Small, cheap and doing more than it looks like. Here are twelve.
1. Nearly All the Cooling Happens at the Melt
Warming ice from freezer temperature to zero takes a…
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.…
A balloon is a very thin sheet of stretched rubber holding back a pressure it can barely contain - and almost everything it does follows from that. Here are twelve.…
There is a piece of physics that almost everybody half-knows and that is more interesting stated precisely.
The half-known version is that things fall faster and faster. That is true…
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…
A moving bicycle with nobody on it can stay upright for a considerable distance, correcting itself when pushed. Working out why took far longer than anybody expected, and the popular…