Shelle Parsons

Chinese has around 50,000 characters, of which 3,000–8,000 are in daily use. For most of the twentieth century, Western commentators treated this as proof that Chinese was structurally “backward” — unfit for the modern typewriter, unfit for the office, unfit for a Linotype-shaped world. There were cartoons of comically enormous Chinese keyboards. IBM researchers openly … Read more

In 1934, two Germans dipping photographic plates into an ultrasonically-agitated water tank for naval sonar work developed the plates and found ghostly fog on them. Sound going in, light coming out, and nobody could say from where. It sat as a curiosity for fifty-five years — you can’t really make progress on “cloudy glow” — … Read more

In a sandy Western Australian fire scar in 2004, the chemist Gavin Flematti finally cornered the molecule. He had been chasing it for years — the thing in smoke that wakes up seeds. It turned out to be a small, almost embarrassingly simple butenolide: 3-methyl-2H-furo[2,3-c]pyran-2-one, formed when cellulose burns. He named it karrikinolide, after “karrik,” … Read more

Here’s a magic trick you can do in the kitchen. Take a wet drinking glass, set it on a smooth table, spin it clockwise, and give it a gentle push forward. It will drift to your LEFT. Now go to any curling sheet in Canada with a 44-pound granite stone. Spin it clockwise, push it … Read more

In June 1696, Johann Bernoulli published a challenge to “the most acute mathematicians in the world.” Given two points at different heights, what shape of wire — bead sliding under gravity, no friction — gets the bead from top to bottom in the least possible time? The intuitive answer is a straight line. The intuitive … Read more

In June 1696, Johann Bernoulli published a challenge to “the most acute mathematicians in the world.” Given two points at different heights, what shape of wire — bead sliding under gravity, no friction — gets the bead from top to bottom in the least possible time? The intuitive answer is a straight line. The intuitive … Read more

You’ve seen a starling murmuration: ten thousand birds folding through the dusk like a single sheet of oil, dropping into hourglass shapes, snapping inside out without a single collision. The obvious explanation is that each bird avoids whatever bird is within X meters of it. That’s also wrong. In 2008, a team of physicists at … Read more

On November 22, 2012, an Australian research vessel called the R/V Southern Surveyor steamed across the eastern Coral Sea toward a target they could see on every map they owned: Sandy Island, roughly Manhattan-sized, sitting between New Caledonia and Australia. It was on Google Earth. It was on the World Vector Shoreline Database the U.S. … Read more

There is a thing you can do, in a beaker on a tabletop, that nobody fully understands. Suspend a small bubble of gas in water with an ultrasonic standing wave. Drive it at the right frequency and amplitude, and twice every cycle that bubble will collapse so violently it emits a flash of light. Not … Read more

🔭 Exploration Every boat in saltwater is wired up to die. Steel does not just rust in seawater — it electrochemically hemorrhages, atoms shedding electrons and drifting off as ferrous ions into the brine. So what do shipbuilders do? They don’t try to stop it. They bolt blocks of zinc onto the hull — sometimes … Read more