Dry heat does two things to spices, nuts and seeds: it releases what was locked inside them and it creates compounds that were never there. Here are fifteen.
1. Moisture…
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 widespread mental model of a kite that treats the string as a leash, restraining something that would otherwise escape.
That model produces a specific prediction: cut the…
There is a category of discovery that arrives sideways, as the residue of an argument about something else entirely.
The argument concerned whether a space containing nothing could exist. The…
There is a category of living thing that is truly difficult to classify, and lichens are the standard example.
The difficulty is not that they are obscure. They are everywhere…
Texture is not a minor component of eating. It is perceived through an entirely different set of senses from flavour, and it decides more about whether something is acceptable than…