Science
How the world actually works.
A slime mould designed the Tokyo rail network
Scientists put oat flakes where Tokyo’s cities are. A brainless single-celled organism grew a network remarkably like the real railway.
A volcano gave us Frankenstein
A massive eruption in Indonesia in 1815 caused a cold, stormy summer in Switzerland, which kept a group of writers indoors telling ghost stories.
An 18-year-old’s failed medicine set off a fashion craze
In 1856 a student trying to make a malaria drug produced a purple stain instead, and within two years Europe was wearing mauve.
Does listening to Mozart make you smarter?
A small 1993 experiment about spatial puzzles turned into the belief that Mozart makes babies clever. The science never said that.
Every apple you have eaten comes from Kazakhstan
The main wild ancestor of the domestic apple still grows in forests in the mountains around Almaty, a city whose name is often linked to the Kazakh word for apple.
How a meat-eater’s body survives on bamboo
The giant panda is a bear with a carnivore’s gut, eating a plant it can barely digest. It survives by eating almost constantly and spending almost no energy.
Octopuses have three hearts and blue blood
Two hearts pump blood through the gills, one pumps it to the body, and that one stops beating when the octopus swims.
Palindromes are written into your DNA
“A man, a plan, a canal: Panama” has a molecular cousin: your genome is full of sequences that read the same in both directions.
Sichuan pepper makes your lips buzz at 50 Hz
It isn’t a pepper and it isn’t hot. It makes your mouth tingle, and researchers found the tingling feels like a vibration of about 50 times a second.
Spicy isn’t a taste. It’s pain.
Chilli “heat” triggers the same receptor that detects a burn. Birds can’t feel it, and that seems to be the point.
The “last wild horse” descends from tamed horses of the Kazakh steppe
5,500 years ago, people at Botai in northern Kazakhstan were bridling horses and probably milking mares. Their horses’ descendants became Przewalski’s horse, long thought to be truly wild.
The arch that hangs upside down
Hang a chain from two points, photograph it, flip the picture, and you have the ideal shape for an arch.
The country that gave up the world’s fourth-largest nuclear arsenal
The Soviet Union set off 456 nuclear explosions in Kazakhstan. After independence, Kazakhstan closed the test site and gave up about 1,400 nuclear warheads.
The doctor who said “wash your hands”
In 1847 Ignaz Semmelweis cut deaths on a Vienna maternity ward from about 18% to around 2% by making doctors wash their hands. The story of what happened next is more complicated than the legend.
The Dunning–Kruger effect is not what the internet says
It started with a bank robber who thought lemon juice made him invisible. The famous “Mount Stupid” chart was never in the paper.
The mixtape we sent to the stars
Two spacecraft leaving the solar system carry a gold-plated record with whale song, a kiss, 55 greetings and Chuck Berry’s “Johnny B. Goode”.
The Pale Blue Dot
In 1990, from about 6 billion kilometres away, Voyager 1 turned around and photographed Earth. We take up less than a pixel.
The spandrel: a by-product that looks like a purpose
Not every feature of a living thing was ‘designed’ for a job. Two biologists borrowed a word from cathedral builders to make the point, and then architects argued about whether they had the cathedral right.
Umami: the taste discovered in a bowl of soup
In 1908 a Japanese chemist wondered why his wife’s seaweed broth tasted so good, and identified a fifth basic taste.
Venice stands on an upside-down forest
Under the palaces of Venice are millions of wooden stakes driven into the mud of the lagoon, some of them for more than a thousand years.
Why Ramadan moves about 11 days earlier every year
The Islamic calendar follows the moon, not the sun, so Ramadan travels through every season in about 33 years.
Why the sky is blue, and not violet
Air scatters blue light more than red. By that logic the sky should be violet. Here is why it isn’t.