A compass needle points north. Almost everyone knows this and almost nobody knows what it means.
It does not point at the North Pole. The geographic North Pole is a…
There are a small number of biological rules that hold across every vertebrate: a spine, a heart, and haemoglobin to move oxygen around the body.
The last one has exactly…
Card games spread along the same routes as trade and armies, mutating at every border. Here are seventeen, and what is known about where each came from.
1. Whist -…
There is a case to be made that the most consequential object of the twentieth century is a corrugated steel box.
It is not an impressive thing to look at.…
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…