Imagine the snow-capped peaks of mountainous eastern Afghanistan. Wouldn’t it be better topped off with a cooling tower for a nuclear reactor? The Pentagon’s way-out research arm thinks so. It’s all part of a big push to make the military more eco-friendly.

Buried within Darpa’s 2012 budget request under the innocuous name of “Small Rugged Reactor Technologies” is a $10 million proposal to fuel wartime Forward Operating Bases with nuclear power. It springs from an admirable impulse: to reduce the need for troops or contractors to truck down roads littered with bombs to get power onto the base. ...

1898: Enzo Ferrari is born in Modena, Italy. He’ll achieve fame as the builder of racing cars and sports cars.

“An institution is the lengthened shadow of one man,” Ralph Waldo Emerson once said, and perhaps nowhere is that more true than at Ferrari, the legendary Italian auto company that perfectly reflects the passions of its founder, Enzo Ferrari.

Few loom larger in the history of motor sports than Enzo Ferrari and the company that bears his name. In more than 100 years of motor racing, no one can match the accomplishments — or the influence — that Il Commendatore has had on racing and...