Few animals have contributed to modern medicine in a way quite as improbable as the horseshoe crab. It looks prehistoric because, in evolutionary terms, it is. Horseshoe-crab relatives were swimming in ancient seas hundreds of millions of y...
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Every email address contains a tiny piece of computing history. Between a person's name and the domain sits a character that most of us type without thinking: @.It seems inevitable now. We r...
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Few words sound more futuristic than “robot.” It belongs to Mars rovers, factory arms, humanoid machines and today's arguments about artificial intelligence. Yet the word did not originate i...
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Your passport knows exactly how old you are. Your cells are a more complicated matter. Two people born on the same day can reach middle age with very different cardiovascular health, physica...
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When a tropical system appears in the Atlantic, the urge to watch it move across a map can become almost compulsive. A disturbance off Africa becomes a colored area on an outlook. A few days...
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“Why does my stomach hurt?” sounds like a simple question, but medically it is one of the broadest questions a person can ask. What we casually call the stomach is often the entire abdomen,...
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Artificial intelligence has become one of those phrases that seems to describe everything at once. It can mean the system that recommends a song, the software that detects a suspicious bank...
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Some of the most senior people inside the U.S. military recently found themselves in an unusual position: sitting in a room, connected to physiological sensors, answering questions while inv...
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Open a familiar rectangular world map and something strange happens to the planet. Greenland appears enormous, sometimes looking almost comparable to Africa. Russia stretches across the top...
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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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