Jason Pontin: Can technology solve our big ... So, we used to solve big problems. On July 21st, 1969, Buzz Aldrin climbed out of Apollo 11's lunar module and descended onto the Sea of Tranquility. Armstrong and Aldrin were alone, but their…

Adam Spencer: Why I fell in love with monster prime ... Ah yes, those university days, a heady mix of Ph.D-level pure mathematics and world debating championships, or, as I like to say, "Hello, ladies. Oh yeah." Didn't get much sexier than…

Frank Warren: Half a million secrets - YouTube Hi, my name is Frank, and I collect secrets. It all started with a crazy idea in November of 2004. I printed up 3,000 self-addressed postcards, just like this. They were blank on one side, and…

Kees Moeliker: How a dead duck changed my life ... This is the Natural History Museum in Rotterdam, where I work as a curator. It's my job to make sure the collection stays okay, and that it grows, and basically it means I collect dead ani…

Eli Beer: The fastest ambulance? A motorcycle - YouTube This is an ambucycle. This is the fastest way to reach any medical emergency. It has everything an ambulance has except for a bed. You see the defibrillator. You see the equipment. We…

Kevin Breel: Confessions of a depressed comic ... For a long time in my life, I felt like I'd been living two different lives. There's the life that everyone sees, and then there's the life that only I see. And in the life that everyone se…

Hendrik Poinar: Bring back the woolly mammoth ... When I was a young boy, I used to gaze through the microscope of my father at the insects in amber that he kept in the house. And they were remarkably well preserved, morphologically just p…