Around the house
Keeping ordinary things working, and knowing when they won't
Food
Why does bread go stale faster in the fridge?
Staling is starch slowly re-crystallising rather than bread drying out, and that crystallisation runs fastest at exactly the temperature a fridge holds.
5 min read
Engineering
Why do carbon monoxide alarms matter when smoke alarms already exist?
Carbon monoxide has no smell, no colour and no smoke, and it binds to your blood hundreds of times more readily than oxygen — so nothing you can sense tells you it is there.
5 min read
Engineering
Why do bridges have expansion joints?
Steel and concrete get longer when they warm up, and a bridge with nowhere to put that extra length will either buckle or tear itself apart.
5 min read
Engineering
Why do SSDs wear out?
Every write forces electrons through a thin insulating layer, and each crossing damages that insulation slightly until the cell can no longer reliably hold a charge.
6 min readintermediate