shops and hotels stayed open inside them

By Bruno Teles · July 2, 2026

A large 1950s cylindrical metal iron lung respirator with a padded headrest and an angled mirror above it in a quiet hospital room

Science & Tech

For decades a huge metal cylinder breathed for people whose lungs had failed, and long after a vaccine made it obsolete a handful of Americans still spent their entire lives sealed inside one

By Bruno Teles · July 2, 2026

An open metal bomb-shaped canister in the sky with small bats flying out of it, the concept behind the bat bomb

Science & Tech

During World War II the United States seriously built a bomb packed with a thousand live bats, each carrying a tiny firebomb, and in one test the bats escaped and burned down their own airfield

By Bruno Teles · July 2, 2026

An 1880 rooftop apparatus with a mirror and lens aimed at the sun, the setup Alexander Graham Bell used for the photophone

Science & Tech

In 1880 Alexander Graham Bell sent the sound of his own voice through open air on a beam of sunlight, called it the greatest invention of his life, and then watched the world forget it for a hundred years

By Bruno Teles · July 2, 2026

A fenced wooded research plot with numbered markers and a locked gate, the kind of outdoor forensic site known as a body farm

Science & Tech

On a quiet wooded hillside in Tennessee, scientists lay out donated human bodies to rot in the open air on purpose, and what they have learned has helped solve thousands of murders

By Bruno Teles · July 2, 2026

Storm King Mountain rising steeply above the Hudson River under a dramatic sky

Energy

A power company planned to hollow out a mountain on the Hudson River for a giant hydro plant, and the 17-year battle to stop it accidentally created modern environmental law

By Bruno Teles · July 2, 2026

A metal Slinky coil caught mid-motion walking down a set of wooden stairs

Curiosities

A navy engineer accidentally knocked a spring off his desk in 1943, watched it stroll away across the floor, and turned it into a toy that sold hundreds of millions before it tore his own family apart

By Bruno Teles · July 2, 2026

A towering black wall of dust from the 1935 Dust Bowl storm rolling over a small Great Plains farm town

Energy & the Wild

On a spring afternoon in 1935 a mountain of dust two miles tall rolled across the Great Plains, turned day to pitch black, and made people believe the world was ending

By Bruno Teles · July 2, 2026

A Midwestern town flattened into splintered wood after the 1925 Tri-State Tornado under a dark churning sky

Science & Tech

In 1925 a single tornado tore 219 miles across three states in about three hours, killed 695 people, and hardly anyone saw it coming because forecasters were forbidden to say the word tornado

By Bruno Teles · July 2, 2026

The New Madrid earthquakes of 1811 shaking a frontier settlement beside the Mississippi River as boats pitch on churning water

Energy & the Wild

In the winter of 1811 a string of colossal earthquakes tore through the middle of America, made the Mississippi River appear to run backwards, and rang church bells a thousand miles away

By Bruno Teles · July 2, 2026

The streamlined boat-shaped Stanley Steamer racer speeding along a hard sand beach in 1906 throwing up a fine spray

Science & Tech

In 1906 a steam-powered car became the fastest thing on Earth, roaring down a Florida beach at nearly 128 miles an hour, faster than any gasoline car of its day

By Bruno Teles · July 2, 2026

A row of antique Edison nickel-iron battery cells in nickel-plated steel cases with screw terminals on top

Electric

Thomas Edison built a battery so nearly indestructible that cells made more than a hundred years ago still hold a charge, yet it lost the electric car to gasoline and was written off as a failure

By Bruno Teles · July 2, 2026

A flock of green and yellow Carolina parakeet birds perched in a misty cypress swamp in the eastern United States

Energy & the Wild

America once had its own wild parrot, a gold-and-green bird that flocked in the millions across the eastern states, and within a few decades of the hat trade discovering it, every last one was gone

By Bruno Teles · July 2, 2026

A recreation of Grover Cleveland's secret surgery aboard a yacht in 1893, surgeons around a reclining patient in a wood-panelled cabin

Science & Tech

In 1893 a sitting American president slipped aboard a yacht, had a cancerous tumor secretly cut out of his mouth at sea, and the country did not learn the truth for 24 years

By Bruno Teles · July 2, 2026

The abandoned streets and boarded houses of Times Beach, Missouri awaiting demolition

Energy

A Missouri town paid a man to spray oil on its dusty roads, never knowing it was laced with one of the deadliest chemicals known, and the whole town had to be bought out and wiped off the map

By Bruno Teles · July 2, 2026

The Mars Climate Orbiter spacecraft approaching the red planet against black space

Science & Tech

NASA lost a 327 million dollar spacecraft at Mars because one team wrote its numbers in metric units and another read them in imperial, and no one caught the mistake until it was gone

By Bruno Teles · July 2, 2026

A vintage engraving of winged bat-men on the Moon, the imagery of the 1835 Great Moon Hoax

Curiosities

In 1835 a New York newspaper convinced the whole city that an astronomer had spotted forests, unicorns and flying bat-men living on the surface of the Moon, and it became the best-selling paper on Earth

By Bruno Teles · July 2, 2026

An infrared view of a huge methane plume billowing from the Aliso Canyon gas facility above Los Angeles

Energy

A single old well above Los Angeles blew out and spewed an invisible river of gas for nearly four months, becoming the largest methane leak in American history and driving thousands of families from their homes

By Bruno Teles · July 2, 2026

A heath hen booming with inflated orange neck sacs on a grassy heath

Energy & the Wild

Americans fought to save the heath hen with one of the first wildlife refuges ever created, and still had to stand and watch as the whole species dwindled to a single bird named Booming Ben

By Bruno Teles · July 2, 2026

The large industrial deep-sea ship Hughes Glomar Explorer at sea, used in Project Azorian

Curiosities

The CIA built a giant ship and told the world a billionaire was mining the seafloor, when really it was a cover story to steal a sunken Soviet submarine from three miles down

By Bruno Teles · July 2, 2026

The vast Sedan crater blasted into the Nevada desert by a Project Plowshare nuclear test

Science & Tech

The United States seriously tried to dig canals and harbors with nuclear bombs, blasting a crater the size of a stadium into the Nevada desert and coming within a whisker of nuking the coast of Alaska

By Bruno Teles · July 2, 2026

A geyser of gas and water erupting from the ground during the Hutchinson gas explosions

Energy

Natural gas escaped from a storage cavern and traveled seven miles underground before erupting in geysers of fire in a Kansas town, and no one could work out how until it was too late

By Bruno Teles · July 2, 2026

The Hubble Space Telescope in orbit above the blue curve of the Earth

Science & Tech

NASA launched the most powerful telescope ever built and discovered its mirror was ground to precisely the wrong shape, so astronauts had to fly up and fit the Hubble with contact lenses

By Bruno Teles · July 2, 2026

An artist's view of a brilliant cosmic ray streaking down over the dark Utah desert sky

Science & Tech

In 1991 a single invisible particle slammed into the sky over Utah carrying the energy of a fast-pitched baseball, and physicists still cannot explain what in the universe could have made it

By Bruno Teles · July 2, 2026

The blue mirror-glass facade of the John Hancock Tower reflecting the Boston sky

Industry & Mega-Builds

Boston's tallest skyscraper was an award-winning masterpiece that started raining 500-pound windowpanes onto the street, and for years it was wrapped in so much plywood that people called it the Plywood Palace

By Bruno Teles · July 2, 2026

A young 1970s engineer holding the first bulky prototype digital camera with a cassette recorder in a Kodak lab

Science & Tech

A 24-year-old engineer at Kodak invented the world's first digital camera in 1975, and his bosses buried it because they were terrified it would kill the film that made them rich

By Bruno Teles · July 2, 2026

The completed Shoreham nuclear plant beside Long Island Sound, silent and never operating

Energy

Long Island built a nuclear power plant for six billion dollars, licensed it and loaded the fuel, then sold the whole thing to the state for one dollar without ever selling a watt of its power

By Bruno Teles · July 2, 2026

A man bending to turn the hand crank of an early automobile on a snowy Detroit street around 1910

Electric

A man stopped on a Detroit bridge to crank a stranger's stalled car, the handle kicked back and killed him, and his death pushed Cadillac to build the electric starter that doomed the hand crank

By Bruno Teles · July 2, 2026

An aerial view of the grassy mounds of the former Fresh Kills landfill on Staten Island, now Freshkills Park

Industry & Mega-Builds

Fresh Kills on Staten Island was the largest garbage dump on Earth, a mound of trash visible from space, and New York is turning it into a park nearly three times the size of Central Park

By Bruno Teles · July 2, 2026

The Kinzua Bridge, a towering iron railroad viaduct spanning a forested Pennsylvania gorge

Industry & Mega-Builds

For over a century the Kinzua Bridge in Pennsylvania was one of the tallest railroad bridges on Earth, until a tornado tore half of it down in seconds in 2003, minutes after the repair crew went home

By Bruno Teles · July 2, 2026

Lava from Kilauea glowing near the Puna Geothermal Venture plant in Hawaii at night

Energy

Hawaii built its only geothermal plant to harvest the heat of an active volcano, and in 2018 that volcano nearly destroyed the Puna Geothermal Venture as lava buried its wells and swallowed the neighborhood next door

By Bruno Teles · July 2, 2026

Firefighters outside the burning Cocoanut Grove, the deadly 1942 Boston nightclub fire

Curiosities

In 1942 a fire tore through a packed Boston nightclub in minutes, and the Cocoanut Grove fire killed 492 people, then rewrote the safety rules that now protect everyone who walks into a public building

By Bruno Teles · July 2, 2026

The B Reactor building at the Hanford Site in the Washington desert near the Columbia River

Energy

A secret city in the Washington desert made the plutonium that destroyed Nagasaki, and today Hanford is the most contaminated place in America, home to the country's largest and most expensive cleanup

By Bruno Teles · July 2, 2026

The Edmund Fitzgerald, a huge Great Lakes ore freighter, battered by towering waves in a Lake Superior storm

Industry & Mega-Builds

The Edmund Fitzgerald was the biggest ship on the Great Lakes, then on a stormy night in 1975 it vanished into Lake Superior with all 29 crew and no distress call, and no one is sure why

By Bruno Teles · July 2, 2026

The Diablo Canyon nuclear power plant, with its containment domes on the rugged California coast above the Pacific

Energy

California spent decades leading America's fight against nuclear power, then a heat wave and two mothers who ran the reactors helped convince the state to save Diablo Canyon instead of closing it

By Bruno Teles · July 2, 2026

The Arecibo Observatory, a 305-meter radio telescope dish set in a green sinkhole in Puerto Rico

Science & Tech

For 53 years the giant Arecibo dish in Puerto Rico found the first planets beyond our sun and beamed a message to the stars, then in 2020 its 900-ton platform tore loose and crashed into the jungle

By Bruno Teles · July 1, 2026

The towering red 14-story concentration mill of Kennecott, Alaska standing against a glacier and snowy peaks

Industry & Mega-Builds

Prospectors found the richest copper ever discovered on an Alaskan peak, and Kennecott built a town and a 196-mile railroad across glaciers to reach it, then abandoned it in a single day when the ore ran out

By Bruno Teles · July 1, 2026

A wind turbine rising over the rebuilt prairie town of Greensburg, Kansas at sunset

Energy

An EF5 tornado flattened 95 percent of Greensburg, Kansas and killed eleven people in 2007, and the town rebuilt itself as the greenest in America, now powered entirely by the wind that destroyed it

By Bruno Teles · July 1, 2026

Rotor sails, tall white spinning cylinders, on the deck of a modern cargo ship at sea

Energy

A German engineer bolted two spinning towers to a ship in 1924 and sailed it to New York, then cheap oil buried the idea, until rotor sails came back to cut cargo emissions

By Bruno Teles · July 1, 2026

The paddle steamer General Slocum on fire on the East River in 1904 with people crowding the decks

Curiosities

A church picnic put 1,300 mothers and children on the General Slocum in 1904, until a fire and life preservers stuffed with iron made the East River New York's deadliest day before 9/11

By Bruno Teles · July 1, 2026

The Green Bank Telescope rising over the National Radio Quiet Zone in West Virginia at dawn

Science & Tech

In America's most wired age, a 13,000 square mile radio quiet zone bans WiFi and cell phones so one West Virginia telescope can hear a whisper from across the universe

By Bruno Teles · July 1, 2026

A giant Apollo-era Saturn V rocket lifting off on a massive column of fire and smoke

Industry & Mega-Builds

The Saturn V remains the most powerful machine that ever carried humans, five giant engines burning 15 tons of fuel a second to fling astronauts at the Moon

By Bruno Teles · July 1, 2026

A sleek black SR-71 Blackbird reconnaissance jet flying high above the clouds

Science & Tech

The SR-71 Blackbird flew so fast that its answer to an incoming missile was simply to accelerate away, and in 24 years not one was ever shot down

By Bruno Teles · July 1, 2026

A large antique Fresnel lens of concentric glass prism rings glowing inside a lighthouse lantern room

Science & Tech

A frail French physicist sliced a giant lens into rings of glass, and his Fresnel lens turned feeble lighthouse lamps into beams that could be seen 20 miles out to sea

By Bruno Teles · July 1, 2026

The tiled interior of the Holland Tunnel with early automobiles and rows of ceiling lights

Industry & Mega-Builds

The Holland Tunnel solved a deadly new problem, how to stop a mile of car exhaust from poisoning drivers underwater, and it is named for the chief engineer the strain killed before it opened

By Bruno Teles · July 1, 2026

A colossal Victorian steam engine with a huge flywheel in an 1876 exhibition hall, the Corliss engine

Energy

When a US president and the emperor of Brazil turned two cranks in 1876, they woke the Corliss engine, a silent iron giant that single-handedly powered an entire world's fair

By Bruno Teles · July 1, 2026

A grey welded steel Liberty ship under construction in a 1940s wartime shipyard with cranes

