All articles
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Caring for a Bronze Animal Sculpture
Many people assume that a well-made bronze can be left to its own devices for generations. While this is broadly true, a…
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The 999 Operator You Never Knew You Had
Imagine a dispatch centre running round the clock, fielding thousands of calls at once, deciding in real time which ones get three…
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Your Saturday Afternoon Was Invented In About 1850
The weekend walk didn't come from anywhere deep. Nobody worked out through trial and error over thousands of years that a stroll…
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Hobbies to Try: 40 Ideas for Adults, Sorted by Budget, Time and Personality
Plenty of adults would like a hobby and never quite get round to starting one. Work, family and screens fill the evenings,…
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Your Surname Should Already Be Extinct
Francis Galton was a Victorian statistician who measured practically everything he could reach. In the 1870s he noticed something peculiar about the…
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Your House Got a Ticker Symbol in About 1986
In 1978 a mortgage from the Halifax in Huddersfield was arranged by the branch manager interviewing the borrower. Not the collateral of…
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You Didn’t Block a Fireplace. You Removed a Lung.
Black mould in the corner of your bedroom has been painted over twice and has returned both times. Anti-mould paint, a dehumidifier…
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The Water Rule That Nobody Invented
Somewhere right now, somebody is gulping down their sixth glass of water because they read they should drink eight a day. They're…
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The Update Has Never Come
Somewhere in your skull, there is a piece of software that has not been patched since the Pleistocene. It runs constantly, in…
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The Machine Learned Its English Somewhere Around the M25
Ask Alexa to do something for you when speaking in a strong Newcastle accent and she will often reply as if you…
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Being Late Was Not a Character Flaw Until 1847
The twinge of guilt we feel when we are only late by two minutes. The hasty apology sent while we are still…
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Your Feed Lives Next to a Fjord
Somewhere inside your phone there are billions of transistors. Each one flips between on and off billions of times a second. Each…
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Your Gran Was Wrong. She Was Also Right.
For at least two generations of people who were paying attention in biology class, the annual warning to go and get a…
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Everything You Do On Saturday Passed A Victorian Audition
Think about the last time you went for a swim, turned out for a Sunday league game, or found yourself watching eleven…
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The Chip That Rendered Lara Croft Is Now Reading Your Lungs
In 1996, a team at Nvidia had a problem: triangles. Thousands of them, each needing to be transformed, lit, and placed on…
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Your Nervous System Doesn’t Know It’s Not Hunting
Somewhere in a community centre on a Wednesday night, a person who describes themselves as "not really a creative type" is absolutely…
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The Alarm That Keeps Going Off In An Empty House
Somewhere around 3pm on a Sunday, it arrives. Not sadness, not tiredness, but that low, unplaceable hum of wrongness. You are warm,…
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Your Surname Is a Medieval Spreadsheet Column
Somewhere around the 12th and 13th centuries, England's clerks and tax collectors ran into a problem. There were, depending on the village,…
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The Archivist Has Already Decided
Somewhere around the age of seven, you made a filing decision. You didn't know you were making it. You were just splashing…
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The Government Can’t Agree What a Family Is (And Neither Can Itself)
Picture this. You're living in a house with a partner and two kids, one of whom is from a previous relationship. To…