Facts So Romantic

Over a decade ago, I was sitting in a college math physics course and my professor spelt out an idea that kind of blew my mind. I think it isn’t a stretch to say that this is one of the…

In George Bernard Shaw’s play Pygmalion, professor Henry Higgins says: “You can spot an Irishman or a Yorkshireman by his brogue. I can place any man within six miles. I can place him…

I told myself it was absurd to be discontented with the way Game of Thrones ended. Why should I feel anything for the fate of a fictional world? Even so, I watched with interest, on YouTube,…

In the Netflix anime series Knights of Sidonia, humankind is marooned in a spaceship 500,000-strong, refugees constantly on the run from shapeshifting aliens who destroyed Earth over 1,000…

You may have heard the news of what sounds like a resurrection story on the small island of Aldabra, off the coast of Madagascar. Around 136,000 years ago, the island was submerged in water…

Here’s one way to rid society of “fake news”—abandon the term altogether.That’s what a U.K. committee recommended that Parliament do last fall. It argued that the concept has…

We’ve all been caught unawares by our digestive tract at one time or another. It happened to the Nash family several months ago. We were nearing the end of an extended road trip, driving…

One of my favorite words is lox,” says Gregory Guy, a professor of linguistics at New York University. There is hardly a more quintessential New York food than a lox bagel—a century-old…

Reprinted with permission from Quanta Magazine’s Abstractions blog.The galactic center shines too brightly, like the glow of a metropolis at night where maps show only a town. To mend…

This past “Star Wars Day,” May 4, I watched some of the original trilogy a bit mournfully: Peter Mayhew, who played Chewbacca, passed away the day before. When The Empire Strikes Back…