The Bomb-proof, Cold War-era New York data center inspiring spy movies

A Manhattan building doomed to collapse was saved in secret

After completing the Citicorp Center, its engineer realized that cost-cutting measures to use bolted instead of welded joints made the building vulnerable to collapse under quartering winds. For three months, crews worked in secret at night to reinforce the building under Project Serene.

The Manhattan Project created secret cities that didn’t appear on maps

To maintain secrecy, the US built three remote research facilities and entire “secret cities” to house thousands of workers and families. These communities—home to tens of thousands—were omitted from official maps until after World War II.

There is a secretive bomb-proof bunker located under the White House

Built in 1942 during World War II, the Presidential Emergency Operations Center lies beneath the East Wing. Designed to protect the president during air raids—and later nuclear threats—it remains a top-secret command site used during crises like 9/11.

Watch a time-lapse of the construction of a data center

After the external structure of a data center is built, cooling systems are installed, followed by interior offices and other rooms. Before installing racks of servers and other equipment, floors are raised beneath where they will be installed to create space for cold fluid to be pumped into the hardware and to facilitate cable management.

Essential pipes, sewers, and cables lie buried beneath New York City

The Department of Design and Construction offers a tour of its work sites, explaining the complex systems that exist underground. Gas, electrical, telecom pipes, and many others, sprawl out underneath the entire city, with dozens of maps that help workers know where they're placed. This layout is unusual compared to the rest of the country, where wires are often present and visible above ground.

The UN in NYC is an international zone belonging to all member-states

The four primary buildings are located on an 18-acre site on the East Side of Manhattan. The complex has its own postal administration, fire department, and security forces.

After the 9/11 terrorist attacks in New York City’s Financial District in 2001, many banks decided to relocate

Much has been said about why today’s top banks are typically no longer headquartered on Wall Street itself. The terrorist attacks in New York City’s Financial District on Sept. 11, 2001, are one reason many banks decided to relocate.

A rich archive of the visual imagination of the Cold War era

The blog aggregates art, design, fashion, and technology from the atomic and space age, spanning mid-century American futurism and its Soviet counterpart. The content has a broad range: escape pods from a B-58 bomber sit alongside Tour de France caravan vehicles and unidentified industrial designs.

Manhattan Project explained

Driven by fears of a Nazi nuclear bomb, the Manhattan Project united leading scientists to build the first atomic weapons. Its success ended World War II, caused catastrophic human loss, and launched the nuclear age that reshaped global politics and science.

The story of Kryptos, the long unsolved cryptographic sculpture outside the CIA's headquarters

Made by American artist Jim Sanborn, the sculpture features four copper plates engraved with messages written with the 26 letters of the Latin alphabet and question marks. The last of these plates was solved in 2025, but the piece remains of interest to cryptoanalysts.

A US Department of Defense research lab developed the technology for the dark web

Although encryption existed to mask the content of communications across the internet before the 1990s, those managing overseas network infrastructure could determine a spy's affiliation based on where they saw data sent to and received from. To keep this information secret, the US Naval Research Laboratory developed onion routing, which enabled anonymized web browsing. The release of the technology to the public obscured sensitive communications further by growing the volume of anonymous data.

Nikola Tesla's original laboratory was recognized as a historical site in 2018

Beginning in 1901, the Wardenclyffe Tower was built on Long Island, New York to transmit electrical power through Earth's atmosphere. The project was abandoned before becoming operational due to limited funding, and was demolished for scrap in 1917 to help pay off Tesla's debts.

Your iPhone started with a Cold War secret

Silicon Valley wasn't supposed to happen. A stretch of California orchard land somehow became the place that built the modern world: chips, PCs, the internet, the smartphone, and now AI. But the real story isn't the garage myth. It's a series of contradictions hiding in plain sight.

An NSA analyst helped avert nuclear war during the Cuban Missile Crisis

In October 1962, NSA cryptographer Juanita Moody headed analysis of U‑2 surveillance data and urgently produced intelligence on Soviet missile deployments in Cuba. Her reports drove high-level US decision-making, and were critical to avoiding nuclear war during the Cuban Missile Crisis.

The story of Wall Street's Charging Bull statue

In New York City's Financial District, there's a bronze statue of a bull that attracts tourists from all over the world. But how did it get there, and what is it about the statue that makes people line up for photographs, day after day? Journalist PJ Vogt dives into the Charging Bull statue's origin story in a podcast episode (warning: some mature language).

Watch a former CIA deputy director rate spy gadgets from movies and television

Dawn Meyerriecks, former CIA deputy director of science and technology, examines the realism of gadgets, including James Bond's weaponized Aston Martin, climbing gloves from the Mission: Impossible franchise, and the briefcase and listening device from "The Americans."

Explore a map of data centers worldwide

As of February 2026, the US has more data centers (over 4,000) than the next 15 countries combined, thanks to years of investment by cloud service providers and technology companies. The next largest data center footprints come from the UK and Germany, with about 500 facilities each, followed by China with about 370.

Spikes in pizza orders near US government buildings are thought to be signs of international crises

Theorists have long believed that sudden increases in pizza deliveries near the Pentagon signal a major event is about to occur. Historical examples include the CIA ordering 21 pizzas the day before the beginning of the Gulf War, and another surge of deliveries before former President Bill Clinton's impeachment hearings. Citizens have since begun monitoring food orders in the area. See a tracker of Pentagon pizza orders here.

