feedle

Last year, I suffered a severe injury initially rendering my right arm and hand both completely numb and paralyzed. Tests revealed severe damage to a network of nerves called the brachial plexus. That’s the crucial nexus of nerve pathways carrying signals back and forth between the spinal column and...

Chicago has an extensive alleyway network, populated with distinctively utilitarian wooden fire escapes bolted onto the backs of low- and mid-rise buildings. Though to call them fire escapes is almost a misnomer; they usually have a substantial landing at each floor, so they serve as a kind of de fa...

Between early wired networks and today’s fiber optics sat a system of microwave relay towers transmitting information from coast to coast across the United States. Built in the early 1950s, this line-of-sight network spanned the continent using zig-zag patterns to avoid signal overlap. It conveyed p...

There are lots of reasons to build underground. In Singapore, there are skyscrapers being constructed under the earth because the country has run out of space on the surface. In Toronto, Canada, there’s a network of tunnels called The Path that connects the whole downtown, so people never have to go...

As many know, 99pi is a member of Radiotopia, a podcast network produced and distributed in collaboration with PRX. All of the shows in Radiotopia are independent, including 99pi. We are not employed by PRX, but we have worked together for a long time. PRX has played an important and unique role in ...

Engineers at Bell Labs first envisioned a modern cellular communications network back in the 1940s. Wireless towers, they imagined, would create biological cell-like coverage areas. But that was the extent of their organic metaphor — they never would have guessed that the towers themselves would be ...

At a glance, the overall pattern formed by these first 25 polar histograms (or: rose diagrams) is clear: orthogonal grids, mostly aligned with cardinal directions in orientation, dominate American cities. There are exceptions, but most streets run north, south, east and west. Geoff Boeing, an assist...

Dotting the hillsides of Europe, the remnants of a vast long-distance communications network look a bit like anachronistic cell towers. Some of these infrastructural remains date all the way back to the French Revolution, a period of regional turmoil during which a novel approach to semaphore (visua...