There are few moments quite like looking into the toilet and discovering that something which is normally brown has turned unmistakably green. It is the kind of question many people would rather type into a search box than ask another human...
Read article
A cat is calmly eating from its bowl. While its attention is elsewhere, someone quietly places a cucumber on the floor behind it. The cat turns, sees the vegetable and suddenly launches itse...
Read
Few breakfast foods come with a better internet story than Corn Flakes. According to the version repeated across social media, Dr. John Harvey Kellogg invented the famously plain cereal in t...
Read
A newly hatched chick enters the world with an urgent problem. It can walk almost immediately, but walking in the wrong direction could be fatal. In nature, staying near a parent means warmt...
Read
In 1997, IBM's Deep Blue defeated world chess champion Garry Kasparov in a match. The achievement looked like a milestone on the road to machine intelligence: a computer had conquered a game...
Read
Dig beneath a forest and the roots are not alone. Wrapped around them, penetrating them and extending far beyond them are microscopic fungal threads called hyphae. Together those threads for...
Read
A black hole does something stranger than simply swallowing light. Before a photon crosses the point of no return, spacetime can bend its trajectory so violently that the light can travel ar...
Read
Every email address contains a tiny piece of computing history. Between a person's name and the domain sits a character that most of us type without thinking: @.It seems inevitable now. We r...
Read
From the air, parts of the Namib Desert look as if someone has stamped an enormous sheet of polka dots across the landscape. Thousands upon thousands of roughly circular patches of bare grou...
Read
Open the Voynich Manuscript and almost everything about it looks tantalizingly close to comprehension. Lines of neat handwriting run from left to right. Words are separated by spaces. Paragr...
Read