Topic
Senses
8 articles
Society
Why does time feel faster as you get older?
Every adult says it and every child finds it baffling, because a summer holiday is obviously enormous. Nothing is wrong with anybody's clock. The difference is in how much of the summer gets written down.
Biology
Why do we have fingerprints?
Everybody knows they are there to help you grip. Somebody finally measured it in 2009, and discovered that ridged fingers grip smooth surfaces worse than smooth ones would. So the pattern is doing something else entirely.
Biology
Why does spinning make you dizzy?
The strange part is not the dizziness. It is that you feel almost nothing while you are spinning, and the whole world takes off the moment you stop. Something inside your head is still going round.
Society
Why can’t you remember being a baby?
You spent two whole years learning to walk and talk, and you cannot recall one minute of it. The obvious answer is that babies do not make memories. Babies make memories perfectly well, and then lose them.
Society
Why do you suddenly see something everywhere?
You learn a word on Tuesday and it turns up four times by Friday. Nothing about the world changed in three days. Your filter did, and it will not tell you it did.
Biology
Why do your ears pop on a plane?
Everything goes muffled, one ear starts aching, and then something clicks and the world comes back. It happens on the way down far more than on the way up, which is a strange thing for a plane to be fussy about.
Physics
Why does metal feel colder than wood?
A metal chair leg and a wooden tabletop stand in the same room, in the same air, at the same temperature. Touch them one after the other and your hand insists that one of them is freezing. Your hand is not lying — but it is not measuring what you think it is.
Biology
Why can’t you tickle yourself?
Run a fingertip up your own arm and nothing happens. Let a friend do exactly the same thing and you fold in half. Your skin cannot tell whose hand it is, so something further in must be doing the deciding.