The Western and Orthodox Christian traditions usually celebrate the same festivals on different dates. But in 2025, their Easter dates align. Here's why.

A while ago I treated you to a dissertation entitled “Does The Sun Set On The British Empire?”, and concluded that it doesn't. The UK's widely scattered overseas territories, sparse though they are, mean that the sun is still always shining, somewhere in t...

A pint’s a pound the world around. Traditional American mnemonic A pint of water’s a pound and a quarter. Traditional British mnemonic There’s something odd going on there, isn’t there? I learned that British mnemonic at primary school, and I can still viv...

At the meeting of the Society in November last I mentioned that on the day of the next opposition of the planet Mars, the Earth and Moon, as seen from Mars, would cross the Sun’s disk, a phenomenon which has not happened since the year 1800, and I stated t...

Human eyes have round pupils, but there is considerable variation in the animal kingdom, from the vertical slit pupil of a cat, to the horizontal slot of a goat, as pictured above. So Martin S. Banks and his colleagues asked the question “Why?” in an artic...