Few breakfast foods come with a better internet story than Corn Flakes. According to the version repeated across social media, Dr. John Harvey Kellogg invented the famously plain cereal in the late 19th century for one extraordinary purpose...
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You are walking past a town hall, courthouse, school or government building when something looks slightly wrong: the flag is not at the top of its pole. It is hanging lower, leaving an unmis...
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A newly hatched chick enters the world with an urgent problem. It can walk almost immediately, but walking in the wrong direction could be fatal. In nature, staying near a parent means warmt...
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In 1997, IBM's Deep Blue defeated world chess champion Garry Kasparov in a match. The achievement looked like a milestone on the road to machine intelligence: a computer had conquered a game...
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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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From the air, parts of the Namib Desert look as if someone has stamped an enormous sheet of polka dots across the landscape. Thousands upon thousands of roughly circular patches of bare grou...
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Open the Voynich Manuscript and almost everything about it looks tantalizingly close to comprehension. Lines of neat handwriting run from left to right. Words are separated by spaces. Paragr...
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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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Imagine taking the mass of a mountain and compressing it until its boundary is smaller than an atom. There would be no miniature rocky mountain inside, no visible sphere and certainly nothin...
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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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