Ice does two things to a landscape: it removes material from where it flows and deposits it where it stops. Almost every feature below is one of those two, and…
The film is not a solid thing. It is a layer of water held between two surfaces, and everything a bubble does - its shape, its colours, its lifespan and…
The whole subject reduces to one comparison: which rock resisted and which did not. Everything projecting is what held out, everything indented is what did not, and every feature between…
There is a small category of materials obtained from a living organism without killing it, and a smaller category still where the organism replaces what was taken.
Cork belongs to…
There is a common assumption about concealment that is intuitive and mostly wrong.
The assumption is that hiding means matching — that the way to be invisible is to be…
There is a plant that behaves so differently from a tree that most of what people assume about it is wrong, starting with what it is.
Bamboo is a grass.…