Industry & Mega-Builds

In the Second World War, American shipyards run largely by women welders learned to build a giant Liberty ship in weeks, and once, as a stunt, in under five days

By Bruno Teles · July 1, 2026

A devastated coastal town of splintered wooden houses after the 1900 Galveston hurricane

Industry & Mega-Builds

The 1900 Galveston hurricane killed thousands and nearly erased a Texas city from the map, so its survivors did something astonishing, they lifted the entire city into the air and walled out the sea

By Bruno Teles · July 1, 2026

A large 1930s American schoolhouse in an oil-boom town, evoking the site of the New London School explosion

Energy

In 1937 an odorless gas leak blew up a Texas school and killed nearly 300 children, and the New London School explosion is the reason natural gas has its rotten-egg smell today

By Bruno Teles · July 1, 2026

A large early electric dynamo generator driven by a steam engine inside an 1880s power station, like Pearl Street Station

Energy

When Edison switched on his Pearl Street Station in 1882, he did not just light a few blocks of Manhattan, he invented the electric utility and the whole business of selling power

By Bruno Teles · July 1, 2026

A large 18th-century beam steam engine of the kind James Watt built, with a rocking beam, brass fittings and iron cylinder

Energy

James Watt did not invent the steam engine, but the fix he dreamed up while repairing a broken model made steam power efficient enough to drive the Industrial Revolution

By Bruno Teles · July 1, 2026

A 19th-century Bessemer converter erupting in a fountain of orange and white sparks inside a dark steel mill

Industry & Mega-Builds

Almost no one has heard of the Bessemer process, but this sparky trick for making cheap steel in 1856 quietly built the railways, bridges and skyscrapers of the modern world

By Bruno Teles · July 1, 2026

A collection of glossy dark brown and amber vintage Bakelite objects, an old radio, telephone handset, buttons and jewelry

Science & Tech

In 1907 a chemist named Leo Baekeland cooked up Bakelite, the first material never found in nature, and without quite meaning to he launched the age of plastic

By Bruno Teles · July 1, 2026

An enormous early commercial microwave oven from the late 1940s, a tall metal cabinet with dials in a mid-century kitchen

Curiosities

A radar engineer felt a chocolate bar melt in his pocket in 1945, got curious instead of annoyed, and that stray observation became the microwave oven in nearly every kitchen

By Bruno Teles · July 1, 2026

A 19th-century canal with wooden barge boats pulled by mules on a towpath beside a small town, evoking the Erie Canal

Industry & Mega-Builds

Critics mocked the Erie Canal as Clinton's Folly, a mad ditch dug across 363 miles of wilderness, and then it opened the American interior and made New York the nation's greatest city

By Bruno Teles · July 1, 2026

A 19th-century inventor's cluttered workbench covered with lumps of raw rubber, jars of sulfur and tools, evoking Charles Goodyear's experiments

Science & Tech

Charles Goodyear spent his life and his family's fortune obsessed with fixing rubber, and he finally cracked it, only to die deeply in debt while others grew rich

By Bruno Teles · July 1, 2026

A long tunnel carved into thick blue-white glacial ice with a prefabricated hut inside, part of Camp Century under Greenland

Industry & Mega-Builds

The US Army built a nuclear-powered city called Camp Century inside the Greenland ice sheet to hide missiles from the Soviets, but the ice itself slowly crushed the whole thing

By Bruno Teles · July 1, 2026

An early 20th-century industrial air conditioning machine with metal cooling coils and pipes in a factory

Science & Tech

Willis Carrier did not invent air conditioning to keep people cool, he built it in 1902 to stop humidity from smudging the ink at a Brooklyn printing plant

By Bruno Teles · July 1, 2026

Nineteenth-century workers cutting blocks of ice from a frozen New England pond in winter, part of the ice trade

Curiosities

People called Frederic Tudor insane for wanting to cut ice from frozen Boston ponds and sell it in the tropics, and he built a global ice trade that made him a fortune

By Bruno Teles · July 1, 2026

A small 19th-century wooden town engulfed in a massive nighttime firestorm during the Peshtigo fire, walls of orange flame under a black sky

Curiosities

On the same night the Great Chicago Fire made headlines around the world, a far deadlier firestorm erased a Wisconsin town, and the Peshtigo fire was almost entirely forgotten

By Bruno Teles · July 1, 2026

A classic wooden San Francisco cable car climbing a very steep city street with the bay visible below

Industry & Mega-Builds

The San Francisco cable car was not built for charm or tourists, it was born because one man could not forget the sight of horses dying on a steep wet hill

By Bruno Teles · July 1, 2026

A crowded Victorian city street packed with horse-drawn carriages and carts during the horse manure crisis

Curiosities

Victorian cities were so buried in horse dung that experts feared a horse manure crisis would drown the streets, and then the automobile made the whole problem vanish

By Bruno Teles · July 1, 2026

Niagara Falls thundering over the cliff in clouds of mist with an old stone hydroelectric powerhouse on the riverbank

Energy

Nikola Tesla had been mocked and nearly ruined, but in 1895 his alternating current was chosen to harness Niagara Falls, and the modern electrical grid was born

By Bruno Teles · July 1, 2026

The old steel eyebar-chain Silver Bridge spanning a wide grey river between two towns under an overcast 1960s sky

Industry & Mega-Builds

A single crack no wider than a few millimeters, hidden deep inside one steel bar, dropped the Silver Bridge and dozens of Christmas shoppers into the Ohio River in under a minute

By Bruno Teles · July 1, 2026

A huge nuclear mushroom cloud from the Castle Bravo test rising over a Pacific atoll at dawn

Science & Tech

American scientists expected Castle Bravo to be a routine hydrogen bomb test, but a single mistake about lithium made it explode nearly three times too big and poison the Pacific

By Bruno Teles · July 1, 2026

The Chicago River flowing through downtown Chicago between skyscrapers and bridges under an overcast sky

Industry & Mega-Builds

In 1900 Chicago was poisoning itself with its own sewage, so its engineers did the unthinkable and reversed the entire Chicago River to make it flow backward, away from the lake

By Bruno Teles · July 1, 2026

The Onagawa nuclear plant on higher ground behind a tall concrete seawall as dark waves break against the Japanese coast

Energy

Closer to the 2011 earthquake than Fukushima, the Onagawa nuclear plant should have been doomed, but one engineer's stubborn insistence on a taller seawall decades earlier saved it

By Bruno Teles · July 1, 2026

Extreme close-up of a periodical cicada with striking red eyes and orange-veined transparent wings clinging to a green twig

Energy & the Wild

Every 13 or 17 years billions of periodical cicadas claw out of the ground across America all at once, scream for a few frantic weeks, mate, and vanish again for a generation

By Bruno Teles · July 1, 2026

The Ever Given, an enormous container ship, wedged diagonally across a narrow desert canal, its bow buried in the bank, blocking all traffic

Industry & Mega-Builds

A gust of wind turned one of the largest ships ever built sideways in the Suez Canal, and for six days the Ever Given jammed a tenth of world trade behind it

By Bruno Teles · July 1, 2026

Aerial view of the Bath County pumped storage upper reservoir held by a dam high in forested Appalachian mountains, with a lower lake in the valley

Energy

The biggest battery in America is not made of lithium but of two lakes on a Virginia mountain, and the Bath County pumped storage plant has quietly powered millions for forty years

By Bruno Teles · July 1, 2026

The Sultana disaster, an overcrowded 1860s paddle steamboat exploding and burning on the dark Mississippi River at night with men in the water

Curiosities

Thousands of Union soldiers survived the Civil War and its deadliest prison camps, then died within days of freedom when the overloaded steamboat Sultana blew apart on the Mississippi in 1865

By Bruno Teles · July 1, 2026

The Voyager 1 space probe with its golden dish antenna and long instrument booms drifting alone against the stars of interstellar space

Science & Tech

A 47-year-old spacecraft 15 billion miles away started sending home gibberish, and NASA engineers had to debug and reprogram Voyager 1 across a signal that takes almost a full day to arrive

By Bruno Teles · July 1, 2026

A woman smiling warmly in soft light, healthy and hopeful after a CRISPR sickle cell gene therapy transformed her life

Science & Tech

Victoria Gray spent her whole life crippled by the agony of sickle cell disease, until doctors rewrote the genes in her own blood with CRISPR and the pain simply stopped

By Bruno Teles · July 1, 2026

An enormous male northern elephant seal with a drooping snout rearing up and roaring on a California beach with surf behind

Energy & the Wild

Hunters shot the northern elephant seal down to perhaps 20 survivors on a single Mexican island by 1892, and from that tiny remnant the giant has clawed back to more than 200,000

By Bruno Teles · July 1, 2026

A California town engulfed by the Camp Fire under a dark orange smoke-filled sky, houses and pines burning as a road leads into the smoke

Energy

A single worn hook on a 97-year-old power line snapped one November morning in 2018 and started the Camp Fire, which killed 85 people and erased the town of Paradise in hours

By Bruno Teles · July 1, 2026

A huge crater torn in the concrete spillway of Oroville Dam with brown floodwater blasting sideways through the broken chute

Industry & Mega-Builds

A crater tore open the spillway of the tallest dam in America during a flood, and within days 188,000 people downstream of Oroville Dam were told to run for higher ground

By Bruno Teles · July 1, 2026

The Palisades nuclear plant with its containment dome on the wooded shore of Lake Michigan at dawn

Energy

Workers were tearing the Palisades nuclear plant apart for scrap when Michigan told them to reverse course and switch it back on, the first dead US reactor ever brought back to life

By Bruno Teles · July 1, 2026

A gloved scientist examines dark grains from asteroid Bennu in a sealed laboratory chamber under bright light

Science & Tech

NASA flew billions of miles to scoop a few spoonfuls of a dark asteroid called Bennu, and the dust came back carrying almost every ingredient life needs to begin

By Bruno Teles · July 1, 2026

The Moss Landing battery storage facility on fire at dusk with a huge dark smoke plume rising over the California coast

Energy

California built a giant battery at Moss Landing to prove clean power was safe, then it caught fire, emptied a town, and rained heavy metals on a wildlife estuary

By Bruno Teles · July 1, 2026

A Tachi Yokut man stands at the edge of the returned Tulare Lake at golden dusk, tule reeds along the flooded shore

Energy & the Wild

California spent a century draining Tulare Lake to grow cotton, then the storms of 2023 brought the vanished lake roaring back to drown the farms that killed it

By Bruno Teles · July 1, 2026

A huge glass convention building lit up at night beside a lake with small birds flying near the bright windows, a setting for bird collisions

Energy & the Wild

Nearly 1,000 migrating birds died in a single night against one Chicago building's glass

By Bruno Teles · July 1, 2026

Norman Borlaug, the agronomist credited with saving a billion lives, inspecting ripe wheat in a golden field

Science & Tech

A quiet plant breeder from Iowa is said to have saved a billion lives, and almost no one knows his name

By Bruno Teles · July 1, 2026

The Carbfix site at the Hellisheidi geothermal plant in Iceland, steam rising over a black lava field where CO2 is turned into stone

Energy

Iceland found a way to turn carbon dioxide into stone, and it happens in under two years instead of a thousand

By Bruno Teles · July 1, 2026

The Millennium Tower, a 58-story San Francisco glass high-rise, rising over the skyline as it keeps sinking and leaning

Industry & Mega-Builds

They paid millions for condos in the sky, then watched their luxury tower sink 18 inches and lean toward the street

By Bruno Teles · July 1, 2026

Karen Wetterhahn, a chemist, holding a small clear vial under a fume hood in a university chemistry laboratory

Science & Tech

A single drop of clear liquid soaked through Karen Wetterhahn's glove, and ten months later it took her life

By Bruno Teles · June 30, 2026

A 1948 Tucker 48 sedan with its distinctive central third headlight in a showroom

Industry & Mega-Builds

He built the safest car in America, then a courtroom destroyed his company

By Bruno Teles · June 30, 2026

Rescue crews searching the collapsed concrete rubble of the Sampoong Department Store in Seoul, 1995

Industry & Mega-Builds

They were warned the building was falling, and kept the doors open

By Bruno Teles · June 30, 2026

The Plumbbob manhole cover test site, a 1957 Nevada nuclear shaft capped with a steel plate, with instrument towers

Energy

Did a nuclear test fire a steel cap into space at 66 km/s?

