Nearly everyone learns that a rainbow is sunlight split into colours by raindrops, which is true and which explains almost none of the things that are actually strange about rainbows.…
Maya Linton
This single misunderstanding, that the mushroom is the fungus, is responsible for most of what people get wrong about fungi. It makes them seem like odd, short-lived things that appear…
Corrugated board is one of those inventions so completely ordinary that it is hard to see as an invention at all. Something like a hundred billion boxes are made from…
Most explanations of bruising stop at the first sentence: a knock breaks small blood vessels under the skin, blood escapes into the tissue, and you can see it. That is…
Source: Wikipedia
Nettles are so ordinary in temperate countries that nobody looks closely at them, which is a shame, because the stinging apparatus is one of the more precisely engineered things…
There is a category of object assembled entirely without fixings, and basketry is the oldest and most widespread example.
Almost everything else made of many parts is held together by…