Few animals have contributed to modern medicine in a way quite as improbable as the horseshoe crab. It looks prehistoric because, in evolutionary terms, it is. Horseshoe-crab relatives were swimming in ancient seas hundreds of millions of y...
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Every email address contains a tiny piece of computing history. Between a person's name and the domain sits a character that most of us type without thinking: @.It seems inevitable now. We r...
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A thirsty tomato plant can be surprisingly noisy. Not to us: stand beside it in a greenhouse and you will probably hear nothing beyond leaves rustling and the ordinary sounds of the room. Bu...
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On the morning of November 14, 1963, sailors south of Iceland saw something that looked at first like a ship on fire. A dark column was rising from the North Atlantic. It was not smoke from...
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A sleeping octopus can look almost ghostly. Its body lies still, its eyes close and its skin may fade toward a pale, uniform color. Then, without waking, the animal seems to erupt into activ...
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Few words sound more futuristic than “robot.” It belongs to Mars rovers, factory arms, humanoid machines and today's arguments about artificial intelligence. Yet the word did not originate i...
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Few wildlife events are as disturbing as a whale stranding. An animal exquisitely adapted to life in deep water suddenly lies helpless on a beach, sometimes alone and sometimes alongside doz...
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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...
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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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The James Webb Space Telescope is often introduced through spectacular pictures: glowing stellar nurseries, delicate shells of gas, galaxies from the young universe and strange worlds orbiti...
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