By Bruno Teles · June 30, 2026

An ancient clay tablet covered in rows of Linear B syllabic symbols

Science & Tech

The architect who read a 3,000-year-old script the experts gave up on

By Bruno Teles · June 30, 2026

The Iron Bridge, a single-span cast-iron arch over the River Severn at Coalbrookdale, completed in 1779

Industry & Mega-Builds

The bridge that launched the Industrial Revolution, and ruined its maker

By Bruno Teles · June 30, 2026

The Cuyahoga River fire, an industrial river ablaze with flames and black smoke beside steel mills and a railroad bridge

Energy

The river so dirty it caught fire, and the day America finally noticed

By Bruno Teles · June 30, 2026

The Cardiff Giant, a ten-foot carved stone man lying in a pit, surrounded by Victorian onlookers

Curiosities

The stone giant that fooled America, and the fake of the fake

By Bruno Teles · June 30, 2026

The narrow Fenix rescue capsule emerging at a floodlit Chilean mine head as the Chilean miners are brought up

Energy

Given up for dead, then a note came up from half a mile down

By Bruno Teles · June 30, 2026

Garrett Morgan, an early 20th-century Black inventor, with his safety hood breathing device

Science & Tech

He saved lives in a smoke-filled tunnel, then was written out of the story

By Bruno Teles · June 30, 2026

Shelves of seed samples in the Vavilov seed bank in besieged Leningrad

Energy & the Wild

The scientists who starved to death surrounded by food

By Bruno Teles · June 30, 2026

The original 1893 Ferris Wheel towering over the Chicago World's Fair midway

Industry & Mega-Builds

The wheel built to out-Eiffel the Eiffel Tower, and the man it ruined

By Bruno Teles · June 30, 2026

The Telharmonium, a vast 1900s hall of electrical dynamos and a keyboard that streamed music over phone lines

Electric

The 200-ton machine that streamed music in 1906

By Bruno Teles · June 30, 2026

The Mechanical Turk, a turbaned wooden figure seated at a chess cabinet, an 18th-century automaton

Curiosities

The chess robot that beat Napoleon, and the man hidden inside it

By Bruno Teles · June 30, 2026

An ornate gas-lit Victorian underground station with a fountain, chandeliers and a grand piano, the Beach Pneumatic Transit beneath Broadway

Industry & Mega-Builds

The secret subway one man dug under Broadway in the dark

By Bruno Teles · June 30, 2026

A thorny devil lizard covered in conical spines standing on red Australian desert sand

Energy & the Wild

Meet the spiky lizard that drinks rainwater through its skin

By Bruno Teles · June 30, 2026

The Burj Khalifa towering over the Dubai skyline at dusk, the world's tallest building

Industry & Mega-Builds

The tallest building ever made was renamed at the last second after a crisis nearly sank Dubai

By Bruno Teles · June 30, 2026

A field of tall thin flat mounds built by magnetic termites all aligned the same way across a northern Australian plain

Energy & the Wild

These termites build flat mounds all facing the same way, as natural air conditioning

By Bruno Teles · June 30, 2026

A 1980s television showing a glitchy masked figure against a wavy background, evoking the Max Headroom hijack

Curiosities

Someone hijacked two Chicago TV stations in 1987, then vanished without a trace

By Bruno Teles · June 30, 2026

A forensic cotton swab sealed in a clear evidence tube on a steel lab table, central to the Phantom of Heilbronn case

Science & Tech

Police hunted a serial killer for 16 years, then found she was a woman in a swab factory

By Bruno Teles · June 30, 2026

A wide modern multi-lane underground highway tunnel with cars, like the Big Dig in Boston

Industry & Mega-Builds

To bury a city's highway, engineers froze the ground and ran up the biggest road bill in history

By Bruno Teles · June 30, 2026

A long red segmented Pelamis sea snake wave energy machine floating on ocean swells offshore

Energy

A giant red sea snake once floated off the coast turning waves into electricity

By Bruno Teles · June 30, 2026

A Welwitschia plant in the Namib desert, a low mass of long frayed strap-like leaves on bare gravel

Energy & the Wild

This desert plant grows just two leaves and lives for over a thousand years

By Bruno Teles · June 30, 2026

A dark computer screen glowing with cryptic code and a cicada symbol, evoking the Cicada 3301 puzzle

Curiosities

An anonymous group hid the hardest puzzle on the internet, and no one knows why

By Bruno Teles · June 30, 2026

An old coffee machine in a 1990s computer lab with a small early video camera on a tripod pointed at it, the first webcam

Science & Tech

The world's first webcam was invented just to watch a pot of coffee

By Bruno Teles · June 30, 2026

A frigatebird soaring with huge angular black wings and a forked tail against a bright tropical sky

Energy & the Wild

This seabird flies for two months without landing, and would drown if it touched the sea

By Bruno Teles · June 30, 2026

A 1971 Boeing 727 on a rainy night tarmac with its rear airstair lowered, evoking the D.B. Cooper hijacking

Curiosities

A man in a suit hijacked a jet, took the cash, and jumped into the night forever

By Bruno Teles · June 30, 2026

A 1968 conference stage where Douglas Engelbart gave the Mother of All Demos before a darkened auditorium

Science & Tech

In 1968 one man showed off the mouse, hyperlinks and video calls in a single demo

By Bruno Teles · June 30, 2026

The Voxan Wattman electric record motorcycle at high speed on a long runway, rider tucked low

Electric

A silent electric motorcycle hit 455 km/h on the runway where the Space Shuttle used to land

By Bruno Teles · June 30, 2026

The Kryptos sculpture at CIA headquarters, a curved copper screen covered in encrypted letters

Curiosities

For 35 years a sculpture taunted the CIA's own codebreakers, then its last secret slipped out

By Bruno Teles · June 30, 2026

A tiny peacock spider with its iridescent rainbow abdominal fan raised in display

Energy & the Wild

This spider is smaller than a grain of rice, glows like a rainbow, and dances for its life

By Bruno Teles · June 30, 2026

A British submarine surfaced at night off the Spanish coast, the start of Operation Mincemeat in 1943

Curiosities

British spies fooled Hitler with a dead homeless man, a fake name, and a briefcase of lies

By Bruno Teles · June 30, 2026

The Niagara Falls power plant of 1895 beside the thundering falls, an early hydroelectric station

Electric

In 1895 engineers chained the world's mightiest waterfall and used it to light a city 20 miles away

By Bruno Teles · June 30, 2026

Barry Marshall, a 1980s doctor, holding a beaker of murky liquid culture in a laboratory

Science

Doctors laughed at his idea about ulcers, so he drank a glass of bacteria to prove them wrong

By Bruno Teles · June 30, 2026

The ornate first Eddystone Lighthouse, a tall wooden tower on a wave-battered rock off Plymouth

Industry & Mega-Builds

He wished to be inside his lighthouse in the greatest storm ever, and the sea granted it

By Bruno Teles · June 30, 2026

A cuttlefish changing the color and pattern of its skin to blend into a coral reef

Energy & the Wild

It is colorblind, yet it is the greatest quick-change artist the ocean has ever produced

By Bruno Teles · June 30, 2026

The vast black surface of the Pitch Lake in Trinidad, a natural lake of asphalt under a tropical sky

Energy

There is a lake of tar in Trinidad that you can walk across, and it never runs out

By Bruno Teles · June 30, 2026

A Heikegani crab shell patterned like the angry face of a samurai

Curiosities

A Japanese crab carries the face of an angry samurai, and the famous reason may be wrong

By Bruno Teles · June 30, 2026

Le Gentil, an 18th-century French astronomer, at a brass telescope beside a colonial observatory under a clear sky

Science

He sailed the world for 11 years to watch Venus, saw nothing, and came home a dead man

By Bruno Teles · June 30, 2026

A bowhead whale surfacing among Arctic sea ice, showing its huge bowed head

Energy & the Wild

Some of these Arctic whales were born before the lightbulb and are still alive today

By Bruno Teles · June 30, 2026

Ghost Army soldiers lifting a lightweight inflatable dummy tank in a field during World War II

Curiosities

They beat the Nazis with rubber tanks, sound effects and a thousand artists

By Bruno Teles · June 30, 2026

Stanislav Petrov, a lone Soviet officer, at a 1980s early-warning command center lit by alert screens

Science

His screen said five nuclear missiles were inbound, and he chose to call it a glitch

By Bruno Teles · June 30, 2026

Gustave Trouve riding a three-wheeled electric tricycle through a Paris street in 1881

Electric

He drove the world's first electric car in 1881, then was thrown into a pauper's grave

By Bruno Teles · June 30, 2026

A large container ship moving through the Suez Canal flanked by open desert

Industry & Mega-Builds

A sea-level ditch dug by hand across a desert still holds the world's trade hostage

By Bruno Teles · June 30, 2026

A narwhal surfacing among Arctic sea ice with its long straight spiral tusk pointing forward

Energy & the Wild

Its horn was sold as a unicorn's for centuries, but it is really a tooth that can feel the ocean

By Bruno Teles · June 30, 2026

A person riding a two-wheeled self-balancing Segway personal transporter along a city pavement

Electric

It was going to remake every city on Earth, then it became a punchline with two wheels

By Bruno Teles · June 30, 2026

A rigid winged Makani energy kite with rotors flying high in the sky on a long tether

Energy

Google built a flying wind turbine on a string, proved it worked, then let it go

By Bruno Teles · June 30, 2026

A southern cassowary with a glossy black body, bright blue and red neck and a tall casque, in rainforest

Energy & the Wild

It looks like a dinosaur, kicks like a weapon, and quietly plants an entire rainforest

By Bruno Teles · June 30, 2026

The long needle-shaped Buckeye Bullet electric streamliner racing across the white Bonneville Salt Flats

Electric

College students built an electric car and drove it to 341 miles an hour on a salt flat

By Bruno Teles · June 30, 2026

A dark deep-sea anglerfish with a glowing lure in front of its toothy mouth in black water

Energy & the Wild

It fishes with a living lantern, and its mate melts into its body forever

By Bruno Teles · June 30, 2026

The huge flat dark slab of the Hoba meteorite in a stone amphitheatre in the Namibian bush

Curiosities

A farmer's plough struck the biggest meteorite on Earth, and it had landed without leaving a crater

By Bruno Teles · June 30, 2026

A sleek silver TGV train blurring past at extreme speed on an open high-speed line

Electric

France pushed a train on ordinary rails to 574.8 km/h, almost catching the floating trains

By Bruno Teles · June 30, 2026

Workers welding a huge steel section of the Big Inch pipeline across open country in 1943

Energy

U-boats were sinking America's oil tankers, so the country buried a 1,250-mile pipeline to beat them

By Bruno Teles · June 30, 2026

Workers on the deck of the Golden Gate Bridge under construction in 1936 with a safety net in the fog below

Industry & Mega-Builds

A net under the Golden Gate Bridge caught 19 falling men, who formed a club nobody wanted to join

By Bruno Teles · June 30, 2026

A tiny boxy 1970s Enfield 8000 electric city car parked on a British street

Electric

They laughed at this 48 mph electric car, until one beat a Lamborghini off the line

By Bruno Teles · June 30, 2026

A lone stone marker in a remote New Mexico forest clearing over the Project Gasbuggy nuclear test site

Energy

In 1967 the US set off a nuclear bomb underground to frack gas, and it worked too well to use

By Bruno Teles · June 30, 2026

The lone surviving concrete monolith of the St. Francis Dam in a wrecked canyon after the 1928 collapse

Industry & Mega-Builds

He inspected his dam and called it safe, twelve hours before it killed more than 400 people

By Bruno Teles · June 30, 2026

The elevated silver Trans-Alaska Pipeline zigzagging across Arctic tundra on metal support legs with mountains behind

Energy

Hot oil would have melted the Arctic ground and sunk the pipe, so engineers cooled the permafrost with thousands of heat pipes and let the line zigzag through earthquakes

By Bruno Teles · June 29, 2026

A long-nosed SCMaglev L0 Series bullet train speeding along an elevated U-shaped guideway in Japan

Electric

Japan built the fastest train on Earth, a 603 km/h machine that floats on superconducting magnets, and still cannot finish the track to run it on

By Bruno Teles · June 29, 2026

An aerial view of a huge hydroelectric dam and reservoir of the James Bay Project in the boreal forest of northern Quebec

Industry & Mega-Builds

Quebec reversed wild subarctic rivers to build one of the planet's biggest power systems, and flooded 11,000 square kilometres of Cree homeland to do it

By Bruno Teles · June 29, 2026

The snowy houses of the Drake Landing Solar Community with rows of solar thermal collectors on the garage roofs in winter

Energy

A Canadian town banked summer sunshine underground all year and used it to heat 52 homes through brutal winters, almost without fuel

By Bruno Teles · June 29, 2026

An electric tugboat pushing hard against the huge hull of a container ship in a port, white water at its bow

Electric

A little electric tugboat with a 70-tonne grip shoves the world's biggest ships around all day, then recharges over lunch

By Bruno Teles · June 29, 2026

A translucent bluish block of aerogel glowing like solid frozen smoke against a dark background

Science & Tech

A chemist won a bet in 1931 and created frozen smoke, the lightest solid on Earth, that now catches stardust and shields Mars rovers

By Bruno Teles · June 29, 2026

A Guam brown tree snake coiled and climbing along electrical power lines on a utility pole in a tropical setting

Energy & the Wild

A single stowaway snake ate almost every bird on a Pacific island, then started knocking out the power, and there is still no way to get rid of it

By Bruno Teles · June 29, 2026

A modern commuter train emerging from the deep Marmaray tunnel under the Bosphorus between Europe and Asia

Industry & Mega-Builds

Turkey spent a century dreaming of a tunnel under the Bosphorus, then digging it unearthed a lost harbour and 8,000 years of buried history

By Bruno Teles · June 29, 2026

The Yara Birkeland electric container ship sailing on a calm Norwegian fjord with no funnel or smoke

Electric

A Norwegian fertilizer giant built the world's first crewless, all-electric cargo ship to wipe out 40,000 diesel truck trips a year

By Bruno Teles · June 29, 2026

The James Webb Space Telescope deployed in deep space with its golden hexagonal mirror above the silver sunshield

Science & Tech

A $10 billion telescope had to unfold itself like origami a million miles from Earth, with 344 ways to fail and no one able to fix it

By Bruno Teles · June 29, 2026

The long concrete seawall and turbine powerhouse of the Sihwa Lake tidal power station with seawater rushing through

Energy

South Korea built a wall that turned a bay into a dead, poisoned lake, then fixed its mistake by making it the largest tidal power station on Earth

By Bruno Teles · June 29, 2026

The massive nine-ton revolving stone gate of Coral Castle standing between rough limestone walls in the Florida light

Curiosities

A heartbroken five-foot immigrant secretly carved 1,100 tons of stone by hand, alone and at night, and never let a soul see how he did it

By Bruno Teles · June 29, 2026

The Guoliang Tunnel, a rough rock road cut by hand into a vertical cliff with open windows letting daylight onto the floor

Industry & Mega-Builds

Cut off from the world by a sheer cliff, 13 villagers spent five years carving a road through solid mountain with hammers and chisels

By Bruno Teles · June 29, 2026

A Kashagan oil field production island of steel rising from a frozen Caspian Sea with a gas flare burning against a grey winter sky

