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...
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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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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....
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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...
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At this moment, Earth is moving in several different ways at once. It spins on its axis, circles the Sun at roughly 30 kilometers per second, and accompanies the entire Solar System on a vas...
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In 1929, while scholars were cataloguing manuscripts in Istanbul's Topkapı Palace, they encountered a fragment of an extraordinary world map. Painted in vivid colors on parchment traditional...
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In 1901, divers working an ancient shipwreck near the Greek island of Antikythera recovered statues, ceramics, glass and a badly corroded mass of bronze. The wreck had carried valuable cargo...
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When sponge divers found an ancient shipwreck off the small Greek island of Antikythera around 1900, they brought up the kinds of objects archaeologists expected from a wealthy vessel of the...
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From the road near Fish Lake in central Utah, Pando looks like an ordinary mountain forest. Thousands of pale trunks rise from the ground. Their leaves tremble in the slightest breeze, turni...
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When Iñupiat hunters and biologists began finding ancient weapon fragments inside bowhead whales harvested in Arctic Alaska, the discoveries posed an extraordinary question: how long had the...
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