May & Jun '24

Fifty late bloomers.

Women outperform men in ultradistance swimming.

A British nurse was found guilty of killing seven babies. Did she do it?

How to build 300,000 Airplanes in five years.

Over the course of the war the U.S. produced around 325,000 airplanes valued at roughly $46 billion ($800 billion in 2024 dollars). Not only is this more aircraft than what Germany, Japan, and Italy combined produced during the war — it’s also more aircraft than have been built for commercial transport in the entire history of aviation.

As a measure of the industrial might of the United States in 1944 and 1945, the subsequent whirl of destruction told a better story than a thousand pages of statistics. If a plane needed minor repairs, it was pulled off the flight line and junked, and a shiny new replacement unit flew in to take its place. Hundreds of airplanes were flown into remote Pacific island airstrips, parked in a vacant clearing, and abandoned. Many such aircraft “boneyards” were later used for target practice by U.S. bombers on training missions. Scrapped airplanes were bulldozed into pits, and the wreckage compacted by running tanks over them. Marginally damaged carrier planes were pushed off the flight decks into the sea, and new replacement units flown in from escort carriers. This mass-junking of perfectly serviceable warplanes occurred at the height of the war, when the Japanese were falling well short of aircraft production targets and struggling to keep their assembly lines in operation at all.

Can SO2 reverse global warming?

One balloon releasing SO2 in the stratosphere is the equivalent of 38,636 fully-grown trees that last for a year.

The obscure federal intelligence bureau that got Vietnam, Iraq, and Ukraine right.

Baby simulators increase teen pregnancy rates.

The plastic chemicals hiding in your food.

The outside is much more brighter than you think it is.

Taking Risk.

Why did supersonic airliners fail?

The evolutionary mystery of the German cockroach.

Pentagon ran secret anti-vax campaign to incite fear of Chinese vaccines.

No evidence sperm counts are dropping.