Maybe you live in a super-clean house, but I don’t. If you look under the (my) sofa or bed you will see little clusters of fluff hiding there. (It’s easier to find these if you don’t have carpets.) They’re dust-bunnies. Dust-bunnies are clumps of all kinds of detritus (waste and grunge) that has drifted around…
Tag: Anne Rooney
Do you speak mushroom? It’s the language of the worldwide wood
If you’ve see the film Avatar, you might remember that the forest is a living being, with the plants able to communicate with one another. It’s not just a sci-fi fantasy, though. Researchers found that the trees in a forest in Canada really do cooperate and communicate. They share resources and look out for one…
A metal nose, a pet moose and the stars
We take it for granted that the universe changes. It began with the Big Bang, is still expanding; stars generate, die and are recycled. But until the sixteenth everyone believed – as the great Greek philosopher Aristotle had taught – that the heavens are eternal and unchanging. Then in 1572, a new star appeared. That…
Dead heads all in a row
The creature in the picture is a caterpillar with a pretty weird habit. That bit that looks like a spike is actually a pile of heads. As if that wasn’t odd enough, the heads all once belonged to the same caterpillar. Caterpillars go through molts as they grow. They start off teeny-tiny, and as…
The original shipwrecked rhino
January 1516 – the rhino famous from Durer’s illustration drowns in the Mediterranean
The shipwrecked rhino 