Some aircraft are born from decades of relentless experimentation, cutting-edge wind-tunnel sorcery, and quietly panicked engineers who haven’t seen their families since the Bush administration. Others, like the Chengdu J-20, arrive in the world looking suspiciously like someone copied the clever kid’s homework, ran it through Google Translate, and declared it a national triumph. For years, the J-20 has been described as everything from a Raptor-killer to a melted F-22 drawn from memory. The truth is far less dramatic and far more entertaining. It’s neither a miracle nor a joke, neither a threat to civilisation nor the winged embodiment of

Every so often physics quietly taps us on the shoulder to let us know we’ve misunderstood something fundamental. No drama, no explosions, just a small shrug from reality that basically says, “yeah, you got that bit wrong.” This time the correction comes from an ultra-boring material called YbB₁₂, normally as electrically active as a house brick and about as exciting. It’s the kind of insulator you’d never look at twice unless you were planning to build a shed with it. Everything changed the moment researchers cranked a monstrous 35-Tesla magnetic field at it, a field strong enough to rearrange your

There are big planes. There are very big planes. And then there’s the Stratolaunch Roc, an aircraft so unnecessarily massive that even the Antonov would look at it and quietly whisper, “Mate, you alright?” The Roc isn’t here to carry your Amazon parcels or your gran’s suitcase to Tenerife. Its job is stranger, more niche, and significantly more dramatic: haul hypersonic vehicles into the sky and drop them like a mother bird yeeting its young into a hurricane. This isn’t cargo aviation. This is controlled chaos with wings. Its wingspan stretches an absurd 117 metres, something Stratolaunch confirms directly in

Cancer treatment has always had a depressing resemblance to British rail infrastructure: expensive, delayed, unreliable, and usually requiring a replacement bus service at the exact moment you need it most. For years, the cutting edge of cellular therapy has been stuck in the same loop, brilliant science throttled by the sheer faff of having to manufacture a bespoke treatment for each individual patient. Hand-crafted, artisanal immune cells. Lovely idea. Terrible scalability. That bottleneck is now cracking. Deep inside MIT and Harvard, researchers have engineered a new breed of Natural Killer cells that behave like stealth aircraft in a world full

There’s a scene in The Matrix that never really left the cultural bloodstream. Not the kung-fu, not the trench coats, not the slow-motion bullets, the bit that truly lodged itself into the collective brain is quieter, far more dangerous. It’s Cypher, sitting at a white-tablecloth restaurant, cutting into a simulated steak with the satisfaction of a man who has finally worked out what he wants from life. He chews, savours, and calmly tells Agent Smith that he knows the steak isn’t real… but his brain decides it is anyway. And that simple sentence, “ignorance is bliss,” became a kind of

Human civilisation runs on a single fragile assumption: that the sky will keep talking to us. Planes, banks, ships, phones, your Uber Eats driver carrying a lukewarm korma, all rely on a set of whisper-quiet satellite signals that can be jammed with the electromagnetic equivalent of a cranky toddler screaming into a walkie-talkie. So it was only a matter of time before someone finally said: maybe we shouldn’t build the global economy on something that collapses if a cloud gives it a funny look. Enter quantum navigation, the quietly world-changing technology the Royal Navy just strapped to a submarine like