Known as bullet trains in English, the Shinkansen uses electric motors, aerodynamic design, and infrastructure that prioritizes straightaways to travel at speeds equivalent to commercial planes' takeoff velocity.

Ingenuity and advanced engineering have allowed trains to overcome extreme landscapes

The Jungfrau Railway utilizes electric trains powered by hydroelectric energy to ascend the Swiss Alps, while Poland's Elbląg Canal hauls ships along cable-powered tracks driven by waterwheels. Germany's Wuppertal monorail navigates bends as it glides over a river valley, and New Mexico's Holloman High-Speed Test Track can achieve speeds of Mach 8.6 for rocket sleds.

Why high-speed rail hasn't worked in the US

High-speed rail connects cities across Europe and Asia, but American attempts have faced ballooning costs and delays. California's failed attempt to connect San Francisco and Los Angeles is the most prominent example of the dysfunction.

Objects that move faster than the speed of sound—Mach 1—create shockwaves called sonic booms by building up and forcing sound waves to combine as they lag behind the object.

LA used to have one of the best mass transit systems in the country

A century ago, Los Angeles had one of the greatest urban transit networks in America. Today, driving in LA traffic can still be faster than taking the train. The city's rail design, which funnels traffic through a single point, fails to support a city with such a spread-out population.

The speed of electricity may refer to the movement of electrons, which is on the order of a fraction of a millimeter per second, or energy, which is near the speed of light.

If they could be built, antimatter drives, which run on energy released from the collision of matter and antimatter particles, would be the most efficient engines in existence.

View the 18 vehicles that broke the land speed record

The battery-powered "La Jamais Contente" was the first car to exceed 100 kilometers (62.1 miles) per hour, achieving the feat in 1899. By 1997, advancements in aerodynamic understanding and engineering led to the Thrust Supersonic Car, a jet-powered vehicle that reached a speed of 1,223.6 kilometers (760.3 miles) per hour.

Learn about five of the largest particle accelerators on Earth, which, as of 2026, are led by the Large Hadron Collider at the European Organization for Nuclear Research.

Modern innovations have allowed rides to simultaneously become more extreme and safer

Several ingenious additions to roller coasters, such as extra wheels, magnetic brakes, and hydraulic system safety bars, have largely reduced discomfort and threats such as broken rides or ejected passengers.

Nuclear-powered missiles replace chemical combustion with energy from nuclear fission

In these systems, energy is added to an airstream, which passes through a nozzle to generate thrust. Because the amount of energy released per unit mass of nuclear fuel is millions of times larger than that of chemical propellants, nuclear missiles can travel faster and farther with less fuel.

North Korea's Kim Jong Un travels in a train with a helicopter and antiaircraft guns

The train, known as the Taeyangho (or "sun"), is a moving fortress, the country's equivalent of Air Force One. Its windows are bulletproof, exteriors built to withstand explosions, and heavy with armaments. Kim claims the train helps signal closeness to the people.

The most common type of particle accelerator is a linear electron accelerator, which fires particles in a straight line, making them useful for the intense, targeted beams needed in cancer treatment.

The hypothetical particle that travels faster than light

Astrophysicists inspired by science fiction developed the theory of the tachyon—a Greek word for "fast"—which is a field or particle hypothetically able to travel faster than light. Although no experiments have confirmed any part of it, it's a fun theory to consider.

Special relativity shows how motion at high speeds reshapes time, space, and energy

Einstein’s 1905 special theory of relativity revealed that the speed of light is absolute in the universe, forcing time and space to vary with one's speed. This idea led to the famous equation E=mc2, which shows that mass and energy are interchangeable.

At the Large Hadron Collider, protons are accelerated so close to the speed of light that they would lag behind a laser by just 10 feet after 14 minutes of travel.

