Esther Inglis-Arkell

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The Perfect Purple Dye Comes from Milking Snails, of Course

We know the Cleopatra’s sails were dyed with Tyrian purple. We know that Roman emperors dyed their new robes Tyrian purple as a sign of wealth. What we don’t know, exactly, is what this legendary purple looked like. But we do know where it comes from—namely, “snail milk.” Snails on near-opposite sides of the world … Continued

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How One of My Favorite Childhood Literary Heroines Poisoned a Child

Anne of Green Gables is a children’s classic and deservedly so. In one dramatic scene its heroine, Anne Shirley, uses ipecac to save a dying child. Here’s what ipecac would actually have done, and why it fell out of favor. Anne Shirley, the orphan girl taken in by a couple of curmudgeonly old siblings, has … Continued

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This Scene From Son of Batman is Just Shockingly Creepy

That title is not hyperbole. This literally shocked me. Son of Batman, an animated movie, is pretty much exactly what the title suggests. And this scene, in which Batman finds out he has a son, is one of the more bizarre and uncomfortable on-screen moments I’ve ever seen. Son of Batman is the animated version … Continued

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How Do Scientists Know What the Temperature Was Thousands of Years Ago?

The Earth has heated up and cooled down repeatedly, according to scientists. And we believe them— but how do they actually know? We’ll tell you how scientists know, today, that an Ice Age occurred millennia ago. You’re drinking the evidence that scientists use to track climate change. Each molecule of water contains one atom of … Continued

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How to Pour Two Liquids into a Glass and Make a Rope

One of the most famous tricks in chemistry is “The Rope Trick.” First discovered in 1959 by the chemist who went on to invent kevlar, this lets chemists pour two liquids into a glass . . . and then pull out a seemingly endless nylon rope from between the still-separated-liquids. Here’s how this trick goes. … Continued

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These Webspinning Insects May Look Like Spiders’ Prey—But They’re Not

If you’ve wandered through a wood and idly peeled back the bark of a tree, you may have found a little expanse of silk, like a nest, with insects stuck inside. If you thought that those insects were the prey of a spider, you might have been right, or you might have been looking at … Continued

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Pigs Are Much, Much Weirder Than You Ever Realized

Did you know that in the Old West, people used to have pig drives, the same way they had cattle drives? They marched huge herds of pigs across the country to be slaughtered. Also, pigs attack and kill people every year, including one man who was pinned to his tractor. We have a very strange … Continued

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This One-Ton Fish Is One of Nature’s Most Improbable Creations

The ocean sunfish is so improbable that even it looks astonished that it exists. The size alone is crazy. It can weigh up to 2,200 pounds, and grow to be the size of a small car that has been squashed flat by a larger car. How it does this is, mostly, a mystery. Oh, the … Continued

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This Antiquated Technology is Why Movies are Called “Flicks”

You might think early movies got called “flickers” and then “flicks” because they flicked through a series of images. Not true. What gave movies their nickname was a bug, not a feature. Learn about the outdated technology that made the images flicker far more than they should have. We can watch early movies, but we … Continued

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The 7 Stages of Falling Out of Love With Your Fandom

What happens when you stop loving a piece of entertainment that once could do no wrong? It’s one of the nastiest kinds of break-ups there is. Your love was pure and true. And then it was gone, and you were a wreck of yourself. How did it come to this? Here are the seven stages … Continued

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The Cancer Treatment That Launched an American-Canadian Patent War

A Canadian lab testing a folk treatment for diabetes stumbled on an amazing new cancer treatment. The problem was that they stumbled on it a little too late, according to the United States, and it’s led to a grudge that persists to this day. In the 1950s the Madagascar periwinkle, a type of vinca, was … Continued

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This Statue is a 500-Year-Old Snark Message Board

This is Pasquino, a statue near the famous Piazza Navona in Rome. For the past 500 years, it’s where you go when you want to read something mean, snarky, or scandalous about someone, and you didn’t have the internet to help you. The statue Pasquino was created well before the 1500s. Historians think it was … Continued

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Watch a Laser Pulse Obliterate an Ink Drop

This is so cool! Here’s a video that shows an ink drop getting hit, all of a sudden, by a laser. We can see what happens when the laser pulse is out of focus, and the drop is pushed. And we can see the drop get obliterated when it’s hit with a focused laser. Not … Continued

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Obsessively Check the Calorie Count of Your Food!  We’ll Show You How!

Calculating the calorie count of your food is easier than you imagine. You can make a calorimeter at home, and measure calories with just a couple of stands, a graduated cylinder, a good thermometer, and a good scale. (And by disabling the fire alarms in your building.) To get a really accurate calorie count, you’d … Continued

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Basil Valentine’s Home Remedies Killed A Lot Of People. But Who Was He?

Basil Valentine, or Basilius Valentinius, was the name of a distinguished and learned Benedictine monk, who wrote treatises on medicinal compounds and alchemy. Except there’s no record that this monk ever existed. Back in the 1600s, the public believed that Basil Valentine was a member of the Order of the Benedictines, living in austere studiousness … Continued

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Scandium: The Element That Was Foretold

One of the fun things about science is it allows people to be prophets without the need to grow a big beard and walk around the desert in a robe. True, Dmitri Mendeleev did have a big beard when he predicted the appearance of scandium—but he didn’t need it, and that’s the point. Scandium is … Continued

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To Gaze into the Jaws of Camel Spiders Is to Gaze into the Jaws of Hell

Camel spiders have a lot of different names and a lot of different forms. Their different forms have been noted, but not studied in depth, partially because their chief distinguishing characteristic was their mouth-parts, and no one wanted to look at those. Until now. A coalition of scientists from museums, including the American Museum of … Continued

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The Neanderthal That Got Mistaken For A Cossack

Today, we think that the discovery of neanderthal fossils were a revelation. At the time, they were just another thing to argue about. Here’s why one talented scientist confused a neanderthal with a Cossack. Neanderthal remains came to light in the 1800s. One of the first sets of remains to be unearthed is what’s now … Continued

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Why This Critter Was The Must-Have Pet For Gold Miners

The ring-tailed cat is a creature that looks like a lemur had a wild night with a fox. It hangs out in arid places, eating whatever’s available. Here’s why it became the purse-dog of the gold rush. Few people know of the ring-tailed cat, even though the animals aren’t particularly rare. They range from southern … Continued

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These Ants Took Over The World, And We Just Noticed

We know ants form large colonies. In 2002, we realized one specific kind of ant formed supercolonies. And then, in 2010, we learned that they had formed a global colony— and that, without even know it, we had helped them do it. The Argentine Ant It’s not surprising that Argentine ants are a successful invasive … Continued