There is a category of biological material that outperforms engineered equivalents, and the interesting question is usually not the material but the manufacturing.
Silk is the clearest example. The properties…
There is a class of everyday object where the design solves a problem so completely that the problem becomes invisible, and the pencil is a good example.
The problem is…
There is a satisfying category of question where something entirely familiar turns out to be unexplained, and purring belongs in it.
The sound is known to essentially everybody. It is…
The central fact is that honey contains far more dissolved sugar than water can normally hold, and very little water at all. Almost every peculiar thing about it follows from…
There is a category of behaviour that everybody recognises immediately and nobody can define precisely, which is usually a sign that something interesting is going on.
Play is obvious when…
Source: Wikipedia
There is an intuition about layered rock that is almost universal and substantially wrong.
The intuition is that layers accumulate steadily, like pages in a book, so that a…