You light a fire only briefly in the evening, yet the floor stays warm until dawn. The ondol is an ingenious heat-storing system: it detours hot exhaust through winding flues, stores the heat in stone, and returns it slowly through the night.
Every spring a whole city’s cherry trees burst into bloom within days and fall together about a week later. This synchrony is no accident — it is the result of a temperature calculation the trees have run since winter: the chilling requirement, accumulated warmth, and clones.
In spring, whole neighborhoods turn pink — but the Japanese apricot, apricot, peach, and plum are all different trees, not cherries. They look alike because they are close cousins in the genus Prunus. Here is how to tell the five spring blossoms apart, starting with the flower stalk.
A single fair-weather cumulus cloud weighs about 500 tonnes — as much as 100 elephants. So why doesn’t it fall? We look at the terminal velocity of tiny droplets, updrafts, the buoyancy of moist air, and the physics of the moment rain finally falls.
The Moon shows us the same face not because it ‘doesn’t rotate’ but because its rotation is perfectly synchronized with its orbit. We explore the exquisite principle of tidal locking written into the Earth-Moon system.
A palm-sized pink rodent overturns our assumptions about mammals again and again – a eusocial colony ruled by a single queen, a body in which spontaneous tumours are extremely rare, a death rate that barely rises with age, and a metabolism that endures on fructose when oxygen is cut off. A look at the intricate design of the naked mole-rat, from the primary sources.
