M.I.T. engineers scoffed but Maria Telkes knew that when you need heat and energy, the sun works wonders.

The old station was a tomb, slated for demolition. Then the former First Lady stepped up.

The commons was doomed, economists said. Elinor Ostrom disagreed and won a Nobel.

Back when space travel was science-fiction, Robert Goddard saw no limit to the sky.

With the Cold War looming, The Family of Man toured the world, creating a family portrait that fought the gloom.

The first skateboards were skates nailed to a board. By kids like me. But today the sky’s the limit.

As a potter, Theaster Gates learned to shape clay. Now he is reshaping a Chicago neighborhood — and lives.

Swimming the Panama Canal, flying to Timbuktu, crossing the Alps on an elephant, Richard Halliburton enthralled a housebound America.

Coast-to-coast? Done that. So Matt Green set out to walk New York. Every borough. Every street. Every pier and park. Eight years and 8,000 miles later. . . (As seen in “The World Beneath My Feet.”)

“I have met with but one or two persons in the course of my life who understood the art of Walking.” — Thoreau

From a rooftop vision to a counterculture bible, Stewart Brand sowed the seeds of several revolutions.

Reading science fiction, Octavia Butler saw no one like herself. So she vowed to “write myself in.”

Once endangered, bald eagles are back! And from coast to coast, webcams are watching.

Her stirring poem about a statue was almost forgotten. Today the statue still speaks in the voice of Emma Lazarus.

After Apollo 14, Edgar Mitchell kept soaring. ESP? Psychokinesis? UFOs? When you’ve been to the Moon, anything seems possible.

Long before journalists were “embedded,” Nellie Bly amazed readers from inside an asylum and by circling the globe — in 72 days.