Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges

Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges

Industry & Mega-Builds

Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges is a journalist specializing in construction, mining, and large engineering and infrastructure projects. She has written hundreds of articles on the megaprojects and industrial works reshaping the modern world. At Watts & Wild she covers heavy industry and mega-builds: dams, tunnels, data centers, factories, offshore platforms, and the record-breaking engineering behind them.

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Recent articles

A small rufous-brown rusty bush lark perched on a bare branch in dry Sahel savanna scrubland

Energy & the Wild

A rusty bush lark, unseen for 94 years, has turned up alive in the Sahel of Chad

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · July 4, 2026

A humpback whale breaching out of the open ocean with spray flying, its long flippers spread wide

Energy & the Wild

A humpback whale swam farther than any other on record, from Australia toward Brazil

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · July 4, 2026

An ancient Ediacaran seabed with soft-bodied organisms and faint trails from animals living before the Cambrian explosion

Curiosities

Long before the Cambrian explosion, the first animals were already learning to sense their world

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · July 4, 2026

Four astronauts in white spacesuits walking together toward a rocket at dawn ahead of the Artemis III mission

Science & Tech

NASA just named the Artemis III crew, and quietly confirmed they will not land on the Moon

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · July 4, 2026

A stone Maya city pyramid temple rising out of dense green rainforest canopy under morning mist

Curiosities

Archaeologists cut five kilometres through the jungle and found a Maya city no looter had ever touched

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · July 4, 2026

A bumblebee rolling a small ball beneath an artificial blue flower in a laboratory problem-solving experiment

Energy & the Wild

A bumblebee just solved a puzzle scientists built for big-brained animals, with no training at all

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · July 4, 2026

A supermarket shelf lined with packaged and processed foods that commonly contain food preservatives

Science & Tech

A huge new study ties the preservatives in everyday food to higher blood pressure and heart disease

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · July 4, 2026

A close-up of a tube-nosed bat with short tube-shaped nostrils sticking out from its face

Energy & the Wild

Scientists just named six new tube-nosed bats that were hiding in the Philippines all along

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · July 4, 2026

A health worker giving a malaria vaccine to a young child at a clinic in Africa

Science & Tech

After a century of failure, a malaria vaccine is now measurably saving children's lives in Africa

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · July 4, 2026

A large group of Antarctic penguins at their breeding colony on rock and snow

Energy & the Wild

Antarctic penguins are rewriting their calendar faster than any animal with a backbone ever recorded

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · July 4, 2026

An old shipwreck on the dark seabed surrounded by stacks of intact white and blue porcelain dishes

Curiosities

A watchmaker found an 18th-century ship two thousand feet down, its cargo of porcelain almost untouched

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · July 4, 2026

A brown fanged frog on a wet rock beside a forest stream, small fang-like projections in its mouth

Energy & the Wild

A frog science has known for nearly two centuries just turned out to be a whole cluster of hidden species

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · July 4, 2026

A coin-sized brain-computer interface implant with fine thread electrodes

Science & Tech

People are moving cursors and robotic arms with their thoughts, and in 2026 it stopped being a stunt

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · July 4, 2026

Several bright young galaxies merging around a glowing central supermassive black hole in deep space

Curiosities

James Webb caught a giant galaxy and a supermassive black hole being born together in the young universe

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · July 4, 2026

Early humans gathered around a small controlled fire deep inside a dark cave

Curiosities

Burnt bones deep in an African cave may be the oldest sign yet that our ancestors tamed fire

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · July 4, 2026

A diver tending rows of young corals on a coral restoration nursery frame in clear blue water

Energy & the Wild

Scientists are now breeding corals by the million and planting them on the reef, in a race against the heat

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · July 4, 2026

A glowing DNA double helix with one segment being edited, illustrating in vivo gene editing

Science & Tech

For the first time, a single infusion edited a genetic disease away inside patients' own bodies

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · July 4, 2026

A delicate glowing deep-sea jellyfish drifting in black water off Brazil

Energy & the Wild

A single expedition off Brazil found more than 30 new creatures in the ocean's dark middle, in a matter of days

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · July 4, 2026

Illustration of a large long-necked titanosaur dinosaur walking through a green Late Cretaceous forest

Science & Tech

A fossil sat forgotten in a drawer for 41 years, and turned out to be the first dinosaur bone ever collected in Antarctica

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · July 4, 2026

A sleek aerodynamic electric semi truck hauling a trailer along an open American highway

Electric

After nine years of promises, the Tesla Semi is finally rolling off a real production line

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · July 4, 2026

A pale spiky spider on the underside of a leaf shaped to resemble a growth of fungus

Energy & the Wild

Scientists found a fungus-mimicking spider in the Amazon that copies the parasite which eats spiders alive

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · July 4, 2026

Close-up of a Heliconius tropical butterfly with orange and yellow markings resting on a green leaf

Science & Tech

A tropical butterfly that barely ages could hold clues to a longer, healthier old age

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · July 4, 2026

Salvation Mountain, a brightly painted adobe hill covered in colourful flowers, streams and the words God is Love, in the California desert

Curiosities

One man spent three decades alone in the desert turning a hillside into a glowing painted monument, and keeping it alive means never letting it dry out

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · July 3, 2026

Bleached bare dead tree trunks of the coast's ghost forests standing in shallow marsh water under a grey sky

Energy & the Wild

Whole forests along the American coast are dying on their feet, turned to fields of bleached dead trees by salt water creeping inland

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · July 3, 2026

An antique Stradivarius-style violin with glowing amber varnish resting on dark velvet, its curves and f-holes catching the light

Curiosities

People have spent centuries and fortunes trying to work out why a 300-year-old violin sounds so perfect, and the honest answer is not what anyone wants

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · July 3, 2026

The tall golden Kelso Dunes rising from the Mojave Desert floor under a clear blue sky, with distant mountains behind

Energy & the Wild

Slide down the right desert dune on a dry day and the whole mountain of sand hums a deep note you can feel through your feet

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · July 3, 2026

The gold Pioneer plaque engraved with a nude man and woman, a hydrogen atom symbol and a radiating pulsar map, on a dark background

Science & Tech

We engraved a naked man, a naked woman and a map to Earth on a gold plate and threw it into the galaxy, and almost no one will ever see it

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · July 3, 2026

A group of well-dressed children from the orphan trains with small bags standing on a station platform in the early 1900s waiting to be chosen

Curiosities

A quarter of a million children were put on trains, sent across the country and lined up at stations for strangers to pick, in the name of saving them

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · July 3, 2026

A long vaulted stone cell block corridor of Eastern State Penitentiary with rows of arched cell doors and light from skylights above

Curiosities

A prison was built to be kind by keeping every inmate in perfect silence and solitude, and the mercy turned out to be a slow torture of the mind

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · July 3, 2026

Aerial view of the great semicircular stone ruins of Pueblo Bonito in Chaco Canyon, New Mexico, set in a bare desert canyon

Curiosities

A thousand years ago people built a monumental stone city in a desert that could barely feed them, then walked away, and we still get the ending wrong

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · July 3, 2026

The 1936 Stout Scarab, a rounded streamlined beetle-shaped car with smooth metal bodywork, parked on a street

Science & Tech

An aircraft engineer built a roomy, flat-floored family van with a rear engine in 1936, and the world was not ready to buy the future

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · July 3, 2026

The Animas River in Colorado running bright mustard orange with toxic mine water after the 2015 Gold King Mine spill, green banks alongside

Energy & the Wild

A team sent to stop an old mine from leaking accidentally blew it open, and three million gallons of orange poison poured into a Western river

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · July 3, 2026

A vintage brass telegraph key on a wooden desk beside a paper tape of dots and dashes, evoking Samuel Morse and the birth of the telegraph

Science & Tech

A painter learned his wife had died only after she was buried, because news moved so slowly, and his grief helped wire the world for instant messages

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · July 3, 2026

The Kensington Runestone, a flat grey slab densely carved with rows of angular Norse runes, displayed under museum lighting

Curiosities

A farmer dug a stone out of his field carved with a Viking message from 1362, and more than a century later nobody can fully kill the mystery

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · July 3, 2026

An aerial view of the shrinking Great Salt Lake in Utah, pale exposed lakebed and receding shoreline around bright saline water

Energy & the Wild

A great inland sea is disappearing next to a major city, and the lakebed it leaves behind is laced with arsenic that can blow back over two million people

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · July 3, 2026

The Ringling Bros big top engulfed in flames during the 1944 Hartford circus fire as crowds flee the burning tent

Curiosities

A tent full of children went to the circus on a summer afternoon in 1944, and the canvas over their heads had been waterproofed with gasoline

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · July 3, 2026

A shaft of sunlight falling through the glowing orange sandstone walls of Antelope Canyon, a narrow slot canyon in Arizona

Energy & the Wild

The most photographed slot canyon on Earth is a beautiful death trap, and the very floods that carved its glowing walls once killed eleven people under a clear blue sky

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · July 3, 2026

An 1890s electric streetcar entering the tiled tunnel portal of the new Tremont Street Subway in Boston, the first subway in America

Industry & Mega-Builds

Long before New York, a city choking on its own streetcars dug the first subway in America, tunnelling under a historic park and its old graves while frightened riders wondered what waited below

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · July 3, 2026

Devils Tower rising alone above the Wyoming plains, its steep sides scored into tall vertical rock columns under a blue sky

Energy & the Wild

A giant tower of stone columns rises alone out of the Wyoming plains, and almost everything famous about it, including its ominous name, rests on a mistake and an unsolved mystery

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · July 3, 2026

An ornate, empty early-1900s theatre interior with gilded balconies and rows of seats, evoking the Iroquois Theatre before the fire

Science & Tech

A brand-new theatre sold to the public as absolutely fireproof became the site of the deadliest building fire in American history, and quietly rewrote the way every exit is built

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · July 3, 2026

A cluster of bright yellow, pink and blue Post-it notes stuck at angles on a plain wall, some curling at the corners

Science & Tech

A chemist accidentally made a glue that barely stuck, spent years unable to find a use for it, and then a choir singer turned the useless failure into the Post-it note

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · July 3, 2026

An old sheet of paper covered in long rows of handwritten numbers, representing one of the Beale ciphers on a wooden desk

Curiosities

Three coded messages have promised a buried fortune in Virginia for more than a century, and only one of them has ever been cracked, using of all things the Declaration of Independence

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · July 3, 2026

Extreme close-up of a single clear drop of Super Glue instantly bonding a fingertip to a metal surface under bright studio light

Science & Tech

A chemist trying to build clear plastic gun sights kept making a goo that ruined everything it touched, and years later that same sticky failure became Super Glue

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · July 3, 2026

Aerial view of green circular center-pivot irrigation fields watered by the Ogallala Aquifer spread across the flat Great Plains

Energy

A hidden ocean of ancient water beneath the Great Plains turned a near-desert into America's breadbasket, and now the country is pumping it dry faster than the rain can ever refill it

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · July 3, 2026

The restored Elwha River running clear through lush green temperate rainforest and mountains on the Olympic Peninsula in Washington

Energy & the Wild

For a century two dams strangled one of America's greatest salmon rivers, until the largest dam removal in the country's history tore them down and the fish came roaring back

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · July 3, 2026

An early 1900s woman cook in a long apron preparing food at a wooden table in a dim period kitchen, evoking Typhoid Mary

Curiosities

She felt perfectly healthy, but the food she cooked kept killing people, and in the end America locked Typhoid Mary on an island for more than two decades

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · July 3, 2026

A small sparse desert town in the California Mojave near Hinkley, with scattered houses and a water tower amid dry scrub, the setting of the Erin Brockovich case

Science & Tech

A single mother with no legal training took on a giant California utility over poisoned water, won a record settlement, and became the most famous name in environmental law

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · July 3, 2026

The rugged volcanic Superstition Mountains east of Phoenix Arizona at golden dusk with jagged red peaks and saguaro cactus, setting for the Lost Dutchman legend

Curiosities

For more than a century treasure hunters have died in the Arizona mountains chasing the Lost Dutchman's gold mine, a fortune that geologists say probably never existed

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · July 3, 2026

A close-up of the Hope Diamond, a large deep-blue cushion-cut diamond ringed with small white diamonds on dark velvet under museum lighting

Curiosities

The Hope Diamond is famous for a curse that supposedly dooms its owners, but the deadly legend was largely invented to help sell the giant blue stone

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · July 3, 2026

A close-up of an early 1980s medicine bottle with a foil safety seal over its mouth beside a sealed carton, evoking the Tylenol murders and tamper-evident packaging

Science & Tech

In 1982 seven people near Chicago died from cyanide hidden in Tylenol capsules, and the terror of it is the reason every pill bottle and food jar you own now comes sealed shut

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · July 3, 2026

A herd of Kaibab deer standing on a sparse, overgrazed high plateau of thin grass and scattered pines in Arizona at evening

Energy & the Wild

In the 1920s America shot every wolf and cougar to save the Kaibab deer, and the herd promptly exploded to 100,000 and then starved to death on its own ruined range

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · July 3, 2026

A misty New England country graveyard at dusk with old slate headstones under bare trees, evoking the Mercy Brown vampire case

Science & Tech

In 1892 a Rhode Island farmer was pressured to dig up his dead daughter, burn her heart, and feed the ashes to his dying son to stop a vampire that was really tuberculosis

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · July 3, 2026

A huge faded yellow concrete arrow on the desert ground beside a tall steel beacon tower under a wide sky

Industry & Mega-Builds

In the 1920s America built a chain of giant concrete arrows and lit towers stretching coast to coast, a lighted highway in the sky that guided airmail pilots flying blind through the night

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · July 2, 2026

A dim candlelit Victorian parlour where two young women sit at a table with listeners, evoking the Fox sisters and their spirit rappings

Curiosities

In 1848 two teenage sisters in a New York farmhouse pretended to talk to a ghost through mysterious knocks, and accidentally launched a worldwide religion of the dead that millions came to believe in

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · July 2, 2026

The tall slender Beaux-Arts Singer Building with its domed crown rising above the rooftops of 1908 New York

Industry & Mega-Builds

For one year it was the tallest building in the world, a graceful tower crowning the New York skyline, and then in 1968 the Singer Building was quietly torn down and almost completely forgotten

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · July 2, 2026

An aerial view of the Serpent Mound in Ohio, a long grassy earthwork shaped like a coiled snake winding across a green plateau

Science & Tech

A quarter-mile-long serpent lies coiled in the hills of Ohio, built by Native Americans on top of an ancient crater, and after 150 years of study nobody is sure how old it is

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · July 2, 2026

Floodwater from the Great Mississippi Flood of 1927 swallowing a Southern town, rooftops and trees rising from a brown inland sea

