Last month was the 100th anniversary of the first cars made by William Morris (1877-1963). The Morris-Oxford Light was a small car with a 1018cc four-cylinder side-valve engine, made in 1913. But William Morris wasn't just a titan of the British car industry; he was also a philanthropist who manufactured and donated over 5,000 iron lungs to hospitals across the UK. Read More >>

Poop has been around for as long as there have been animals to produce it. It's a constant, brown, smelly presence in all of our lives. But over the long stretch of history, humanity has come up with some brilliant and clever uses for it. Advance apologies for spoiling your lunch. Read More >>

Before the arrival of the microchip in the 1970s, a maths boffin didn’t have the luxury of a portable electronic calculator. They carried an abacus, a blackboard, and a bit of chalk on their person at all times. But wait, we stand corrected – for a brief spell in the second half of the twentieth century, there was an alternative, an ingenious device known as the Curta Read More >>

Take a walk through University College London, and you may stumble across a wooden display cabinet containing a human skeleton with a wax head, wearing period dress. These are the remains of Jeremy Bentham (1748-1832), Enlightenment philosopher and spiritual founder of UCL. And thanks to an online crowdsourcing initiative called Transcribe Bentham, his work has taken on a new lease of life. Read More >>

Many inventors qualify as dreamers, but precious few captured the popular imagination in the same manner as Harry Grindell Matthews. In the early twentieth century he produced a litany of devices that were the stuff of science fiction and fantasy, chief among them the "Death Ray" and the "Sky Projector". But his reluctance to explain how they worked caused him to frequently butt heads with a sceptical establishment. Read More >>

An Associate Professor of English at the University of Maryland has identified the first literary work to be written with a word processor, instead of a typewriter. The book is Bomber, by Len Deighton, a World War II thriller published to critical acclaim in 1970. What follows is a magnificent tale which sees several fellow authors' names being put forward for this accolade, before Deighton himself was fingered. Read More >>

We've just clapped our eyes on 20 minutes of footage from Ridley Scott's Prometheus. Nothing spoilerific, but enough to give us a better idea of the world and its characters. Already on the verge of a full-blown nerdgasm, we were also treated to a Q&A session with director Scott, and his cast of Charlize Theron, Michael Fassbender and Noomi Rapace. Read on for the full details. Read More >>

It's an epic film, laden with eleven Oscars and one of the biggest box-office returns in history. It also has a running time of biblical proportions, and many backsides were irretrievably numbed by the experience. But do you really need to see Titanic in glorious, stereoscopic 3D? Director James Cameron thinks you do. Read More >>

There were many fronts of battle in World War II, and military intelligence had a part to play in all of them. Scattered all over the country were bases and labs where spies, analysts and technicians feverishly worked on cracking codes, studying photos, making maps and designing weapons. Here's a list of the five most important: Read More >>

"You mean it wasn't out of print already?" That's our first reaction to the news about the print edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica being discontinued. Our second is, "What's for dinner?" Because the emotional impact of the announcement is fleeting -- how did this publishing dinosaur manage to limp so far into the 21st century? Read More >>

As the shutters come down on Baselworld 2012, the biggest watch fair in the world, it's a time to reflect on the highs and the lows of the past week. Mainly the lows, because isn't that more fun for everyone? Except the manufacturers, natch. Read More >>

After the Royal Air Force gave G-Shock the skinny on the various functions it needs from a watch, the "Gravity Defier" GW-A1000RAF-1AER was born. We sat down with Flight Lieutenant Nathan Jones to discuss his involvement on the project, and find out why he deemed compasses, torches and locator beacons surplus to an RAF pilot's requirements. Read More >>

More than thirty years after its release, Das Boot remains one of the most gripping war movies ever made. We're on the edge of our seat just thinking about it. But is it really the best candidate to launch a new line of watches? That's exactly what's happened at Baselworld, with the company describing them as "Divers' watches for real men!" Read More >>

With so much attention lavished on luxury watches at Baselworld in Switzerland, another important timekeeping device is woefullly neglected -- the cuckoo clock. Contrary to popular belief, it's not actually a Swiss invention (that honour belongs to the Black Forest in Germany), but scattered around the exhibition halls are some spectacular examples of the craft. Read More >>

The Baselworld trade show for watch companies is held annually in the heart of watch-land (that's Switzerland!), showcasing 2,100 timepiece manufacturers from over 45 countries. We ran around like a man possessed to find the 10 best watches you'll want to strap on this year -- good luck affording many of them, though. Sadface. Read More >>