The most spectacular sign of a geomagnetic storm can look almost supernatural. Green curtains ripple across the night sky, red light appears hundreds or even thousands of kilometres farther south than normal, and photographs of auroras floo...
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Some of the most senior people inside the U.S. military recently found themselves in an unusual position: sitting in a room, connected to physiological sensors, answering questions while inv...
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Long before Mario jumped over his first barrel, before the Game Boy disappeared into millions of backpacks and before families swung Wii Remotes in front of television screens, Nintendo sold...
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On the evening of October 29, 1969, a student programmer at UCLA began typing a word into a computer. The machine was connected over a network to another computer at the Stanford Research In...
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Step out of a dark cinema into brilliant afternoon sunlight and, for some people, the reaction is immediate. The eyes narrow, the nose begins to tingle and within seconds comes an involuntar...
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For 73 years, the Titanic existed in two places at once: in history, where the details of its final night were argued over in inquiries, newspapers and survivor testimony, and somewhere in t...
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Seal a cat inside a box with a radioactive atom, a radiation detector and a mechanism capable of releasing poison. Arrange the experiment so that, after an hour, the atom has a 50 percent ch...
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Draw a line from Miami to Bermuda, another from Bermuda to Puerto Rico, and a third back toward Florida, and you have the rough outline of one of the most famous imaginary places on Earth. T...
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Imagine exchanging messages with an unseen stranger. The replies are witty, coherent and sensitive to context. The stranger remembers what you said earlier, catches a joke, explains a diffic...
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There is a place on Earth where Mount Everest could be lowered beneath the waves and its summit would still remain underwater. It lies in the western Pacific, in the Mariana Trench, where th...
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