Computer viruses have a reputation for destruction. They can erase files, encrypt disks, steal passwords and make a computer unusable. But can malicious software cross the invisible boundary between code and matter and actually break the ma...
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Ask the meaning of life in the right corner of the internet and there is a good chance someone will answer with a number: 42. It has become one of popular culture’s most durable private joke...
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Ask whether snakes have legs and the obvious answer seems to be no. A cobra, viper or grass snake has no arms, no feet and no visible limbs at all. Yet the evolutionary answer is more intere...
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On November 20, 1969, Apollo 12 astronauts Pete Conrad and Alan Bean left the lunar surface and rejoined Richard Gordon in orbit. Their lunar module's ascent stage was no longer useful, so m...
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Suppose you buy a brand-new one-terabyte SSD and place it on an impossibly precise scale. Then you fill every available byte with photographs, films, documents and music. Has the drive becom...
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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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Wi-Fi feels almost absurdly simple from the outside. Tap a network name, enter a password, and within seconds a phone can stream a film from a server thousands of kilometers away. No cable r...
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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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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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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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