The counterintuitive fact underlying all of this is that mixing two soft metals frequently produces something substantially harder than either, and the reason is geometric. Here are twelve.
1. Why…
Maya Linton
Almost everybody has experienced this, and almost nobody has considered how strange it is.
Sitting still in a vehicle, entirely uninjured, having eaten nothing unusual, a person becomes progressively unwell…
Before printing, every copy of every text was made by hand and therefore differed from every other copy. Almost everything below follows from that changing. Here are sixteen.
1. Paper…
The test is simple: pigment colour looks the same from every angle, and structural colour changes as you move. Once you know that, a great deal of the natural world…
Ask most people whether counting is natural and they will say obviously yes. Every culture counts. Children learn numbers early. It feels less like a skill than a faculty.
The…
Every pass is a compromise between height and distance: the lowest crossing point is rarely the shortest route, and the route that everyone took is whichever combination was survivable. Here…