Energy & the Wild

In 1927 the Mississippi River smashed through its levees in 145 places, drowned an area the size of New England, and set in motion changes that reshaped American politics for a generation

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · July 2, 2026

The cracked white salt flat of the dried Owens Lake bed stretching toward mountains under a dusty sky

Industry & Mega-Builds

Los Angeles built a 233-mile aqueduct in 1913 and quietly drained an entire valley, turning a huge lake into the worst dust hazard in America, and it is still paying billions to hold the dust down

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · July 2, 2026

A 1930s US Navy airship in flight releasing a small biplane fighter from a trapeze beneath its belly, one of the flying aircraft carriers

Industry & Mega-Builds

In the 1930s the US Navy really did fly two enormous airships that carried fighter planes inside their bellies and launched and caught them in mid-air on a trapeze

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · July 2, 2026

An 1859 confrontation on San Juan Island with American soldiers and a British warship offshore during the Pig War

Curiosities

In 1859 an American farmer shot a pig rooting in his garden and very nearly dragged the United States and Britain into a shooting war, with thousands of troops facing off over a dead hog

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · July 2, 2026

Silver Asian carp leaping in a chaotic spray around a small motorboat on a Midwestern river

Energy & the Wild

A fish imported to clean American fish farms escaped, took over entire rivers, learned to hurl itself into passing boats, and is now held back from the Great Lakes only by a wall of electricity

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · July 2, 2026

A postal worker loading a cylindrical carrier into a brass pneumatic tube mail station in an early 1900s post office

Industry & Mega-Builds

For more than half a century American cities fired the mail through underground tubes at 30 miles an hour on blasts of compressed air, and once even shot a live cat across town

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · July 2, 2026

An absurdly narrow four-storey spite house wedged between two normal brick buildings on a Boston street

Curiosities

Some Americans got so furious with a neighbour or the city that they built an entire house purely to annoy them, and a handful of these spite houses are still standing today

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · July 2, 2026

Flakes of red meat scattered across the grass of an 1876 Kentucky farmyard under a clear blue sky, the Kentucky Meat Shower

Curiosities

In 1876 flakes of red meat fell out of a clear blue Kentucky sky onto a woman making soap, and the explanation scientists settled on is even stranger than the shower itself

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · July 2, 2026

An empty concrete Cincinnati subway tunnel with an abandoned station platform lit by a single work light

Industry & Mega-Builds

Cincinnati spent years digging a full subway under its streets in the 1920s, then ran out of money before a single train ever ran, and the finished tunnels still sit empty a century later

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · July 2, 2026

The Cleveland LNG explosion of 1944, a residential street reduced to burning rubble and smoke under a dark sky

Energy

In 1944 a storage tank of super-cold liquefied gas in Cleveland cracked open, flooded the sewers with invisible vapor, and blew a whole neighborhood off the map in minutes

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · July 2, 2026

The Great Baltimore Fire of 1904 raging through a downtown of burning brick buildings under a smoke-black sky

Industry & Mega-Builds

In 1904 fire crews rushed to Baltimore from as far as New York, only to find their hose couplings would not fit the city's hydrants, so they could only stand and watch it burn

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · July 2, 2026

A brown rooster with no head standing upright in a 1940s farmyard, evoking Mike the Headless Chicken

Curiosities

A Colorado farmer chopped the head off a rooster for dinner in 1945 and the bird simply refused to die, living another 18 months and touring the country as Mike the Headless Chicken

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · July 2, 2026

Inside SubTropolis, a vast underground complex of paved roads between huge square limestone pillars

Industry & Mega-Builds

An old Kansas City mine was hollowed into the world's largest underground business complex, where trucks drive miles of roads through solid rock and the temperature never changes all year

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · July 2, 2026

A dusky seaside sparrow perched on green cordgrass in a Florida salt marsh

Energy & the Wild

A tiny Florida songbird was quietly wiped out when the marshes beside the Kennedy Space Center were flooded and drained, and the very last one died in a pen at Walt Disney World

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · July 2, 2026

The vast domed interior of the Houston Astrodome with tiers of empty seats under a huge curved roof

Industry & Mega-Builds

Houston built the world's first domed stadium and called it the eighth wonder, then discovered the roof killed the grass, so it invented fake grass and accidentally named it after the building

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · July 2, 2026

A black nonstick Teflon-coated frying pan with an egg sliding across its slick surface

Science & Tech

A chemist chasing a better fridge gas opened a gas cylinder that had turned into a slippery white powder by accident, and that mistake became Teflon, the atom-bomb material now coating half the pans on Earth

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · July 2, 2026

A 1960s Greenwich Village street protest of the kind Jane Jacobs led against a planned highway

Industry & Mega-Builds

A writer with no power stopped the most feared builder in America from bulldozing a ten-lane highway through Lower Manhattan, and in doing so saved the neighborhoods we now call SoHo and Greenwich Village

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · July 2, 2026

An American alligator resting in a dark southern swamp with its eyes and back above the still water

Energy & the Wild

Hunters nearly wiped the American alligator off the map for its leather, and then the same animal came roaring back so completely that there are now around five million of them

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · July 2, 2026

The soaring lace-like steel spires of the Watts Towers covered in colorful mosaic against a blue Los Angeles sky

Curiosities

An immigrant laborer spent 33 years building soaring towers in his Los Angeles backyard with no plans and no help, and when the city tried to tear them down they refused to fall

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · July 2, 2026

A large mottled brown northern snakehead fish with a long body and sharp teeth in shallow water

Energy & the Wild

A voracious air-breathing fish nicknamed the Frankenfish turned up in a Maryland pond in 2002, and no matter how much poison officials poured in, the northern snakehead kept coming back and spreading

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · July 2, 2026

The wide waters of Passamaquoddy Bay on the Maine coast at low tide

Energy

In 1935 Franklin Roosevelt tried to power part of Maine with the ocean itself, damming the giant tides of Passamaquoddy Bay, until Congress killed the dream and left a ghost town behind

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · July 2, 2026

The tidy brick rowhouses of the model company town of Pullman, Illinois in the 1890s

Industry & Mega-Builds

A railroad tycoon built a model town where he owned his workers' homes, shops and church, until he cut their pay but not their rent and touched off a strike that shut down the nation's railroads

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · July 2, 2026

A 1940s banana plantation with workers carrying huge bunches of Gros Michel bananas

Energy & the Wild

The banana your grandparents ate was a different, tastier fruit that a fungus wiped out in the 1950s, and the fake banana flavor in candy is a ghost of that lost variety

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · July 2, 2026

A classical statue of a robed woman holding a boll weevil aloft in the town square of Enterprise, Alabama

Curiosities

An Alabama town was so grateful to the beetle that wiped out its cotton and forced it to grow peanuts instead that it built the world's only statue honoring an agricultural pest

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · July 2, 2026

The calm surface of the Quabbin Reservoir over the drowned Swift River Valley in autumn

Industry & Mega-Builds

Massachusetts erased four whole towns from the map and drowned their homes, farms and even their graveyards under the Quabbin Reservoir so that faraway Boston would never run out of water

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · July 2, 2026

A guide with a lantern in a vast passage of Mammoth Cave, Kentucky, the longest cave on Earth

Energy & the Wild

The longest cave on Earth runs for hundreds of miles under Kentucky, and much of what we know about Mammoth Cave was discovered by Stephen Bishop, an enslaved man who mapped its depths from memory

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · July 2, 2026

A street in Donora, Pennsylvania shrouded in the deadly 1948 Donora smog at midday

Curiosities

For five days in 1948, a poisonous fog settled over the mill town of Donora, Pennsylvania and killed 20 people, and the Donora smog shocked America into finally cleaning up its air

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · July 2, 2026

An angler holding a huge Lahontan cutthroat trout at Pyramid Lake, Nevada

Energy & the Wild

A 60-pound trout that vanished from a Nevada lake was declared extinct for decades, until it turned up alive in a tiny desert creek and the Paiute brought the Lahontan cutthroat trout home

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · July 2, 2026

The giant sequoia General Sherman, the largest tree on Earth, towering over tiny visitors in Sequoia National Park

Energy & the Wild

Firefighters wrapped the base of General Sherman, the largest tree on Earth, in aluminum foil in 2021 to save it from wildfire, because the giant sequoia that needs fire is now being killed by it

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · July 2, 2026

A Southern landscape blanketed in kudzu, the vine that ate the South, draping trees and an old barn

Energy & the Wild

The US government paid Southern farmers to plant kudzu to save their soil, it became the vine that ate the South, and then scientists found the legend was far bigger than the plant

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · July 2, 2026

An ivory-billed woodpecker, the Lord God Bird, clinging to a tree in a Southern old-growth bottomland forest

Energy & the Wild

The ivory-billed woodpecker was declared gone in the 1940s, then a kayaker's 2005 sighting in an Arkansas swamp thrilled the world, and the US still cannot decide whether the Lord God Bird is truly extinct

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · July 2, 2026

A steaming Yellowstone hot spring ringed with thermophile mats, the source of Thermus aquaticus and its Taq polymerase enzyme

Science & Tech

A scientist was told nothing could live in Yellowstone's boiling springs, but the microbe Thomas Brock found there in 1966 gave the world Taq polymerase, the enzyme that makes every PCR and COVID test possible

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · July 2, 2026

An aerial view of Dry Falls in the Channeled Scablands of eastern Washington, a vast dry cataract carved by Ice Age floods

Science & Tech

A high-school teacher turned geologist said a flood bigger than every river on Earth carved eastern Washington, and colleagues mocked J Harlen Bretz for forty years before the Channeled Scablands proved him right

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · July 1, 2026

An illustration of Cahokia at its height around 1100 AD, a great plaza and the terraced Monks Mound surrounded by thatched houses

Curiosities

A thousand years ago the biggest city in North America stood across the river from modern St. Louis, and Cahokia was larger than London before its people walked away and let it vanish from memory

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · July 1, 2026

The eerie tufa towers of Mono Lake, California rising from still water at sunrise with the Sierra Nevada behind

Energy & the Wild

A young biologist fell in love with the salt lake Los Angeles was quietly draining, and the fight David Gaines started to save California's Mono Lake was won six years after a snowstorm killed him

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · July 1, 2026

The Berkeley Pit, a mile-wide flooded copper mine in Butte, Montana, its acidic rust-colored water ringed by terraced rock walls

Science & Tech

Thousands of geese fell dead onto a Montana lake so acidic it dissolves metal, then two chemists found the microbes thriving in the Berkeley Pit were making new cancer and antibiotic drugs

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · July 1, 2026

A relief map of Zealandia, Earth's hidden eighth continent, mostly submerged around New Zealand

Science & Tech

For centuries maps showed seven continents, but a team led by geologist Nick Mortimer proved Earth has an eighth, a nearly five million square kilometer continent called Zealandia hiding almost entirely underwater

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · July 1, 2026

A Greenland shark gliding slowly through the dark cold water of the Arctic Ocean

Energy & the Wild

A slow, nearly blind fish in the Arctic Ocean turned out to be the oldest animal with a backbone on Earth, and some Greenland sharks alive today were born before Isaac Newton

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · July 1, 2026

Synchronous fireflies flashing in unison across a dark forest in the Great Smoky Mountains at night

Energy & the Wild

Scientists insisted no fireflies in the Americas could flash in unison, until a woman who grew up watching them in the Great Smoky Mountains proved the synchronous fireflies were real

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · July 1, 2026

A soft-bodied velvet worm with many short stubby legs crawling on a damp mossy forest floor

Energy & the Wild

The velvet worm looks like a soft, harmless caterpillar with too many legs, but it hunts by firing two jets of slime that whip back and forth to net its prey

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · July 1, 2026

An Arctic tern with a black cap and red bill in flight against a bright sky over the sea

Energy & the Wild

Every year the Arctic tern flies from the top of the world to the bottom and back, the longest migration of any animal, chasing summer from pole to pole

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · July 1, 2026

A spiny horned lizard with a crown of horns and sandy-brown skin on desert ground

Energy & the Wild

When a coyote gets too close, the horned lizard of the American desert does something almost unbelievable, it shoots a jet of its own foul blood straight from its eyes

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · July 1, 2026

A small translucent green glass frog resting on a bright green leaf

Energy & the Wild

To turn itself nearly invisible while it sleeps, the glass frog performs a trick that should be deadly, it hides almost all of its red blood inside its own liver

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · July 1, 2026

A tuatara, an olive-grey New Zealand reptile with a spiny crest, resting on a mossy rock

Energy & the Wild

The tuatara looks like an ordinary lizard, but it is really the last survivor of a reptile dynasty older than the dinosaurs, and it still wears a third eye on its head

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · July 1, 2026

A white camellia-like flower with a golden center on a leafy branch, the flower of the Franklin tree

Energy & the Wild

The Franklin tree has not been seen growing wild since 1803, yet it still blooms in gardens around the world, because one colonial botanist carried its seeds home in time

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · July 1, 2026

An open Venus flytrap with vivid red inner lobes and spiky interlocking teeth

Energy & the Wild

The Venus flytrap has no brain, no nerves and no muscles, yet it can count the touches of an insect's legs and decide, in a fraction of a second, whether to snap shut

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · July 1, 2026

A small iridescent blue butterfly resting on a dune flower, evoking the extinct Xerces blue butterfly

Energy & the Wild

A dazzling blue butterfly once lived only in the sand dunes of San Francisco, and the Xerces blue butterfly became the first insect in America that we know humans drove to extinction

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · July 1, 2026

Plain white pills spilling from a small unlabeled bottle, representing the placebo effect

Science & Tech

A sugar pill with no medicine in it can genuinely ease pain and illness, and the placebo effect is so strange that it even works when patients know the pill is fake

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · July 1, 2026

A Portuguese man o' war floating on the ocean surface with its translucent blue-and-pink gas float rising like a sail

Energy & the Wild

The Portuguese man o' war looks like a single drifting jellyfish, but it is really a colony of separate creatures, none of which could survive on its own

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · July 1, 2026

A shiny black dung beetle rolling a large round ball of dung across dry savanna soil at dusk

Energy & the Wild

To roll its ball of dung away in a straight line, the humble dung beetle looks up at the night sky and steers by the light of the entire Milky Way

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · July 1, 2026

A macro photograph of a human eye surrounded by a soft explosion of vivid rainbow colours, evoking tetrachromacy

Science & Tech

Most of us see about a million colors, but a rare few people, almost all of them women, have a condition called tetrachromacy that may let them see a hundred million

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · July 1, 2026

A brown-and-white striped mimic octopus with long slender arms on an open sandy seabed in murky tropical water

Energy & the Wild

Most animals that mimic can only copy one thing, but the mimic octopus can impersonate a dozen different creatures, and it seems to pick which disguise to wear for each threat

