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What would totalitarian governments of the past have looked like if they were never defeated? The Nazis operated with 20th Century technology and it still took a world war to stop them.

"People have always wanted to travel fast, ever since the first person galloped across the plains on horseback," says Mike Bannister.And he should know. Mr Bannister flew Concorde with British Airways for 22 years.

Volkswagen Transporter 2.

Scientists have found the first material that displays a much sought-after property at room temperature. It is superconducting, which means electrical current flows through it with perfect efficiency - with no energy wasted as heat.

Heineken's pubs business has been fined £2m by the industry watchdog after forcing tenants to sell "unreasonable levels" of its own beers and ciders. Star Pubs and Bars "seriously and repeatedly" broke rules for three years, the Pubs Code Adjudicator said.

Catch a more in-depth interview with Ben Sparks on our Numberphile Podcast: https://youtu.be/-tGni9ObJWk Check out Brilliant (and get 20% off) by clicking https://brilliant.org/numberphile More links & stuff in full description below ↓↓↓ Golden seeds limited edition T-Shirt: https://teespring

Every Wednesday evening for the last year, I have been relearning Hindi, my third language after Bengali and English. Although it’s been wonderful to feel more connected to my culture, I’ve been surprised and somewhat disappointed to discover the gendered structure of my mother tongue.

Three new underground lakes have been detected near the south pole of Mars. Scientists also confirmed the existence of a fourth lake - the presence of which was hinted at in 2018.

The 20 km of Brussels (French: 20 km de Bruxelles, Dutch: 20 km door Brussel) is a 20.1 km running race that has been held each year in Brussels since 1980, usually in May.

When scientists presented the first ever picture of a black hole last year, it was hailed as an extraordinary breakthrough. Well, now they've reassessed some of the image data that was acquired in the years running up to that historic snapshot.

From rock art in southern Africa to pyramids along the River Nile, humans have been leaving their mark across the continent for millennia.

Mark Chapman, the man who killed John Lennon, has apologised to the late Beatle's widow, Yoko Ono, 40 years after his death. Chapman shot Lennon four times outside his New York Manhattan apartment as Ono looked on, in 1980.

For much of history, reading was a fairly noisy activity. On clay tablets written in ancient Iraq and Syria some 4,000 years ago, the commonly used words for “to read” literally meant “to cry out” or “to listen”. “I am sending a very urgent message,” says one letter from this period.

At the time the Black Lives Matter campaign in the UK was drawing the national spotlight to the statues of slave traders, another activist was highlighting the way women are represented in civic statuary.

More than 75 years after Israel declared statehood, its borders are yet to be entirely settled. Wars, treaties and occupation mean the shape of the Jewish state has changed over time, and in parts is still undefined. Here is a series of maps explaining why.

It's an extraordinary possibility - the idea that living organisms are floating in the clouds of Planet Venus. But this is what astronomers are now considering after detecting a gas in the atmosphere they can't explain.

Say you're walking your dog in the park, when he comes face to snout with another dog. An intricate dance begins, as if each movement was precisely choreographed. The dogs visually inspect each other, sniff each other, walk circles around each other. And then the fight begins.

To mark the end of a turbulent year, we are bringing back some of our favourite stories for BBC Future’s “Best of 2020” collection. Discover more of our picks here. Far from the protective embrace of the Sun, the edge of our Solar System would seem to be a cold, empty, and dark place.

We now know that masks have an outsized effect on slowing the spread of COVID-19. And yet, some people oppose wearing masks because they view this as a personal choice rather than a public health issue. This misses the big picture because masks protect the wearer and the people around them.

One of the key findings over the past decades is that our number faculty is deeply rooted in our biological ancestry, and not based on our ability to use language. Considering the multitude of situations in which we humans use numerical information, life without numbers is inconceivable.

Fans have flocked to a church in Germany to hear a chord change in a musical composition that lasts for 639 years. It is the first change in the piece, As Slow As Possible, in seven years.

Cooking oils are a kitchen staple. But there’s a lot of conflicting information regarding how healthy each of them are.

There is "unequivocal proof" that Russian opposition politician Alexei Navalny was poisoned with a Novichok nerve agent, Germany has said. Chancellor Angela Merkel said he was a victim of attempted murder and the world would look to Russia for answers.