This year marks the sixth year since the U.S. Space Force was established, and it still has fewer people in uniform than the New York City Police Department. Yet, last month they asked Congress for...
Are tariffs the answer? They certainly weren’t 94 years ago when Washington slapped a $0.04 tariff on every single pound of imported copper. Six months later, copper was selling for a shade under...
When a young researcher at Oxford named Dorothy Hodgkin was handed a small sample of crystalline insulin more than 90 years ago, she had a burning desire to know its shape...
We often get caught up in resource dominance today, whether it’s China’s unerring control over rare earths or the fact that six out of every 10 barrels of oil pumped out of the ground in the...
Last week, President Trump thought he announced a bombshell when he touted that America had secured majority control of 65 billion barrels of Venezuelan reserves...
In 1946, President Harry Truman quietly offered Denmark $100 million in gold for the entire island of Greenland. For a little perspective, that’s roughly $1.7 billion in today's dollars...
In 1990, the U.S. government committed roughly $3 billion and 13 years to a single audacious goal. For the first time in history, we were going to sequence the entire human genome.
During the California Gold Rush, miners ran headfirst into a problem nobody had solved yet. What you may not know is that trading raw gold dust or nuggets was a lot harder than you’d think.
When rebel forces invaded a remote province in Zaire back in May of 1978, the West suddenly had a very serious problem on their hands. Practically overnight, we had lost access to roughly 65% of...
In 1926, the U.S. government went looking for a rancher named William Henry Bush. Geologists had found something remarkable underneath his land outside Amarillo, Texas — a natural dome-shaped rock...
Three miles beneath central Oregon, a beam of energy is vaporizing solid rock right now. We’re not talking about your typical drilling operations that your standard oil and gas rig crews have been...
With the Apollo program barely off the ground in the fall of 1962, NASA ran into a real cash crisis. It turns out that President Kennedy had rejected the agency's request for additional funding.