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 involuntary sneeze — sometimes two or three in rapid success...
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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...
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Look closely at the tip of your finger and you are looking at a landscape that began forming months before you were born. Ridges curve, split, stop and rejoin in patterns so detailed that th...
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You walk into a café you have never visited. The tables, the light from the window and the conversation at the next table suddenly feel uncannily familiar. For a few seconds, there is an ove...
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Nelson Mandela did not die in a South African prison in the 1980s. He was released in 1990, became South Africa’s first Black president in 1994 and died in 2013 at the age of 95. Yet some pe...
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When George Herbert, the 5th Earl of Carnarvon, died in Cairo on April 5, 1923, the timing was almost too perfect for a sensational story. Only months earlier he had stood with archaeologist...
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There is a place on Earth where Mount Everest could be lowered beneath the waves and its summit would still remain underwater. It lies in the western Pacific, in the Mariana Trench, where th...
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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...
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A dog stops halfway through a walk, lowers its head and begins grazing with the concentration of a miniature cow. For many owners, what happens next seems obvious: the dog must have an upset...
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It is one of those questions that sounds almost too simple to deserve a scientific explanation. Look up on a clear afternoon and the sky is blue. Yet that familiar color is the visible resul...
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