Latest - Ola88

Japanese washoku: a philosophy of the seasons and the art of balance at the table

15/09/2026
4,940

World - World food culture - Washoku is not simply a list of familiar Japanese dishes. It is a way of watching the seasons, choosing ingredients, combining colours and arranging a meal so that it feels harmonious. A tray that l ..

How to cook bun bo Hue: deep flavour, lemongrass aroma and a broth that stays clear

14/09/2026
4,644

Culture & Cuisine - Cooking guides - A good bun bo Hue has a broth that is reasonably clear but deep in flavour, fragrant with lemongrass, with the shrimp paste melting into the base rather than standing out on its own, and an orange-r ..

The Wow! Signal: 72 Seconds That Kept Humanity Listening to the Cosmos for Half a Century

14/09/2026
5,058

World - Mysteries & the bizarre - On the night of August 15, 1977, the Big Ear radio telescope in Ohio recorded a narrow, powerful signal near the 21 cm hydrogen line. It lasted for only a single 72-second scan, then never reappeare ..

Tunguska 1908: What Exploded in the Skies Over Siberia?

14/09/2026
4,771

World - Mysteries & the bizarre - On the morning of June 30, 1908, a streak of light tore through the Siberian sky and exploded over the taiga near the Podkamennaya Tunguska River. The shock wave flattened trees across more than 2,0 ..

UVB-76: The Mysterious Buzzing Sound Broadcast for Decades on 4625 kHz

14/09/2026
4,709

World - Mysteries & the bizarre - On 4625 kHz, an intermittent buzzing sound has repeated day after day since at least the early 1980s. Occasionally, the channel marker stops, a Russian voice reads out a call sign, code words, and n ..

The Hessdalen Lights: Strange Orbs Continue to Appear Over a Norwegian Valley

13/09/2026
5,060

World - Mysteries & the bizarre - In Norway’s cold and sparsely populated Hessdalen valley, people report white, yellow, or red lights that sometimes hover motionless and sometimes streak across the sky. A wave of sightings in the e ..

Upsweep: the rising tone still echoing across the Pacific

13/09/2026
5,080

World - Mysteries & the bizarre - Ever since NOAA gained access to the SOSUS hydroacoustic data in 1991, listening stations across the Pacific have been recording trains of pulses a few seconds long whose pitch sweeps upward. The so ..

Bloop: The colossal sound under the Pacific and the answer from Antarctic ice

13/09/2026
4,680

World - Mysteries & the bizarre - In 1997, hydrophones spaced more than 3,000 km apart across the Pacific Ocean recorded a very low-frequency sound so powerful that it was given its own name: Bloop. When the sped-up recording was po ..

How to cook thit kho tau: tender rich pork, a clear sauce and eggs that stay soft

13/09/2026
4,639

Culture & Cuisine - Cooking guides - A good thit kho tau has square pieces of pork that keep their shape, tender lean meat and fat that has turned translucent without being cloying; the eggs take on colour outside while the yolks stay ..

How to cook ca kho to: deep flavour, whole pieces of fish and a glossy sauce

12/09/2026
4,749

Culture & Cuisine - Cooking guides - A good ca kho to is more than fish with an attractive brown colour. The pieces have to stay whole, the flesh just cooked and still moist, the sauce lightly glossy but not thick and gluey, and the ba ..

Perytons: the fake cosmic signal produced by a microwave oven

12/09/2026
4,940

World - Mysteries & the bizarre - For years the Parkes telescope in Australia picked up radio pulses in which the high frequencies arrived first and the low frequencies later - the look of a signal that had travelled through plasma ..

Fast radio bursts: millisecond signals carrying colossal energy

12/09/2026
4,838

World - Mysteries & the bizarre - A fast radio burst can end before a human can blink, but in that brief moment, the source in a distant galaxy emits an extraordinary amount of radio energy. When the first FRB was recognized in arch ..

How Did the Sailing Stones of Death Valley Move?

12/09/2026
4,921

World - Mysteries & the bizarre - Across the dry lake bed of Racetrack Playa in Death Valley, stones sit at the ends of long trails as if they crept through the mud when no one was looking. Some weigh hundreds of kilograms, with pat ..

Tabby's Star: Do Its Unusual Dimmings Really Hide a Megastructure?

11/09/2026
4,854

World - Mysteries & the bizarre - In Kepler data, KIC 8462852 occasionally dimmed by more than 20% in irregular curves, much deeper than a normal transiting planet. When familiar causes did not fit immediately, the idea of an "alien ..

Fairy Circles in Namibia: Footprints of the Gods, Sand Termites, or a Battle for Water?

11/09/2026
4,787

World - Mysteries & the bizarre - Across a long strip of the Namib Desert, millions of nearly circular barren patches lie evenly spaced across a grassy carpet. Seen from above, they resemble a grid drawn with a compass. Legend calls ..

LGM-1: the clockwork signal once suspected of being aliens

11/09/2026
4,967

World - Mysteries & the bizarre - In 1967 the postgraduate student Jocelyn Bell noticed a recurring patch of "scruff" on kilometres of chart paper from the Cambridge radio array. Recording at a faster rate turned the signal into pul ..

How to cook chicken braised with ginger: warm and fragrant, tender meat and skin that stays put

11/09/2026
4,869

Culture & Cuisine - Cooking guides - Chicken braised with ginger is an easy home dish, but three things go wrong very easily: the meat dries out, the skin turns flabby, or the ginger is sharply hot without being fragrant. The trick lie ..

Southern Vietnamese sour fish soup: no fishy smell, vegetables still crisp

10/09/2026
4,643

Culture & Cuisine - Cooking guides - A good canh chua ca loc has a clean sourness from tamarind, a gentle sweetness that is nothing like sugar water, fish that is tender but still in whole steaks, and vegetables that are fresh and cris ..

The Taos Hum: the drone only some people hear in the New Mexico desert

10/09/2026
5,053

World - Mysteries & the bizarre - In the early 1990s a number of residents around Taos described a low hum like a diesel engine in the distance, clearer indoors and at night. A neighbour standing in the same room might hear nothing ..

Oumuamua: The First Interstellar Visitor and the Invisible Acceleration

10/09/2026
5,124

World - Mysteries & the bizarre - On October 19, 2017, Pan-STARRS1 detected a point of light leaving the Solar System on a hyperbolic orbit. It was traveling too fast to have ever been gravitationally bound to the Sun and became the ..

Ball lightning: a real glowing sphere or just an illusion after a flash?

10/09/2026
4,875

World - Mysteries & the bizarre - After a lightning flash, witnesses sometimes describe a glowing sphere about the size of an orange floating through the air, lasting a few seconds before fading or exploding. There are accounts of i ..