Look up on a clear night and the most obvious feature of the universe is not the stars. It is the darkness between them. That darkness seems perfectly ordinary, yet for centuries it posed a surprisingly deep problem. If space contains an en...
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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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From the road near Fish Lake in central Utah, Pando looks like an ordinary mountain forest. Thousands of pale trunks rise from the ground. Their leaves tremble in the slightest breeze, turni...
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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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Quantum entanglement is often introduced with a sentence that sounds like science fiction: two particles can be linked so deeply that changing one instantly changes the other, even if they a...
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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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Technology is supposed to age quickly. Phones become obsolete, startups disappear, frameworks fall out of fashion and yesterday's revolutionary software becomes tomorrow's migration problem....
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The first message sent across the network that would become a crucial ancestor of the modern Internet was not profound, poetic or even complete. It consisted of two lowercase letters: lo.Tha...
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There is a peculiar kind of certainty that appears around traditional food. A grandmother made a dish one way, a restaurant in its supposed birthplace serves it another, and suddenly one ver...
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Few subjects can turn an ordinary Italian lunch into a tribunal quite as quickly as a traditional recipe. Put cream in carbonara, use pancetta instead of guanciale, add garlic where somebody...
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