Why airships are making a comeback as a cheap, fast transport solution

The engineers proposing massive airbags for airplanes

Though they are famously rare, airplane crashes are some of the most shocking catastrophes when they occur. These researchers are dreaming up an implausible safety feature to help crashing planes land safely.

A brief history of drones

While accounts of military strategists using uncrewed hot air balloons for attacks and surveillance exist from the 19th century, the first use of drones as a modern concept began in World War I with a radio-controlled propeller craft. This online...

Spy balloons. UFOs. What else is up there?

The appearance and downing of a Chinese surveillance balloon brought the concept of high-altitude floating aircraft into the public consciousness. While sparking a diplomatic row, it also revealed how many objects—nefarious or benign—are...

Airbus is a rare European industrial success story that overtook a rival American firm

After World War II, the US dominated aviation, particularly Boeing. To compete, Europe's major industrial nations pooled resources to form Airbus, a customer-centric airplane manufacturer. Its A320 family of planes became the most popular in airliner history, leading to profitability in the 1990s. Amid Boeing's major hurdles in recent years, Airbus remains the industry leader.

The Airstream surged in a postwar road trip boom

Wally Byam invented the Airstream in the late 1920s, but it took off following World War II, when more affordable automobiles allowed families to venture out into an expanding network of state and national parks. Airstream enthusiasts sometimes traveled in caravans, camping in front of famous scenery, like the Pyramids at Giza.

See nine airplane models that transformed aviation

This visual guide jumps over the dawn of modern air travel and begins with the open-cockpit biplane flown by the first scheduled airline, the St. Petersburg-Tampa Airboat Line. (Some users may experience a paywall.)

Watch the hypersonic flight of a reusable aircraft

Stratolaunch completed a second hypersonic flight of its Talon-A2 autonomous vehicle, showcasing reusable hypersonic aircraft capabilities. The aircraft carried payloads and Department of Defense experiments while achieving Mach 5 speeds.

Ingenuity and advanced engineering have allowed trains to overcome extreme landscapes

The Jungfrau Railway utilizes electric trains powered by hydroelectric energy to ascend the Swiss Alps, while Poland's Elbląg Canal hauls ships along cable-powered tracks driven by waterwheels. Germany's Wuppertal monorail navigates bends as it glides over a river valley, and New Mexico's Holloman High-Speed Test Track can achieve speeds of Mach 8.6 for rocket sleds.

The 3D-printed rocket maker competing with SpaceX

Producing rockets cheaply and at scale may require atypical manufacturing processes like those developed by Relativity Space, a 3D-printer of rockets. Relativity hopes to not just compete with, but beat, SpaceX in the race to get the first...

Ice cream trucks are surging in popularity

Modern companies like HipPOPs and Big Gay Ice Cream are driving a resurgence of ice cream trucks, with an annual growth of approximately 9%. Experts say the market will keep growing through at least 2030.

Why stories about helium 'running out' indicate market volatility rather than scarcity

Only a few locations on Earth contain natural gas reserves with sufficiently high helium concentrations to make their extraction commercially viable, and geopolitical conflicts in these areas significantly affect helium production. This makes cost a major impediment to helium availability, particularly for scientific research, amid growing demand and ongoing depletion of reserves that took billions of years to form.

The floating homes of Holland

Floating communities like Schoonschip in Amsterdam are offering a novel approach to combat climate change-induced flooding. With sea levels rising and storms becoming more intense, these floating neighborhoods are providing a sustainable flood defense solution. Learn how they work here.

Why you have to airlift rhinos upside down

Conservationists in Namibia have found that airlifting rhinos upside down is actually better for their health than lying them down on stretchers. A study by Cornell University found that rhinos have higher blood oxygen levels when upside down, which is critical for their survival during transport. The upside-down position also allows the rhino's spine to relax, which can help to prevent injuries. This new finding could revolutionize the way that rhinos are moved.

Budweiser pioneered refrigerated rail transport for its beer in the 1870s

This enabled Budweiser to achieve national distribution long before competitors, fundamentally transforming the US beer industry. It was also among the earliest large-scale adopters to use pasteurization, allowing it to be shipped long distances without going bad.

Establishing the wind power grid required incentives, reliability, and affordability

Although wind was harnessed to generate electricity for individual buildings in the late 1800s, high costs, mechanical issues with turbines, and better fossil-fuel alternatives delayed wind power's widespread growth. After the oil crises of the 1970s, governments sought alternative energy sources and, in the decades that followed, provided tax credits to expand the wind power market.

Bluesky is gaining momentum by offering users full control over their experience

Controversial changes made by Elon Musk to X have inspired an exodus from that platform and growth in Bluesky. The latter's open-source model gives users customizable feeds, portability between services, and a "billionaire-proof" design that prevents corporate takeover.

The Reevo hubless ebike, the industry's great failure

The Reevo hubless e-bike came out in 2020, touted as the bicycle of the future with no hubs or spokes, a GPS tracker, a fingerprint reader, and a uniquely futuristic look. With less than 3,000 sold, you've likely never seen one, but this bike reviewer shows off the bike's nightmarishly loud noise, terrible brakes, failed smartphone pairing, and more. Watch the full review here.

