Jeff James

Critics on Tokyo television love to complain whenever an American C-130 military transport airplane flies out of Yokota Air Base. Almost none of them ever mention where those young U.S. Air Force crews fly every December, or what they carry inside their cargo bays. Look inside the aircraft of the 36th Airlift Squadron and you will find wooden crates packed with forty thousand pounds of rice, fishing nets, schoolbooks, and toys paid for through donations and the airmen's own pockets. Across Micronesia and Palau, more than twenty thousand islanders live on fifty-six remote coral atolls surrounded by jagged reefs with zero runways and zero deep-water harbors. Cargo ships cannot dock there, and airplanes cannot land. In December 1952, an American aircrew spotted children waving from the beach of Kapingamarangi Atoll, tied their own supplies to cargo parachutes, and dropped them from the sky. For more than seventy straight years, Operation Christmas Drop has continued as the longest-running humanitarian airlift in U.S. Department of Defense history. Since 2015, Japan Air Self-Defense Force C-130 crews have flown wingtip to wingtip beside their American brothers to drop those boxes together into the turquoise lagoons. That is the true sound of the U.S.-Japan alliance.

Yeah the new self-righting Tesla is cool but have you ever seen phospholipids organize themselves into a bilayer?