There is a useful test for whether an ability is special: look at what the nearest relatives can do.
For most human capabilities, the answer is that they do something…
There is a way of thinking about disturbance that treats it as damage — something that happens to an ecosystem and that the ecosystem then recovers from.
That framing works…
There is a question about animal communication that has been argued for a long time, and alarm calls are where the evidence is strongest.
The question is whether animal signals…
Fruit Ripens Because of a Gas It Releases Itself, and One Ripe Piece Will Set Off Everything Near It
There is a category of everyday phenomenon that turns out to have a mechanism nobody would guess, and the way fruit behaves in a bowl is one.
The observable facts…
The single variable through most of this is how much water remains. Temperature rises as water leaves, so the temperature of a syrup is really a measurement of its concentration.…
Every sound in a room reaches you twice - directly, and then repeatedly as reflections from every surface. What a room sounds like is almost entirely a question of how…