Step out of a dark cinema into brilliant afternoon sunlight and, for some people, the reaction is immediate. The eyes narrow, the nose begins to tingle and within seconds comes an involuntary sneeze — sometimes two or three in rapid success...
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For 73 years, the Titanic existed in two places at once: in history, where the details of its final night were argued over in inquiries, newspapers and survivor testimony, and somewhere in t...
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Seal a cat inside a box with a radioactive atom, a radiation detector and a mechanism capable of releasing poison. Arrange the experiment so that, after an hour, the atom has a 50 percent ch...
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Imagine exchanging messages with an unseen stranger. The replies are witty, coherent and sensitive to context. The stranger remembers what you said earlier, catches a joke, explains a diffic...
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In the Chihuahuan Desert of northern Mexico, where Durango, Chihuahua and Coahuila approach one another across an immense dry basin, a patch of landscape has acquired one of the strangest re...
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On October 30, 1961, a Soviet Tu-95 bomber crossed the frozen landscape of Novaya Zemlya carrying an object so large that the aircraft had been specially modified to accommodate it. The bomb...
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Quantum entanglement is often introduced with a sentence that sounds like science fiction: two particles can be linked so deeply that changing one instantly changes the other, even if they a...
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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...
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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...
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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...
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