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 swimming in ancient seas hundreds of millions of y...
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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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Open the Voynich Manuscript and almost everything about it looks tantalizingly close to comprehension. Lines of neat handwriting run from left to right. Words are separated by spaces. Paragr...
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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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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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Put a slice of aged cheddar in a hot pan and things can become unpredictable. It may soften beautifully, but push the temperature too far and orange oil can pool around clumps of tightening...
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You open a social-media app to check one headline. A war update leads to a natural disaster, which leads to political outrage, an economic warning and a frightening health story. Twenty minu...
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Your passport knows exactly how old you are. Your cells are a more complicated matter. Two people born on the same day can reach middle age with very different cardiovascular health, physica...
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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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