Curated Series
Collections
Themed series of case files that cut across departments. Read them in order, track your progress and take a Collection Quiz. 13 collections, 323 case files.
The Arsenal
Weapons, defense and the factories behind them.
Atomic Annie · Cannikin Quake · EKV: Exoatmospheric Kill Vehicle · Mobile Mortars · Sending EMALS · Supersonic Striker · XB-70 Valkyrie · Anduril · Bethlehem Steel · Hypersonic Missiles · Iranian Missile Cities · Shoot-and-Scoot · B52 Stratofortress · USS Gerald R. Ford · Gassed Up...Way Up · Ekranoplan · Ballistic Trident · Northrop Grumman · The Iron Dome · Flying Bike · Duga · Raytheon · 2-Billion Dollar B=2 · Blackbird · King Tiger · Destroyer · Typhoon · Subs · Helo · Railguns · SAMs · The Atomic Gun · Angel of Death · Tanking Railways
Extreme Cold
Liquid nitrogen, millikelvin fridges, a tunnel built for -40 °F, a city carved from river ice, Everest's death zone, a glacier that bleeds, a nuclear icebreaker built for 2.8 m of ice, a nebula at 1 K, snowflakes that never quite match, glacier ice that glows blue, emperor penguin dads who fast all winter, polar bears that swim between floes, Mercury's frozen nights and the tundra's permafrost.
CryoBranding · Quantum Infrastructure · One Roof Town · Winter in Harbin · Foreverest · The Glacier That Bleeds · Uranium Ural · Cosmic Freezer · No Perfect Crystallizations · Iceberg Blue · Emperor Penguins · Polar · Mercury · Earth's Harshest Biome · The Fingers of Death · What Are You Waiting For? · Glacial Waterfalls · To Break the Ice · Preserve Your Bubbles · ICECORE · nICE · Snowplower · Advanced Bicycle Riding II · FREEZING · Just a Chill Dog · Immune to Cold · How Water Freezes · Layer by Layer · Frozen Gators · The Plunge · Feeling Froggy?
Inside the Body
Cells, organelles, bacteria-eating immune cells, the things floating in your eyes, blood moving through living vessels, veins sealed shut from the inside, red cells bent into sickles, heart pumps that work from outside a child's chest, lungs that give way to sudden pressure and the scanners that image you.
Eukaryotic · The Vault · Starry Eyed · Macrophagia · Blood Watch · Sclerotherapy · Sickled Cells · Berlin Heart · Imploder · An MRI's Skeleton · I Wanted You to Know... · Bacteria Hunters · Your Heart in a Glass · Embryonic Development · Blood Destruction · Articulated Prosthesis · Rabies Crazies · Root of the Problem · Seeing Things Differently · Face Creator · MAiD · Lens Crafter · Shifty Periphery · Cell Death · Wet Response · HHS · AI Surgery II
Machines of Tomorrow
Robots, robot arms that carve marble, braided robot muscles, flying fans, new factories, AI road cameras, sails pushed by sunlight, turbines lifted by helium, an uncrewed combat jet, drones that knock ice off power lines, a wingless eVTOL prototype, robots that build a lunar test tower, a soft gripper shaped like an octopus arm, a droid trained in simulation and a virtual prison that exists only as a concept.
WHRGs 2026 · Gravity, or Lunavity? · Rapid Liquid Printing (RLP) · Ocean-3 · TeraFab · The Flock · Solar Sailing · Airborne Wind Turbines · Anduril · Self-Made Modular · Volar eVTOL · RoboClassical · RoboWeaving · Drone De-icing · Octopus Robo-Grip · NVIDIA's Blue · A Prison for Your Mind · Ectogenesis · BioInspired Robots · Drone Swarms · AI Surgery · Print Your Home
Engineering Oddities
Clever machines that solve small problems in surprising ways, from spinning LED 'hologram' fans to tubs that melt a city's snow, new pipes cured inside old ones, pumps that squeeze fluid through a tube, trailer floors that walk their load out, air-held domes over building sites, wire that springs back to shape when heated, farm sprinklers that strike themselves to turn, rocket test stands flooded with water, a calculator that never finishes dividing by zero, train couplers that lock on contact and the awning that shaded the Colosseum.
Vertical Parking II · Modern Mahjong · Footstep Power · Probe IV · Print Precision · Torque Conversion · Piston Pumps · Gas Blasting · HoloFans · HoloFans II · New York Hot Tub · CIPP · Peristaltic Pumps · Walking Floors · Construction Covers · Shape Memory · Sprinkle Of Truth · Deluge Days · Vertical Parking · OVER 0 · Knuckle Coupling · The Colosseum · Dredging Up the...Ground? · A Step Up · The Googol Gears · Earth Movers I · Quarrels With Quarrying? · Baffling · Rolling Steel
Places With a Story
A town in one building, a lake in the sky, a glacier that bleeds, a pyramid hotel in Las Vegas, a Roman arch carved with the Temple's spoils, a bridge that floats on a reservoir, an escalator up granite cliffs, all of the ancient Seven Wonders and the New 7 Wonders, and more.
