Dazzle Camouflage: Hiding in Plain Sight
Kaushik Patowary
Mar 5, 2021
Unlike a submarine that can lurk beneath the waves, or an artillery tank that can camouflage itself among trees and the surrounding terrain,...
Pisonia: The Tree That Kills Birds
Kaushik Patowary
Mar 4, 2021
An overwhelming majority of plants depend upon birds and insects for seed dispersal. Plants attract pollinators by releasing aromatic compou...
The Lakeview Gusher: The Mother of Oil Spills
Kaushik Patowary
Mar 3, 2021
In the early days of oil drilling, when tools were basic and technology was lacking, every new oil well sunk into the ground ran the risk of...
The Pumps That Keep Germany Dry
Kaushik Patowary
Mar 1, 2021
The Ruhr valley in North Rhine-Westphalia was once Germany’s industrial heartland producing coal and steel, the two very essential raw mater...
Boot Scrapers
Kaushik Patowary
Mar 1, 2021
In the days before automobiles, when streets were meant for horses and their carts mostly, walking through mud and excrement was an unavoida...
Hitler’s Monster Railway
Kaushik Patowary
Feb 27, 2021
Hitler’s megalomaniac plans for Germany included a monumental new railway. This railway was supposed to connect the most important cities i...
The Great Smog of 1952
Kaushik Patowary
Feb 24, 2021
Londoners are no stranger to the cold, but on the morning of December 5, 1952, the sting of winter was felt worse than ever. The cold had th...
Johann Josef Loschmidt And Avogadro’s Number
Kaushik Patowary
Feb 22, 2021
Johann Josef Loschmidt is a name that might not ring many bells, yet everyone who took chemistry in junior college had surely come across Lo...
The Mad World of Hat Making
Kaushik Patowary
Feb 19, 2021
Hat-making in the 18th and 19th centuries was a hazardous business, because it involved the use of many chemicals, one of which was the toxi...
The Ingenuity of The ‘Ha-Ha’
Kaushik Patowary
Feb 17, 2021
What’s in a wall but a simple structure to keep intruders out, you might say. But a surprising amount of thought goes behind the constructio...
