Ice presents a small everyday mystery. A cold pavement can be dangerously slippery even when the air temperature is far below freezing, while many other crystalline solids are perfectly easy to walk on. A steel skate can glide across a rink...
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There is a place in the South Pacific where the horizon contains nothing but water and the nearest scraps of land are roughly 2,688 kilometers away. No island marks the spot. There is no lig...
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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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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...
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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...
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On September 9, 1947, somebody working with one of the most advanced calculating machines in the United States opened its hardware and found an unusually literal explanation for a malfunctio...
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A dashboard can be perfectly accurate and still tell the wrong story. Traffic rises 28 percent, engagement improves, impressions reach a record high and the chart turns reassuringly green —...
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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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A setting exists on your phone but vanishes on your laptop. An onboarding screen refuses to advance even though every field appears complete. An organization account opens a dashboard that a...
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An email can be perfectly written, legitimately requested and sent from a real company — and still end up in spam. The reason is that modern email delivery is no longer determined only by wh...
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