Look up from a truly dark place and the Milky Way appears as a pale river of light crossing the sky. That glow is produced by stars so numerous and distant that most cannot be distinguished individually with the naked eye. It raises one of...
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The internet contains billions of websites, streams enormous quantities of video, connects data centers across continents and crosses oceans through cables thousands of kilometers long. So i...
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The little hat-and-glasses icon has become shorthand for secrecy. Open an Incognito window in Chrome — or a Private Browsing window in another browser — and it feels as though you have stepp...
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Suppose you buy a brand-new one-terabyte SSD and place it on an impossibly precise scale. Then you fill every available byte with photographs, films, documents and music. Has the drive becom...
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A bitcoin cannot be held in your hand. It does not represent a legal claim on a company, pay a dividend or give its owner a stream of rental income. There is no warehouse containing one bar...
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Wi-Fi feels almost absurdly simple from the outside. Tap a network name, enter a password, and within seconds a phone can stream a film from a server thousands of kilometers away. No cable r...
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You type a search into Google, press Enter, and nothing happens. The page spins. Gmail refuses to load. Drive throws an error. Within seconds, one of the internet's most common diagnostic qu...
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It is one of those rules that millions of Americans seem to remember learning without remembering who taught it: you cannot drive a car barefoot. Maybe a parent said it. Maybe a driving inst...
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A penguin standing on ice looks as though someone designed a bird with a torso, two feet and almost nothing in between. Its legs seem impossibly short, and when it starts walking, the famili...
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The internet has produced plenty of suspiciously convenient health claims, but few are as appealing as this one: every time you fart, you supposedly burn 67 calories. Repeat the process ofte...
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