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 Institute, hundreds of kilometres away. The intended...
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For 73 years, the Titanic existed in two places at once: in history, where the details of its final night were argued over in inquiries, newspapers and survivor testimony, and somewhere in t...
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There is a place on Earth where Mount Everest could be lowered beneath the waves and its summit would still remain underwater. It lies in the western Pacific, in the Mariana Trench, where th...
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Look up on a clear night and the most obvious feature of the universe is not the stars. It is the darkness between them. That darkness seems perfectly ordinary, yet for centuries it posed a...
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It is one of those questions that sounds almost too simple to deserve a scientific explanation. Look up on a clear afternoon and the sky is blue. Yet that familiar color is the visible resul...
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Near the heart of the Milky Way lies a cloud with a reputation that sounds invented for a science-fiction cocktail menu. Sagittarius B2 contains alcohol. It also contains ethyl formate, an o...
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Few astronomical discoveries have produced a nickname as irresistible as the “diamond planet.” About 41 light-years away in the constellation Cancer, 55 Cancri e is a super-Earth nearly twic...
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Imagine putting the entire Solar System on a cosmic scale: the eight planets, every known moon, the asteroids, comets, dwarf planets, dust and the enormous Sun. The result would be absurdly...
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At this moment, Earth is moving in several different ways at once. It spins on its axis, circles the Sun at roughly 30 kilometers per second, and accompanies the entire Solar System on a vas...
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Space is a vacuum, so an astronaut cannot simply lift a visor and take a sniff. Yet crews returning from spacewalks have repeatedly described something remarkably close to a smell of space:...
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