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 pieces of decorated cardboard.The company’s story...
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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...
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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...
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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...
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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...
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Quantum entanglement is often introduced with a sentence that sounds like science fiction: two particles can be linked so deeply that changing one instantly changes the other, even if they a...
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An old tree can carry the shape of an injury long after the branch that caused it has disappeared. A swollen collar may surround the site of a lost limb. Growth rings can bend around the old...
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Modern elections are designed to look ordinary. Voters enter a booth, mark a choice, deposit a ballot and wait for arithmetic to produce a winner. In medieval and early modern Europe, choosi...
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Astronomy has a reputation for expensive telescopes, complicated star charts and distant objects visible only through professional instruments. Yet some of the sky's most memorable events re...
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“Demmel Sims” might sound like the name of your new favorite jazz bassist or a long-lost Marvel character, but in reality, it’s... no one. Or at least, no one definitively identifiable. Go a...
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