A half-century ago, NASA was preparing feverishly for a moon landing in a race against the former Soviet Union. The non-stop campaign of testing and launches was also a race against time—specifically to honor slain president John F. Kennedy’s 1961 pledge for the country to land a ...read more

By 1968, America’s space program was on the brink. A launchpad fire at Cape Canaveral killed three astronauts as they were conducting tests in their space capsule in January 1967. After 20 months of congressional hearings, political fallout and a spacecraft redesign, three new ...read more

Adolf Hitler used the concept of Lebensraum (“living space”) to justify the invasion of Poland, Russia and other eastern European nations to his people. But one small chapter in Hitler’s drive for new land is often overlooked: how the Third Reich’s hunger for margarine led to a ...read more

Global tournaments like the World Cup are never free of politics and that was especially true in 1938 during the run-up to World War II when the fascist leaders of Germany and Italy were eager to put their stamp on the final outcome. But the Germans may have made a miscalculation ...read more

In 1877, Italian astronomer Giovanni Schiaparelli turned his telescope to Mars and saw signs of a potentially lush world. He would publish his observations of what he believed to be “seas” and “continents” on the Martian surface. He also described channels (later found to be an ...read more

Bullets, missiles and swords may be what most people think of when it comes to weapons, but sound has also been deployed over the millennia to disrupt, confuse or even injure opponents on the global battlefield.From the Israelite army of trumpet-blaring priests who shook the ...read more