The useful habit when standing in an unfamiliar square is to look at what faces onto it, because the buildings around the edge record who wanted the space and what…
Maya Linton
Picture a world map. North is at the top, south at the bottom, and it feels less like a convention than a fact — as settled as the ground being…
Source: Wikipedia
There is a category of problem that looks impossible from the outside and turns out to be merely extremely difficult, and decipherment sits squarely in it.
When Egyptian hieroglyphs…
Ice cubes float. This is so ordinary that it takes a moment to see anything strange in it.
Consider what floating means. An object floats when it is less dense…
Soap is one of the oldest manufactured substances and one of the most consequential, and almost nobody can explain what it does.
The common assumption is that soap is a…
The fossil record is overwhelmingly a record of hard parts.
Bones, teeth and shells survive because they are mineral to begin with. Everything else — muscle, skin, fur, feathers, gut…