There is a difference between two ways of putting a mark on a surface, and almost everything about the history of writing materials follows from it.
The first is to…
There is a small category of materials obtained from a living organism without killing it, and a smaller category still where the organism replaces what was taken.
Cork belongs to…
There is a common assumption about concealment that is intuitive and mostly wrong.
The assumption is that hiding means matching — that the way to be invisible is to be…
There is a plant that behaves so differently from a tree that most of what people assume about it is wrong, starting with what it is.
Bamboo is a grass.…
There is a category of engineering problem that only becomes visible once you think about what a machine has to do over a whole journey rather than at any moment.…
There is a useful principle about signals that applies well beyond sound, and whistles are the clearest everyday demonstration of it.
The principle is that being heard is a matter…