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 common feature is that nobody is doing anything for most of the duration. The work is at the beginning and the end, and in between the food is changing…
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…
Almost everybody has experienced this, and almost nobody has considered how strange it is.
Sitting still in a vehicle, entirely uninjured, having eaten nothing unusual, a person becomes progressively unwell…
Before printing, every copy of every text was made by hand and therefore differed from every other copy. Almost everything below follows from that changing. Here are sixteen.
1. Paper…
The test is simple: pigment colour looks the same from every angle, and structural colour changes as you move. Once you know that, a great deal of the natural world…