The interesting thing about an egg is how many contradictory requirements it satisfies simultaneously. Strong and breakable, sealed and breathing, hidden and identifiable. Here are sixteen.
1. It Has to…
The governing constraint is that heat is gained by volume and lost through surface, so the ratio between the two determines the entire problem. Almost everything below follows from that.…
The abyssal plain is frequently described as a desert, and the comparison is a good one for a specific reason.
Deserts are not lifeless. They are places where the limiting…
The thing worth understanding first is that a rope is not a long thing. It is an enormous number of short things arranged so that pulling on the assembly squeezes…
The useful way to think about any bond is as a chain with three links - surface, adhesive, surface - and a chain fails at whichever link is weakest. Here…
There is an enormous quantity of food on this planet that almost nothing can eat.
Cellulose makes up the structural walls of plant cells, which means it constitutes the bulk…