Explained

Hand-drawn split picture: an angry crowd of round-headed figures pointing at a grey windowless building behind a fence, and on the other side a green lawn under arcing sprinklers
You Are Angry at the Wrong Building
One AI prompt does not drink a bottle of water. Here is what US data centers really use, why the numbers online are so far apart, the strongest case against... Read more...
Hand-drawn stack of thin horizontal lines on cream paper, each with a small bump in the middle, lettered PULSE PROFILE
You Have Been Wearing a Dead Star on a T-Shirt
The stacked wavy lines on the Unknown Pleasures album cover are not a design. They are a recording of the first pulsar ever found: a dead star the size of... Read more...
Hand-drawn long lumpy brown fossil dropping above a measuring arrow lettered 67.5 CM
The Biggest Poos in the History of the Planet
The largest fossilized dung ever found is 67.5 centimeters long. A Viking one in York is insured for about $39,000. And dung settled how T. rex ate, started a war... Read more...
Hand-drawn giant ground sloth standing on its hind legs pulling down a tree branch, a small round-headed figure at its feet
Everything Big Died, and It Was Probably Your Fault
Twenty thousand years ago there were sloths four meters tall, armadillos the size of cars and lions in America. Nearly all of it vanished, continent by continent, just as people... Read more...
Hand-drawn line-up of five round-headed figures in different coloured robes against a height chart, the first one circled in red
We Were Not Alone: Every Other Kind of Human
For two million years there was always more than one kind of human. Then, about 40,000 years ago, there was only us. Every other species, how we know, and what... Read more...
Hand-drawn cartoon: a grey asteroid the size of London hanging over the Houses of Parliament, St Paul's and Tower Bridge, a small stick figure on the river bank
The Day the Asteroid Hit, Minute by Minute
Sixty-six million years ago a rock six miles wide hit Mexico. What happened in the next second, minute, hour, year and million years, in order, and how anybody knows. Read more...
Hand-drawn cartoon: a straight Kansas road through wheat today, beside the same spot 85 million years ago, deep blue sea with a marine lizard swimming in it
What Your State Looked Like Before You Ruined It
Kansas was a sea, Utah was a sand sea bigger than the Sahara's, Wyoming had crocodiles and the rock under Florida came from Africa. All fifty states, west to east,... Read more...