Insight
The Moon Is Drifting Away From Earth, and We Can Measure It to the Millimetre
The Moon is leaving. Slowly, by about 3.8 centimetres a year, roughly the speed your fingernails grow. That number is not an…
Publications
Theses, research papers, blogs, stories, ideas, and insights, published by the people who wrote them.
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Insight
Insight
The Placebo Effect Is Real Biology, Even When You Know It Is a Placebo
In 1799, a doctor in Bath named John Haygarth ran one of the first proper tests of a medical treatment. The treatment…
Insight
How Migrating Birds Feel the Earth’s Magnetic Field
Every autumn, European robins that breed in Scandinavia leave for southern Europe and North Africa. Many of them fly at night, alone,…
Insight
How a Lithium-Ion Battery Stores Energy, and Why It Slowly Wears Out
Your phone, your laptop and most electric cars run on the same basic idea: lithium atoms shuffling back and forth between two…
Blog
Life Without Sunlight: The 1977 Dive That Changed Biology
Until 1977, biology textbooks had a simple rule for life on Earth. Almost every food chain started with sunlight. Plants and algae…
Blog
Leafcutter Ants Were Farming Millions of Years Before Humans
Walk through a forest in Central or South America and you may see a moving green line on the ground: thousands of…
Insight
Why the Sun’s Outer Atmosphere Is Hotter Than Its Surface
Stand next to a campfire and step back, and you get cooler. That is how heat is supposed to work. The further…
Insight
Why Yawns Are Contagious, and What a Yawn Might Actually Be For
You have probably yawned at least once since you started reading this, or you will before the end. That is the strange…
Insight
How Quantum Computers Use Superposition to Solve Problems Classical Computers Can’t
A classical computer bit is either a 0 or a 1, always, no ambiguity. A qubit, the basic unit of a quantum…
Insight
How mRNA Vaccines Actually Teach Your Cells to Build Immunity
Traditional vaccines work by showing your immune system a weakened or dead version of a pathogen, or a piece of one, and…
Blog
Poison Dart Frogs Don’t Make Their Own Poison. Here’s Where It Actually Comes From
Some poison dart frogs carry enough toxin in their skin to kill several adult humans, all packed into an animal small enough…
Insight
The Strangler Fig: The Rainforest Tree That Starts by Killing Its Host
Walk into a mature rainforest and you’ll eventually find one: a massive, lattice-like trunk, made of what looks like dozens of woody…