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 ground interrupt the grassland, often with a taller fr...
Read article
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...
Read
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...
Read
Few astronomical discoveries have produced a nickname as irresistible as the “diamond planet.” About 41 light-years away in the constellation Cancer, 55 Cancri e is a super-Earth nearly twic...
Read
At this moment, Earth is moving in several different ways at once. It spins on its axis, circles the Sun at roughly 30 kilometers per second, and accompanies the entire Solar System on a vas...
Read
In the old medina of Fez, behind carved doors and walls that have witnessed more than a millennium of Moroccan history, books have survived dynasties, wars, political upheavals and the arriv...
Read
From the ground, Earth is almost too large to understand. Nations fill maps. Mountain ranges divide regions. Oceans separate continents. Political borders seem concrete because they organize...
Read
There is a place in the South Pacific where the horizon contains nothing but water and the nearest scraps of land are roughly 2,688 kilometers away. No island marks the spot. There is no lig...
Read
A setting exists on your phone but vanishes on your laptop. An onboarding screen refuses to advance even though every field appears complete. An organization account opens a dashboard that a...
Read
In 1947, computer scientists working on the Harvard Mark II, one of the earliest electromechanical computers, noticed a malfunction in the system. Upon inspection, they found the cause: a d...
Read