Its name says ‘shrimp’ but it is not a true shrimp; its fist flies through water like a bullet and boils it; and its famously dazzling eye actually distinguishes color worse than a human. A look at two intricate designs packed into the small creature that is the mantis shrimp, and the common beliefs they overturn.
A superconductor floating above a magnet stays put even when flipped or tilted. The force that lifts it and the force that locks it are two different laws of physics — the story of the Meissner effect and flux pinning.
The electric eel is not actually an eel. A South American knifefish, it turns its whole body into a living battery of thousands of electrocytes stacked in series. We look at how 0.15 volts per cell add up to hundreds of volts, and how it is designed to almost never shock itself.
Why does a rainbow always appear at 42°, why is it actually a full circle rather than a semicircle, and why does everyone see their own rainbow? The surface physics of the rainbow — refraction, one internal reflection, and dispersion inside a single water droplet.
Why do water droplets bead up and roll off a lotus leaf instead of soaking in? The answer is not smoothness but an invisible, two-tier roughness. Hydrophobic wax (chemistry) multiplied by micro- and nano-scale roughness (structure) pushes the contact angle past 160°, and the rolling droplets carry the dust away with them.
The Divine Bell of King Seongdeok (the Emille Bell), cast more than 1,200 years ago, still swells and fades as if breathing — not by mystery but by a beat. A slight asymmetry splits one vibration into two, creating rhythms of about 3 and 9 seconds. We also revisit the Emille legend through the bell’s own inscription.
