‘The life of a single human being is worth millions of times more than all the property of the richest man on earth’ When a single human life is weighed against material wealth, the right choice seems clear. Yet everyday real-world systems constantly do the math in reverse. Car companies weigh the cost of fixing…

Under the watchful eye of scientists, volunteers clean the skeleton of a mastodonsaurus A huge fossilised skeleton weighing 1,300 kilograms (2,865 pounds) that was found in southern Poland is currently being chipped out of solid rock by a group of more than 2,000 public volunteers.According to a report by the Associated Press, this unusual public…

More than a century ago, engineers proposed an audacious idea for Egypt’s Western Desert, cutting a canal from the Mediterranean Sea into the Qattara Depression, a vast basin sitting well below sea level, and using the resulting flow of water to generate electricity indefinitely. The concept first surfaced around 1912 and was developed further by…

A routine railway tunnel project in the Swedish coastal town of Varberg has turned into an unexpected archaeological event, after construction crews cut into a buried stretch of the town’s medieval waterfront and uncovered the remains of six separate shipwrecks. The vessels range from the Middle Ages to the seventeenth century, with four dating to…

Britain’s canal network was never designed with nature in mind. Built more than two centuries ago to move coal, clay and cotton across an industrialising country, these engineered waterways were about as far from a natural habitat as a landscape could get. Yet today, nearly 8,000 kilometres of canals crisscrossing the country have quietly become…

Pic courtesy: Instagram/ @pennyhundleyart Her picture is still circulating in millions of pockets every day, and yet her story remains largely untold. Flip the U.S. Mint’s 2026 Sacagawea $1 coin, and you will see her: Polly Cooper, a woman from the Oneida tribe who helped George Washington’s Continental Army during the Revolutionary War. Chances are,…