Liam Shaw

The pain​ of toothache arrives long after the damage has been done. The process begins when bacteria in the mouth turn sugars from our food into acid, which etches the tooth’s enamel, allowing the bacteria to penetrate further. Only when they hit the nerve bundles at the tooth’s pulpy core does the sufferer become aware – all too painfully aware – of their...

‘Great Auk’ by John James Audubon (1836).

The great auk, or garefowl, was a flightless North Atlantic seabird and it tasted delicious, perhaps a little like duck with a hint of seaweed. It’s hard to be sure because by the 1860s the great auk was extinct. It had once been abundant: in the 16th century, a breeding ground off Newfoundland – known as Funk Island for the...

When​ Virgin Galactic’s spaceplane VSS Unity made its third commercial flight on 8 September 2023, its three crew members were accompanied by three paying customers, ‘private astronauts’ who had bought their tickets as long ago as 2004 (when they were a bit less than half the current asking price of $450,000). Ken Baxter, a Las Vegas real-estate investor; the British racing...

The old​ Palais de Justice in Lyon is one of the finest examples of neoclassical architecture in France. Its entrance hall is flanked with marble columns, and winged lions prowl the architraves.Between 1845 and 1995, it housed the major courts for the surrounding region. From 1912, access to the world’s first official police forensic laboratory was gained by entering through a back...

On an atoll​ in the Indian Ocean, on an April day in 1836 when the water was unusually smooth, Charles Darwin wandered out over a coral reef. He gazed through the water into the ‘gullies and hollows’ below. He admired the scene, though not excessively. The naturalists he had read had described ‘submarine grottos decked with a thousand beauties’. This was, he thought,...