Rolling uphill
The mechanical paradox is a device that seemingly defies the law of gravity: a pair of cones that roll uphill.
Category: Sciences
Chimeric parents
During a child support dispute in 2002, a DNA test seemed to show that a mother was not the parent of her own biological children. The truth was stranger than anyone expected.
Space junk
A bit of the Apollo 12 rocket from 1969 is still floating around out in space. It orbits the sun – but every thirty or forty years it comes back to orbit the Earth for a while.
Endless elevator
Imagine an elevator with no doors that never stops: this is the paternoster lift.
Climate crisis knitting
How do you visualise climate change simply and evocatively? Well, you could knit it.
Shallowest sea
The Sea of Azov, between Ukraine and Russia, is never more than fourteen metres deep. Parts of the sea are shallow enough to wade across.
The gannet’s dive
Gannets have evolved some very strange adaptations that make them some of the best divers in the natural world.
The Daylight Comet
Everyone eagerly anticipated Halley’s comet showing up in April 1910. It came as quite a surprise, then, when another brighter comet appeared just four months before: the Daylight Comet.
Doomsday Glacier
Thwaites Glacier, in West Antarctica, is roughly the size of Florida. This glacier alone contributes four percent of the global rise in sea levels, and if it melted completely oceans would be 65cm higher – hence its alternative name, the Doomsday Glacier.
Vegetarian spider
Bagheera kiplingi is unique amongst spiders: it’s a vegetarian.
The sound of hell
An urban legend from the late 1980s claimed that Soviet scientists had drilled so far down they hit hell – and brought back an audio recording of the suffering souls. But it was actually Baron Blood.
Mathematical collective
Since 1939 an author named Nicolas Bourbaki has published a series of volumes on pure mathematics. But Bourbaki does not exist.
Underwater airport
At Barra Airport, in Scotland’s Outer Hebrides, you cannot land at high tide.
Left snail
The shells of almost all common garden snails coil to the right. Almost all.
Dragon blood island
Socotra, the alien island wedged between the Arabian Sea and the Gulf of Aden, is home to the dragon blood tree: a source of dye, paint, medicine, varnish, and magic.
Cat poetry (Part 2)
The famed Romantic poet Thomas Gray wrote a verse about his friend’s cat drowning in a goldfish bowl. [2 of 2]
The Generalist Academy 