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · July 1, 2026

A simple mirror box therapy device on a table, a vertical mirror reflecting a hand, used to treat phantom limb pain

Science & Tech

Amputees can feel agonizing pain in a hand that is no longer there, and a neuroscientist found he could ease the phantom limb with nothing more than a cheap mirror

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · July 1, 2026

A pale translucent Antarctic icefish with a large mouth hovering near the dark seafloor in freezing water

Energy & the Wild

The Antarctic icefish is the only animal with a backbone that has no red blood at all, its veins run clear, and by every rule of biology it should not be alive

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · July 1, 2026

A towering titan arum corpse flower in full bloom, a tall pale spadix rising from a huge frilled deep crimson spathe

Energy & the Wild

The corpse flower is one of the biggest and rarest blooms on Earth, and it survives by heating itself up and stinking like a rotting body to lure in the flies

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · July 1, 2026

A large flock of migratory birds flying in formation across a vast dusk sky over the sea, an example of magnetoreception in action

Science & Tech

Migratory birds cross whole oceans without a map, and the leading explanation for their magnetoreception is that they may literally see the Earth's magnetic field using quantum physics in their eyes

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · July 1, 2026

A slender Boquila vine winding up a mossy tree in a temperate rainforest, its leaves blending in with the host tree's foliage

Energy & the Wild

The Boquila vine of Chile can reshape its own leaves to copy almost any plant it climbs, matching size, colour and even veins, and no one is sure how it does it

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · July 1, 2026

A vivid yellow slime mold spreading its branching web of veins across a damp decaying log on a forest floor

Energy & the Wild

A slime mold has no brain, no nerves and is not even an animal, yet it can solve a maze and design a transport network better than teams of human engineers

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · July 1, 2026

A mid-19th-century physician like Ignaz Semmelweis washing his hands in a basin in a dim hospital ward by lamplight

Science & Tech

Ignaz Semmelweis found a way to stop mothers dying in childbirth simply by washing hands, and for telling the truth too soon he was mocked, broken and locked away

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · July 1, 2026

Aerial view of thousands of fairy circles forming a honeycomb pattern of bare patches across the reddish Namib Desert grassland

Energy & the Wild

Across the Namib Desert, thousands of bare circles dot the grass in an eerily perfect honeycomb, and scientists have argued for decades over what makes the fairy circles form

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · July 1, 2026

The open Sargasso Sea with mats of golden-brown floating sargassum seaweed drifting on deep blue Atlantic water

Energy & the Wild

For over 2,000 years nobody could work out where eels come from, until scientists traced them to one weed-choked patch of the Atlantic called the Sargasso Sea

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · July 1, 2026

A single tall Judean date palm growing in an arid desert landscape near a rocky cliff in warm golden light

Energy & the Wild

The Judean date palm had been extinct for centuries, until scientists coaxed a single 2,000-year-old seed from an ancient desert fortress back into a living, fruit-bearing tree

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · July 1, 2026

The barren dark volcanic island of Surtsey with a cinder cone rising from a grey ocean off Iceland

Science & Tech

In 1963 a fishing crew watched smoke rise from the empty ocean off Iceland, and within days a brand new island named Surtsey had been born

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · July 1, 2026

Dragon blood trees with thick trunks and umbrella-shaped canopies scattered across a rocky plateau on Socotra under a dramatic sky

Energy & the Wild

The island of Socotra looks so alien that visitors swear they have left Earth, but its strangest inhabitants, the blood-red dragon trees, are quietly dying out

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · July 1, 2026

A band of shaggy wild horses standing on the windswept grassy dunes of Sable Island with the grey Atlantic behind them

Energy & the Wild

For centuries people believed the wild horses of Sable Island swam ashore from shipwrecks, but the truth is stranger, they are the living survivors of an 18th century expulsion

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · July 1, 2026

The first black hole image, a glowing fiery orange ring of light around a dark circular shadow at its center against the black of space

Science & Tech

A black hole swallows even light, so it should be impossible to photograph, yet in 2019 a team turned the whole planet into a telescope and captured the first image of one

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · July 1, 2026

Surreal neon yellow and green acid pools with orange and white mineral crusts steaming in the Danakil Depression, an alien landscape

Curiosities

The Danakil Depression in Ethiopia is one of the hottest, lowest places on Earth, where neon acid pools bubble beside a lava lake and people still walk in to cut salt

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · July 1, 2026

A small dark grey crystalline LK-99 fragment tilted and partially hovering above a silver magnet on a lab bench near tweezers

Science & Tech

For a few electric weeks in 2023 the whole world believed a Korean crystal called LK-99 was a room-temperature superconductor that would change everything, and then it quietly fell apart

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · July 1, 2026

A Florida panther, a tawny cougar, walking alert through Everglades sawgrass and palmetto in golden morning light

Energy & the Wild

Down to fewer than 30 inbred cats with kinked tails and failing hearts, the Florida panther was saved from extinction by an audacious act of mixing in the genes of Texas cougars

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · July 1, 2026

Rows of solar panels raised on tall frames over a lush field of leafy greens and tomato plants, a farmer walking between them, an agrivoltaics farm

Energy

Farmers were told they had to choose between growing food and hosting solar panels, but a Colorado experiment called agrivoltaics is proving the same acre can do both, and better

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · July 1, 2026

The Centennial Light, an old hand-blown carbon-filament lightbulb glowing a soft orange as it hangs in a dim fire station

Electric

The Centennial Light has glowed in a California fire station since 1901, outliving by a century the millions of bulbs an industry secretly agreed to build so they would burn out fast

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · July 1, 2026

Aerial view of the Chesapeake Bay Bridge-Tunnel, a long low highway crossing open sea with a man-made island where the road dips into a tunnel and a ship passing over

Industry & Mega-Builds

For 17.6 miles across the open mouth of Chesapeake Bay, a highway carries cars over the water and then plunges twice into tunnels beneath it so that Navy ships can sail overhead

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · July 1, 2026

Fly Geyser in the Nevada desert, brightly colored red and green travertine cones spraying hot water into terraced pools under a dramatic sky

Curiosities

Fly Geyser looks like one of America's most surreal natural wonders, but this rainbow-colored Nevada spring is really an accident, a well someone drilled, botched, and walked away from a century ago

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · July 1, 2026

A woman recovering in a hospital bed by a bright window after a pig kidney transplant, a faint hopeful smile

Science & Tech

A woman from Alabama who spent nine years on dialysis lived a record 130 days with a gene-edited pig kidney, the longest anyone has ever survived on an animal organ

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · July 1, 2026

A lone red wolf with tawny-red fur and large ears standing alert in a misty North Carolina pine forest at golden hour

Energy & the Wild

America declared the red wolf extinct in the wild in 1980, then brought it back to one North Carolina refuge, where new wild pups just proved the fight is not over

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · July 1, 2026

Giant gray piles of toxic mine chat looming over the abandoned streets and empty houses of Picher, Oklahoma

Curiosities

Picher, Oklahoma mined the lead that won two world wars, then poisoned a third of its children and paid every resident to leave before the town vanished for good

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · July 1, 2026

The Key Bridge collapse at night, a steel truss span fallen into a dark river with a huge container ship in the wreckage and emergency lights

Industry & Mega-Builds

A blacked-out cargo ship drifted toward Baltimore's Key Bridge in the dark, and the mayday it sent bought just enough time to stop traffic and save dozens, but six workers still fell

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · July 1, 2026

Extreme close-up of a northern giant hornet, the world's largest hornet, showing its orange head and powerful mandibles on a leaf

Energy & the Wild

America spent five years terrified of the two-inch murder hornet, then a handful of scientists glued radio trackers to the insects with dental floss and quietly wiped it off the continent

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · July 1, 2026

Michael Faraday in his Royal Institution laboratory surrounded by coils of wire, a magnet and glass jars by lamplight

Electric

A poor bookbinder taught himself science and found how to make electricity from a magnet, and now every power plant runs on his idea

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · July 1, 2026

The Morandi Bridge in Genoa, its concrete A-shaped towers carrying the motorway over the city under a dark storm sky

Industry & Mega-Builds

A motorway bridge in Genoa stood for 51 years, then fell in seconds and killed 43 people in a rainstorm

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · July 1, 2026

The Georgia Guidestones, a Stonehenge-like monument of tall grey granite slabs standing in a field in Elberton, Georgia

Curiosities

A stranger built a granite monument for the end of the world, kept his name secret forever, and 42 years later someone blew it up

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · July 1, 2026

Thomas Davenport, a Vermont blacksmith, at his forge studying an early hand-built electric motor of coiled wire and magnets

Electric

A Vermont blacksmith built the first electric motor in 1834, then died broke because the world had no power to run it

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · July 1, 2026

Old lattice wind turbines covering the golden hills of Altamont Pass with a golden eagle soaring overhead

Energy & the Wild

America's first big wind farm became a death trap for golden eagles, and one biologist spent years counting the bodies

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · June 30, 2026

An 1880s laboratory bench with the kind of early AC induction motor Galileo Ferraris built

Electric

He invented the motor that powers the modern world, then refused to own it

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · June 30, 2026

The three-bladed Gedser wind turbine on its concrete tower on the Danish coast in the late 1950s

Energy

The self-taught Dane whose windmill became the template for every modern turbine

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · June 30, 2026

The bleak misty Norwegian valley of Isdalen where the Isdal Woman was found in 1970

Curiosities

The burned body, the coded notes, and the spy with nine names

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · June 30, 2026

Luigi Galvani touching dissected frog legs with a metal instrument as they twitch in an 18th-century laboratory

Electric

The twitching frog that gave us the battery and Frankenstein

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · June 30, 2026

The Collyer brothers' brownstone interior packed floor to ceiling with hoarded newspapers, books and junk in 1947

Curiosities

The recluses buried alive by the mountain of junk they collected

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · June 30, 2026

A Bersey electric cab, a Victorian battery-powered hansom, on a foggy gas-lit London street in 1897

Electric

London had silent electric taxis in 1897, then threw them away

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · June 30, 2026

The Laki eruption of 1783, a long fissure of fire fountains across a barren Icelandic plain under a smoke-choked sky

Energy & the Wild

The Icelandic eruption that poisoned the skies over Europe

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · June 30, 2026

Mary Anning searching for fossils with a basket and hammer beneath the cliffs at Lyme Regis

Science & Tech

The poor girl who found the sea dragons and got none of the credit

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · June 30, 2026

Bertha Benz driving the three-wheeled Benz Motorwagen along a country road in 1888 with her two sons

Industry & Mega-Builds

The wife who stole the first car and drove it into history

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · June 30, 2026

Families gathered around a 1930s radio during the War of the Worlds broadcast

Curiosities

The night Martians invaded the radio, and the panic that mostly wasn't

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · June 30, 2026

Clever Hans, a horse tapping its hoof before a crowd in early 1900s Berlin

Science & Tech

The horse that seemed to do math, and the trick no one meant to play

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · June 30, 2026

Wojtek the bear, a large brown bear standing among Polish soldiers in a WWII army camp

Energy & the Wild

The orphaned cub who became a soldier in the Polish army

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · June 30, 2026

A 1980s Therac-25 style radiation therapy machine aimed at an empty treatment table in a hospital room

Science & Tech

The radiation machine whose software quietly killed its patients

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · June 30, 2026

A large brass Foucault pendulum bob hanging on a long wire and swinging beneath a grand domed ceiling

Science & Tech

The swinging weight that let people watch the Earth turn

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · June 30, 2026

A white twin-engine airliner gliding silently toward a remote runway, the Gimli Glider making its powerless descent

Science & Tech

The jet that ran out of fuel at 41,000 feet and glided to safety

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · June 30, 2026

A worn handmade tile with faded lettering embedded flush in the cracked asphalt of a city street, a Toynbee tile

Curiosities

For 40 years, strange tiles with the same baffling message have appeared in city streets

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · June 30, 2026

A simple glass electrolysis cell with electrodes and bubbling liquid on a lab bench, evoking the cold fusion experiment

Science & Tech

In 1989 two chemists said they had bottled the power of the sun, and for weeks the world believed them

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · June 30, 2026

The vast golden dome of Hagia Sophia ringed with arched windows, seen from inside

Industry & Mega-Builds

Two mathematicians built a dome so daring it seemed to hang from heaven, and it has stood 1,500 years

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · June 30, 2026

Four glowing incandescent light bulbs on a wire in a 1950s reactor building, as at EBR-1

Energy

The nuclear age began with four light bulbs glowing in a hut in the Idaho desert

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · June 30, 2026

A honey badger standing alert on dry African ground with its black body and grey-white back stripe

Energy & the Wild

It fights cobras, survives their venom, and one of them broke out of every cage it was given

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · June 30, 2026

A lonely grassy hilltop overlooking a Brazilian coastal city at dusk, the setting of the Lead Masks Case

Curiosities

Two men were found dead on a hill in lead masks, and no one has ever explained why

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · June 30, 2026

A late-1980s computer terminal screen filling with system error messages, evoking the Morris worm

Science & Tech

A student wrote a tiny program to measure the internet, and accidentally crashed a tenth of it

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · June 30, 2026

The white marble Leaning Tower of Pisa tilting against a clear blue sky

Industry & Mega-Builds

The Leaning Tower of Pisa was about to fall, so engineers un-leaned it just enough

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · June 30, 2026

A lonely abandoned concrete lighthouse on a frozen Arctic coast under a grey sky, a Soviet nuclear lighthouse

Energy

The Soviet Union built a thousand nuclear lighthouses, then walked away and left them in the snow

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · June 30, 2026

A sleek low luxury electric sports sedan with a long hood under dramatic studio lighting, evoking the Fisker Karma

Electric

A legendary designer built the prettiest electric car of its age, then watched it drown

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · June 30, 2026

The giant golden tuned mass damper sphere hanging on steel cables inside the upper floors of Taipei 101

Industry & Mega-Builds

A 660-ton golden ball hangs inside this skyscraper to stop it swaying in a typhoon

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · June 30, 2026

A gloved hand holding a sealed capsule glowing blue in the dark, evoking the Goiânia accident cesium source

Energy

A glowing blue powder looked like treasure, and it was one of the deadliest things on Earth

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · June 30, 2026

A dense cluster of giant tube worms with red plumes around a deep-sea hydrothermal vent in the dark

Energy & the Wild

These deep-sea worms have no mouth and no gut, and they feed on the planet's own poison

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · June 30, 2026

The twin-bore Hallandsås Tunnel portal cut into a green forested ridge in southern Sweden

Industry & Mega-Builds

A tunnel leaked so badly that Sweden poured in poison, and then the poison got out

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · June 30, 2026

The secret Mayak nuclear complex in the Ural Mountains, site of the 1957 Kyshtym disaster

