ARCHIVE.

A micromort is a one-in-a-million chance of dying, packaged as a unit. Giving tiny risks a shared scale lets them be compared and, within limits, added up. And the limits turn out to be the interesting part.

A century ago, a quiet electric car was a perfectly normal way to get around town. Then the job it was good at stopped being the job most drivers wanted done, and a better battery, much later, helped bring it back.

Things can get better and people can still feel worse off. It depends on who they're comparing themselves with.

A comet's tail isn't exhaust trailing behind it. It points away from the Sun, wherever the comet happens to be going. And look closely, and there are two of them, because the Sun is pushing on the comet in two quite different ways.

In Jane Austen's Emma, a young man nearly confesses something, and the narrator tells us he "was more in love with her than Emma had supposed". It reads like a fact. It isn't. It's Emma's own guess, slipped into the narrator's voice without a single quotation mark, and once you can spot the trick, you'll find it all over the novels you read.

Inside many of your cells are tiny structures that carry their own DNA, separate from the DNA in the cell's nucleus. They are the descendants of bacteria that were swallowed more than a billion years ago, never got digested, and never left.

Dub the sound of one syllable onto a film of a mouth shaping another, and people report hearing a syllable that's on neither track. The trick is old, simple and stubborn, and it shows sight reaching into hearing.