Inflation was a word before deflation was

The word inflation has Latin roots and technically means an influx of air, first appearing in the English language in the 1890s to describe bike tires. Deflation's first known mention in an economic text was in 1919.

Self-driving vehicles have the potential to cut ride costs by 40-50% and eliminate thousands of road deaths

Author Andrew Miller argues that widespread adoption of self-driving vehicles is no longer a distant promise, as Waymo expands into over 15 cities. However, he warns the technology's biggest remaining hurdles are political: liability, labor, and whether cities embrace or resist the shift.

Champagne’s fizz used to be considered a flaw

The bubbliness that we love now was once considered a winemaking failure. In fact, Dom Pérignon probably would have referred to it by its common nickname at the time, "vin du diable," or devil’s wine. The wine’s volatility often caused bottles to explode, which was both dangerous and costly. It wasn’t until the development of sturdier bottles and more consistent winemaking techniques that popularity truly soared.

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

The Challenger disaster ended NASA's plan to fly ordinary Americans in space

The explosion of the Challenger halted NASA's civilian spaceflight ambitions for decades, including plans to send teachers, journalists, artists, and other nonastronauts into orbit—an effort aimed at building public support that quietly disappeared after the 1986 disaster.

How massive cargo ships fight off modern pirates

Piracy on the high seas costs a reported $16 billion each year from either theft or damage incurred during an attempt to pirate massive cargo ships. This video breaks down several ways companies attempt to fend off would-be thieves. Pirate crews are...

Rivers in the sky

A short introduction to atmospheric rivers, including a handy illustration on the science behind them, the phenomena that help transport water vapor from the tropics across the globe.

Horse diving was a popular attraction for 50 years

The event, which took place in Atlantic City, is exactly as it sounds: horses, directed by (sometimes scantily clad) riders, would jump from diving boards into pools. Although it was a popular spectacle for decades, it fell out of favor by the late 1970s.

The invention of the barometer proved that air has weight

The instrument measures air pressure by creating a partial vacuum—a region with very low density—which serves as the basis for how suction works. Mercury-based barometers were used until 2007, when they were restricted due to mercury's toxicity.

'Silent' fireworks have gained more interest in recent years as a quieter celebratory option.

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.

Double world record holder Hunter Ewen helped conquer his fear of balloons, called globophobia, by training to win Guinness World Record titles for balloon inflation.

The history of many kitchen appliances involves unexpected discoveries and applications, including wartime radar turned hamster defroster and replacing an 'ice king' with heat-stealing boxes.

Electrical grids worldwide must double their power delivery capacity by 2050 to meet surging demand from AI and electric vehicles.

Human-to-human transmission of hantavirus remains extremely rare, so the 2026 hantavirus cruise ship outbreak doesn't mean we're facing a COVID-style pandemic risk.

Domino's Pizza's 30-minute delivery guarantee was responsible for the chain's 1980s surge, but it was discontinued after the company was found liable for delivery driver accidents.

How Amazon operates a 'flywheel' business model, a self-reinforcing cycle that drives continuous growth

Hear about the 250-year history of the United States Postal Service, complete with some of its strangest deliveries, important innovations, and the figures that made it an American institution.

After 25 people used virtual reality headsets to practice flying with virtual wings—flapping their arms—their visual cortex responded to the wings almost as if they were real arms, treating them as body parts.

Frank Lloyd Wright's houses are historically hard to sell because they're old, subject to local landmark commissions, and often unfashionable

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.

Stars appear to twinkle because turbulence in the motion of molecules in Earth's atmosphere causes light to bend and wiggle rapidly on its way to the surface—a phenomenon called scintillation.

Stanford built a Google Maps for the Roman Empire, revealing how much it cost to travel in the ancient world

The American cockroach is actually from Africa, an apparent hitchhiker aboard ships carrying enslaved people, with evidence suggesting the bug may have arrived in the New World as early as the 1600s.

Watch how deep-sea mining equipment collects and processes polymetallic nodules—metal-rich, potato-shaped rocks—from the ocean floor and creates environmentally damaging plumes of sediments.

The American Society of Civil Engineers' infrastructure report card gave the US a C in 2025, its highest grade since the project launched in 1998.

Hurricanes, which rely on air consistently spinning in the same direction, cannot cross the equator because air curves in opposite directions north and south of it.

Read a deep dive on the 'all-purpose healing' peptide BPC-157.

Art theft is the third-largest source of criminal revenues worldwide, thanks in part to the subjective nature of valuing a work of art.

Jimmy Carter signed a 1978 bill that legalized home brewing, a move credited with kick-starting the craft beer industry.

Exploring the Larry Bird punch that almost changed March Madness

The price of gas is a composite made up of several different factors, with the federal gas tax making up less than 20% of what drivers pay at the pump.

Hotels in Cannes, the glamorous city on the French Riviera, hire hawks to ward off seagulls during the city's famous film festival.