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...
Bronze Age bling fell out of the sky
If you were a Mycenaean nobleman around 1500 BC and you wanted the most expensive ring on the Aegean, you would not have asked for gold. You would have asked for what was, materially, rarer: a ring whose iron had been beaten out of a meteorite. A team led by Eleni...
Can you keep a coral’s pump primed? Yes \u2014 for a few hours, with a motor
The new piece of coral biology, as a Quanta Magazine piece on Pacherres and Kühl’s May 2026 Science paper lays it out, is that the polyps are not passive. Across the surface of every polyp, cilia beat in coordinated hexagonal patches to spin up tiny vortices...
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...