The internet has produced plenty of suspiciously convenient health claims, but few are as appealing as this one: every time you fart, you supposedly burn 67 calories. Repeat the process often enough, the story goes, and your digestive syste...
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Taking a screenshot is one of the smallest computer skills imaginable — right up until you switch from a Mac to Windows, buy a keyboard without an obvious Print Screen key, or need to captur...
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Artificial intelligence used to be the sort of technology most people encountered without thinking about it. It filtered spam, ranked search results, recommended movies and helped cameras re...
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Watch a turkey closely and its stare can seem almost unnervingly steady. Its eyes sit high on the sides of its head, scanning the surroundings while the bird walks, feeds and watches for dan...
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Every email, video stream, security-camera frame, cloud backup, online purchase, AI response and sensor reading leaves a digital trail. Multiply those events across billions of people, phone...
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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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Ask a modern AI whether it is frightened, lonely or aware of its own existence and it may produce an answer that sounds uncannily introspective. It can discuss its “thoughts,” describe imagi...
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Every few years, a headline or social-media post seems to announce the same piece of cosmic good news: Pluto is a planet again. For anyone who learned the old nine-planet Solar System in sch...
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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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Science-fiction space battles have trained us to expect a particular soundtrack: engines roar, lasers crack and exploding spacecraft detonate with a cinematic boom. Put the same battle in th...
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