On a clear Arctic night, the sky can begin almost imperceptibly. A pale band appears above the horizon, faint enough to be mistaken for a cloud. Then it brightens. The band folds into curtains, rays climb toward the stars and green light be...
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On the evening of October 29, 1969, a student programmer at UCLA began typing a word into a computer. The machine was connected over a network to another computer at the Stanford Research In...
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Look closely at the tip of your finger and you are looking at a landscape that began forming months before you were born. Ridges curve, split, stop and rejoin in patterns so detailed that th...
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Suppose engineers invent a computer chip that performs the same calculation using half as much electricity. The obvious conclusion is that electricity consumption should fall. Now suppose th...
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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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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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Look down at a computer keyboard and you are looking at a museum whose exhibits still work. Some keys preserve decisions made by nineteenth-century typewriter manufacturers. Others carry sym...
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In 1969, NASA’s Apollo 11 mission made history by landing humans on the Moon. But what’s mind-blowing is the technology they used: the Apollo Guidance Computer (AGC) had a clock speed of ju...
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You’ve heard it a hundred times: “Please switch your device to airplane mode.” But have you ever wondered what actually happens if you don’t? Airplane mode disables your phone’s ability t...
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Long before Steve Jobs took the stage, IBM released the Simon Personal Communicator in 1994 — considered the first real smartphone. It could make calls, send emails, store contacts, manage c...
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