Animals are smarter than many people realize, and they can learn to do all sorts of stuff. That's why so many creatures have been domesticated — but it's also why people have tried, over and over, to send animals to war. Here's a history of animal soldiers, in pictures.

An Iranian boy found a Syrian brown bear cub in 1942, and sold it to the 22nd Artillery Supply Company of the Polish II Corps for canned meat. That's how the story of the most famous military animal started.

Tanks are a crucial part of any land force in battle, and every military dreams of coming up with the ultimate invincible vehicle, complete with incredible firepower. But some militaries dream bigger than others. From winged tanks and DiY armored cars, to tanks studded with flamethrowers, here are some of the most…

Krampnitz Kaserne was a massive military complex, housing in its history members of not just the Nazi military but also the Soviet military. Now, aside from the occasional urban explorer and movie crew, the complex sits abandoned, though some chilling reminders of its wartime existence still remain.

My story "Intestate" is up now at Tor.com — it's one of the weirdest things I've ever written, sort of an attempt to do something like The Royal Tenenbaums except with mad science.

Elon Musk (the billionaire genius who helped inspire RDJ's Tony Stark) and his space transport company SpaceX just lined up their very first military contracts with the US Air Force. Oh, privatized aerospace — you're growing up so fast!

Here's a quirky find from the National Archives: the United States Air Force's 1956 plan to build a saucer-shaped aircraft that would zip across the skies with the greatest of ease. As the Archives explain of "Project 1794, Final Development Summary Report":

In 1998, a secret Army intelligence analysis suggested a new way to take out enemies: blast them with electromagnetic energy until their brains overload and they start to convulse. Amazingly, it was an idea inspired by a Pokemon episode.

Remember AlphaDog, the mechanical pack mule built by the roboticists at Boston Dynamics in conjunction with the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA)?

You remember Cheetah, don't you? Back in March, DARPA released video of the robotic quadruped galloping at speeds of up to 18 miles per hour. At the time, 18 mph was a new record, outstripping the previous one by just shy of five miles per hour.