Chemistry
- Unpacked Why Fast Charging Slows Down at 80 Per Cent The charging piece pictured lithium being marched uphill into the graphite. So why does the march race to 80 per cent and then crawl? Because the last few seats in a crowded hall are the hardest to fill. Opens once you've read “Charging Your Phone Means Pushing Lithium Uphill”
- Unpacked Why Water in Leh Gives Up at 88 °C The rajma in Leh refused to cook at 88 °C. Here's the full science of why, and how explorers once used boiling water to measure mountains. Opens once you've read “The Rajma That Defeated My Grandmother”
- Deep Dives How a Rock Ended Up Running Your Phone Nearly every phone, laptop and satellite begins as a lump of quartz. Getting from one to the other is one of the strangest supply chains in the world.
- Unpacked Why the Bottom of a Frozen Lake Stays at 4 °C The ice poem promised that the fish below swim on at four degrees all day. Why four, and not zero? The answer involves two forces fighting inside every drop of cold water, and a lake that flips itself over every autumn. Opens once you've read “Ice Floats, Which Is Lucky for Fish”
- Unpacked Why Stars Stop Making Elements at Iron The stardust poem says stars fuse their way up to iron and stop, "for when it fuses iron, the profit's gone". Here's the single curve behind that line, which also explains nuclear power stations and why a star's death takes less than a second. Opens once you've read “Most of You Was Made Inside a Star”
- Unpacked Why You Can't Crack the Same Knuckle Twice Mr Joshi has timed it many times: twenty minutes before the same knuckle will crack again. His wife confirms it. Here's what is happening inside the joint during those twenty minutes, and what it has in common with a bottle of soda. Opens once you've read “Man Cracks Knuckles for Decades to Annoy Mother, Science Backs Him”
- Unpacked Why the Grapes Never Ripened Rohan's bananas ripened in the mango box. The grapes beside them, in the same cloud of ethylene for two days, didn't change at all. Mummy said grapes are picked when they're ready, and that's that. Here's why she's right. Opens once you've read “The Mango That Ripened All the Bananas”
- Stories The Rajma That Defeated My Grandmother A family trip to Leh, a pot of rajma that refuses to soften, and a pressure cooker that suddenly makes sense.
- Unpacked Why Octopus Blood Is Blue and Yours Is Red The octopus poem says its blood is blue because "copper lends a bluish shade". Here's why copper and iron give different colours, why your veins look blue when your blood never is, and why an octopus gets out of breath. Opens once you've read “The Octopus Has Three Hearts and Blue Blood”
- Deep Dives Your Fridge Is Secretly Heating Your Kitchen Heat naturally flows from hot to cold. Your fridge spends all day forcing it the other way. Here's how.
- Unpacked How One Atom in a Million Turns Sand Into a Switch The silicon piece ended with nine-nines purity as "a blank page". Here's what chipmakers write on it: a few atoms of phosphorus and boron, placed with extraordinary care, which turn a crystal of rock into billions of tiny switches. Opens once you've read “How a Rock Ended Up Running Your Phone”
- Stories My Grandmother's Secret Is Bacteria Every night, Ammi saves one spoonful of curd. It takes a week away, a cold December windowsill and two ruined batches for anyone to ask why.
- Poetry Trees Are Made of Thin Air A poem about where a tree actually comes from.
- Unpacked Meet the Bacteria Living in Your Curd A spoonful of old curd turned warm milk into new curd overnight, and a cold windowsill stopped it dead. Here's who was doing the work, and why they work best as a team. Opens once you've read “My Grandmother's Secret Is Bacteria”
- Stories The Matka That Sweats to Stay Cold Nani swears matka water is the only water that tastes like water. In Jodhpur, her pot beats the heat by eleven degrees. In Mumbai, in July, it barely tries.
- Unpacked The Oxygen You Breathe Came Out of Water The tree poem says a leaf frees oxygen "from water, not the air". It sounds like a mistake. It isn't, and the way we found out involved purple bacteria, rotten-egg gas and a heavy kind of oxygen. Opens once you've read “Trees Are Made of Thin Air”
- Stories My Phone Died at 20 Per Cent in Spiti At the top of Kunzum Pass, at the exact moment I wanted a photo, my phone gave up. An hour later it came back, looking innocent.
- Satire & Humour Bacteria Form Union, Demand Credit for Idli "Every night we work," said a spokesperson, one thousandth of a millimetre long. "Then somebody's mother gets all the compliments."
- Stories The Mango That Ripened All the Bananas My brother hid three green bananas and a bunch of grapes in Mummy's mango box. Two days later the bananas had overtaken the whole bunch. The grapes had not moved.
- Deep Dives Charging Your Phone Means Pushing Lithium Uphill Plug in your phone and nothing seems to happen. Inside, billions of billions of lithium ions are being forced to move house, from a comfortable home to a cramped one, and that is where the energy is stored.
- Poetry Salt Is a Metal That Explodes and a Poison Gas A poem about the most ordinary thing on the dinner table, made from a metal that bursts into flame in water and a gas that makes you choke.
- Poetry Ice Floats, Which Is Lucky for Fish A poem about the one liquid that breaks the rule almost everything else obeys, and the fish that owe their winters to it.
- Rhetoric There Is No Such Thing as Chemical-Free An argument that the most common label in the shop is the only one guaranteed to be false, and that the right question was asked five hundred years ago.
- Deep Dives Bread Is Held Up by Billions of Tiny Fungi Every loaf is a sponge full of gas made by living things. The holes are where the gas was, and the walls between them are made of a protein net you built with your hands.