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 A Lego brick on its own is nothing special. But link some of them together, and you could end up with anything from a medieval castle, to a pirate hideout or a space ship. Since 1947, the Lego company has released thousands of sets under the banner of a variety of different themes. Every one [...]  The black and white Great Auk was a beautiful bird of bizarre proportions. Its ribbed beak was huge and unwieldy, its legs were too short and its stubby wings were far too small to carry its big body into the air. In these regards, the Great Auk’s clumsy appearance rivals that of the Dodo. And [...]  Nineteenth century biologists had a point when they divided the ringed worms into free-living hunters and sessile filter feeders. Their classification was dismissed in the 1970s, but a closer look at the genes of many different worms now shows that they were closer to the truth than their later colleagues. The classification of worms got [...]  It is the year 2092. Nemo Nobody is the last mortal on our planet. At 117 years old, the brittle Nemo is almost at the end of his life. Everyone around him will live forever, whereas he will be the last one to die. Nemo spends his last days in a hospital where he features in [...]  In the 17th century, the Japanese shoguns decided that the only Westerners allowed to trade with the Japanese empire, would be the Dutch. By doing so they not only opened up their country to sugar, cotton and silk, they also unintentionally exposed the Japanese language to Dutch words and terminology. Many Dutch naval terms and words [...]  The figure below comes from Helmets and Body Armor in Modern Warfare, a book written by the medieval armour expert Bashford Dean (1867 – 1930). The similarities between the evolution of these European war helmets and ‘proper’ biological evolution are striking. At the base we can see the ancestor of this clade of helmets: the [...] |
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