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Helen SullivanThe Guardian |
Of all the languages’ words for cicada, Croatian’s might be the best: cvrčak, pronounced: tvr-chak. The sound it makes is tvr-chi tvr-chi. I have a...
In her book Theatres of Glass, Rebecca Stott writes about the Victorian craze for home aquariums – which swept London in the 1850s, with people...
Pufferfish are cute, and most pufferfish are toxic. Like people, they spend their weeks moving between states of puffed up and deflated. Or,...
I walked out of my kitchen on an overcast morning last week, feeling depressed, trying to think my way around the US election result somehow...
Imagine if your Wikipedia page described you as a “segmented or parasitic worm” with “two head segments” and “suckers at both ends”. You...
As you contemplate the wonders of evolution, and how a creature can be born with something weird and new, and that thing can either help it get...
The thing to know about the pygmy hippopotamus named Moo Deng is that she is angry, but also she is sweet. In photographs, she is often blurry and...
The thing about starfish is that you tend to forget the -fish part. But when you think about that, a lot of things come into focus. For example,...
A giant clam has hundreds, if not thousands, of eyes, which lie on the exposed flesh that lines the shell, and work like pinhole cameras. “They...
To read about the naked mole rat is to come across information that you wish you never knew – and then to look for more. The first thing to know...