There is a reason water clocks were difficult and sand timers were easy, and it comes down to a surprising difference between liquids and piles of small solid grains.
A…
There is a process going on beneath almost every lawn, field and garden that is too slow to see and large enough to reshape the ground.
Earthworms eat their way…
There is a category of everyday observation that everybody has seen and that turns out to have no settled explanation, and moths around a light are among the clearest examples.…
Cocoa butter can set in several different ways, and only one of them produces chocolate that behaves the way people expect. Almost everything below follows from that. Here are fifteen.…
The air around you is holding water you cannot see, and the amount it can hold depends almost entirely on temperature. Cool it enough and the water has to go…
There is a question that sounds simple and is not: what is the minimum an animal needs in order to be an animal?
Most of the answers people reach for…