The test is simple: pigment colour looks the same from every angle, and structural colour changes as you move. Once you know that, a great deal of the natural world…
Ice cubes float. This is so ordinary that it takes a moment to see anything strange in it.
Consider what floating means. An object floats when it is less dense…
The fossil record is overwhelmingly a record of hard parts.
Bones, teeth and shells survive because they are mineral to begin with. Everything else — muscle, skin, fur, feathers, gut…
Almost none of these are about a single person doing a small thing. They are about what a small thing becomes when several million people do it in a year.…
The feature that makes a fjord a fjord is the sill at its entrance - a shallow threshold of rock and debris left where the glacier terminated. Water inside is…
The useful way to read these is as solutions rather than as homes. Each one is addressing a specific physical problem, and the structure follows from the problem rather than…