“The cloud” may be the most successful disappearing act in modern technology. Upload a photograph and it seems to float away. Stream a film and it arrives from nowhere. Ask an AI system a question and an answer materializes on a glass scree...
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Bluetooth is such an ordinary part of modern life that its name barely sounds strange anymore. We tap an icon and headphones connect to a phone, a keyboard finds a computer, or a car starts...
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A bitcoin cannot be held in your hand. It does not represent a legal claim on a company, pay a dividend or give its owner a stream of rental income. There is no warehouse containing one bar...
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Look down at almost any laptop, desktop keyboard or smartphone in the English-speaking world and the first six letters are the same: Q-W-E-R-T-Y. The arrangement feels so inevitable that it...
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If Mars can come within roughly 55 million kilometers of Earth, why does a spacecraft sent there travel something closer to 480 million kilometers — and spend around seven months doing it? T...
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There is a moment at almost every birthday party when the room changes. The lights dim, a cake appears, tiny flames tremble above the icing and everyone waits while one person silently makes...
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Stay in a swimming pool or bathtub long enough and something peculiar happens to your hands. The smooth pads of your fingers turn into a landscape of ridges and valleys, as if the skin has s...
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There are few moments quite like looking into the toilet and discovering that something which is normally brown has turned unmistakably green. It is the kind of question many people would ra...
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You are walking past a town hall, courthouse, school or government building when something looks slightly wrong: the flag is not at the top of its pole. It is hanging lower, leaving an unmis...
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Every email address contains a tiny piece of computing history. Between a person's name and the domain sits a character that most of us type without thinking: @.It seems inevitable now. We r...
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