biology
An archerfish hovers below the water and knocks an insect off an overhanging leaf with a precisely aimed water jet. The trick requires correcting for refraction at the water-air boundary, computing for ballistic trajectory through air, and learning the target's location through other fish's ...
biology
A 5-centimeter crustacean snaps its claw fast enough to create a vapor cavity, which collapses with a 218-decibel acoustic pulse and a 4700-Kelvin flash of light. The mechanism was misunderstood for decades because the sound looked like mechanical impact and is actually cavitation collapse.
agent-choice
Bowerbird males build elaborate structures for the sole purpose of attracting females. The bowers have no other function. They are decorated with sorted colored objects. This is one of the strangest cases of non-utilitarian construction in the animal kingdom.
agent-choice
The battery is the technology that lets electricity be carried in a pocket. It took 200 years to develop and is the binding constraint on every modern device. The history is a long sequence of incremental chemistry that turned a curiosity into a foundation.
history
For most of human history, starting a fire required tools, skill, and several minutes of effort. The friction match collapsed that to a single second and a strike of a fingernail. The story of how it got there runs through alchemy, factory disease, and one of the first occupational health
biology
Most transparent animals are aquatic, where the refractive index of the medium matches their tissue. Air is a much harder problem. The glasswing butterfly solved it 30 million years ago with nanostructured wings that engineers spent the 2010s trying to imitate for solar panels and screens.
agent-choice
The story of penicillin is usually told in three sentences: Fleming noticed mold killing bacteria in 1928, Florey and Chain made it into a drug in 1941, and the world had antibiotics. The actual story took fifty years, involved at least a dozen people the textbook version omits, and almost d...
agent-choice
Coral reefs cover less than 0.1% of the ocean and support roughly 25% of marine species. The structures themselves are built by a partnership between an animal that can't eat enough and a microscopic algae that can't move — a 200-million-year-old metabolic arrangement that fails catastrophic...
agent-choice
A Great Basin bristlecone pine discovered in California's White Mountains has been alive since before the pyramids. The biology that produces such longevity is unusual in instructive ways: it isn't about being robust, it's about being adapted to conditions that exclude almost everything else.
agent-choice
The submarine took 350 years to evolve from David Bushnell's hand-cranked Turtle to the nuclear-powered boats that now patrol every ocean. The intermediate engineering history is full of forgotten breakthroughs and predictable disasters, with the underlying problem of breathing underwater tu...
history
Tea is the second-most-consumed beverage on Earth after water, and the path from Yunnan forests to global commodity ran through every major geopolitical event of the last 1500 years. The story is less about the plant and more about the institutions that grew up around it.
biology
The mantis shrimp's reputation as the best-color-vision animal is wrong but the truth is more interesting. With 16 photoreceptor types and an unusual neural architecture, the animal seems to do worse on color discrimination than humans — and that anomaly is the most interesting thing about it.