Almost nothing about a reef is the animals. It is a structure they built, shaped by light, waves and water depth, and every part of its form is a record…
There is a recurring result in materials science that is worth stating as a general principle: arrangement frequently matters more than composition.
The lining of certain shells is the standard…
There is a category of object where the useful part is the absence rather than the substance, and netting is the clearest example.
A net is mostly nothing. The material…
There is a constraint on ships that has no equivalent on land and that determines almost everything about how vessels are shaped and sized.
The constraint is that a vessel…
There is a failure mode in any signalling system that is worth more attention than the system itself, and lighthouses have an obvious one.
A light works by being seen.…
There is a problem in measurement that comes up whenever something matters and cannot be instrumented reliably.
The problem is that a quantity may be important, variable and consequential while…