“The cloud” may be the most successful disappearing act in modern technology. Upload a photograph and it seems to float away. Stream a film and it arrives from nowhere. Ask an AI system a question and an answer materializes on a glass scree...
Read article
Space is famously cold. The number repeated in textbooks, documentaries and trivia lists is about 2.7 kelvin, or roughly −270.4 °C — less than three degrees above absolute zero.That number i...
Read
Ask a child to draw the Sun and there is a good chance they will reach for a yellow crayon. Search for a Sun emoji and you will find the same convention. For centuries, artists have painted...
Read
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
Look up from a truly dark place and the Milky Way appears as a pale river of light crossing the sky. That glow is produced by stars so numerous and distant that most cannot be distinguished...
Read
Imagine falling feet-first toward a black hole. At first, if the black hole were isolated and you began far enough away, the experience would not feel supernatural. You would be in free fall...
Read
The internet contains billions of websites, streams enormous quantities of video, connects data centers across continents and crosses oceans through cables thousands of kilometers long. So i...
Read
Suppose you buy a brand-new one-terabyte SSD and place it on an impossibly precise scale. Then you fill every available byte with photographs, films, documents and music. Has the drive becom...
Read
A bitcoin cannot be held in your hand. It does not represent a legal claim on a company, pay a dividend or give its owner a stream of rental income. There is no warehouse containing one bar...
Read
A penguin standing on ice looks as though someone designed a bird with a torso, two feet and almost nothing in between. Its legs seem impossibly short, and when it starts walking, the famili...
Read