Notes

‘Artificial’ didn’t scare Americans in the 19th century. Why does it scare them now?

It’s incredibly hard to deliver drugs to the right organ, especially to reach the brain. Tiny gas-filled spheres that burst on command could change that.

In 1918, fifty systems supplied London’s electricity. Turning these into a grid required war, nationalization, and an act of engineering insubordination.

Long before modern science, Europeans learned to see their own time as an age of invention rather than decline.

Generations of microbes evolve in hours, not millennia. By speeding up Darwin’s clock, scientists have watched evolution happen in real time, and it’s changed how we understand natural selection.

For centuries it was a poison. Then colchicine rewrote treatment for gout, heart disease, and later, the debate over drug exclusivity.

In 1965, married American women did 34 hours of housework weekly. By 2010, that had fallen to 18 hours. The dishwasher wasn’t the only cause, but it certainly helped.

Airbus is an example of successful industrial policy and the rare European company that is better than its American rival. Could its success be copied elsewhere?

Why do some neighborhoods get garden squares and graceful streets, while others don’t? The answer isn’t zoning or taste, it’s who owns the land, and how unified that ownership is.

Keeping the grid stable requires overbuilding generating capacity, driving up costs. Batteries fix that.

Pedestrian tunnels are often thought to undermine urban life. The opposite happened in Toronto.

For nearly two centuries, pain relief meant effective but addictive opioids. Scientists have finally made something better.