During World War II, German hydroelectric dams were lucrative targets for the Allies. Not only would busting one cut off a major source of power for Germany, but it would also cause destruction through flooding. Plus, it would bring the fight to Germany, rather than defending the Allies’ territory.
Finding a method for destroying the dams, however, proved difficult. Anything but a direct hit with a normal bomb would not do enough damage to break the dam, and bombs were not accurate enough at the time. A bomb powerful enough to destroy a dam via a direct hit would be too heavy for any conventional airplane to carry. On top of that, the dams were protected underwater by torpedo nets, so the only possible way to hit the dam would be against its wall, near the surface of the water. There were no bombs that could get around these problems. The British military found this dilemma unsolvable.
Then along came Barnes Wallis, who invented a bomb that capitalized on the same physics as skipping a stone over water.
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Humans have engaged in engineering on a massive scale for thousands of years, but only recently have we gained the ability to truly alter the face of the Earth. The one human structure visible from space when John Glenn looked out the window of Freedom 7 was China’s Great Wall. Today, in addition to that barely distinguishable wavering line, International Space Station crew members can look down and see tiny palm trees sprouting into the Persian Gulf, or even locate themselves on the world’s largest map. 
In the summer of 2004 sheep in the UK’s Yorkshire rallied against their keepers. Sheep are not as imbecilic as generally credited—close, but not quite. I imagine that one day in early spring a group particularly non-conciliatory, escape-driven sheep where forced together into a camp special for escape artists where they were meant to stay, but instead of languishing at the unassailable cattle grids designed to keep them constrained to their appointed pastures, the sheep rallied, and planned a great escape.
If you have kids under 10, you will probably remember the highly inaccurate, if not entertaining film “Anastasia”. You should also recall the scene where Rasputin, in an attempt to get the young Anastasia, sinks glub…glub under the ice, meeting his demise and then melting away when she stomps on his magic crystal thingy. As gruesome as he is in the animated movie, the death of Grigory Rasputin is far more spooky. The man just didn’t wanna go.
What do you do if an eight-ton sperm whale beaches itself in your town and dies? 
Shards, fragments, and ruins are all that remain from the earliest human civilizations ten thousand years ago. Nothing continues to function as it once did; the Earth has ruthlessly erased all that other humans did not destroy. But ten thousand years from now, in a cave in what is now Nevada, a single functional sign of human technological prowess may continue to tick, whether there are humans there to observe it or not. And no, it isn’t Yucca mountain.
Plants have been the the subject of human-imposed genetic manipulation for over 10,000 years. Historically this orchestrated effort was accomplished by way of selective breeding, but more recently technology has allowed direct manipulation of the plants’ DNA. Each successive generation of genetically modified crops produces bigger yields, more appealing output, greater nutritional value, or greater resistance to disease than each generation before it, making a modern crop plant a far more efficient human-feeding machine than its humble progenitors.
Transgenics, while still in its infancy as a field, is nothing new at this point. We already have genetically modified corn, rice, and numerous other plants that have been altered to produce crops that are more disease resistant, more nutritious, or just about anything else the plant geneticists have been able to dream up.