Five potential ways to achieve time travel

While the author discounts the possibility of traveling to the past, it lays out five hypothetical modes of catapulting into the future: speed, gravity, suspended animation, wormholes, and light. Each has some scientific basis, but none are realistic for humans. Read the article to learn where they offer promise and where they fall short.

Mass transit in America began with horse-drawn omnibuses in New York City in 1827

The omnibus, a large horse-drawn stagecoach that ran a fixed route and carried a dozen riders at an affordable fare, was different from a private carriage because it carried everyone, not just the wealthy.

In 1984, Operation Smash Hit intentionally crashed a 239-ton train into a nuclear waste canister at 100 miles per hour to prove the canister's safety, which remained completely intact and lost just 0.29 of its 100 pounds of pressure.

Why Japan builds airports on water

Some of Japan's roughly 100 airports are built on water—that is, engineers have created new land in bodies of water specifically to construct airports. This six-minute video explains why the country is doing so despite the higher cost of such airports.

Read a complete history of urban mass transit in the United States

Explore the rise and fall of American mass transit, from the horse-drawn omnibus era through the streetcar age to the automobile's dominance. In the 1920s, streetcars carried 12 to 13 billion riders per year. By 1963, that number had shrunken to 300,000.

NYC's first subway was built largely in secret

In 1870, Alfred Ely Beach secretly tunneled under Broadway in 58 nights, disguising his pneumatic subway as a mail tube to fool Tammany Hall, the corrupt political machine that ran New York City. Nearly half a million New Yorkers rode it before politics, and a stock market crash killed the project.

Watch a timeline of the history of electricity, from observations of static electricity in antiquity to the War of the Currents—a rivalry to establish the ideal system for electric grids.

Watch the hypersonic flight of a reusable aircraft

Stratolaunch completed a second hypersonic flight of its Talon-A2 autonomous vehicle, showcasing reusable hypersonic aircraft capabilities. The aircraft carried payloads and Department of Defense experiments while achieving Mach 5 speeds.

Although built from 1996 to 2008, the Large Hadron Collider relies on accelerators built starting in 1954 to help bring protons to 99.9999991% the speed of light—about 2.73 million football fields per second.

The New York MTA is North America's largest transit system

The MTA's FY2026 budget is $21.3B, and the system carried 1.6 billion riders on buses and subways in 2024, making it by far the largest transit network in the country.

Particle accelerators propel matter toward small targets at high speed

Devices like cathode-ray tube televisions were once basic particle accelerators, but modern ones, such as the Large Hadron Collider, use massive magnetic fields and circular tunnels to achieve energies high enough to recreate the conditions just after the big bang.

Today's cars use turbocharged hybrid engines and AI-assisted technologies

In addition to enhanced speed, serious accidents and technological advances have led to major innovations, leading to more aerodynamic and more protective cars.

Boston opened the first subway tunnel in the US in 1897

By the end of the 19th century, nearly 400,000 people were packed into less than a square mile of downtown Boston, with 8,000 horses pulling trolleys through streets choked with noise, manure, and congestion. This prompted the city to pursue a then-controversial subway system.

Self-driving cars may upend transit before cities can build it

Austin approved a $7.1B light-rail in 2020, but components of the plan have already been cut. Simultaneously, Waymo launched a 200-car autonomous fleet across the city. Cities now face a choice: invest in decadeslong fixed infrastructure projects or embrace flexible, on-demand autonomous vehicles that can navigate anywhere.

Woven City at the base of Mount Fuji in Japan

The Woven City at the base of Mount Fuji in Japan is a ‘living laboratory’ for new technologies. It is being developed by Toyota subsidiary, Woven Planet, and will be the world’s first programmable city.

Scientists can create movies of atomic and molecular phenomena using X-ray free-electron lasers, in which images are produced by matter being struck by high-intensity light created by accelerating electrons.

In an X-ray free-electron laser, electromagnetic fields are used to accelerate and move electrons in wiggling patterns, causing them to emit synchronized, high-energy X-rays. This resulting light beam can strike targets up to 120 times per second to create movies of changing molecular structures and phenomena.

