All aboard: China’s railway dream

At Asia’s biggest rail cargo base in Chengdu in south-west China, the cranes are hard at work, swinging containers from trucks onto a freight train. The containers are filled with computers, clothes, even cars.

Until last year, all of it would have first gone more than 1,000 miles east to Shanghai and then to Europe by sea.

Japan’s Secret WWII Weapon: Balloon Bombs

Balloon bombs aimed to be the silent assassins of World War II. Hitching a ride on a jet stream, these weapons from Japan could float soundlessly across the Pacific Ocean to their marks in North America.

Still largely unknown, these armaments were a byproduct of an atmospheric experiment by the Axis power. In the 1940s, the Japanese were mapping out air currents by launching balloons attached with measuring instruments from the western side of Japan and picking them up on the eastern side.