biology
A common pipistrelle bat weighs five grams and hunts mosquitoes in the dark. It launches itself from a roost beam at dusk, flies a complex aerial pattern through trees and over water, locates and intercepts up to a thousand insects per night, and returns to the same roost before dawn.
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
biology
The hagfish is the standard counterexample to almost every generalization a biology student learns about vertebrates. It does not have a true vertebra (the partial cartilaginous structure is called the notochord); it does not have a jaw, even a primitive one (it predates jawed fish entirely); it does not have
biology
The standard middle-school summary of mitochondria — "the powerhouse of the cell" — captures one functional fact and misses everything that makes mitochondria the strangest object in biology. Every cell in every plant, animal, fungus, and protist contains hundreds to thousands of organelles that began as free-living bacteria, were engulfed
biology
The standard biology textbook divides vertebrates into ectotherms, whose body temperature matches the environment, and endotherms, who maintain a constant high body temperature through metabolic heat. Mammals and birds are endotherms; fish and reptiles are ectotherms. The standard biology textbook is wrong about tuna, billfish, and a small number of
history
The Washington Monument was completed in 1884 with a cap made of aluminum. The choice was a deliberate flex: aluminum at the time cost about $1 per ounce, slightly more than silver, and was considered a precious metal worthy of capping a monument to the founder of the country. Less
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...
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 ...
mathematics
The Mandelbrot set is perhaps the most-photographed mathematical object in history, but the visualization is the surface of a much deeper theory. The mathematics behind the famous shape includes a still-open major conjecture, a proof that its boundary has Hausdorff dimension 2, and a co...
mathematics
Honeybees build hexagonal comb. Pappus of Alexandria conjectured in the 4th century that hexagons were the optimal solution to the problem the bees were solving
history
The compass arrived in Europe sometime in the 12th century from sources that may or may not have been Chinese. Within 200 years it had restructured Mediterranean trade, cracked open the Atlantic, and made global navigation possible
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