Picture a world map. Almost everyone picturing one is imagining the same thing: a rectangle, with a large Greenland floating at the top, Canada and Russia spread enormously across the…
Source: Wikipedia
The Royal Observatory at Greenwich has one of the more unusual tourist attractions in the world: a line on the ground. Visitors queue for a photograph straddling it, one…
Source: Wikipedia
Walk down a supermarket aisle and you can buy walnuts, pecans, hazelnuts, pistachios and almonds in their shells. You cannot buy cashews that way, anywhere, ever.
Most people have…
Most inherited traits are messy. Height involves hundreds of genetic contributions. Most physical characteristics are the product of many genes interacting with environment and chance, which is why family resemblance…
The flamingo is one of the few animals recognizable from colour alone. The name itself comes from a Spanish or Portuguese word meaning flame-coloured, and the birds are so associated…
Most people picture the Panama Canal as a ditch: a channel cut through the isthmus, joining two oceans, with ships sailing along it. That picture is wrong in a specific…