Energy

The world's third-worst nuclear disaster happened in 1957, and the Soviets hid it for thirty years

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · June 30, 2026

Hedy Lamarr, a glamorous 1940s film star, working at a desk with engineering sketches

Science

Hollywood's most glamorous star spent her nights inventing the radio trick that powers WiFi

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · June 30, 2026

The 1869 golden spike ceremony completing the Transcontinental Railroad, with two locomotives meeting at Promontory

Industry & Mega-Builds

Thousands blasted a railroad through the mountains, then were written out of the story they built

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · June 30, 2026

A small mouse-like brown antechinus marsupial perched on a log in Australian bushland

Energy & the Wild

These tiny marsupials mate for hours on end until the stress literally kills every male

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · June 30, 2026

The Salar de Uyuni salt flat in Bolivia turned into a vast mirror reflecting the sky and clouds

Energy

The world's biggest mirror hides the white gold that powers electric cars

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · June 30, 2026

A vintage shortwave radio with a glowing dial in a dark room, used to receive numbers stations

Curiosities

For decades, eerie voices have read endless numbers over the radio, and almost no one will say why

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · June 30, 2026

Clair Patterson, a 1950s geochemist, working at a mass spectrometer in a spotless clean room

Science

He weighed the Earth's true age, then found the whole planet was being quietly poisoned

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · June 30, 2026

A pale eel-like hagfish on the dark seafloor surrounded by clouds of white slime

Energy & the Wild

Bite this ancient fish and it drowns your gills in slime, then ties itself in a knot to escape

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · June 30, 2026

The collapsed iron span of the first Tay Bridge after the 1879 Tay Bridge disaster, with a gap over the stormy firth

Industry & Mega-Builds

Scotland's longest bridge collapsed in a gale and took a whole train into the river

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · June 30, 2026

The Daddy Long Legs car on tall stilt-legs moving through the sea off Brighton in the 1890s

Electric

A Victorian inventor built an electric tram on stilts and drove it straight through the sea

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · June 30, 2026

The small SL-1 reactor building standing alone in the snowy Idaho desert in 1961

Energy

One man pulled a control rod too far, and America's only fatal reactor accident followed

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · June 30, 2026

The grand atrium of the Hyatt Regency, where the walkway collapse happened, with suspended skywalks crossing high above the lobby floor

Industry & Mega-Builds

A single change no one double-checked dropped two walkways onto a crowded dance floor

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · June 30, 2026

A pale eyeless olm cave salamander with feathery red external gills swimming in dark cave water

Energy & the Wild

People once thought it was a baby dragon, and it can go ten years without a meal

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · June 30, 2026

The tall cylindrical Brent Spar oil storage buoy floating alone in the grey North Sea

Energy

Shell tried to sink an oil platform in the Atlantic, and a continent of angry drivers stopped it

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · June 30, 2026

The enormous open Codex Gigas medieval manuscript on a stand, lit by candlelight

Curiosities

A monk facing death promised to write a book in one night, and a portrait of the Devil hides inside it

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · June 30, 2026

A visualisation of a single-atom-thick graphene sheet as a glowing blue honeycomb lattice

Science & Tech

Two scientists peeled the strongest material on Earth off a pencil with sticky tape

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · June 30, 2026

The huge silver British R101 airship moored to its mast above Cardington in 1930

Industry & Mega-Builds

Britain's giant airship crashed on its first real voyage, killing more people than the Hindenburg

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · June 30, 2026

A four-leaf clover on an old lottery ticket, evoking the luck of Frane Selak

Curiosities

He survived a train, a plane and a cliff, then won the lottery, if the stories are true

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · June 30, 2026

A white Finn Dorset ewe in a 1990s research barn, representing Dolly the sheep

Science & Tech

She was cloned from a single adult cell, and the world feared she had been born old

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · June 30, 2026

The great steel cantilever Quebec Bridge spanning the wide St. Lawrence River

Industry & Mega-Builds

The world's longest cantilever bridge collapsed twice and killed 88 men, 33 from one small town

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · June 30, 2026

The Yanar Dag hillside in Azerbaijan with natural gas flames rising along the slope at night

Energy

In Azerbaijan a hillside has been on fire for centuries, and no one ever lit it on purpose

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · June 30, 2026

A 1960s woman scientist beside a tall stack of printed Apollo source code, evoking Margaret Hamilton

Science & Tech

When the computer cried for help during the Moon landing, Margaret Hamilton's code saved the day

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · June 30, 2026

The broken tail of a 1970s airliner on a snowy mountain slope where Vesna Vulovic survived her fall

Curiosities

She fell six miles out of an exploding plane with no parachute, and somehow lived

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · June 30, 2026

A pangolin curled into a tight armoured ball of scales on a forest floor

Energy & the Wild

The pangolin's armour stops a lion, and that is exactly why poachers can carry it away

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · June 30, 2026

A Chinese woman scientist in a 1970s laboratory studying plant extracts, evoking Tu Youyou's malaria research

Science & Tech

She had no PhD, found a malaria cure in a 1,600-year-old book, and tested it on herself

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · June 30, 2026

An Edwardian ocean liner stewardess in uniform on the deck of a great ship, evoking Violet Jessop

Curiosities

She worked on all three of history's most famous doomed ships, and survived every one

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · June 30, 2026

A bright emerald-green leaf-shaped solar-powered sea slug resting on algae in shallow water

Energy & the Wild

This sea slug steals sunlight from algae and lives like a leaf for a year

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · June 30, 2026

A single bright blue LED glowing on a circuit board in a dim laboratory

Science & Tech

He cracked the blue LED that giants gave up on, and his reward was a $180 bonus

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · June 30, 2026

A well-dressed man lying still on a deserted Australian beach at dawn in 1948, evoking the Somerton Man case

Curiosities

A nameless man was found dead on a beach in 1948 with a secret code sewn into his clothes, and it took 74 years and DNA to even learn who he was

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · June 29, 2026

A huge coconut crab with thick armored claws gripping a coconut on a tropical island forest floor

Energy & the Wild

The biggest land crab on Earth climbs trees, cracks coconuts with a lion's grip, eats birds, and may have devoured Amelia Earhart

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · June 29, 2026

An aerial view of the L-shaped LIGO gravitational waves observatory with two 4-kilometre arms meeting at a right angle

Science & Tech

Two black holes collided 1.3 billion years ago, and in 2015 a machine on Earth felt the wobble it made, a shudder smaller than a proton

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · June 29, 2026

The dark surface of a cold southern ocean at dusk with distant icebergs, evoking the mystery of the Bloop

Curiosities

A sound so loud it crossed an ocean made scientists wonder if a sea monster was real, until they traced it to cracking Antarctic ice

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · June 29, 2026

The Pontcysyllte Aqueduct carrying a narrowboat in a cast-iron trough high on tall stone piers across a green Welsh valley

Industry & Mega-Builds

In 1805 engineers sent canal boats floating across the sky in an iron trough 38 metres up, with nothing but air on the open side

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · June 29, 2026

The Akademik Lomonosov floating nuclear power plant, a barge moored at a snowy Arctic port town

Energy

Russia towed a nuclear power station across the Arctic on a barge to light up its most remote town, and critics call it Chernobyl on ice

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · June 29, 2026

The DART spacecraft approaching the asteroid Dimorphos moments before impact

Science & Tech

NASA crashed a fridge-sized spacecraft into an asteroid at 14,000 mph on purpose, and for the first time ever humanity moved another world

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · June 29, 2026

The vast interior of the Longyou Caves with huge carved stone pillars and chisel-marked rock ceilings

Curiosities

Villagers drained a pond they thought was bottomless and found 24 vast caverns carved by hand that no history book mentions

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · June 29, 2026

A grey squirrel perched on the wires of an electrical substation transformer, a threat to the power grid

Energy & the Wild

Forget hackers: squirrels have knocked out the power grid more than 900 times, and once took down the NASDAQ

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · June 29, 2026

A large concrete hydro-electric dam of the Snowy Mountains Scheme set in rugged Australian alpine mountains

Industry & Mega-Builds

It took 100,000 workers from 30 countries and 121 lives to turn Australia's rivers backward through the mountains

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · June 29, 2026

A small white two-seat electric plane with a nose propeller parked on a grass airfield at golden hour

Electric

The world's first certified electric plane is not a jet from Boeing or Airbus, but a tiny two-seat trainer from a small Slovenian workshop

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · June 29, 2026

A swarm of moon jellyfish clogging the steel cooling water intake screen of a coastal power plant

Energy & the Wild

A swarm of brainless jellyfish can shut down a billion-dollar nuclear reactor in hours, and warming seas are making it happen more often

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · June 29, 2026

A crumpled foil object half coated in Vantablack so the black side looks like a flat featureless hole with no visible folds

Science & Tech

One artist bought the exclusive right to the blackest colour ever made, so a rival invented the pinkest pink and banned him from buying it

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · June 29, 2026

A white research-farm spider goats doe in a clean pen with a dew-covered spider web in the foreground

Science & Tech

Spiders are too vicious to farm, so scientists hid their silk gene in goats and now milk it out

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · June 29, 2026

An aerial view of the giant hummingbird geoglyph, one of the famous Nazca Lines

Curiosities

Giant 2,000-year-old drawings carved into a Peruvian desert can only be seen from the sky, and nobody is quite sure why they exist

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · June 29, 2026

An 1882 Victorian parlour with a tree of early electric Christmas lights

Electric

The cosy tradition of electric Christmas lights began in 1882 as a corporate stunt by one of Edison's men to sell electricity

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · June 29, 2026

Looking down the deep brick-lined shaft of the Woodingdean Well into darkness

Industry & Mega-Builds

To dodge a water bill, Victorian paupers spent four years hand-digging a well deeper than the Empire State Building is tall

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · June 29, 2026

A cluster of hibernating bats on a cave ceiling, some showing the white fungus of white-nose syndrome

Energy & the Wild

A cold-loving fungus has killed millions of America's bats since 2006, and almost nobody noticed we were losing one of farming's most valuable workers

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · June 29, 2026

The vast underground machine hall cavern of Cruachan Power Station inside Ben Cruachan

Energy

Hidden inside a Scottish mountain is a power station that works like a giant battery, dug out by tunnellers, 36 of whom died

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · June 29, 2026

A wave of dark porter surging through a London street during the London Beer Flood of 1814

Curiosities

In 1814 a giant vat burst and sent a wave of a million litres of beer through a London slum, drowning eight people at a child's wake

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · June 29, 2026

An 1890s electric carriage like the William Morrison electric car on a small-town street

Electric

America's first car was electric, built in 1890 by a Scottish chemist who didn't care about cars, only about the battery inside it

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · June 29, 2026

Aerial view of the vast terraced pit of the Mirny diamond mine in snowy Siberia

Industry & Mega-Builds

Soviet miners dug a 525-metre hole into frozen Siberia for its diamonds, so vast that aircraft are banned from flying over it

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · June 29, 2026

A close-up of a metallic blowfly, the kind targeted by screwworm eradication

Energy & the Wild

Scientists wiped a flesh-eating parasite off a continent not with poison but by breeding billions of flies and sterilising the males

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · June 29, 2026

The four cooling towers of Calder Hall nuclear power station in 1956

Energy

The Queen opened the world's first nuclear power station in 1956 as a gift of peace, but its real job was making plutonium for the bomb

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · June 29, 2026

The sprawling Victorian facade of the Winchester Mystery House under a moody sky

Curiosities

A grieving rifle heiress spent 38 years building a mansion that never stopped growing, with staircases to nowhere and doors that open onto thin air

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · June 29, 2026

The Manhattan skyline in total darkness during the 1977 New York City blackout

Electric

The 1977 blackout dropped nine million New Yorkers into darkness for 25 hours, and the same city that stayed calm in 1965 tore itself apart

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · June 29, 2026

Aerial view of the Hong Kong-Zhuhai-Macau Bridge curving across the open sea

Industry & Mega-Builds

The world's longest sea crossing runs 55 km, then dives into a tunnel on the seabed so ships can sail right over the traffic

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · June 29, 2026

A Pyrenean ibex on a rocky ledge, the species at the centre of the Pyrenean ibex de-extinction

Energy & the Wild

Scientists cloned this extinct mountain goat back to life in 2003 and watched it die minutes later, the only animal ever to go extinct twice

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · June 29, 2026

A Victorian inventor beside an early Charles Fritts solar cell array on a New York rooftop in 1884

Energy

A New York inventor put working solar panels on a rooftop in 1884, while the city wired itself to coal, and the world ignored him for seventy years

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · June 29, 2026

Charles Steinmetz, a short hunchbacked man in spectacles, beside crackling electrical apparatus in a dim laboratory

Electric

Almost turned away at Ellis Island for being a dwarf, this 4-foot immigrant became the wizard who built 120,000-volt lightning for General Electric

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · June 29, 2026

A herd of Pere David's deer, large marsh deer with backward-branching antlers, standing in wetland grass

Energy & the Wild

A Chinese deer went extinct at home and survived only because an English duke had quietly gathered the last few in his park, then it was shipped back a century later

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · June 29, 2026

The narrow Corinth Canal cut deep between high vertical rock walls in Greece, a small ship passing through

Industry & Mega-Builds

People dreamed of slicing through this Greek isthmus for 2,000 years, an emperor tried it with thousands of slaves, and when it was finally cut it was almost too narrow to use

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · June 29, 2026

A reconstructed brown fossil skull of Piltdown Man displayed on a stand in a museum

Curiosities

A skull dug from an English gravel pit was crowned the missing link in human evolution, and it took science 40 years to admit the whole thing was a deliberate fake

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · June 29, 2026

A Victorian woman scientist studying a bright carbon electric arc lamp on a laboratory bench, representing Hertha Ayrton

Electric

She worked out why the electric arc lighting the world's streets hissed and flickered, became the first woman in Britain's engineering institution, and was still refused her rightful honour

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · June 29, 2026

The Spindletop gusher of 1901 erupting a tall black fountain of oil high above a wooden drilling derrick in Texas

Energy

Everyone laughed at the self-taught dreamer who swore oil lay under a low Texas hill, until the day it erupted 150 feet into the sky and made the modern world run on oil

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · June 29, 2026

A small black robin perched on a mossy branch on a windswept Chatham Island

Energy & the Wild

A whole bird species came down to five survivors and a single fertile female, and the fact that it exists at all today rests on that one bird, called Old Blue

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · June 29, 2026

A train on the Qinghai-Tibet Railway crossing a vast high plateau with snow-capped mountains

Industry & Mega-Builds

To build the highest railway on Earth across ground that melts and heaves, engineers had to do something strange: keep the frozen earth frozen on purpose

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · June 29, 2026

A quagga on African grassland, striped on the head and neck and fading to plain brown on the body

