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? The answer is one of the most important ideas in sp...
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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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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...
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You are almost asleep when the floor seems to disappear. For a fraction of a second, your body feels as though it has stepped off a ledge. A leg kicks, an arm jerks or your whole torso jumps...
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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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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 t...
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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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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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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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