When Iñupiat hunters and biologists began finding ancient weapon fragments inside bowhead whales harvested in Arctic Alaska, the discoveries posed an extraordinary question: how long had these animals been swimming with pieces of an earlier...
Read article
In the old medina of Fez, behind carved doors and walls that have witnessed more than a millennium of Moroccan history, books have survived dynasties, wars, political upheavals and the arriv...
Read
From the ground, Earth is almost too large to understand. Nations fill maps. Mountain ranges divide regions. Oceans separate continents. Political borders seem concrete because they organize...
Read
Listen to some of NASA's most famous recordings from the outer Solar System and space does not sound silent at all. Jupiter whistles, crackles and roars. Saturn produces eerie rising tones....
Read
Suppose engineers invent a computer chip that performs the same calculation using half as much electricity. The obvious conclusion is that electricity consumption should fall. Now suppose th...
Read
Technology is supposed to age quickly. Phones become obsolete, startups disappear, frameworks fall out of fashion and yesterday's revolutionary software becomes tomorrow's migration problem....
Read
There is a place in the South Pacific where the horizon contains nothing but water and the nearest scraps of land are roughly 2,688 kilometers away. No island marks the spot. There is no lig...
Read
Few keyboard shortcuts have acquired a reputation beyond computing itself. Ctrl-C means copy, Alt-Tab switches windows, but Control-Alt-Delete became something larger: a universal gesture of...
Read
A dashboard can be perfectly accurate and still tell the wrong story. Traffic rises 28 percent, engagement improves, impressions reach a record high and the chart turns reassuringly green —...
Read
Modern elections are designed to look ordinary. Voters enter a booth, mark a choice, deposit a ballot and wait for arithmetic to produce a winner. In medieval and early modern Europe, choosi...
Read