On the evening of May 17, 1884, New Yorkers witnessed a sight strange enough to compete with the bridge beneath it. A procession of circus animals moved across the East River from Manhattan toward Brooklyn: camels, elephants and, among them...
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A solitary desert locust can spend its life trying to avoid other locusts. Put enough of them together, however, and something extraordinary begins to happen. The insects become more active,...
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You walk into a café you have never visited. The tables, the light from the window and the conversation at the next table suddenly feel uncannily familiar. For a few seconds, there is an ove...
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Nelson Mandela did not die in a South African prison in the 1980s. He was released in 1990, became South Africa’s first Black president in 1994 and died in 2013 at the age of 95. Yet some pe...
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In 1929, while scholars were cataloguing manuscripts in Istanbul's Topkapı Palace, they encountered a fragment of an extraordinary world map. Painted in vivid colors on parchment traditional...
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For years, the basic experience of generative AI could be reduced to a remarkably simple exchange: you type something, the machine types something back. Ask for a summary, a translation, an...
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Stones that float on water? Sounds impossible—unless you’re in Rameswaram, India. Here, ancient stones defy gravity, floating on the surface like driftwood. Linked to one of Hinduism’s gr...
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Before there were alien abductions and Area 51 memes, there were the Contactees. These were people—mostly in the 1950s—who claimed not only to see UFOs, but to have had face-to-face chats wi...
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Long before Zoom meetings and TikTok streams, the first webcam in history had a surprisingly humble mission: to monitor a coffee pot. In 1991, researchers at the University of Cambridge g...
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Rising from a sea of mist in central Italy is Civita di Bagnoregio, a medieval village perched on top of a crumbling volcanic cliff. Often called “The Dying Town,” Civita seems straight out...
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