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Why “The old man the boat” reads as broken: garden-path sentences Read this: The old man the boat. If it stalled you at the end, your brain did exactly what it always does: it guessed ahead and lost the bet. A garden-path… Language4 min read7 Oct Why a tone can climb forever without getting higher: the Shepard illusion Play a tone that climbs and climbs, forever, and never gets any higher. It sounds impossible, but it only takes a few sine waves and one volume curve. A… Music & Sound3 min read6 Oct Why 0.1 + 0.2 isn't 0.3: flip the 64 bits a computer uses for decimals Type 0.1 + 0.2 into almost any programming language and you get 0.30000000000000004. Nothing is broken. Computers count in powers of two, and a tenth is an… Computing3 min read6 Oct Why you can't ignore the word and name the colour: the Stroop effect Read the word, then name its ink colour: you can't turn reading off. In 1886 Cattell noticed that people read words faster than they name colours, and in 1935… Mind4 min read6 Oct Why every bridge is made of triangles: a square frame folds, a triangle can't Push on the corner of a square frame and it folds flat. Push on a triangle made of the same sticks and nothing moves. The reason is simple: three side lengths… Engineering4 min read6 Oct Why adding a road can slow every driver down: Braess's paradox You would think a free shortcut can only help. In 1968 the mathematician Dietrich Braess showed it can make every driver slower. In our four-road example… Economics4 min read5 Oct Why salt makes ice cream freeze: the cold that ice and salt create Ice is already cold, so why does salt make ice cream freeze? Because salt does not add cold. It stops the ice and water from staying in balance at 0 °C… Food Science3 min read5 Oct Why a tossed tennis racket flips: the intermediate axis theorem Spin a tennis racket about its handle or its face and it flies cleanly. Spin it about the third axis and it flips, even in orbit where nothing pushes on it… Physics3 min read5 Oct How a leopard gets its spots: Turing's two-chemical pattern machine A leopard's spots and a zebra's stripes start out as a smooth sheet of near-identical cells. In 1952 Alan Turing showed that two interacting chemicals, one… Biology3 min read5 Oct How a 2,000-year-old bronze machine predicted eclipses with the number 223 In 1901, divers pulled a corroded bronze machine from a shipwreck off the Greek island of Antikythera. One dial ended in the number 223, written in Greek… History4 min read4 Oct How dropping needles on a floor reveals the number π: Buffon's needle Toss a match onto a plank floor and ask: does it touch a crack? Do it thousands of times and the fraction that do will quietly spell out π, though no circle is… Maths3 min read4 Oct Why one day on Mercury lasts two Mercury years Mercury circles the Sun in 88 Earth days and spins once every 58.6 days. That odd pairing, three spins for every two orbits, means one sunrise to the next… Earth & Space3 min read4 Oct