When your brand name becomes the ordinary word for the thing, that looks like marketing's biggest win. It can also cost you the trademark. French law sets a precise condition, and simply being famous doesn't meet it: the drift has to be attributable to the owner. Which is why companies write letters to dictionaries.

Your stomach holds hydrochloric acid and an enzyme whose entire job is cutting proteins, and its own wall is built out of proteins. Three defenses keep it standing, and not one of them is the one you would picture. The last isn't armor at all. It is a race, won by rebuilding faster.

You should end up with a piece that is all north and a piece that is all south. You end up with two complete magnets. Cut again, same thing, always. The single-pole version has a name, and it has been hunted in accelerators, under mountains, in ocean water and in rocks from the Moon.

An official commission of veterinarians and teachers examined him and found no fraud. They were right. There was no fraud, and the horse could not count. A young psychologist worked it out, not by watching the owner but by changing the conditions, starting with a question the questioner couldn't answer.

No pump, no heart, no moving part. The roots do push, but their push is measured in a few feet, not in hundreds of them. The engine is at the top, in the leaves, where every molecule that evaporates pulls the one behind it. The column isn't under pressure. It is under tension.

That instantly recognizable smell is injected at a plant, in milligrams per cubic meter, long before the gas reaches your kitchen. The detector the whole system is built around is your own nose. Why odorizing became mandatory, and then spread widely, has a great deal to do with one date in 1937.

After a workout, everybody blames the same thing, and that thing is almost completely odorless. The molecules involved are too large and not volatile enough to reach a nose at all. What lives in your armpit has enzymes you don't, and it cuts those molecules into much smaller pieces.

Early January, northern hemisphere, the middle of winter, and about three million miles nearer the Sun than in July. Distance is clearly not what makes a season. The proof that settles it is happening right now in Australia: same instant, same distance from the Sun, the middle of summer.