Podcast Episodes
Back to SearchIgor Sikorsky and the 30 year wait
Episode 6323
In 1911, a young pilot's experimental airplane lost power and barely survived a crash landing. The culprit wasn't a broken fuel line or a snapped win…
1 week, 4 days ago
How Zulu Spears Defeated British Rifles
Episode 6322
Picture the most fearsome military machine of the 19th century: the British Empire at the peak of its industrial power, with breech-loading rifles, f…
1 week, 4 days ago
How your shadow becomes a Brocken spectre
Episode 6321
On a misty mountain ridge at dawn, you raise your arm to shield your eyes and a hundred-foot faceless giant in the fog raises its arm too, its head c…
1 week, 4 days ago
How your brain physically rewires itself
Episode 6320
The brain inside your head right now is not the same one you woke up with. For most of the 20th century, neuroscientists held a bleak dogma: once you…
1 week, 4 days ago
How Water Built and Broke Angkor
Episode 6319
Deep in the Cambodian jungle stands a stone city of impossible proportions: lotus-bud towers built for kings worshipped as living gods, surrounded by…
1 week, 4 days ago
How the world hijacked Pink Panther
Episode 6318
What connects an elite international jewel thief network, a tough Irish boxer, a desert-camouflaged military Land Rover, and a 1963 Hollywood comedy?…
1 week, 4 days ago
How the Somme Forged Modern Warfare
Episode 6317
By sunset on July 1st, 1916, the British Army had suffered over 57,000 casualties, the bloodiest single day in its history. The Battle of the Somme w…
1 week, 4 days ago
How the ranch forged Sandra Day O Connor
Episode 6316
She grew up nine miles from the nearest paved road on a 198,000-acre Arizona cattle ranch with no electricity until age seven, fixing tractors and sh…
1 week, 4 days ago
How the Ottoman Invincibility Myth Shattered
Episode 6315
At the climax of one of the most consequential battles of the 16th century, elite Ottoman Janissaries ran out of ammunition and began hurling oranges…
1 week, 4 days ago
How the Brinicle Finger of Death Forms
Episode 6314
At the bottom of the polar ocean, an icy hollow pipe creeps down from the frozen ceiling like a pale finger. When it touches the seabed, it spreads i…
1 week, 4 days ago