Here is a question that has been asked for centuries and is still argued about on television panel shows: why does a mirror swap left and right but leave up…
Maya Linton
Source: Wikipedia
Most ancient monuments survive because they are made of something durable. Stone lasts. Metal lasts. Fired clay lasts. Their survival requires nothing from anybody.
There is a category of…
Source: Wikipedia
Archaeology depends on context. An object in the ground is surrounded by information — what layer it sat in, what was beside it, how it was arranged, what the…
For most of the history of ocean navigation, a ship's crew could tell you how far north or south they were with reasonable confidence and had very little idea how…
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…
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…