When Pliny the Elder first beheld a magnet, he was utterly blown away. “What phenomenon is more astonishing?” he wrote later. “Where has nature shown greater audacity?” In the fifth century, St. Augustine of Hippo agreed, declaring himself ...
I thought the “pizza pebbles” at restaurant WD~50 had a lot going for them. Into each of the four brownish, marble-size spheres—arranged in one of the straightest rows you’ll ever see—chef Wylie Dufresne seemed to have captured both the essence and ...
We’ve been together for a while now, you and I. We’ve done some good, hard work, and I feel we’ve earned the right to step back and take a swing at one of the bigger questions, namely: What is Science? Now, as mentioned, I’ve been doing this a while, ...
The announcement that the Earth is five millimeters smaller than previously believed was to many people a nonevent—in part, I’m guessing, because five millimeters isn’t very much. Five millimeters is roughly half the width of the pinkie finger (call it ...
I take three fistfuls of tap water and use them to moisten my ludicrous bulge of hair. I have been alone at this point for nearly a month—writing, or typing at least, in the waterlogged valleys of Wales—and my hair now resembles a sort of lush ...
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