Fact-based Cosmic Questions
Why Is the Sky Blue but the Sunset Orange?
The same sky and the same sunlight give us a blue afternoon and an orange evening, and the difference comes down to how tiny air molecules toss light around.
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Fact-based Cosmic Questions
Why Is the Sea Salty When the Rivers Feeding It Are Fresh?
The rivers pouring into the sea taste fresh, yet the ocean is salty, and the answer is a very slow partnership between rain, rock and sunshine.
Fact-based Weird Facts
A Fluffy White Cloud Weighs About as Much as a Hundred Elephants
The small cumulus drifting over your garden is carrying roughly five hundred tonnes of water, and it stays up there for a reason that has nothing to do with being light.
Fact-based Weird Facts
Lightning Does Strike the Same Place Twice
The old saying is wrong: tall, pointy, isolated things are struck again and again, and New York's Empire State Building takes an average of 23 hits a year.
Fiction Animal News — Fiction
Penguins Announce Standing Rota
Under the new arrangement, everybody takes a turn on the outside of the huddle, and nobody is to mention how long anyone else has been in the middle.
Fiction Useless Inventions
The Weather Doormat
A handsome coir mat with a small display in the corner, which tells you, as you come in, exactly what the weather was doing an hour ago.
Fact-based Weird Facts
Snow Falls in the Sahara
At the desert's edge in Algeria, snow has settled on the dunes more than once, and NASA satellites have photographed it from space.
Fact-based Cosmic Questions
Do Fish Know When It Is Raining?
Rain fills the water with sound, but much of that sound is pitched far higher than many fish can hear, so the answer is less obvious than it seems.
Fiction Tiny Stories
The Umbrella Nobody Meant to Keep
There is an umbrella in a cafe lost-and-found that has been claimed eleven times, returned twelve, and has quietly decided that being forgotten is the whole point.
Fact-based Weird Facts
That Fresh Rain Smell? You're Actually Sniffing Bacteria
The earthy smell of rain has a name, petrichor, and a key ingredient is geosmin, made by soil bacteria, which the human nose can detect at about one hundred parts per trillion.