Life expectancy — the average number of years a person born today can expect to live — is one of the most revealing statistics about a country, reflecting its healthcare,…
Source: Wikimedia Commons
Every July 25 marks the birthday of a scientist whose name most people now know, and whose actual work most people could not describe. Rosalind Franklin was born…
Source: Wikimedia Commons
It is the oldest unsolved mystery in American history, and one of the strangest disappearances anywhere: an entire English colony, more than a hundred people, gone without explanation…
Tea is the most consumed drink on Earth after water, but the appetite for it is wildly uneven — and the per-person rankings scramble almost every assumption. China and India…
Source: Wikipedia
The story of invention is usually told as a story of intent: someone identifies a problem and engineers a solution. But a surprising share of the objects in an…
Every so often the planet produces a landscape so far outside ordinary experience that photographs of it get accused of being fake. Strange geology, isolated evolution, and extreme chemistry have…