The technical term for this is path dependence: an early decision constrains everything afterwards, not because it was right but because too much was built on top of it. Here…
Almost nothing in the animal world does what this does.
A great many animals signal. They warn, threaten, court and call, and the signal refers to the here and now…
Here is a question that has been asked for centuries and is still argued about on television panel shows: why does a mirror swap left and right but leave up…
Weaving was invented independently in every inhabited part of the world, which is a strong indication that the problem has a limited number of solutions. Here are eleven of the…
For most of the history of ocean navigation, a ship's crew could tell you how far north or south they were with reasonable confidence and had very little idea how…
The counterintuitive fact underlying all of this is that mixing two soft metals frequently produces something substantially harder than either, and the reason is geometric. Here are twelve.
1. Why…