Electricity can flow indefinitely along a ring of superconducting material, which provides zero resistance to the movement of charges due to quantum effects.

Explore plans for smart cities expected to be built by 2050

Locations such as Net City in China, Woven City in Japan, and NEOM in Saudi Arabia are expected to incorporate green energy, AI, and advanced transportation system technologies to enhance air quality, reduce congestion, and minimize pollution by significantly reducing personal car use.

How long it takes to travel by train from various cities

This interactive allows users to see how long it would take to move from one city to another in Europe via trains.

A pair of engineers began Tesla to prove the viability of electric vehicles

Martin Eberhard and Marc Tarpenning sought to design a high-end electric sports car for environmentally motivated, affluent buyers. The Tesla Roadster would be the first highway-legal car to use lithium-ion batteries.

In 2026, researchers successfully transported antimatter in a truck using a portable trap that employed electromagnetic fields to hold 92 antiprotons.

Tokyo is the world's largest city by population

Home to over 41 million people, the megacity used to be a humble fishing village called Edo. Since Japan opened to foreign trade in the mid-1800s, Tokyo has made significant economic advances and achieved numerous milestones in public transportation, urban planning and culture.

Tachyons are theoretical particles that travel through space faster than light

The equations of special relativity require these objects to possess imaginary mass, and they would travel faster the more energy is taken away from them. The existence of tachyons would necessitate an unknown form of matter and lead to paradoxes involving information that can hypothetically travel backward in time.

As of 2023, the world's smallest particle accelerator is smaller than a penny

The prototype is an example of a photonic accelerator, which utilizes tiny lasers to accelerate electrons rather than relying on oscillating electromagnetic fields to move them. It can deliver about 1 electron per second with energies equivalent to those found in cathode-ray tube televisions.

Washington DC's streetcar network built the modern American suburb

Washington's first electric streetcar line launched in 1888, and real estate developers quickly built lines to open new neighborhoods. A 35-minute ride from Chevy Chase, Maryland, to downtown Washington transformed farmland into a suburb.

Japan had the world's best carrier aviation in 1941

In late 1941, Japan possessed the world’s most powerful carrier fleet and the best-trained naval aviators, giving it a short-term edge over the US. But Japan couldn’t replace ships or pilots quickly, and US industry would soon outbuild it.

A nuclear reactor's characteristic blue light is produced from superluminal particles

When light travels through water, its effective speed is 25% lower than its speed in a vacuum. Just as sound waves bunch up and produce a sonic boom when objects move faster than the speed of sound, particles moving faster than this reduced speed generate a shock wave of light, visible as a blue hue.

When modeling the fastest way to board passengers onto an airplane, research shows that random boarding is often faster than boarding in groups.

Airplanes generate enough lift to fly by accelerating air faster over their moving wings, which makes the pressure above the wings lower than the pressure below.

Before 1932, when particle accelerators were first used for nuclear research, scientists relied on naturally radioactive substances to advance their understanding of the atomic nucleus.

Nearly 40% of American cars were electric in 1899

They were most common in cities, where battery swap stations allowed drivers to "refuel" their vehicles reliably. Innovations in combustion engines caused electric cars to lose ground until environmental policies and advances in battery technology revitalized interest.

Listen to a jazz composition triggered by the New York City Subway

A creative coder created a (synthetic) jazz ensemble that uses the locations of the city's trains to determine its performance. It's both a fascinating bit of internet culture and a fitting homage to New York, one of jazz's major hubs.

Cosmic rays are thought to be accelerated to near the speed of light by repeatedly bouncing across shockwaves produced by high-energy cosmic events, such as supernovae.

Japan train station names cat stationmaster

Tsunamis are a series of waves rather than a single one, and boats are safer from them in deeper waters, where tsunami waves are smaller.