Energy

Engineers spent more than $50 billion taming the world's most dangerous oilfield, then watched its own poison gas crack the pipelines apart within weeks

By Bruno Teles · June 29, 2026

A large warty cane toad on red Australian soil, one of millions of invasive cane toads

Energy & the Wild

Australia released 102 toads in 1935 to save its sugar crop, they failed, and now 200 million poisonous descendants are conquering the country

By Bruno Teles · June 29, 2026

The vast below-sea-level desert basin at the heart of the Qattara Depression Project

Energy

Engineers wanted to flood an Egyptian desert with the sea to make power forever, and one plan called for digging the canal with 213 nuclear bombs

By Bruno Teles · June 29, 2026

A deep timber-shored excavation shaft, the Oak Island money pit, on a wooded island

Curiosities

For 230 years people have dug into a Canadian island chasing buried treasure, at a cost of millions, six lives, and possibly nothing real

By Bruno Teles · June 29, 2026

A 1959 Henney Kilowatt electric car plugged in to charge in a suburban driveway

Electric

A battery company built a real electric production car in 1959 and sold most of them to power companies, fifty years before the EV boom

By Bruno Teles · June 29, 2026

The Great Wall of China snaking along a misty mountain ridge

Industry & Mega-Builds

The Great Wall is not one wall, you can't see it from space, and it repeatedly failed to keep invaders out

By Bruno Teles · June 29, 2026

A large Burmese python coiled in the sawgrass of the Florida Everglades

Energy & the Wild

Released pet snakes ate their way through 99% of the Everglades' mammals, and an army of hunters can barely dent them

By Bruno Teles · June 29, 2026

The glowing central tower of the Crescent Dunes solar plant ringed by mirrors in the desert

Energy

A billion-dollar solar tower built to store the sun in molten salt and run all night just sold out of bankruptcy for seven million

By Bruno Teles · June 29, 2026

A glowing sphere of ball lightning floating above a dark stormy field at night

Curiosities

A glowing ball that drifts through storms and even walls killed a scientist in 1753, and science still can't fully explain it

By Bruno Teles · June 29, 2026

A period portrait of Lewis Latimer at a draftsman's table with an early light bulb

Electric

He drew the patent for the telephone and made the light bulb cheap enough for everyone, yet the son of escaped slaves is barely remembered

By Bruno Teles · June 29, 2026

The Karakoram Highway clinging to a cliff high in the snow-capped mountains

Industry & Mega-Builds

The highest paved road on Earth cost about a thousand lives to carve through the mountains, and the peaks keep trying to swallow it back

By Bruno Teles · June 29, 2026

A vast murmuration of European starlings swirling against a dusk sky over North America

Energy & the Wild

One man released a few dozen starlings in Central Park in 1890, and today 200 million blanket North America, supposedly for the love of Shakespeare

By Bruno Teles · June 29, 2026

A 1970s nuclear pacemaker device beside a chest X-ray showing an implanted pacemaker

Energy

In the 1970s doctors put a speck of plutonium in people's chests to power their pacemakers, and some are still ticking decades later

By Bruno Teles · June 29, 2026

Harrison's H4 marine chronometer, the clock at the heart of the John Harrison longitude story

Curiosities

A self-taught carpenter solved the deadliest problem at sea with a clock, and the experts spent forty years refusing to pay him for it

By Bruno Teles · June 29, 2026

The 1900 Lohner-Porsche electric car displayed at the Paris World's Fair Palace of Electricity

Electric

The first car Ferdinand Porsche ever built was electric, with a motor inside each wheel, an idea the world is only now coming back to

By Bruno Teles · June 29, 2026

Black migrant workers drilling inside the dusty Hawks Nest Tunnel disaster site in 1930s West Virginia

Industry & Mega-Builds

They were sent to drill a mountain of pure silica with no masks while the bosses wore them, and hundreds died of dust in their lungs within five years

By Bruno Teles · June 29, 2026

An enormous nuclear mushroom cloud from the Tsar Bomba rising high over the Arctic

Curiosities

The Soviets built a bomb so vast it was almost useless as a weapon, its flash seen 1,000 km away, and the scientist who designed it turned against the bomb forever

By Bruno Teles · June 29, 2026

A vast Victorian brick power station beside the Thames at Deptford with tall chimneys

Electric

A young engineer barely out of his teens bet that electricity should come from giant distant power stations, and built the one that proved the whole modern grid right

By Bruno Teles · June 29, 2026

The long La Rance tidal barrage stretching across a wide estuary in Brittany with a road on top

Energy

France built the world's first tidal power station in 1966, running a city on the pull of the moon, and then almost no one ever copied it

By Bruno Teles · June 29, 2026

A large American bison bull standing on open Great Plains grassland under a wide sky

Energy & the Wild

Tens of millions of bison were shot down to barely a thousand in a single human lifetime, and the animal survives today only because a few unlikely people changed their minds

By Bruno Teles · June 29, 2026

The interior of the Laerdal Tunnel opening into a large cavern bathed in blue and gold light deep inside a Norwegian mountain

Industry & Mega-Builds

The world's longest road tunnel is so long it could hypnotise drivers to sleep, so engineers carved glowing blue caves into the mountain to keep them awake

By Bruno Teles · June 29, 2026

A huge slab-sided aircraft carrier made of ice floating in a grey wartime sea with planes on its deck

Curiosities

In the Second World War Britain seriously tried to build a giant, unsinkable aircraft carrier out of ice, and an eccentric inventor very nearly pulled it off

By Bruno Teles · June 29, 2026

A large industrial ammonia plant with tall towers and pipework at dusk, where nitrogen from the air becomes fertilizer

Energy

A single chemical reaction makes bread out of thin air and feeds half the world, yet the genius behind it also invented poison gas, and it now devours a chunk of the planet's energy

By Bruno Teles · June 29, 2026

The upper floors of the Empire State Building wreathed in fog with smoke pouring from a gash where a bomber struck in 1945

Curiosities

A bomber flew straight into the Empire State Building in 1945, and the most astonishing thing is that the tower barely flinched and a woman survived a 75-floor fall

By Bruno Teles · June 29, 2026

A 19th-century Black engineer in a workshop holding telegraph equipment with a steam train behind him, representing Granville Woods

Electric

A self-taught Black inventor found a way to let speeding trains warn each other of danger, then beat Thomas Edison in court twice, and still died poor and almost forgotten

By Bruno Teles · June 29, 2026

The long straight Afsluitdijk dam stretching to the horizon with the sea on one side and a calm lake on the other

Industry & Mega-Builds

The Dutch did not just hold back the sea, they erased an entire sea from the map, damming off the Zuiderzee with a 32 km wall and turning salt water into farmland

By Bruno Teles · June 29, 2026

The underwater steel legs of an offshore oil rig encrusted with mussels and anemones and surrounded by dense schools of fish

Energy & the Wild

Everyone assumed offshore oil rigs were marine dead zones, then a biologist dived under them and found some of the richest fish habitats on the planet

By Bruno Teles · June 29, 2026

The deep-red steel cantilever Forth Bridge spanning the Firth of Forth in Scotland with a train crossing

Industry & Mega-Builds

After a bridge collapse killed 75 people, terrified Scotland demanded a bridge that could never fall, and the Forth Bridge was deliberately over-built into an icon

By Bruno Teles · June 29, 2026

Ian Wright, an engineer in a hi-vis vest, standing beside a garbage truck with an electric powertrain in a workshop

Electric

Ian Wright helped found Tesla and then walked away, ending up not in supercars but in the unglamorous business of electrifying garbage trucks, where the fuel savings are biggest

By Bruno Teles · June 29, 2026

The Smith-Putnam wind turbine, a huge two-bladed steel machine on a lattice tower on a Vermont hilltop in 1941

Energy

In 1941 a giant two-bladed wind turbine on a Vermont hilltop fed a megawatt of power into the grid, decades ahead of its time, until a blade snapped off and killed the dream

By Bruno Teles · June 29, 2026

A husky sled dog team pulling a musher through a blizzard during the 1925 serum run, the world of Balto and Togo

Energy & the Wild

In 1925 a relay of sled dogs raced diphtheria serum 674 miles through Alaskan blizzards to save Nome, and the dog who did the least got the statue

By Bruno Teles · June 29, 2026

A respectful 1950s-style portrait evoking Henrietta Lacks, a young Black woman whose cells became immortal

Curiosities

Henrietta Lacks died of cancer in 1951, but a sample of her tumour taken without her consent became the first immortal human cells and quietly rebuilt modern medicine

By Bruno Teles · June 29, 2026

A man in uniform on horseback raising a sword at the ribbon during the Sydney Harbour Bridge opening in 1932

Industry & Mega-Builds

As the premier prepared to open the Sydney Harbour Bridge in 1932, a man in uniform rode out of the crowd on a horse and slashed the ribbon with a cavalry sword first

By Bruno Teles · June 29, 2026

The White Zombie, a plain white 1972 Datsun electric drag car, staged at a drag strip start line beside a muscle car

Electric

A rusty 1972 Datsun rebuilt in a garage as an electric drag car, the White Zombie, has spent decades beating Vipers and muscle cars off the line years before Tesla made electric cars cool

By Bruno Teles · June 29, 2026

Edwin Drake in a top hat standing before a wooden oil derrick beside a creek, the first oil well at Titusville in 1859

Energy

Edwin Drake drilled the first oil well in 1859 and gave the world the petroleum age, then failed to patent his idea, lost his savings, and died so poor the state had to grant him a pension

By Bruno Teles · June 29, 2026

Old Tom the killer whale slapping his tail beside a small wooden whaleboat in a calm Australian bay at dawn

Energy & the Wild

For decades a wild killer whale named Old Tom herded whales into an Australian bay for human hunters, who repaid him under a strange pact called the Law of the Tongue, until one broken promise ended it

By Bruno Teles · June 29, 2026

The Voyager Golden Record, a gleaming gold disc with engraved cover, mounted on a spacecraft against deep starry space

Curiosities

While making a golden record to introduce Earth to the stars, Carl Sagan and Ann Druyan fell in love, so they recorded her brainwaves and heartbeat onto the Voyager Golden Record now flying through interstellar space

By Bruno Teles · June 29, 2026

The Kowloon Walled City as one dense monolithic block of stacked buildings covered in wires, pipes and laundry under a hazy sky

Industry & Mega-Builds

Tens of thousands of people once lived stacked inside one ungoverned block in Hong Kong, the Kowloon Walled City, the densest place humanity ever built, and it worked far better than its lawless legend suggests

By Bruno Teles · June 28, 2026

Henrik Fisker presenting a sleek silver electric luxury sedan on an auto show stage under spotlights

Electric

Henrik Fisker drew the curves that made the Aston Martin DB9 a legend, then bet everything on electric cars and went bankrupt twice, the second time owing close to a billion dollars

By Bruno Teles · June 28, 2026

The Nebra sky disc, a round blue-green bronze disc inlaid with gold symbols of a sun, crescent moon and scattered stars

Curiosities

The Nebra sky disc is a 3,600-year-old bronze map of the heavens, a Bronze Age astronomical calendar found by looters and recovered in a police sting

By Bruno Teles · June 28, 2026

An aerial view of Palm Jumeirah, the palm-tree-shaped artificial island off Dubai, with its trunk, fronds and crescent breakwater in turquoise sea

Industry & Mega-Builds

Dubai built Palm Jumeirah, an island shaped like a palm tree, out of nothing but sand sprayed from the sea by GPS and held together by a curving wall of rock

By Bruno Teles · June 28, 2026

A rider at a bright green Gogoro GoStation kiosk on a Taiwan street, lifting a battery out of an electric scooter to swap it

Electric

In Taiwan, electric scooters do not charge: their riders pull into a green kiosk, swap two drained Gogoro batteries for fresh ones in seconds, and ride away

By Bruno Teles · June 28, 2026

An aerial view of the vast terraced spiral of the Bingham Canyon open-pit copper mine, a kilometre deep, under a clear sky

Industry & Mega-Builds

Bingham Canyon is the largest hole humans have ever dug, a mine a kilometre deep and visible from space, into which the biggest landslide in mining history once fell

By Bruno Teles · June 28, 2026

A compressed air energy storage plant at the surface, with compressor buildings and pipes above an underground salt cavern

Energy

Compressed air energy storage banks surplus electricity by pumping air into vast underground salt caverns, then lets it rush back out through a turbine when the grid runs short

By Bruno Teles · June 28, 2026

A sleek low flat solar-panelled race car driving along an empty outback highway under bright sun in the World Solar Challenge

Electric

Every couple of years, sleek cars powered by nothing but sunlight race 3,000 kilometres across the Australian outback in the World Solar Challenge

By Bruno Teles · June 28, 2026

A close-up of a bombardier beetle on a leaf, its abdomen tip raised, ready to fire its defensive spray

Energy & the Wild

The bombardier beetle brews two chemicals into an explosive reaction and fires a boiling, stinging spray from its abdomen in machine-gun pulses, aimed almost anywhere

By Bruno Teles · June 28, 2026

A curved Damascus steel sword blade showing its rippling watery damask surface pattern in close detail

Curiosities

Damascus steel made swords of legendary sharpness, then the recipe vanished around 1750, and centuries later scientists found carbon nanotubes hidden inside the blades

By Bruno Teles · June 28, 2026

The blue tunnel of the Large Hadron Collider curving away into the distance, lined with its huge cylindrical magnets

Industry & Mega-Builds

The Large Hadron Collider is the biggest machine humanity has built, a 27-kilometre ring colder than space that smashes protons together to study the smallest things there are

By Bruno Teles · June 28, 2026

A floating ocean thermal energy platform on a calm tropical sea with a large pipe descending into deep blue water

Energy

The sea stores the sun's heat near its surface, and ocean thermal energy turns the gap between that warm water and the cold depths into round-the-clock electricity

