Who will be the first to sail non-stop around the world? In 1968, The Sunday Times announces a trophy and a cash prize for ...

In the late 1930s, the Roosevelt administration embarked on a curious project. Officials hired thousands of unemployed writers to produce guidebooks, children’s books, local histories, collections ...

The marathon, the algorithm and me Twenty-five centuries ago, after the Greeks shattered the Persian army at Marathon, brave Pheidippides ran 26 miles to Athens with the news. Robert Browning’s ...

Chris McKinlay is a good looking, smart student at UCLA, but he can’t seem to get a girlfriend. He’s a computing expert, so why not use his technology prowess to supercharge his search ...

To celebrate – or commiserate – this year’s Valentine’s Day, Tim has something a little different. Straight from the Cautionary Library of misadventures comes a bumper crop ...

Panic has erupted in the cockpit of AirFrance Flight 447. The pilots are convinced they’ve lost control of the plane. It’s lurching violently. Then, it begins plummeting from the sky at breakneck ...

Adi and Rudi Dassler made sports shoes together – until a feud erupted between them. They set up competing companies, Adidas and Puma, and their bitter rivalry divided the sporting world, their family ...

Claude Shannon was brilliant. He was the Einstein of computer science… only he loved “fritterin’ away” his time building machines to play chess, solve Rubik’s cubes and beat the house at roulette. If ...

France 1346: The army of King Philip VI is Europe’s pre-eminent killing machine. It is used to crushing any force stupid enough to oppose it, and now fully expects to annihilate a motley band of ...

In the 1920s, Germany’s Society for Spaceship Travel boasted some of the sharpest scientific minds – like the incandescently brilliant young Wernher von Braun. But it had very little money, and ...