The little hat-and-glasses icon has become shorthand for secrecy. Open an Incognito window in Chrome — or a Private Browsing window in another browser — and it feels as though you have stepped into a hidden version of the internet where not...
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You type a search into Google, press Enter, and nothing happens. The page spins. Gmail refuses to load. Drive throws an error. Within seconds, one of the internet's most common diagnostic qu...
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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 few years, a headline or social-media post seems to announce the same piece of cosmic good news: Pluto is a planet again. For anyone who learned the old nine-planet Solar System in sch...
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A thirsty tomato plant can be surprisingly noisy. Not to us: stand beside it in a greenhouse and you will probably hear nothing beyond leaves rustling and the ordinary sounds of the room. Bu...
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Few numbers can transform an ordinary convenience-store counter into a national obsession as quickly as a giant lottery jackpot. Once Powerball or Mega Millions climbs into the hundreds of m...
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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...
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When Iñupiat hunters and biologists began finding ancient weapon fragments inside bowhead whales harvested in Arctic Alaska, the discoveries posed an extraordinary question: how long had the...
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An old tree can carry the shape of an injury long after the branch that caused it has disappeared. A swollen collar may surround the site of a lost limb. Growth rings can bend around the old...
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Few keyboard shortcuts have acquired a reputation beyond computing itself. Ctrl-C means copy, Alt-Tab switches windows, but Control-Alt-Delete became something larger: a universal gesture of...
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