On August 11, 1994, a man in Philadelphia sat down at a computer and bought a CD. The album was Sting’s Ten Summoner’s Tales, the price was $12.48 plus shipping, and the seller was a young company called NetMarket. Nothing about the object...
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Put a glass of water near a cat and it may drink calmly. Turn on a faucet and the same cat might become fascinated, batting at droplets for minutes. Lower it into a bathtub, however, and you...
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Space is famously cold. The number repeated in textbooks, documentaries and trivia lists is about 2.7 kelvin, or roughly −270.4 °C — less than three degrees above absolute zero.That number i...
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The internet contains billions of websites, streams enormous quantities of video, connects data centers across continents and crosses oceans through cables thousands of kilometers long. So i...
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Artificial intelligence used to be the sort of technology most people encountered without thinking about it. It filtered spam, ranked search results, recommended movies and helped cameras re...
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Ask a modern AI whether it is frightened, lonely or aware of its own existence and it may produce an answer that sounds uncannily introspective. It can discuss its “thoughts,” describe imagi...
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Every few years, a headline or social-media post seems to announce the same piece of cosmic good news: Pluto is a planet again. For anyone who learned the old nine-planet Solar System in sch...
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If Mars can come within roughly 55 million kilometers of Earth, why does a spacecraft sent there travel something closer to 480 million kilometers — and spend around seven months doing it? T...
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There is a moment at almost every birthday party when the room changes. The lights dim, a cake appears, tiny flames tremble above the icing and everyone waits while one person silently makes...
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Few breakfast foods come with a better internet story than Corn Flakes. According to the version repeated across social media, Dr. John Harvey Kellogg invented the famously plain cereal in t...
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