It is one of those rules that millions of Americans seem to remember learning without remembering who taught it: you cannot drive a car barefoot. Maybe a parent said it. Maybe a driving instructor mentioned shoes. Maybe it simply sounded pl...
Read article
The internet has produced plenty of suspiciously convenient health claims, but few are as appealing as this one: every time you fart, you supposedly burn 67 calories. Repeat the process ofte...
Read
Taking a screenshot is one of the smallest computer skills imaginable — right up until you switch from a Mac to Windows, buy a keyboard without an obvious Print Screen key, or need to captur...
Read
Type “What is my IP?” into a search engine and the answer usually appears before you even reach the first result: a string of numbers, or sometimes numbers and letters, identifying the inter...
Read
The sky is so reliably blue on a clear day that the color can feel like a property of the atmosphere itself, as though Earth were covered by an enormous blue ceiling. It is not. Air is essen...
Read
Look down at almost any laptop, desktop keyboard or smartphone in the English-speaking world and the first six letters are the same: Q-W-E-R-T-Y. The arrangement feels so inevitable that it...
Read
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...
Read
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...
Read
If Mars can come within roughly 55 million kilometers of Earth, why does a spacecraft sent there travel something closer to 480 million kilometers — and spend around seven months doing it? T...
Read
Stay in a swimming pool or bathtub long enough and something peculiar happens to your hands. The smooth pads of your fingers turn into a landscape of ridges and valleys, as if the skin has s...
Read