You walk into a café you have never visited. The tables, the light from the window and the conversation at the next table suddenly feel uncannily familiar. For a few seconds, there is an overwhelming conviction that this exact moment has ha...
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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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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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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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Ice presents a small everyday mystery. A cold pavement can be dangerously slippery even when the air temperature is far below freezing, while many other crystalline solids are perfectly easy...
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Look down at a computer keyboard and you are looking at a museum whose exhibits still work. Some keys preserve decisions made by nineteenth-century typewriter manufacturers. Others carry sym...
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There is a peculiar kind of certainty that appears around traditional food. A grandmother made a dish one way, a restaurant in its supposed birthplace serves it another, and suddenly one ver...
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Few subjects can turn an ordinary Italian lunch into a tribunal quite as quickly as a traditional recipe. Put cream in carbonara, use pancetta instead of guanciale, add garlic where somebody...
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The idea of launching an object into space was born of a scientific and political ambition that changed the course of history. The first artificial satellite, launched in 1957, was not jus...
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Was wine invented in Georgia or by the Romans? The answer isn't as simple as one might think. While Georgia holds the title for the oldest wine, Rome may be the birthplace of modern wine cul...
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