Taste a drop of seawater and the answer seems obvious: the ocean contains salt. The more interesting question is how it got there. There are no gigantic salt deposits steadily dissolving into every sea, and most rivers taste fresh even thou...
Read article
Step out of a dark cinema into brilliant afternoon sunlight and, for some people, the reaction is immediate. The eyes narrow, the nose begins to tingle and within seconds comes an involuntar...
Read
For 73 years, the Titanic existed in two places at once: in history, where the details of its final night were argued over in inquiries, newspapers and survivor testimony, and somewhere in t...
Read
Draw a line from Miami to Bermuda, another from Bermuda to Puerto Rico, and a third back toward Florida, and you have the rough outline of one of the most famous imaginary places on Earth. T...
Read
Few foods carry a national story as neatly as Pizza Margherita. Red tomato, white mozzarella and green basil seem to reproduce the Italian flag on a circle of dough. According to the story r...
Read
Imagine exchanging messages with an unseen stranger. The replies are witty, coherent and sensitive to context. The stranger remembers what you said earlier, catches a joke, explains a diffic...
Read
Somewhere on Earth, while you read this sentence, babies are being born and people are dying. Others are crossing national borders, changing the population of one country without changing th...
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
In the Chihuahuan Desert of northern Mexico, where Durango, Chihuahua and Coahuila approach one another across an immense dry basin, a patch of landscape has acquired one of the strangest re...
Read
For generations, chemistry books could place bismuth near the end of the periodic table's stable territory. Its naturally occurring isotope, bismuth-209, showed no detectable radioactive dec...
Read