Every email address contains a tiny piece of computing history. Between a person's name and the domain sits a character that most of us type without thinking: @.It seems inevitable now. We read name@example.com almost instinctively as “name...
Read article
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...
Read
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...
Read
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...
Read
Few words sound more futuristic than “robot.” It belongs to Mars rovers, factory arms, humanoid machines and today's arguments about artificial intelligence. Yet the word did not originate i...
Read
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...
Read
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...
Read
A solitary desert locust can spend its life trying to avoid other locusts. Put enough of them together, however, and something extraordinary begins to happen. The insects become more active,...
Read
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...
Read
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...
Read