We tend to assume that simple things are old things. If an object is uncomplicated and useful, surely someone thought of it long ago. In fact, the gap between when…
Soup is the most universal thing people cook. It stretches scarce ingredients, it uses the parts of an animal nobody else wants, and it turns up in some form in…
Source: Wikimedia Commons
There are landscapes that look like other planets, and then there is the Danakil Depression, which scientists actually use as a stand-in for one. It sits in the…
Look at Earth from orbit today and you see the famous blue marble: oceans, cloud swirls, green continents. Run the clock back roughly 700 million years and an observer in…
Source: Wikipedia
From ground level they are odd but unremarkable: bare, roughly circular patches of soil in dry grassland, each one somewhere between two and fifteen meters across, fringed by a…
Walk through the storage areas of any museum with a substantial Egyptian collection and you will find, among the pottery and the alabaster, vessels that once held food. Most of…