The heat does not exist in the seed. It is created on demand when the cell structure is broken and water is present, and it is unstable from the moment…
The hard part of a clock was never the gears. It was finding something that does the same thing over and over at exactly the same rate, and then extracting…
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…