The bitter compounds in kale, broccoli and green tea are plant defence weapons — and the reason vegetables extend human life. A look at hormesis, the gut bacteria that decide who benefits, and why the vegetables engineered to taste mild may deliver less of what makes them medicine.
Sara Blakely built a billion-dollar company on $5,000 of her own money and never took a cent from outside investors.
Cuttlefish have monochromatic vision but produce some of the most accurate colour camouflage in nature. New computer-vision studies of their chromatophores are finally showing how.
After 340 days on the ISS, astronaut Scott Kelly returned to Earth to find his own home felt staged, his skin broke out from soft furniture, and the smell of rain on his patio hit him like a physical event — a reentry the launch had never prepared him for.
In 1996, Cornell psychologist Thomas Gilovich sent students into a room wearing a Barry Manilow T-shirt and measured a gap that would reshape how psychologists think about self-consciousness: wearers guessed 46 per cent of observers noticed the shirt. The real number was 23 per cent.
Singapore had local freshwater reservoirs in 1965, but depended heavily on imported water. Its later prosperity grew through trade, investment, infrastructure and education.
A physical book makes a narrow promise.
There is a particular kind of desk that looks as if it belongs to two eras at once.
Stand like a superhero for two minutes before a job interview, and your body chemistry shifts to make you braver.
There is an oddly revealing moment in modern life: someone needs to remember something, reaches past the phone already in their hand, and looks for a pen.
Marcus Aurelius wrote one of his clearest warnings about ambition in the fourth book of the notes now called Meditations.
Dubai is routinely treated as an oil city because it is wealthy, Gulf-based and visually associated with the wider United Arab Emirates.
