Few foods carry a national story as neatly as Pizza Margherita. Red tomato, white mozzarella and green basil seem to reproduce the Italian flag on a circle of dough. According to the story repeated in pizzerias and cookbooks around the worl...
Read article
Nelson Mandela did not die in a South African prison in the 1980s. He was released in 1990, became South Africa’s first Black president in 1994 and died in 2013 at the age of 95. Yet some pe...
Read
When George Herbert, the 5th Earl of Carnarvon, died in Cairo on April 5, 1923, the timing was almost too perfect for a sensational story. Only months earlier he had stood with archaeologist...
Read
Imagine exchanging messages with an unseen stranger. The replies are witty, coherent and sensitive to context. The stranger remembers what you said earlier, catches a joke, explains a diffic...
Read
You may already have yawned simply because you read the word. If not, there is a reasonable chance that a photograph or video of someone opening their mouth in a long yawn would do the job....
Read
There is a place on Earth where Mount Everest could be lowered beneath the waves and its summit would still remain underwater. It lies in the western Pacific, in the Mariana Trench, where th...
Read
Look up on a clear night and the most obvious feature of the universe is not the stars. It is the darkness between them. That darkness seems perfectly ordinary, yet for centuries it posed a...
Read
Somewhere on Earth, while you read this sentence, babies are being born and people are dying. Others are crossing national borders, changing the population of one country without changing th...
Read
A dog stops halfway through a walk, lowers its head and begins grazing with the concentration of a miniature cow. For many owners, what happens next seems obvious: the dog must have an upset...
Read
It is one of those questions that sounds almost too simple to deserve a scientific explanation. Look up on a clear afternoon and the sky is blue. Yet that familiar color is the visible resul...
Read