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Fact-based Nature Did It First
A pine cone opens in dry air and shuts in the rain without a single living cell, and engineers have copied its swelling layers to build shading that needs no motor and no electricity.
Fact-based Nature Did It First
The florets in a sunflower head sit in a spiral that wastes no space, and engineers found that the same pattern fits a field of solar mirrors into a fifth less land.
Fact-based Cosmic Questions
The yellow in an autumn leaf was hiding there all summer, the red is made fresh in its last weeks, and the frost that usually gets the credit actually spoils the show.
Fact-based Nature Did It First
A lotus leaf is far too bumpy for dirt to hold on to, and once a microscope explained why, the same trick went onto building walls, fabrics and glass.
Fiction Tiny Stories
A window box on the third floor of Aldergate Road is planted the wrong way round on purpose, so that the people waiting for the 47 have something better to look at than a shuttered travel agent.
Fact-based Weird Facts
A global count using satellites and four hundred thousand forest plots put Earth's tree total near three trillion, several times the stars our whole galaxy is thought to hold.
Fact-based Nature Did It First
A walk in the woods in 1941 ended with burrs clinging to a dog's fur, and one close look under a microscope gave the world the hook-and-loop fastener.
Fiction Tiny Stories
Thirty-one plots, thirty-one opinions about slugs, and one single tomato that everybody grows, because a woman on plot twelve once dried seeds on a saucer.
Fiction Useless Inventions
A glazed ceramic pot with a tiny built-in speaker that reads your houseplant a soothing story every evening, so you no longer have to feel guilty about never talking to it.
Fact-based Weird Facts
Certain bamboos have been measured growing about 91 centimetres in 24 hours, roughly a millimetre every ninety seconds, which is fast enough that you could almost watch it happen.