Limited transparency soon after Chernobyl made it a source of conspiracy theories

Some rumors about the event became perceived as more reliable than the Soviet mass media, which had omitted key information during the early days of uncertainty. The resulting theories included CIA involvement in the disaster, three-headed birds, aliens, and a weaponized earthquake.

A writer's reflection on 'The Falling Man' - the man who fell from the World Trade Center

In an excerpt from his ‘Press Box’ interview with Bryan Curtis, writer Tom Junod discusses his Esquire story about the image of a man who fell or jumped from the North Tower on Sept. 11, 2001.

Inside the most crowded place on Earth

Once the densest place on Earth, Kowloon Walled City was a chaotic labyrinth of stacked homes, hidden corridors, and thriving underground life.

See how the National Archives protects America's founding documents

This "60 Minutes" segment takes viewers behind the scenes at the National Archives, showcasing how experts use conservation science, security, and technology to preserve cornerstone records—such as the original Declaration of Independence—for future generations.

An overview of atomic composition, scale, and structure, which is almost all 'empty' space

It takes about 500,000 carbon atoms lined up next to one another to span the thickness of human hair, and over 99.9994% of the mass of each is contained in the nucleus. About 99.999999999999% of an atom's volume lies outside this nucleus, where electrons exist in clouds of probability. Removing these clouds, the Empire State Building would be the size of a rice grain.

IBM Quantum’s dilution refrigerators keep quantum processors colder than space

In IBM’s quantum lab, quantum processors are kept at a temperature of 15 millikelvin using dilution refrigerators. These refrigerators use nested thermal layers, cryogens like liquid nitrogen and helium, and powerful compressors to maintain the ultra-cold temperatures required for qubit stability and performance.

A breakdown of the Detonation Research Test Facility, which features a 500-foot explosion tube

Located at Texas A&M University, DRTF is the largest explosions lab in the world as of 2026 and features a steel-and-concrete structure that scientists use to initiate and track explosions with split-second precision. Among the facility's goals are studying the large industrial explosions, hypersonic flight, and supernovae.

Massive 3D printers have been used to build homes by stacking layers of 'concrete toothpaste,' a fire-resistant material that effectively insulates against outside noise.

In 1984, Operation Smash Hit intentionally crashed a 239-ton train into a nuclear waste canister at 100 miles per hour to prove the canister's safety, which remained completely intact and lost just 0.29 of its 100 pounds of pressure.

In 1915, workers recovered a submarine-like vessel from the Chicago River, prompting fears of German espionage

Legendary architect Frank Lloyd Wright designed the SC Johnson headquarters in Wisconsin, aiming to make a cathedral-like workplace

The name 'Silicon Valley' arose from the founding of Shockley Semiconductor Laboratory in Fairchild Semiconductor in 1956-57, founded near Stanford University in Palo Alto

In 1963, a basement renovation in Turkey revealed a passageway to a hidden, multilevel underground city that once housed as many as 20,000 people

Discover the catastrophic consequences of a failure of the US electrical grid—something that is more likely than many Americans think.

US intelligence allegedly pursued more than 600 schemes to assassinate Cuban revolutionary Fidel Castro.

Netflix profits when you're not watching, and its movies are designed that way—read a detail-rich critical essay exposing lesser-known Netflix takes

For centuries, Niagara Falls has been a magnet for daredevils seeking to conquer one of nature's most powerful wonders, with its 200-foot drop and water rushing at 32 feet per second with 280 tons of force.

See the most iconic photos from four decades of LIFE magazine

At the beginning of the 20th century, a group of young men ate standard American food—replete with food additives like borax and formaldehyde—as part of government research to better understand food safety.

While atoms are normally made of protons, neutrons, and electrons, exotic ones have been built with antimatter—alternate versions of normal matter that live for fractions of a second and are about a billion times as rare.

Explore fun facts from the USPS, including unique post office buildings, a stamp that traveled past Pluto, and more.

Sunflowers have long been a symbol of nuclear disarmament because they can extract large amounts of radioactive cesium from soil.

In 2019, a laptop loaded with six of the worst malware in history and described as 'an exhibit of historical weaponry' sold for $1.3M.

Explore what it's like inside a patient isolation unit, used in situations such as treating a patient or suspected patient with Ebola.

Power lines are dotted with large, brightly colored balls to improve the visibility of these thin wires to helicopters and small planes and help prevent potential crashes.

The identity of the Tank Man in the iconic photo from the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests remains unknown and was possibly killed.

According to the physics of black holes, our 4D reality may be a hologram—a projection of information coded on a 2D surface on the edge of the universe.

The story of Dollree Mapp, whose legal challenge over her 1957 conviction for possessing "obscene material" led to a major strengthening of the Fourth Amendment

A 2019 Facebook event called on attendees to "Storm Area 51, They Can't Stop All of Us," resulting in countless memes, the creation of a music festival, and eventually the arrests of those who did try to approach the area.

Search a massive database of over 4 decades of clues from the TV quiz show 'Jeopardy!'

Lesser-known phobias include turophobia, or the fear of cheese, and nomophobia, the fear of being without your cell phone.

Louisiana's 'Cancer Alley' is infamous for having some of the highest industrial pollution, toxic air emissions, and cancer risks in the US.