Every email, video stream, security-camera frame, cloud backup, online purchase, AI response and sensor reading leaves a digital trail. Multiply those events across billions of people, phones, computers, factories and connected devices, and...
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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 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 r...
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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...
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High on a mountain in late spring, a patch of snow can suddenly look as though someone spilled watermelon juice across it. The surface turns pale pink, rose red or even crimson, sometimes st...
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Every September, the technology calendar suddenly becomes crowded. New phones appear within days of one another. Operating systems move from summer previews to public releases. Chipmakers an...
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Few English words have traveled as far politically as “woke.” Depending on who says it, the word can mean alert to racial injustice, broadly progressive, excessively politically correct, per...
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Stand on a beach and the ocean looks almost two-dimensional: a glittering surface stretching to the horizon. The reality underneath is closer to an inverted mountain world. Plains, ridges, v...
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If someone asks when World War II ended, the safest short answer is 1945. If they ask for the exact date, history becomes more interesting. Was it May 8, when Nazi Germany's defeat ended the...
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The most spectacular sign of a geomagnetic storm can look almost supernatural. Green curtains ripple across the night sky, red light appears hundreds or even thousands of kilometres farther...
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