Bluetooth is such an ordinary part of modern life that its name barely sounds strange anymore. We tap an icon and headphones connect to a phone, a keyboard finds a computer, or a car starts playing music wirelessly. But judged as the name o...
Read article
On November 20, 1969, Apollo 12 astronauts Pete Conrad and Alan Bean left the lunar surface and rejoined Richard Gordon in orbit. Their lunar module's ascent stage was no longer useful, so m...
Read
Wi-Fi feels almost absurdly simple from the outside. Tap a network name, enter a password, and within seconds a phone can stream a film from a server thousands of kilometers away. No cable r...
Read
Science-fiction space battles have trained us to expect a particular soundtrack: engines roar, lasers crack and exploding spacecraft detonate with a cinematic boom. Put the same battle in th...
Read
A black hole does something stranger than simply swallowing light. Before a photon crosses the point of no return, spacetime can bend its trajectory so violently that the light can travel ar...
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
In daylight, the water may look ordinary — or even unappealingly reddish-brown. Then darkness falls, a wave breaks, and the shoreline suddenly flashes electric blue. Footsteps sparkle in wet...
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
When a tropical system appears in the Atlantic, the urge to watch it move across a map can become almost compulsive. A disturbance off Africa becomes a colored area on an outlook. A few days...
Read