The Meal That Bites Back A toad spots something small moving nearby. The larva waves its antennae slowly, irregularly, in a way that reads to the toad’s brain as: food. The tongue fires in roughly one-tenth of a second. The larva disappears. The toad settles back into stillness, apparently satisfied. What follows is not digestion. … Read more
The Argument That Backfired In January 2009, a junior constable from Brisbane’s City Beat unit walked into the Krispy Kreme store on Albert Street in the Brisbane CBD and asked for free donuts. That part was unremarkable. The store had an informal arrangement with local police, and officers had been stopping in for years. What … Read more
The Frozen Food Aisle Meets the Internet In February 2014, Birds Eye, a brand that had spent decades putting fish fingers and potato waffles on British dinner tables, announced a product called Mashtags. These were frozen potato pieces pressed into five shapes: a hashtag, an @ sign, an asterisk, a heart, and a smiley face. … Read more
The Flock That Drew Itself The Image That Stops You Cold Picture an aerial photograph: dark water below, and across its surface, a mass of pink. Then your eye adjusts. The flock has a long, curved neck, a compact body, wings folded just so, the unmistakable silhouette of a flamingo, where every dot making up … Read more
Instructions Not Included (Or Maybe They Were) Open Judges 21 and you will eventually land on a passage where a group of men called the Benjaminites are told, in effect, to hide near a festival, wait for women to start dancing, then grab one and carry her off. The verse is 21:19–25, and it sits … Read more
He Wrote the Sentence. Then He Couldn’t Read It. In 2001, Howard Engel picked up his copy of The Globe and Mail and found he couldn’t read it. The letters were there, but they looked like a script he had never encountered, somewhere between Cyrillic and Korean, completely opaque. This was a man with a … Read more
The Chiropractor and the Elephant Picture a chiropractic appointment, except the patient weighs several tons and has a spine roughly the size of a tree trunk. Dr. Norman “Rod” Block, a Southern California practitioner with approximately 30 years of human chiropractic behind him, has performed spinal adjustments on an elephant at the Meadowbrook Animal Sanctuary … Read more
The Unbeatable Game Walk into any casino and the math is already working against you. Not because the games are rigged in some back-room sense, but because every game on the floor carries a built-in house advantage. American roulette has a house edge of 5.26%. Keno, at some casinos, runs as high as 35%. According … Read more
Deploy the Santas Picture a snow-covered plain filled with 4,000 identical Santa Claus figures, each armed with a candy cane, advancing toward an oncoming wave of penguins, not dozens, not hundreds, but 11,000, pressing forward so densely the ground is invisible. Total headcount: 15,000 characters, all moving, all colliding, all doing their thing simultaneously. This … Read more
Eight Piglets, One Dog, Zero Precedent Treasure had already beaten the odds once. She came off the streets as a stray before landing at Spectrum Plants Gold Coast, a plant nursery on the Gold Coast in Queensland, Australia, run by Wes Trevor. What she did next was harder to explain. Eight piglets arrived at the … Read more