One Roof Town · Heavenly Lake · Bethlehem Steel · Water Forest Park · The Chronicles of Georgia · The Line · Winter in Harbin · Tilted Town · The White Temple · Coffin Homes · Dead Pools · Foreverest · The Glacier That Bleeds · Danakil Depression · Plitvice Pure · Reservoir Ruin · Haus des Glockenspiels · Three Whale Rock · Mount Bokty · The Wailing Wall · Siwa Salt Oasis · One Incense Pillar · Lux or Luxor · da Vinci's Double Helix · Arch of Titus · Lingshan Lift · The Kaaba · Buoyancy Bridge II · ProsperiTree · BAPS NJ · Three Gorges · Aquatic Ambulances · Rainbow Mountains · Kawah Ijen · Kailasa Temple · Mount Kailash · Mercedes Stadium · The Glades · Hallgrímskirkja · Baikonur Cosmodrome · Bunker Valentin · Unlimited Bladeworks · Buzludzha · Starbase · The Motherland Calls · Ardabil · Chichen Itza · The Colosseum · Taj Mahal · The Great Pyramid · Hanging Gardens · Zeus @ Olympia · Temple of Artemis · Mausoleum at Halicarnassus · Colossus of Rhodes · Lighthouse of Alexandria · The Great Wall · Petra · Christ the Redeemer · Machu Picchu · Iguazu · Eiffel · Empire State · Burj Khalifa · The City of 10,000 Shrines · Thera · Catalan Gothic · The Red City · Soft Coral Capital of the World! · Visit This Tropical Paradise · Life on The Palm · Astonishing Arabian Architecture · Mall of the Emirates · A Winter Oasis · Wanderlust & Desert Dust · The Bermuda Triangle · Towering Tower · Maeklong Market · Sanctuary of Truth · The Titanpointe · Enter Sion · Shanghai · Blood Beach
Power and Energy
Waves, solar mountains, wind turbines on airships, offshore rigs, footsteps, reactor pools, a car built to waste less fuel, a 582-ton fusion magnet, plasma squeezed by its own current, the world's largest hydropower dam, solar panels that float and an icebreaker driven by two reactors.
Ocean-3 · Guizhou Solar · Offshore Oil · Data Centers · Footstep Power · Cherenkov Glow · Probe IV · Airborne Wind Turbines · Hefei Fusion · (Z) Pinch Me · Three Gorges · Floatovoltaics · Uranium Ural · Energizer · Type I
From Transistors to Qubits
The hardware behind computing, from Ada Lovelace's notes and 1971 to a film made of molecules and the quantum fridge.
Shrinking Circuits · TeraFab · Quantum Infrastructure · Ocean-3 · Data Centers · Atomic Stop-motion · Ada All-Time · The Future Is Now · Entanglement · Quantum Shenanigans · A Look Inside
Everyday Physics
Wine tears, inkjet drops, a blue glow that outruns light in water, a street that fools your balance, paint held on by static, the fluid inside an automatic car, water that carries a current, a laser that branches in a soap film, a golf ball that squashes and springs back, a crane kept upright by its counterweights, sunscreen that goes dark on a UV camera, vapor trails left by radiation, rainbows that are really circles, iron too hot for a magnet, beads that fall into a bell curve, metal that sparks in a microwave, a desk toy that passes momentum down the line, plasma made in a microwave, the ball in a ballpoint pen, water that holds itself together, a match head catching fire, a camera that bends propellers, charges that link up into lightning, plasma, the fourth state of matter,, the quartz crystal that keeps your watch on time and the metals that color fireworks.
Marangoni Motion · Print Precision · Cherenkov Glow · Tilted Town · Static Spray · Torque Conversion · Liquid Lights · Branched Flow · Golf Balling · Counter Crane · UV Face · Cloud Chambers · Around the Rainbow · Point Curie · Central Limits · Microwave Metal · Newtons Cradle · Making Plasma in the Microwave · Getting to the (Ball)Point · Is Water Sticky? · A Real Hot Head · Video Trickery · Linking Up · Plasma · Quartz Crystals · Fire Works · CASCADE · You're Spinning Me Around · The Strings of Fate · See Right Through Me · Sudsy · Computer Wave Control · Acoustic Levitation · Video Trickery II
The Nuclear Age
An atomic cannon, a 1950s nuclear bomber still in service, a Mach 3 bomber that never went to war, a megaton test under Alaska, a bomber stripped of its nuclear role, a submarine-launched nuclear missile, the interceptors built to stop warheads, a reactor's blue glow, the first seconds of a nuclear fireball, the corium mass under Chernobyl and the pines its radiation killed.
Atomic Annie · B52 Stratofortress · XB-70 Valkyrie · Cannikin Quake · Supersonic Striker · Ballistic Trident · EKV: Exoatmospheric Kill Vehicle · Cherenkov Glow · Nuclear Fireball · NUCLEAR DISASTER · The Red Forest · Kiloton · The Atomic Gun · Nuclear Shadows · Fall Marya
The Sun and the Stars
How stars are born, what the Sun throws into space, what's left when a massive star collapses, how sunlight can push a spacecraft, the plasma clouds the Sun hurls at Earth and the black holes that light up quasars.
Stellar Birth · Solar Prominence · Neutron Spin · Solar Sailing · Coronal Mass Ejection · Quasi-Stellar · Nebula · Event Horizon · striking! · 433 Eros · Lunar Topography
Persons of Interest
Short, sourced profiles of the people behind the headlines, with each living person's status checked as of the date shown.
Branson · Karp · The Shah · Tyler, The Creator · Felix Falls · Nic Mad · Ellison · Kirk · Ali Khamenei · Air Jordan · Kenny POWERs · Rick Charls · Rosalind · Ada All-Time · Cleo · Martha · Jack · The Beast of Rome · The First Roman Emperor · Little Boot · Canute the Great · Charlemagne · The Last Czar · Russia's Greatest Empress · The Virgin Queen · The Famine Queen · Khan of Khans · SHŌGUN · Le Petit Caporal · Performing Emperor · ArisTutor · Tenzing on Top
The Brain
Wiring, neurochemistry and emotion: the connections and chemistry behind how you think and feel.
Connected · Happiness · Sadness · Anger · Disgust · Surprise · Fear · SSRIs · Synaptic Transmission · Seems Familiar · Neuralink