The history of rapid-transit began 150 years ago, with the opening of the Metropolitan Railway in London in 1863. In the next century and a half, dozens of architects and engineers have worked on underground tunnels and stations. Some are abandoned now, but others are as good as new. Here are some of the most wonderful underground railway stations.

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17A

Retro Futurism: Desert Edition

Retronaut has a neat pair of photos today of a proposed desert crossing vehicle. It was designed in the early 1930s to safely cross Central Asia. I wasn't able to find any additional information about the vehicle that wasn't in German. However, I was struck by how similar it was to the Khetanna, Jabba's sail barge…

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13A

Carnivorous plant doesn't have time for any of that junk DNA

In the human genome, only about 2% of our DNA are genes involved in coding the proteins essential to our existence. The other 98% is noncoding DNA, often called junk DNA because there's no clear purpose for it. That name might seem a bit pejorative, but a new study of the bladderwort genome suggests it's oddly…

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8A

Crowdfund a collection of Osamu Tezuka's short manga and more

There are tons of great crowdfunding projects running this week, from tiny robot sculptures to a book by the Godfather of Anime. You can also crowdfund a short film about dinosaurs on the hunt, simple programmable robots, and much more.

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5A

Seriously, you know what would have been awesome on last night's Doctor Who? If Sarah Connor had popped up, preferably the Lena Headey version, and told the Doctor and his friends there's "no fate but what we make." And then blown up the Great Intelligence with a pipe bomb or something. That's not what happened, though.

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261A

These are the remnants of the last supernova known to explode in our galaxy whose light has reached Earth. It lit up the night sky in 1604 and attracted the attention of Johannes Kepler himself. But it's only in the last couple of decades that we've developed the technology to understand exactly what kind of supernova this is.

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3A

The Unexpected Artwork of Physicist Richard Feynman

In addition to being a world-renowned physicist, Richard Feynman was also an amateur artist, one who was fascinated by the power of lines and forms. He felt that his appreciation of art was deeply connected to his love of physics, representing an appreciation of the complexity and beauty of the world.

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5A
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