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 
Kuru: They Ate Their Dead, Properly Awful
A remote tribe's funeral custom of eating brains passed a prion like a bad tune down the line and it was grim, tragic, and oddly avoidable.Read More 
When My Brain Forgets Faces (Prosopagnosia)
About one in forty people quietly can't recognise faces-so if I pretend I know you and then stare blankly, blame my neurons, not my manners.Read More 
Kayardild: The Language That Stacks Cases
Out on a small Australian island some nouns get so many endings they look like grammatical onions - and they actually mean something.Read More 
Blue Whale Panic: Mostly Nonsense
They said an online game was telling kids to die; turns out it was mostly daft panic.Read More 
The Day They Bolted Jet Engines On A Train And It Absolutely Peaked
New York Central's 1966 M-497 strapped two jet engines to a railcar, hit 183.85 mph, and then we all agreed to pretend it was a joke.Read More 
The Beetle That Runs a Tiny Bomb Factory
A modest ground beetle mixes chemicals in a microscopic antechamber, then fires boiling, noxious micro-explosions at anything foolish enough to touch it.Read More 
Colgate Tried to Feed Us ToothpasteBranded Dinners and It Bombed
In the early 1980s Colgate-Palmolive launched frozen entrees and learned the hard way that some brand loyalties stop at the dinner table.Read More 
neutron star mountains are basically crumbs
They call them mountains but they're the universe's most dramatic breadcrumb-millimetres high, insanely heavy, and loud enough for gravity detectors to care.Read More 
The Naked Mole-Rat Monarchy (One Queen, Many Peasants)
One breeding queen rules a subterranean republic of sterile workers - brutal, efficient and oddly civilised.Read More 