By Bruno Teles · June 28, 2026

The black and white electric Volkswagen ID.R race car with a huge rear wing climbing a mountain road on Pikes Peak

Electric

On the thin-aired road up Pikes Peak, an electric Volkswagen beat a century of petrol cars to set the fastest time ever, because its motors never gasped for breath

By Bruno Teles · June 28, 2026

NASA's massive tracked crawler-transporter carrying a mobile launch platform and rocket along a wide gravel road toward the launch pad

Industry & Mega-Builds

The most powerful rockets begin their journey to space at one mile per hour, riding a 2,700-tonne NASA crawler-transporter built to keep them perfectly upright

By Bruno Teles · June 28, 2026

The white electric car ferry Ampere crossing a calm Norwegian fjord with steep green mountains rising on either side

Electric

Norway answered a government challenge with the world's first all-electric ferry, a silent ship that glides across its deepest fjord on a battery the size of a small power plant

By Bruno Teles · June 28, 2026

A vividly colored peacock mantis shrimp with bright green, red and blue body and large eyes on a coral reef

Energy & the Wild

The peacock mantis shrimp throws the fastest punch in nature, so fast it boils the water into a flash of light briefly hotter than the surface of the sun

By Bruno Teles · June 28, 2026

The Pipistrel Velis Electro electric aircraft, a small white two-seat plane, parked on an airfield

Electric

A small Slovenian company beat Boeing and Airbus to the first electric aircraft ever certified to fly, a quiet two-seat trainer that recharges between flying lessons

By Bruno Teles · June 28, 2026

The stainless steel Gateway Arch in St. Louis rising 630 feet above the city against a blue sky

Industry

When the final piece of the Gateway Arch would not fit, St. Louis firefighters hosed one leg with cold water to shrink it while jacks forced the gap open

By Bruno Teles · June 28, 2026

Glowing orbs of the Hessdalen lights hovering over a dark snowy Norwegian valley at night

Curiosities

For forty years scientists have aimed cameras and radar at the Hessdalen lights over a Norwegian valley, and the best explanation is that the ground itself is a battery

By Bruno Teles · June 28, 2026

A space solar power satellite with vast panels in orbit above Earth, beaming energy down to the planet

Energy

A billionaire quietly funded a decade of space solar power research, and in 2023 a Caltech team beamed sunlight down from orbit to Earth for the first time in history

By Bruno Teles · June 28, 2026

A wild bottlenose dolphin surfacing near fishermen with cast nets in the lagoon at Laguna, Brazil

Energy & the Wild

The Laguna dolphins of southern Brazil have hunted alongside human fishermen for more than a century, herding fish to the nets and reading a partnership taught on both sides

By Bruno Teles · June 28, 2026

The Aptera, a sleek teardrop-shaped three-wheeled solar electric car parked in sunshine

Electric

Two engineers built a three-wheeled car so efficient it can run on sunlight for the daily commute, watched their company go bankrupt, then bought it back to try again as Aptera

By Bruno Teles · June 28, 2026

The Antonov An-225 Mriya, a vast six-engined cargo aircraft, taking off against a wide sky

Industry

The Antonov An-225 was the largest plane ever built, a six-engined giant made to carry a space shuttle, and it was destroyed in its hangar in the opening days of Russia's invasion

By Bruno Teles · June 28, 2026

Annie Edson Taylor in Victorian dress standing beside the wooden barrel she rode over Niagara Falls in 1901

Curiosities

A 63-year-old schoolteacher, broke and afraid of the poorhouse, climbed into a padded barrel and went over Niagara Falls to get rich, and Annie Edson Taylor became the first to survive it

By Bruno Teles · June 28, 2026

A zombie ant fungus stalk growing from the head of a dead carpenter ant clamped to a leaf in a rainforest

Energy & the Wild

A zombie ant fungus marches carpenter ants to a precise leaf to bite down and die, and the strangest part is that it never even touches the brain it seems to control

By Bruno Teles · June 28, 2026

Steam rising from The Geysers geothermal field power plants in the forested Mayacamas Mountains of California

Energy

The Geysers, the biggest geothermal field on Earth, was running out of steam, until a nearby city began pumping its treated sewage 40 miles uphill to turn the dirtiest water into clean power

By Bruno Teles · June 28, 2026

The cherry-red Tesla Roadster in space with a spacesuited Starman dummy at the wheel, Earth behind

Electric

SpaceX needed a dummy weight for its first giant rocket, so Elon Musk strapped in his own electric Tesla Roadster and a spacesuited mannequin, and the car is still orbiting the Sun

By Bruno Teles · June 28, 2026

The Leaning Tower of Pisa tilting against a blue sky, the white marble bell tower in its grassy square

Industry

An engineer saved the Leaning Tower of Pisa from collapse by doing the one thing that sounds insane, digging soil out from under its higher side until it leaned back

By Bruno Teles · June 28, 2026

A small dull-grey sphere of plutonium, the demon core, on a laboratory bench under harsh light

Curiosities

The same sphere of plutonium killed two scientists a year apart, each by a slip of the hand, and the men who built it called it the demon core

By Bruno Teles · June 28, 2026

The capsized Costa Concordia cruise ship lying on its side beside the island of Giglio before the salvage

Industry

For 30 months a South African salvage master and 500 workers fought to roll the wrecked Costa Concordia upright, the largest ship ever lifted off the seabed in one piece

By Bruno Teles · June 28, 2026

An open page of the Voynich manuscript covered in unknown handwriting and a strange plant drawing, the book no one can read

Curiosities

The greatest codebreakers in history, the people who cracked the ciphers that won world wars, were all defeated by a single 600-year-old book no one can read

By Bruno Teles · June 28, 2026

Rows of long parabolic mirror troughs in the Egyptian desert, evoking Frank Shuman's solar plant of 1913 near Cairo

Energy

A working solar power station was already pumping water from the Nile in the Egyptian desert in 1913, decades before the world believed solar power could work

By Bruno Teles · June 28, 2026

An 1830s passenger boat on the Neva in St Petersburg with no funnel or smoke, evoking Jacobi's electric boat

Electric

Decades before the electric car, a battery-powered boat was already carrying passengers up a Russian river in front of the Tsar, the first time electricity ever moved people

By Bruno Teles · June 28, 2026

Aerial view of the Oresund Bridge crossing the sea toward an artificial island where it descends into a tunnel

Industry

A bridge between two countries dives into the sea and becomes a tunnel halfway across, and the island of rubble it leaves behind has turned into an accidental nature reserve

By Bruno Teles · June 28, 2026

A close-up of a common vampire bat roosting, an animal that shares blood with hungry roostmates

Energy & Nature

The vampire bat, a creature of horror films, turns out to be one of the most generous mammals alive, giving starving neighbours a life-saving meal and remembering who pays it back

By Bruno Teles · June 28, 2026

A vast cavern of illuminated stalactites with an organ console, the Great Stalacpipe Organ in Luray Caverns

Curiosities

The world's largest musical instrument is not an organ or a piano but an entire cave, its ancient stalactites tuned and wired to a keyboard by one man over three years

By Bruno Teles · June 28, 2026

An early 1900s businessman in a suit standing in the turbine hall of an electric power station, like Samuel Insull

Energy

The man who made electricity cheap enough for everyone built the modern power grid, then became the most hated businessman in America when his empire collapsed

By Bruno Teles · June 28, 2026

A low yellow hand-built electric sports car, the AC Propulsion tzero, in a California workshop

Electric

A brilliant engineer built a screaming-fast electric sports car by hand in a California workshop, the carmakers ignored it, and it quietly gave birth to Tesla

By Bruno Teles · June 28, 2026

A World War Two Mulberry harbour off the Normandy coast with floating roadways, concrete breakwaters and ships unloading

Industry

Unable to capture a port, the Allies built two entire harbours in secret and towed them across the Channel to keep the D-Day invasion alive

By Bruno Teles · June 28, 2026

A honeybee on honeycomb surrounded by other bees, performing the waggle dance to share directions

Energy & Nature

A honeybee tells its hivemates the exact compass bearing and distance to flowers by dancing in the dark, and one man spent 50 years learning to read it

By Bruno Teles · June 28, 2026

A magnetic compass lying on cracked Arctic sea ice, its needle pointing toward the wandering magnetic north pole

Curiosities

The north your compass points to is not the real North Pole, and it is sprinting across the Arctic toward Siberia fast enough to break the maps

By Bruno Teles · June 28, 2026

The Larderello geothermal field in Tuscany, white steam rising from vents and cooling towers among green hills

Energy

The entire geothermal industry began in 1904 with five light bulbs glowing in a Tuscan valley so hellish it is said to have inspired Dante

By Bruno Teles · June 28, 2026

A 1972 Buick Skylark sedan with its hood open showing the experimental hybrid drive built by Victor Wouk

Electric

In 1974 an engineer built a hybrid that doubled the mileage and cut emissions to a tenth, and a single government official killed it on principle

By Bruno Teles · June 28, 2026

The giant Victorian steamship SS Great Eastern paying out a transatlantic cable on the open ocean

Industry

The largest ship ever built was a famous flop, until it found its purpose laying the cable that shrank the Atlantic from ten days to a few minutes

By Bruno Teles · June 28, 2026

A live salmon flying out of the end of a salmon cannon tube above a river beside a concrete dam

Energy & Nature

To get salmon over the dams that block them, engineers fire the live fish through a misted tube at 22 mph, using a machine first built to move apples

By Bruno Teles · June 28, 2026

A young Judean date palm tree with green fronds grown from a 2,000-year-old seed, standing in the desert at an Israeli kibbutz

Curiosities

A date seed sat in the ruins of Masada for 2,000 years, then a doctor coaxed it back to life and it grew into a tree that fruits again

By Bruno Teles · June 28, 2026

Cragside, a grand Victorian mansion on a wooded Northumberland hillside at dusk with a few windows glowing from early electric light

Energy

The man who armed the world's navies built the first house ever lit by water, a Victorian smart home run by its own lakes

By Bruno Teles · June 28, 2026

The first electric railway at the 1879 Berlin exhibition, a small locomotive pulling open cars of passengers

Electric

The age of electric trains began as a fairground ride in 1879, a tiny locomotive pulling crowds in circles around a Berlin exhibition

By Bruno Teles · June 28, 2026

A 1970s radio telescope at night under the Milky Way, the kind that detected the Wow signal

Curiosities

In 1977 a telescope caught a 72-second signal from space so strong an astronomer wrote Wow! beside it, and we have never heard it again

By Bruno Teles · June 28, 2026

The Lakeview Gusher of 1910, a towering black fountain of oil erupting from a wrecked derrick in the California desert

Energy

The biggest accidental oil spill in history gushed for 18 months in 1910, and at the time people came to admire it as a sign of good fortune

By Bruno Teles · June 28, 2026

The Akashi Kaikyo Bridge, a vast white suspension bridge with two towers spanning a strait in Japan at dusk

Industry

A magnitude 7 earthquake struck this Japanese bridge mid-construction, shoved its towers apart, and left it a metre longer than planned

By Bruno Teles · June 28, 2026

A Tasmanian tiger, or thylacine, with dark stripes across its back, standing in the Tasmanian bush

Energy & the Wild

The last Tasmanian tiger died in 1936, and a 10-billion-dollar company now says it can bring the species back, sort of

By Bruno Teles · June 28, 2026

A man riding the first electric vehicle, a battery-powered tricycle, on a Paris street in 1881

Electric

The first electric vehicle was a tricycle built in Paris in 1881, years before the petrol car, by an inventor who died forgotten in a pauper's grave

By Bruno Teles · June 28, 2026

The Mary Celeste, a two-masted brigantine, drifting deserted on a grey Atlantic under partial sail

Curiosities

A perfectly seaworthy ship was found drifting in the Atlantic in 1872 with its cargo intact and all ten people aboard gone without a trace

By Bruno Teles · June 28, 2026

The cooling towers of the Three Mile Island nuclear plant reflected in a calm river at dusk

Energy

The most infamous nuclear plant in America, Three Mile Island, is being switched back on to feed the AI boom, decades after its 1979 meltdown

By Bruno Teles · June 28, 2026

A high-speed train entering the Gotthard Base Tunnel portal at the foot of the towering Swiss Alps

Industry

Rather than climb over the Alps, engineers drove the world's longest tunnel straight through their base, under 2.3 kilometres of solid rock

By Bruno Teles · June 28, 2026

A wooden crate descending under a parachute over an Idaho mountain meadow during the 1948 beaver drop

Energy & the Wild

In 1948 Idaho dropped 76 beavers out of planes by parachute to rebuild its wetlands, and 75 of them landed and got straight to work

By Bruno Teles · June 28, 2026

The cigar-shaped Peral submarine of 1888 floating at a Spanish naval arsenal with sailors on its deck

Electric

A Spanish officer built a battery-powered submarine in 1888 that sank a cruiser in trials, and his own navy buried the project out of spite

By Bruno Teles · June 28, 2026

A vast Siberian forest with millions of trees flattened in a radial pattern by the 1908 Tunguska event

Curiosities

A blast 1,000 times Hiroshima flattened 80 million trees in Siberia in 1908, left no crater, and waited 19 years for anyone to come looking

By Bruno Teles · June 28, 2026

Manhattan skyline in total darkness during the 2003 Northeast blackout, lit only by car headlights

Energy

A tree brushed a power line in Ohio and a silent software bug did the rest, blacking out 55 million people across the Northeast

By Bruno Teles · June 28, 2026

The four giant seated colossi of Ramesses II carved into the cliff at Abu Simbel in golden desert light

Industry

To stop a dam from drowning Ramesses II's 3,000-year-old temple, engineers sawed it into 1,042 blocks and rebuilt it higher up the cliff

