An American helicopter pilot landed between Vietnamese civilians and American soldiers. He told his crew to be ready to fire on their own men if they tried to kill the people he was rescuing. His name was Hugh Thompson. He was 24 years old. On March 16, 1968, Thompson was flying a scout helicopter over My Lai, South Vietnam, with Larry Colburn and Glenn Andreotta. Their job was to support American troops on the ground. But there was no enemy fire. Instead, they saw dead and wounded civilians along the roads. Some were people they had seen alive minutes earlier. Below them, American soldiers were killing unarmed villagers. Thompson landed near a ditch filled with bodies. Some people were still alive. When he told a soldier they needed help, Colburn recalled the man replying that they would help them “out of their misery.” Then Thompson spotted another group of villagers running toward a bunker, with American troops following them. He decided to get in the way. He landed between the soldiers and the civilians. Before getting out, he told his crew to shoot if the Americans opened fire on him or the villagers. He walked toward the bunker without drawing his sidearm and brought the people out. Other helicopters carried them to safety. The crew then returned to the ditch, found a child still alive among the bodies, and flew him to a hospital. Thompson reported the killings and later testified about them. Back in the United States, he received death threats. Mutilated animals were left on his porch. He recalled entering a crowded officers’ club and watching it empty until almost nobody remained but him and the bartender. He had protected civilians from American soldiers. Some people treated him as though that was the betrayal. In 1998, thirty years after My Lai, the Army awarded Thompson, Colburn, and Andreotta the Soldier’s Medal. Andreotta’s award was posthumous; he had been killed in Vietnam shortly after the massacre. That same year, Thompson and Colburn returned to My Lai with 60 Minutes and met two women they had helped rescue. One had been a little girl when the helicopter landed. Now she stood before them, thirty years older. Thompson introduced the man beside him: “This is Larry. He was with me that day.”

Before he sang “You’re Beautiful,” James Blunt says he was ordered to overpower 200 Russian soldiers at an airport in Kosovo. He questioned the order. Then a British general came on the radio. It was June 1999. Blunt was 25, serving as a British Army officer near the front of a NATO force advancing toward Pristina airport. Russian troops had arrived first. According to Blunt, they pointed their weapons at his men and warned them against entering. The instruction he says came down from NATO commander General Wesley Clark was to “overrun and overpower the Russians.” Blunt had armed troops behind him. The Russians were standing in front of them. Carrying out the order risked turning a dispute over an airport into a direct military confrontation. He began questioning the instructions. Then General Mike Jackson intervened. At the Oxford Union, Blunt recalled Jackson’s words: “I will not have my soldiers be responsible for starting World War III.” The troops pulled back and surrounded the airfield. Blunt says that two days later, the Russians asked to share their food and water. The British response was that they could share supplies if the Russians shared access to the airport. The wider standoff still required negotiations. It would be misleading to say one young officer settled the entire crisis himself. But listen to how Blunt tells the story. He calls it the moment of his life he would most like to be remembered for. Then, after describing the confrontation, he makes a point of giving Jackson the credit. The famous singer is telling the audience to remember someone else’s name.

Jack Barsky, a KGB spy living undercover in America, says he avoided returning to the Soviet Union by pretending he had AIDS. The KGB believed him and told his family he was already dead. “I sent them my last letter with secret writing.” “I said, ‘I wish I could come, but I can’t because I have contracted HIV/AIDS.’” “That was the best lie ever because nobody wanted to have AIDS in their country.” “Those days it was a death sentence, right?” “So they believed it, and I asked them to give my dollar savings to my German family.” “They gave them some, but they told my family that I already passed away, that I’m dead.” “They believed it, 100%.” “And the next three months, I made sure that I wasn’t reliably at the same spot in the same time frame.” “So I went to work in different paths at different times.” “After I sent the letter, I threw the shortwave radio in the Hudson River.” “For a new life and live out my life as an American, undiscovered.”

The KGB looked for signs of nuclear war in Margaret Thatcher’s schedule. Even a meeting with the Queen could make the list. In this 1990 interview, former KGB officer Oleg Gordievsky explains how Soviet fears reached that point. Between 1979 and 1984, he says, some Soviet leaders began to believe the Reagan administration might be preparing a surprise nuclear attack. An attack intended to get rid of the Soviet Union and communism for good. So the KGB and Soviet military intelligence were ordered to search for signs that preparations were underway. Troop movements. Military activity. Weapons being prepared. Then Gordievsky describes the smaller details they watched. “Prime minister working until the early morning hours.” “Prime minister visiting the Queen.” Visits by the American ambassador to government agencies in London also attracted attention. So did lights staying on overnight in intelligence and defence buildings. And, as Gordievsky puts it: “A lot of limousines between the ministries.” An office working late. An ambassador making visits. The prime minister meeting the Queen. Ordinary government activity was being examined for clues to an approaching nuclear attack. Gordievsky’s account offers a disturbing glimpse into how intelligence can be interpreted when the people requesting it already fear the worst. Someone had to report those details. Someone else had to decide what they meant. And in a confrontation between nuclear powers, that judgment mattered enormously. When you are already expecting an attack, how easily does an office light become evidence?

This drop of metal can switch a circuit. Electrical signals move it between contacts, turning components on and off. It can also bridge a broken connection and restore current. The potential uses: electronics with connections that can be rearranged, circuit repair, and tiny robotic mechanisms. Left: the droplet moves on command. Right: it switches LEDs by connecting different contacts. For now, these are laboratory demonstrations. The goal is hardware whose electrical connections can physically change after it is built.

This flat surface can raise buttons you can actually press. Flat Panel Haptics uses tiny electrically controlled pumps to move liquid beneath a flexible surface. Apply voltage, and a button rises. Reverse the flow, and it sinks back down. The pumps are just 1.5 mm thick. The prototype creates a physical shape your fingers can feel. That could give touchscreens a keyboard that appears when you need to type, then flattens when you’re done. A way to bring the feel of physical controls to a surface that can change.

Self-Healing Electrical Material. Cut into the circuit, and it keeps working. Researchers at Carnegie Mellon embedded tiny droplets of liquid metal inside a soft, stretchable material. When damaged, the droplets rupture and connect with their neighbors, creating new paths for electricity. The surprising part is that the damage itself triggers the response. The material can keep conducting while being punctured or having pieces removed. For soft robots and wearable sensors, this could mean surviving a tear that would normally cause an electrical failure. Watch what happens to the device when the material gets damaged.

Someone made a controller fly with propellers. Tesla made a car jump with gas thrusters. So why choose compressed gas when propellers already work? The interesting part is how long you need the thrust. Propellers keep moving the air around them. Gas thrusters release a stored supply through nozzles, giving a brief burst of thrust. That supply runs out quickly. For a short airborne maneuver, though, it creates a very different set of possibilities.

Your router can make walls “transparent.” An ESP32 running ESPectre can detect movement through walls using Wi-Fi CSI tiny changes in how radio waves travel through a room. When you move, your body changes the signal. The chip picks up the difference. No camera. No microphone. Everything is processed locally. That movement can trigger lights or other smart-home automations. A tiny board turns the Wi-Fi you already use into a sensor.