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...
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Imagine two identical buildings on the same street. One has a broken window that is repaired the next morning. The other has a broken window that remains shattered for weeks. Graffiti appear...
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A solitary desert locust can spend its life trying to avoid other locusts. Put enough of them together, however, and something extraordinary begins to happen. The insects become more active,...
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For many Americans, Labor Day means a three-day weekend, backyard cookouts, crowded beaches, college football and the unofficial end of summer. Retailers turn it into a sales event, swimming...
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When artificial-intelligence stocks surge, most attention goes to the companies designing the chips. Nvidia became the emblem of the AI boom because its GPUs perform much of the enormous par...
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On most nights, Americans who want to see the northern lights need to travel a very long way north. Then the Sun becomes unusually active, NOAA issues a geomagnetic-storm watch or warning, a...
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Artificial intelligence has become one of those phrases that seems to describe everything at once. It can mean the system that recommends a song, the software that detects a suspicious bank...
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There is a point in an Arctic winter when ordinary ideas about daytime stop being useful. The sun may skim the horizon without properly rising, snow can turn blue in the long twilight, and a...
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The most spectacular sign of a geomagnetic storm can look almost supernatural. Green curtains ripple across the night sky, red light appears hundreds or even thousands of kilometres farther...
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On the evening of October 29, 1969, a student programmer at UCLA began typing a word into a computer. The machine was connected over a network to another computer at the Stanford Research In...
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