The useful way to think about vision is not as a recording but as a reconstruction — a best guess assembled from partial data. Here are twelve of the shortcuts…
Goosebumps are among the strangest things the human body does routinely. A sensation arrives — cold air, a piece of music, someone's fingertips on the back of your neck —…
Autumn colour is usually described as leaves changing colour, which frames it as something the leaf does. That is only half right, and the half that is wrong is the…
Hiccups are so ordinary that almost nobody asks what they are for. Everyone gets them, they arrive unbidden, they are mildly annoying, and they go away.
But consider what is…
Before anyone thought to define units against physical constants, they were defined against whatever was to hand — literally. Most of those origins are still buried in the words. Here…
Time feels like the most objective thing we measure, and the system we use to measure it is almost entirely a set of historical accidents. Here are twelve of them.…