Taste a drop of seawater and the answer seems obvious: the ocean contains salt. The more interesting question is how it got there. There are no gigantic salt deposits steadily dissolving into every sea, and most rivers taste fresh even thou...
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Draw a line from Miami to Bermuda, another from Bermuda to Puerto Rico, and a third back toward Florida, and you have the rough outline of one of the most famous imaginary places on Earth. T...
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From the ground, Earth is almost too large to understand. Nations fill maps. Mountain ranges divide regions. Oceans separate continents. Political borders seem concrete because they organize...
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Listen to some of NASA's most famous recordings from the outer Solar System and space does not sound silent at all. Jupiter whistles, crackles and roars. Saturn produces eerie rising tones....
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Suppose engineers invent a computer chip that performs the same calculation using half as much electricity. The obvious conclusion is that electricity consumption should fall. Now suppose th...
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A dashboard can be perfectly accurate and still tell the wrong story. Traffic rises 28 percent, engagement improves, impressions reach a record high and the chart turns reassuringly green —...
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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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For years, the basic experience of generative AI could be reduced to a remarkably simple exchange: you type something, the machine types something back. Ask for a summary, a translation, an...
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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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Long before Zoom meetings and TikTok streams, the first webcam in history had a surprisingly humble mission: to monitor a coffee pot. In 1991, researchers at the University of Cambridge g...
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