There is a place in the South Pacific where the horizon contains nothing but water and the nearest scraps of land are roughly 2,688 kilometers away. No island marks the spot. There is no lighthouse, settlement or permanent buoy announcing t...
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Modern elections are designed to look ordinary. Voters enter a booth, mark a choice, deposit a ballot and wait for arithmetic to produce a winner. In medieval and early modern Europe, choosi...
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Astronomy has a reputation for expensive telescopes, complicated star charts and distant objects visible only through professional instruments. Yet some of the sky's most memorable events re...
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Look down at a computer keyboard and you are looking at a museum whose exhibits still work. Some keys preserve decisions made by nineteenth-century typewriter manufacturers. Others carry sym...
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Ask a modern AI system about a breaking scientific discovery and the answer may arrive with links to a university, a journal and a newspaper. It can feel as though the model has opened the i...
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The moon can appear red during a total lunar eclipse, a phenomenon that has always intrigued observers. This occurs when the Earth comes between the Sun and the Moon, blocking direct sunligh...
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It sounds like sci-fi, but it’s 100% real. In the late 1950s, during the height of the Cold War, the United States developed Project A119, a top-secret plan to detonate a nuclear bomb on the...
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In 1969, NASA’s Apollo 11 mission made history by landing humans on the Moon. But what’s mind-blowing is the technology they used: the Apollo Guidance Computer (AGC) had a clock speed of ju...
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Apollo Guidance Computer vs. Modern Computers: What’s the Real Difference? In 1969, NASA sent astronauts to the Moon using a spacecraft controlled by a computer with less power than today...
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Was the Apollo Computer Really Powerful Enough to Go to the Moon? One of the most fascinating facts about the Apollo Moon landings is how little computing power was available at the time....
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