“The cloud” may be the most successful disappearing act in modern technology. Upload a photograph and it seems to float away. Stream a film and it arrives from nowhere. Ask an AI system a question and an answer materializes on a glass scree...
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Ask the meaning of life in the right corner of the internet and there is a good chance someone will answer with a number: 42. It has become one of popular culture’s most durable private joke...
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Ask a child to draw the Sun and there is a good chance they will reach for a yellow crayon. Search for a Sun emoji and you will find the same convention. For centuries, artists have painted...
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Imagine falling feet-first toward a black hole. At first, if the black hole were isolated and you began far enough away, the experience would not feel supernatural. You would be in free fall...
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The internet contains billions of websites, streams enormous quantities of video, connects data centers across continents and crosses oceans through cables thousands of kilometers long. So i...
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Suppose you buy a brand-new one-terabyte SSD and place it on an impossibly precise scale. Then you fill every available byte with photographs, films, documents and music. Has the drive becom...
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Wi-Fi feels almost absurdly simple from the outside. Tap a network name, enter a password, and within seconds a phone can stream a film from a server thousands of kilometers away. No cable r...
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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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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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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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