Energy & the Wild

A half-striped zebra was hunted into extinction and the last one died unnoticed in a zoo, and now South African breeders are conjuring it back from its own living cousins

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · June 29, 2026

A 19th-century Danish experimental windmill beside a folk school building, representing Poul la Cour's wind power work

Energy

A village schoolteacher in 1890s Denmark cracked the science of wind power and split water into hydrogen to light his school, a century before the rest of the world caught up

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · June 29, 2026

A Victorian naval officer studying a weather chart and barometer by candlelight, representing Robert FitzRoy

Curiosities

The man who invented the weather forecast was mocked into ruin for it, took his own life, and only decades later was proved right by the millions who now trust it daily

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · June 29, 2026

A large polished cone-shaped 19th-century solar concentrator aimed at the sun with a small central boiler in a stone courtyard

Energy

In 1878 a French teacher made a block of ice using nothing but sunshine, won a gold medal in Paris, then watched cheap coal bury his solar engine for a hundred years

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · June 29, 2026

A freediver reaching toward a wild octopus in a sunlit kelp forest, the scene from My Octopus Teacher

Energy & the Wild

A burned-out filmmaker free-dived a freezing kelp forest every day for a year and built a friendship with a wild octopus, and the film of it won an Oscar

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · June 29, 2026

Alex the parrot, an African grey parrot with pale eyes and a red tail, tilting its head with a curious expression

Curiosities

Alex the parrot learned over 100 words, counted to six, sorted colors and shapes, and may be the only animal ever to ask a question about itself

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · June 29, 2026

The long interior of the Seikan Tunnel curving into the distance deep underground with a single rail track

Industry & Mega-Builds

Japan dug the world's longest undersea tunnel, the Seikan Tunnel, because a typhoon sank five ferries in the strait and killed more than 1,400 people in a single night

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · June 29, 2026

The sleek silver teardrop-shaped GM EV1 electric car parked on a sunny California road

Electric

General Motors built a beloved electric car in the 1990s, the EV1, then took every one back from its drivers and crushed them in the Arizona desert

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · June 29, 2026

Charles Brush's giant 144-blade wooden wind turbine on a tall tower behind a Victorian mansion in Cleveland in 1888

Energy

In 1888 Charles Brush lit his Cleveland mansion with a giant backyard windmill, the first automatic wind turbine to make electricity, decades before anyone called it wind power

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · June 29, 2026

Wisdom the albatross, a Laysan albatross with a leg band, sitting on her nest on a sandy Pacific island

Energy & the Wild

Wisdom the albatross is at least 74 years old, has flown three million miles, outlived the scientist who banded her in 1956, and is still raising chicks

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · June 29, 2026

Joy Milne, a woman with a heightened sense of smell, breathing in the scent of a white t-shirt in a research lab

Curiosities

Joy Milne smelled a strange new odour on her husband and only understood it 12 years later, when he was diagnosed with Parkinson's, and her nose is now becoming a medical test

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · June 29, 2026

The gleaming stainless-steel Art Deco crown and spire of the Chrysler Building shining against a blue sky

Industry & Mega-Builds

To win the race for the world's tallest building, the architect of the Chrysler Building hid a 185-foot spire inside its crown and raised it in 90 minutes to ambush his rival

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · June 29, 2026

The tiny Reva G-Wiz electric car parked on a central London street beside a red double-decker bus

Electric

A tiny Indian electric car that Top Gear crash-tested into a punchline, the Reva G-Wiz, quietly became Britain's best-selling electric car years before most people had heard of Tesla

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · June 29, 2026

Scientists on a wooden balcony watching instruments above the dark graphite reactor of Chicago Pile-1, the first nuclear reactor

Energy

In 1942 a refugee physicist, Enrico Fermi, lit the first self-sustaining nuclear chain reaction inside a squash court under a Chicago football stadium, a crude pile of graphite and uranium called Chicago Pile-1 that quietly opened the atomic age

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · June 28, 2026

The loneliest whale swimming alone through deep blue open ocean with sunlight filtering down from the surface

Energy & the Wild

A single whale has crossed the Pacific for decades singing at a pitch no other whale answers, the loneliest whale on Earth, yet the scientists who know it best doubt it is lonely at all

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · June 28, 2026

A silver and black striped archerfish near the water surface, mouth at the surface, in a sunlit mangrove pool

Energy & the Wild

The archerfish hunts by spitting a precise jet of water to knock insects off leaves above the surface, solving the bending of light that should make the shot impossible

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · June 28, 2026

Stacked carbon blocks inside an insulated chamber glowing brilliant white and orange hot, a thermal battery storing energy as heat

Energy

A new kind of thermal battery stores cheap renewable electricity by heating blocks of carbon until they glow white-hot, hotter than lava, then turns that light back into power

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · June 28, 2026

A close-up of a star-nosed mole showing the ring of twenty-two pink fleshy appendages around its nose, dark fur and tiny eyes

Energy & the Wild

The star-nosed mole is nearly blind, but a ring of twenty-two fleshy tentacles lets it feel out and eat a meal in a tenth of a second, the fastest forager known

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · June 28, 2026

A field of tall thin leaning blades of white ice, penitentes, on a high sunlit Andean mountainside under a deep blue sky

Curiosities

High in the dry Andes stand fields of penitentes, blades of ice taller than a person, carved not by melting or wind but by sunlight turning snow straight into vapour

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · June 28, 2026

A platypus with its duck-like bill, dense brown fur and webbed feet swimming at the surface of a calm river

Energy & the Wild

The platypus lays eggs, carries venom in its heels and hunts with its eyes shut by feeling the faint electricity of its prey through a bill packed with forty thousand sensors

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · June 28, 2026

A carved underground stone chamber and stairway in the Derinkuyu underground city, lit by warm lamplight deep below ground

Curiosities

Beneath a Turkish town lies Derinkuyu, an ancient underground city carved eighteen storeys deep that could hide twenty thousand people and seal itself with rolling stone doors

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · June 28, 2026

The enormous Prelude FLNG floating gas facility, a vast red and grey industrial vessel covered in pipework, moored on the open sea

Industry & Mega-Builds

Prelude FLNG is a floating gas factory longer than the tallest skyscraper, built to ride out a category-five cyclone while turning natural gas to liquid on the open ocean

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · June 28, 2026

Large insulated cryogenic storage tanks and turbines at a liquid air energy storage plant under a clear sky

Energy

Liquid air energy storage turns spare electricity into a tank of air chilled to minus 196 degrees, then lets it boil back to power a turbine when the grid runs short

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · June 28, 2026

A hybrid truck driving under overhead electric wires on a highway, its roof pantograph raised to the catenary line

Electric

The eHighway hangs tram-style overhead wires above the motorway so that long-haul trucks can raise a pantograph and drive on electricity without hauling a giant battery

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · June 28, 2026

A superb lyrebird standing on the forest floor with its long elegant lyre-shaped tail feathers visible

Energy & the Wild

The superb lyrebird can imitate chainsaws, camera shutters and the calls of twenty other birds so perfectly that even the birds it copies cannot tell the difference

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · June 28, 2026

A Byzantine warship spraying a jet of burning liquid Greek fire across the sea onto an enemy ship, flames floating on the water

Curiosities

Byzantium guarded the recipe for Greek fire, a weapon that burned even on water, so jealously that the secret was finally lost and no one can reproduce it today

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · June 28, 2026

A diving bell spider inside a silvery bubble of air attached to underwater plants in a freshwater pond

Energy & the Wild

The diving bell spider lives its entire life underwater, breathing from a bubble of air it spins into a silk bell that works like a gill

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · June 28, 2026

A hollow tube of ice, a brinicle, hanging down from the underside of Antarctic sea ice into dark blue water

Curiosities

Beneath the Antarctic sea ice, a hollow finger of ice called a brinicle grows downward through the water and freezes every slow creature it touches on the seabed

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · June 28, 2026

The Millau Viaduct, a long white cable-stayed bridge on tall slender piers, spanning a green river valley in southern France

Industry & Mega-Builds

The mast of the Millau Viaduct in southern France stands taller than the Eiffel Tower, carrying drivers across a valley so high they often cross above the clouds

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · June 28, 2026

Two pale green-skinned children in ragged medieval clothes standing at the edge of an English harvest field

Curiosities

Two green-skinned children speaking no known language appeared in a medieval English village, and the truth behind the Green Children of Woolpit may be sadder than any fairy tale

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · June 28, 2026

A floating wind farm of turbines on the open sea far from shore, the Hywind Scotland project

Energy

Wind turbines used to need shallow water to stand up, until an oil company floated five of them in the deep North Sea and built the world's first floating wind farm

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · June 28, 2026

Clusters of honey-colored Armillaria mushrooms on a forest floor, the only visible sign of the humongous fungus

Energy & the Wild

The largest living thing on Earth is not a whale or a tree but a humongous fungus quietly spreading under an Oregon forest for thousands of years, killing it from below

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · June 28, 2026

A Formula E electric single-seater racing car cornering on a city street circuit between barriers

Electric

A napkin sketch in a Paris restaurant became Formula E, the electric racing series that petrolheads laughed at, until Porsche, Jaguar and Nissan came to race silent cars through the world's cities

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · June 28, 2026

Yellow MOSE flood barrier gates raised out of the water at a Venice lagoon inlet, holding back the sea

Industry

Venice spent six billion euros and a decade fighting corruption to build MOSE, a wall of 78 hidden gates that rise from the seabed to hold back the floods drowning the city

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · June 28, 2026

The Devils Kettle waterfall, where the Brule River splits and half pours into a dark pothole in the rock

Curiosities

For decades, half of a Minnesota river poured into a hole at Devils Kettle and seemed to vanish, and people threw in dye, balls and logs trying to find where it went

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · June 28, 2026

A small lab-grown diamond battery cell containing carbon-14, held in tweezers under bright laboratory light

Energy

Scientists in Bristol found a way to turn the most stubborn kind of nuclear waste into a tiny diamond battery that powers itself, safely, for thousands of years

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · June 28, 2026

The Tree of Tenere, a lone acacia standing in an empty expanse of Sahara desert sand under a vast sky

Energy & the Wild

The Tree of Tenere stood alone in the Sahara for 300 years, the only tree for 400 kilometres and a lifeline for caravans, until a truck driver somehow managed to hit it

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · June 28, 2026

The Rimac Nevera electric hypercar built by Mate Rimac, a sleek low blue sports car on a track

Electric

Mate Rimac was mocked for turning an old BMW into an electric racer in his garage at 18, and now he builds the fastest car on Earth and runs Bugatti

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · June 28, 2026

The London Millennium Bridge, a slender steel footbridge over the Thames with St Paul's Cathedral behind

Industry

London opened a sleek new footbridge over the Thames in 2000, then watched 90,000 people make it sway so badly the Millennium Bridge had to close just two days later

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · June 28, 2026

A snow-covered Ural slope at dusk with a half-buried tent, evoking the Dyatlov Pass incident of 1959

Curiosities

Nine hikers fled their tent into a freezing Ural night in 1959, and for sixty years the Dyatlov Pass incident bred theories of yetis and secret weapons, until physics finally cracked it

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · June 28, 2026

Iberian orcas surfacing close to a small sailboat in the Strait of Gibraltar

Energy & the Wild

A pod of critically endangered Iberian orcas has spent five years ramming the rudders off sailboats in the Strait of Gibraltar, and the likeliest reason is that they find it fun

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · June 28, 2026

Skiers on the green rooftop ski slope of CopenHill, the Copenhagen waste-to-energy plant

Energy

Copenhagen turned a trash-burning power plant into CopenHill, a 90-meter artificial mountain with a 400-meter ski slope on its roof, and made the thing every city hides its proudest landmark

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · June 28, 2026

A charismatic tech founder presenting the Better Place electric car vision on a bright keynote stage

Electric

A charismatic tech star raised more than 800 million dollars so Better Place could kill the gas pump with swappable batteries, and it sold barely 1,000 cars before collapsing

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · June 28, 2026

A North Atlantic right whale surfacing in cold grey water beside floating lobster trap buoys

Energy & the Wild

A Cape Cod lobsterman pulled the rope out of the water to help save the 70 mothers left of the North Atlantic right whale, the rarest great whale in the Atlantic

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · June 28, 2026

The twin brick arches of the Thames Tunnel lit by gas lamps with Victorian visitors walking through, Brunel's tunnel under the river

Industry

The first tunnel ever dug under a river was made possible by a creature engineers had spent centuries trying to destroy: the shipworm that eats ships from the inside

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · June 28, 2026

A male bowerbird at its decorated stick bower on the forest floor, the structure it builds to court mates

Energy & Nature

A bird builds a decorated stage, sorts its treasures by colour, and arranges them to create an optical illusion, all to impress a mate who judges the artistry

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · June 28, 2026

A lone park ranger on a misty mountain ridge as a lightning storm flashes behind, evoking Roy Sullivan

Curiosities

A park ranger was struck by lightning seven separate times over thirty-five years and survived every one, earning a record and a loneliness no one envies

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · June 28, 2026

Cam-shaped floating wave energy devices, like Salter's Duck, nodding on grey ocean swells

Energy

A device that could turn nine-tenths of a wave into electricity was shut down in a closed meeting in 1982, on a cost estimate later found to be wrong by a factor of ten

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · June 28, 2026

A small late-1990s hybrid sedan on a road, like the first Toyota Prius of 1997

Electric

The car that made hybrids mainstream nearly died in the lab, with prototypes that would not move and batteries that caught fire, before it was rushed out in 1997

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · June 28, 2026

A 1960s woman chemist holding up a beaker of cloudy liquid, like Stephanie Kwolek discovering Kevlar

Industry

A cloudy liquid that should have been thrown away became a fibre five times stronger than steel, and the woman who made it never got rich from the patent

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · June 28, 2026

A prairie dog standing upright at its burrow with mouth open, giving the alarm call at the heart of prairie dog language

Energy & Nature

A much-poisoned rodent of the American plains may have the most detailed animal language ever decoded, able to say not just danger but a tall human in a yellow shirt

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · June 28, 2026

A dark flooded passage of Movile Cave with pale microbial mats on the water and walls

Curiosities

A whole world of creatures has survived sealed off from the sun for millions of years, eating poison gas in air that would kill a person in minutes

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · June 28, 2026

Grand Coulee Dam, an immense concrete gravity dam on the Columbia River with water spilling over it

Energy

The dam that helped win the war and build the atomic bomb also drowned one of the greatest salmon runs on Earth and a Native nation's heart

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · June 28, 2026

Two men in 1910s suits beside an early electric automobile with battery cells, the Edison Ford electric car of 1914

Electric

In 1914 Edison and Ford promised the world a cheap electric car for everyone, then it quietly vanished and gasoline ruled for a century