By Bruno Teles · June 28, 2026

One of Colombia's cocaine hippos half-submerged in a green tropical river at dusk

Energy & the Wild

Pablo Escobar kept four hippos in his private zoo, and 30 years after his death they have become a 200-strong invasion Colombia cannot stop

By Bruno Teles · June 28, 2026

An 1899 New York electric taxi, a black electric Hansom cab, on a busy city street with a lady boarding

Electric

In 1899 most of New York's taxis were electric, and a crane swapped their half-ton batteries for fresh ones in three minutes

By Bruno Teles · June 27, 2026

The 1883 Krakatoa eruption sending a towering black ash column over the sea at dawn with ships below

Curiosities

When Krakatoa exploded in 1883 it made the loudest sound in history, ruptured the eardrums of sailors 40 miles away, and was heard 3,000 miles across the sea

By Bruno Teles · June 27, 2026

Smoke rising from cracks in the ground along an empty road, the landscape of the Centralia mine fire

Energy

John Lokitis kept mowing the lawns and painting the benches of his hometown long after the Centralia mine fire had emptied it, because the coal beneath the streets has burned since 1962

By Bruno Teles · June 27, 2026

Scrapped streetcars piled in a junkyard at the heart of the streetcar conspiracy

Electric

Americans were told General Motors secretly ripped out their electric streetcars, and the real story behind the great streetcar conspiracy is stranger and sadder than the myth

By Bruno Teles · June 27, 2026

The Baker underwater nuclear test explosion at Bikini Atoll in 1946, an enormous white column of water and radioactive spray rising from the Pacific lagoon with navy warships visible below in the Marshall Islands

Wild

The US detonated 23 nuclear bombs on Bikini Atoll, told its 167 residents to leave for a few years, and 70 years later the islanders are still waiting to go home

By Bruno Teles · June 26, 2026

Deepwater Horizon oil rig burning in the Gulf of Mexico on April 21 2010, black smoke rising from the platform above the water before the rig sank

Energy

Eleven workers died when Deepwater Horizon exploded in the Gulf of Mexico in April 2010, and BP's emergency response plan for the spill listed walruses as local wildlife to protect

By Bruno Teles · June 26, 2026

The Spruce Goose H-4 Hercules flying boat built by Howard Hughes floating on Long Beach harbor in 1947

Industry

Congress accused Howard Hughes of defrauding the government on a wooden flying boat that never fought in the war it was built for, so on November 2, 1947 he climbed in the Spruce Goose, flew it once for twenty-six seconds at seventy feet, and put it back in its hangar forever

By Bruno Teles · June 26, 2026

Chico Mendes, Amazon rubber tapper and conservationist who organized resistance to deforestation, standing among tall rainforest trees in Xapuri, Acre, Brazil, in the late 1980s

Wild

A cattle rancher shot Chico Mendes dead on his porch in Brazil's Amazon in 1988, and the murder backfired so completely that 35 million acres the killers wanted to clear are still forest today

By Bruno Teles · June 26, 2026

Aerial view of Itaipu dam spanning the Parana River between Brazil and Paraguay, massive concrete structure with spillways releasing white water into the river gorge below

Energy

Brazil flooded the largest waterfall on earth to fill the Itaipu dam's reservoir in 1982, and a pedestrian bridge collapsed killing around 80 people who had come to say goodbye to Guaira Falls

By Bruno Teles · June 26, 2026

Eben Byers, Pittsburgh socialite and amateur golf champion, posed confidently in 1920s formal attire before Radithor destroyed his health

Curiosities

Eben Byers drank roughly 1,400 bottles of Radithor because his doctor prescribed the radioactive patent medicine as a health tonic, and over three years it dissolved his bones

By Bruno Teles · June 26, 2026

Vast field of silver heliostat mirrors angled toward a central tower rising above the Mojave Desert floor under an intense California sun

Energy

The Ivanpah solar plant was built in the Mojave to show concentrated solar power could replace fossil fuels, but biologists found birds igniting in midair above its 173,000 heliostats

By Bruno Teles · June 25, 2026

Rusted fishing boats stranded in sandy desert near Moynaq Uzbekistan where the Aral Sea once reached, skeletal hulls in dust under pale blue sky

Wild

Moscow planned to turn the Kazakh steppe into a cotton empire, drained the world's fourth-largest lake in forty years and left an entire fishing fleet rusting in the desert

By Bruno Teles · June 25, 2026

A kakapo parrot with bright apple-green feathers and a large round facial disc looking directly at the camera, perched on a mossy branch in a New Zealand fern forest

Wild

New Zealand's heaviest parrot fell to 51 survivors in 1995, and the conservation team that saved it gave every bird a name, a radio transmitter, and an individual recovery plan

By Bruno Teles · June 25, 2026

A northern spotted owl perched on a moss-covered branch in an ancient Pacific Northwest old-growth forest, large dark eyes facing the camera

Wild

Scientists fought for three decades to save the northern spotted owl from chainsaws, then a bigger, bolder cousin arrived from the East and did what the loggers never could

By Bruno Teles · June 25, 2026

Love Canal Niagara Falls New York abandoned toxic neighborhood, empty 1970s American suburban houses with warning signs, chemical waste remediation site

Industry

In 1978 Lois Gibbs discovered her children's school sat on a toxic waste dump in Niagara Falls, organized 900 families, and created the Superfund

By Bruno Teles · June 25, 2026

Mount Tambora volcanic caldera aerial view Indonesia, large circular crater with steep gray walls surrounded by tropical rainforest on Sumbawa island, remote volcanic landscape

Curiosities

In April 1815 a volcano in Indonesia erupted and erased summer from the Northern Hemisphere the following year, killing hundreds of thousands and inspiring Frankenstein

By Bruno Teles · June 25, 2026

Borneo tropical rainforest with traditional Dayak village settlement, thatched roof longhouses in jungle clearing, dense green canopy, misty highland landscape

Curiosities

In the 1950s the World Health Organization sprayed DDT across Borneo to fight malaria, killed the cats by accident, and ended up parachuting thousands of replacement cats into the jungle

By Bruno Teles · June 25, 2026

Seveso disaster 1976 ICMESA chemical factory northern Italy, industrial chemical plant with tall chimneys and vapor plume over Italian residential town, Lombardy countryside

Industry

In July 1976 the Seveso disaster released dioxin over a northern Italian town, covered children in lesions, and sent forty-one drums of contaminated soil on a nine-month disappearance across Europe

By Bruno Teles · June 25, 2026

Lake Nyos Cameroon deep blue-green volcanic crater lake surrounded by lush tropical highlands, misty morning, remote landscape

Curiosities

On August 21, 1986, a crater lake in Cameroon released a cloud of carbon dioxide that flowed silently down into the valleys below and killed 1,746 people in their sleep

By Bruno Teles · June 25, 2026

Emu War 1932 Western Australia wheat farm, large mob of emus moving through dry golden fields under clear Australian sky, flat outback landscape

Curiosities

In November 1932 the Australian Army sent soldiers with machine guns to Western Australia to kill 20,000 emus that were trampling wheat farms, and the emus won

By Bruno Teles · June 25, 2026

SS Eastland disaster 1915 Chicago River, steamship capsized on its side at the dock with rescuers alongside the overturned hull

Industry

On July 24, 1915, the steamship Eastland capsized in the Chicago River while still tied to the dock, killing 835 people going to a company picnic, and the Titanic disaster was partly why it happened

By Bruno Teles · June 25, 2026

Boston Molasses Flood 1919 North End waterfront neighborhood, large cylindrical steel molasses storage tank looming over cobblestone street near harbor in winter

Curiosities

On January 15, 1919, a five-story molasses tank burst in Boston's North End, swept 21 people to their deaths at 35 miles per hour, and the company spent six years blaming anarchists

By Bruno Teles · June 25, 2026

The lush green volcanic peak of Mount Pelée rising above the coastal city of Saint-Pierre in Martinique, Caribbean tropical landscape with dramatic clouds around the volcano summit

Curiosities

On May 8, 1902, Mount Pelée erupted above Saint-Pierre and killed thirty thousand people in under four minutes, and the one survivor inside the city walls was in a stone prison cell

By Bruno Teles · June 25, 2026

A large munitions ship on fire in Halifax Harbour sending thick black smoke into the winter sky of 1917, Canadian port buildings visible on the waterfront, dramatic documentary historical scene

Industry

On December 6, 1917, Vincent Coleman stayed at his telegraph key in Halifax to warn a passenger train that the burning ship nearby carried ammunition and was about to destroy half a city

By Bruno Teles · June 25, 2026

A large cargo ship sending enormous black smoke columns into the sky over an American harbor, massive industrial fire on the dockside in 1947, dramatic morning light over Texas City port

Industry

On April 16, 1947, all 28 members of the Texas City volunteer fire department walked toward a burning cargo ship not knowing it carried 2,300 tons of ammonium nitrate

By Bruno Teles · June 25, 2026

The Union Carbide pesticide factory in Bhopal India at dawn, industrial plant with smokestacks, empty streets below, moody dramatic light

Industry

In December 1984 the Bhopal gas disaster killed fifteen thousand people overnight in India, Union Carbide's CEO was arrested, posted bail, flew home, and was never brought back

By Bruno Teles · June 25, 2026

The Triangle Shirtwaist factory fire burning in the Asch Building on Washington Place in New York City on March 25 1911, smoke and flames pouring from upper floors, crowds gathering on the street below

Industry

On March 25, 1911, 146 garment workers died in eighteen minutes in a Manhattan factory fire, the owners were acquitted, and the 26-year-old social worker who watched them jump from the windows became Roosevelt's Secretary of Labor

By Bruno Teles · June 25, 2026

Aerial view of Johnstown Pennsylvania devastation after the 1889 flood, Conemaugh valley filled with debris and collapsed 19th century wooden buildings, wreckage of the dam failure

Industry

On May 31, 1889, a dam owned by a private fishing club whose members included Andrew Carnegie burst above Johnstown, Pennsylvania, and killed 2,209 people in minutes

By Bruno Teles · June 25, 2026

Windscale nuclear reactor complex with two large concrete cooling towers rising above the Cumberland coastal plain in northwest England, 1950s atomic age industrial facility before the 1957 fire

Energy

In October 1957 a fire burning inside a British nuclear reactor for three days poured radioactive iodine across northwest England, and Harold Macmillan ordered the government inquiry suppressed

By Bruno Teles · June 25, 2026

Medieval European city street with people in 15th century clothing dancing uncontrollably on cobblestones, Gothic cathedral and timber-framed buildings of Strasbourg in background, the dancing plague of 1518

Curiosities

In July 1518 in Strasbourg, a woman named Frau Troffea began dancing in a street and could not stop, and within a month four hundred people had joined her

By Bruno Teles · June 25, 2026

The Hindenburg airship on fire over Lakehurst New Jersey in 1937, massive zeppelin burning with orange and red flames, thick black smoke rising into the night sky

Industry

The Hindenburg was built to fly on American helium, but Harold Ickes blocked the sale to Germany, so on May 6, 1937, it burned on hydrogen over New Jersey

By Bruno Teles · June 25, 2026

Piper Alpha oil platform engulfed in fire at night in the North Sea, massive orange and red flames with thick black smoke rising into a dark sky

Energy

On Piper Alpha on July 6, 1988, the night shift pumped gas through a valve sealed only by a maintenance permit that had not been cancelled, and 167 men died

By Bruno Teles · June 25, 2026

War of Currents Thomas Edison laboratory 1880s, inventor surrounded by light bulbs batteries and electrical wires in a Victorian-era workshop

Electric

Thomas Edison publicly electrocuted dogs and horses with AC current to discredit Westinghouse, lost the War of Currents anyway, and the first man killed by an electric chair died on Westinghouse power

By Bruno Teles · June 25, 2026

Thomas Midgley leaded gasoline invention 1920s, American chemist at industrial chemistry laboratory workbench with glassware and chemical equipment

Curiosities

Thomas Midgley invented leaded gasoline and the aerosols that made the ozone hole, won the chemistry medal twice for it, and was strangled by his own rope-and-pulley after polio

By Bruno Teles · June 25, 2026

Jimmy Carter Chalk River nuclear reactor 1952, US Navy officer at 1950s reactor control panel with analog dials and warning lights in nuclear research facility

Energy

Jimmy Carter was the naval lieutenant who crawled into Canada's first melted nuclear reactor in 1952, and twenty-seven years later he was the president who handled Three Mile Island

By Bruno Teles · June 25, 2026

Radium Girls painting watch dials with luminous radium paint in a 1920s New Jersey factory, young women in white lab coats at long tables under bright lights

Curiosities

A factory in New Jersey told young women that licking their paintbrushes was safe, while the men handling the same radium upstairs wore lead suits and used tongs

By Bruno Teles · June 25, 2026

A vast flock of passenger pigeons filling the sky above a 19th century North American forest, the mass of birds darkening the sky from horizon to horizon

Wild

At the start of the nineteenth century there were five billion passenger pigeons in North America, and when the last one died in a Cincinnati zoo in 1914 it had happened within a single human lifetime

By Bruno Teles · June 25, 2026

A Welsh valley mining village with a black coal waste slag tip looming on a steep hillside above rows of stone cottages, overcast grey sky, Aberfan 1966 disaster

Industry

Aberfan residents had warned for years that the coal tip above their village would kill someone, and on October 21 1966 it slid onto a primary school and killed 116 children

By Bruno Teles · June 25, 2026

The Banqiao Dam on the Ru River in Henan Province China, a concrete dam wall above a wide river valley, grey sky, historical engineering photograph

Industry

China built a dam and called it indestructible, silenced the engineer who warned it would fail, and in August 1975 it drowned more than 170,000 people in a single night

By Bruno Teles · June 25, 2026

A herd of Arabian oryx walking across a wide sandy Arabian desert at golden hour, white coats bright against the dunes

