Watch a turkey closely and its stare can seem almost unnervingly steady. Its eyes sit high on the sides of its head, scanning the surroundings while the bird walks, feeds and watches for danger. Around Thanksgiving, that intense gaze has in...
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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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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 sch...
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It often begins so subtly that you wonder whether you imagined it: a tiny flutter under one eye, a faint pulse in the eyelid, then another. A few minutes later you are staring into a mirror,...
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You are walking past a town hall, courthouse, school or government building when something looks slightly wrong: the flag is not at the top of its pole. It is hanging lower, leaving an unmis...
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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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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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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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When a tropical system appears in the Atlantic, the urge to watch it move across a map can become almost compulsive. A disturbance off Africa becomes a colored area on an outlook. A few days...
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A mosquito bite is usually an itchy annoyance that disappears within a few days. During summer and early autumn in the United States, however, one particular mosquito-borne infection repeate...
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