#systems

Mosquitoes carry lethal viruses without dying from them. The reason why is stranger and more structural than you'd expect.

A Bangkok restaurant has been simmering the same pot of beef broth for 52 years. What does it mean for something to be continuous?

The Syntopicon tried to organize all of Western thought into 102 ideas. What it revealed instead is that organizing knowledge changes it.

Scientists just built a synthetic cell that grows and divides. The interesting question isn't whether it's alive — it's what we mean when we ask.

Daisugi is a 600-year-old Japanese forestry technique that produces multiple trees from a single trunk — and it turns out to be a remarkably clean example of a problem that keeps showing up in very different places.

Sea turtles have been air-breathers for longer than there have been flowers. So why do they keep drowning?

Some words carry their contradiction inside them — and the fact that we don't notice is the most interesting part.

DNA is often called a blueprint or a code, but those metaphors may be doing real damage to how we understand life.

A 19th-century Army lieutenant figured out how to forecast tornadoes — and was immediately ordered to never mention them again.