the news

The First Thing Humans Ever Sent to Another World On March 1, 1966, a spherical object no larger than a beach ball plunged into the atmosphere of Venus at roughly 11 kilometers per second. It was the lander module of Venera 3, a Soviet spacecraft launched sixteen weeks earlier from Baikonur Cosmodrome. The probe had…

A Road That Crosses Itself Without Stopping On February 29, 1916, a leap day in a leap year, the United States Patent Office granted Arthur Hale, a civil engineer from Maryland, patent number 1,176,331. The document described a highway interchange in which two roads crossed at different elevations, with loop ramps allowing traffic to merge…

A Secret in Plain Sight On February 28, 1959, a Thor-Agena rocket lifted off from the newly activated Vandenberg Air Force Base on the California coast. Its payload was called Discoverer 1, described to the public as a scientific research satellite carrying biological and radiation experiments into orbit. The press release was technically true. It…

When Scientists Paused to Ask Permission On February 27, 1975, a group of roughly 140 molecular biologists concluded five days of meetings at a conference center on the California coast and did something unprecedented in the history of science. They agreed to restrict their own research. The Asilomar Conference on Recombinant DNA, held at the…

A Vault Inside a Mountain On February 26, 2008, representatives from fifty-four countries gathered on a remote Norwegian archipelago less than a thousand miles from the North Pole. They had come to watch a steel door close behind a concrete tunnel bored 120 meters into a sandstone mountain on the island of Spitsbergen. Inside, behind…

A Small Country, a Small Satellite, a Big Step On February 25, 2013, a Polar Satellite Launch Vehicle lifted off from the Satish Dhawan Space Centre on India’s southeastern coast. Among its payload were two objects barely larger than toaster ovens, each weighing roughly seven kilograms. They were TUGSAT-1 and UniBRITE, and they represented something…

One Last Ride On February 24, 2011, at 4:53 PM EST, Space Shuttle Discovery roared off Launch Pad 39A at Kennedy Space Center. The countdown had been scrubbed four times since November 2010—twice for weather, once for a faulty backup computer, once because technicians found cracks in the external tank’s support ribs. But this time…

A New Star Where None Had Been On February 23, 1987, Ian Shelton, a Canadian astronomer working at the Las Campanas Observatory in Chile, walked outside after developing a photographic plate and looked up. What he saw in the Large Magellanic Cloud—a dwarf galaxy visible only from the Southern Hemisphere—was a point of light that…

A Sheep That Should Not Exist On February 22, 1997, a press conference at the Roslin Institute in Edinburgh announced something the scientific world had considered impossible. A Finn Dorset sheep, born the previous July, had been created not from the union of egg and sperm but from the genetic material of a single adult…

The Wrong Side of the Ocean On February 21, 1995, Steve Fossett touched down in a field near Leader, Saskatchewan. He had set out six days earlier from Seoul, South Korea, and he had not slept more than a few hours at a stretch since. A farmer named Wilf Helmuth, checking cattle in the snow,…