British law entitles staff to every penny of a service charge
British law bans an employer from keeping any part of a card or cash tip, including a service charge added to the bill before a worker sees it.
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Desalination boils or filters the salt out of seawater
A desalination plant strips salt from seawater by boiling it or forcing it through a membrane, leaving drinkable water and a salty waste called brine.
A Dublin team's computer search proved Sudoku's 17-clue floor
In 2012, a University College Dublin team's exhaustive computer search proved no 16-clue Sudoku grid has a single, unique solution.
A warehouse robot's job is carrying, not picking
A warehouse robot spends its shift moving pallets, totes, and shelves under a routing system, while a person still handles most single items.
New robot submersibles aim to explore the ocean's hadal zone
Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution and NASA built Orpheus, a small robot submarine meant to survey the ocean trenches below 6,000 metres.
A chameleon rearranges skin crystals to shift colour
A chameleon shifts colour by rearranging crystals in its skin, not by mixing pigment, and the switch is mostly about signalling, not hiding.
Timing decides what a Las Vegas flight costs
Which? found a £433 Las Vegas return by flying on New Year's Eve, against a £709 average, and KAYAK lists one-way fares to Vegas from $44.
Two Chinese towers pulled the core out of the middle
A skyscraper's core holds its lifts and mechanical services. Two towers in Beijing and Shenzhen split it or set it apart from the offices.
Enem: the exam that decides who gets into university in Brazil
Brazil's Enem replaced universities' separate entrance tests with one national exam that almost every public university now uses to admit students.
Amazon paid $775 million for a warehouse robot maker
In 2012 Amazon bought Kiva Systems for $775 million in cash, taking in-house the robots that brought items to warehouse workers.
What a blue plaque costs in England, and who decides
A blue plaque has cost about £1,000 to make and install, but no national body sets that fee. Each scheme runs its own rules and its own price.
A planarian cut into pieces grows back its head
A planarian flatworm rebuilds a whole head from a scrap of body, using stem cells that can make any tissue and a chemical signal that says which end is which.
Coral polyps build reefs from the skeletons they leave behind
A coral reef is limestone laid down by tiny animals. Each polyp builds a skeleton from calcium carbonate, and the skeleton stays in the reef after it dies.
A Broadway show earns back its investors, one week at a time
A Broadway show recoups its backers only once weekly earnings beat its running costs, a bar few recent musicals have cleared.
A hot, dry pan turns a steak's crust into flavour
Dry heat pushes a steak's surface past 150°C, where amino acids and sugars react and rebuild themselves into thousands of new flavour compounds.
No decoding of the Voynich manuscript has survived scrutiny
Three researchers have separately announced they cracked the Voynich manuscript's code since 2017. None produced a translation other experts accept.
A researcher unlocked an encrypted laptop in about five minutes
A 2020 demonstration called Thunderspy unlocked encrypted Windows and Linux laptops in minutes. A separate flaw breaks the security chip in Macs.
Rachel Carson's book set off the US fight that banned DDT
Silent Spring exposed DDT's toll on wildlife in 1962. It took a decade of research, lawsuits and a new federal agency to get the chemical banned.
A surgeon still controls the surgical robots used on patients
A surgeon drives the surgical robots used on patients today, from an NHS console to the labs training robots to work with less help.
Afghanistan's instrument bonfires: how the Taliban hushed music
Since 2021 the Taliban have burned instruments, shut music stations and driven Afghanistan's singers into hiding or exile. This is how they did it.
James Flynn found IQ scores rising for decades
James Flynn found IQ scores rising by about three points a decade across nearly thirty countries, a shift too fast for genes to explain.
The EU's GDPR replaced a law from when 1% of Europe was online
The EU's GDPR replaced the 1995 Data Protection Directive. It kept most of the old principles, added accountability, and set fines of up to 4% of revenue.
Josef Čapek coined the word robot, not his brother Karel
Karel Čapek's 1921 play R.U.R. made the word 'robot' famous, but his brother Josef, a painter, is the one who coined it.
Seabed 2030 has mapped 28.7% of the world's ocean floor
An international project has charted 28.7% of the seabed in detail, adding five million square kilometres of new data in a year.