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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Near the heart of the Milky Way lies a cloud with a reputation that sounds invented for a science-fiction cocktail menu. Sagittarius B2 contains alcohol. It also contains ethyl formate, an o...
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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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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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The first message sent across the network that would become a crucial ancestor of the modern Internet was not profound, poetic or even complete. It consisted of two lowercase letters: lo.Tha...
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There is a peculiar kind of certainty that appears around traditional food. A grandmother made a dish one way, a restaurant in its supposed birthplace serves it another, and suddenly one ver...
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Few subjects can turn an ordinary Italian lunch into a tribunal quite as quickly as a traditional recipe. Put cream in carbonara, use pancetta instead of guanciale, add garlic where somebody...
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Was wine invented in Georgia or by the Romans? The answer isn't as simple as one might think. While Georgia holds the title for the oldest wine, Rome may be the birthplace of modern wine cul...
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Who can claim the invention of wine? A drink so old and widespread that it predates written history. Traces of fermented grape juice have been found across ancient civilizations, but where e...
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In southern Brazil lies a small town where twins are born at an extraordinary rate. Cândido Godói, often dubbed the "Land of Twins," has baffled scientists and intrigued visitors with its hi...
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