Author: Ed Hatchet

Ed travels the world (wide web, mostly) to write lists for you to read over breakfast. For more of his stuff, click here.

As far as the universe can be said to exist at all, it probably has 10 dimensions. That’s the only way string theory makes sense. And physicists want string theory to make sense because it could be the Theory of Everything, uniting the otherwise incompatible theories of general relativity (for very big things) and quantum…

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It’s always interesting to find out what people are searching for on Google. Often, they’ll ask questions they deem too silly to ask anywhere else – such as whether it’s possible to stop thinking entirely or to age backwards to get younger. A lot of the time, though, the sillier the question, the more interesting…

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Once you get past the potatoes and the other humdrum members of the family, nightshades can be fascinating plants—often frighteningly so. Whether strikingly beautiful or modestly mediocre, many belie deadly poisons, potent psychoactive effects, and grisly albeit spellbinding histories. According to one theory, they might even have wiped out the dinosaurs. So it’s no surprise…

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It’s easy, even comforting, to think of history’s tyrants as one-dimensional bad guys. That they may have had emotions and frailties as complex as our own threatens to muddy the narrative. But humanizing the inhuman can really drive home the terrifying reality of their despotic regimes, not to mention their sociopathic capacity for compartmentalization. To…

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