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · June 28, 2026

The 1851 Crystal Palace, a vast glass and iron exhibition hall with an arched transept gleaming in a London park

Industry

The most dazzling building of the 19th century was designed not by an architect but by a gardener, who copied its skeleton from a giant Amazon waterlily

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · June 28, 2026

A small brown honeyguide bird calling from a branch with an African honey hunter in the savanna behind

Energy & Nature

A wild African bird and a honey hunter call back and forth to each other, then team up to raid a beehive, a partnership no one taught either of them

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · June 28, 2026

The Naica crystal cave in Mexico, giant translucent selenite crystal beams crisscrossing a cavern with a tiny person in a heat suit for scale

Curiosities

Deep under a Mexican desert lies a chamber of crystals taller than houses, grown over half a million years in air so hot it can kill a person in minutes

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · June 28, 2026

The Ardnacrusha hydroelectric power station, a 1920s concrete power house beside a canal on the River Shannon in Ireland

Energy

A broke new nation bet a fifth of its entire budget on a single power station on the Shannon, and used it to switch on a whole country

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · June 28, 2026

A long-nosed high-speed bullet train shaped like a kingfisher's beak bursting out of a tunnel at speed

Electric

Japan's bullet train was too loud for the law, so a birdwatching engineer rebuilt its nose like a kingfisher's beak

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · June 28, 2026

Aerial view of the Afsluitdijk, the long straight dam that sealed off the Zuiderzee, with open sea on one side and a calm lake on the other

Industry

The Dutch got tired of the sea flooding them, so they walled off an entire arm of the ocean and grew a province on the bottom

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · June 28, 2026

A bar-tailed godwit flying alone high over an empty grey ocean, the small shorebird that crosses the Pacific nonstop

Energy & Nature

A four-month-old bar-tailed godwit flew 13,556 km across the Pacific without once stopping to eat, drink or sleep

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · June 28, 2026

The Hoover Dam, a huge curved concrete dam wedged in a desert canyon holding back a blue reservoir

Industry

The concrete in the Hoover Dam would have taken 125 years to cool on its own, so engineers ran 900 kilometres of ice-water pipes through it

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · June 28, 2026

Millions of monarch butterflies blanketing the fir trees of a Mexican forest where they overwinter

Energy & the Wild

For 38 years nobody knew where North America's monarch butterflies vanished each winter, and the answer is that no single butterfly even knows the way

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · June 28, 2026

A 1974 CitiCar, a tiny wedge-shaped plastic electric car, parked on an American suburban street

Electric

A plastic wedge that looked like a doorstop was America's best-selling electric car for over 30 years, until Tesla came along

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · June 28, 2026

Roopkund Lake, a frozen Himalayan glacial lake with ancient bones scattered on its rocky shore

Curiosities

A frozen Himalayan lake is full of hundreds of ancient skeletons, and DNA only deepened the mystery of how they got there

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · June 28, 2026

The 1991 Kuwait oil fires, rows of burning oil wells under a sky blackened by smoke

Energy

Retreating troops set 700 Kuwaiti oil wells on fire in 1991, turning day to night, and experts said they would burn for years

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · June 28, 2026

The towering Troll A platform standing in the North Sea with a tiny supply boat beside it for scale

Industry

The tallest thing humans have ever moved is a concrete tower taller than the Eiffel Tower, floated upright across the North Sea in 1995

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · June 28, 2026

A small vaquita porpoise with dark eye rings surfacing in the blue-green Gulf of California

Energy & the Wild

Fewer than ten vaquitas are left on Earth, and they are dying not for themselves but for the black-market bladder of another fish

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · June 28, 2026

A sepia 1890s portrait of inventor Frank Sprague in a Victorian suit

Electric

Cities grew outward and upward because one forgotten inventor put electric motors in streetcars and elevators, and almost nobody knows his name

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · June 28, 2026

A sepia portrait of Phineas Gage seated and holding the long iron tamping bar that passed through his head

Curiosities

A railroad blast drove a metre-long iron bar clean through Phineas Gage's skull in 1848, and he stood up, spoke, and lived another twelve years

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · June 28, 2026

The huge spherical fusion target chamber of the National Ignition Facility studded with laser ports

Energy

For a fraction of a second, 192 lasers recreated the heart of the sun and, for the first time, fusion gave back more energy than it took

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · June 28, 2026

The vast Panama Canal construction site at the Culebra Cut, with steam shovels and railways carving through the hills

Industry

The man who built the Suez Canal was defeated in Panama by a mosquito, and 22,000 deaths later a doubted army doctor finished what he could not

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · June 28, 2026

Magawa, an African giant pouched rat in a harness, sniffing the red earth of a Cambodian field

Energy & the Wild

Magawa was a rat too light to set off a landmine, and he cleared 141,000 square metres of Cambodia before winning a medal for bravery

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · June 28, 2026

The 1900 Lohner-Porsche electric carriage on display at the Paris World's Fair Palace of Electricity

Electric

Before Porsche meant roaring engines, a 24-year-old built an electric car with motors in its wheels and then the world's first hybrid

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · June 28, 2026

The Flannan Isles lighthouse on a remote Scottish island cliff battered by huge Atlantic waves under a stormy sky

Curiosities

Three lighthouse keepers vanished from a Scottish island in 1900, the lamp cleaned and ready, and the sea was the only suspect that made sense

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · June 28, 2026

The Chernobyl divers in wetsuits wading through a flooded basement corridor of pipes by flashlight

Energy

Three men waded into the flooded basement under Chernobyl's burning reactor, and the legend that they died doing it is wrong

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · June 28, 2026

Two Channel Tunnel miners shaking hands through a broken hole in a chalk tunnel wall deep under the sea

Industry

The Englishman who broke through the last wall of chalk to shake a French worker's hand had just ended Britain's 8,000 years as an island

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · June 27, 2026

Manatees huddled together in the warm water discharge of a power plant on a cold winter morning

Energy & the Wild

Florida's endangered manatees survive winter only by huddling in a power plant's warm wastewater, and the clean-energy switch could leave them out in the cold

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · June 27, 2026

The Citicorp Center skyscraper with its sloped roof rising over the Manhattan skyline

Industry

A young engineer's question sent William LeMessurier back to his calculations, where he found that his gleaming new Citicorp Center skyscraper could be toppled by a strong New York wind

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · June 27, 2026

The aftermath of the Tenerife airport disaster in March 1977 showing the burned wreckage of the KLM and Pan Am Boeing 747s on the Los Rodeos runway, emergency vehicles surrounding the collision site, thick fog still visible over the airfield

Curiosities

The KLM captain who killed 583 people at Tenerife in 1977 was also the airline's chief flight safety officer, and the other crew on his flight didn't dare question him

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · June 26, 2026

The Vasa warship preserved and raised in the Vasa Museum in Stockholm, the massive dark oak hull towering above visitors in the exhibition hall

Industry

The Vasa warship had 64 cannons and sank twenty minutes into its maiden voyage in 1628, and when divers found it 333 years later at the bottom of Stockholm harbor it was almost perfectly intact

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · June 26, 2026

Christmas Island red crabs carpeting a jungle road during their annual migration to the sea

Wild

Forty million Christmas Island red crabs close the island's roads every November to reach the sea, and when yellow crazy ants began killing them by the million, rangers spent a decade saving them with a parasitoid wasp

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · June 26, 2026

Frozen streets and iced-over homes in Texas during Winter Storm Uri in February 2021, the Texas power grid failure leaving millions without electricity in deadly sub-zero temperatures

Energy

Texas kept its power grid deliberately isolated from other states for 80 years to avoid federal rules, and when Winter Storm Uri hit in 2021 that decision killed 246 people who had nowhere to borrow electricity from

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · June 26, 2026

Frances Kelsey, FDA pharmacologist who blocked thalidomide approval, at her 1960s Washington office desk reviewing drug application documents with resolve

Curiosities

Frances Kelsey spent fourteen months refusing to approve thalidomide for the American market despite a pharmaceutical company's pressure campaign, and the ten thousand babies born with malformed limbs in Europe proved she had been right

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · June 26, 2026

An electric eel in dark Amazon River water showing its elongated brown body with the electric organ running nearly the full length of its torso

Wild

Alexander von Humboldt watched electric eels leap from the water onto horses in Venezuela in 1800, biologists doubted the account for generations, and a Vanderbilt neuroscientist finally filmed it in his lab in 2016

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · June 26, 2026

The Tacoma Narrows Bridge twisting violently in the wind moments before it collapsed into Puget Sound in November 1940

Industry

A journalist abandoned his daughter's dog in his car to escape Galloping Gertie, and the Tacoma Narrows Bridge took the dog with it when it collapsed four months after opening

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · June 25, 2026

Lake Peigneur whirlpool disaster in Louisiana in 1980 with a massive vortex visible at the surface of the shallow lake

Curiosities

Texaco's drill missed oil and hit a salt mine ceiling under Lake Peigneur instead, and the shallow Louisiana lake swallowed eleven barges, a rig and a botanical garden in three hours

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · June 25, 2026

A large adult female African elephant without tusks standing in golden savanna grassland in Mozambique

Wild

A civil war that killed 90% of Gorongosa's elephants for their ivory forced evolution in real time, and the daughters of survivors are now being born without tusks at twice the normal rate

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · June 25, 2026

An aerial view of a vast open-pit uranium mine in Gabon surrounded by equatorial rainforest with deep excavated terraces of reddish-orange rock

Energy

Nature ran a self-sustaining nuclear reactor in Gabon for 300,000 years before humans invented fission, and the fuel was already spent when we found it

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · June 25, 2026

A grey wolf standing alert in a misty European pine forest at dawn, thick fur, amber eyes, frost on the ground, old pine trees behind

Wild

Wolves vanished from western Europe for a century, then in 2012 they walked back from Germany without anyone's help and are now breeding in France, Belgium and the Netherlands

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · June 25, 2026

A large silver European eel moving through shallow clear river water over mossy green stones in a European river, its long body catching the light

Wild

The European eel fed empires for 2,000 years and now 95% is gone from every river on the continent, and science still has never seen one breed

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · June 25, 2026

A 1950s laboratory scene with researchers in white shirts and ties demonstrating a small solar panel powering a toy on a workbench in warm sunlight

Energy

The first practical solar cell was born in 1954, and it was far too expensive for anyone to use

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · June 25, 2026

A tall glass-sided elevator structure climbing the face of a sheer sandstone cliff among the misty stone pillars of Zhangjiajie in China

Industry

China built a glass elevator 300 metres up a cliff in its most beautiful park, and it split opinion

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · June 25, 2026

A row of small white 1990s wind turbines standing in calm shallow blue sea near a low green Danish coastline under a soft sky

Energy

The world's first offshore wind farm was tiny, and it has already been taken down

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · June 25, 2026

A small ochre clay jar beside a copper cylinder and an iron rod on a dark museum surface, lit like an ancient artifact

Curiosities

An ancient jar near Baghdad looks like a 2,000-year-old battery, and it probably never was one

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · June 25, 2026

A wide canal full of water carried on a long bridge over the River Elbe, with a barge crossing high above the river and green banks on either side

Industry

Germany built a giant bridge so boats could sail straight over a river

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · June 25, 2026

A horseshoe crab with a domed brown shell and long spiked tail on a wet sandy shore at dusk with gentle waves behind it

Curiosities

A 445-million-year-old animal has blue blood, and it quietly keeps your vaccines safe

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · June 25, 2026

A long trail of leafcutter ants each carrying a bright green fragment of leaf above its head, marching across the rainforest floor

Wild

These tiny ants were farming fungus 50 million years before humans planted a thing

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · June 25, 2026

The vast inverted-pyramid of crisscrossing sandstone steps of Chand Baori descending steeply to a small pool of green water at the bottom

Industry

This Indian stepwell drops thirteen storeys into the Earth on 3,500 perfect steps

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · June 25, 2026

A geothermal drilling rig on a volcanic plain in Iceland with a tall plume of white superheated steam roaring from the wellhead against snow and dark lava

Energy

A drill in Iceland hit magma by accident, and the steam that roared back was the hottest ever tapped

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · June 25, 2026

A huge haystack-like grass nest draped over the branches of a lone camelthorn tree in the golden Kalahari desert under a clear blue sky

Wild

These tiny birds build the largest nests on Earth, and the weight can bring a whole tree down

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · June 25, 2026

A small golden flame glowing in a wet rocky grotto with a thin waterfall cascading past it in a green forest gorge

Curiosities

A small flame burns behind a New York waterfall, and the gas that feeds it should not exist

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · June 25, 2026

A tall slender chimney tower rising from the centre of a vast circular transparent glass canopy on a dry plain under a bright sky

Energy

A tower rising from a giant glass canopy turned warm air into electricity for seven years, until a storm toppled it

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · June 25, 2026

The white sail-like shells of the Sydney Opera House gleaming on the harbour against a bright blue sky

Industry

The architect of the Sydney Opera House quit in fury, left the country, and never once saw his masterpiece finished

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · June 25, 2026

A tall Wollemi pine with dark green fern-like foliage and knobbly brown bark standing in a misty sandstone canyon

Wild

A tree thought extinct for the age of dinosaurs was found alive in a secret canyon, and firefighters risked a hidden mission to save it

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · June 25, 2026

A sleek white passenger pod inside a long elevated steel hyperloop tube stretching into the distance, futuristic and clean

Electric

Elon Musk promised a 1,000 km/h tube that would beat the plane, and a decade later the hyperloop has quietly stalled

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · June 25, 2026

Close-up of a ship's steel hull at the waterline showing the round Plimsoll load line marking painted in white

Industry

Ship owners overloaded vessels and let sailors drown for the insurance money, until Samuel Plimsoll forced a safety line onto every hull

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · June 25, 2026

Rows of white industrial battery units lined up in the dry South Australian outback with wind turbines turning on the horizon

Energy

Elon Musk bet he could build the world's biggest battery in 100 days or it would be free, and South Australia took the deal

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · June 25, 2026

A gnarled, twisted ancient bristlecone pine tree on a barren high mountain ridge at golden hour, its weathered trunk shaped by millennia of wind

Curiosities

The oldest tree on Earth was nearly 5,000 years old, and in 1964 a researcher cut it down by accident

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · June 25, 2026

A clear river flowing over a riverbed blazing bright red and pink with patches of yellow and green, surrounded by Colombian jungle

Wild

For a few months each year a Colombian river erupts into five colours, and a war kept the world from seeing it for decades

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · June 25, 2026

A 1950s cream and red gyrobus at a street stop with three poles raised to an overhead charging post, no overhead wires along the street

Electric

Decades before the electric bus, a Swiss town ran one on a giant spinning flywheel charged at the kerb

