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 often enough, the story goes, and your digestive syste...
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Artificial intelligence used to be the sort of technology most people encountered without thinking about it. It filtered spam, ranked search results, recommended movies and helped cameras re...
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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...
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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...
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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...
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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...
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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...
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Science-fiction space battles have trained us to expect a particular soundtrack: engines roar, lasers crack and exploding spacecraft detonate with a cinematic boom. Put the same battle in th...
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Dog owners become experts in noticing small mysteries. One week the mystery is a dog that seems unable to stop licking its front paws. The next it is the same animal stepping onto the lawn a...
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A cat is calmly eating from its bowl. While its attention is elsewhere, someone quietly places a cucumber on the floor behind it. The cat turns, sees the vegetable and suddenly launches itse...
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