Taste a drop of seawater and the answer seems obvious: the ocean contains salt. The more interesting question is how it got there. There are no gigantic salt deposits steadily dissolving into every sea, and most rivers taste fresh even thou...
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Step out of a dark cinema into brilliant afternoon sunlight and, for some people, the reaction is immediate. The eyes narrow, the nose begins to tingle and within seconds comes an involuntar...
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Look closely at the tip of your finger and you are looking at a landscape that began forming months before you were born. Ridges curve, split, stop and rejoin in patterns so detailed that th...
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Draw a line from Miami to Bermuda, another from Bermuda to Puerto Rico, and a third back toward Florida, and you have the rough outline of one of the most famous imaginary places on Earth. T...
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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 r...
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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...
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Few animal sounds are as instantly recognizable as a cat’s purr. A hand reaches toward a warm patch of fur, the cat closes its eyes, and a low vibration begins somewhere inside its body. To...
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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...
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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...
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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...
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