Ars Mundi: The Gravity Highway

When a working principle of manipulating gravity was discovered, the general populace went mad. "It's just like Star Wars!!" the popsci websites and blogs shouted, rabid with the idea of being able to take to the stars in spaceships that could accelerate so fast as to get to lightspeed in mere days. As usual, the scientists had to destroy their ill-conceived dreams – gravitics still have to obey the conservation of momentum. Just like you can't push your car forwards while sitting inside it, you can't speed a ship up with a gravity generator on board. The reaction force has to go somewhere. Dreams of routine space travel were smashed. All the technology really offered was artificial gravity on-board spaceships, and zero-gravity chambers on Earth. Anything else was impossible, it seemed.

It took about five years for someone to figure out a solution to the problem: the gravity highway.

Ars Mundi: Coldfire

The Great Archmage Talistandra Orvalus XII is credited with the discovery – posthumously, of course. Her death baffled the College for months before enough of the event was reconstructed using divination and scrying magic. Orvalus' remains were found in her tower, along with the burnt remnants of her books, clothes, bookshelves, wands, staves, cat, owl and collection of novelty tea cosies, all scorched and clearly destroyed by flames. Yet when her apprentice arrived later that day, he found the entire tower covered in a thick layer of frost, even though it was a pleasantly balmy day in early spring.

Like any true academic, Orvalus was absolutely delighted about her discovery, even as it burnt her alive.

Ars Mundi: The Serpens Codex

Arecibo saw it first, by pure chance. In the ever-present radio noise of the universe, a small blip, 24 times as strong as the background. Two blips. Three blips. Then five, seven, eleven, thirteen and seventeen blips. Then it repeated. Seven prime numbers. The signal repeated over and over again and as the Earth turned, every radio observatory around the world trained their receivers on the constellation of Serpens. The pattern repeated for forty-seven days, during which time scientists hotly debated what it meant. But the initial consensus was immediate:

We were not alone.

Ars Mundi: Redpowder

Resembling a fine, glittering dust, as if a farmer had accidentally ground ruby into meal, redpowder gives off mystery and otherworldliness like a vapour. The European powers trade for it from the East, the scintillating red stuff coming west along the Silk Road from the farthest reaches of the Earth, perhaps beyond even Cathay. The man who discovered its fantastical properties was unfortunately struck blind and burned badly by his discovery, though learned much from the experience and is still regarded today as the father of prismatic muskets.