The photographs are among the most striking images in science: a column of ash rising into the dark, with lightning threading through it.
The informal name is a dirty thunderstorm,…
Almost every design feature on an aircraft has a reason, and most of them are invisible to passengers. The window shape is the exception: it is the one piece of…
Almost everyone has done it: left a note in a pocket, washed the trousers, and found the money at the bottom of the drum, damp and crumpled but entirely usable.…
Children ask why the sea is salty, and the standard answer — rivers carry salt into it and evaporation leaves the salt behind — is correct as far as it…
Scripts are usually classified by what a single character represents: a sound, a syllable, a consonant, or a whole word. Almost every design choice below follows from that decision. Here…
Few scientific ideas have travelled as far or as fast as this one. Trees, it is said, are connected underground by fungal threads through which they share nutrients, support their…