biology
In 1995, divers off Japan's Amami Islands began noticing perfectly geometric circles two meters across on the seabed. The structures were intricate, symmetric, and clearly built — but no one knew what was making them. The answer turned out to be a five-inch fish performing a week-long cons...
history
Until 1846, surgery without anesthesia was the standard of medical practice. The patient was held down or strapped to the table. Speed was the surgeon's primary virtue. The transformation from this state to modern surgery happened in a few years through the convergence of three independent...
biology
Heterocephalus glaber breaks almost every rule mammalian biology is supposed to follow. It lives 30 years on a 10-year body plan, almost never gets cancer, feels no pain from acid or capsaicin, tolerates oxygen levels that would kill most mammals, and runs a eusocial colony like an insect....
science
Plants do not have nervous systems and yet they sense, integrate, and respond to a wide range of environmental signals with surprising sophistication. The mechanisms — calcium signaling, electrical waves, chemical messengers, and slow growth-based responses — solve problems that animals so...
history
The standard story of computing places the foundational moment somewhere between Charles Babbage's Analytical Engine in the 1830s and Alan Turing's 1936 paper on computable numbers. The standard story is missing thirty years and an industrial machine. The actual moment when a device first separated the
biology
The European eel, Anguilla anguilla, is a fish that lives most of its life in fresh water — in rivers, streams, and lakes from Norway to North Africa, from Ireland to the Caspian Sea — and that spawns, at the end of a long-distance migration, in a region of the western Atlantic
history
Spices motivated the European Age of Exploration, sustained one of the longest trade networks in human history, and produced political and military consequences out of all proportion to their nutritional importance. The history of cloves, nutmeg, and pepper is the history of how dried p...
biology
Cuttlefish are colorblind by every standard test of color vision and produce some of the most vivid color displays in the animal kingdom, with chromatophore patterns that match their backgrounds with apparent precision. The 2016 Stubbs and Stubbs paper proposed an unusual mechanism: chr...
history
Paper money was invented in China around 800 CE and took 700 years to reach Europe. The history is the slow social construction of a counter-intuitive proposition: that printed paper backed only by trust in an issuer can function as a medium of exchange. Every paper-money episode from T...
biology
Jellyfish are 700 million years old, brainless, eyeless in most species, and one of them is biologically immortal. They occupy almost every marine niche and are increasing in abundance globally as warmer and more eutrophic oceans favor them. The biology that lets a hydrostatic skeleton ...
history
The schoolroom story of photography starts with Daguerre in 1839. The actual story is two thousand years long, involves Chinese natural philosophers, Persian alchemists, and the chemistry of silver halides discovered by accident in the dark. The path to the smartphone in your poc
biology
Tardigrades survive conditions that should kill any animal: the vacuum of space, ten years without water, temperatures from near absolute zero to above the boiling point of water, and radiation doses thousands of times what kills a human. The biology that makes this possible is s