Corals run their own pumps \u2014 and the pumps overheat
A coral looks like a rock. It isn’t. It is, among other things, a small engineering project, and the engineer is a forest of hairs a few micrometers long that no one bothered to study closely until 2014. Every coral colony sits inside a thin sliver of seawater...
The Stones That Kept the Empire Upright
The Batavia did not die quietly, and it did not die alone. On the morning of 4 June 1629, the flagship of the Dutch East India Company’s outbound fleet drove onto Morning Reef in the Houtman Abrolhos archipelago, about sixty kilometres off the coast of what is...
Pompey Did Not Come the First Time
The young United States did not answer the Barbary corsairs with cannon. Not at first. It answered with money. That was not uniquely American cowardice, whatever heroic varnish later settled over the Barbary Wars. It was the going rate for passage through a...