(via Reactions) I spent three months of my life trying to figure out pykrete—basically ice with wood pulp mixed in—how it works and how I could make it better. I still don’t know how it works, but I ...

I tried to improve pykrete for months, then tossed it off a building. I spent three months of my life trying to figure out pykrete—basically ice with wood pulp mixed in—how it works and how I could ...

Just before the outbreak of the First World War, one visionary Japanese naval officer proposed plans for what could have been the largest warship ever built. Called the Zipang, this mega ship would ...

Discover Operation Habbakuk, the plan to build a super aircraft carrier from pykrete—a mixture of ice and wood powder with superior strength compared to concrete—in order to dominate the Atlantic.

It sounds like something dreamed up on a napkin during a long winter night, but it was very real. In the middle of World War II, Allied engineers seriously considered building giant aircraft carriers ...

Project Habakkuk was a wartime proposal to build an enormous aircraft carrier from “pykrete,” an ice-and-wood-pulp composite pitched as strong, slow to melt, and difficult to sink. The transcript ...

Learn the chemical science behind drugs, food, animal behavior, climate change and more with videos from Reactions—a science video series that uncovers the chemistry all around us.

ON February 23 1948, the inventor Geoffrey Pyke was reported dead at his home in Hampstead by his landlady. He had clearly committed suicide, aged 54, though no-one was precisely sure why. It was a ...

In the 1940s, a British plan was launched to use ice as a material for the hull of a ship instead of the scarce steel and aluminum. The 99% Invisible podcast series introduced the failed 'Habakkuk ...