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…
Source: Wikipedia
Nettles are so ordinary in temperate countries that nobody looks closely at them, which is a shame, because the stinging apparatus is one of the more precisely engineered things…
It looks like the least interesting substance in the garden. Here are seventeen things it is doing.
1. Half of It Is Not There
Good soil is roughly half solid…
One rock type, unusually pure and unusually porous, produces a landscape unlike anything around it - dry on top, wet underneath and covered in a grassland that only exists because…
There is a habit of describing sea organisms using land vocabulary, and it causes a persistent misunderstanding about seaweed.
The words used — root, stem, leaf — describe a land…