In 1901, divers working an ancient shipwreck near the Greek island of Antikythera recovered statues, ceramics, glass and a badly corroded mass of bronze. The wreck had carried valuable cargo across the Mediterranean during the final centuri...
Read article
When sponge divers found an ancient shipwreck off the small Greek island of Antikythera around 1900, they brought up the kinds of objects archaeologists expected from a wealthy vessel of the...
Read
From the road near Fish Lake in central Utah, Pando looks like an ordinary mountain forest. Thousands of pale trunks rise from the ground. Their leaves tremble in the slightest breeze, turni...
Read
When Iñupiat hunters and biologists began finding ancient weapon fragments inside bowhead whales harvested in Arctic Alaska, the discoveries posed an extraordinary question: how long had the...
Read
In the old medina of Fez, behind carved doors and walls that have witnessed more than a millennium of Moroccan history, books have survived dynasties, wars, political upheavals and the arriv...
Read
The first message sent across the network that would become a crucial ancestor of the modern Internet was not profound, poetic or even complete. It consisted of two lowercase letters: lo.Tha...
Read
Few keyboard shortcuts have acquired a reputation beyond computing itself. Ctrl-C means copy, Alt-Tab switches windows, but Control-Alt-Delete became something larger: a universal gesture of...
Read
There is a peculiar kind of certainty that appears around traditional food. A grandmother made a dish one way, a restaurant in its supposed birthplace serves it another, and suddenly one ver...
Read
For years, the basic experience of generative AI could be reduced to a remarkably simple exchange: you type something, the machine types something back. Ask for a summary, a translation, an...
Read
The idea of launching an object into space was born of a scientific and political ambition that changed the course of history. The first artificial satellite, launched in 1957, was not jus...
Read