Amusing Planet

Humans have been making music for thousands of years, as evidenced by fragments of ancient instruments unearthed by archaeologists, such as ...

In the years leading up to the First World War, Britain’s Royal Navy faced an existential challenge. Germany’s naval expansion, and especial...

The Ambrose Channel pilot cable was an early 20th-century navigational aid installed on the seabed of New York Harbor’s Ambrose Channel, the...

In the autumn of 1952, a small black rubber dinghy drifted out of the Canaries and into the immensity of the Atlantic Ocean. Its lone occupa...

On a crisp October morning in 1906, a man in an immaculate Prussian captain’s uniform marched into the Berlin suburb of Köpenick and coolly ...

In the early decades of the twentieth century, as radium fever gripped scientists and entrepreneurs alike, one Philadelphia businessman join...

In 1667, in a small Parisian chamber lit by oil lamps and crowded with curious observers, a young physician named Jean-Baptiste Denys carrie...

In California’s Imperial Valley—an expanse of desert where geothermal energy, agriculture, and quiet rural towns coexist—lies one of the mos...

In the late 1960s and early 1970s, the United States conducted one of the most ambitious experiments in human undersea habitation: Project ...

Few rivers in human history have been so closely tied to a nation’s destiny as the Yellow River— Huang He , the “Mother of China.” Rising in...