After the 1995 floods forced 250,000 people to evacuate, the Netherlands stopped raising its dikes and instead spent €2.3 billion giving its rivers more room. Here is how the Room for the River program actually worked — and what happened when the water came back in 2021.
After a 1991 cyclone killed roughly 138,000 people, Bangladesh planted around 200,000 hectares of salt-tolerant keora mangroves along its Bay of Bengal coast. When a comparable storm hit in 2007, the death toll fell to about 3,500.
China's Loess Plateau shed roughly 1.6 billion tonnes of silt a year into the Yellow River for millennia. Then Grain-for-Green, check dams and terracing cut that discharge by nearly 30 billion tonnes cumulatively in two decades — with hydrological costs that are still being counted.
Twenty metres under a Romanian wheatfield, Movile Cave holds 35 species found nowhere else on Earth — a food web powered by bacteria that eat hydrogen sulphide instead of sunlight, sealed off from the surface for roughly 5.5 million years.
The image that solved DNA's structure was captured in a basement darkroom before the men who won the Nobel Prize had assembled their first model.
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