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 school, the idea has obvious emotional appeal. Unfort...
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Dog owners become experts in noticing small mysteries. One week the mystery is a dog that seems unable to stop licking its front paws. The next it is the same animal stepping onto the lawn a...
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A newly hatched chick enters the world with an urgent problem. It can walk almost immediately, but walking in the wrong direction could be fatal. In nature, staying near a parent means warmt...
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In 1997, IBM's Deep Blue defeated world chess champion Garry Kasparov in a match. The achievement looked like a milestone on the road to machine intelligence: a computer had conquered a game...
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Few animals have contributed to modern medicine in a way quite as improbable as the horseshoe crab. It looks prehistoric because, in evolutionary terms, it is. Horseshoe-crab relatives were...
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From the air, parts of the Namib Desert look as if someone has stamped an enormous sheet of polka dots across the landscape. Thousands upon thousands of roughly circular patches of bare grou...
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On the morning of November 14, 1963, sailors south of Iceland saw something that looked at first like a ship on fire. A dark column was rising from the North Atlantic. It was not smoke from...
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High on a mountain in late spring, a patch of snow can suddenly look as though someone spilled watermelon juice across it. The surface turns pale pink, rose red or even crimson, sometimes st...
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Imagine taking the mass of a mountain and compressing it until its boundary is smaller than an atom. There would be no miniature rocky mountain inside, no visible sphere and certainly nothin...
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In daylight, the water may look ordinary — or even unappealingly reddish-brown. Then darkness falls, a wave breaks, and the shoreline suddenly flashes electric blue. Footsteps sparkle in wet...
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