Baby-Farming: How Victorian Respectability Outsourced Its Orphans
When middle-class shame met entrepreneurial thrift, Victorian England quietly contracted strangers to raise or vanish unwanted infants - and sometimes the workmanlike economics were ghastly.Read More 
Dyatlov Pass: The Tent They Left Inside Out
Nine competent skiers peeled open their own tent in the middle of the Urals and the world's explanations have been politely useless ever since.Read More 
The Salamanders That Steal Their Neighbours' DNA
A troop of all-female salamanders reproduces by borrowing sperm from local males, sometimes swallowing the fellow's genome like a particularly awkward lodger - and biologists have been both furious and fascinated.Read More 
The Wasp That Loves Paperwork
A posh little wasp drags paralysed prey to its burrow, performs a ritual inspection, and will obediently repeat the whole daft checklist if you nudge its sandwich a few inches.Read More 
The Gentlemen Who Borrowed Corpses
When surgeons wanted fresh bodies, Victorian respectability quietly outsourced the job to night-shift graverobbers, iron cages and an Act of Parliament.Read More 
Venus's Atmosphere Routinely Runs Rings Around It
Venus rotates like a dozing duke, yet its clouds sprint the planet in four days flat and leave the poor surface looking embarrassingly stationary.Read More 
When Doctors Sold Tomato Pills and Took Ourselves Seriously
In the 1830s a respectable American physician rebranded tomatoes as cure-alls, bottled them into pills and sauces, and the nation politely believed him.Read More 
The Fussy German Linking S That Insists On Its Own Rules
German compounds hide a tiny linking 's' that turns up like a bureaucrat at a picnic and nobody quite agrees where it comes from.Read More 
The Grammar That Goes Pitter
Some languages give onomatopoeia a permanent desk, a pension and a union rep: ideophones are an actual grammatical class that can act like verbs, adverbs or whole sentences - and English simply nods politely and takes notes.Read More 
The Language That Got Away With Eleven Sounds
A tiny Bougainville tongue runs the whole human drama on as few as eleven sounds and leaves English looking like an indecisive orchestra.Read More 