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · June 25, 2026

The giant curved parabolic mirror wall of the Odeillo solar furnace gleaming in the sun, reflecting the sky and surrounding mountains

Energy

A wall of mirrors in the French Pyrenees focuses sunlight to 3,500C, hot enough to melt almost anything

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · June 25, 2026

A close-up of a colourful pistol shrimp on the seabed with one enormous oversized claw held ready

Wild

A shrimp the size of your finger snaps a claw so fast it fires a bubble hotter than the surface of the sun

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · June 25, 2026

The wrought-iron Eiffel Tower rising over Paris at golden hour, its lattice silhouette against a warm sky

Industry

Paris hated the Eiffel Tower and meant to tear it down after 20 years, until it became too useful as a radio antenna

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · June 25, 2026

A vivid red and green aurora blazing across the night sky over a quiet 19th century town, with people in the street looking up in wonder

Curiosities

In 1859 a solar storm set telegraph offices on fire and lit auroras over the tropics, and a repeat today could black out the grid

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · June 25, 2026

A sleek white and green maglev train speeding along an elevated concrete guideway with motion blur and the Shanghai skyline behind

Electric

Shanghai's maglev floats on magnets and hits 431 km/h, the fastest train on Earth, yet almost nobody else has built one

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · June 25, 2026

A tall stone lighthouse rising straight out of the open grey sea with white waves crashing around its base and no land in sight

Industry

A Scottish reef vanishes under the sea twice a day, yet two hundred years ago engineers built the Bell Rock lighthouse on it and it still shines

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · June 25, 2026

A pink wrinkled hairless naked mole-rat with large protruding front teeth and tiny eyes in an earthy burrow under soft light

Wild

The naked mole-rat, a wrinkled near-blind rodent that lives like an ant, almost never gets cancer and barely seems to age

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · June 25, 2026

A vast underground turbine hall cavern deep inside a mountain with huge green generators and tiny workers for scale under dramatic lighting

Energy

A hollowed-out Welsh mountain hides a power station that can answer a nation's kettles in sixteen seconds

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · June 25, 2026

Two glasses of water side by side on a frosty surface, one steaming hot and one cold, with ice crystals beginning to form

Curiosities

A schoolboy named Mpemba was laughed at for saying hot water can freeze faster than cold, and the effect now carries his name

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · June 25, 2026

A blue and silver Wuppertal Schwebebahn carriage hanging from a steel frame above the Wupper river with old German buildings alongside

Electric

A German city has carried its commuters under a hanging railway since 1901, and in 1950 a circus elephant leapt from a car into the river below

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · June 25, 2026

A small iridescent neon-blue Devils Hole pupfish hovering over a pale limestone shelf in clear sunlit turquoise water

Wild

The world's rarest fish survives in one desert pool the size of two dining tables, and saving the Devils Hole pupfish rewrote American water law

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · June 25, 2026

The ornately carved wooden warship Vasa under sail leaving Stockholm harbour with bright painted sculptures along its high stern

Industry

The warship Vasa capsized minutes into its maiden voyage in 1628, and the cold Baltic kept it almost whole for 333 years

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · June 25, 2026

A glass funnel on a stand holding black pitch with a single drop hanging from the stem above a beaker inside a display case

Curiosities

A blob of tar in a funnel has been dripping for nearly a century, and the man who guarded it for 52 years never once saw a drop fall

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · June 25, 2026

An early 1800s voltaic pile, a tall stack of copper and zinc discs with brine-soaked cloth, on a wooden bench

Energy

A feud over why a dead frog's legs twitched led Alessandro Volta to stack metal and brine into the first battery, and switch on the electric age

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · June 25, 2026

A sleek white and blue bullet-nosed Shinkansen train speeding through the Japanese countryside with Mount Fuji behind

Electric

In 1964 Japan bet everything on a sleek electric train that crossed the country at over 200 km/h, and the Shinkansen has carried billions of passengers without a single death in operation

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · June 25, 2026

A woman scuba diver in vintage gear swimming calmly alongside a large reef shark in clear blue water

Wild

When the world saw sharks only as mindless monsters, a young woman dived in among them, proved they were intelligent, and became famous as the Shark Lady

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · June 25, 2026

A microscopic translucent tardigrade water bear with eight clawed legs on a mossy surface

Curiosities

A microscopic animal called the tardigrade can survive being boiled, frozen near absolute zero, blasted with radiation and even the vacuum of space, by drying itself into a near-dead husk

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · June 25, 2026

A wide river meeting the blue sea at an estuary with a power plant on the shore where the waters mix

Energy

Where every river pours into the sea, the simple mixing of fresh water and salt releases energy, and engineers have spent decades chasing this hidden blue power

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · June 25, 2026

An elegant tall boxy 1910s Detroit Electric car on a city street with a woman in period dress at the tiller

Electric

Around 1900 a third of America's cars were electric, clean and quiet and beloved by women drivers, and even Henry Ford's wife preferred her Detroit Electric to his gasoline Model T

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · June 25, 2026

The Concorde, a sleek white delta-wing supersonic airliner with a pointed nose, climbing into a blue sky

Industry

For 27 years the Concorde flew passengers across the Atlantic at twice the speed of sound, and then the world quietly retired it and went back to flying slower than our grandparents did

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · June 25, 2026

A small brown wood frog frozen and frosted among icy leaf litter in a winter forest, ice crystals on its skin

Wild

Every winter a small North American frog lets itself freeze almost solid, its heart stops for weeks, and then in spring it simply thaws out and hops away as if nothing happened

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · June 25, 2026

Thousands of bright red crabs swarming across a forest road with a crab bridge arching overhead during the red crab migration

Wild

Once a year tens of millions of red crabs pour out of the forest on a remote Australian island and march to the sea, so engineers built them bridges and tunnels over the roads

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · June 25, 2026

An inventor in a lab coat examining a flexible thin-film solar panel beside a row of batteries in a laboratory

Energy

A self-taught son of an immigrant scrap dealer, with no science degree, became one of the most prolific inventors in American history, and Stanford Ovshinsky's battery quietly powered a generation of hybrid cars

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · June 25, 2026

The Caspian Sea Monster, a colossal Soviet ekranoplan with stubby wings and jet engines, skimming low over the sea

Industry

American spy satellites spotted a 500-tonne machine skimming the Caspian Sea metres above the water, and the Soviet craft nicknamed the Caspian Sea Monster was neither ship nor plane

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · June 25, 2026

The Gossamer Condor, a huge translucent human-powered aircraft, flying low over a field with a pilot pedalling

Electric

Told that human-powered flight was impossible, an engineer named Paul MacCready built a featherlight pedal-powered plane, won a famous prize, and later helped spark the modern electric car

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · June 25, 2026

A great humpback whale swimming through sunlit blue ocean surrounded by a drifting cloud of plankton

Wild

Whaling stripped the oceans of millions of great whales, and scientists now realise we also tore out one of the planet's most powerful natural machines for pulling carbon from the sky

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · June 25, 2026

The barren grey moonscape of mined-out phosphate pinnacles covering the interior of Nauru, a Pacific island, with ocean beyond

Curiosities

A tiny Pacific island grew so rich on bird droppings that its people barely worked, then they dug up almost the whole country and Nauru became a cautionary tale of ruin

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · June 25, 2026

The tall thin concrete arch of the Vajont Dam wedged in a narrow alpine gorge at dusk

Industry

Engineers built one of the world's tallest dams in the Italian Alps and ignored the crumbling mountain above it, and in 1963 the Vajont Dam unleashed a wave that killed almost 2,000 people

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · June 25, 2026

A massive retro-futuristic Project Orion spaceship riding a nuclear blast upward into a starry sky above Earth

Energy

In the 1950s American scientists seriously planned to ride atomic bombs into space, and Project Orion was a spaceship that would blast itself toward the planets one nuclear explosion at a time

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · June 25, 2026

The Wardenclyffe Tower, a tall lattice tower with a mushroom-shaped dome, rising over Long Island farmland around 1903

Electric

Nikola Tesla built a giant tower on Long Island to beam free electricity through the air to the whole world, and the dream of Wardenclyffe Tower helped ruin him

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · June 25, 2026

Rural Kenyan women planting tree seedlings together on a green hillside in the Green Belt Movement

Wild

A Kenyan scientist told rural women the cure for their empty wells and barren soil was to plant trees, and Wangari Maathai's idea grew into a movement that won a Nobel Peace Prize

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · June 25, 2026

The thin glowing blue band of the ozone layer along the curved edge of Earth seen from space

Energy

In the 1980s scientists found a growing hole in the ozone layer over Antarctica, the world banned the chemicals tearing it apart, and the sky is slowly healing itself

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · June 25, 2026

A rusted metal cap bolted shut over the Kola Superdeep Borehole on bleak Arctic tundra, ruined Soviet buildings behind

Curiosities

For twenty years the Soviet Union drilled the deepest hole ever made, and the Kola Superdeep Borehole hit water, ancient microfossils and rock so hot the drilling simply stopped

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · June 25, 2026

An American-style town with white clapboard houses and a water tower on the bank of the Amazon, jungle crowding behind it

Industry

Henry Ford tried to build a slice of small-town America deep in the Amazon to grow his own rubber, and the jungle, the blight and his own workers defeated Fordlandia

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · June 25, 2026

A white single-seat Sinclair C5 electric trike with a long nose, parked low on a grey British street

Electric

The man who put a computer in millions of British homes bet his reputation on a tiny electric trike, and the 1985 Sinclair C5 became one of the most famous flops in history

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · June 25, 2026

Game rangers in a small boat guiding a swimming antelope across a flooded African valley during Operation Noah

Wild

When a new dam began drowning the Zambezi valley, a game ranger took to the water in small boats and spent six years ferrying thousands of trapped animals to safety

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · June 25, 2026

The Eastgate Centre, a brick office building with tall ventilation chimneys on its roof, in Harare

Industry

An architect in Zimbabwe skipped the air conditioning and copied a termite mound instead, and his Eastgate Centre cools a whole office block on a fraction of the energy

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · June 25, 2026

A Lakota solar installer beside solar panels on a Pine Ridge home

Energy

A fifth-generation descendant of the Lakota war chief Red Cloud is fighting a new battle on the Pine Ridge reservation, where Henry Red Cloud turns sunlight into heat, jobs and a kind of freedom

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · June 25, 2026

The immortal jellyfish, a tiny translucent Turritopsis, floating in dark water

Curiosities

Most animals grow old and die, but one tiny creature in the sea hits reset when its body fails, which is why the immortal jellyfish may never die of old age

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · June 25, 2026

A geothermal energy plant with steam over the Rift Valley in Kenya

Energy

While rich nations still burn oil and gas, Kenya quietly built a grid that runs mostly on clean power, drawing nearly half its electricity from geothermal energy pulled out of the Great Rift Valley

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · June 25, 2026

Stari Most, the arched stone Ottoman bridge over the Neretva in Mostar

Industry

A 16th-century Ottoman bridge was the soul of Mostar until a 1993 war shelled it into the river, and then the city raised Stari Most again, stone by stone, and the divers came back

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · June 25, 2026

A pot-in-pot clay cooler holding fresh vegetables

Curiosities

A Nigerian teacher gave families a refrigerator with no electricity, no moving parts and no running costs, just two clay pots and wet sand, and the pot-in-pot kept food fresh for weeks

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · June 25, 2026

Solar Impulse, a wide solar-powered plane, flying above the clouds at sunrise

Electric

A plane as wide as a jumbo jet but as light as a car flew around the world on sunlight alone, and Solar Impulse did it without burning a single drop of fuel

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · June 25, 2026

A misty forest with a glowing fungal network linking tree roots underground

Energy & Nature

One scientist showed that trees secretly feed and warn each other through an underground fungal network, and now others say the evidence for this wood wide web is far thinner than the beautiful story

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · June 25, 2026

A row of yellow electric school buses plugged into chargers at a depot

Electric

A diesel school bus is one of the dirtiest rides of a child's day, so Oakland turned its whole fleet electric, and now those electric school buses double as a giant battery for the grid

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · June 24, 2026

A wind-powered cargo ship at sea with two tall rigid wing sails on its deck

Energy

Sail vanished from the seas a century ago, but giant computer-controlled steel wings are rising over cargo decks again, and these wind-powered cargo ships are cutting fuel by up to a third

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · June 24, 2026

A robotic gantry printer extruding the curved walls of a 3D-printed home on a building site

Industry

A machine the size of a house now squeezes out walls overnight, and from a Texas suburb to a Malawi schoolyard, 3D-printed homes are going up in a day instead of a year

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · June 24, 2026

A deep tunnel of a nuclear waste repository bored into grey granite bedrock

Curiosities

Finland is about to seal the world's first permanent nuclear waste repository, a tomb in the bedrock built to guard its deadly cargo for 100,000 years, and to be safely forgotten

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · June 24, 2026

A wild jaguar walking through golden marshland at dawn in Argentina's Iberá wetlands

Energy & Nature

A couple who got rich at The North Face and Patagonia gave their wild land away, and a jaguar reintroduction has big cats hunting Argentina's Iberá again after 70 years

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · June 24, 2026

South Asian children sitting at small desks inside a wooden boat that serves as a floating classroom on a river in Bangladesh, with solar panels on the roof and a teacher beside them

Energy

In Bangladesh the floods shut the schools every year, so an architect put the classrooms on solar-powered boats that sail to the children and bring the lessons to them

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · June 24, 2026

A woman in a mid-19th-century dress in a sunlit home study holding a glass cylinder with a thermometer up to the sunlight, with brass scientific instruments on the table

Curiosities

An American woman heated a jar of carbon dioxide in the sun in 1856 and predicted global warming, but a man got the credit for the next 150 years

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · June 24, 2026

Aerial view of a vast rectangular artificial island airport in a calm blue sea with long runways and a slender bridge to the distant mainland at golden hour

Industry

Japan ran out of land for an airport, so it built an entire island in the sea, and that island has been sinking under the runways ever since

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · June 24, 2026

A young engineer standing beside a long sleek silver solar-electric car whose roof and bonnet are covered in dark solar cells on a sunny test track

Electric

Dutch students won three solar races, then built the world's first production solar car that charges itself from the sun, only to watch it unravel weeks after the first deliveries

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · June 24, 2026

Two children playing on a seesaw that doubles as a water pump in a tropical savanna village, with low buildings and the flat Colombian Llanos grassland behind them at golden hour

Energy

Scientists were told nothing could grow on Colombia's barren eastern plains, so they built a village that runs on sunlight and accidentally grew a rainforest of 8 million trees

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · June 24, 2026

An African smallholder farmer standing at the edge of his maize field beside a beehive fence of wooden hives strung on wires, with a wild elephant in the savannah behind him at golden hour

