Why does a cut you can barely see hurt so much? The science of paper cuts, from your fingertips’ nerve density to the physicists who built a paper knife.
Yellow autumn leaves are a reveal; red ones are a pigment the tree makes from scratch. Why a tree bothers, and why eastern North America seems to do it more than Europe.
This is the ground of the colony's first farm, and the crop failed. The garden that followed in 1816 is the oldest in Australia — a claim Tasmania's own botanical gardens concede. Two things older accounts promise are no longer there: the flying-foxes were driven out in 2012, and the Tropical Centre's pyramid glasshouse was demolished in 2015.
Three of the best things on Observatory Hill are routinely mis-told. The transit circle is a telescope, not a clock. The time ball has not stopped — it still drops daily at one o'clock, as it has since 1858. And this is not Australia's oldest astronomical centre, a claim the Observatory itself never makes.
The aquarium older accounts describe has largely ceased to exist — no platypus, no crocodile, no seal, no tiger or lemon shark, and not one of the five zone names in circulation survives. Of the two rescued dugongs, one has died and the other has moved out of the exhibit built for them. One warning about figures: the operator's own website gives three different species counts on three different pages.
