In the New Mexico desert, discarded car tyres, beer cans and bottles became the unlikely foundations of a different kind of home. Architect Michael Reynolds began developing his Earthship idea in the early 1970s, turning waste materials into thick walls designed to hold heat and houses built to produce and manage many of their own…

1958, the US secretly detonated 3 nuclear devices In August and September 1958, the United States military carried out a secret series of high-altitude nuclear tests in the remote upper reaches of the South Atlantic Ocean. Code-named Operation Argus, the operation involved launching three low-yield nuclear devices between 100 and 500 kilometres into space. The…

Peter Hunter kneels beside a clump of young willows clinging to the edge of Dry Creek. The slender shoots are leafless but supple, a faint tinge of red promising spring growth. On the bank above him, Hunter eyes hundreds of seedlings, cottonwoods, redbud, and other shrubs pushing up through protective plastic tubes into the pale…

Wolf Trap remains the only national park in the United States devoted to the performing arts, advancing the concept Shouse first put forth more than six decades ago Before it became a stage beneath the stars, Wolf Trap was simply a Virginia farm. But in the 1960s, one woman had a very different dream for…