Energy & Nature

African farmers kept losing whole harvests to elephants overnight, until a biologist found the six-tonne giants flee from honey bees and ringed the fields with beehive fences

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · June 24, 2026

A small brilliant blue Spix's macaw perched on a dry twisted branch in the sparse Caatinga scrubland of northeast Brazil at golden afternoon light

Energy & Nature

The blue macaw that inspired Rio went extinct in the wild in 2000, made it back with the first wild chicks in 24 years, then a bureaucratic fight and a lethal virus arrived

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · June 24, 2026

A Biloxi-Chitimacha-Choctaw tribal elder standing on the narrow road of Isle de Jean Charles, Louisiana, with open Gulf water visible on both sides and weathered houses behind him

Energy & Nature

The tribe that came to this Louisiana island to escape forced removal in the 1830s is being moved again, and the $48 million the US gave them to relocate built homes that leak

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · June 24, 2026

White storks on a large stick nest atop a gnarled old oak above wild scrubby English meadow at golden light

Energy & Nature

A couple gave up on their failing Sussex farm and let it run wild, and twenty years on white storks are nesting over England for the first time in 600 years

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · June 24, 2026

A pale pink axolotl with feathery pink external gills and a smiling face resting among green water plants underwater

Curiosities

The axolotl can regrow its legs, spine and even parts of its brain, but it is nearly extinct in the only lake it calls home, where scientists just released lab-raised ones that survived

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · June 24, 2026

A California condor with its huge dark wingspan soaring above ancient redwood forest canopy in Northern California

Energy & Nature

Critics said capturing every last California condor in 1987 was a death sentence; the bird named At Last I Fly proved them wrong by nesting on Yurok land in 2026

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · June 24, 2026

A power station engineer at a control panel on the final day of Ratcliffe-on-Soar, the last coal power station in Britain

Energy

Peter O'Grady spent 36 years running Britain's last coal station; he was also the one who clicked it off at 15:35 on September 30, 2024, ending 142 years of coal power

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · June 24, 2026

A line of air bubbles rising in a diagonal across an Amsterdam canal at golden hour, a person watching from the brick quayside

Industry

Three friends in Amsterdam got tired of watching plastic drift out to sea, so they strung a curtain of air bubbles across a canal that has now caught a million pieces

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · June 24, 2026

A row of blue and red modular pods on hydraulic legs and skis standing on the flat white Antarctic ice shelf

Industry

Britain built its Antarctic science base on giant skis so the ice could not swallow it, and when a crack opened beneath the station, the whole thing got up and walked 23 kilometres away

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · June 25, 2026

A black Tasmanian devil with a white chest stripe standing alert in dry Australian bushland at golden light

Curiosities

Tasmanian devils vanished from mainland Australia 3,000 years ago and are dying of a contagious cancer at home, so conservationists bred them back into the wild on the mainland

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · June 25, 2026

A cheetah standing alert in tall dry golden grassland in India scanning the horizon

Energy & Nature

India lost its last cheetahs in the 1950s, so it flew big cats in from Africa, and for the first time in about 75 years cheetah cubs are being born on Indian soil

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · June 25, 2026

A snowy street in a Norwegian city lined with electric cars plugged into charging points beside colourful wooden buildings

Electric

The country that got rich pumping oil now barely sells a petrol car, as 96 percent of Norway's new vehicles went electric while it keeps exporting the fuel it will not burn at home

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · June 25, 2026

Two white rhinos grazing on the open grassland of a Kenyan conservancy at golden hour with an armed ranger watching

Curiosities

Only two northern white rhinos are left on Earth, both female, so scientists are racing to bring the subspecies back from extinction with frozen sperm, test-tube embryos and a surrogate mother

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · June 25, 2026

Several large white wind turbines standing across green farmland on a flat Danish island with the sea in the distance

Energy

Dared to go fully green in ten years, a windswept island of Danish farmers bought their own wind turbines and made Samsø the first place on Earth to run on renewable energy

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · June 25, 2026

A wide misty river winding through steep green native forest hills in New Zealand at dawn

Energy & Nature

After a 140-year fight, a Māori people in New Zealand won their river the legal rights of a human being, and now two guardians speak in court as the river itself

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · June 24, 2026

A bright orange volcanic fissure erupting fountains of lava across a dark Icelandic landscape at night with a town and power plant glowing in the distance

Industry

An Icelandic town that lived off the planet's free heat had to flee when the ground tore open, and now engineers fight the lava with 14 kilometres of earth walls

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · June 24, 2026

A busy Indian street crowded with colourful electric auto-rickshaws carrying passengers through dense traffic

Electric

India quietly built the world's largest electric vehicle fleet, and it is not Teslas but millions of humble rickshaws that are pulling their drivers out of poverty one cheap battery at a time

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · June 24, 2026

The wedge-shaped concrete entrance of the Svalbard Global Seed Vault jutting from a snow-covered Arctic mountainside at polar twilight

Curiosities

On an Arctic island built to outlast any disaster, a vault holds 1.3 million seeds for the end of the world, and the first people to ask for them back were escaping a war

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · June 24, 2026

The restored Notre-Dame de Paris cathedral with its rebuilt spire glowing under a dramatic evening sky across the Seine

Industry

Five years after the world watched Notre-Dame burn, an army of 2,000 carpenters and stonemasons has raised it from the ashes by hand, rebuilding its lost oak forest with medieval axes

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · June 24, 2026

An aerial view over a dense Pakistani city where flat concrete rooftops are covered with rows of solar panels stretching to the horizon

Energy

While its national grid sank into debt, Pakistan became one of the fastest solar nations on Earth, as millions of families bolted cheap Chinese panels to their roofs to escape soaring power bills

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · June 24, 2026

A humpback whale lunging out of the water with its mouth open among a flock of seabirds, with the Manhattan skyline and the Statue of Liberty in the hazy background

Energy & Nature

A century after they vanished, humpback whales are feeding again within sight of the Statue of Liberty, up from three sightings off New York in 2011 to more than 300 a year

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · June 24, 2026

An enormous concrete hydroelectric dam spanning a wide river gorge in the Ethiopian highlands, with white water rushing from the spillways and a large reservoir behind it

Energy

One of the world's poorest countries just switched on Africa's largest dam, a 5 gigawatt wall across the Nile that Ethiopia built almost alone, doubling its power and alarming Egypt downstream

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · June 24, 2026

A sleek modern silver electric luxury sedan driving along an open European highway through green countryside at golden hour

Electric

A Mercedes test car with a new solid-state battery just drove 1,205 km from Germany to Sweden on a single charge and arrived with range to spare, hinting at the end of charging anxiety

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · June 24, 2026

A small spacecraft with a glowing white heat shield flying close to the enormous fiery orange surface of the Sun

Curiosities

On Christmas Eve 2024 a NASA probe flew right through the Sun's atmosphere and lived, the fastest object ever built passing 6 million kilometres from the surface at 690,000 km/h

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · June 24, 2026

A single saiga antelope with its distinctive large drooping trunk-like nose and pale tan fur standing on the open grassy steppe of Kazakhstan

Energy & Nature

A strange ice-age antelope that once collapsed to 48,000 animals, and lost 200,000 more in a single three-week die-off, has roared back to nearly 3 million and off the critically endangered list

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · June 24, 2026

An enormous tall suspension bridge spanning a vast deep misty river canyon in mountainous Guizhou China, with clouds drifting below the bridge deck

Industry

China just opened the highest bridge on Earth, a span 625 metres above a river gorge so deep that clouds drift below it, turning a winding two-hour mountain crossing into a two-minute drive

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · June 24, 2026

A small hydrogen exploration drilling rig and metal derrick standing in green rolling rural French countryside at dawn with mist over the hills

Energy

The clean hydrogen the world is spending billions to manufacture may be sitting under our feet already, and in France geologists think they have found 92 million tonnes of it brewing naturally underground

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · June 24, 2026

A huge yellow electric mining haul truck loaded with dark ore driving through a vast open-pit coal mine under a grey overcast sky

Electric

China just switched on the world's largest fleet of driverless electric mining trucks, 100 giant machines that each haul 90 tonnes, swap their batteries instead of charging, and run with nobody in the cab

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · June 24, 2026

A huge circular crater in a flat desert at night filled with burning orange flames under a dark starry sky

Curiosities

A crater of fire in the Turkmenistan desert has been burning nonstop since 1971 after a Soviet drilling accident, and now, 54 years on, the so-called Door to Hell is finally going out

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · June 24, 2026

A wild Iberian lynx with tufted ears and spotted tawny fur standing alert in sunlit Mediterranean scrubland in southern Spain

Energy & Nature

The Iberian lynx was the world's most endangered cat, down to about 62 adults two decades ago, and after a 20-year rescue it has bounced back past 2,000 and off the endangered list

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · June 24, 2026

A modern advanced nuclear power plant with clean white buildings on a wide flat Wyoming plain at dusk

Energy

Bill Gates is building a nuclear reactor cooled by liquid sodium on the site of a retiring coal plant in Wyoming, with a molten-salt battery that lets it ramp up to power 400,000 homes

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · June 24, 2026

A sleek modern automated electric car battery swap station at night with a white electric sedan parked inside

Electric

Instead of charging an electric car, China's NIO swaps the whole battery for a full one in about three minutes, and it has now done this more than 100 million times across nearly 4,000 robot stations

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · June 24, 2026

A large modern dome observatory on a high mountain ridge at night under a brilliant starry sky filled with the Milky Way

Curiosities

The world's largest camera, a 3,200-megapixel machine the size of a car, has started filming the entire southern sky over and over for ten years to build the first true time-lapse of the universe

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · June 24, 2026

A sea otter floating on its back at the surface of calm blue ocean water among strands of golden kelp

Energy & Nature

Sea otters were hunted almost to extinction, and bringing them back turned out to be the key to saving entire underwater forests, because without them sea urchins eat the kelp until nothing is left

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · June 24, 2026

A vast modern steel factory with tall towers and hydrogen electrolyser buildings in a snowy Swedish landscape at dusk

Industry

A Swedish factory is about to make steel without coal, replacing it with green hydrogen that emits only water and strips up to 95 percent of the carbon from one of the world's dirtiest industries

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · June 24, 2026

A colossal single coral colony the size of a building rising from the seafloor in clear blue water with a tiny scuba diver beside it

Energy & Nature

Divers in the Solomon Islands thought they had found a shipwreck, but it was the largest coral on Earth, a single 300-year-old creature of nearly a billion polyps so big it can be seen from space

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · June 24, 2026

Two large fluffy white wolf pups with thick fur sitting together in a snowy pine forest

Curiosities

A US company says it brought back the dire wolf, extinct for 12,500 years, by rewriting 20 genes in a grey wolf, and the three white pups are real, though not quite what the name suggests

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · June 24, 2026

A sleek white and silver high-speed bullet train racing along an elevated railway through green countryside

Electric

China is about to run the world's fastest passenger train at 400 km/h, an all-electric machine that hit 453 km/h on test and can beat a plane on the trips most people actually take

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · June 24, 2026

An aerial view of a vast floating solar farm of dark panels on steel platforms stretching across the open sea at dawn

Energy

China just switched on the world's largest floating solar farm in the open sea, 2.3 million panels riding the waves 8 kilometres off its coast to power 2.6 million homes from water instead of land

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · June 24, 2026

A sleek white electric air taxi with six rotors flying over the Dubai skyline at golden sunset

Electric

Dubai is about to launch the world's first electric air taxi service, flying four passengers across the city in a quiet six-rotor aircraft that turns a 45 minute drive into a 12 minute flight

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · June 24, 2026

A colossal flat-topped iceberg with towering ice cliffs rising out of a grey Southern Ocean

Curiosities

The world's largest iceberg sat stuck on the seabed for over 30 years, then broke free and drifted a trillion tonnes of ice toward an island of two million penguins, where it is now shattering apart

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · June 24, 2026

A vast rectangular concrete tunnel element floating in the sea between two vessels before being lowered to the seabed

Industry

Denmark just sank the first of 89 giant concrete tubes into the Baltic Sea to build the world's longest immersed tunnel, which will turn a 45 minute ferry to Germany into a 7 minute train ride

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · June 24, 2026

A wide river running free through a green forested canyon at sunrise where a dam once stood

Energy & Nature

Engineers pulled four dams off the Klamath River in the largest dam removal in US history, and within ten days salmon were swimming into habitat that had been blocked to them for over a century

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · June 24, 2026

A tall concrete energy storage tower in flat farmland at sunset with heavy blocks suspended inside its steel frame

Energy

China built the world's first commercial gravity battery, a 148-metre tower that stores electricity by stacking 35-tonne blocks made from coal ash and old wind turbine blades, and is now building eight more

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · June 24, 2026

A large white aluminium catamaran ferry cutting across a wide river estuary at dawn with a city skyline behind it

Electric

The world's largest electric ship is a passenger ferry built to carry 2,100 people across the river between Argentina and Uruguay, running on 250 tonnes of batteries instead of a drop of diesel

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · June 24, 2026

A grid-scale battery storage facility with liquid tanks beside a desert solar farm at sunrise

Energy

China just switched on the world's first gigawatt-hour flow battery, storing its power in tanks of liquid vanadium that cannot catch fire and are built to last 30 years

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · June 24, 2026

A nuclear power plant beside a glowing data center at dusk

Industry

Big Tech is restarting a dead nuclear reactor to feed its AI, with Microsoft paying to bring 835 megawatts back online at Three Mile Island after six years dark

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · June 23, 2026

A lit expressway tunnel portal in a snowy Tianshan mountainside

Industry

China opened the world's longest expressway tunnel on December 26, 2025, a 22.13 kilometer bore through the Tianshan Mountains that cuts an hours-long crossing to about 20 minutes

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · June 23, 2026

A suspension bridge spanning a deep green canyon in Guizhou

Industry

China opened the world's highest bridge in Guizhou on September 28, 2025, its deck soaring 625 meters above the Beipan River, nearly nine times the height of the Golden Gate

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · June 23, 2026

A grid of direct air capture fan units on a volcanic Icelandic plateau

Industry

Climeworks switched on Mammoth, the world's largest carbon-sucking plant designed for 36,000 tonnes a year, but in its first ten months it verifiably removed about 105

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · June 23, 2026

A chain of stone oyster-reef breakwaters off a residential coast

Energy & Nature

New York just finished a 111 million dollar living seawall off Staten Island, a 2,400 foot chain of eight stone reefs built to grow oysters and break storm waves

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · June 23, 2026

A colossal hydropower dam under construction in a Himalayan gorge

Industry

China has begun building a 137 billion dollar megadam in the Himalayas that will generate three times the power of the Three Gorges, and two countries downstream are worried

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · June 23, 2026