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. There is no invisible cosmic hand suddenly grabb...
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
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
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...
Read
A thirsty tomato plant can be surprisingly noisy. Not to us: stand beside it in a greenhouse and you will probably hear nothing beyond leaves rustling and the ordinary sounds of the room. Bu...
Read
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...
Read
Long before Mario jumped over his first barrel, before the Game Boy disappeared into millions of backpacks and before families swung Wii Remotes in front of television screens, Nintendo sold...
Read
Seal a cat inside a box with a radioactive atom, a radiation detector and a mechanism capable of releasing poison. Arrange the experiment so that, after an hour, the atom has a 50 percent ch...
Read
For generations, chemistry books could place bismuth near the end of the periodic table's stable territory. Its naturally occurring isotope, bismuth-209, showed no detectable radioactive dec...
Read
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...
Read