Long before Mario jumped over his first barrel, before the Game Boy disappeared into millions of backpacks and before families swung Wii Remotes in front of television screens, Nintendo sold pieces of decorated cardboard.The company’s story...
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Step out of a dark cinema into brilliant afternoon sunlight and, for some people, the reaction is immediate. The eyes narrow, the nose begins to tingle and within seconds comes an involuntar...
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Few animal sounds are as instantly recognizable as a cat’s purr. A hand reaches toward a warm patch of fur, the cat closes its eyes, and a low vibration begins somewhere inside its body. To...
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Space is a vacuum, so an astronaut cannot simply lift a visor and take a sniff. Yet crews returning from spacewalks have repeatedly described something remarkably close to a smell of space:...
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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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On October 30, 1961, a Soviet Tu-95 bomber crossed the frozen landscape of Novaya Zemlya carrying an object so large that the aircraft had been specially modified to accommodate it. The bomb...
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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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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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