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 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…
Almost every large cave system exists because slightly acidic water met soluble rock and took a very long time about it. The shape of what resulted records the route the…
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…
There is a strong intuition that coordinated group movement requires coordination — something issuing instructions, or at minimum some shared signal that everybody is responding to.
That intuition is wrong,…