Grant Piper

1 week ago | grantpiperwriting.medium.com | Grant Piper

And how it changes the way we look at the atmosphereWhen people look up and consider the sky, many things come to mind. The sun, clouds, the current weather, rain, wind, the moon, and the wind all come to mind. Something that never crosses the mind is bacteria. People typically don’t consider the sky to be a realm in which bacteria live. But that is not the case. Research into the composition of the air continues to turn up surprising results.

1 week ago | grantpiperwriting.medium.com | Grant Piper

The Glorious Revolution and the end of Catholic dominance in EnglandGreat Britain hasn’t had a Catholic monarch in 337 years. After ruling the country for centuries, Catholicism died in England after the Glorious Revolution. Catholicism was replaced with a militant Protestantism, which eventually leaked into the New World via English settlers. So who was the last Catholic monarch of Great Britain, and what happened to them?

1 week ago | grantpiperwriting.medium.com | Grant Piper

It would have been the largest amphibious invasion in historyIn 1945, the United States only had two nuclear bombs in its arsenal, and both were deployed against the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. While the hopes were that the overwhelming show of nuclear force would be enough to force the Japanese to surrender (historically, it was), there were contingency plans that called for an all-out invasion of the Japanese home islands to force a surrender by conventional means.

2 weeks ago | grantpiperwriting.medium.com | Grant Piper

A submerged king, a demonic daughter, and a flight from deathHumanity has long been fascinated by the idea of sunken cities. Places that once stood in grandeur but eventually fell into the sea and disappeared. Most people are familiar with the tale of Atlantis, the most famous of the sunken cities. But there are others, including one that, legend says, existed off the coast of Brittany in France. This city, known as Ys (pronounced EESS), was built upon a small island or land reclaimed from the sea.

2 weeks ago | grantpiperwriting.medium.com | Grant Piper

A missing nuke that could resurface someday, one way or anotherOn February 5th, 1958, an F-86 fighter collided in midair with a B-47 bomber loaded with a Mark 15 nuclear bomb. The two planes collided during a nighttime training mission, sending the planes careening out of the sky. The F-86 pilot ejected and his plane crashed into the ground while the B-47 arrested its downward trajectory 20,000 feet above the sea.