Wild

Hunters wiped the Arabian oryx from its last wild territory in 1972, nine survivors sat in a Phoenix zoo, and those nine became the founders of a living species

By Bruno Teles · June 25, 2026

A dense yellow-grey smog engulfing a London street in December 1952, Victorian brick buildings barely visible, a red double-decker bus with its headlights on emerging from the London fog

Energy

The Great Smog of 1952 killed twelve thousand Londoners in five days, the government blamed influenza, and the future prime minister delayed clean air legislation by three years

By Bruno Teles · June 25, 2026

A documentary photographer on the dock of Minamata's fishing harbor in the 1970s, photographing traditional wooden boats on the misty bay with the Chisso Corporation factory smokestacks visible across the water

Industry

A Japanese fishing city watched its people lose the ability to walk, talk, and hold their children, and the company causing it with mercury had known for years

By Bruno Teles · June 25, 2026

A mountain gorilla mother sitting in lush green Virunga forest vegetation with her young infant clinging to her chest, soft morning light filtering through the rainforest canopy

Wild

Mountain gorillas fell to 250 animals in 1981, the woman who gave her life defending them was murdered four years later, and the species still crossed one thousand

By Bruno Teles · June 25, 2026

Aerial view of the Three Gorges Dam spanning the wide Yangtze River in China, the vast concrete wall cutting across the gorge with the reservoir stretching back into misty mountains

Curiosities

Three Gorges Dam slowed Earth's rotation, shifted its axis by two centimetres and flattened the poles, all by lifting 39 trillion litres of river into a single lake

By Bruno Teles · June 25, 2026

Welsh ornithologist Carl Jones holding a spotted Mauritius kestrel on his gloved hand in front of native forest in Mauritius

Wild

The island of the dodo once had just four Mauritius kestrels left in the wild, and a Welsh ornithologist spent 45 years turning them into 350

By Bruno Teles · June 25, 2026

A Rendille pastoralist woman stands before rows of white wind turbines on the arid Lake Turkana plains in northern Kenya

Energy

Africa's largest wind farm promised clean energy to the continent, but the 1,180 people of Sarima village were each paid $140 and told to leave their land

By Bruno Teles · June 25, 2026

The tree lobster, a large glossy black Lord Howe Island stick insect, on a green branch

Wild

A giant insect the size of a hand was wiped out by rats and thought extinct for 80 years, until climbers found a few survivors on a single bush on a sea cliff

By Bruno Teles · June 25, 2026

An ironworker balanced on a steel beam high above the New York City skyline

Industry

The skyscrapers and bridges of New York were raised by Mohawk ironworkers from a reserve near Montreal, men who walked steel beams hundreds of metres up as if on a sidewalk

By Bruno Teles · June 25, 2026

The Apollo Lunar Rover, an electric moon buggy with wire-mesh wheels, parked on the Moon

Electric

Decades before electric cars caught on down here, NASA was already driving one on the Moon, a battery-powered Lunar Rover with a motor in each of its four wheels

By Bruno Teles · June 25, 2026

Blood Falls, a red iron stain pouring down the white Taylor Glacier in Antarctica

Curiosities

A glacier in Antarctica appears to bleed bright red into the snow, and for a century the cause was a mystery, until scientists traced Blood Falls to rust and hidden life

By Bruno Teles · June 25, 2026

The Dover Sun House of 1948, a modernist home with a tall wall of solar collector glass in the snow

Energy

In 1948, decades before solar power was fashionable, an immigrant scientist named Maria Telkes heated an entire house through a New England winter using nothing but sunshine and salt

By Bruno Teles · June 25, 2026

A living coelacanth, a steel-blue prehistoric fish, in the dark deep sea

Wild

A fish that science was sure had died out with the dinosaurs 66 million years ago was hauled out of the sea alive in 1938, and a young museum curator saved it

By Bruno Teles · June 25, 2026

The Brooklyn Bridge around 1883, its gothic stone towers spanning the East River

Industry

When the chief engineer of the Brooklyn Bridge was left paralysed by caisson disease, his wife Emily Roebling quietly learned engineering and spent eleven years getting the great bridge finished

By Bruno Teles · June 25, 2026

A rock at the end of a long trail across the cracked mud of Racetrack Playa in Death Valley

Curiosities

For a century, rocks left long trails across a dry lake bed in Death Valley with nobody ever seeing them move, until scientists finally caught the sailing stones in the act

By Bruno Teles · June 25, 2026

The blue fire glowing at night in the crater of Kawah Ijen volcano in Java

Wild

At a volcano in Java called Kawah Ijen, tourists come to watch an eerie blue fire burn at night while miners haul 90 kilo loads of raw sulfur out of the crater

By Bruno Teles · June 25, 2026

Wind turbines on a volcanic ridge of El Hierro island above the Atlantic

Energy

A tiny Canary Island called El Hierro is trying to run entirely on wind and water, using the crater of a dead volcano as a giant battery for its electricity

By Bruno Teles · June 25, 2026

The Pantheon dome in Rome, a 2,000-year-old Roman concrete structure

Industry

Roman concrete has stood for 2,000 years while modern concrete crumbles in decades, and in 2023 MIT scientists finally worked out the strange self-healing secret hiding inside it

By Bruno Teles · June 25, 2026

The torpedo-shaped silver electric car La Jamais Contente racing in 1899 with driver Camille Jenatzy

Electric

The first car to break 100 km/h was electric, a torpedo called La Jamais Contente, and in 1899 its Belgian driver Camille Jenatzy earned the nickname the Red Devil

By Bruno Teles · June 25, 2026

The corroded green bronze Antikythera mechanism, the ancient Greek computer, displayed in a museum with gear wheels visible

Curiosities

In 1901 Greek sponge divers pulled a lump of bronze from a shipwreck off Antikythera, and it turned out to be a 2,000-year-old computer of gears that could predict eclipses

By Bruno Teles · June 25, 2026

The Bagger 288, the largest land vehicle ever built, a colossal bucket-wheel excavator towering in a German open-pit lignite mine

Industry

The Bagger 288 is the heaviest machine ever to move on land, a 13,500-ton excavator that chews through whole German villages to reach the dirtiest coal there is, as it did at Lützerath

By Bruno Teles · June 25, 2026

A wild Przewalski's horse standing in front of an abandoned overgrown Soviet building in the Chernobyl exclusion zone

Wild

Forty years after the world's worst nuclear disaster emptied the land of people, the Chernobyl exclusion zone has filled up with wolves, bears and wild horses, as if nature hit a reset button

By Bruno Teles · June 25, 2026

The Begich Towers, the 14-story building where almost all of Whittier, Alaska lives, standing alone beneath snowy mountains by a fjord

Curiosities

Almost everyone in Whittier, Alaska lives in the same 14-story building, a former Cold War barracks reached only by a one-lane tunnel that cars and trains share and that locks shut at night

By Bruno Teles · June 25, 2026

The brick arches of a grand Victorian London sewer tunnel built by Joseph Bazalgette

Industry

In 1858 the Thames became an open sewer so foul that Parliament nearly fled, so Joseph Bazalgette built London a sewer system twice as big as it needed, and it lasted 160 years

By Bruno Teles · June 25, 2026

An Indian vulture, a white-rumped scavenger with a bald grey head, perched on a bare branch against a hazy sky

Wild

Indian vultures were everywhere until a cheap cattle painkiller wiped out almost all 50 million of them, and losing the silent clean-up crew was tied to half a million human deaths

By Bruno Teles · June 25, 2026

Elderly hands holding a lithium-ion battery cell in a research laboratory, evoking inventor John Goodenough

Electric

Almost every rechargeable gadget on Earth runs on a battery John Goodenough invented, yet he never got the patent, won the Nobel Prize at 97, and kept inventing until he died at 100

By Bruno Teles · June 25, 2026

A hydroelectric dam in a green Himalayan river valley in Bhutan, the source of the country's carbon-negative power

Energy

Bhutan is the only carbon-negative country on Earth and measures success in Gross National Happiness, and it quietly turned its Himalayan hydropower into one of the world's biggest sovereign bitcoin mines

By Bruno Teles · June 24, 2026

An aerial view of Aogashima, a remote volcano island in the Pacific that is one giant green crater with a smaller cone and a village inside

Curiosities

About 160 people live inside the crater of an active volcano on Aogashima, a remote Japanese island whose last eruption killed half its people, and they cook with its heat

By Bruno Teles · June 24, 2026

The abandoned Hashima Island, or Gunkanjima, a concrete ghost city rising from the gray sea off Nagasaki, Japan, ringed by a seawall

Industry

A tiny rock off Japan called Hashima Island was once the most densely crowded place on Earth, over 5,000 people mining coal under the sea, until oil emptied it almost overnight

By Bruno Teles · June 24, 2026

A blue hydrogen train traveling through the flat green northern German countryside, the first fleet of its kind in the world

Electric

Germany put the world on the first hydrogen passenger trains and hailed them as the end of diesel, now the operator of its first hydrogen line is switching back to batteries

By Bruno Teles · June 24, 2026

A dugout home dug into a red desert hill in Coober Pedy, the underground opal town in the Australian outback, with mounds of mined earth around it at golden hour

Energy

In the Australian outback the heat is so brutal that more than half of Coober Pedy lives underground, an opal town that quietly swapped its diesel generators for sun and wind

By Bruno Teles · June 24, 2026

A kakapo, the world's only flightless parrot, a plump moss-green bird with an owl-like face, on a mossy forest floor at night in New Zealand

Wild

New Zealand almost lost its kakapo when only 51 were left in 1995, now the flightless parrot has hatched over 100 chicks in its biggest breeding season on record

By Bruno Teles · June 24, 2026

The Sagrada Familia basilica in Barcelona seen from below, its tall central tower crowned with a large cross rising above a cluster of stone spires

Industry

Antoni Gaudi spent 43 years on a church he knew he would never see finished, and now, 100 years after a tram killed him, Barcelona has finally crowned the Sagrada Familia as the tallest church on Earth

By Bruno Teles · June 24, 2026

A huge old Galapagos giant tortoise with a thick domed shell and wrinkled neck raised, standing on the dry scrubby ground of Espanola Island under bright light

Curiosities

Diego the giant tortoise became famous as the tireless father who saved his species from extinction almost by himself, until a DNA test showed a quieter male in the same pen had fathered even more of the offspring

By Bruno Teles · June 24, 2026

A Karuk tribal fire practitioner holding a drip torch in a Northern California forest, smoke drifting through ponderosa pines in warm afternoon light

Wild

A hundred years ago California banned indigenous burning and the forests turned to tinderboxes, and now the Karuk and Yurok are the ones being asked to bring fire back

By Bruno Teles · June 24, 2026

Dense green Costa Rican rainforest covering steep misty mountains, with mist rising between the trees in the morning light

Wild

Costa Rica chopped down most of its forest to raise cattle, then did something almost no country has managed and paid its farmers to grow the jungle back until it covered half the country again

By Bruno Teles · June 24, 2026

Multiple branching bolts of lightning striking down through dark storm clouds over a wide black lake at night in Venezuela

Curiosities

Over one lake in Venezuela the sky fills with lightning almost every night of the year, so reliably that sailors steered by it for centuries and called it the beacon of Maracaibo

By Bruno Teles · June 24, 2026

The Falkirk Wheel, a huge modern rotating boat lift with two curved steel arms and water-filled gondolas, beside a canal basin in Scotland under a bright sky

Industry

Scotland reconnected two canals that had been cut apart for decades not with a staircase of locks but with a single giant wheel that scoops boats up and turns them through the air

By Bruno Teles · June 24, 2026

A classic small British electric milk float loaded with crates of glass milk bottles, parked on a quiet suburban street in the soft light of early morning

Electric

Long before anyone had heard of Tesla, Britain quietly ran the biggest fleet of electric vehicles on Earth, and almost every one of them was a milkman's float humming down the street at dawn

By Bruno Teles · June 24, 2026

A small Austrian town with red roofs and a castle on a hill, surrounded by green forested hills, with a biomass heating plant and wood-chip silos at its edge

Energy

A dying Austrian town was bleeding money on imported fuel, so it stopped buying energy from the outside world and learned to power itself on the wood from its own forests

By Bruno Teles · June 24, 2026

A sleek white electric hydrofoil ferry lifted clear of the water on slender underwater wings, flying just above the surface with the Stockholm skyline behind it

Electric

Crossing to central Stockholm by boat once ate an hour of the day, so Sweden put commuters on an electric ferry that rises onto underwater wings and flies above the water, halving the trip on 80 percent less power

By Bruno Teles · June 24, 2026

A person stands at the salt-encrusted edge of the shrinking Salton Sea, looking out at the water, with white exposed lakebed in every direction and mountains in the distance

Energy

Everyone wrote off California's shrinking Salton Sea, then geologists found 18 million tons of lithium in the brine and the children breathing its toxic dust became America's clean energy problem

By Bruno Teles · June 24, 2026

A scientist in a greenhouse holding a small chestnut seedling at eye level, examining it in warm afternoon light

Wild

Bill Powell spent 33 years engineering a modified chestnut to rescue a species killed across 3.5 billion trees and died the month his most powerful ally walked away

By Bruno Teles · June 24, 2026

A fresh black tar road in India with a worker beside a heap of shredded colourful waste plastic

Industry

India drowns in plastic bags it cannot recycle, so a chemistry professor worked out how to shred them into the tar and pave the country's roads with its own rubbish

By Bruno Teles · June 24, 2026

Tall mesh fog nets on a misty arid mountain ridge in Morocco catching water from the cloud

Wild

In one of the driest corners of Morocco, where women once walked four hours a day for water, a charity hung giant nets on a mountain to catch drinking water straight out of the fog

By Bruno Teles · June 24, 2026

The huge glass and steel domes of Biosphere 2 in the Arizona desert under a blue sky

