Stay in a swimming pool or bathtub long enough and something peculiar happens to your hands. The smooth pads of your fingers turn into a landscape of ridges and valleys, as if the skin has suddenly aged decades in a few minutes. For generat...
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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...
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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...
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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...
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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...
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A thirsty tomato plant can be surprisingly noisy. Not to us: stand beside it in a greenhouse and you will probably hear nothing beyond leaves rustling and the ordinary sounds of the room. Bu...
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On the morning of November 14, 1963, sailors south of Iceland saw something that looked at first like a ship on fire. A dark column was rising from the North Atlantic. It was not smoke from...
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High on a mountain in late spring, a patch of snow can suddenly look as though someone spilled watermelon juice across it. The surface turns pale pink, rose red or even crimson, sometimes st...
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In daylight, the water may look ordinary — or even unappealingly reddish-brown. Then darkness falls, a wave breaks, and the shoreline suddenly flashes electric blue. Footsteps sparkle in wet...
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Few wildlife events are as disturbing as a whale stranding. An animal exquisitely adapted to life in deep water suddenly lies helpless on a beach, sometimes alone and sometimes alongside doz...
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