The interesting thing about an egg is how many contradictory requirements it satisfies simultaneously. Strong and breakable, sealed and breathing, hidden and identifiable. Here are sixteen.
1. It Has to…
The governing constraint is that heat is gained by volume and lost through surface, so the ratio between the two determines the entire problem. Almost everything below follows from that.…
The abyssal plain is frequently described as a desert, and the comparison is a good one for a specific reason.
Deserts are not lifeless. They are places where the limiting…
There is a category error built into the way most people look at a shallow sea.
Everything green underwater gets filed as seaweed, and seaweed is algae — a fundamentally…
The useful question in any wetland is not what grows there but what fills it. Rain-fed and groundwater-fed wetlands sitting side by side can support entirely different vegetation. Here are…
There is an enormous quantity of food on this planet that almost nothing can eat.
Cellulose makes up the structural walls of plant cells, which means it constitutes the bulk…