There is ordinary tiredness—the heavy-eyed feeling after a late night, a long flight or an exhausting week—and then there is the more puzzling question: Why am I tired all the time? You sleep, drink coffee, get through the day, sleep again,...
Read article
Few English words have traveled as far politically as “woke.” Depending on who says it, the word can mean alert to racial injustice, broadly progressive, excessively politically correct, per...
Read
Stand on a beach and the ocean looks almost two-dimensional: a glittering surface stretching to the horizon. The reality underneath is closer to an inverted mountain world. Plains, ridges, v...
Read
You are reading an email, driving home or trying to fall asleep when one eyelid begins to flutter. It stops. Ten minutes later it starts again. By the third day, a tiny muscle movement that...
Read
“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,...
Read
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...
Read
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 curtai...
Read
The most spectacular sign of a geomagnetic storm can look almost supernatural. Green curtains ripple across the night sky, red light appears hundreds or even thousands of kilometres farther...
Read
A family flight from the Bahamas to South Florida turned into a frantic international search after a small twin-engine aircraft disappeared over the water west of Andros Island. By the follo...
Read
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...
Read