Walk through the storage areas of any museum with a substantial Egyptian collection and you will find, among the pottery and the alabaster, vessels that once held food. Most of…
Food fears are not a modern invention. Long before anyone was arguing online about ingredients, entire societies decided that perfectly ordinary foods were poisonous, corrupting, or medically dangerous — and…
Source: Wikipedia
Almost everything alive on the surface of this planet runs, ultimately, on sunlight. Plants capture light and turn it into sugar. Animals eat the plants. Other animals eat those…
Some scientific questions are hard because the subject is inaccessible. Others are hard because the subject is so familiar that everyone assumes it must already be settled. The zebra falls…
Source: Wikipedia
Some scientific mysteries involve exotic, hard-to-reach subjects: distant stars, deep ocean trenches, particles too small to see. The mystery of the eel is not like that. Eels are ordinary.…
Between 2009 and 2013, a space telescope stared at a single patch of sky and monitored the brightness of more than a hundred thousand stars, looking for the tiny, regular…