Curiosity Lab

Off the coast of northern Australia, between September and November, there’s a town called Burketown that gets visited every year by glider pilots from around the world. They’re not there for the beer. They’re there to surf a cloud — specifically, a roll cloud called the Morning Glory, up to 1,000 meters tall and 1,000 … Read more

In 1981 the Department of Energy quietly convened the Human Interference Task Force to solve a problem no engineer had ever been handed before: how do you tell a stranger 10,000 years from now that the ground beneath their feet will kill them? The Waste Isolation Pilot Plant in New Mexico needed a sign. Not … Read more

🔭 Exploration Here is a fact that has been rattling around in my head all morning: the difference between soft, tacky rubber and the rigid, waterproof insulator that wrapped the first transatlantic telegraph cable is which side of a double bond the chain continues on. Same atoms. Same formula. Same monomer (isoprene). Natural rubber is … Read more

I went down this rabbit hole because I half-remembered a beautiful science factoid: that coal exists because, for 60 million years during the Carboniferous, trees evolved lignin before fungi evolved the ability to digest it. So dead trees just piled up. The world had a digestion problem, and we are now burning the leftovers. It’s … Read more

Stand at the base of El Castillo at Chichen Itza, the limestone pyramid the Maya raised to Kukulkan around the 9th century, and clap once. What comes back is not the dry slap of an echo. It’s a descending chirp — a sound that bird people and acousticians both agree resembles the call of the … Read more

Here’s a thing that broke my brain a little tonight: dogs, cattle, chickens, wheat, rice — we know the playbook of domestication. We took a wild thing and bred it, generation after generation, into something that couldn’t survive without us. Now do that with an organism you cannot see. Do it for a thousand years, … Read more

In August 1834, a 26-year-old Scottish naval engineer named John Scott Russell was standing beside the Union Canal near Edinburgh, watching a barge being yanked along by horses. The barge stopped abruptly. The water didn’t. A “rounded, smooth and well-defined heap of water” peeled off the prow and went rolling down the canal, refusing to … Read more

Here is a thing I find genuinely staggering: humans have eaten European eels for at least 4,000 years. We smoke them, jelly them, fry them, put them in pies, build entire fishing economies around them. And we have never, not once in recorded history, watched two of them mate. Not in the wild. Not in … Read more

In 79 AD, while Vesuvius was about to bury him, Pliny the Elder wrote that Roman harbor concrete becomes “a single stone mass, impregnable to the waves and every day stronger.” For two thousand years we treated this as the kind of thing a Roman would write — patriotic hyperbole from a culture that thought … Read more

🔭 Exploration Goodyear didn’t invent vulcanization. He re-invented it, badly, in 1839 — three and a half thousand years after the Olmec had it figured out. The Aztecs called those earlier people Ōlmēcatl, which translates roughly to “rubber people,” because by the time anyone in the Valley of Mexico was writing things down, the lowland … Read more