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Global oil and gas markets, exploration, production, pipelines, energy security, and the technologies and policies shaping the world's conventional energy sector.
Oil and Gas
A pumped-hydro station in Wales moves 7.2 million cubic metres of water up a mountain at night and releases it through six turbines in the morning, delivering roughly 1,728 megawatts to the grid within 12 seconds of the operator pressing the start button
Buried inside a Welsh mountain, the Dinorwig pumped storage station uses six reversible turbines and a reservoir near the summit of Elidir Fawr to swing more than a gigawatt of electricity onto the British grid in seconds — the fastest-responding power plant in the country, and a template for the pumped hydro revival now underway from Gwynedd to New South Wales.
Nikola Tesla demonstrated alternating current at the 1893 Chicago World's Fair by lighting 200,000 incandescent bulbs from a single Westinghouse generator, undercutting Edison's DC bid by roughly half and effectively deciding which current would carry electricity into every home on the planet for the next 130 years.
Titan's atmosphere is roughly four times denser than Earth's while its gravity is only one-seventh as strong, which means a human standing on Saturn's largest moon could strap wings to their arms and, in principle, take off under their own muscle power
A fossil bed in North Dakota preserves fish with Chicxulub impact glass trapped in their gills, evidence they were alive as asteroid debris fell 3,000 kilometres from the crater during the first hour or two after the strike that ended the age of non-avian dinosaurs
Fraunhofer ISE achieves record 31.3% outdoor solar-to-hydrogen efficiency
How did a Central American country smaller than West Virginia go from barely one-fifth forest cover to trees covering more than half its land in a single generation?
How did a Soviet lander survive 127 minutes on the surface of a planet where the air pressure crushes submarines and the ambient heat melts lead?
How did a captured wartime rocket, fired straight up from a New Mexico desert range in 1946, return the first photograph of Earth taken from above the atmosphere?
A bowhead whale killed off Alaska in 2007 had likely carried a brass bomb-lance fragment in its shoulder since around 1890, evidence of a failed whaling strike more than a century earlier
In 1952, Rosalind Franklin and Raymond Gosling exposed a hydrated DNA fibre to X-rays for 62 hours, producing Photo 51: the pattern that helped Watson and Crick build the correct double-helix model months later
A water-harvesting jacket developed at the University of Texas can collect up to 900 millilitres a day from ambient air, but the captured moisture still has to be heated before it becomes drinkable
