Sourdough occupies an unusual place in food culture. It is simultaneously the oldest form of leavened bread, a craft with real skill involved, and a subject about which an extraordinary…
The Dead Sea Is Not a Sea, and Its Water Is So Dense With Salt That a Human Body Cannot Sink Into It
The Dead Sea produces one of the most recognisable travel photographs there is: a person lying on their back on the surface of the water, reading a newspaper, entirely unsupported.…
There are natural phenomena that photographs oversell, and this is one of the few that photographs undersell, largely because cameras struggle with it.
The effect is simple to describe. In…
Fingerprints feel like a distinctly primate thing, and mostly they are. Humans have them, as do chimpanzees, orangutans and other primates, which makes sense given how recently we shared an…
The Great Pacific Garbage Patch may be the most misunderstood environmental subject there is, and the misunderstanding is remarkably specific. People do not merely have a vague sense of it;…
Some questions look simple and turn out to have no answer. How long is the coastline of Britain is one of them, and the discovery of why is one of…