Curiosities

Eight people sealed themselves inside a glass world in the Arizona desert for two years, and then the oxygen they were breathing began to quietly vanish

By Bruno Teles · June 24, 2026

A cable car gondola rising over a dense hillside barrio of brick houses in Medellin

Electric

Medellin was once the most dangerous city on Earth, so it strung electric cable cars up to the poorest barrios on the mountainside and let the people there finally ride down into the city

By Bruno Teles · June 24, 2026

A restored sunken stream park in central Seoul with clear water and greenery below skyscrapers

Industry

Seoul spent decades burying a river under concrete and a six lane elevated highway, then tore the whole road down to bring the water back into the light

By Bruno Teles · June 24, 2026

A maternity ward at night lit by a solar powered light, with a midwife and a mother holding her newborn

Energy

An American doctor went to Nigeria to study why mothers die in childbirth, and found the answer was sometimes as simple as the lights going out, so she built a suitcase full of sunlight

By Bruno Teles · June 24, 2026

A living root bridge of intertwined tree roots arching over a turquoise river in the jungle of Meghalaya

Curiosities

In the wettest place on Earth, steel bridges rust and wash away, so for centuries the Khasi people have not built their bridges at all, they have grown them from living tree roots

By Bruno Teles · June 24, 2026

A green sponge city park with ponds and wetlands soaking up rainwater in front of a city skyline

Wild

A boy who nearly drowned in a flooded creek grew up to teach China's cities to drink the rain instead of fighting it, then died chasing that idea across the world

By Bruno Teles · June 24, 2026

A brightly painted chrome traditional Filipino jeepney packed with passengers on a busy Manila street

Electric

The Philippines wants to swap its smoke-belching jeepneys for clean electric ones, but the drivers who own the country's most beloved icon say the price tag will bury them in debt

By Bruno Teles · June 24, 2026

The Eden Project's huge white geodesic bubble domes nestled in a green reclaimed clay crater in Cornwall

Curiosities

A former music producer sketched a rainforest inside a dead Cornish clay pit on a napkin, and it became the Eden Project, the biggest indoor jungle in the world

By Bruno Teles · June 24, 2026

A large dark-red wooden church being moved whole on giant trailers along a road through an Arctic Swedish town

Industry

The Swedish town of Kiruna is being moved three kilometres down the road, homes, church and all, because the giant iron mine that built it is swallowing the ground beneath it

By Bruno Teles · June 24, 2026

Reindeer grazing on a snowy upland in Norway with wind turbines on the ridgeline behind them

Energy

Norway built Europe's largest onshore wind farm on the Sami's reindeer pastures, its own Supreme Court ruled it a violation of their rights, and still the turbines kept turning for years

By Bruno Teles · June 24, 2026

A kayak paddle dipping into dark night water that glows electric blue with bioluminescence

Energy & Nature

The brightest bioluminescent bay on Earth went dark after Hurricane Maria, and Vieques feared its blue glow was gone for good, until the water lit up again brighter than before

By Bruno Teles · June 24, 2026

A wide river steaming heavily as it winds through dense green Amazon rainforest

Curiosities

A geoscientist grew up on a family legend of an Amazon river that boils, was told it could not exist, then found it, water hot enough to cook an animal alive

By Bruno Teles · June 24, 2026

A modern electric city bus on a Santiago street with the snow-capped Andes rising behind the buildings

Electric

Santiago spent decades choking on the diesel smoke of its city buses, then built the biggest electric bus fleet outside China, and its 3 million daily riders are breathing the difference

By Bruno Teles · June 24, 2026

A small fishing boat back on the blue water of the restored North Aral Sea with a low desert shoreline behind it

Energy & Nature

Soviet planners drained the world's fourth-largest lake until ships sat rusting in the desert, but a single dam has brought the North Aral Sea and its fishermen back from the dead

By Bruno Teles · June 24, 2026

An off-grid Earthship home set into an earth berm in the New Mexico high desert with a sloping wall of south-facing glass

Industry

An architect in New Mexico lost his license fighting to build houses out of old tires, cans and bottles, and 50 years on his off-grid Earthships have spread around the world

By Bruno Teles · June 24, 2026

An older woman in a colourful sari soldering a circuit board for a solar charge controller in rural India

Energy

A college in rural India takes illiterate grandmothers nobody else would hire and turns them into solar engineers in six months, then sends them home to electrify their own villages

By Bruno Teles · June 24, 2026

A vast calm African lake at dusk ringed by green volcanic hills and lakeside towns

Curiosities

Two million people live beside Lake Kivu, an African lake that could suffocate them all in one night, so Rwanda is defusing the bomb by burning it for electricity

By Bruno Teles · June 24, 2026

A motorcycle-taxi rider on an electric motorbike on a busy African city street with other riders and traffic behind

Electric

For Africa's motorcycle-taxi riders the petrol pump ate the day's wages, so they are switching to electric bikes that swap a dead battery for a full one in under two minutes

By Bruno Teles · June 24, 2026

A young man standing beside a tall handmade wooden windmill built from bicycle parts and a fan blade in a rural African village

Energy

A famine pulled 14-year-old William Kamkwamba out of school in Malawi, so he taught himself from a library book and built a windmill out of scrapyard junk to light his family's home

By Bruno Teles · June 24, 2026

A long U-shaped floating barrier towed between two ships across the open ocean, gathering floating plastic into a retention zone

Industry

Experts said cleaning plastic out of the ocean was impossible, so a Dutch teenager quit engineering school to prove them wrong, and Boyan Slat's machines have now pulled 50 million kilograms from the sea

By Bruno Teles · June 24, 2026

A lone man standing inside a dense green forest he planted on a former river sandbar beside the wide Brahmaputra in Assam

Energy & Nature

Jadav Payeng spent 40 years turning a bare sandbar in Assam into a jungle of tigers and rhinos, then fire tore through 5,000 saplings of his newest forest days after Christmas

By Bruno Teles · June 24, 2026

An enormous twin-hull construction ship closing around an offshore oil platform at sea

Industry

The heaviest vehicle ever built is a 382 metre ship that swallows an entire oil platform between two giant hulls and lifts its 48,000 ton deck out of the sea in a single move, then carries it away

By Bruno Teles · June 24, 2026

A vast solar power satellite with huge panels orbiting above the blue Earth against black space

Energy

Solar power is beaten by night and clouds, so the new plan is to put the panels in orbit where the sun never sets and beam the energy back to Earth by microwave, a feat just tested in space

By Bruno Teles · June 24, 2026

An aerial view of a green belt of young trees cutting across dry semi-desert land in the African Sahel

Energy & Nature

To hold back the Sahara, Africa is growing a wall of trees 8,000 kilometres long across 11 countries, and the strange twist is that it only started working once people stopped trying to build a literal wall

By Bruno Teles · June 24, 2026

A large grey Greenland shark swimming slowly through dark cold deep ocean water

Curiosities

The longest-lived animal with a backbone on Earth is a shark in the Arctic that may live for 400 years, grows barely a centimetre a year, and does not become an adult until it is 150 years old

By Bruno Teles · June 24, 2026

A glowing concentrated solar power tower ringed by thousands of mirrors in the Atacama desert at dusk

Energy

Solar power has one obvious flaw, the sun sets, so in the Atacama desert Chile built a tower ringed by 10,600 mirrors that stores the sun's heat in molten salt and keeps making electricity long after dark

By Bruno Teles · June 24, 2026

Aerial view of the two huge white steel arms of the Maeslant storm surge barrier on the banks of a canal near Rotterdam

Industry

To guard Rotterdam from the sea, the Dutch built two of the largest moving structures on Earth, a pair of steel arms each the size of the Eiffel Tower that a computer swings shut across the water by itself

By Bruno Teles · June 24, 2026

A modern white electric delivery van driving along a city street with a faint blue glow of charging coils beneath the asphalt

Electric

An electric car's biggest weakness is stopping to charge, so a street in Detroit now charges vehicles wirelessly as they drive over it, sending power up through copper coils buried under the asphalt

By Bruno Teles · June 24, 2026

A vast grove of white-barked golden aspen trees on a Utah hillside

Curiosities

What looks like a forest of 47,000 trees in Utah is secretly a single living thing, one giant aspen clone weighing 6,000 tons that may be 80,000 years old and is quietly dying

By Bruno Teles · June 24, 2026

A tall conical tower of ice in a barren Himalayan desert valley with snow-capped peaks behind

Energy & Nature

In a frozen Himalayan desert where the glaciers are melting too early to water the crops, one engineer stopped waiting and started building his own, growing 30 metre towers of ice that store winter water until spring

By Bruno Teles · June 24, 2026

A huge container ship squeezed into a narrow Panama Canal lock surrounded by tropical forest

Industry

The Panama Canal does not run on seawater but on rain, and every giant ship that crosses dumps about 200 million litres of fresh water into the ocean, which is why a drought can choke world trade

By Bruno Teles · June 24, 2026

Aerial view of powerful tidal currents swirling through a narrow channel between rugged Scottish islands

Energy

Off the northern tip of Scotland sits the world's largest tidal power station, turbines bolted to the seabed that spin with the pull of the moon to make the most predictable renewable energy on Earth

By Bruno Teles · June 24, 2026

A huge yellow electric mining dump truck loaded with rock descending a quarry road in the Swiss mountains

Electric

The world's largest electric vehicle is a 110 ton mining truck in Switzerland that never has to be plugged in, because hauling rock downhill all day makes more power than it burns climbing back up

By Bruno Teles · June 24, 2026

Aerial view of a vast vegetated wildlife crossing planted to look like a hill spanning ten lanes of the 101 Freeway near Los Angeles

Energy & Nature

Los Angeles is finishing the world's largest wildlife crossing, a 114 million dollar bridge disguised as a hillside over 10 lanes of freeway, built so the mountain lions the road trapped and inbred can finally cross

By Bruno Teles · June 24, 2026

Reindeer on the windswept tundra of a remote Bering Sea island under a grey sky

Curiosities

The US Coast Guard left 29 reindeer on a remote Alaskan island in 1944, and with no predators the herd exploded to 6,000, then crashed to 42 in a single brutal winter

By Bruno Teles · June 24, 2026

A coastal seawater desalination plant on the Red Sea at sunset with solar panels

Industry

Saudi Arabia has almost no rivers, so it drinks the sea, and its newest mega-plant just stopped burning oil to do it, turning 600 million litres of seawater into drinking water a day

By Bruno Teles · June 24, 2026

A glowing ring of orange plasma inside a tokamak fusion reactor

Energy

China's "artificial sun" held a 100-million-degree plasma steady for 1,066 seconds, almost 18 minutes, becoming the first reactor ever to break the 1,000-second wall

By Bruno Teles · June 23, 2026

A tall sand battery silo in a snowy Finnish landscape

Energy

Finland switched on the world's largest sand battery in June 2025, a 100 MWh store holding 2,000 tonnes of soapstone that cuts a town's heating emissions by nearly 70 percent

By Bruno Teles · June 23, 2026

An aerial view of a belt of solar panels across desert dunes

Energy

China is building a 400 km solar great wall across a desert it once called the Sea of Death, aiming for 100 GW by 2030 to help power Beijing

By Bruno Teles · June 23, 2026

A colossal offshore wind turbine above a grey sea

Energy

China just built a 26 MW offshore wind turbine with a 310-metre rotor, smashing the old 20 MW record while Western makers stalled near 18 MW

By Bruno Teles · June 23, 2026

An experimental nuclear reactor in the Gobi Desert at golden hour

Energy

In the Gobi Desert China just got the only reactor on Earth to breed uranium-233 from thorium, six decades after the US built the idea and walked away in 1969

By Bruno Teles · June 23, 2026

A geothermal drilling rig in the Utah desert at golden hour

Energy

Fervo's Cape Station in Utah is on track to send its first 100 MW of 24/7 geothermal power to the grid in late 2026, scaling to 500 MW by 2028

By Bruno Teles · June 23, 2026

An electric car fast-charging at dusk beside a coffee cup

Electric

BYD's new megawatt platform charges an EV with about 400 km of range in just 5 minutes at a record 1,000 kW, roughly as fast as a petrol fill-up

By Bruno Teles · June 23, 2026

A glowing solid-state battery cell on a clean-room line

Electric

Solid-state batteries promising up to 1,000 kilometres of EV range just hit a real pilot line in 2026, and the catch is not the chemistry

By Bruno Teles · June 23, 2026

A cutaway of an electric car revealing its battery pack

Electric

An EV battery loses only 2.3 percent of capacity a year across 22,700 real cars, so it still holds more than 80 percent after eight years on the road

By Bruno Teles · June 23, 2026

A yard stacked with used EV battery packs

Electric

China won the electric car race, but now it faces a wave of worn-out batteries heading for a million tonnes a year by 2030

By Bruno Teles · June 23, 2026

Battery cells on a production line with salt crystals

Energy

China is putting a battery made from salt into cars in 2026, and at about 19 dollars a kilowatt-hour it undercuts lithium by more than half

By Bruno Teles · June 23, 2026

Grid-scale battery storage containers next to a substation

Energy

The world's largest battery will run on rust, an iron-air design that holds a charge for 100 hours instead of four

By Bruno Teles · June 23, 2026

A coastal wind turbine with one blade painted black

Energy & Nature

Painting just one of a wind turbine's three blades black cut bird collision deaths by an average of 71.9 percent in a field experiment at a Norwegian wind farm

By Bruno Teles · June 23, 2026

Solar panels mounted over a wide irrigation canal in California

Energy & Nature

California just switched on the first US solar panels built over irrigation canals, and covering all 4,000 miles could save 63 billion gallons of water a year

By Bruno Teles · June 23, 2026

A vast solar farm with sheep grazing between the panel rows

Energy

Inside the world's largest solar farm, where 20,000 sheep keep the grass down

By Bruno Teles · June 23, 2026