Small, cheap and doing more than it looks like. Here are twelve.
1. Nearly All the Cooling Happens at the Melt
Warming ice from freezer temperature to zero takes a…
Almost everything that makes a chair comfortable or unbearable was decided by a handful of measurements, and they interact. Here are fifteen.
1. Seat Height Decides Everything Else
The distance…
There is moss on the wall outside, on the north face of a gravestone, in the gaps between paving slabs, along the damp side of a tree. It looks like…
Nearly everyone learns that a rainbow is sunlight split into colours by raindrops, which is true and which explains almost none of the things that are actually strange about rainbows.…
This single misunderstanding, that the mushroom is the fungus, is responsible for most of what people get wrong about fungi. It makes them seem like odd, short-lived things that appear…
Corrugated board is one of those inventions so completely ordinary that it is hard to see as an invention at all. Something like a hundred billion boxes are made from…