On the evening of May 17, 1884, New Yorkers witnessed a sight strange enough to compete with the bridge beneath it. A procession of circus animals moved across the East River from Manhattan toward Brooklyn: camels, elephants and, among them...
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Few sights make the Moon seem more theatrical than an early-autumn moonrise. A huge amber disk appears behind trees, rooftops or distant hills, looking far larger than the Moon we see later...
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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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There is ordinary tiredness—the heavy-eyed feeling after a late night, a long flight or an exhausting week—and then there is the more puzzling question: Why am I tired all the time? You slee...
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If someone asks when World War II ended, the safest short answer is 1945. If they ask for the exact date, history becomes more interesting. Was it May 8, when Nazi Germany's defeat ended the...
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You check your phone and it is 4:44. Later, a receipt ends in $4.44. That evening, three fours appear in an address or a license plate. After the third encounter, coincidence can start to fe...
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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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You walk into a café you have never visited. The tables, the light from the window and the conversation at the next table suddenly feel uncannily familiar. For a few seconds, there is an ove...
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Nelson Mandela did not die in a South African prison in the 1980s. He was released in 1990, became South Africa’s first Black president in 1994 and died in 2013 at the age of 95. Yet some pe...
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Imagine exchanging messages with an unseen stranger. The replies are witty, coherent and sensitive to context. The stranger remembers what you said earlier, catches a joke, explains a diffic...
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