The silver was never theirs
Pick up a Samanid dirham from the right century and you can almost make it out. Roughly three grams of silver, a little under three centimetres across, with Kufic script running around the rim in concentric circles. The one I have in mind is dated 921 or 922 CE,...
Marble Bar is a waiting room, and the iron is still working through the door
If you walk the bed of Coongan Creek in the right stretch of the Hamersley Range in Western Australia, you will, at one point, walk across a bar of red-and-cream rock. It is not marble. It never was. It is a bar of banded iron formation — jaspilite, alternating...
The hidden demon-fish from beneath an arsenal
There is a fish, two centimetres long, eyeless, pink, and almost phosphorescently strange, that lives in a limestone aquifer beneath a US Army ammunition plant in northern Alabama. It was formally described for the first time in 2025, by a team led by a researcher at...