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...
Read article
A penguin standing on ice looks as though someone designed a bird with a torso, two feet and almost nothing in between. Its legs seem impossibly short, and when it starts walking, the famili...
Read
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...
Read
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...
Read
Watch a turkey closely and its stare can seem almost unnervingly steady. Its eyes sit high on the sides of its head, scanning the surroundings while the bird walks, feeds and watches for dan...
Read
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...
Read
Every few years, a headline or social-media post seems to announce the same piece of cosmic good news: Pluto is a planet again. For anyone who learned the old nine-planet Solar System in sch...
Read
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...
Read
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...
Read
There is a moment at almost every birthday party when the room changes. The lights dim, a cake appears, tiny flames tremble above the icing and everyone waits while one person silently makes...
Read