It often begins so subtly that you wonder whether you imagined it: a tiny flutter under one eye, a faint pulse in the eyelid, then another. A few minutes later you are staring into a mirror, watching for it to happen again and wondering why...
Read article
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 ra...
Read
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
You are walking past a town hall, courthouse, school or government building when something looks slightly wrong: the flag is not at the top of its pole. It is hanging lower, leaving an unmis...
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
Few animals have contributed to modern medicine in a way quite as improbable as the horseshoe crab. It looks prehistoric because, in evolutionary terms, it is. Horseshoe-crab relatives were...
Read