On the evening of May 17, 1884, New Yorkers witnessed a sight strange enough to compete with the bridge beneath it. A procession of circus animals moved across the East River from Manhattan toward Brooklyn: camels, elephants and, among them...
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The James Webb Space Telescope is often introduced through spectacular pictures: glowing stellar nurseries, delicate shells of gas, galaxies from the young universe and strange worlds orbiti...
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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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When artificial-intelligence stocks surge, most attention goes to the companies designing the chips. Nvidia became the emblem of the AI boom because its GPUs perform much of the enormous par...
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On most nights, Americans who want to see the northern lights need to travel a very long way north. Then the Sun becomes unusually active, NOAA issues a geomagnetic-storm watch or warning, a...
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Every September, the technology calendar suddenly becomes crowded. New phones appear within days of one another. Operating systems move from summer previews to public releases. Chipmakers an...
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During Atlantic hurricane season, a disturbance thousands of miles from Florida can become one of the most searched subjects in the United States within hours. A colored blob appears on a we...
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Artificial intelligence has become one of those phrases that seems to describe everything at once. It can mean the system that recommends a song, the software that detects a suspicious bank...
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There is a point in an Arctic winter when ordinary ideas about daytime stop being useful. The sun may skim the horizon without properly rising, snow can turn blue in the long twilight, and a...
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On a clear Arctic night, the sky can begin almost imperceptibly. A pale band appears above the horizon, faint enough to be mistaken for a cloud. Then it brightens. The band folds into curtai...
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